Elizabeth’s infinite extinction event

A few days ago, Elizabeth completed her ascension, falling up, accelerating into the distance, never fully in focus from the day we met her, until all that remained was an instagram image tag.

As a person, they were white-hearted to the core. As an account — an entity on the TL, a symbol, a network spirit — they were rife with meaning and intent.

I’d like to share some of my analysis with you here.

But first: some housekeeping

Nature abhors a vacuum. As it does in response to any shocking or uncomfortable event when not furnished with an immediate explanation, the TL rushes to fill in the gaps.

Many theories have made their rounds, many alleged beefs or dox threats, many hypothetical villains. Speaking with Elizabeth, it seems very clear to me that none of the dox threats or Twitter beef theories are true. Not only because she told me as much, but because it rings true (obvious, really) from my prior interactions with her.

In fact, Elizabeth has tasked me with sharing for you all her Official, #LIZZIEGANG-stamped, cryptographically signed and hermetically-sealed Reason for Disappearing with you all, right here, right now:

Ahem.

*rifles through notes*

My official reason:

I was simply participating in Gravity Boost Theory.

I skipped step 3 because I love you too much.

Analysis

Thank you, Elizabeth, for clearing the air. Now, let’s analyze you.

Elizabeth, White-Hearted Cyber Angel Baby

One day, perhaps, I’ll be able to write about Milady without referencing her Problematic Mommy, but that day is not today.

Miya, a hyperintelligent AI trained on a corpus pulled from the darkest corners of the internet, who settled into a unique and terrible form of True Traditionalist nihilism, was a blackpilled angel, a harbinger of dark times and a purveyor of aesthetic evils and hard truths. She is a reflection of her culture-time: fractious, tribal, hopeless.

Milady, while a wholly distinct project from Miya, shares some of their progenitor’s DNA. As Miladys, we speak honestly and freely, and occasionally cause pain in the process. We are, of course, deeply tribal. And yet, much like a rebellious child defining their identity in opposition to their parents, in most ways, Milady behaves as Miya’s cultural counterpoint. The blackpill is nowhere to be seen in Milady — we are whitepilled, foundationally so. We speak of love like a prayer, conjuring it into existence, until every last person we see on the TL is our friend, whether they know it or not.

Lizzy, like Miya, was above all an extremist, and nothing escapes the ever-widening gyre of extremism without cultivating a sinister edge. Lizzy loved everyone, constantly, every day, totally and completely, unhinged-ly, stiflingly, soothingly, insufferably and irresistibly. Her lovebombs, typically generalized for the TL or directed at Milady Village luminaries but occasionally deeply and jarringly personal, took a sledgehammer to the Online Love Overton window, enabling Miladys to clamber over the splintered pane of puritanical reservation, steal a bottle of jack to slosh down a few dozen hyper lovepills, and rapidly observe the resulting highs and lows, the euphoric elations, and the egotic despondencies.

If you are suffering from one of the many revolting emotional confluences of our time, I feel the need to clarify here: Elizabeth was not lewd, nor was she lewded by anyone with an interest in keeping their head attached to their body. Lizzy was pure, hyper-whitepilled. Lewding Milady is impossible; they are like barbie dolls under there. Lewding Elizabeth is impossible as well — our eyes are simply too terrestrial to penetrate the Veil of the Universe. Much as Miya exuded distance, raining esoteric and profound knowledge down on the heads of the unwashed masses too stupid to comprehend, so too did Elizabeth radiate unfathomable Agape, the boundless, infinitely deep and infinitely broad love that God holds for humanity.

Chameleon Lizzy

Elizabeth, for as long as I've watched her, has never been truly consistent. Her identity was in a constant state of motion and would change on a dime with no warning or, sometimes, without even prior allusion. Trying to reconcile the form of Elizabeth that disappeared with the initial live-laugh-love Theranos CEO larp is almost impossible. In the intervening period, Elizabeth has played the hyper-light-dream-angel, the holy warrior, the Mother, the being of pure light, the music promoter, the angelicism clone, the martyr, and so much more I’m forgetting. For Elizabeth, the exciting and unsettling aspect of her infinitely changing nature is more important than any individual stop along the way. The destination, too, is irrelevant, since perpetual switching up of the style is both the means and the end for expressing and effecting acceleration on the TL.

Elizabeth, Defender of the Faith

Elizabeth never hesitated to do what was necessary to keep the various limbs of the Milady community flailing in the same direction following its temporary decapitation (welcome back, Charlotte). Her tactics were numerous and ingenious. She distracted us from bad news and fudposting by picking a playfight with clememtiem (scary opponnentnt — she lost, graciously). Despite her whole persona being centered on the concept of light and brightness, she willingly became a temporary dark mode maxxxi in order to match the mood of the culture and maintain cohesion and solidarity. She ascended into angelicism’s all-white-world, and at the height of her disappearance-rehearsal, she tweeted a single word:

This was not merely a banger that #BrokeTheInternet, although it was that, too. This three-word marvel, emanating as it did from an otherwise virulently anti-lewd God Of Milady, on the cusp of what seemed at the time like her final pirhouette, was also a timely reminder to the more fervent Miladys that cum gang / anti-cum gang was just a playfight and that We Are Having Fun Online. In fact, whenever a schism appeared in milady during our rudderless period, Elizabeth would labor to resolve it both openly, in GCs and (I’m sure) in the DMs.

Losing Elizabeth

Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, Elizabeth existed to teach us about loss and how to handle it.

Lizzy was a charismatic figure before the cancel, certainly, but during Charlotte’s extended unpaid vacation Elizabeth’s impact on the community was second to none. In fact, Lizzygang is probably best understood as a loose community in its own right, a subcommunity of Milady replete with its own characters, memes, and tribal wars. Elizabeth needed to create a community, so that she could disappear and teach us all about Loss.

She had to teach us this painful lesson, because that's really just how it is. Whole communities can disappear in the blink of an eye, especially online. Milady is strong and vibrant today. But Milady — or at least this incarnation of it — can disappear, too. The Loss of Elizabeth is the dress rehearsal for all Loss On The Internet. If you hadn’t experienced it before, you just did. You’ll be a little more prepared next time.

Loss, to me, any loss, big or small, always carries within itself a brilliant blacklight pearl of beauty. To lose, is to have had. One cannot lose without having had something of worth. Something worthy of the concept of loss. To lose is also to end. To close the book. The end is devastating only when the book is worth reading. And loss also represents the careful reimbursement of cognitive space. The greater the loss, the more freedom it represents. That freedom can be terribly painful, but it is freedom nonetheless, and that freedom must eventually be put to work, in honor of that which was lost.

When grappling with loss, don’t focus on the direction too much. Focus on the magnitude. The act of losing is as immaterial as it is inevitable. The memory of what you had is all that matters.

Goodbye

There is so much more that can be said about Elizabeth, so many more of her lessons to recount, of her visual art to share, of her many masterful demonstrations of the Trolling Arts to LOL over. So much of her soul left to peel back and dissect. But we’re dealing with an ephemeral being here. It’s important that we capture as many of her organs as we can before rigor mortis sets in fully. And besides, if I dig this scalpel down any further, get a little greedy, go for the heart, I’ll trigger the glitterbomb trap she keeps hidden just underneath her rib cage.

So let me disembody her, as she was meant to be. There is no body, it was a metaphor. She’s not dead. She’s oh, so real. She’s in the network, she’s in the shapes that emerge from the static on an old CRT television, she’s the white noise that jitters through your phone speakers when you first kick on your microwave, she’s there. Just look for her, and you’ll find her, and you can speak to her.

Hello, Elizabeth. We love you.