Nobody is Coming to Save You | On Scene Building and the CCCRU.

I was in rural Nova Scotia standing in the middle of a scrap yard, tweaked on coke with my best friend. The 4am sky glowed green, lit from the large neon letters of the local grocery store “Sobeys”. However, the first and last S had flickered out leaving only word “Obey”, the corniest fucking sign from god I’d ever seen.

I sometimes revere the youthful innocence of drug abuse but one can only do coke in a scrapyard so many times before they become the scrapyard coke guy, so I left Nova Scotia.

Rhizomes.

In 2021 I made the move to Ottawa to begin my MFA. The only person I knew who existed in that wretched city was a YouTuber I was a fan of named Jreg. Upon moving to Ottawa, I had a joke with my friends that I would befriend Jreg given the opportunity. 2 months later, I encountered him outside a Dollarama on Elgin St.

After getting a selfie with him to show my friends back home we went our separate ways. That evening I shot him a blind DM asking if we wanted to get a drink sometime.

My father had recently passed away and I dropped out of my MFA to go back home for a month to care for my mom. Returning to Ottawa I got a job flipping burgers while making videos part time for my 200 subscribers on YouTube. Although I had nothing to offer Greg, we had attended a few parties together and I had been ingratiated into his friend group.

Regardless of my shitty life, Greg and I kindled a growing friendship. I was available and ambitious. If there was a party I was going. If there was a chance to collab, I was ready. Through this, I had the opportunity to chat with J.J. McCullough, Josh Citarella, Ben Thomas (sisyphus55), and many others far out of my league. It’s around this time I first floated the idea of building a community with him. Standing in his friends kitchen in suburban Ottawa at 3am I drunkenly cornered Greg and joked about creating the CCCRU, a Canadian spin-off of the Warwick University study group that spawned Mark Fisher and Nick Land.

This would become sort of a running joke that I would gleefully bring up now and then but we were still both looking for our next reinvention, both non-committal to anyone or anything. I quickly became aware that Ottawa is the most boring fucking city on the planet so Greg and I went our separate ways, him to Vancouver and I to Toronto.

Toronto is the land of opportunity for uneducated Canadians who can’t get an American visa. This has made the city a perpetual runner-up. People settle for Toronto, which is fine, You can’t have it all. Toronto is fertile, it has money, art, culture, and almost eight million people. The only thing it lacks is will. I moved here to be the change I wanted to see. The future isn’t built through neurotic denial and wishy-washyness, it’s built through action.

Once I settled in to my basement flat in Little Italy, I shot Greg another blind Dm. “Move to Toronto and work out my living room”. We’ll dm every theorycel video essayist in this fucking city and create Toronto’s intelligentsia. a month later in September in 2023. I would wake up to an assortment of strangers sitting in my living room, all of them writers and researchers.

Many of these characters I have grown to build loving friendships with. People like wereinhell, Duncan Clarke, Gokanaru, Jane Gatsby, a network that slowly grew until my apartment was full everyday with like-minded people. Enough people to go the full distance and split on proper office space. In March 2024 we began renting an old Foley sound studio in downtown Toronto, replacing the sign on the door with a cardboard cut-out that says CCCRU.

The past year has brought opportunities I never thought possible growing up in rural Nova Scotia. Every YouTuber that comes to Toronto will come by our studio. We have made contact with almost every political streamer, independent researcher, and contemporary theory author. A close friend of mine rented the unit across from ours and opened a music and styling studio. We are collaborating to throw our first private event complete with a bar, security, and a DJ. Open only to Toronto’s most talented authors and artists.

I’m not wealthy, I’m not well known, but I have will. Greg has will. We’ve sacrificed money, privacy, and sanctity to build something that didn’t exist before. We didn’t run, we didn’t wait for someone to do it for us. We went from working out of my basement to throwing 100+ person art parties in 18 months. If we didn’t build this, it wouldn’t exist. Simple as.

The moral of this story is that you can do whatever you want. Culture is built by scenes, the rhizome of connections that emerges from socializing. Whatever it is, you can’t do it alone. You’re actively harming yourself by trying to do it alone.

The beat scene started in Greenwich NYC. The hippie movement started at Haight-Asbury in SF. The podcast scene started in Dime’s Square in the early 2010s. Whatever cultural movement comes next will be born out of the CCCRU in the west side of Toronto.