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\n Emilia Howe, Sierra Armor, Chloe Bartlewski, and Lola Jusidman.
\n Photo: David Zavala\n <\/p>\n
Sierra Armor was bored. It was December 2020, the middle of a Vermont winter, and she was marooned in her dorm room at Bennington College in a white shingled house overlooking a sloping meadow. She wanted to learn how to write stylistically innovative novels like Tao Lin and Marguerite Duras. But many classmates had stayed home that semester, and much of her academic life \u2014 including her creative-writing classes \u2014 had vanished into Zoom squares.<\/p>\n
That month, her boyfriend sent her a link to a strange Substack with a tiny following, written by an online presence called Angelicism01, or simply \u201c01.\u201d 01 published manic, labyrinthine, thousands-of-words-long ruminations on nearly every concern of the high-COVID era. They drew parallels between cancel culture and the automated, self-replicating logic of AI models, riffed on the possibility that the DNC hacked the 2020 election, and mused on how podcasters\u2019 vocal fries evoked \u201cthe sound of a universe closing out.\u201d Animating all of this was the idea that humankind is nearing an extinction event, an end of the world accelerated not just by climate change but by AI and the internet. Though often inscrutable, the writing was sometimes shot through with insight about the self-destructive pleasure of digital life during crisis, from \u201cthe pure cerebral slice and drop\u201d of Netflix autoplay to the \u201cjouissance of relapse and robodenihilism on the addictogenic screen.\u201d Armor was drawn less to their ideas than to the stylish, erudite, and elusive way they expressed them.<\/p>\n
Who was Angelicism01? Their profile picture was a blank white circle. 01 seemed young to her because they said things like \u201cfuck with\u201d and \u201cbruh\u201d but also kind of old because of the way they referenced thinkers such as Deleuze and Lacan and Simone Weil. One night, she followed the Angelicism01 Instagram account: a collage of internet ephemera, anime girls, and dreamy images of skies or water. She was excited when 01 followed her back.<\/p>\n
Armor grew up in a strict, isolated Calvinist community in New Hampshire. Her entire life, she was rarely allowed to watch TV or go on the internet and then only with an adult standing over her shoulder. She found her way to the local library and read anything she could: The Secret Garden, Anne of Green Gables, The Bell Jar. She chafed against her community\u2019s religious injunctions, and her parents found her strange and hard to control. Her siblings had been homeschooled, but her parents sent her to public school. She didn\u2019t have friends there. While other girls wore tank tops and shorts, she was teased about the modest, oversize clothes that covered her entire body.<\/p>\n
At 17, on an old iPhone she bought from someone at school, she sneaked onto Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and 4chan. After coming across the work of Bret Easton Ellis, she learned about his alma mater, Bennington, and got in with a scholarship. Her parents were opposed, but she was ready to leave their way of life behind. By her junior year, though, Armor had grown tired of how everyone on the tiny bucolic campus seemed so careful to say the right progressive thing. She found her classmates\u2019 tendency to condemn artists for their political views or scandalous pasts to be fake and puritanical. 01, however, was abrasive, violent, taboo-crashing. He praised Trump\u2019s disruptive energy and considered Kanye West a genius; he wrote things like \u201csomebody please Columbine the entire editorial staff of The Drunken Canal and the NYT as well as the retarded dead white Biden era ubilapse they rode in on.\u201d<\/p>\n
Armor\u2019s boyfriend told her that 01 was an older man, probably in his 40s, living in the U.K. She noticed that 01 watched her Instagram Stories, like one she took of a winter storm outside her window, which he reposted. In February, on Substack, he linked to her tweet: \u201cmight quit school and start a substack.\u201d Seeing him write her name gave her a rush. She guessed from his Instagram that one of his aesthetic fixations was young women partying, so she uploaded photos of herself hanging out with her friends. Through this game of posting, the two grew closer, and Instagram likes and replies spun into longer conversations.<\/p>\n
Unable to stop by in-person office hours or chat with professors after class, Armor turned to 01. She emailed him her short stories and essays, and he\u2019d offer advice on syntax and structure. He told her to take more philosophy classes and suggested books to read. She came from a place where no one thought of becoming a writer or an artist, and, among her classmates who were getting internships at publishing houses and vacationing in Nantucket with their parents\u2019 film-director friends, she sometimes felt like she had been dropped from Mars. 01\u2019s attentions made her feel less adrift. \u201cHe gave me confidence with how supportive he was,\u201d she says. \u201cI started to feel I was doing something that mattered. I needed a figure like that in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n
01 was prolific. By the summer of 2021, he\u2019d amassed more than 160,000 words of writing on his Substack and thousands of followers. One of his most devoted readers was a 23-year-old writer named Honor Levy, who lived downtown in New York. On her podcast, Wet Brain, she and her co-host, another writer named Walt John Pearce, talked extensively about Angelicism01 and his ideas. (His writing, Levy said, \u201cfelt like the internet come alive.\u201d) Wet Brain had an accompanying Discord server. The members were socially alienated and awkward and terminally online, cycling through fringe philosophies and niche internet subcultures. Most of them had read 01\u2019s Substack, and anytime he appeared in the chat, they clamored to talk to him.<\/p>\n
\u201ci am the size of stuart little. i am sitting on angelicism shoulder. when i am bored i pull on its ear. listen to me!! listen to me!!\u201d a 23-year-old trans woman named Chloe Bartlewski or @waifmaterial posted in the Discord server one day. She was stuck\u00a0 in Orlando, Florida, living in her childhood bedroom, which was decorated with stuffed animals, anime posters, and wooden crosses. She had built a PC at the start of the pandemic. Most days, she didn\u2019t talk to anyone in real life; she sat at her desk playing Minecraft for hours and crafting tweets like \u201ci will be exercising extreme autism today.\u201d She struck up a conversation with 01 on Discord.<\/p>\n
Lola Jusidman, 26, was living in an apartment in the East Village. As a student at NYU, she had been an ardent climate-change activist, but she\u2019d grown disillusioned. She read Angelicism01\u2019s Substack every morning on her rainbow-striped bedsheets before getting up. She was drawn to his message that humans were living through an extinction event and nobody was paying attention. In a March 2021 essay titled \u201cThe Stupidity of the Most Intelligent People on Earth,\u201d he invoked Jean Baudrillard, arguing that fighting for things like equality and justice was a \u201cmistake made at the end of history of accelerating the end of history by thinking there is still time to do certain things for which there is no longer, if there ever was, time.\u201d To Jusidman, the stepped-up apocalyptic drama was just a realistic description of how things were, a narration of her inner panic. In October 2021, she messaged 01 on Discord, where they launched into an exchange ridiculing the cryptocurrency craze.<\/p>\n
The three women started messaging 01 regularly. They felt like they had been chosen to be part of an inner circle \u2014 maybe for the ironic deflection that was their native language or for their waifish, gamine aesthetics online. In 2022, 01 began talking about making a film that would capture the feeling of whiling away one\u2019s time online as the world was ending. The women knew barely anything about him, including who he was or what he looked like, but they liked the idea of being collaborators. It felt as if they were part of an art collective, a movement.<\/p>\n
That year, 19-year-old Emilia Howe, another Angelicism fan, left Indiana University. She\u2019d grown up in an Evangelical family and had been chatting with 01 and the other three on Discord. \u201cI wanted to distance myself from being a boring western girl and be part of an avant-garde social club,\u201d she says. She moved to New York and started making YouTube montages of her new life: churches and gardens she wandered into, art openings. 01 told her he was interested in her cinematography and bought a series of her vlogs for a couple hundred dollars and commissioned more. Over New Year\u2019s, Bartlewski flew out for a week to meet the people she had been talking to online and never left. Her parents shipped her PC to her new apartment in Chinatown.<\/p>\n
Armor was in Texas, living with her boyfriend and DM-ing 01 constantly. She\u2019d been sending him clips for his film, including several of her walking around in a white L.A. Apparel tennis skirt. One day, she told him that she wanted to break up with her boyfriend and move to New York. 01 said he could help her. In late spring of 2023, he bought her a plane ticket to visit the city, where she crashed on Howe\u2019s spare mattress. 01 emailed Howe instructions to film in a setting like a beach or a park, and the two spent the week running around gathering footage on their iPhones.<\/p>\n
At a vintage store on the Lower East Side, Armor picked out a midnight-blue John Galliano dress that cost $400 \u2014 by far the most expensive item of clothing she had ever owned. 01 paid for it. She returned home and broke up with her boyfriend. Later that summer, she found a $600-a-month room in Brooklyn and signed a lease.<\/p>\n
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\n From left: Sierra Armor, Lola Jusidman, and Chloe Bartlewski in June 2024. Photo: David ZavalaLola Jusidman hangs posters promoting Film01. Photo: David Zavala\n <\/p>\n
\n From top: Sierra Armor, Lola Jusidman, and Chloe Bartlewski in June 2024. Photo: David ZavalaLola Jusidman hangs posters promoting Film01. Photo: Davi… more
\n From top: Sierra Armor, Lola Jusidman, and Chloe Bartlewski in June 2024. Photo: David ZavalaLola Jusidman hangs posters promoting Film01. Photo: David Zavala\n <\/p>\n
By the fall of 2023, Sierra Armor, Emilia Howe, Chloe Bartlewski, and Lola Jusidman were united in New York. These were still the days of Dimes Square<\/a>, a short-lived art scene that had coalesced on a few blocks at the edge of Chinatown during the pandemic. Aspiring writers and artists, self-styled provocateurs, and post-internet bohemian wannabes were slipping in and out of the same three bars wearing Hysteric Glamour and trying to reenact the grittier, more romantic, less sanitized New York they had read about in books. When most of the city steadfastly wore masks and staged cocktail gatherings over Zoom, they openly rebelled against COVID-era pieties \u2014 lockdowns and distancing, identity politics and pronouns. Post-left Bernie fans were reading Houellebecq and saying \u201cretard.\u201d An instant mythology emerged in new print magazines like The Drunken Canal<\/a> and on 01\u2019s Substack, where he constantly referenced Dimes Square\u2019s main characters and became the scene\u2019s most prolific and prominent gossip.<\/p>\n For the four women, 01 operated as a kind of remote guru, curating a creative young person\u2019s life in New York from afar. He asked Armor to read his writing aloud for voice-overs, so she would film herself alone in her bedroom trying out sultry voices. He encouraged the group to film whatever excited them. Howe gathered footage of people she encountered at gallery parties; of her co-workers reapplying lip gloss and gossiping in the bathroom at Lucien, the East Village bistro where she worked; of herself reading Heidegger aloud in a Dimes Square bodega. They would send 01 the files via WeTransfer, and he\u2019d send them erratic amounts, PayPaling a few hundred dollars for a video of them reading philosophy aloud to one another or walking down the street.<\/p>\n For Bartlewski, that era was her first experience of partying and night life, and she was going out a lot and sleeping through the day. One morning, she was sobbing in bed about a boy when she caught her naked reflection on her phone. Her eyes were smudged with last night\u2019s makeup, her long blonde hair tangled against the white bedding. It struck her as a quintessential 01 moment. She pulled the bedsheet around her chest, reached for her MacBook, and hit RECORD on Photo Booth. She knew he would like the grainy, low-quality effect.<\/p>\n Because no one had met Angelicism01 in person, rumors abounded among the artists, academics, gallerists, and disaffected 20-somethings following his work. That he was superrich. That he was in the south of France. That he had been in jail. That he was funding the film with an inheritance from his grandmother. That he was in a mental hospital. That he was actually Honor Levy.<\/p>\n Among these readers and followers, the group of four became known as \u201cthe Angelicism girls,\u201d the human avatars of 01. They convened at the River, a Chinatown bar that was their de facto headquarters. \u201cTheir vibe was super-ethereal,\u201d says an employee of the bar. \u201cThey seemed like they glided in and out.\u201d The four often wore matching white T-shirts, which 01 had instructed Howe to print at Uniqlo, emblazoned with his phrases, like I LOVE YOU FOREVER AFTER THE END and SUCK MY DICK IN HEAVEN BITCH. \u201cI felt like a Brandy Melville girl,\u201d she says, \u201cexcept I was wearing a shirt that said EXTINCTION.\u201d<\/p>\n People sometimes compared them to the Manson girls, which they found funny and didn\u2019t mind playing into. Like with a photo they took in their white shirts, sitting on a stoop, staring stonily into the distance, which 01 posted on Instagram. The more people commented on the strangeness of the situation, the closer they felt \u2014 they liked being part of something people disapproved of. 01 infused the usual struggle of being young in the city with a sense of intensity and purpose. \u201cI wanted to be cool, and it felt cool,\u201d Bartlewski says. \u201cIn New York, a lot of people will ask you, \u2018Are you an artist?\u2019 This gave me a reason to say \u2018yes.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Armor found a job teaching at an after-school program but continued to work with 01 on her writing. He\u2019d pay her $200 an essay on topics he chose. \u201cI know ur a great author and u will publish a great book,\u201d he had DM\u2019d her. He started calling her on the phone, sometimes several times a day. On their calls, she began to coax a few shadowy biographical details out of him. He told her he was funding the film with money from an anonymous crypto donor. She learned he lived close to his family, and the family wasn\u2019t rich. He spoke with a working-class British accent.<\/p>\n \n The Angelicism girls at a 2023 screening of Film01. 01 had hired Jusidman to be his producer; she was in charge of coordinating and promoting screenings for Film01, not just in New York but in Los Angeles, Milan, Paris, New Delhi, and Berlin. He was editing up until the last possible moment with the idea that the film would continue to change form: He had amassed other hyperonline collaborators and editors from around the world and, even after the screenings, wanted them to continue sending him footage, which they would churn out for dozens of new cuts through the next year, including one Warholian ten-hour version.<\/p>\n Earlier that summer, at the first showing in New York at Anthology Film Archives in the East Village, the line snaked around the block. The crowd was a mix of novelists, professors, art-world people, Dimes Square fixtures, and 4chan trolls. Dasha Nekrasova, a co-host of the Red Scare podcast, shrieked when she saw herself projected on the screen in footage 01 had found and slotted in.<\/p>\n Film01 was designed to give viewers the feeling of falling into the internet and not being able to get out. For hours, the films cut frantically from Kanye West paparazzi footage to clips of the Angelicism girls to K-pop stars to anime characters to teens dancing on TikTok. Footage of uprisings and border conflicts and natural disasters were spliced with screen recordings of anonymous shitposters\u2019 Twitter replies and webcam videos of girls crying. Some viewers found it hypnotic, some were bored out of their minds, some thought it was a masterpiece of internet cinema, some were disturbed by the flagrant sexualizing of young women. The novelist Madeline Cash says watching the film \u201cfelt like it was a punishment. Like a hostage situation.\u201d Artist and Harvard professor David Levine said, \u201cIt\u2019s a very Virgin Suicides kind of beauty.\u201d<\/p>\n Watching it, Bartlewski came to appreciate some of 01\u2019s inscrutable philosophical writing: \u201cHis writing is best when it\u2019s being read out loud by a girl who thinks he\u2019s cool. The cold, robotic strangeness of his writing gets lost in the warm, real voice of a beautiful young woman.\u201d<\/p>\n After one of the New York screenings, a group of 01 acolytes celebrated over red wine and steak-frites at Lucien. That night, he called Jusidman on the phone: He wanted to know who was there and what they were talking about and what they thought of the film. He was eager to hear about a social scene he\u2019d helped shape even though he had never stepped foot in it. But this absence was his thing. It was, in a way, his medium. His whole project seemed to ask, How far can you go remotely? People joked that Angelicism was an Instagram-era Charlie\u2019s Angels; Gossip Girl, but with Derrida; a post-internet Wizard of Oz.<\/p>\n In spite of all the theatrics and mystery, the Angelicism girls began to grow closer to the man behind the curtain. In the fall, Bartlewski confided in him over Instagram DMs that she felt like her life was getting out of hand. She thought she might be an alcoholic. 01 told her about his own struggles with sobriety. He told her that recovery isn\u2019t always linear. \u201cThat was something that humanized him for me,\u201d she says. She began going to AA meetings in Chinatown.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, Armor and 01 were trading messages all day and at strange hours of the night. They exchanged long emails and talked on the phone for five hours at a time. In September, he DM\u2019d her \u201cyour so in my mind as i wake \u2026 your voice is inside me like an awakening, like something erotic i lost and now have again i will write you mad cringe beautiful love letters.\u201d She wrote him love letters via email with lines like \u201cIt\u2019s almost impossible to not fall in love when someone speaks all the languages in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n With the confidence he gave her, she had begun publishing dark, moody, often surrealistic autofiction in Dimes Square literary magazines. One day that winter, she sent 01 part of an experimental story about a smart, alienated young woman, which she felt good about. To her surprise, 01 told her it was terrible. He told her she should focus more on theory. He told her to stop trying to write like Bret Easton Ellis, she says. He didn\u2019t want her to write anything with a story line. She was crushed.<\/p>\n \n A photo of Chloe Bartlewski from April 2024. 01 does not have Wi-Fi in his flat. He does not have a smartphone. He finds the addictiveness of the internet threatening. He feels like it could pull him under. Out of self-preservation, he rations his access.<\/p>\n Most days, he walks to the public library in his small English town near the sea. The library overlooks pastel houses dotting green hilltops. He sits at a desktop computer at a communal table, where he posts and peruses the internet. People in town call him \u201cthe guy from the library.\u201d<\/p>\n He goes swimming in the ocean in all seasons. He loves the frigid water. He likes to be outside in the dusk. He doesn\u2019t like talking out loud. Once he threw his phone into the river. Another time, his laptop. By this point, hurling his devices into the water has kind of become a habit.<\/p>\n 01 became \u201cAngelicism01\u201d by accident. In the first winter of the pandemic, he published an essay on a Substack called COVIDian \u00c6sthetics, and the editor somehow used part of his email address, Angelicism01, as his byline. He loved the feeling of shedding his name. He had been studying Dzogchen, a Buddhist tradition that reinforced the idea of leaving behind the self, and began to step up his practice, training with a remote\u00a0 teacher.<\/p>\n His old name, which he jokingly and sometimes not so jokingly refers to as his deadname, is Jonty Tiplady. In some sense, becoming Angelicism01 offered him a solution to the problem of being Jonty Tiplady. By his 30s, he says, he was struggling spectacularly with substance abuse, cycling through a series of \u201cdesperate relationships,\u201d disappearing into stretches of severe mental illness. There is a photo of him taken after punching himself in the face during a psychiatric episode. He tried to kill himself several times over the years. \u201cI wanted to get away from an identity, my own, that had undergone too much to bear,\u201d he said over email.<\/p>\n Tiplady grew up in a working-class house with hardly any books. Though his father lacked a formal education, he had a deep appreciation of beauty \u2014 in, say, a vista or the score of The Godfather. At 19, Tiplady got on a train to Paris, he says, to study with Jacques Derrida in his seminar at 105 Boulevard Raspail. He intuitively took to the famously inscrutable language of deconstruction. To him, the work carried within it a trace of total loss, rigorously and variously examined.<\/p>\n But in the years after, he struggled to find a place in academia or the poetry scene or the intellectual world. He shook like a leaf in a hurricane when he had to deliver an academic paper. He had a \u201creticence to speak bordering on absolute muteness.\u201d For a while, he was addicted to heroin. He was drinking way too much. He experienced, as he put it, \u201cevery last style of not knowing how to inhabit the world.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2017, Tiplady became interested in a controversy surrounding a fringe gallery in East London called LD50. The gallery put on an inflammatory show: One exhibit featured alt-right, white-supremacist imagery, and it staged a conference of far-right-wing thinkers, including the philosopher Nick Land. At one point, there was a pink swastika on the door. British intellectuals and art-world people reacted strongly \u2014 they believed the gallery was giving a platform to dangerous hate speech. In pieces published online, Tiplady began defending the gallery\u2019s work on the grounds of free speech and intellectual diversity. He argued that it was irresponsible to dismiss thinkers as racist without reading and fully grappling with their theories. Friends turned against him. On a stranger\u2019s Facebook page, he came across a long essay denouncing him for being a fascist and racist. Some of his articles were taken down from websites. Long-planned poetry readings were canceled. He felt misread or unread, which to him was the worst feeling in the world. He took the episode as a total crushing destruction. Not long after, he used a tool called DeleteMe to erase much of Jonty Tiplady from the internet.<\/p>\n He wrote his first Substack post as 01 toward the end of 2020, and it was a kind of celebration of Trump\u2019s energy: \u201cTrump\u2019s genius is of course partly penis.\u201d He veered into an anecdote from his time in rehab, when he changed his mind about someone he detested after hearing their life story in group therapy. That\u2019s when he realized, paraphrasing the French writer Jean Genet, \u201cThis person in front of me is just as good as me.\u201d Over the first months, he found an intoxicating freedom in transforming and fully inhabiting this new character, Angelicism01. \u201cI love the freedom of not having to face others,\u201d he wrote on the Substack in February 2021, \u201cso that instead they can see what is really inside me and not be distracted by the inequality of physicality and location and reputation.\u201d He feels that in some meaningful way he transitioned into a disembodied technological self, that he left the battered, bruised Jonty Tiplady behind. \u201cI believe trans people have perhaps opened a portal here, a good one, a complex one, for everyone, both dangerous and amazing,\u201d he says now. \u201cRight now I feel I almost don\u2019t have a name. Perhaps there is a further transition?\u201d<\/p>\n His readership grew, especially after Honor Levy started writing about him. The filmmaker Harmony Korine subscribed. The critic Dean Kissick wrote several admiring pieces in Spike magazine about it. He argued that the anonymity of 01 was an attack on the rampant and degraded individualism of a generation posting about themselves online and an art world infatuated with celebrity. Kissick believes that the art and literary worlds have become sanitized and politically homogenized, that there should be more maniacs and madmen.<\/p>\n In 2021, 01 paid Sierra Armor $1,000 to create an Angelicism01 clone account on Twitter, and new ones started popping up on their own until there were, by his count, at least 70 on Twitter and Instagram. In the enforced quiet of the pandemic, he could see the outlines of a community forming. He was beginning to sense that he could move people, even shape their thinking.<\/p>\n Still, drama would continue to swirl around him: embittered former collaborators, spectacular blowouts with internet friends and dark online trolls. When people got publicly involved in 01\u2019s project, they\u2019d sometimes receive long, unsolicited emails warning them how dangerous he is. One said, \u201cAngelicism01 purveys views so extreme that I fear they risk degrading the reputation of those who knowingly associate with him.\u201d<\/p>\n He carried an edgelord energy into the new version of himself. He made Angelicism01 into \u201ca semi-wrathful entity.\u201d In posts, he often borrowed the language of extreme historic events \u2014 comparing, say, the rise of NFTs to a \u201cwater cooler in treblinka. It is itself \u2014 holocaustically, impossibly, glossily \u2014 fun.\u201d He returns compulsively to the LD50 scandal, likening it to \u201cone of the many miniature 9\/11s that followed the election of Donald Trump.\u201d His rhetoric, which can veer into ugly and violent territory, seems less about a coherent political message than about an aesthetic energy he admires: the explosion of pieties, which he views as a metacommentary on policed speech. Sometimes, it feels like rage fuels him. At other times, it seems as if all the extinction talk is a wish for the world, which feels so painful, to disappear.<\/p>\n From the shelter of Angelicism01, he corresponded with some of the older or more established people following his Substack. Via emails and Instagram DMs, he sent them exquisite close readings of their work, picking out a single line from their writing and finding what was beautiful or beguiling or original in it. When 01 read his Substack, Walt John Pearce says, \u201che immediately took from it what I would like people to take from it.\u201d This was the power of his attention, many of them said. 01 could transform himself into whatever his interlocutors needed: a mentor, an ideal reader, a sobriety coach, a romantic partner, a guide through the ruins of late capitalism.<\/p>\n \n A still of Emilia Howe from a cut of Film01. While the others sometimes joked about 01, Lola Jusidman was the most fervently loyal, the most invested in his vision. The daughter of a prominent Jewish Mexican artist known for his paintings of gas chambers in concentration camps, she carried herself with the seriousness of a high-minded heroine from a Henry James novel. She had begun writing her own anonymous Substack emulating his style, and she served as his spokesperson on podcasts talking about Film01. Her then-boyfriend, Mateo Demarigny, was also helping 01 edit the film. \u201c01 was like a god we followed,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n In 2023, Jusidman and 01 began dreaming up a \u201cdissolution seminar\u201d about climate change. 01 would be involved remotely. She began plotting a syllabus and found a space on the Upper West Side, All Angels\u2019 Church, to rent for meetings. She\u2019d drop everything if he needed to talk to her, but she didn\u2019t want to ever meet him in person. So many relationships were tarnished when you, say, got together for drinks and dinner. She liked preserving the enchantment and often referred to him as \u201cit\u201d and \u201cthey.\u201d<\/p>\n For Armor, though, the novelty of the disembodied attachment was wearing off. As her relationship with 01 intensified, she began to want the conventional things. She became fixated on meeting him in person. On some level, she knew this would never happen, but she couldn\u2019t let it go. She started asking him relentlessly. \u201cI felt like I was in love with him,\u201d she says. \u201cI was very adamant about meeting him. He didn\u2019t understand why. He just said, \u2018I don\u2019t meet people.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Despite his resistance, they crafted elaborate scenarios of being in the same room. Referring to an image of a shirtless man French-kissing himself in the mirror, she messaged 01, \u201cI am you, and I\u2019m kissing me as you.\u201d 01 fleetingly told her he might meet her. To troll him, Armor posted an Instagram Story announcing that she and 01 were having a wedding in the U.K. and everyone was invited. She enlisted one of her tech-savvy friends to trace his IP so she would know exactly where he was. They found his small town near the coast in England. She studied the town\u2019s map closely to spot the library he had described to her.<\/p>\n They indulged in extreme fantasies over text, some of which involved him killing her. For Armor, the violence was part of the appeal. She wrote to him, \u201ci would let u decimate me and it would feel perfect.\u201d He described scenes like pushing her against a beautiful mirror and using a knife to remove her clothes while holding another knife to her throat. He sent her a message about spilling her guts onto the sidewalk and leaving her there for dead in her rolled-up white dress. She hearted the message. She liked testing the limits of what could be imagined and said, and the extremity of these exchanges thrilled her. Because they never met in person, she was operating entirely in her favorite medium: words. She wrote in one of her stories, \u201cEliza sought stimulation because she had a high iq. She made a private game out of trying to shock herself. She treated those around her as objects in her game. She called it \u2018disturbancemaxxing.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n 01 could be aggressive and also tender. \u201cWhen Monday comes I love you more than ever, haven\u2019t you noticed? By Sunday I\u2019m more than dead, I feel threatened in my bones by the whole world, and you seem gone,\u201d he wrote her. There was always the temptation to think, as Armor sometimes did, that what happened between them was not real. How wounded can you be in a relationship composed entirely of Instagram messages and texts and emails and phone calls? She was already used to living the most vivid parts of her life online. In a story she later published, she wrote, \u201cI want to kiss you but you don\u2019t have a face. This was not a problem for me.\u201d<\/p>\n ANGELICISM01: are you in love?<\/p>\n UNBRIDLED_ID: yes<\/p>\n UNBRIDLED_ID: are you?<\/p>\n ANGELICISM01: I definitely don\u2019t feel\u00a0this way with anyone else, I am, yes.<\/p>\n In real life, Armor was seeing some of the scruffy, unemployed, Peter Pan\u2013ish men hanging around Dimes Square. When she was with them, she\u2019d sometimes ignore 01\u2019s messages. At the bars, the other Angelicism girls would come up to tell her 01 was urgently trying to reach her: He always wanted to know where she was and whom she was with. Once he called her 32 times in a single night. He would sometimes leave her unhinged voice-mails cycling through rage, desperation, and panic and apologize the next morning. She felt like he had no right to be jealous, but she also wanted him to be.<\/p>\n They fought constantly, and when he was mad at her, 01 would tell her she was replaceable. Sometimes he threatened not to pay her. At one point, he emailed her an apology, telling her he was going to try his best to leave her alone for at least a few weeks. He told her he wanted her to have a great time in New York and that he never wanted to get in the way. He signed the email \u201ctenderly and in pain, and full of difficult love, forgive me for writing quickly.\u201d The next day, he broke his resolve and wrote to her again.<\/p>\n The power dynamics of Angelicism, with 01 as a controlling authority figure, were both deeply familiar to Armor from her strict religious childhood and also deeply maddening. She wanted to be more than a muse. She started telling people that she thought 01\u2019s writing was unintelligible. \u201cThere was always a part of me that wanted to usurp his role as the leader,\u201d she says. \u201cI want to be the person who is making the movie.\u201d<\/p>\n To her, there is a boring version of this story in which an older man abused his power over a younger woman, but that doesn\u2019t quite do justice to what happened, or to who she was, a powerful actor and fantasist herself. In a story, she wrote, \u201cYou are only words and sometimes I think my future self could have written you.\u201d<\/p>\n After two years of talking, they finally FaceTimed with both of their cameras on, which was the closest any of the women ever came to meeting him. It was nighttime, and he had taken his computer to a bus stop where there was Wi-Fi. He turned on his camera by accident. \u201cIt was the most unflattering angle from below his face,\u201d Armor says. She had in her head the few photographs he had sent her from when he was younger where she thought he looked angelic and handsome in a very British way. She was taken aback by how old he looked on the screen.<\/p>\n To 01, the situation felt like it was spinning out of his control. At the beginning, they were playing with projections and personas and extremes. He felt like he was still \u201cin character,\u201d that he was the assured anonymous presence who wrote wild confrontational things, including \u201cAny blind girls in heaven wearing tennis skirts want me to shoot them and then push them out of a plane?\u201d Then he started to be in love. He was suddenly Jonty Tiplady again, not 01. He felt like she was playing games with him. At six in the morning his time, she would call him to dissect her problems with another man in New York. It seemed to him like a battle of wills. \u201cI think I felt something like terror,\u201d 01 says, when he \u201crealized that any fade in interest from me would literally be met with a self-conscious and symbolized attempt to destroy my life.\u201d After all of his effort to curate his image, he was afraid of her novelist\u2019s tendency to rearrange facts to reflect her own truth. She knows she can lie without even realizing she is lying. \u201cI\u2019m a fiction writer and not so good with facts,\u201d she says. She once wrote to 01, \u201cI self narrate until I\u2019m not sure what is true and what isn\u2019t tbh.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe relationship was out of hand,\u201d 01 admits. \u201cMy behavior in it was too extreme.\u201d He felt pushed out of the comfortable distance he had created between him and the clamoring world. He had worked so hard to find this safe way of being, and she was disrupting it. \u201cSierra was an exception to my rule to keep at a distance,\u201d he says. \u201cI guess she broke all my rules.\u201d<\/p>\n In April 2024, a new cut of Film01 screened at Anthology Film Archives. In the darkened theater, Armor saw herself blown up on the giant screen. For three very long minutes, she watched herself topless kissing her reflection in the mirror. The only sound was the faint noise of her lipsticked mouth against the glass. She couldn\u2019t bear to watch this in a theater crowded with friends, acquaintances, and strangers.<\/p>\n She walked out. In the bathroom, she shot off angry messages to 01. Yes, she had sent him the footage with the knowledge that he would put it in the film. But she didn\u2019t expect to feel so violated.<\/p>\n Over the summer, on Instagram Stories, Armor began posting old angry voice-mails 01 had left her. She also posted disturbing, graphic texts he\u2019d sent, saying he wished she would die. \u201cI am no longer working with Angelicism01,\u201d she wrote. \u201cThis isn\u2019t a metoo \u2014 I just think he\u2019s insufferable to work with and I believe that the quality of his work has declined tbh.\u201d<\/p>\n She later posted a picture of herself in a slip dress in bed next to a photograph a friend had found online of his face. This would have been unthinkable to her months earlier \u2014 she knew this was a total betrayal of his anonymity and how precious this anonymity was to him. She DM\u2019d him, \u201cI am making the decision to take creative control of YOUR project.\u201d Then she blocked him, though not without a sense of loss. \u201cI was closer to him than to pretty much anyone in my life.\u201d<\/p>\n \n A photo Sierra Armor posted on Instagram in the fall of 2024 outing Angelicism01. Watching this unfold, Jusidman was angry. To her, the public drama felt like a distraction from the higher aims of the project. Armor saw posts of the others hanging out without her on Instagram.<\/p>\n There had long been a free-floating resentment toward Angelicism among the wannabe male novelists and scene kids of the Lower East Side. On her Substack, Jusidman wrote that \u201cgrown, sometimes even married men also came to town and came online, wanting to \u2018be\u2019 angelicism01 too.\u201d 01 feels that the Angelicism project placed him at the center of a kind of \u201cwhite light of sexual heat.\u201d As he puts it, \u201cPeople were like what is this? Where did it come from? Why does it attract women? We need to get rid of it.\u201d<\/p>\n Late that fall, a group of Armor\u2019s new downtown friends started a doxing campaign against 01. The ringleader was Joe Buck, a stubbly man with a cartoon mouse tattooed on his chest. As a lark, they went out one day and plastered posters of Jonty Tiplady\u2019s face and name all over Dimes Square. They used an image of a scruffy Tiplady wearing glasses they had found on Twitter. When they ran into people associated with Angelicism on the street, they asked them to take photos in front of the posters. They posted a video of people stamping on torn-up photos of Tiplady\u2019s face. \u201cI felt like he was omnipresent,\u201d says Buck. \u201cI just wanted him to not be anonymous.\u201d<\/p>\n 01 spiraled. For him, the public use of his name and photo was an almost physical violation. \u201cI have terrible winter depressions, literally life-threatening,\u201d he says. At the end of 2024, in the grip of one of these episodes, he opened his Substack and deleted all of his posts. He says he was \u201cheartbroken about it, still am inside. Everything hurt.\u201d<\/p>\n Jusidman came back from ballet class to find the Substack deleted in its entirety. Someone sent her a screen recording of 01 erasing it in real time. She called him to shout at him, then dashed off a devastated Substack post saying he had amputated his masterpiece.<\/p>\n As Angelicism faded from the internet, the group began to drift apart. Emilia Howe went back to school. Chloe Bartlewski says she got a flip phone because of internet exhaustion and deactivated her Instagram. She was recently baptized and now attends the Catholic Church. \u201cMy life is now so entirely influenced by Angelicism,\u201d she says. \u201cEven if I hated him, I would have to give him credit, like a dad almost.\u201d More broadly, though, the project has lost its transgressive cachet. With ICE agents seizing students on the streets and late-night hosts taken off the air after offending the administration, Angelicism01\u2019s rage seems strangely misplaced. Now that the whole woke cultural Establishment is melting away or deeply embattled, fury at woke thought-policing feels antiquated.<\/p>\n Armor still misses the other Angelicism girls. She is engaged to a 20-year-old man she met through a friend who met him on Minecraft. This past April, the doxer, Joe Buck, hosted a reading and asked her to read aloud from Jonty Tiplady\u2019s book of poems. People were draped across the sofa, half-listening and half-scrolling. Holding a wired microphone, she tried to read but was too high on ketamine to get through a single poem.<\/p>\n For all the chaos, Armor says, Angelicism gave her many things she needed at the time: money and connections and writing material. She sometimes feels lazy or adrift without the motivation 01 provided. Dean Kissick observes, \u201cI imagine this cultic environment being good for your art, in a way, even if it is not necessarily good for you.\u201d<\/p>\n 01 has no regrets. He feels Angelicism saved not only his life but other people\u2019s as well. He is helping Jusidman with a new \u201cdissolution seminar.\u201d He has forgiven Buck for the doxing and now occasionally sees the humor of it. He has finished work on a new film called This Is the Girl, including footage shot by Buck. The film will feature a 20-something brunette whose Instagram handle is @Idontreallyexistokay.<\/p>\n What\u2019s left of 01\u2019s experiment is mostly a few isolated people inventing and creating online. His idea of leaving his body and actually merging with the machine, his rapturous vision of human souls disappearing into digital memory, is not, after all, so far from where we are.<\/p>\n Armor is now working on a novel about a girl texting an anonymous internet presence. She writes, \u201cEvery night, after my parents went to bed, I would text a man named 01. I never learned what 01 looked like. He said that that was besides the point.\u201d This version of 01 turns out to be not a separate person but a reflection of the girl\u2019s own psyche. She narrates an exhilarating ascent into online immortality: \u201cI knew that there had to be a methodical way to get you to love me. I am the last wunderkind of my generation. Google me next century and I will still be new. I am new again and again.\u201d<\/p>\n Thank you for subscribing and supporting our journalism.![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/fd72e92bb936018ab47074652934c8f31f-angelicism-3.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: David Zavala\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/d3832e1c530065062672c0b4d0e04b4e00-angelicism-2.rhorizontal.w700.jpg\")
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\n Photo: courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/097b007977247f82fdb0df0bcd7af22f22-angelicism-7.w710.jpg\")
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\n Photo: Film01\n <\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/a589787a82dad87e150181599abf7bba4c-angelicism-5.rvertical.w570.jpg\")
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\n Photo: courtesy of the subject\n <\/p>\n
\n If you prefer to read in print, you can also find this article in the October 20, 2025, issue of
\n New York\u00a0Magazine.<\/p>\n