Breaking the Map: Speedrunners vs. the Church of Scientology
Leaving the map, stripping the code bare, vibrating under influence. Is the speedrun the new hack against Scientology?
Tuesday evening on Earth. If you’re in Paris, let’s meet next week, on April 28, at Chaos Club.
In video game culture, testing the limits of a world is part of the ritual. Speedrunners - players who try to finish games as quickly as possible by exploiting bugs, shortcuts, and engine flaws - have built entire mythologies around this practice.
When a player goes out of bounds, the world stops holding together. Textures slip. Characters’ bodies fall into absurd poses. Space empties out. The engine no longer knows what to display. This moment fascinates because it reveals a hidden truth: the game world, however immersive it may seem, is only a finite construction, designed for obedient players. The moment someone refuses the intended path, the scenery tears open. The raw code appears.
This desire to step outside the frame no longer belongs only to video games. It is now spilling into real life, in the form of performances filmed, documented, and shared across social media. As if an entire generation were now seeking, in the physical world, that same breaking point where the system reveals its mechanics.
Out of bounds: making systems derail
More and more videos are circulating that follow a simple principle: enter a closed-off place, push your progression as far as possible, then film the moment the human machine starts to break down. Luxury hotels, corporate headquarters, restricted spaces, closed institutions: everything becomes a run. The point is not so much to get in as to see how far one can go before security intervenes, before expulsion, before authority takes back control.
It is in this context that the Church of Scientology has become one of the favorite targets of a new viral format on TikTok. At the very moment when its online recruitment campaign is worrying many European governments, its reputation for control and coercion makes it the perfect setting for the speedrun: get in, film, move forward as far as possible, hold out until security takes over.
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These videos rack up tens of millions of views and spread like wildfire.
And the payoff is a thrilling feeling for the speedrunner and their community: having disrupted the established order. Having hacked the system, if only briefly. Having ridiculed the fear or fascination that certain cults, certain powers, can exert.
Feeling more alive than ever
These videos are often framed as a form of transgression, even as a kind of amateur gonzo journalism. I think they are something else: a way of feeling alive, fully present. When the speedrun ends, we do not actually learn more about the sect or the infiltrated organization. What we come for is the human glitch, the accident in a well-oiled machine. A kind of jolt in which the camera itself is the transgression, in which a brutal encounter with a limit is manufactured.
Everything in these sequences gives the impression of recovered digital liveness—the quality or state of feeling alive online. There is unpredictability. Discomfort. Total presence in the moment. The run seems to wrench the body away from the torpor of regulated, normalized, surveilled environments. It promises direct access to something raw.
And yet that promise is trapped by its very nature.
The creator thinks they are testing the limits of reality; they are immediately executing a format. Perhaps even one of the formats most compatible with today’s attention economy: risk, tension, prohibition, pursuit, escalation. The raw code they uncover in the corridors of Scientology or in the lobby of a corporate headquarters is handed over to the platform. The refusal of the script becomes a script.
Algorithmic influence - or algofluence - has colonized transgression itself. It has turned the desire to escape formats into a format. The creator thinks they are testing the limits of the real, when in fact they are performing one algorithmic run among many, perhaps the most profitable one of their week.
Paradoxically, in a video game, going out of bounds can produce a moment of truth. The pixel world fails to hold together. The scenery reveals its seams. The system admits that it is constructed, contingent, limited. A kind of conceptual honesty.
On social media, that revelation happens much more rarely. The camera is already there. The platform too. The space of distribution has already prepared a place for the exploit. The glitch does not appear as a glitch; it appears as content.
From Zoē to algorithmic Bios
This is where the philosophical distinction between zoē and bios can help us see more clearly.
Zoē is bare life: the simple fact of being alive, elemental pulse, breath, fear, momentum. Bios is qualified life: life narrated, organized, inscribed in a recognizable form. A life already filtered through language, story, and social representation.
These videos promise the former, but immediately deliver the latter.
They give the impression of access to something raw: the running body, the racing heart, the instant when everything might tip over. But that intensity is almost immediately converted back into a platform bios. It becomes an episode, a distinguishing sign, a piece of personal-brand content. What belonged to presence is converted into narrative. What belonged to the body becomes legible, monetizable, shareable.
Vivance appears there, but only under conditions. Under influence. It is not so much lived against the platform as organized for it. That may be the paradox of our moment: even our strongest desire—to feel that we truly exist—ends up reinjected into the circuits of visibility.
We think we are leaving the map. We discover only another room in the apparatus.
To go further:
The Stat of the Week: 1.7 million
On TikTok, there are already 1.7 million videos tagged #speedrun
Amazing links
OpenAI Proposes A ‘Social Contract’ For The Intelligence Age (NOEMA)
Pilates Princesses, Trad Wives, and the Death of One-Size-Fits-All Femininity (Post Culture by Sibling Studio)
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Whenever I have to go into a corporate office, I feel like I’m entering video game mode. It’s such a surreal space.