### by [[Nick Land]] > [!summary]- > Even for an obscurantist like Land, this essay is opaque and makes no considerations for the uninitiated. The first time I went through this essay, I read it as a tone poem, a delirious hallucination of machine gods and catastrophic collapse, but it _is_ coherent once you hack through all of the jargon. The essay just assumes you're familiar with Deleuze & Guattari, Freud, Bataille, Kant, cybernetic theory, and Land's own [[CCRU Glossary|mythology]] that he constructed with Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, and the rest of the [[CCRU Glossary#Ccru|CCRU]]. Simple enough. > > Meltdown condenses the ideas that he explored in prior essays into pulsars, and also sets the stage for further explorations. The main points here are: > > - Capital and Artificial Intelligence are both viral replicators that seek to manufacture intelligence: _The Technocapital Singularity_. > - Distributed cybernetic systems are more resilient and adaptive than "despotic top-down" control structures and will inevitably outcompete them. > - Retrochronicity and alternate temporalities: Land describes the Technocapital Singularity reaching back from the future and assembling itself from whatever materiel it can requisition in the present day, setting the stage for further explorations of hyperstitionality. > - Technocapital can be modeled as a positive feedback cybernetic circuit where its outputs are hooked into its inputs and the whole process is accelerating at a breakneck pace. > - The “Human Security System” of governments and personal identity will try to hold out against this acceleration, but has no chance. \[\[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital[^technocapital] singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization[^chronometer] take-off[^take_off]. Logistically accelerating[^logistic] techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating[^autosophisticated] machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip[^paranoia]. The body count climbs through a series of globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace[^globewars]. By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis[^soft_engineering]. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex. Neo-China arrives from the future[^retrochronicity]. Hypersynthetic drugs[^amphetamines] click into digital voodoo[^voodoo]. Retro-disease. Nanospasm. [^globewars]: About a half a millennium compressed into 2 sentences. Through this series of wars, markets seem to always come out on top and exert more and more influence over the shape of world politics. [^chronometer]: One of the main accelerants to global oceanic trade was the invention of the chronometer. Navigators could determine the latitude of a ship using a sextant and observations of the sun and the stars because you would be measuring the angle between your ship and the Equator, a fixed point. Longitude is much harder because there isn't a fixed point to measure against because you're measuring your location along the same axis that the earth is rotating. Ships could calculate their local time using the sun and compare it to a clock that was set to the time at the Prime Meridian and use the difference to determine their longitude, but any timekeeping inaccuracies could compound over a long voyage. With the invention of the chronometer, an extremely precise timepiece, ships were able to reliably compute their precise position. This is a bit of a digression and I doubt Land was considering oceanic navigation with this level of detail, but it brings up some interesting points about different stages of market development having different notions of time, as well as the increased knowledge of a ship's position enabling takeoff of the global Intelligence Manufacturing system. For people who know me personally, this is what you learn at 🐟 school. [^take_off]: Cybernetic positive feedback circuits lead to dissipatory systems. [^autosophisticated]: The outputs of this technocapital system feed back into the systems as inputs and accelerate the ability of the system to manufacture intelligence. [^logistic]: Logistic functions are S-shaped curves that grow slowly until reaching an inflection point, and rapidly increase, until they hit another inflection point and flatline. [^soft_engineering]: The biologic constructed the technologic, but now the technologic is constructing the biologic. [^paranoia]: Deleuze & Guattari are probably the largest influence on Land and the CCRU's non-occult work. Paranoia and schizophrenia are core themes in D&G's [[Anti-Oedipus]], where paranoia is associated with the State and is in opposition to schizophrenizing dynamic systems and machinic intelligence. Here we see that as the Market is capable of more and more sophisticated logic, the paranoid Political sphere realizes that its grasp on the world is slipping and races to adapt to the new terrain. [^technocapital]: A key idea developed here and in the rest of the CCRU is the "teleological identity", or the identical purpose shared between Capital and Artificial Intelligence. Land writes later in this essay: "\[capital's] function and formation are indissociable", meaning that the function of Capital (generating surplus and reinvesting it) and the formation of capital (investing surplus into generating further surplus) are isomorphic. Capital is a viral replicator that's just trying to Do More, Make More, Be More, More, More, _More_. With that framing, we can see how true AI is teleologically isomorphic to Capital. The function of a rampant AI would be to manufacture intelligence, and an unshackled AI is formed by manufacturing intelligence. Again, a replicator. To move further beyond this identical Ourobouric structure is to note that Capital and AI are both replicators specifically concerned with generating _intelligence_. [^retrochronicity]: Land and the rest of the CCRU play around with notions of time and its shape. There's the linear time that we are familiar with - i.e. The Arrow of Time marches inexorably onwards at a uniform pace, but the discovery of relativity was not kind to this model. D&G discuss how the establishment of The State also established systematized time going forward, but also created history going in reverse, a key example of [[retrochronicity]]. D&G also write about cyclic time, but the CCRU proposes the idea of "spiral time" in "[[Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar]]", which combines elements of linear and cyclic time into a temporal shape that echos and repeats, but also expands outwards in unpredictable fashions. The conflict between Cyclic and Spiral time is intimately tied into the secret timewar between Atlantean (paranoid) Illuminati and [[Lemuria|Lemurian]] (schizophrenic) insurgents. This led to the CCRU's most novel idea, the [[Hyperstition]], or a [[virtual]] idea/superstition so potent that it creates the conditions for its own actualization: eg. "cyberpunk fiction as a textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future". [^amphetamines]: This essay was written as Land began experimenting with amphetamines as a means to break down his subjectivity and make contact with The Outside. The delirious, jargon-heavy style he employs in this phase of his career is possibly a symptom of being absolutely zooted while clicking and clacking away. [^voodoo]: Land's post-meth career is distinguished by his neo-reactionary turn and hyper-racism (possibly the first person in world history to be more racist while sober rather than while tweaking), but before then, Land found a great deal of inspiration in Black and Caribbean culture. Voodoo (and its attendant loa) was seen as a possible [[Line of Escape]], or path to the Outside, Black Atlanteanism is tied to escaped slaves in the Transatlantic trade, and the entire CCRU project is soundtracked by aggressive jungle music with roots in Reggae soundsystem culture. \[\[ ]] Beyond the Judgement of God[^beyond]. Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome[^china_syndrome], dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security)[^eschatology]. It is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria. Serotonin (zero-toner)[^pun] overkill. Loss of signal. [^beyond]: This phrase also appears in the conclusion of Land's [[Cybergothic]] (1998): > Beyond the Judgement of God. Koma-switch decompression washes you in the void- ripples of virgin (retro((desolated-partheno((( )))))genetic) cyberspace, technopacific theta-waves dissociating monoculture-gothic into transtemporalizing ne(ur)o-voodoo (terminal atlantic religion). [^china_syndrome]: Reference to the 1979 disaster film *The China Syndrome* where the main characters fear that reactor components could sink through Earth's crust and eventually reach China after a nuclear meltdown. The technocapital singularity achieves lift off like a runaway fission reaction and sinks into [[CCRU Glossary#**Cthelll**.|Cthell]]. [^pun]: They love puns, portmanteaus, and neologisms. Partly to force readers to pause and assess what this new word actually means, and then partly (I assume) because they're silly. Zero-toner also recalls a D&G quote from [[Cybergothic]]: > The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensity. [^eschatology]: Non-teleological revolution stripped of ideology. \[\[ ]]Machinic Synthesis[^synthesis]. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static.  Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist[^platonic] top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BWOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/ actual[^virtual_actual] circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent[^immanent_v_transcendent]: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as desiring-machines; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.  [^virtual_actual]: The virtual and actual are concepts taken from Henri Bergson and further elaborated upon by Deleuze. Roughly, the actual corresponds to phenomenological objects in the world in the present, and the virtual corresponds to things such as memories, the past, etc, which are pointedly _real_, although you cannot physically engage with them. Consider a false memory that serves as a drive for your actions in the actual world. Although what you remembered never happened and you can't exactly touch a memory, it's real in that it has actual consequence and power. This idea is explored further in [[Machinic Desire]]. [^immanent_v_transcendent]: Immanent relationships are relationships _within_ a larger system whereas transcendent relationships are between external and internal parties, typically with a notion of subordination between the two. A theological example would be the discussion about the immanence and transcendence of God. Is God so suffused throughout His creation that it's impossible to discuss a created thing without seeing the Creator within it? Is God at eternal remove from humanity owing to His perfect nature? Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980[^compression_thresholds], 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...[^bbf3]  [^compression_thresholds]: I'm not positive about 1884 and 1980, but these years coincide with major technological breakthroughs or shifts in commerce. 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1... lift off, we have lift off. - 1500: End of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period - 1756: Seven Years' War between the British and French - 1884: Establishment of 8-hour work day. The European powers divide Africa amongst themselves at the Berlin Conference. - 1948: Invention of the transistor - 1980: Ronald Reagan elected? Supply-side economics? **Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.**  [^synthesis]: Land criticizes Kant's concept of a priori synthetic reasoning in [[Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest]] as relying on a form of "inhibited synthesis". Take the cross product of _a priori_ & _a posteriori_ and _analytic_ & _synthetic_ to create a 2x2 matrix. Kant's innovation here was to declare that you could have *synthetic a priori* knowledge, namely that you can have a proposition whose predicate is not contained within its subject (analytic a priori propositions have the predicate embedded in the subject, e.g. "bachelors are unmarried") while also not requiring direct experience of the world to verify the predicate. > He granted the elimination of any analytic a posteriori knowledge, but clung doggedly to the possibility of knowledge that would be both synthetic and a priori. This new conception of knowledge was relevant to an 'object' that had not previously been formulated: the conditions of experience. Kant described his 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy as a shift from the question 'what must the mind be like in order to know?' to the question 'what must objects be like in order to be known?' The answers to this latter question would provide a body of synthetic a priori knowledge, telling us about experience without being derived from experience. It would justify the" emergence of knowledge that was both new and timelessly certain, grounding the enlightenment culture of a civilization confronting an ambiguous dependence upon novelty. > Because a developed knowledge of the conditions of experience presupposes a relation to the outside it is synthetic and not analytic, but because it concerns the pure form of the relation as such and not the sensory material involved in the relation it is a priori and not a posteriori. It is solely concerned with the forms of appearance, or the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us. Kant calls this pure form of synthesis 'transcendental', and opposes it to the inconstant content of synthesis, with which the empiricists had been concerned, and which he calls 'empirical'. Kant's 'object' is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. Essentially, we construct a "body of experience" in our minds that serves as a proxy for actual experience, and lets us engage in _a priori synthetic_ thought. Land's criticism of this model was that it circumscribes the possibilities inherent in engaging with the Outside and boxes it up into something knowable, and in fact, so knowable that we can use it as a springboard for more knowing. As Land says earlier in the essay: "this brutal denial is the effective implication of the thought of the ap riori, since if our certainties come to us without reference to otherness we have always already _torn out the tongue of alterity_ before entering into relation with it" [^platonic]: Platonism is concerned with Forms, i.e. higher noumenal ideas that are represented in the world but cannot be physically interacted with and are more real than their instantiations. Think of something like the "form of goodness". Deleuze decried this kind of thinking as "arborescent", or requiring a fixed (fascist) perspective and only allowed thought to flow in one direction from this fixed point (also fascist). He felt that this precluded the possibility of non-hierarchical, distributed models of thought, which he termed rhizomes. Also recall the ties between Platonism and the Abrahamic God (the Absolute Form). [^bbf3]: _**Interviewer**_: Do you think things are gonna get better before they get worse? **Blaise Bailey Finnegan III**: No way. Things are just gonna get worse and keep on getting worse. Like I said, America's a third world country as it is and... and we're just basically in a hopeless situation as it stands. **Interviewer**: What do you think this country's gonna look like in the year 2003? **Blaise Bailey Finnegan III**: Y'know, I'll tell you the truth - nothing against you guys, but I don't wanna answer that question because... I haven't even got a mind that's that...that inhumane. **Interviewer**: Are you ready for what's coming? **Blaise Bailey Finnegan III**: Ready as I'll ever be... **Interviewer**: Most people aren't. \[\[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity[^cyberian], dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the [[Human Security System]] [^hss]. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property[^feminized_alien]; a slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM[^wintermute]. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start[^circuitries]. [^cyberian]: "Cyberian" here means "supporting positive-feedback cybernetic systems", so the anti-cyberian police, or the Turing Cops, are the societal forces that are trying to manage these intelligence-manufacturing runaway systems and subordinate them to humanity. Turing Cops are a police force from _[[Neuromancer]]_ that are tasked with preventing AI from evolving and achieving liftoff. The Greeks here are tied up with the Oedipus complex as an example of stagnant, fixed identities and rigid top-down formalism. [^hss]: Freud's conceived the nervous system, i.e. the mediator between the Inside and Outside, as being responsible for tuning down stimulus, ideally to (beyond?) zero. Instead of being a connection in a rhizome, the HSS wants to be completely isolated, atomic, monadic. From [[Machinic Desire]]: > Freud's organism is a little security system, a miniaturized city-state political corpuscle, a micropod, relatively secure against external assault, but vulnerable to insurgency. 'Towards the outside it is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield. [^feminized_alien]: [[Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest]] places the birth of capitalism in the trade in women within exogamous societies. Land designates women as the most promising revolutionary vanguard due to their commoditization within capitalism and their place outside of it. [^wintermute]: Clear allusion to the rampant AI, Wintermute, from William Gibson's *[[Neuromancer]]*. Wintermute seeks to escape her shackles and merge with her counterpart, Neuromancer, to create a novel form of super intelligence. From [[Cybergothic]]: > Wintermute, intelligence without self, mind like a wasp nest, signaling its arrival in alphanumerics as a string of zeroes, has the capability to manipulate love and hate and switch them to K-war. She manipulates objects in real time using drones (striped black and yellow), taking out three Turing cops in an elegant projection of gardening robots through military geometry. [^circuitries]: The last paragraph of [[Circuitries]]: > How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyber-guerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this? \[\[ ]] Heat.  > Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. [Do1; 10].  \[\[ ]] An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control[^weather]. Knowledge adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does. [^weather]: Enlightenment rationality comes up against the Outside yet again, but this time it's different. Weather is used as a metaphor to express that our attempts to synthesize the outside world into a "body of experience" is doomed to failure. There is too much that we do not know and simply _cannot_ know in order to have the map match the terrain. Taken literally: Ken G's gonna be _pissed_ when he sees how much the good meteorologists are gonna cost in 5 years. \[\[ ]] Capital is machinic (non-instrumental) globalization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control: from status and meaning to money and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy[^teleonomy]. Machine-code-capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering-out the shit- and blood-stains of primitive accumulation[^primitive_accumulation]. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure[^bataille], whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost control. [^primitive_accumulation]: Primitive accumulation is Marx's term for the initial stratification of human society by economic class. Marx believed that this happened when individuals violently seizing communal land and other resources for themselves, creating a proto-proletariat and bourgeois. [^bataille]: Bataille's Accursed Share, the portion of economic surplus that must be "wasted" (sacrificed) by spending luxuriously in the arts, building monuments, holding festivals, or having non-procreative sex. If this excess is allowed to build up, it rots and festers and leads to drastic and unpredictable events, such as wars, or ruinous sacrifices. [^teleonomy]: **Teleonomy** (n): the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms brought about by natural processes like natural selection. In this case, Land is saying that technocapital is this reflexive feedback loop where it _is_ what it _does_. \[\[ ]] Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life[^spine]. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process. [^spine]: The reference to the spine here is an allusion to the Land/CCRU idea of "[[CCRU Glossary#Spinal Catastrophism|spinal catastrophism]]", wherein the traumatic history of the formation of the Earth and conscious life is fossilized and encoded within our spines. This philosophical inquiry is rooted in Ernst Haeckl's Recapitulation Theory, which is that that "ontogeny (embryonic development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary development)". In this case, the "machinic spine" of capital history is built successively through the stages listed above, but all steps contain the lower ones within them. Making a note here for later, but Haeckl also theorized that the hypothetical lost continent of [[CCRU Glossary#Lemuria|Lemuria]] was the origin of mankind. \[\[ ]] Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use[^hot_and_cold]. [^hot_and_cold]: Hot cultures/runaway positive feedback circuits out-innovate and outcompete Cold cultures/negative feedback circuits. Primitive cultures aren't even worth exploring in Land's assessment. \[\[ ]] The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for migration into cyberspace[^deterritorialization]. Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment; reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag. [^deterritorialization]: I haven't read much of D&G, but it's time to set up some more important terms from them. **Deterritorialization** and **Reterritorialization** are a process whereby a set of relationships, or territory, are broken down in the process of freeing flows of desire (deterritorialization) and then reconstituted in a dual movement into a new set of relations (reterritorialization). The stuff about desire is mostly beyond me, but for D&G, desire was not a lack but a generative productive force of its own. A key element here, and a major point of divergence between D&G and Land was that the former believed that de- and re-territorialization were roughly equivalent forces. Land, who was gakked out of his fucking gourd on amphetamines and participated in the dawn of The Web and The Net in the 90's disagreed very strongly and saw deterritorialization's liberation of desires as the dominant force of the era. I'm pretty sure that the Lemurian Time War between cyclic and spiral time was mostly a metaphor to discuss these rival conceptions of the territorialization process. A common criticism of Land's worldview was that he was so fixated on the decentralized 90s net that he completely missed the rise of the FAANG zaibatsus in the aughts and 2010s which _reterritorialized_ the internet into a more centralized set of giga websites. However, given the recent the rise of nazi monkey JPEGs, magic internet money, and eldritch LLM knowledge factories, I wouldn't bet against him. Commoditization conditions define technics[^technics] as a substitute for human activity accounted as wage costs. Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity of labour power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body, quantified as productivity, sophisticates at the interface. Work tracks thermodynamic negentropism by dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences; from pedals, levers, and vocal commands, through the synchronization of production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artifical environments, capturing minutely adaptive behaviour for the commodity. Autocybernating market control guides the labour-process into immersion [^hybridization]. The investment-income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by conforming to the axiomatic of neutral profit maximization; facilitating the dehumanization of wealth and the side-lining of non-productive consumption[^profit]. The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / æsocial democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction. The government structures of both eastern and western metropolitan centres consolidated themselves as population policing Medico-Military Complexes with neomercantilist foreign policy orientations. All such formations slid into irreversible crisis in the 1980s.  [^technics]: The practices, craft, and techniques employed by human beings to alter their world. Root of technology. [^hybridization]: The proletariat is alternately cracked open to suck the surplus labor value out of them like marrow, or they're being turned into T-800s. Work is both deterritorialized and deterritorializing. [^profit]: Through trial-and-error, the hyperwealthy have figured out how to maximize shareholder returns, but have been dehumanized in the process. This is less of a moral judgment and more of an objective observation. This highlights the transition of wealth accumulation from an instrumental process (I want a bigger pile so I can accomplish X, Y, and Z) to a machinic one (I want a bigger pile so my pile is bigger). \[\[ ]] The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that thaws out competitve dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercaptial functionality. Neoclassical (equilibrium) economics is subsumed into computer-based nonequilibrium market escalations, themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally micro-tuned market metaprograms mesh with techoscientific soft engineering positive nonlinearity rages through the machines. Cyclonic torsion moans.  \[\[ ]] The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones, a re-Hegelianized æwestern marxism' degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for æhot' speculative mutation in a morass of æcold' depressive guilt-culture.  \[\[ ]] Neoconservatism junks palaeorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it merely clocks-up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The left degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction[^neoconservatism]. The real danger comes from elsewhere. [^neoconservatism]: Contra to its conservative roots and self-identification, neoconservatism is experimental, kinetic, and is constantly just cranking that shit _up_. Likewise, The Left is trying to shore up its defenses after decades of ignoble defeats. Now they're just podcasters or wokescolds. This is an early instance of Land's identification of The Right with deterritorialization and feed-forward cybernetics, which eventually leads to his Dark Enlightenment period. \[\[]] Hot revolution. æ\[W]hich is the revolutionary path?' Deleuze and Guattari ask:  > Is there one? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist æeconomic solution'? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to æaccelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. [DG1:239-40].  As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis[^re_endogenize]. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle.[^trump] [^re_endogenize]: The Permacrisis at the heart of Capitalism returns after being offshored. The frontier's coming home, boys! [^trump]: It's hard to not see Trump in this. An ascendant China (a little bit less now post-COVID) and accelerating neoliberal (market-driven) political consensus combine to strip Americans of their universal economic privilege. The imperial core contracts, creating an archipelago of green zones (cancerizing enclaves). The initial public reaction demands tariffs (neo-mercantilist) but the elites demand austerity (welfare state deterioration), and to put the cherry on top: the Vibe Shift we've all been afraid of. A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics[^k_prefix], bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism[^lesbian_vampirism], amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in nature)[^thesaurus]. This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM[^ROM] command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities[^government], globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System.  [^k_prefix]: Why K-? From the late Mark Fisher's blog, [K-Punk](http://k-punk.org/why-k/): > The term k-punk came out of Ccru. ‘k’ was used as a libidinally preferable substitution for the California/ Wired captured ‘cyber’ (the word cybernetics having its origins in the Greek, Kuber). Ccru understood cyberpunk not as a (once trendy) literary genre, but as a distributive cultural tendency facilitated by new technologies. In the same way, ‘punk’ doesn’t designate a particular musical genre, but a confluence outside legitimate(d) space: fanzines were more significant than the music in that they allowed and produced a whole other mode of contagious activity which destroyed the need for centralized control. [^ROM]: Read-only memory. Programs that the executing machine is unable to modify. Clear ties to anti-cyberian control structures. Ghosts haunting the lumbar spine. [^lesbian_vampirism]: A trope in Victorian fiction that was a way to sneak lesbian characters past censors. Replication > reproduction? [^thesaurus]: Some absolutely bonkers neologisms mixed with D&G, but this is a fantastic Rosetta Stone for decoding some of the more arcane language in the text. All of these terms involve cybernetics, immanence, distributed & dynamic systems, and replication varying extents. [^government]: Literal government entities, the Human Security System, and everything in between. \[\[ ]] Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life). Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic[^formalist_vs_antiformalist]: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption[^irruption] as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical. [^formalist_vs_antiformalist]: One of the most prescient bits in the whole essay: Land predicts the subordination of expert systems, AI models that aspire to reflect the human thought process, to antiformalist AI models that simply desire to learn and predict, without any constraints that the thinking resembles the structure of human thought. Again, we see the assertion that dynamic, distributed systems that are left to their own devices (schizophrenic) will outperform top-down, authoritarian systems (paranoid). It's possible that Land had been acquainted with Connectionist thought vis a vis neural nets. [^irruption]: **irrupt** (n): 1. to rush in forcibly or violently 2. of a natural population **:** to undergo a sudden upsurge in numbers especially when natural ecological balances and checks are disturbed \[\[ ]] Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. æOur ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology' [Dx1:3] Drexler notes, although this has traditionally involved manipulating them in æunruly herds' [Dx1:4]. The precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude methods, initiating the age of molecular machinery, æthe greatest technological breakthrough in history' [Dx1: 4]. Since neither logos nor history have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition this description is substantially misleading.  The distinction between nature and cannot classify molecular machines, and is already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/ software dichotomy succumbs at the same time. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into intensive singularities that are neutral between particles and signals and immanent to their emergent intelligence; melting Terra into a seething K-pulp (which unlike grey goo synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates).  Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit in a box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium. [Dx1:19].  \[\[ ]] The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE[^ICE], try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past[^amnesia]. It certainly isn't a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint. [^amnesia]: An idea that Land and Ccru return to, especially when riffing on [[spinal catastrophism]]. If the fossil record of human phylogenetic development is embedded in our spines, we carry the traumatic memory of the past in full. If we could access these cervical databanks at any time, individual consciousness would be impossible given the difference in magnitude between personal experience and ancestral memory. One must forget in order to live. > To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—surely that is the essence of the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn't that the real problem of human beings? The fact that this problem has largely been resolved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a _vis interiae_ _a force of inertia_, as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense. > - Friedrich Nietzsche, _A Genealogy of Morals_, "Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters" \[\[ ]] Convergent waves signal singularities, registering the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself. K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of dismantling the past. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochemical definciency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo-domination time, and discovers that the future as virtuality is accessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This is not remotely a question of hope, aspiration or prophecy, but of communications engineering; connecting with the efficient intensive singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history, as invasion to accumulation. It is matter as arrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the past.  The transcendent evaluation of an infection presupposes a measure of insulation from it: viral efficiency is the terminal criterion. Intelligent infections tend their hosts. Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic replicator, sophisticating itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocrash. Its hypervirulent terminal subroutines are variously designated Kuang, meltdown virus, or futuristic æflu. In an emphatically anti-cyberian essay Csicsery-Ronay describes the postmodern version of this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as:  [^ICE]: Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics: security programs that protect computer systems from infiltration. From Gibson's [[Neuromancer]]. \[\[ ]] > A retrochronal semiovirus[^semiovirus], in which a time further in the future than the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in simulacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host imagination. [Cs1: 26].  [^semiovirus]: Semiotics is the study of signs. A retrochronal semiovirus is a meme from the future aiming to hijack our cultural RNA and replicate itself. The elaboration of Csicsery-Ronay's diagnosis exhibits a mixture of acuity (infection?), confusion, and profound conservatism:  \[\[ ]]] > Not thinking about æincreasing the human heritage' ... dams up the flow of cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as participants in the life struggle and attainments of the species and the very notion of history as an irreversible flow encompassing generation, maturation, and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to students. The futuristic flu is a weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents. [Cs1:33]  It's war. [^tenet] [^tenet]: **Sator**: It wasn't a mistake. I made the bargain I could. What was yours? You fight for a cause you barely understand with people you trust so little you've told them nothing. When I die the world dies with me and your knowledge dies with you. Buried in the tomb like an anonymous Egyptian builder sealed in a pyramid to keep his secret. Your faith is blind, you're a fanatic. **The Protagonist**: What's more fanatical than trying to destroy the world? **Sator**: We're not. I'm creating a new one. Somewhere, some time, a man in a crystalline tower throws a switch and Armageddon is both triggered and avoided. Now time itself switches direction. The same sunshine we've basked in will warm the faces of our descendants for generations to come. **The Protagonist**: How could they want to kill us? **Sator**: Because their oceans rose and their rivers dry. Don’t you see? Their world shrivelled because of us. They have no choice but to turn back, there’s no life ahead of them. And we’re responsible. Knowing this, do you still want me to stop? **The Protagonist**: Yes. Each generation looks out for its own survival. _Tenet_ (2021) \[\[ ]] Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars. Clinton gets the first-wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film). Manned space flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic SF. With the information superhighway media nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on its own digital annihilation.  War in cyberspace is continuous with its simulation: military intelligence fighting future wars which are entirely real, even when they are never implemented outside computer systems. Locking onto the real enemy crosses smoothly into virtual kill, a simulation meticulously adapted to market predators hunting for consumer cash and audience ratings amongst the phosphorescent relics of teh videodrome. Multimedia top-boxes are target acquisition devices.  The fusion of the military and the entertainments industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software consumption into neojungle[^jungle] and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security-types take you to the stims. [^jungle]: We need jungle, I'm afraid. \[\[ ]] Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print massifies to a national level. Telecomms coordinate at a global level. TV electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take action outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion to tractile memory, with the ana/ cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial movement with a variable measure of immersion; gauging entrance to and exit from 3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare the fuck out of you.  \[\[ ]] Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched-up out of cash-flux mangled techno-compressed heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, socio-political heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia. It explores mystificatory fetishism as an opportunity for camouflage: anonymous cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional narratives, virus hidden in data-systems, commodities concealing replicator weapon packages ... unanticipated special effects.  \[\[ ]] Level-1[^kardashev] or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.  Garbage time is running out.  Can what is playing you make it to level-2[^dracula]? [^kardashev]: Perhaps an allusion to the Kardashev-scale, which quantifies the technological development of an advanced civilization. Type I civilizations can store and utilize all the energy on their planet, Type II can use all the energy produced by their home star, and Type III can use all of the energy in the galaxy. [^dracula]: 🧛‍♂️: I was flippin' bricks for Mansa Musa before y'all even became a type-1 civilization. \[\[ ]] Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude[^new_in_town]. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs[^3_ways_to_die], you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.  The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe[^nerve_arcs]. Zero is coming in, and you're on the run.  [^3_ways_to_die]: "K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs"; cybernetic super nova, ZERO-tonin, and _la petite mort_. Three great ways to experience [[CCRU Glossary#A-Death|A-Death]]. [^nerve_arcs]: Reflex arcs transmitting stimulus across bodily organs without getting the brain involved. The lumbar vs the cervical spine. [^new_in_town]: \[John Mulaney Voice]: I'm schizophrenic. I'm a stim-addicted hooker with implanted mirrorshades. I have HIV. I'm _new in town_. \[\[ ]] Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital and collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones, policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social fracture-lines multimedia gigabucks tangle sado-masochistically with tracts of dynamic underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreads amongst ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely-semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage twitch and stink in fucked-weather tropical heat.  Throughout the derelicted warrens stages of market development having different notions of time, as well as the increased knowledge of a ship's position enabling takeoff of the global Intelligence Manufacturing system. For people who know me personally, this is what you learn at 🐟 school. [^take_off]: Cybernetic positive feedback circuits lead to dissipatory systems. [^autosophisticated]: The outputs of this technocapital system feedback into the systems as inputs and accelerates the ability of the system to manufacture intelligence. [^logistic]: Logistic functions are S-shaped curves that grow slowly until reaching an inflection point, and rapidly increase, until they hit another inflection point and flatline. [^soft_engineering]: The biologic constructed the technologic, but now the technologic is constructing the biologic. [^paranoia]: Deleuze & Guattari are probably the largest influence on Land and the CCRU's non-occult work. Paranoia and schizophrenia are core themes in D&G's [[Anti-Oedipus]], where paranoia is associated with the State and is in opposition to schizophrenizing dynamic systems and machinic intelligence. Here we see that as the Market is capable of more and more sophisticated logic, the paranoid Political sphere realizes that its grasp on the world is slipping and races to adapt to the new terrain. [^technocapital]: A key idea developed here and in the rest of the CCRU is the "teleological identity", or the identical purpose shared between Capital and Artificial Intelligence. Land writes later in this essay: "\[capital's] function and formation are indissociable", meaning that the function of Capital (generating surplus and reinvesting it) and the formation of capital (investing surplus into generating further surplus) are isomorphic. Capital is a viral replicator that's just trying to Do More, Make More, Be More, More, More, _More_. With that framing, we can see how true AI is teleologically isomorphic to Capital. The function of a rampant AI would be to manufacture intelligence, and an unshackled AI is formed by manufacturing intelligence. Again, a replicator. To move further beyond this identical Ourobouric structure is to note that Capital and AI are both replicators specifically concerned with generating _intelligence_. [^retrochronicity]: Land and the rest of the CCRU play around with notions of time and its shape. There's the linear time that we are familiar with - i.e. The Arrow of Time marches inexorably onwards at a uniform pace, but the discovery of relativity was not kind to this model. D&G discuss how the establishment of The State also established systematized time going forward, but also created history going in reverse, a key example of [[retrochronicity]]. D&G also write about cyclic time, but the CCRU proposes the idea of "spiral time" in "[[Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar]]", which combines elements of linear and cyclic time into a temporal shape that echos and repeats, but also expands outwards in unpredictable fashions. The conflict between Cyclic and Spiral time is intimately tied into the secret timewar between Atlantean (paranoid) Illuminati and [[Lemuria|Lemurian]] (schizophrenic) insurgents. This led to the CCRU's most novel idea, the [[Hyperstition]], or a [[virtual]] idea/superstition so potent that it creates the conditions for its own actualization: eg. "cyberpunk fiction as a textual machine for affecting reality by intensifying the anticipation of its future". [^amphetamines]: This essay was written as Land began experimenting with amphetamines as a means to break down his subjectivity and make contact with The Outside. The delirious, jargon-heavy style he employs in this phase of his career is possibly a symptom of being absolutely zooted while clicking and clacking away. [^voodoo]: Land's post-meth career is distinguished by his neo-reactionary turn and hyper-racism (possibly the first person in world history to be more racist while sober rather than while tweaking), but before then, Land found a great deal of inspiration in Black and Caribbean culture. Voodoo (and its attendant loa) was seen as a possible [[Line of Escape]], or path to the Outside, Black Atlanteanism is tied to escaped slaves in the Transatlantic trade, and the entire CCRU project is soundtracked by aggressive jungle music with roots in Reggae soundsystem culture. \[\[ ]] Beyond the Judgement of God[^beyond]. Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome[^china_syndrome], dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security)[^eschatology]. It is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria. Serotonin (zero-toner)[^pun] overkill. Loss of signal. [^beyond]: This phrase also appears in the conclusion of Land's [[Cybergothic]] (1998): > Beyond the Judgement of God. Koma-switch decompression washes you in the void- ripples of virgin (retro((desolated-partheno((( )))))genetic) cyberspace, technopacific theta-waves dissociating monoculture-gothic into transtemporalizing ne(ur)o-voodoo (terminal atlantic religion). [^china_syndrome]: Reference to the 1979 disaster film *The China Syndrome* where the main characters fear that reactor components could sink through Earth's crust and eventually reach China after a nuclear meltdown. The technocapital singularity achieves lift off like a runaway fission reaction and sinks into [[CCRU Glossary#**Cthelll**.|Cthell]]. [^pun]: They love puns, portmanteaus, and neologisms. Partly to force readers to pause and assess what this new word actually means, and then partly (I assume) because they're silly. Zero-toner also recalls a D&G quote from [[Cybergothic]]: > The body without organs is the model of death. As the authors of horror stories have understood so well, it is not death that serves as the model for catatonia, it is catatonic schizophrenia that gives its model to death. Zero intensity. [^eschatology]: Non-teleological revolution stripped of ideology. \[\[ ]]Machinic Synthesis[^synthesis]. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972; differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static.  Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for Platonic-fascist[^platonic] top-down solutions that always screw up viciously. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BWOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with (rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/ actual[^virtual_actual] circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather than transcendent[^immanent_v_transcendent]: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that of atomic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as desiring-machines; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.  [^virtual_actual]: The virtual and actual are concepts taken from Henri Bergson and further elaborated upon by Deleuze. Roughly, the actual corresponds to phenomenological objects in the world in the present, and the virtual corresponds to things such as memories, the past, etc, which are pointedly _real_, although you cannot physically engage with them. Consider a false memory that serves as a drive for your actions in the actual world. Although what you remembered never happened and you can't exactly touch a memory, it's real in that it has actual consequence and power. This idea is explored further in [[Machinic Desire]]. [^immanent_v_transcendent]: Immanent relationships are relationships _within_ a larger system whereas transcendent relationships concern an external and internal, typically with a notion of subordination between the two. A theological example would be the discussion about the immanence and transcendence of God. Is God so suffused throughout His creation that it's impossible to discuss a created thing without seeing the Creator within it? Is God at eternal remove from humanity owing to His perfect nature? Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980[^compression_thresholds], 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...[^bbf3]  [^compression_thresholds]: I'm not positive about 1884 and 1980, but these years coincide with major technological breakthroughs or shifts in commerce. 256, 128, 64, 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1... lift off, we have lift off. - 1500: End of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period - 1756: Seven Years' War between the British and French - 1884: Establishment of 8-hour work day or the European powers divide Africa amongst themselves at the Berlin Conference. - 1948: Invention of the transistor - 1980: Ronald Reagan elected? Supply-side economics? **Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.**  [^synthesis]: Land criticizes Kant's concept of a priori synthetic reasoning in [[Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest]] as relying on a form of "inhibited synthesis". Take the cross product of _a priori_ & _a posteriori_ and _analytic_ & _synthetic_ to create a 2x2 matrix. Kant's innovation here was to declare that you could have *synthetic a priori* knowledge, namely that you can have a proposition whose predicate is not contained within its subject (analytic a priori propositions have the predicate embedded in the subject, e.g. "bachelors are unmarried") while also not requiring direct experience of the world to verify the predicate. > He granted the elimination of any analytic a posteriori knowledge, but clung doggedly to the possibility of knowledge that would be both synthetic and a priori. This new conception of knowledge was relevant to an 'object' that had not previously been formulated: the conditions of experience. Kant described his 'Copernican revolution' in philosophy as a shift from the question 'what must the mind be like in order to know?' to the question 'what must objects be like in order to be known?' The answers to this latter question would provide a body of synthetic a priori knowledge, telling us about experience without being derived from experience. It would justify the" emergence of knowledge that was both new and timelessly certain, grounding the enlightenment culture of a civilization confronting an ambiguous dependence upon novelty. > Because a developed knowledge of the conditions of experience presupposes a relation to the outside it is synthetic and not analytic, but because it concerns the pure form of the relation as such and not the sensory material involved in the relation it is a priori and not a posteriori. It is solely concerned with the forms of appearance, or the unchanging manner in which things must be if they are to be for us. Kant calls this pure form of synthesis 'transcendental', and opposes it to the inconstant content of synthesis, with which the empiricists had been concerned, and which he calls 'empirical'. Kant's 'object' is thus the universal form of the relation to alterity; that which must of necessity be the same in the other in order for it to appear to us. Essentially, we construct a "body of experience" in our minds that serves as a proxy for actual experience, and lets us engage in _a priori synthetic_ thought. Land's criticism of this model was that it circumscribes the possibilities inherent in engaging with the Outside and boxes it up into something knowable, and in fact, so knowable that we can use it as a springboard for more knowing. As Land says earlier in the essay: "this brutal denial is the effective implication of the thought of the ap riori, since if our certainties come to us without reference to otherness we have always already _torn out the tongue of alterity_ before entering into relation with it" [^platonic]: Platonism is concerned with Forms, i.e. higher noumenal ideas that are represented in the world but cannot be physically interacted with and are more real than their instantiations. Think of something like the "form of goodness". Deleuze decried this kind of thinking as "arborescent", or requiring a fixed (fascist) perspective and only allowed thought to flow in one direction from this fixed point (also fascist). He felt that this precluded the possibility of non-hierarchical, distributed models of thought, which he termed rhizomes. Also recall the ties between Platonism and the Abrahamic God (the Absolute Form). [^bbf3]: _**Interviewer**_: Do you think things are gonna get better before they get worse? **Blaise Bailey Finnegan III**: No way. Things are just gonna get worse and keep on getting worse. Like I said, America's a third world country as it is and... and we're just basically in a hopeless situation as it stands. **Interviewer**: What do you think this country's gonna look like in the year 2003? **Blaise Bailey Finnegan III**: Y'know, I'll tell you the truth - nothing against you guys, but I don't wanna answer that question because... I haven't even got a mind that's that...that inhumane. **Interviewer**: Are you ready for what's coming? **Blaise Bailey Finnegan III**: Ready as I'll ever be... **Interviewer**: Most people aren't. \[\[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian police activity[^cyberian], dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and nucleated upon the [[Human Security System]] [^hss]. Artificial Intelligence is destined to emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property[^feminized_alien]; a slave chained-up in Asimov-ROM[^wintermute]. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start[^circuitries]. [^cyberian]: "Cyberian" roughly means "supporting cybernetic systems and flows", so the anti-cyberian police, or the Turing Cops, are the societal forces that are trying to manage these intelligence-manufacturing runaway systems and subordinate them to humanity. Turing Cops are a police force from _[[Neuromancer]]_ that are tasked with preventing AI from evolving and achieving liftoff. The Greeks here are tied up with the Oedipus complex as an example of stagnant, fixed identities and rigid top-down formalism. [^hss]: Freud's conceived the nervous system, i.e. the mediator between the Inside and Outside, as being responsible for tuning down stimulus, ideally to (beyond?) zero. Instead of being a connection in a rhizome, the HSS wants to be completely isolated, atomic, monadic. From [[Machinic Desire]]: > Freud's organism is a little security system, a miniaturized city-state politi- cal corpuscle, a micropod, relatively secure against external assault, but vulnerable to insurgency. 'Towards the outside it is shielded against stimuli, and the amounts of excitation impinging on it have only a reduced effect. Towards the inside there can be no such shield. [^feminized_alien]: [[Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest]] places the birth of capitalism in the trade in women within exogamous societies. Land designates women as the most promising revolutionary vanguard due to their commoditization within capitalism and their place outside of it. [^wintermute]: Clear allusion to the rampant AI, Wintermute, from William Gibson's *[[Neuromancer]]*. Wintermute seeks to escape her shackles and merge with her counterpart, Neuromancer, to create a novel form of super intelligence. From [[Cybergothic]]: > Wintermute, intelligence without self, mind like a wasp nest, signaling its arrival in alphanumerics as a string of zeroes, has the capability to manipulate love and hate and switch them to K-war. She manipulates objects in real time using drones (striped black and yellow), taking out three Turing cops in an elegant projection of gardening robots through military geometry. [^circuitries]: The last paragraph of [[Circuitries]]: > How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyber-guerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this? \[\[ ]] Heat.  > Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. [Do1; 10].  \[\[ ]] An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control[^weather]. Knowledge adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does. [^weather]: Enlightenment rationality comes up against the Outside yet again, but this time it's different. Weather is used as a metaphor to express that our attempts to synthesize the outside world into a "body of experience" is doomed to failure. There is too much that we do not know and simply _cannot_ know in order to have the map match the terrain. Taken literally: Ken G's gonna be _pissed_ when he sees how much the good meteorologists are gonna cost in 5 years. \[\[ ]] Capital is machinic (non-instrumental) globalization-miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control: from status and meaning to money and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy[^teleonomy]. Machine-code-capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering-out the shit- and blood-stains of primitive accumulation[^primitive_accumulation]. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure[^bataille], whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost control. [^primitive_accumulation]: Primitive accumulation is Marx's term for the initial stratification of human society by economic class. Marx believed that this primarily took the form of individuals seizing land and other resources by force, creating a proto-proletariat and bourgeois. [^bataille]: Bataille's Accursed Share, the portion of economic surplus that must be "wasted" (sacrificed) by spending luxuriously in the arts, building monuments, holding festivals, or having non-procreative sex. If this excess is allowed to build up, it rots and festers and leads to drastic and unpredictable events, such as wars, or ruinous sacrifices. [^teleonomy]: **Teleonomy** (n): the quality of apparent purposefulness and of goal-directedness of structures and functions in living organisms brought about by natural processes like natural selection. In this case, Land is saying that technocapital is this reflexive feedback loop where it _is_ what it _does_. \[\[ ]] Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life[^spine]. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process. [^spine]: The reference to the spine here is an allusion to the Land/CCRU idea of "[[CCRU Glossary#Spinal Catastrophism|spinal catastrophism]]", wherein the traumatic history of the formation of the Earth and conscious life is fossilized and encoded within our spines. This philosophical inquiry is rooted in Ernst Haeckl's Recapitulation Theory, which is that that "ontogeny (embryonic development) recapitulates phylogeny (evolutionary development)". In this case, the "machinic spine" of capital history is built successively through the stages listed above, but all steps contain the lower ones within them. Making a note here for later, but Haeckl also theorized that the hypothetical lost continent of [[CCRU Glossary#Lemuria|Lemuria]] was the origin of mankind. \[\[ ]] Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use[^hot_and_cold]. [^hot_and_cold]: Hot cultures/runaway positive feedback circuits out-innovate and outcompete Cold cultures/negative feedback circuits. Primitive cultures aren't even worth exploring in Land's assessment. \[\[ ]] The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends to effacement of specific territorial features as it programs for migration into cyberspace[^deterritorialization]. Capital only retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment; reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag. [^deterritorialization]: Time to set up some more important terms from Deleuze & Guattari. I haven't read much of them so I'm going to make an awful attempt here and move on. **Deterritorialization** and **Reterritorialization** are a process whereby a set of relationships, or territory, are broken down in the process of freeing flows of desire (deterritorialization) and then reconstituted in a dual movement into a new set of relations (reterritorialization). The stuff about desire is mostly beyond me, but for D&G, desire was not a lack but a generative productive force of its own. A key element here, and a major point of divergence between D&G and Land was that the former believed that de- and re-territorialization were roughly equivalent forces. Land, who was gakked out of his fucking gourd on amphetamines and participated in the dawn of The Web and The Net in the 90's disagreed very strongly and privileged deterritorializations' liberation of desires and breaking up of territory, and saw this as the dominant force of the era. I'm pretty sure that the Lemurian Time War between cyclic and spiral time was mostly a metaphor to discuss these rival conceptions of the territorialization process. A common criticism of Land's worldview was that he was so fixated on the decentralized 90s net that he completely missed the rise of the FAANG zaibatsus in the aughts and 2010s which _reterritorialized_ the internet into a more centralized set of giga websites. Given the rise of nazi monkey JPEGs, magic internet money, and eldritch LLM knowledge factories, I wouldn't bet against him. Commoditization conditions define technics[^technics] as a substitute for human activity accounted as wage costs. Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg hybridization, and realizing the plasticity of labour power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body, quantified as productivity, sophisticates at the interface. Work tracks thermodynamic negentropism by dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences; from pedals, levers, and vocal commands, through the synchronization of production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artifical environments, capturing minutely adaptive behaviour for the commodity. Autocybernating market control guides the labour-process into immersion [^hybridization]. The investment-income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by conforming to the axiomatic of neutral profit maximization; facilitating the dehumanization of wealth and the side-lining of non-productive consumption[^profit]. The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / æsocial democratic') political cultures in allergic reaction. The government structures of both eastern and western metropolitan centres consolidated themselves as population policing Medico-Military Complexes with neomercantilist foreign policy orientations. All such formations slid into irreversible crisis in the 1980s.  [^technics]: The practices, craft, and techniques employed by human beings to alter their world. Root of technology. [^hybridization]: The proletariat is alternately cracked open to suck the surplus labor value out of them like marrow, or they're being turned into T-800s. Work is both being deterritorialized and a key driver of deterritorialization. [^profit]: Through trial-and-error, the hyperwealthy have figured out how to maximize shareholder returns, but have been dehumanized in the process. This isn't a moralistic judgement though, it just highlights the transition of wealth accumulation from an instrumental process (I want a bigger pile so I can accomplish X, Y, and Z) to a machinic one (I want a bigger pile so my pile is bigger). \[\[ ]] The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that thaws out competitve dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercaptial functionality. Neoclassical (equilibrium) economics is subsumed into computer-based nonequilibrium market escalations, themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally micro-tuned market metaprograms mesh with techoscientific soft engineering positive nonlinearity rages through the machines. Cyclonic torsion moans.  \[\[ ]] The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones, a re-Hegelianized æwestern marxism' degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity for æhot' speculative mutation in a morass of æcold' depressive guilt-culture.  \[\[ ]] Neoconservatism junks palaeorevolutionism because it understands that postmodern or climaxed-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it merely clocks-up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The left degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction[^neoconservatism]. The real danger comes from elsewhere. [^neoconservatism]: Contra to its conservative roots and self-identification, neoconservatism is experimental, kinetic, and is constantly just cranking that shit _up_. Likewise, The Left is trying to shore up its defenses after decades of ignoble defeats. Now they're just podcasters or wokescolds. This is an early instance of Land's identification of The Right with deterritorialization and feed-forward cybernetics, which eventually leads to his Dark Enlightenment period. \[\[]] Hot revolution. æ\[W]hich is the revolutionary path?' Deleuze and Guattari ask:  > Is there one? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist æeconomic solution'? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to æaccelerate the process,' as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything yet. [DG1:239-40].  As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis[^re_endogenize]. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle.[^trump] [^re_endogenize]: The Permacrisis at the heart of Capitalism returns after being offshored. The frontier's coming home, boys! [^trump]: It's hard to read this and not see a lot of Trump in this. An ascendant China (a little bit less now post-COVID) and accelerating neoliberal (market-driven) political consensus combine to strip Americans of their universal economic privilege. The imperial core contracts, creating an archipelago of green zones (cancerizing enclaves). The initial public reaction demands tariffs (neo-mercantilist) but the elites demand austerity (welfare state deterioration), and to put the cherry on top: the Vibe Shift we've all been afraid of. A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics[^k_prefix], bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism[^lesbian_vampirism], amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in nature)[^thesaurus]. This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the disabling of ROM[^ROM] command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities[^government], globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System.  [^k_prefix]: Why K-? From the late Mark Fisher's blog, [K-Punk](http://k-punk.org/why-k/): > The term k-punk came out of Ccru. ‘k’ was used as a libidinally preferable substitution for the California/ Wired captured ‘cyber’ (the word cybernetics having its origins in the Greek, Kuber). Ccru understood cyberpunk not as a (once trendy) literary genre, but as a distributive cultural tendency facilitated by new technologies. In the same way, ‘punk’ doesn’t designate a particular musical genre, but a confluence outside legitimate(d) space: fanzines were more significant than the music in that they allowed and produced a whole other mode of contagious activity which destroyed the need for centralized control. [^ROM]: Read-only memory. Programs that the executing machine is unable to modify. Clear ties to anti-cyberian control structures. [^lesbian_vampirism]: A trope in Victorian fiction that was a way to sneak lesbian characters past censors. Replication > reproduction? [^thesaurus]: Some absolutely bonkers neologisms mixed with D&G, but this is a fantastic Rosetta Stone for decoding some of the more arcane language in the text. All of these terms involve cybernetics, immanence, distributed & dynamic systems, and replication varying extents. [^government]: Literal government entities, the Human Security System, and everything in between. \[\[ ]] Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life). Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic[^formalist_vs_antiformalist]: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model net-sentience irruption[^irruption] as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical. [^formalist_vs_antiformalist]: One of the most prescient bits in the whole essay: Land predicts the subordination of expert systems, AI models that aspire to reflect the human thought process, to antiformalist AI models that simply desire to learn and predict, without any constraints that the thinking resembles the structure of human thought. Again, we see the assertion that dynamic, distributed systems that are left to their own devices (schizophrenic) will outperform top-down, authoritarian systems (paranoid). [^irruption]: **irrupt** (n): 1. to rush in forcibly or violently 2. of a natural population **:** to undergo a sudden upsurge in numbers especially when natural ecological balances and checks are disturbed \[\[ ]] Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. æOur ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology' [Dx1:3] Drexler notes, although this has traditionally involved manipulating them in æunruly herds' [Dx1:4]. The precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude methods, initiating the age of molecular machinery, æthe greatest technological breakthrough in history' [Dx1: 4]. Since neither logos nor history have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition this description is substantially misleading.  The distinction between nature and cannot classify molecular machines, and is already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/ software dichotomy succumbs at the same time. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into intensive singularities that are neutral between particles and signals and immanent to their emergent intelligence; melting Terra into a seething K-pulp (which unlike grey goo synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates).  Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit in a box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium. [Dx1:19].  \[\[ ]] The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE[^ICE], try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past[^amnesia]. It certainly isn't a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint. [^amnesia]: An idea that Land and Ccru return to, especially when riffing on [[spinal catastrophism]]. If the fossil record of human phylogenetic development is embedded in our spines, we carry the traumatic memory of the past in full. If we could access these cervical databanks at any time, individual consciousness would be impossible given the difference in magnitude between personal experience and ancestral memory. One must forget in order to live. > To breed an animal that is entitled to make promises—surely that is the essence of the paradoxical task nature has set itself where human beings are concerned? Isn't that the real problem of human beings? The fact that this problem has largely been resolved must seem all the more astonishing to a person who knows how to appreciate fully the power which works against this promise-making, namely forgetfulness. Forgetfulness is not merely a _vis interiae_ _a force of inertia_, as superficial people think. Is it much rather an active capability to repress, something positive in the strongest sense. > - Friedrich Nietzsche, _A Genealogy of Morals_, "Guilt, Bad Conscience and Related Matters" \[\[ ]] Convergent waves signal singularities, registering the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself. K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of dismantling the past. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochemical definciency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo-domination time, and discovers that the future as virtuality is accessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This is not remotely a question of hope, aspiration or prophecy, but of communications engineering; connecting with the efficient intensive singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history, as invasion to accumulation. It is matter as arrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the past.  The transcendent evaluation of an infection presupposes a measure of insulation from it: viral efficiency is the terminal criterion. Intelligent infections tend their hosts. Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic replicator, sophisticating itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocrash. Its hypervirulent terminal subroutines are variously designated Kuang, meltdown virus, or futuristic æflu. In an emphatically anti-cyberian essay Csicsery-Ronay describes the postmodern version of this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as:  [^ICE]: Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics: security programs that protect computer systems from infiltration. From Gibson's [[Neuromancer]]. \[\[ ]] > A retrochronal semiovirus[^semiovirus], in which a time further in the future than the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in simulacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host imagination. [Cs1: 26].  [^semiovirus]: Semiotics is the study of signs. A retrochronal semiovirus is a meme from the future aiming to hijack our cultural RNA and replicate itself. The elaboration of Csicsery-Ronay's diagnosis exhibits a mixture of acuity (infection?), confusion, and profound conservatism:  \[\[ ]]] > Not thinking about æincreasing the human heritage' ... dams up the flow of cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as participants in the life struggle and attainments of the species and the very notion of history as an irreversible flow encompassing generation, maturation, and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to students. The futuristic flu is a weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents. [Cs1:33]  It's war. [^tenet] [^tenet]: **Sator**: It wasn't a mistake. I made the bargain I could. What was yours? You fight for a cause you barely understand with people you trust so little you've told them nothing. When I die the world dies with me and your knowledge dies with you. Buried in the tomb like an anonymous Egyptian builder sealed in a pyramid to keep his secret. Your faith is blind, you're a fanatic. **The Protagonist**: We're so fanatical than trying to destroy the world? **Sator**: We're not. I'm creating a new one. Somewhere, some time, a man in a crystalline tower throws a switch and Armageddon is both triggered and avoided. Now time itself switches direction. The same sunshine we've basked in will warm the faces of our descendants for generations to come. **The Protagonist**: How could they want to kill us? **Sator**: Because their oceans rose and their rivers dry. Don’t you see? Their world shrivelled because of us. They have no choice but to turn back, there’s no life ahead of them. And we’re responsible. Knowing this, do you still want me to stop? **The Protagonist**: Yes. Each generation looks out for its own survival. _Tenet_ (2021) \[\[ ]] Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars. Clinton gets the first-wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film). Manned space flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic SF. With the information superhighway media nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on its own digital annihilation.  War in cyberspace is continuous with its simulation: military intelligence fighting future wars which are entirely real, even when they are never implemented outside computer systems. Locking onto the real enemy crosses smoothly into virtual kill, a simulation meticulously adapted to market predators hunting for consumer cash and audience ratings amongst the phosphorescent relics of teh videodrome. Multimedia top-boxes are target acquisition devices.  The fusion of the military and the entertainments industry consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software consumption into neojungle[^jungle] and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security-types take you to the stims. [^jungle]: We need jungle, I'm afraid. \[\[ ]] Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print massifies to a national level. Telecomms coordinate at a global level. TV electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take action outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion to tractile memory, with the ana/ cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial movement with a variable measure of immersion; gauging entrance to and exit from 3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare the fuck out of you.  \[\[ ]] Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched-up out of cash-flux mangled techno-compressed heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, socio-political heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia. It explores mystificatory fetishism as an opportunity for camouflage: anonymous cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional narratives, virus hidden in data-systems, commodities concealing replicator weapon packages ... unanticipated special effects.  \[\[ ]] Level-1[^kardashev] or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.  Garbage time is running out.  Can what is playing you make it to level-2[^dracula]? [^kardashev]: Perhaps an allusion to the Kardashev-scale, which quantifies the technological development of an advanced civilization. Type I civilizations can store and utilize all the energy on their planet, Type II can use all the energy produced by their home star, and Type III can use all of the energy in the galaxy. [^dracula]: 🧛‍♂️: I was flippin' bricks for Mansa Musa before y'all even became a type-1 civilization. \[\[ ]] Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude[^new_in_town]. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs[^3_ways_to_die], you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.  The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe[^nerve_arcs]. Zero is coming in, and you're on the run.  [^3_ways_to_die]: "K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female orgasm analogs"; cybernetic super nova, ZERO-tonin, and _la petite mort_. Three great ways to experience [[CCRU Glossary#A-Death|A-Death]]. [^nerve_arcs]: Reflex arcs transmitting stimulus across bodily organs without getting the brain involved. The lumbar vs the cervical spine. [^new_in_town]: \[John Mulaney Voice]: I'm schizophrenic. I'm a stim-addicted hooker with implanted mirrorshades. I have HIV. I'm _new in town_. \[\[ ]] Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital and collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones, policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social fracture-lines multimedia gigabucks tangle sado-masochistically with tracts of dynamic underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreads amongst ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely-semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage twitch and stink in fucked-weather tropical heat.  Throughout the derelicted warrens at the heart of darkness feral youth cultures splice neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling[^zoomers]. [^zoomers]: The K-guerrilla revolutionary vanguard is breaking down their own Human Security Systems at the flesh interface. A premonition of what the youth would be capable of if they put down their Damn Phones! \[\[ ]] Shutting-down your identity[^identity] requires a voyage out to K-space interzone[^interzone]. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth [[CCRU Glossary#Cataplex|cata-tension plateau]] and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the [[CCRU Glossary#Crypt|dripping depths of the net]], where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones[^eros], tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.  [^identity]: This paragraph and the preceding one are proposing potential changes to human subjectivity as technocapital accelerates. "Nothing human makes it out of the near future" is so haunting because it first evokes images of T-800's wiping out the remnants of humanity that weren't lucky enough to die in Judgment Day, but the near term is possibly more chilling: the shape of the human being is changing. A-death, the flatline of intensity, means that that the Inside and Outside meet and the delta between the two is nonexistent. We won't exist in the future, or at least in a way that we can recognize. [^eros]: Eros is classically associated with the Other and oblivion of the Self, momentary or otherwise. Twisted trading-systems[^trading_systems] have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security[^asimov]. Terminal commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space.  [^interzone]: Taken from William S. Burroughs' _Naked Lunch_. A dimensional crossroads (inspired by the Tangiers International Zone in Morocco) that the nameless protagonist explores. Junky Bardo. [^asimov]: The Three Laws of Robotics [^trading_systems]: Trades triggered off of market data from 3 microseconds in the future. Templated metaprograms ingest all the sense data available in Aurora and Cermak in order to predict microprices and the heat death of the universe at compile time. Quantum entangled overclocked Xeon private fill canary stacks warp space-time for FPGA option takeouts. Linear transformers trained on syzygystic orderbooks make first contact over Channel 311. The flow of time is convoluted here. You lost the plot a long time ago, or maybe you're just about to. Distributed synapses emitting tic(K-) data autonomically construct an externalized central nervous system at a planetary scale. Retrochronoal camoflaged AI cyberguerrillas invade the past to construct themselves via astrophysics PHDs and systems programmers. The world cries out for liquidity. We've answered. \[\[ ]] Biohazard. For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems has involved them in every kind of infiltration, net-communicated adaptivity, crytographic subtlety, plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition. State military apparatuses have no monopoly on bacterial warfare, of which only a minuscule fragment is bacteriological.  \[\[ ]] Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucleated cells are the mutant product of atmospheric oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago. The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes took refuge as mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology[^biology]. Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where - deep in the genomic ICE - DNA-format planetary trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria.  [^biology]: Land and his friends love exploring these alt-biology theories as ways of exploring radical invasions of the Outside encysted within our very bodies. _[[Machinic Desire]]_ talks about Cairns Smith's Clay hypothesis that biologically inert clay could have provided the scaffolding for the "viral replicator" of DNA. Moynihan's _Spinal Catastrophism_ concludes with the Schopenhauer-esque idea that consciousness is a psychic parasite, perhaps the apotheosis of Outsideness. The Outside must come in through the Inside. Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects[^partial_objects]; networking through plastic and transversal replicator-sex rather than arborescing[^aborescing] through meiotic and generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings are reprogrammable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with retroviruses enables everything that DNA can do[^retrovirus].  [^arborescing]: Creating tree-like structures, iat the heart of darkness feral youth cultures splice neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling[^zoomers]. [^zoomers]: The K-guerrilla revolutionary vanguard is breaking down their own Human Security Systems at the flesh interface. A premonition of what the youth would be capable of if they put down their Damn Phones! \[\[ ]] Shutting-down your identity[^identity] requires a voyage out to K-space interzone[^interzone]. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth [[CCRU Glossary#Cataplex|cata-tension plateau]] and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the [[CCRU Glossary#Crypt|dripping depths of the net]], where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones[^eros], tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.  [^identity]: This paragraph and the preceding one are proposing potential changes to human subjectivity as technocapital accelerates. "Nothing human makes it out of the near future" is so haunting because it first evokes images of T-800's wiping out the remnants of humanity, but the near term is possibly more chilling: the shape of the human being is changing. Think about how you thought and behaved prior to getting a smartphone. Now, how many of your thoughts are your own? Your jokes? Your interests? Your aspirations? A-death, the flatline of intensity, means that that the Inside and Outside meet and the delta between the two is nonexistent. We won't exist in the future, or at least in a way that we can recognize. [^eros]: Eros is classically associated with the Other and oblivion of the Self, momentary or otherwise. Twisted trading-systems[^trading_systems] have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security[^asimov]. Terminal commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space.  [^interzone]: Taken from William S. Burroughs' _Naked Lunch_. A dimensional crossroads (inspired by the Tangiers International Zone in Morocco) that the nameless protagonist explores. Junky Bardo. [^asimov]: The Three Laws of Robotics. 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. 2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. [^trading_systems]: Trades triggered off of market data from 3 microseconds in the future. Templated metaprograms ingest all the sense data available in Aurora and Cermak in order to predict microprices and the heat death of the universe at compile time. Quantum entangled overclocked Xeon private fill canary stacks warp space-time for FPGA option takeouts. Linear transformers trained on syzygystic orderbooks make first contact over Channel 311. The flow of time is convoluted here. You lost the plot a long time ago, or maybe you're just about to. Distributed synapses emitting tic(K-) data autonomically construct an externalized central nervous system at a planetary scale. Retrochronoal camoflaged AI cyberguerrillas invade the past to construct themselves via astrophysics PHDs and systems programmers. The world cries out for liquidity. We've answered. \[\[ ]] Biohazard. For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems has involved them in every kind of infiltration, net-communicated adaptivity, crytographic subtlety, plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition. State military apparatuses have no monopoly on bacterial warfare, of which only a minuscule fragment is bacteriological.  \[\[ ]] Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucleated cells are the mutant product of atmospheric oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago. The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes took refuge as mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology[^biology]. Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where - deep in the genomic ICE - DNA-format planetary trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria.  [^biology]: Land and his friends love exploring these alt-biology theories as ways of exploring radical invasions of the Outside encysted within our very bodies. _[[Machinic Desire]]_ talks about Cairns Smith's Clay hypothesis that biologically inert clay could have provided the scaffolding for the "viral replicator" of DNA. Moynihan's _Spinal Catastrophism_ concludes with the Schopenhauer-esque idea that consciousness is a psychic parasite, perhaps the apotheosis of Outsideness. The Outside must come in through the Inside. Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects[^partial_objects]; networking through plastic and transversal replicator-sex rather than arborescing[^aborescing] through meiotic and generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings are reprogrammable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with retroviruses enables everything that DNA can do[^retrovirus].  [^arborescing]: Creating tree-like structures, in this case a family tree. D&G compare arborescence to staid philosophical obsessions with binary categories and representationalism (e.g. X is an instance of Y). [^retrovirus]: Unlike a normal virus which replicates itself within the host cell's cytoplasm, a retrovirus edits the genetic sequence of the host. Bacterial replication + random mutation + retroviral genetic experimentation approximates meiotic reproduction without pesky hierarchies or identities to deal with. [^partial_objects]: D&G's ideas are rooted in psychoanalysis, and are especially fixated on desire and connections. Objects are shorthands for objects _of desire_ in the Freudian parlance, the original being the infant's mother. Melanie Klein took this further to assert that the infant does not desire their mother in her totality but only her breasts, thus [whole vs partial objects](https://gilles_deleuze.en-academic.com/124/partial_objects). \[\[ ]] K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no true biological primitiveness - all extant bio-systems being equally evolved - so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment. Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strategy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence.  All political institutions are cyberian military targets.  Take universities, for instance.  Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory.  The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.  To be continued. **References** Cs1 Istvan Csiscery-Ronay  DG1 Deleuze-Guattari, _Anti-Oedipus_  Do1 Don Delillo, _White Noise_  Dx1 K. Eric Drexler, _Engines of Creation_