The Canada Connection: Demon Machines

Canada is weird.

Take this disordered time (tape) loop, with its lurches forward and backwards:

1900-1972: The great majority of mayors and councillors in Toronto and its surrounding areas were part of an occultist group Orange Order of Canada that had symbolic ties to Freemasons and Gnostics. This has had lasting weird effects in architecture and city organization (satanically named streets, prevalence of concrete structures, etc.). On a geotraumatic register - a geology to accompany our genealogy - the cities of Canada are structured around the flows of a deep, cryptic, occult.

Nick Land wrote 'the city is a time machine,' but might it also be that the city, like Sunnydale in Buffy the Vampire Slayer which sits on the 'Hell Mouth,' is the crystallization of a demonic power? A city is a demon machine.

1957-1964: British Psychiatrist and head of the Canadian Psychiatric association Donald Cameron carries out  CIA mind control experiment MK Ultra in McGill University Allan Clinic, Quebec. It is here he lures innocent women and children into his assylum under the false pretense of helping them only to dose them with LSD and expose them to tape loops of static and repetitive phrases.

Cameron was surely a demon, or at least in communion with them not unlike the doctors in Jacobs Ladder

or the psychiatrist in Hellraiser II

1966-2014: David Cronenberg writes, directs, and produces weird horror films (including a William Burroughs adaption) that cover topics such as postmodernism, anti-psychiatry, bodyhorror, psychoanalysis, xenofeminism, technoviruses, etc.

1973: Felix Guattari travels to Canada for a lecture (Intersecting Lives pg. 273). I wish there was more to it than this.

1979: Lyotard is commissioned by the government of Quebec to publish The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. The text maps onto some of Felix Guattari's wok on language, psychoanalysis, and cultural critique.

1980: In A Thousand Plateaus D and G talk of languages that pull from disparate elements to create a weird 'minor' language that breaks with structuralist conceptions of language. As an example, they mention Quebec

“It is also said that ‘the Quebecois language is so rich in modulations and variations of regional accents and in games with tonic accents that it sometimes seems, with no exaggeration, that it would be better preserved by musical notation than by any system of spelling’…the Quebecois language must be evaluated not only in relation to standard French but also in relation to major English, from which it borrows all kinds of phonetic and syntactical elements, in order to set them in variation” (pg. 101-102). 

1981: A Guattari revival begins thanks to "Greek- Canadian academic, Constantin Boundas, a philosophy professor at Trent University in Canada" (Intersecting Lives).

1981: UK Prog rock band The Police record Ghost in the Machine at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title is a reference to Arthur Koestler's book of the same title, while the album artwork is intended to represent the 3 members of the band and their hairstyles, but appears to be '3:33' on a digital clock. Almost corresponding numerologically, the album was ranked 323 out 500 in an album ranking magazine article.

This 3:33 should of course remind us of Nick Land's twitter avatar.

1982-1983:  The Police record Synchronicity, the follow up to Ghost in the Machine, at Le Studio in Quebec. The album title, album artwork, and two correspondingly named songs, all reference psychoanalyst Carl Jung's (and Arthur Koestler's) scientific-mystical concept of synchronicity, a non-causal but related and meaningful coincidence (not identical but certainly similar to the CCRU's hyperstition).

The song Sychronocity II follows the story of an impotent, castrated worker and family man going about his day while, in an unrelated time and place, "something crawls from the slime at the bottom of a dark Scottish lake" a something which, by the end of the song, crawls onto the shores and becomes "a shadow on the door." A boring, regular Capitalist day is penetrated by a unnameable, slime monster from the deeps (Cthulhuic much?).

1984: Lyotard's Postmodern book is republished.

1987: D and G's A Thousand Plateaus is republished, translated by Brian Masumi

1989: David Lynch's Twin Peaks takes place in a fictional town about 20 miles from the Canadian border. In the show, the plot brings our main character - a mystical, psychologically minded detective - to Canada in an attempt to solve an uncanny mystery.

1990s: Felix Guattari takes on a new popularity in Canada, some of which is associated to McGill University in Quebec.  Gary Genosko, one of the scholars - if not the one -  responsible for reviving interest in Guattari is based in Ontario. Brian Masumi, translator of both Guattari, and Deleuze and Guattari, teaches at the University of Montreal. Etc.

1995: Boards of Canada, a two-man, Scottish, cryptic lo-fi synth band that, consistent with the explorations of the CCRU to come, creates their music out of drum machines, modified synths, and creepy cut up magnetic tape loops of number codes, documentaries, and children talking (not unlike those used in MK Ultra), release their first music on a major label. The name is a reference to 'the national film board of canada' founded in 1939 by a British man and centered in Quebec.

2003: shortly after the turn of the century, with the dissipation of the CCRU, and after burning out on LSD and speed, the mad black Deleuzian Nick Land disappears. It is rumored he takes solitary refuge in Canada before moving to China.

2010: Panos Cosmatos' Beyond the Black Rainbow is filmed in Canada, a setting which has an important role in the director's upbringing. The psychedelic and antipsychiatry ridden film takes place in the 60s and then the 80s and follows a telepathic woman held against her will by a sadistic psychiatrist in a strange future mental health clinic. The director cites Burroughs as inspiration.

2020: Nick Land returns again to Canada to flee the spread of hypervirus COVID19 through China.

20XX: N1X (Nyx) Land via Šum Journal 12 captures the near future where "Canadian supremacy over North America is largely won."

XXXX: ...

The geographic territory of Canada seems to be haunted by the occult and its adjacent binaries - psychiatric domination of females / anti-psychiatric feminism, psychoanalytic Oedipal / Anoedipal axes, science / mysticism, enlightenment / postmodernism, etc.; binaries that play out across different planes of expression - film, music, architecture, institutional control, etc.

It's likely that there are historical-material (genealogical and geological) processes that lead to these connections - perhaps the overlapping British/Scottish/French colonial expeditions, perhaps something else - but regardless, one could say that certain manifestations seem to resonate - synchronize -  around Canada.

For Jung, the 'mind' is merely an articulation or production of the physical, base material of the Outside. Being that the 'objective' Outside and the 'subjective' inside are of the same 'stuff,' when the Outside matches the inside in a way that seems to have no agentic or local causality, its material-code redundancy is felt to be a meaningful event - a meeting of long separated twins (syzygy).

This is not unlike Guattari's conceptualization of diagramming redundancies of signifying substance and asignifying materials - the inside is simply the outside folded inwards, and the inside is used to traverse the outside. We often neglect our own resonances through a mythic and fictional oedipal disconnection  - the ego and the superego - which fools us into thinking we are a proper 'thing' as opposed to a husk being played by an Outside force.

Synthesizing these thoughts: hyperstition is a techno-magical coincidence intensifier, a fiction that makes itself real through diagrammatic force that concentrates redundancies into interlocking with the Outside.

Let's not slip too much into exposition and isntead end on a weird coincidence: in Canada in 2018 women were still being arrested for witchcraft. In one article documenting this trend, the author writes

"Is it a coincidence that all of this [the arrests] is going down within days of Halloween? If you want to talk crazy coincidences, what about the fact that both Canadian women accused of witchcraft — Dorie Stevenson from Milton, Ont., and Samantha Stevenson from Toronto — have the same last name! (Police are currently looking into any possible connections.)"

What are the odds? Are these perhaps long lost, unconscious twins (syzygy)? Certainly an interesting coincidence.

Notes on Land's Notion of Capitalist Efficiency and the Process

The story goes like this: In 2020 a hyperbiovirus accelerates technocapitalism precisely by collapsing it, putting many humans out of commission, and psychologically burning out those that remain, a cycle that tends towards coldness in the human, which tends towards inhumaneness in the human, which tends towards policy that introduces inhumaneness into institutional structure, which begets more inhumanness in the human...so on, so on...

***

Nick Land's conceptualization of Capitalism:

an autonomous, self-reinforcing, feedback loop that accelerates at a greater rate than the subjects it produces as a byproduct, thereby rendering the byproduct - i.e. the human - obsolete. 

This is not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's application of Samuel Butler's thesis - that machines use humans as nodes in the reproduction process of machines - in that Capitalism uses humans as nodes in its own growth process. In both cases, the future may do away with the human once it becomes an obsolete form of reproduction.

I have understood the concept intellectually for quite a bit, but it was not until yesterday that I understood it on an intuitive and personal level.

The (short) story goes like this: COVID19 has qualitatively (staff and patients alike are psychologically effected) and quantitatively (staff call out, forcing other staff to stay to cover shifts, etc.) intensified the already absurdly long and hard hours I work at the clinic. As a result of this, and because I've been at the same clinic for years, I've become quite burnt out myself.

Burnout means I seek less human contact and have less frustration tolerance. Less human contact and less frustration tolerance means colder approach to the humans I do come in contact with. Colder approach means less psychodynamics and more behaviorism. More cold behaviorism means this:

I recently developed what I call a 'behavioral mechanism' to solve the problem of staff not attending mandatory supervisions. The problem: there were many supervision sessions being offered, the staff had many to choose from, and therefore the value and risk of not attending was low - 'why attend this supervision when I could just attend one next week? And if I attend, why pay attention to which one I attend?' This meant low attendance, and low interest. To incentivize staff to attend and choose wisely, I proposed we offer less supervisions, and increase the value of supervisions. 1 or 2 supervisions a month, and each supervision is worth more hours than before. Now if staff wish to reach their mandatory minimum supervision requirement, they must choose and attend, and if they wish to lessen their own discomfort, choose and attend one they can tolerate. 

This is not important in and of itself. It is merely a symptom of my burnout - turning to cold behavioral mechanisms to induce desired action.

Cold behavioral mechanisms means this:

That I am primed towards further use of behavioral mechanisms. Coldness begets more coldness. So I became cold. Flash forward a day - I am sitting in a staff meeting. We are discussing how to better make efficient the mental health clinic program schedule. Should we move smoke break to this time? Should we shorten the group therapy sessions by 10 minutes? Can we push this or that back? etc. And the humorous thought dawned on me

"Program would run better, smoother, more efficient, if it simply didn't have patients"

The groups, meals, and smoke breaks would begin and end exactly on time, or they wouldn't need to be ran at all. The regular staff would not have to attend to the residents and could devote their time to completing the back log of digital paper work, or filling out notes that document nothing happened.

This is Capitalist efficiency. 

It sometimes feels like this is what positivist psychological research is trying to do - hone its research methods by utilizing the patient as a feedback node to improve the efficiency and accuracy of the method. This has nothing to do with positivism, but is simply positivism, like my clinical thought here, appropriating the efficient mechanisms of capitalism that have no regard for humanity.

We recently saw cringe-worthy high profile celebs singing John Lennon's Imagine. Imagine this:

Imagine there's no humans
It's easy if you try
Only hell below us
Above us, scorched sky
Imagine there's no people
Livin' at all today
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine there's no people
Livin' life in patches

Imagine, if you will, a clinic with no residents. A market of machines. Imagine machines talking to machines about nothing. Imagine a full, rich, nothing. A massive, substantial, zero.

***

Hyperbiovirus accelerates technocapitalism accelerates human-burnout accelerates coldness accelerates inhumaneness tends towards policy that introduces inhumaneness into institutional structure tends towards...
...

The Obscurantist Look Back at 1 Year of Blogging that No one Asked For...

On April 21st or last year, 2019, I began this blog.

"Why" is a not often a question that 'really' gets at motivation. What better serves this function is "what." "Why's" are the stuff of the courtroom, and the cubicle, of voice, and of law. "What" is the stuff of materialism, of the impersonal vector.

As seen in the previous sentence, Why's (as opposed to 'Why' or 'the why') are in part by their nature multiple in a way that condones univocal impotence. Many interchangeable whys may be invoked to explain an action, but the fact that many may be invoked implies that the outcome and the why are already-always disconnected. If the why could be A, B, C, D, E..., without cost, nothing to gain or lose based on which why is chosen, then there is no explanatory power. This makes why simply noise. Whether or not a dispute over shrubbery was 'why' he murdered his neighbor changes not the murder, only the legal sentence. Meanwhile, what - not 'the whats' as in 'whys' -  is the stuff of the real world. Whether or not X was 'why' he killed his neighbor, what he used to do it was a .357.

This blog has tried to be all about 'whats' as seen in my constant attempt to integrate psychoanalysis and hypermaterialism of accelerationism/CCRU.

In this sense, what possessed me to make this blog? A demon?

I had things to say that could not be said elsewhere. Journals would not accept my work - some of it because I needed to improve on a technical register, i.e., grammar, tense, syntax, proof reading, etc., some of it because they disagreed with the form, i.e., cussing, slang, playing too fast and loose, and some of it because they disagreed with the content, i.e., it did not fit with any established school or discipline (not psychoanalytic enough for the psych journals, not social critique enough for the... etc. etc.). - and because Journals would not accept my work, I had accumulated a back log of essays, along with a collection of fragments I wanted to expand into essays, that had no home, essays and to-be texts I felt compelled to share with someone - anyone - who would take the time.

Its not so much that I believed I had anything of importance to say, but rather that I was sitting on somethings that I couldn't let remain unsaid any longer. They were eating at me. I felt filled to the brim with ideas, things I needed to expel. As Nietzsche's Zarathustra experiences - "Behold!  This overflowing cup must now empty itself: Zarathustra will once again become a man"

There is a difference here between containing that which cannot go unsaid and that which one finds is important and must be said. The former presumptuously assumes a level of individualist authority and an 'other,' while the latter assumes a void.

In this sense, this blog has tried to emulated to voids scissor-fucking; it's tried to imagine the bare ontological minimum subjectivity that would be required to 'reflect' on this cosmorgasm.

The depressive laments at the thought of speaking into a void. On the analyst's couch, they wonder if it is not simply the case that the analyst sleeps, or reads. On the phone, they wonder if there really is anyone on the other end. The true Nietzschean's among us know it is only when no one is listening - or when we think no one is listening - that anything worthwhile is said. Words that do not persuade minds, but ripple the cosmos.This comes with presumptions of its own, but they are at least ones that lean towards the inhuman.

But this is all some vague rubbish, isn't it.

Over writing the past year I have learned a great deal. My posts have not tripled in views, but accelerated in their rate of gathering views. Whereas I used to get 80 views over months, I get 100 views over 8 hours. I've improved my technical writing skill and my style, and expanded into different areas of though I had not previously adventured through. In this sense, the 'what' of my blog is 'process' or 'working through' as Freud would put it. I don't agree with everything I've said, and I am not sure any of it needed to be said, but the fact that it has been said and that perhaps someone may have made sense of it in a way that made them enjoy a new thought or feeling makes me feel good.

My blog is a 'what' to you, dear reader. What made him say such a thing? What made him this or that. Perhaps my blog. Perhaps not.
My blog is just another hit of junk in the info-junk stream.
And I think you for taking some of it in.

Viral Epistemology III: Science, the Death of God, and Mike Pence

Euclid-Pascal-Kant-Einstein 

Pascal's Wager:

"If the Christian God does not exist, the agnostic loses little by believing in him and gains correspondingly little by not believing. If the Christian God does exist, the agnostic gains eternal life by believing in him and loses an infinite good by not believing"

- (Encyclopedia Britannica)

If God exists, and you don't believe in him, you go to hell. You lose. If God doesn't exist, whether or not you believe in him, you won't go to hell. Might as well believe in god.

In other words, based on the possible consequences of the belief, it makes more sense to act as if God exists rather than not.

' As if ' philosophy was popularized by the post-Kantian philosopher Hans Vaihinger who posited that because, as Kant illustrated, our ability to know is limited and thereby supplemented with mental conceptual synthesis, we must rely on fiction to form coherent narratives of our self, others, and the world.

We come to simulate the world through fictions, and through this simulation we form models of knowledge acquisition.

More important than his influence on philosophy, Kant was instrumental for the science of physics, specifically Euclid's fifth postulate:

"The fifth postulate is not so easy to accept on the basis of experience. Might it not be that even lines that start out looking parallel come together slowly as they get farther and farther from us? Or, conversely...that lines that start out looking as if they will intersect bend away from each other slowly as they are produced out towards infinity... 

For many centuries people believed that it was not possible for the Fifth Postulate to be false in our space. There were two sorts of reasons given for this belief. The first was...God...The second...Immanuel Kant...his argument...was that space is largely a creation of our own minds, that we cannot imagine non-Euclidean space, and hence space is Euclidean...the idea is that we cannot see or imagine seeing anything that is not located in space...space may have no 'real' existence, but there is no way in which we can order our sense perceptions without using the organizing framework" 

- (Geometry, Relativity, and the Fourth Dimension, Rudolf Rucker, 1977, pg. 20-21).

It's not important that we know all the ins and outs of Euclid's postulates. What is important is that Kant was somewhat wrong, but still kinda right. As Einstein went on to show, space is curved, therefore lines may appear straight despite being curved. Theoretically, the existence of matter warps space. Empirically, physicists talk of geodesics covered in lines (one may here be reminded of Deleuze and Guattari's egg-like body without organs).

That is, despite what Kant theorized, we can imagine and even model non-Euclidian space. However, this does not mean that space is not a synthetic a priori production of the mind. Nor does it contradict the idea that space has no 'real' existence yet is an indispensable concept and undeniable experience. Thus, in science, we act as if both Euclidean and Non-Euclidean models are valid (disjunctive synthesis).

Faith and Hyperstition

Inseparably built into the fabric of science and its historical developments is the acceptance of the power and force of theological fictions that function on and in reality - the Kantian notion of 'as if.' We must act as if space, a kind of transcendental fiction, exists (Nick Land points out that to say time is 'in' time is a transcendental error. Likewise, we cannot conceptualize space 'in' space. Space is a category that is hard to think outside of. Thing's happen in it, space does not happen within itself).

After all, it is a common critique of Kant that for all his scientific critical undermining of the theological argumentation of his time - his refusal to appeal to the name of God in order to make concepts fall in line (to make all that is crooked straight, as Nietzsche would say) - Kant undoes his own critical work by cashing out his concepts and critiques to get back God.

That is, Kant asserts that due to our limits we must still retain faith.

Is this not precisely what Pascal predicted? That faith would incentivize and therefore functionalize itself more than pure reason? And is this not what the CCRU was trying to demonstrate with their notion of hyperstition?

In other words, Pascal's Wager works in reverse order too:

Pascal's Wager: Based on the possible consequences of belief, it makes more sense to act as if God exists rather than not.  

Gnon's Wager: the possible consequences of belief are created by acting as if their source existed (just as Oedipus, in trying to avoid his destiny, acts in a way that guarantees it).

Acting 'as if' may have the same effect as 'is.' As if = hyperstition machine.

Similarly, Freud, a secrete Kantian-Nietzschean, quoted an author in his 1899/1900 'The Interpretation of Dreams:'

"if one is afraid of robbers in a dream, the robbers indeed are imaginary, but the fear is real."

If life is the dream, God is the robber - 'if one is afraid of God in life, God is indeed imaginary, but the fear is real.'

On a Kantian and Freudian register, belief creates reality. Reality creates belief.

To believe in God gives the concept of God a power that then imbues the believer with the sense that God was always there (not unlike a kind of grandfather paradox). That is, to a degree, one acts a certain way when one believes as if there was a God watching the act (as Foucault said regarding the Panopticon - it doesn't matter if someone is watching, only if the prisoner believes someone is watching. This is of course the rule of the Oedipal super ego).

In this sense, not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's explication of Sam Butler's theory of machinic reproduction - that machines use humans as a mere link in the chain for machine reproduction - God uses the human as a mere link in the chain to create himself out of his own fiction.

He made us in his image for reasons similar to the narcissistic parent - to have a clone-pet gaze back at him, validating his holy existing, making him real.

"The Judaeo-Christian portrait of God is a classic sketch of pathological insecurity. How desperate he is to be loved! So insufficient to himself, and so alone..." 

"Time, on the contrary, is as vacant as a marriage, or God alone in the dark...Could such a God glimpsing the impossible sovereignty of his fury - time opening as a dark shaft of impersonal loss - and, howling in utter loathing at the servility of self, restrain from scurrying to a squalid death on the cross?" 

"is it that we imagine God being disappointed by his creation? A surprised God? A bewildered  God?  His great work gone astray." 

"Being  created  in  the  image  of  God,  we  mean  nothing  to ourselves,  and  want only  the  inhuman"  

 -  (Thirst for Annihilation: George Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Nick Land, 1992 pg. 83, 93, 94, 205).

If God dies in the void with no one around to hear him, does he die?
God is a sadistic exhibitionist.

Pence's Wager

Vice President Pence praying to ward off Covid19 is a loaded move. On the one hand, Pence is acting as if God is looking out for him. He exercises faith. On the other hand, strangely, this decision is a radical anti-theological, Nietzschean roll of the dice that affirms necessity and chance,  that affirms the random brutality of nature, the chaotic hyperrreal.

Which is the better path? To go through the rituals of virus safety and die, or to abstain and live?Though ballsy, this is an anti-Pascal's Wager, not to be confused with the reverse, hyperstitional Pascal's Wager above.

As I have shown in my previous posts (Viral Epistemology I, and VE II), there is doubt as to whether masks help deter the spread of COVID19. I aimed to show that it is clear masks do help in preventing the spread of the virus, and that this virus accelerates the breakdown of scientific discourse by exploiting or hacking its core weakness - its tendency to drag its feet on delivering helpful information by getting caught up in honing its simulation models and appealing to foolproof methods instead of human values.

Here, in opposition to Pence, is the Pascal's Wager of the Mask:

"If the masks are not effective, the mask-wearer loses little by wearing it and gains correspondingly little by not wearing it. If masks are effective, the mask-wearer gains eternal life by wearing it and loses an infinite good by not wearing it."

If masks work and you wear them, you live.
If masks work, and you don't wear them, you die.
If masks don't work, and you wear them, you die.
If masks don't work, and you wear them, you die.
Might as well believe as if masks work.

God is dead, science is cool but trips over itself, and, based on the possible consequences of the belief, it makes more sense to act as if ...

Viral Epistemology II: Quaternary Park and The Human Security System

The thrust of my most recent piece Viral Epistemology was that the positivist-scientific approach of controlling the chaotic variability of reality in order to simulate it as an abstract model is easily exploited - 'hacked' if we want to sound cyber-Kool - by a viral epidemic such as COVID19.

Science works in a abstract human register of time through teleological representational communication while the viral works in real time through diagrammatic force. The former is what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as royal science, the latter minor science, rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, diagrammatics, etc., or what is recuperated by the CCRU as hyperstition.

What follows from royal science are scientific findings that influence public policy that influence politics, all of which have more to do with the language games of the simulation models, and therefore are counter-intuitive to lived experience, than they do with real, outside forces that effect behavior. What follows from minor science, the science of multiplicities, is a schizophrenic encounter with the outside, a rendezvous with undeath, an open relationship with a virus.

This is a lot of words to simply say that I missed some things in this piece, so rather than add to something that feels complete, I will expound here.

***

The lesson of Jurassic Park (1993) is a lesson in physics.

John Hammond, a venture capitalist whose most uttered line is "no expense spared," (capitalist in a metaphysical and social sense) turns dead organisms into alive-and-deadly ones through science. He is of course the archetypal arrogant billionaire who believes money grants him unlimited power, even the ability to 'turn back time,' bring the dead back to life, that is, swim against the tide of entropy. With this comes the belief that he can control chaos.

Likewise, Hammond believes that if he crams enough safety precautions into a relatively closed system - the park, with its goals and defenses to protect those goals - that the angry dinosaurs will not escape and eat the park guests (defeating the goal). He believes he can (and has) predicted and accounted for all possible undesirable outcomes.

What we see, of course, is that a series of unforeseen events coincide: a tropical storm links up with a hacker's devious plan bound up with corporate espionage while a population of exclusively female dinosaur clones overcome genetically programmed limitations through accidentally unlocking latent and unintentional genetic coding thereby producing male offspring and restarting the autonomous reproductive feedback cycle, etc., all of which leads to a complete breakdown of the human implemented order system. As chaos theorist Ian Malchom points out, "life, uh, finds a way." As Mencius Moldbug rightly points out - "one bad variable will bust your whole proof."

A genetic nightmare escaped from a giant techno-scientific containment facility? You don't say. Is this not precisely one of the theories as to where COVID19 originated? A gov't designer-virus, a bioweapon gone AWOL.

***

Jurassic Park is not simply a lesson in entropy. It's also a lesson in the Human Security System (HSS).

I'm descending into history. Into drunkenness. Assemblages are taking off without my consent.

The animated series Futurama aired in 1999, the near peak of Y2K anxiety. The premise of the show is that a loser accidentally cryogenically freezes himself and wakes up many years into the future. K time, as the CCRU calls it, is a concept machining these narratives.

In one templexity ridden (the future returns to the past) Futurama episode, the Bronze Age to 8th Century accounts of Amazonian woman warriors gives way to a cartoonish 20th and 21st century depiction of tough, muscular woman keeping men in captivity for sex.

In circa 3000 to 800 BC Amazonian woman kept men in captivity. Let's call this 'Bronze Park.' The Jurassic Park of the Quaternary period had dinosaurs escape the park security system. The Quaternary Park of the [fEuRtRuORe] Period  will have viruses that escape the human security system. It all templexively recurses to Bronze Park.

COVID19 attacks the testicles and kills twice as many men as woman.

As I alluded to above, in Jurassic Park, John Hammond and his scientists clone only female dinosaurs as to prevent the dinosaurs from reproducing on their own. However, some of the DNA the scientists used is from a kind of frog that can 'switch sexes' thereby implanting within the dinosaurs the implicit and latent ability for an all female population supposedly foreclosed to all female limit to produce a mutated strain of males thereby shattering the limit. Of course, as chaos theorist Ian Malcom theorizes, this occurs.

Chaos theory. How strange. Chaos needs no theory. Theory cannot conceptualize chaos. Replace 'chaos theory' with Chaos-praxis. Praxis? Still too presumptuous. Simply 'chaos' will suffice.

***

Jurassic Park, a fictional illustration of the collapse of the HSS.

Nick Land's concept of 'The Human Security System' (HSS) first shows up in Circuitries, then Machinic Desire (which are back to back in Fanged Noumena), then in Meltdown. In Circuitries we are introduced to Cyberia and Artaud, and learn HSS is opposed to schizo flows and bound with globalist order. Machinic Desire begins with an analysis of Bladerunner. The replicants - a kind of android clone - of the book turned film are, like the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, orphans. They have no mommy-daddy (Artaud) and thus break with Oedipal code of patriarchal order. This all culminates in Meltdown where we get an intentional return to Bladerunner coupled with an unwitting return to my Bronzeage/8thcentury Amazonian myth (i.e. Greek myth):

"The  Greek  complex  of rationalized  patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal sedentary identity, and instituted  slavery,  programs  politics  as  anti-cyberian police activity, dedicated to  the  paranoid  ideal  of  self -sufficiency, and  nucleated upon  the Human Security System.  Artificial Intelligence  is  destined  to  emerge  as  a  feminized  alien grasped as  property;  a  cunt-horror  slave  chained-up  in Asimov-ROM.  It  surfaces in  an insurrectionary war zone, with the  Turing cops  already waiting, and  has to be cun­ning from the  start."

A cunt-horror.

What is viral will always tend towards what is 'female.' The great zero. A full zero (the womb?). A hole. A wound in the human security system that allows lines of of flight to flow; an exit. A wound, as Land points out in Thirst for Annihilation, that is likened to the vulva, not because of castration, but in spite of it, as “everything that flows freely [is] like a wound."

As if confirming G/ACC, COVID19  breaks balls as it breaks the human security system.

Gnon finds a way...

Viral Epistemology

Science drags it's knuckles, then its feet...

We recently encountered on a large scale something very symptomatic of scientific discourse: a scientifically grounded position that flirts with logical fallacies and seems at odds with our common sense experience - don't use face masks.

This is of course a somewhat misleading way of framing the issue. To be precise, though the people who know more than me on this topic are correct when they say the CDC / WHO never officially discouraged face mask, it is true that, in order to save the supply of masks for health officials in direct contact treating patients, the WHO and CDC

"Both...have repeatedly said that ordinary citizens do not need to wear masks unless they are sick and coughing"

Masks not discouraged, but unnecessary. Though there is a difference here, most won't know how to spot it.

The US Surgeon General  did not contradict this position

which spawned a debate online regarding the effectiveness of masks, with ivy league professors, medical professionals, and conspiracy theorists alike all chiming in with conflicting information.

Since the initial 'effective/ineffective' debate, both the CDC, WHO, and many public health officials have reneged this position based on "new data" that shows people without symptoms - who are not sick and coughing - may be spreading the virus, and that masks may help prevent this.

As "Everyone Thinks They’re Right About Masks" neatly summarizes,

"If masks are limited, conserving them for the people who need them most makes sense. But that message was lost amid the confusing claim that masks somehow protect health-care workers but are useless for everyone else" 

"If the virus is traveling through the air, then it seems intuitive that masks would block it. But the evidence for this is all over the place [ranging from ineffective, somewhat effective, to effective]."

It is important to remember that - and this is not an endorsement -  this is how science 'works.'

A True Scotsman, a Red Herring, and Billy Occam Walk into a Courtroom...

I am finishing up a Doctoral degree in Clinical Psychoanalysis (which means I am ironically both an essential personnel at my 24 hour care day clinic and also completely inessential when it comes to anything other than talking about your feelings on the virus) and was recently in a research class with a relatively prominent Ivy League professor. He had just finished explaining that, as is par the course for science, the findings on some important research from 2 months ago are now invalid, and with them all theory, hypothesis, policy, whatever, etc., that was based on that research.

Me: "Then what would incentivize one to do research and base further research on findings if it is likely to be undone shortly thereafter? What makes this any different than the 'constant relativism-flux' of postmodernism?" 

Professor: "Research is a social endeavor. Each study contributes to a bigger picture. Now we know what not to do so that we have a clearer idea of what to do in the future."

Let's be clear. This is not postmodernism. This is dialectical, enlightenment age positivism. As parties work together to share information through a cycle of negations (scientific method - falsifiable / verifiable / repeatable, etc.), the truth as an object of representation becomes clearer and clearer until we have a mirror-like representation of the real, outside world.

Through this model, it is par the course that things we may have accurate or pragmatic intuitions about cannot be considered true or real until 'science' has done the dirty work. For example, the big tobacco companies were able to push off regulations on cigarettes (and avoid lawsuits) for years for the reason that there is no ethical (and perhaps even pragmatic) way to randomize people to smoke / not smoke and therefore other scientific methods had to be utilized to support the claim that smoking is harmful.

These alternative methods opened up a gap which the tobacco execs filled with rhetoric, throwing red herring fallacies around the courtroom, forcing scientists to test for absurd confounding variables. Each time the science came back, the tobacco execs suggested another confounding variable was making people ill, not cigarettes. This is the kind of 'no true scotsman' argument psychology unwittingly uses - 'the patient has not improved because they have not taken the therapy seriously, therefore they require more therapy to take therapy seriou...' - which was inherited from medical science during its time of blood letting, 'the patient is sick not because draining blood may have have negative effects, but because we did not drain enough blood to treat the sickness' (also see 'the moon is made of cheese, you're just not digging deep enough;' 'communism does work, all its failed attempts weren't 'actual' communism,' etc.).

The assumption that inhaling substances not inherent or natural to the internal systems of the body would somehow damage those systems - especially when this assumption was later supported by a seemingly high correlation between damage to the organ associated with the substance and consumption of the substance - is intuitive, makes sense,  and follows Occam's razor, but could not be 'verified' by science until science of another kind (molecular cell biology, or whatever) advanced and was able to lend a hand. In this way, the science of this era committed itself to following legal arguments - which we will remember are for the most part derived from moral arguments which are from religious arguments -  that required one to give the time of day to complex and absurd theories rather than follow Occam's razor.

Slate Star Codex’s blog post from March 23rd tackles much of these epistemic questions right down to the legal discourse of science.

Just like with cigarettes,

“It’s unethical to randomize people to wear vs. not-wear masks during a pandemic, so nobody has done this. Instead we have case-control studies…an especially bad study design”

and despite there being somewhat inconclusive or statistically insignificant findings regarding the effectiveness of masks,  the science seems to contradict our intuitions.

For example, take the following clever analogous gestures:

“respirators are better than masks are better than nothing. It would be wrong to genuinely conclude this, because it’s not statistically significant. But it would also be wrong to conclude the studies show masks don’t work, because they mostly show respirators don’t work, and we (hopefully) know they do…” 

“Masked health care workers...travelers...family members... were less likely to catch disease than unmasked ones...All of this accords with a common-sense understanding…None of these…prove that regular people can benefit from masks. But health care workers are closely related to homo sapiens and ought to have similar anatomy and physiology….”

Scientific research - or its language rather -  says one thing, intuition and experience, another.

Ultimately, not unlike our discussion of the tobacco execs in court above, Codex’s theory is that

“…they’re [the CDC] trying to do something different with medical communication. Consider legal communication. If a court declares a suspect is 'not guilty,' that could mean that he is actually not guilty of the crime...that he did it but they can’t prove it...that he did it, they can prove it, but the police officer who found the proof didn’t have a warrant at the time so they had to throw it out. A legal communication like 'this man is not guilty' is intended not just to convey information, but to formally reflect the output of a sacrosanct process. Medicine has been traumatized by its century-long war with quackery [blood letting, bad psychotherapy], and ended up with its jargon also formally reflecting the output of a sacrosanct process. Remember, there are dozens of studies supposedly showing homeopathy works, not to mention even more studies proving telepathy exists. At some point you have to redesign all your institutions to operate in an environment of epistemic learned helplessness, and the result is very high standards of proof. So masks haven’t been proven to work beyond a reasonable doubt. Just like the legal term for 'not proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt' is 'not guilty,' the medical communication term for 'not proven effective beyond a reasonable doubt' is 'not effective'

Jurassic Patch 

For Moldbug, the sacrosanct process that restricts sensible thought through counter-intuitive, legalese derived from moral and therefore religious beliefs is referred to as the Cathedral (note the similarities between Moldbug and Codex's use of analogous logic that connects up with intuition to override the thought restriction). In short, horribly reductive terms, it is an irreproachable cultural security system that transparently exists as a given and therefore influences all values through the spread of memetic thought viruses. 

As I have written elsewhere, as both a computer programmer and political theorist Mencius Moldbug conceptualizes the memetic virus in a highly useful way

"Moldbug’s rhetorical genius should be pointed out here; 1: The concept virus captures the violence and virility of the way ideas contagiously spread with brute force through any avenue available, sexual or not (STD), rather than gene [per Richard Dawkins' definition of meme], which, solely sexual, seems more associated with reproductive processes and naïve teleology or agency (virus is Darwinian, gene is Lamarckian). Genes are passed down through filiation and are associated with values such as ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ while viruses irreverently infect and mutate and are beyond good and evil. A person can host and transfer a virus without knowing it (impersonal force), just like ideology, while, for gene, a person requires agency to reproduce with another person (ego-level interactions). The former captures the chaos of overflowing life and its sublimated residue and sediment known as culture whereas the latter seems too reductive and restrictive (and naturalistic); 2: Virus is a perfect concept for the meme as it is language pertinent to both the computer programming world and biological world. By utilizing the videogame sub culture term ‘pwnd’ in the piece where he expounds on the meme as virus [and criticizes Dawkins for, in spite of his atheist edginess, being unable to critique the outer layer of the Cathedral, its humanism], Moldbug highlights the meme’s digital subculture connotations as well as its bio-socio-scientific connotations in our contemporary digital world."

This is all not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualization of the virus when they remind us in their 'orchid-wasp' motif of A Thousand Plateaus that it is viral contagion, surplus of code, not linear transmission, that is transferred between radically different organisms which leads to previously unlikely parallel evolutionary processes (and it is no surprise that Nick Land manages to tie Deleuze and Guattari with Moldbug).

The virus - COVID19 or otherwise - does not represent something as some will surely argue. It is life itself spilling over its containment system, running amok. (Royal) science cannot keep up with reality. Life does not wait for science to figure it out. The virus unfolds in real time, science in human-time. Science is always dragging its feet, precisely because its dragging its knuckles, trying to 'prove,' communicate, and convince others of facts about a [T/]thing that neither needs, nor heeds proofs, communications, or arguments yet is itself, with its brute processes, an unrelenting proof.  

What would be of interest here is not only taking this into account to help people from dying - I am a fake accelerationist here in that I do not want to die, nor do I want my loved ones to die, nor do I mind saving people's lives if possible - but of also studying the virus from a position of following the virus' flow, letting it inform our concepts; researching it and acknowledging it as a strong indication of our human limits; acknowledging that we cannot arrogantly exercise human agency over the virus to the extent we believe.

This is what Deleuze and Guattari referred to as minor science, rhizomatics, stratoanalysis, schizoanalysis, nomadology, micropolitics, pragmatics, the science of multiplicities, most notably introduced in A Thousand Plateaus by Professor Challenger (and remember, the sequel to Jurassic Park is subtitled 'The Lost World,' a clear reference to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel which contains the a character of the same name...).

In the words of the chaos theorist Doctor Ian Malcom responding to John Hammond's arrogant attempts to obsessively contain and monetize that which is uncontainable, i.e. genetically cloned killing machines 

"Life, uh, finds a way."

And, in the words of the numerology minded, satanic, cybergothicesque, meth addled 90s, breakbeat industrial metal band Slipknot

 "this is the virus of life..."