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..."

Technopagan: Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the CCRU

Ms. Calendar: I teach computer science at the local high school.
Giles: A profession that hardly lends itself to the casting of bones.
Ms. Calendar: Wrong...you think the realm of the mystical is limited to ancient texts and relics? That bad old science made the magic go away?...The divine exists in cyberspace same as out here.
Giles: Are you a witch?
Ms. Calendar: I don't have that kinda power. 'Technopagan' is the term.
[Giles lets out a chuckle]
Ms. Calendar: There are more of us than you think.

There are indeed more of them than you think. Swarms, even...

Or so goes the conversation in Buffy the Vampire Slayer S1E8 'I,Robot...You, Jane" between Giles, the bespectacled British scholar who lives in his library-office surrounded by ancient tomes, and Ms. Calendar, the completely 90s-on-brand, witty, cutting, dark, angular, computer science professor.

And what might these two be talking about? The demon Moloch, of course.

The episode begins in 1418 with Christian (presumably) Monks trapping Moloch in a tome through a binding ritual. In classic campy 90s specialfx fashion, we watch as Moloch's body is literally transformed into text on a page, text that if read aloud will release the demon back into physical form. Flash forward 579 years to 1997 and the Moloch-bound-book has ended up in Giles library where one of his students scans it into his online, digital database, a scanning process - being as it is a form of  (machine) reading - that releases Moloch into not physical, but cyberspace.

From here, Moloch infects the internet, or 'the net' as it is referred to, and, in addition to crashing the global economy, disrupts the libidinal one too; he poses as 'Malcom Black' who seduces others into doing his bidding -  breaking into the Calax Research and Development (CDR [reminiscent vaguely of CCRU]) labs to have a robot body built. However, despite taking physical form as a robot, not unlike the incident in 1418, Moloch is defeated through a binding ritual - he is disconnected from the internet and pushed into an electrical box where he explodes. Instead of being transformed into words in a book, he is transformed into energy in a surge box, a signal to open an information flow, a diagram.

Here, it is clear I, Robot...You, Jane demonstrates the core thrust of the CCRU. Magic and tech, the occult and the cyber, the ancient and the present, mesh. Going forward brings us back to the old ones. Magic is 'primitive' tech. Everything meshes. Distinctions breakdown. Feedback gets going. Signification - written language - no longer represents or symbolizes, it induces, functionalizes. Asignifying diagrammatics - words that act as - not like as D and G remind us - chemical agents, molecules, particles, etc. Command prompts as spells. Abracadabra is information creation; Hebrew for 'as I speak, so I create.' Hyperstition - fictions make themselves real. For Marx, all that was solid melted into air. For magic-tech, all that is ethereal (signification) meltdowns into solid (physical).

But don't take my word for it...

Giles: I still prefer a good book.

Fritz: The printed page is obsolete. Information isn't bound up anymore. It's an entity. The only reality is virtual. If you're not jacked in, you're not alive.

Ms. Calendar: Thank you, Fritz, for making us all sound like crazy 

people...Fritz comes on a little strong, but he does have a point. You know, for the last two years more e-mail was sent than regular mail.

Giles: Oh...

Ms. Calendar: More digitized information went across phone lines than conversation.

Giles: That is a fact that I regard with genuine horror.

Information isn't bound up anymore. Genuine horror, indeed.

Despite all this, Moloch himself is only mentioned once, very briefly, and cryptically in the CCRU. In the text Qabbala Unshelled, the demon is evoked only in mentioning Malkuth's position in the the arbitrary system of the Jewish tree of life (here, on the Hyperstition blog frequented by Reza, Nick, and Mark, Nick mentions that Moloch is related to, or another name for, Malkuth. In that some hyperstition post, Leviathan is mentioned as well. See Vincent Garton's Urbanomic text on Leviathan that also briefly mentions Moloch, and later discusses Nick Land ).

This does not stop him from being a demon linked to Land, however, as the popular blogger Scott Alexander / Slate Star Codex shows in writing a long reflection on Moloch and the demon's relation to Nick Land's work. It is not my interest here to summarize or analyze the excellent text, but I will say this - Alexander, for better or for worse, equates Land's Gnon with Moloch after pointing out that others have argued Moloch symbolizes - as far as poetry is concerned -  Capitalism and its tempting, outside, incentive forces.

So, at the risk of sounding foolishly reductionist, perhaps Moloch was all that the CCRU was ever working towards...

Regardless, one wonders what the aptly named Ms. 'Calendar' (whose extension of her computer science to the analysis of bones brings to mind the archaeologically minded DC Barker and his geotraumatic adventures) and Giles would discuss now, in 2020. We will never know. All that is for certain is that demons don't die, they go cyber. They go viral. They go world dominating. As the tagline to the terrible past-gone-future slasher film Jason X goes, 'evil gets an upgrade.'

The Long Death of Elder Zare

The old wizard Zare of the East poured over his tomes as he always did before resting for the night.
Yellowed pages of grimoires long since forgotten by the common folk - those who worked with their hands - crinkled softly as softer hands ran over them.
Gentle muttering seemed to meet up and depart with the ambivalent flicker of candle light caught in the breeze of the tower's high window.

It'd been years. Decades. Nearly a century. Who knew anymore.
The old wizard had prolonged his life precisely by refusing to live it. Holed up in his tower, surrounded by his books, so many bricks constituting a wall.  A wall that blocked out the outside. Knowledge always staves off the outside, keeps things tightly in their places.

The wizard knew all the secrets - the secrets of the pages, that is. The secrets of saying 'no' to the outside, to the world.
'The potato grows best in such and such a dirt, with such and such water, etc.' said the farmer.
But Zare, despite his never having been a farmer, knew much better - 'that is not what the book says.'
'This kills the man' said the physician.
'But that is not what my books say' said the wizard.
'Time is an arrow that can't be restrung' said the material man.
'But the book, it says otherwise, and I have scoured through their lines from left to right - not unlike an arrow in that sense - my whole life, so surely I and my books know better. Surely because of this, I understand the outside.'

And so he went on arguing, waiting to find the right word inside his tower to finally paint the right picture of the outside.
Meanwhile, the potatoes grew and the farmers fed the masses. The physicians healed the wounds. The hunters learned from their bows.
The wizard, he grew old. By now 300 or so years had passed and the wizard, so drunk on his own presence, believed, if given the appropriate opportunity, could argue death out of taking his life.
Death reminded him kindly that nature does not argue.

British Hyperstition: The Spice Girls-Pink Floyd Assemblage

1:
I like to explore coincidences. I believe the connections between seemingly accidental occurrences say something important and can be understood 'scientifically.' Here scientific can be understood a few ways.

It can be rationalist. As Guattari points out in some lecture somewhere, Freud believed all things, including coincidences - which Mark Fisher points out in his book The Weird and the Eerie are part of what Freud called the 'uncanny' - could be traced back to purely rational causes and effects within a mechanistic world. As Guattari puts it, for Freud even the irrational is just the rational waiting to be uncovered.

It can be transcendental. In his book on Synchronicity, Jung attempts to 'scientifically' research uncanny coincidences, claiming - and this is roughly speaking as here is not the place to get into Jung - that coincidences are resonances between instantiations of deep historical archetypes. For Jung, the rational is just the irrational waiting to be explored.

It can be hyperstitional. A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses (or, when one arrives at a certain point of time, one looks back and sees the distinction between the two was never that hard, never 'really' there...).

It can also be semiotic, which I believe synthesizes the Freudian rationalist and Jungian transcendent approach with the Landian CCRU approach. Language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that still makes things happen - a kind of functional fiction -  does not need to map onto any concrete objects or reality in order to fall into meaningful patterns. There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives, etc. Within limited options, trends catch on, certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material, etc.  Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real.

2:
One such set of semiotic coincidences occurs via the assemblage known as The Spice Girls, the British pop band of the late 90s.

Consider the lyrics of their hit Stop off the 1997 album Spiceworld.

When I first listened to the song with my girlfriend I made the joke that the Spice Girls were merely covering the Pink Floyd song Stop off 1982 album The Wall.

This is obviously not true as the only similarities between the 3 minute and 33 second song - yes, 3:33 as seen int he above video, I am not making this up - and the 30 second Floyd track which is 3rd from last on the album is its title, Stop.

However, while listening to the song, I noticed that not only does the song share a name with a Pink Floyd song, but it mentions two other Pink Floyd songs not only in the lyrics but in the same sentence -'Hey you, always on the run.' Hey You, slow opiate ballad off The Wall, and On The Run, intense modular synth loop-collage off The Dark Side of the Moon.

These coincidences could be easily overlooked if not for another layer: the Spice Girls movie, Spice World (1997), contains several cameos from American celebrities such as Meatloaf and Elvis Costello, but also British musicians and celebrities such as Elton John, Roger Moore, and Bob Geldof. It is the last name here that interests us - Bob Geldof played Pink in the film adaption of Pink Floyd's the Wall. 

Bob as an unhinged Pink (or MFW I start connecting all the dots between Spice Girls and Pink Floyd)

Again, this could be overlooked, but within the film the Spice Girls are excited to run into Bob, and it is implied Bob and the girls have some sort of friendship.

To sum so far - the Spice Girls include references to two songs off The Wall and one song off The Dark Side of the Moon in a song on the album that shares a name and release date with the movie where the girls run into Bob Geldof, i.e., Pink.

This connection is evident in the culture at large. One music blogger connects Pink Floyd and The Spice Girls disjunctively, that is, through a negative associative link. For him, Pink Floyd is good music, no personality, whereas The Spice Girls is good personality, bad music. Why his mind went to this comparison first, we don't know. Why he made this dichotomy a thing, we don't know. We can only speculate it is because of unconscious semiotic and cultural connections.

Consider the following.

A website that tracks and provides crossword search clues states the following "Clue: Title of songs by Pink Floyd and the Spice Girls. Possible Answers: Stop." What this tells us is that somewhere, at sometime, there was a crossword puzzle in some kind of mass produced literature, be it a magazine, newspaper, puzzle book, etc., that also made the simple, obvious connection I've made above. In other words, the Pink Floyd-Spice Girls connection is basically common knowledge given that the crossword is a very simple puzzle distributed to the masses.

Similarly, UK News Outlet The Daily Mail wrote a short piece on Spice Girl Mel wearing a Pink Floyd T-Shirt. The shirt, as the images in the article show, is adorned with a popular graphic design from The Wall.

A Google search of 'Spice Girls Pink Floyd' yields, several pages in, a very interesting Spice Girls fan blog entitled 'Spice Bricks: The Geri Years Revisited.' The reference here is to the phrase 'Spare Bricks' - also the name of the URL and webpage despite the blog being entitled Spice instead of Spare - which is an unreleased Pink Floyd album composed of songs from The Wall that were re-recorded for the movie and padded with newer songs related to The Wall narrative, songs that would later go on to be re-written and included in the last Roger Waters era Floyd album The Final Cut. Though the sidebar of the strange, skeletal blog contains many links to other parts of the blog that sound intentionally Floydian - KAOS Theories, a reference to Roger Water's second solo album Radio KAOS (which is full of accelerationist themes, I might add), Floydian Places, Gilmoure Guitars, etc. - all the links are broken, which is not surprising given it appears the blog has not been updated for 20 years.

The subtitle of the blog here - The Geri Years Revisited - warrants attention as well. This is a nod to the split(s) that occurred to Pink Floyd throughout the years. The early years saw the band centered around Syd Barett who wrote the majority of the tunes. Then David Gilmoure replaced Barett making Waters as the main writer. Later, Waters would take over the band and eventually have a falling out leading to two Pink Floyds touring at the same time, one lead by Gilmoure one by Waters (syzygic Floyds) . 'The Waters Years' then refers to specific albums towards the end of Pink Floyd's career as a complete band, albums with a specific sound and message - Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall, and the Final Cut. As one Guardian article on Pink Floyd notes, the Spice Girls and Pink Floyd share some similarities, specifically around this Geri/Waters years:

"OK, so the subject of The Spice Girls On Trial (Five) is a different kind of deal, but maybe there is some common ground: internal bickering (Geri's defection mirrors Waters'), reconciliation and a comeback (even if after only five minutes). Something else, too: it's very hard to dislike the Spice Girls."

Coincidences? Perhaps.

Let's go further still.

The production company that produced and helped write the single Stop also produced Geri's - the Roger Water's of the spice girls - debut solo album, Schizophonic. We should pause over this name. Not only is the album notably associated with schizophrenia, the 'diagnosis' of accelerationism, what Syd Barrett induced in himself through psychedelics, but it's also a concept - the separation of sound from its source thus creating an uncanny effect - Mark Fisher discusses twice in The Weird and the Eerie, the book we mentioned earlier in relation to Freud's uncanny. That's right folks, we've just come full circle. Though Geri most likely used the term to reference her split (schiz = split or cut) from the Spice Girls and her attempt to forge a new sound (phonics), the double meaning and the coincidence can't be ignored.

A final interesting coincidence. According to multiple sources (1 and 2), in the 90s The Spice Girls were hard-line Thatcherites. Thatcher is a fun link here because it gives us three directions to go in.: Nick Land's post-CCRU accelerationist conceptualizations are often accused of being Thatcherite or Reaganite in nature, Fisher, what I consider Land's friendly antithesis, was adamantly critical of Thatcher, while Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, basically an extension of The Wall, is centered on the Falkland War and polemically refers to Thatcher as 'Maggie' throughout the album. Fisher, Land, Spice Girls, Pink Floyd - the whole gang's here.

3:
One could argue that these similarities are merely the result of overlapping populations and identities - British musicians or theorists interested in music (CCRU-Kode9/Jungle connection, AUDINT, etc.) coexisting at a certain time, in a certain political climate, etc. This is both very much to the point and also far too naive. Yes, there's a 'geist,' yes bodies are dispersed across time that act as nodes for channeling outside forces, but why these specific resonances?

I will end without answering this question but instead doing a bit of what Freud cautioned against, and which he accused Jung of - wild analysis.

I believe The Spice Girls are a soft psyop, a vessel for a virus. As I have pointed out elsewhere regarding memes, viruses, Moldbug, Land, and the methods of political communication in our contemporary age, a viral memetic vessel makes itself just specific to resonate with the particular, i.e. find a first host, and just general enough to apply to the universal, i.e. spread, adapt, grow, transform, etc. The Spice Girls, from their cookie cutter multiculturalism song 'Spice up Your Life' that falls somewhere between tone deaf woke and flat out racist (a song which features a music video set in what appears to be a bland, monolithic dystopian future) or what we might call the 'cultural appropriation' of hiphop in their hit song Wannabe, to the girl power motifs juxtaposed (or intensified to their limit...) with the Thatcherism, one wonders if The Spice Girls where not engineered by a team of market gurus.

This, after all, the basic plot of the Spice Girls film, Spiceworld. The film, in a very meta and self-aware fashion very fit for the late 90s, centers on the girls who must expose their record exec's evil exploitative plot in order to reclaim their art and reunify as a band. That is, the movie plays on the fact that The Spice Girls are a pop sensation likely engineered by a record company to manipulate the masses. In this way it hides in plain sight.

This is what leads me to claim that The Spice Girls were a simulation of what British marketing execs believed the British general population believed the British marketing execs believed about the British gen pop. Or, in other less convoluted words, the subjective reflexive game theory of the marketing exec imaging what the consumer thinks of him (the exec) thinking of the consumer.

Ultimately this is not to say we shouldn't enjoy the Spice Girls. There are a number of songs I unironically listen to - 2 Become 1, for example. This is rather to say that when one goes looking, coincidences interlock and create something interesting and previously unheard of. So, listen to the Spice Girls and see where it gets you.

Nick Land's Crypto Netflix Brand

Intro

This is an excerpt of a chapter of my upcoming E-Book CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism, a Love Story). The book connects, reduces, and clarifies many of my blog posts here into a coherent, dark, comical hyperstitional exploration of how flows emerging from the CCRU have infected the mainstream culture without us knowing it. This particular excerpt can be read with two other blog posts in mind - The Ballad of Kevin Spacey (Space(y)-Time Hyperstition) where I show how Netflix Original House of Cards and Kevin Spacey make eerie fictions become real, and Lemurian TV War (there's a war on for your time) which is my continuation of the CCRU's appendix TV Demonism, a text that highlights the presence of deep, dark, occultist state control and its effects on and in the media. 

Nick Land’s Crypto Netflix Brand

The story goes like this: a little-known Californian company named Netflix is founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Its service is simple – rent DVDs to people around America. In 5 years it has 600 thousand members. 3 years later, over 4 million. 2 years later in 2007 it introduces streaming alongside DVD renting. Within the decade it spreads across the world and introduces a streaming only plan. 2 Years later in 2012 it makes another huge move from renting and streaming others content to coproducing its own content with another company which culminates in the first ‘Netflix Original,’ Lilyhammer. 1 year later Netflix is making its own content completely in house, the first pure Netflix Original House of Cards.

If we consider the major events in Netflix’s history – the founding of the company for renting DVDs, the global spread of the company and its shift to streaming, its first coproduced original content, and its first wholly original content - we see that the major changes occur in a 13 year period between 1997 and 2010, a 2 year period between 2010 and 2012, and finally a 1 year period between 2012 and 2013. Things pick up speed from 13 – an unlucky and occult number - to 2 – a twinning number -  to 1, all culminating in a political drama that blends reality and fiction at an alarming rate.

This makes perfect sense as it is but makes even more perfect sense when we consider the following: Hasting studied computer science, Randolph studied geology, both were rich entrepreneurs. Could one imagine a more accelerationist resonance than computer technology interfacing with an understanding of global territory all within a Californian backdrop? Could one name a better combination for cultural world domination than West Coast technoscientific global investors? I think not.

But Hasting and Randolph don’t get all the credit. They’re merely meat-bags channeling an impersonal vector of capitalism that froths beneath the surface of Netflix. That is, due to advancements in technology resulting in changes in media distribution and consumption and how these advancements and changes benefit people’s economic and time preferences, people go from primarily renting DVDS to streaming content online in their homes (a sign of what Guattari would call Integrated World Capitalism’s tendency to miniaturize its machines as to be internalized by the consumer). Netflix simply rides the wave, appropriates the forces, and in drafting off these forces, cuts away its dead weight and tightens its feedback systems; it decentralizes, dematerializes, deterritorializes.

No more physical DVDs; no more time and money invested in coordinating bodies to ship and handle DVDs. In fact, Netflix even does away with the need for an other altogether  – no more simply sharing others’ content, or cooperating with others to produce content, etc. Like the self-sufficient and auto productive monstrosity of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Netflix produces and distributes itself in digital bits, incorporeal fragments, throughout the air. It makes itself the ether, it builds itself into the fabric of our shared world and the subjectivities produced therein.

If this sounds familiar it’s because it’s an instance of letting ‘the process,’ with all its spatial-territorial variables, determine what sticks and what goes, a method that does away with as much mediation, and human agency as possible. That is, this is all a lot of words to say Netflix is accelerationist. A banality, but one we need for what is to come.

...

Alphabet Soup

a-z

Chemical  agent
F_eder_al agent
________ agent Orange
______________Colors

just colors

With all the energy of a prison riot
With all the intensity and violence

a garbage truck T-boning a family sedan
6 dead, 1 injured. the trash is OK though

The ethos of a village burning
The pathos of a napalm rush
your stomach gutted

a day late and a dollar short

riding out the rest of your time in a non descriptive digital landscape
motion at the pace of the hum of a refrigerator unit

a waltz rings out
it pulls you in

a drum beats strong
a biosin
(psilocybin)

Chemical-Federal-Agent-Orange
(C)_____(I)_____(A)

- ...

Put the 'Rat' Back in Rationality (Libmat/Ratpack Gossip)

Introduction
Between Robin Mackay drunk Tweeting, Reza returning to Twitter, and Peter Wolfendale doing whatever it is he does (here Wolf talks about himself, Reza, and neorats), the internet has been buzzing with a revitalized discussion of the libidinal materialists vs. neorationalists divide.

Ok. There probably wasn't really a resurgence of this 'debate,'  but I am interested in using these semi-recent Twittersphere happenings to bring up a few strange connections that have been on my mind for a while:

• 1 - That one time Peter Wolfendale ambushed Nick Land in one of his own New Center for Research and Practice seminars and debated him for 40 minutes.

• 2 - The strange and sudden disappearance of a website I swear I visited called 'How to argue Nick Land' 

40 Minutes of Pete vs. Nick in 3 Memes 
1 first.

2 hours 5 minutes and 30 seconds into session 2 (06.19.16) of Nick Land’s New Center for Research and Practice class Outer Edges: 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics, a seminar largely centered on the theory of patchwork, Peter Wolfendale makes a surprise entrance to engage with Land. Pete and Nick go at it for about 40 minutes. Pete keeps arguing for some level of connection, agreement, or shared contact on a theoretical register while Land pushes back with his concepts of disintegration, fragmentation, disagreement, deuniversalization on a practical level.

Pete suggests we might have to presuppose some philosophical assumptions which Nick challenges by valuing the ability for one to protect one's sovereignty and independence over philosophical coherence. Nick then reminds Pete that patchwork doesn't want 'rational success' it wants 'several experiments many of which will fail.'

Pete thinks Nick's call to fragmentation and local, spatial agreement as opposed to universal globalist imposition is a "Nietzschean position" that posits something along the lines of 'the only ought one ought to have is to have less oughts'  (which is not the case, here Peter can't think past his own epistemological model of arguing and convincing others) which Nick responds to by pointing out that Pete seems to want libertarianism without the libertarianism (a soft categorical error).

A notable exchange that summarizes the debate:

Pete: "whenever you appeal to Darwinism as just a brute normative given from which political philosophy will start,  you're admitting you don't have an argument" 

Nick: "I think that's right because an argument implies agreement and we've given up on agreement...I reject the whole notion of the naturalistic fallacy. It's a occidental philosophical illusion"

When one watches the interchange one cannot help but laugh. Not because Peter isn't smart or interesting. He is (though I find him kind of irritating, I do admit to having his book in my Amazon cart) and Nick cordially thanks him for his contributions. No, one laughs because Peter speaks rapidly, appealing to rigorous philosophical concepts and arguments, speech and appeals that seem to be responding to - not unlike what D and G mention in a quote we cover later - Peter's own internal idea, his own fantasy of Land, more than Land himself. The tone and context seems to indicate that Peter thinks Land is going to buckle under Peter's intellectual weight; that Land, forced into compliance by the mechanisms of logic, will scurry to recant his obviously wrong statements or argue back. Rather, Land listens and basically retorts that he doesn't care. Peter appears to grow more and more frustrated, distraught, unhinged - 'how could my facts and logic have had no sway?' He cannot handle that he has been pontificating into a void. The rationalist undoes himself.

Considering we're on the Twitter plane of consistency and expression, let's take a moment to link this to three related memes;

ackchyually meme

Peter Wolfendale waiting for the right moment to pounce

Edinburgh Milk Meme

Wolfendale on the left, Land on the right.

Yes chad

Land's response  by the end of the whole thing (headphone-mic and all). 

Wolfendale thinks hes going to dunk on Land with his superior rational argumentation, Land, bored and channeling Deleuze's Nietzschean retort to his hecklers, retorts 'Yes, and?'

Disapearing Websites and Arguing into the Void
This gets us to 2. 

The story goes like this: one night I'm doing my usual Googling of Nick Land and amidst all the weird stuff I stumbled upon, the strangest was a Yahoo Answers style web page entitled 'How to Argue Nick Land.' The webpage, primitive and sparse in design, had a strange url, and had me worried I was going to receive a virus if I clicked in the wrong area. The content consisted of one poorly phrased question - 'How do you argue Nick Land, his ideas seem to not be open to discussion?' - posted by a user followed by a string of user comments (hence Yahoo answers) that covered the usual cool, warm, lukewarm, and hot takes on Nick Land.

 I remember finding the website very strange. Who would obtain a domain for a website centered on one question? Who made these user accounts for such a small, strange website? What would incentive someone to even use such a website with such a small network? etc. What is stranger is a month later when I went to revisit the website it had disappeared completely from the internet. Often one can at least find the url, click it, and get a 404 error. Nothing. I question if I did not simply hallucinate the whole thing in a sleep deprived, caffeine charged state.

Besides how consistent this strange event is with the digital nature of the CCRU, I bring this up to emphasize the effect Land has on others, and the difference between Landian (anti)philosophy and other philosophies - argument.

Nick says 'we've given up on argument.' This Landian discourse is of course reminiscent of my favorite and oft used quote of Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy:

“The best one can say about discussions is that they take things no farther, since the participants never talk about the same thing. Of what concern is it...that someone has such a view, and thinks this or that, if the problems at stake are not stated? And when they are stated, it is no longer a matter of discussing but rather one of creating concepts for the undiscussible problem posed. Communication always comes too early or too late, and when it comes to creating, conversation is always superfluous. Sometimes philosophy is turned into the idea of a perpetual discussion, as "communicative rationality," or as "universal democratic conversation." Nothing is less exact...it never takes place on the same plane...All these debaters and communications are inspired by ressentiment. They speak only of themselves...Debate is unbearable.." 

Everyone loves to argue with Nick, from Pete in the New Center seminar, to Reza on and off over the last decade on the internet. Traditional philosophy is stuck in the trap of debate, of arguing. But, as seen with Pete, what happens when the argument, no matter how well thought out, has no bearing, no meaning to the other? Rationality has no sway over the void. Rationality is obsolete. The argument loses all effect, all impact. This does not sit well with those who wish to argue, however, and we get the universal unconscious wish to know 'how to argue Nick Land,' a universal unconscious wish which, it seems, manifests itself as a digital ghost.

Conclusion
Nicholas Blincoe, who apparently had land as a PHD advisor, writes

"Every month staff would give readings from work-in-progress. Nick’s first talk was entitled: 'Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,' in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation. An older professor tried to get his head round this idea:
'How might we locate this description within human experience?' he asked. Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: 'I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.'

So, put the 'rat' back in rationality.