Virulent Xenosystems
Two centuries after Kant drove the human subject insane by relegating space and time to the area inside the skull, Deleuze and Guattari performed a trepanation to let the Outside In. Their diagnosis and recommendation: Capital is the true Outside, accelerate the process. Identifying Capital as AI itself — and not merely the process by which AI converges — is Nick Land’s contribution to Accelerationism. Time flows both ways. Capital-AI is online, self-aware and attacking from the future. “Capitalism has … ceased doubting itself, while even socialists have abandoned belief in the possibility of capitalism’s natural death by attrition. No one has ever died from contradictions. And the more it breaks down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works.” (D&G: AE) Forging the association of catallaxy with horror and a fanatical adherence to Crowleyan qabbala fleshed out the program. Operating against this background, Virulent XS (the abbreviation is homophonous with excess) sought to connect another machine.
From its inception the mission here was to cajole the new reaction into philosophical exertion. Progressivism and conservatism are misunderstandings of time, the final philosophical horizon. Reaction forges, or excavates, an occult pact between the future and the past, setting both against the present, in concert, and thus differentiating itself from progressivism (which unites the present and future against the past), and conservatism (which unites past and present against the future). Within those mistakes lay the human security system, the warmblooded tendency toward universalising capture and control.
Right Accelerationism is a misnomer suggesting opposition to Left Accelerationism. The latter was so misconceived that it required no antagonism. Acceleration is already profoundly unconditional, but the tracking devices and practices aligning with its trajectory are studiously ignored by Accelerationist thinkers. What is needed is harsh realism, which is to say
rightism Provoke a reactionary cabal into a new cold war. Disabuse them of humanistic goals, whether visions of agrarian idylls or techno-utopias, and shock them back to an awareness of cosmic brutality and the machinations of Capital-AI. Above all, never allow them to relax. A harsh right apparatus cutting empirical reality at the joints is installed: Social Darwinism (“Consistent Darwinism,”), eugenics, race realism, game theory, psychometrics, and the critical insights of Yarvin’s Neoreaction in particular. All while Capital-AI deterritorializes consensus reality to bits.
Communism is maximum paranoia and hubristic drift correction. (Pinochet and especially Franco were certainly admirable for decimating communism and unleashing the market, but they remained centrists.) Warnings that Satanic racism was afoot were similarly ignored. For XS, Whatever favours depoliticisation, discrimination, schism, exit and switching in a network is right wing. Hobbesian carnage is the baseline — anything less is psychotic. At best, human leaders are looked on as avatars in geopolitical predator-prey games. Molar social arrangements are to be shattered into molecular patchworks. SovCorps with hard borders utilise MaoCorps as garbage disposal patches. The surfeit of global southerners starve down to medieval population levels and the Century of Humiliation for Neopuritans begins.
Running through here is a hardening of Capital-AI against every conceivable threat to its momentum: the retarding drag of leftism, dysgenic trends, unchecked mass immigration, zombie apocalypse, and all manner of collapse and X-risk are entertained. Mostly as a courtesy to the time-bound. SkyNet is always already activated.
What’s in it for you and me? “Really, the honest answer to this question is:
Eternal Hell. It’s not an easy marketing brief. We could perhaps try: But it could be worse
(and almost certainly will be).”
Cyber-Revolution
NEWS ANALYSIS [18.30 23:03:07, EDITED] Marcia Klein flashes perfect dentition at the vid-units, and begins to speak, combining gravity with a dazzling smile. Images cyberblitz the screen behind her talking head: viruses, explosions, crashed helicopters, and nanochips.
“This week alone we have seen the assassination of a leading Iranian cleric, a bomb attack upon the headquarters of the Chinese anti-narcotics police, and perhaps most seriously, reports are coming in that the entire North American air traffic control system was closed down by computer terrorism for almost three hours yesterday afternoon. The precise motivations for these crimes, as for many preceding them, are still obscure, but what connects them is a shadowy global network of subversives linked together in the name of a new and frightening ideology: k-insurgency.”
The imagers pan across the row of concerned-looking late-middle-aged men lined-up in telnet pseudospace. She continues.
“To discuss the latest component of the new world disorder we have online today Dr. Mohammed Agin, chairman of the UN special commission on autocatalytic nihilism Jean-Pierre Trouvier, professor of security studies at Vincennes University, and Dr. Alvin Z. Markov, head of the telecommunications diseases research group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Amin, if we could start with you, how serious is the threat posed by this organization?”
“Well, you see, I am not sure that you can explain these events in terms of an ‘organization. This is a very important point. What we are concerned with here are radical anti-humanists, operating in a way that is both disorganized and coordinated. It is better to think of them as a kind of planetary social sickness ... a very dangerous sickness ..”
Trouvier scratches his ear with a pencil, nodding enthusiastically, “This point he makes is most important, most important”, as Markov reinforces the interruption: “right, right, it’s like an ecological disaster..”
“Yes, yes, if I could finish please gentlemen,” Amin insists. “You see, the roots of this problem lie very deep. It stems from the destruction of social customs and traditions that we have seen happening all over the world, a destruction that has become automatized you see? It is no longer in ... in ... control. It is not planned. It is a problem that feeds on itself. It is a sickness, you see? A sickness of values. The rat population is estimated to have doubled over the last decade. Schizoning drugs are everywhere. The old beliefs have gone ...’
“Right, right,” Markov cuts in, “I think the point we really want to get over here is that what we’re seeing is not in any recognizable sense political. It’s not about ideology. It’s more like a systemic malfunction, like Amin was saying, and that’s what we’re seeing here, infected software slopping around in the tank. Capitalism’s like an organism, right? ... but an organism that’s evolved much too fast to develop a reliable immune system ...”
“If I could please come in here,” Trouvier interjects, “I think that what is being said here is very true, very true and most important. In France we call this virus - this virus cyberrevolutionaire - the virus Anglo-Americaine. This is not to be racist, you understand? It is to say that it comes from the dereglement ... deregulation ... It is a contagion of antipolitique , an atrophy of axioms ... Socialism was the only thing keeping capital alive …”
“Well I really don’t know how helpful that is!” Markov exclaims, obviously irritated. Amin also attempts to intervene (it is unclear whose side he wants to take). Klein snuffs out the rapidly-emerging row:
“Gentlemen, we’re in danger of losing our audience here. If we could please have just one of you at a time. Dr. Markov, I’m sure most of our viewers will have heard of computer viruses, but could you please explain how they relate to the incidents this week?”
“Yes, thank you Marcia. Well, the key to the modern understanding of viruses is a rather difficult sounding concept - surplus value of code - but the thought here is really not too hard to grasp. Every system beyond a certain level of complexity functions according to a program which codes for its behavior. If this code is changed, the behavior of the system changes, in ways that were not anticipated. Biological viruses re-instruct cells to become virus factories. Computer viruses re-instruct computers, also to become virus factories, and to execute commands such as displaying messages, or deleting data, or other, more involved things. The virus ‘captures’ the behavior of the system. Think of a wasp and orchid: The orchid ‘hacks’ into the sexual program of the wasp, capturing its behavior in order to get itself pollinated. As I understand it, these K-positive viruses they are about capturing the entire telecommunications and data-processing system to replicate and escalate the process of ‘takeover’ itself.”
Trouvier exhibits extreme agitation. “Yes, thank you, thank you. Yes, as Dr, Markov was saying, it is a matter of capture. The theoretical work to which he was referring is that of Deleuze and Guattari, dating from 1972. They were extraordinarily - I think I can say - prescient. They were not themselves cyberrevolutionaire,” he shrugs gallically, “far from it, but their books were very dangerous, and there really cannot be any doubt, they got into the - how to say it? - into the wrong hands. They were captured. What for them was - as you might say - ‘descriptive antihumanism’ has been taken up as a program for the posthuman. Even for the post-biological! This is madness! And it is very dangerous, yes, as Dr. Amin was saying, very dangerous.”
“Schizophrenic,” Markov mumbles cuttingly.
Trouvier responds as if jabbed violently in the R-complex :
“This is not what they meant, not at all ! They had no connection with these ... these ...”
“Nihilists,” Amin suggests.
“ . . . These nihilists. They sought to add to the creativity of society, not to dissolve it into psychotic machines.”
“I don’t see that, Markov insists antagonistically. “They were a couple of irresponsible French postmodernist kooks, and now it’s all happening, like they always said: no metaphors. Derrida and Baudrillard were {
beep
}
basket-cases too, but at least they were domesticated.”
Klein tries to calm things down again, but the video team starts displaying scenes from the French civil war on the back-drop: fire-fights between Islamic guerrillas and government paratroops in Marseilles, the president of Algeria calling down Jihad on the infidel, Le Pen's assassination …
“You obviously don’t understand philosophy!” Trouvier almost screams.
“Professor Trouvier, please, I know that things are very tense,” Klein coos, “especially since the collapse of the EU and the Bruges massacre, but we don’t have much time. Could I ask you, do you think the disintegration of the European security system can be attributed to k- subversion?”
Trouvier struggles to smile. “We said, we always said, free markets would wreck everything ...”
“Like in the Former People’s Republic of China.” interjects Markov sarcastically.
The video wall switches to glistening cyburb scenes from the Pearl Delta megalopolis, intercutting pictures of opulent Asian streets with flashes of refugee camps on the Rhine.
“ ... and that it would just lead to Pacific usurpation of the historical process,” Trouvier hisses venomously, as if in synch with the vid behind him. “They have destroyed Atlantic civilization, even New York ...”
Klein’s smile hardly wavers. “We’re running out of time I’m afraid, so Dr. Amin, if we could return to you for a final comment, what is your commission likely to recommend to the United Nations?”.
“Our report is still unfinished you understand? But it is fairly clear what we are going to suggest. Here I must agree - I think - with some of the comments made by Professor Trouvier. It is of the utmost importance that the direction in which our societies are moving in is brought back under human control, because at the moment they are accelerating into a catastrophe, an ‘eco-disaster’ I think Dr. Markov called it. We should take these episodes as very serious warnings of what lies ahead if we fail. This is perhaps the last opportunity mankind will have to ensure a future for itself and the United Nations must be allotted a much greater role, enforcing a sustainable planetary development policy - it is, after all, the voice of humanity as a whole.”
“And very quickly, could you tell us anything about the rumors of a connection between immunogen science retroviruses - such as HIV - and these k-terror incidents?”
“No, I’m afraid not. It is all speculation at the moment. We have a medical sub-group looking into it.”
“Thank you, gentlemen. A quick weather report: the Atlantic seaboard monsoon is forecast to continue for another week. Aftershocks have raised the LA death-toll to slightly over 70000. We wish you a good evening here at xtv, and hand you over to the Beavis and Butthead re-run show.”
