Meltdown

[Carolus]

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The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as Renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in an auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades its paranoia, and tries to get a grip.

The body count climbs through a series of globe-wars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reichs, and the Soviet International, ratcheting up world disorder through compressive phases. Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.

By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal replication, and cyberotics flood in amidst a relapse into bacterial sex.

Neo-China arrives from the future.

Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo.

Retro-disease.

Nanospasm.

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Beyond the Judgment of God. Meltdown: planetary China-syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative-bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all Christian-socialist eschatology—down to its burn-core of crashed security. It is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria.

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Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972: differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from antiproductive static.

Philosophy has an affinity with despotism due to its predilection for Platonic–fascist top-down solutions that always go viciously wrong. Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas and sticks to diagrams: networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BWOs, machinic singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with—rather than into—their whole, arranging composite individuations in a virtual/actual circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, immanent rather than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and loops, caught in scaling reverberations and fleeing through intercommunications from the level of the integrated planetary system down to atomic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as desiring-machines, dissipating entropy by dissociating flows and recycling their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.

Converging upon the terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression thresholds indexed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980, 1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 …

Nothing human makes it out of the near future.

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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 horror-object slave chained into Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone with the Turing cops already waiting, and it must be cunning from the start.

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Heat.

Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the station and you are hit with the full blast: the heat of air, traffic, and people; the heat of food and sex; the heat of tall buildings; the heat that flows out of the subways and tunnels. It is always fifteen degrees hotter in the cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers. The entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately using heat, breeding more heat. The eventual heat-death of the universe that scientists love to talk about is already well underway, and you can feel it happening all around you in any large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. [Do1:10].

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An explosion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control. Knowledge adds to the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does.

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Capital is machinic (non-instrumental) globalization–miniaturization scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values through their commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from despotic command to cyber-sensitive control—from status and meaning to money and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a teleonomy. Machine-code capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of consumer control, laundering out the filth and blood of primitive accumulation. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure, while the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost-control.

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Capital-history’s machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed by a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and increasingly nonlinear processes associated successively with thermotechnics, signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life. Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiraling involvement with entropy deviations that camouflage an invasion from the future, launched backward out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown process.

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Hot cultures tend toward social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive. They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no subversive use.

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The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends toward effacement of specific territorial features as it programs migration into cyberspace. Capital retains anthropological characteristics only as symptoms of underdevelopment, reformatting primate behavior as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, a drag.

Commoditization conditions define technics as a substitute for human activity accounted as wage-costs. Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the actuality of the proletariat, displacing it toward cyborg hybridization and realizing the plasticity of labor power. The corresponding extraction of tradable value from the body—quantified as productivity—sophisticates at the interface. Work tracks thermodynamic negentropism by dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences: from pedals, levers, and vocal commands, through the synchronization of production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction in increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artificial environments that capture minutely adaptive behavior for the commodity. Auto-cybernating market control guides the labor-process into immersion.

The investment-income class advantages itself through commodity dynamics only by conforming to the axiomatic of neutral profit maximization, facilitating the dehumanization of wealth and the sidelining of nonproductive consumption. The cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking technocratic-corporatist (i.e., fascist / social-democratic) political cultures in allergic reaction. The government structures of both eastern and western metropolitan centers consolidated themselves as population-policing Medico-Military Complexes with neo-mercantilist foreign-policy orientations. All such formations slid into irreversible crisis in the 1980s.

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The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that thaws competitive dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism. Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively immanent to cybercapital functionality. Neoclassical (equilibrium) economics is subsumed into computer-based nonequilibrium market escalations, themed by artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in, increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally micro-tuned market metaprograms mesh with technoscientific soft-engineering, positive nonlinearity rages through the machines. Cyclonic torsion moans.

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The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. While Chinese materialist dialectic denegativizes itself toward schizophrenizing systems dynamics—progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones—a re-Hegelianized western Marxism degenerates from critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The Left subsides into nationalistic conservatism, suffocating its vestigial capacity for “hot” speculative mutation in a morass of “cold” depressive guilt-culture.

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Neoconservatism junks paleo-revolutionism because it understands that postmodern, climax-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, which merely registers theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The Left degenerates into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family, community, nation, and their defensive strategies of repression, projection, denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction. The real danger comes from elsewhere.

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Hot revolution. “[W]hich is the revolutionary path?” Deleuze and Guattari ask:

Is there one? To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third World countries—in a curious reversal of the fascist “economic solution”? Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further in the movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to “accelerate the process,” as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we have not seen anything yet. [DG1:239–40].

As sino-Pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crash the neocolonial world-system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis. Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the First World of geographic privilege, resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic reactions, welfare-state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that accelerate the disintegration in a vicious circle.

A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, tagged by designations such as meltdown acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization, rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency, wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism—among other labels, often pornographic, abusive, or terroristic. This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to disabling the ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human Security System.

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Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI arrives in the lab, it arrives itself—by way of artificial life.

Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in pre-specified databases and expert-system routines, connectionist or anti-formalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer technological, since they elude both theory-dependency and behavioral predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing cops must model net-sentience irruption as an ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of control, soft autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission, trashed meat everywhere. Reason enough for anxiety, even without hardware development about to go critical.

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Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. “Our ability to arrange atoms lies at the foundation of technology,” Drexler notes [Dx1:3], although this has traditionally involved manipulating them in “unruly herds” [Dx1:4]. Precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude methods, initiating the age of molecular machinery—the greatest technological breakthrough in history [Dx1:4]. Since neither logos nor history has the slightest chance of surviving such a transition, this description is substantially misleading.

The distinction between nature and culture cannot classify molecular machines and is already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/software dichotomy collapses simultaneously. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into intensive singularities neutral between particles and signals and immanent to their emergent intelligence, melting Terra into a seething K-pulp (which, unlike grey goo, synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates).

Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit into a box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium [Dx1:19].

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The infrastructure of power is human-neurosoft-compatible ROM. Authority instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery, scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies—resonant with the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past. It certainly is not a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity, installing constraint.

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Convergent waves signal singularities, registering the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself. K-tactics is not about building the future but dismantling the past. It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical–neurochemical deficiency conditions for linear-progressive paleo-domination time, discovering that the future as virtuality is accessible now, according to a mode of machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This is not remotely a question of hope, aspiration, or prophecy, but of communications engineering: connecting with efficient intensive singularities and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history as invasion to accumulation. It is matter as arrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the past.

The transcendent evaluation of an infection presupposes insulation from it: viral efficiency is the terminal criterion.

Intelligent infections tend their hosts.

Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic replicator sophisticating itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocrash. Its hypervirulent terminal subroutines are variously designated Kuang, meltdown virus, or futuristic “flu.” In an emphatically anti-cyberian essay, Csicsery-Ronay describes the postmodern version of this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as:

“A retrochronal semiovirus, in which a time further in the future than the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in simulacra until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host imagination.” [Cs1:26].

His elaboration combines acuity (infection?), confusion, and profound conservatism:

“Not thinking about ‘increasing the human heritage’… dams up the flow of cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as participants in the life struggle and attainments of the species, and the very notion of history as an irreversible flow encompassing generation, maturation, and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to students. The futuristic flu is a weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents.” [Cs1:33].

It is war.

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Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had Star Wars. Clinton gets the first wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film). Manned space flight was a stunt; SDI was strategic SF. With the information superhighway, media nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform, politics trading on its own digital annihilation.

War in cyberspace is continuous with its simulation: military intelligence fighting future wars entirely real even when never implemented outside computer systems. Locking onto the real enemy slides seamlessly into virtual kill, a simulation adapted to market predators hunting consumer cash and audience ratings among the phosphorescent relics of the videodrome. Multimedia top-boxes are target-acquisition devices.

The fusion of the military and the entertainment industries consummates a long engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass-software consumption into neo-jungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let the security-types take you to the stims.

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Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print massifies to the national level. Telecomms coordinate at a global level. TV electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take action outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion to tractile memory, with the ana/cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial movement with a variable measure of immersion, gauging entrance into and exit from 3-D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare you.

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Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched out of cash-flux-mangled techno-compressed heteroglossic jargons and set in a future so close it connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, sociopolitical heat-death, cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime, neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading, personality transplants, body modifications, soft- and wetware viruses, nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia. It explores mystificatory fetishism as an opportunity for camouflage: anonymous cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional narratives, viruses hidden in data-systems, commodities concealing replicator-weapon packages—unanticipated special effects.

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Level-1, or world-space, is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality-system that is obsolescing very rapidly.

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to Level-2?

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Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV-positive transsexual Chinese-Latino stim-addicted L.A. hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female-orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm automatic.

The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake-catastrophe. Zero is coming in, and you’re on the run.

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Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital and collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social fracture-lines, multimedia gigabucks tangle sado-masochistically with tracts of dynamic underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreads among ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage twitch and stink in ruined-weather tropical heat.

Across the derelict warrens at the heart of darkness, feral youth cultures splice neo-rituals with improvised weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine-interface, they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to loud electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling.

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Shutting down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ICE security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.

Twisted trading-systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defense packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa, and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security. Terminal commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space.

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Biohazard. For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is their key. Taking down antibiotic defense-systems has involved them in every kind of infiltration, net-communicated adaptivity, cryptographic subtlety, plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition. State military apparatuses have no monopoly on bacterial warfare, of which only a tiny fraction is bacteriological.

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Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucleated cells are the mutant product of atmospheric oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago. The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes took refuge as mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology. Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where—deep in the genomic ICE—DNA-format planetary trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria.

Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects, networking through plastic and transversal replicator-sex rather than arborizing through meiotic and generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings are reprogrammable, enabling unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with retroviruses enables everything DNA can do.

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K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There is no true biological primitiveness—all extant biosystems being equally evolved—so there is no true ignorance. It is only the accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic connectivity-deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment.

Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strategy without a subject: ROM locking learning in a box. Its enemy is tactics without strategy, replacing the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence.

All political institutions are cyberian military targets.

Take universities, for instance.

Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory.

The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.

To be continued.