lakshmi

Do Not Mock the Debris

“Identikon has convinced its customers that their egos and bodies are the properties and agents of the brand. A synthetic identity may or may not have a use-value that coincides with its natural characteristics, but in any case ego and body can only take action within the stated framework for ‘owning identity’. That is, as the Identikon corporation develops and markets its products and identifies commercial territories and targets for its own profit.” — Lilian Lioski, The Identikon Files

Education was data, and bureaucracy hedonism. Information was knowledge, love was pornography, and philosophy software. The purpose of Art was to remove suffering by becoming an adjunct of pseudoscience. The blockhead office clerk was a religious icon, the snake oil salesman an intellectual genius.

All the characters in the fiction processed language to let imagination breathe within the confines of a novel strategy in which the arc of Nasrul was a trivial pursuit with no winners or losers. Nas had been invented by an unacknowledged legislator of the world for their own amusement.

Scholars whose chosen subject matter was the political ambience of the environment in which they lived, moved and had their being, were writing about politicians as if describing the structural preconditions which had produced such creatures would cause a revolution.

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Antic Institution

“Earth folks were impressed with suffering. I gained respect and admiration by praising the ordeals of craving and misery. In my disguise as a public intellectual I made myself a paragon of dread and the crowds flocked.” — Nancy B. Haigler, The Guest Book

Gathering to repair the deficiencies of their professional doctrine, the technologians adopted the robust perspectives of the Institution, the manifesto for which declared a humanistic programme for prosperity and happiness.

For the information architext, being without an informational construct meant being disconnected from the flow of life in the datastream. The concerns that surrounded the lack of an object generated unwanted empty space. The pro-consumer could only reach satisfaction by filling up space with one or another of the architext’s inventions. So, the architext designed a new mediator that would be more addictive than any drug.

Picking up the literary pencil once again, I was startled to find out just how much its outpourings failed to correlate with the literary pixel. I had access to a super-charged and strangely constructive ambiguity (which I stole from a journalist who’d been to Cheltenham Ladies’ College), although I was probably too attached to rhetoric and the monastic stench of myrrh and frankincense.

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Beacon & Vessel

“Allow me the pleasure of your destruction.” — Agapios Stojanov, Bonds

The world inhabited by Nasrul was one in which the rationales of quantification and categorisation were dominant throughout all forms of human action and interaction. His life was experienced by its readers both within and outside this novel, but less via his character than his status as transmitter of the novel’s primary superstitions, yet his absence as a coherent character and his mysterious presence as an anomalous cipher meant that the novel had no conceptual form. Rather than possessing a core integral message as a communicating vessel, whatever was communicated was unknown / anomalous.

One accurate impression that was conveyed was of N as the last man standing. The one who best portrayed N was YOU, but YOU could not realistically expect to fulfil all the requirements of the main character by recourse to facts.

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The Entertrainment Consultancy

“In utilising the audio-visual-spatial ability it is possible to affect a trance through which the cognitive restructuring takes place, leading to almost infinite modes of perception and expression. However, it is important to work with human nature rather than against it, and to practice patience, discipline and trial and error.”— Danica Klossner, New Frontiers in the Practice of Psychology

I was attempting to write the definitive article when some kinda energy association happened. Must’ve been my carnivorous soul recalibrating the diagnostic entrances.

The Entertrainment Consultancy had formed a general consensus that gave superficial material power to the survival of functions via the use value of the names of things but not their meanings. The tyranny of the obvious had made organic substance, being, thought and objects serve the separate illusions of free choice. People and things were representations of functions rather than vessels of imagination.

Time was distorted. In the reflection zone, artificial parallels were engendered between communications, making them appear to correlate with each other to the extent that they matched almost exactly and therefore cancelled each other out.

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Fiction is Stranger than Truth

“We live in Utopia amongst the shells of the un-dead, / Unseen behind the veils of empire’s walls. / The emperors kill for pleasure and spoils of war bring them bread, / But we have made the laws that bring their fall.” — Gordon Pearce-Lonsdale, Collected Poems, 1924-1977

Technocrats in smart rooms were asleep and dreaming in barcodes and serial numbers, arguing that the end of history and the end of society had brought more effective securitization and a more sustainable repackaging of the consumerist catastrophe with their branding schemes: FreeDomination, Leaphonine, Equipole, etc.

Those kinds of intellectual gymnastics recalled the triteness of that well-known 1960s Pop Art collage by Feigenbaum of the revisionist Joseph Stalin in 1942 as a Buddha with armalite rifles sprouting from his handlebar moustache.

Branding was what used to be done to slaves and livestock but now there were prized consumers to think about, more worthy jobs, enhanced revenue streams and much improved documentation. Also, convenient social applications that would eradicate needless barriers to communication. (more…)

How to Break Algorithms

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“Under the rule of the algorithm, all modes of cognition and communication are manipulated, categorised and quantified to promote the dominant ideology of financialization. There is currently no parallel or alternative system to undermine or replace it.” — Yakim Janović, Dystopia Ltd

Art was pregnant with artificial intelligence. But intelligence had always been artificial anyway, despite its humanity.

The seven sensors raised their ugly heads. They’d been trans-mutated by Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria, but the rationalist purveyors of ideology served education. (more…)

The Image is Dead

“As contradictions may be considered true and false at once, those closest to fiction usually tend to be the more precise, fiction being the prima mobile encompassing all that is factual in the naming of images and ideas.” — Mileva Martin, Clandestine Misdemeanors

To you the image was not dead. You saw literal forms in colours and structures as if their designs were of matchless purity. But the imagistic reproduction of a humanistic aesthetic profile which you fancied had social or political meaning was null and void.

The image was dead but to you the image was not dead.
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Datasexual Supernature

“To the poet, philosophy is pure emotionalism, poignancy for its own sake. To the poet, philosophy is cause to weep for no reason.” —Alberto Lopez, In Pursuit of Zosimos

Nasrul knew the game was rigged. He was from a brutal background and had seen the aestheticisation of mainstream corporate values for what they were. Information had become a parody of itself. What was it saying? What did it mean? N was not inclined to be moved by any bullshit information.

N discovered a representation reduced to a vague feeling. Its meaning would have no further implication except in a fictional sense. So, any statement made by someone or other without factuality would not imply anything more than the meaning ascribed to it. Factual interpretation was unnecessary as it was all too often anathema to reasonable action.

“I don’t think you’ve ever been equal to another human being.”

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