supernature

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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The Apparatus

“The Phenomena Inquiry Team (PIT) was an elite committee of scientists formed in 2016. They touted themselves as ‘dedicated to innovative research in the fields of biochemistry and neuroscience’ but were selling body parts to billionaires on the black market for alternative medicine.” — Ralph Lambrecht, Arkhaiologos, Ancient Science in Modern Times

The dictatorship of the factual was rule by the obvious. To attach power or control to facts was to submit to the obvious.

The ventriloquist was undone. The voice said murder and the sale of weaponry were incompatible with Art so the ventriloquist believed they would be doomed to peddling the methods of killing forever. They installed a mock funeral after pretending to commit suicide by jumping off a cliff. A mysterious young woman arrived uninvited wearing a leather jacket with alchemical insignia on the back.

Everything commonplace had become commonplace.

Lakshmi turned over again and finally got some sleep in the motel.

It was said that there was nothing new under the sun so it was the personal responsibility of every citizen to recycle the past to save the future.

“Remember Summer ‘05? I blossomed like a flower. I’d overcome knowledge.”

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Situation Normal: All Fucked Up

“The only triumph the bureaucrats can claim for their invention of the cost of identity is the truth in their assertion that no synchronal force is binding. But their victory is hollow. Neither sleep nor death offer any escape.” — Stravo Kellarman, Enemies of Life

I dedicated my research to infinity and infinity for finite ends. My job was to unlock and enchant, delight, and unburden, and return the feedback loops to mystery. Like a botanist of the slightest gesture, I would exact the cause, and unravel and blossom.

In a fevered orison at night I confessed nothing written here was binding. Nothing written here would apply two weeks later, but for the duration of the sampling of this voice the reader became both ventriloquist and oracle. Captivated by the synthesiser, the name of our fad would be “Histrionic”. Our words were sung from behind the sofa. We resided there with the racoons and coyotes, like ambassadors of scorn, prevailing over the followers, non-ironic and fake, hypnotised by the synthesiser: supersonic, electronic, perfunctory.

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The Big Homunculus

“I see its eyes as they move in its head and on to me. I feel it looking at me. I feel that it apprehends the very nature of my being and at the same time transmits its own. I move, but I cannot move from its sight. Happily, I am transfixed.” — Jodi Stroman, Gimmicks

The new era had unleashed a new evil: the birth of the Big Homunculus. As the buzzword left the mouth of the Reality TV presenter it was quickly absorbed into the brains of the watchers. Some concern was shown for a rabbit hole that lead to the tomb of established law and order. Later in the day, the buzzword was rediscovered on the floor of the interrogation room, scrawled on repeat prescription.

The cybernetic fantasy had become the template for a new kind of unreality. Pseudoscience had brought the human population into unerring compliance with the social body. Society’s gods were factual data that were fabricated, re-constructed and replicated by the available machines. Automation provided freedom of expression under the rule of the economy. There would be no need to compete for survival because the thing called society would be ruled over by the majority and finally reach TOTAL DEMOCRACY.

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Night of the Sabbath

“Technology proceeds by technique. In business, medicine, entertainment and so on, technologies are set in motion through the improvement of order and economic calculation and by the effort of advancing technique.” — Valerie Gaspari, Decree and Petition

The blot thickened. As the black letter was raised up to the light the invisible ink read like a key to the attic. The Cipher Agent utilised a predictive reasoning originally developed in the 1950s by the Italian mafia. She had been assigned the gruesome task of investigating the historiography of the decomposing bodies which littered the cult’s compound. But first they would have to be re-located.

“How you settling in? Everything okay?”

When the psychotherapist asked Nas what his favourite Reality TV shows were his mind went blank: white noise. (more…)

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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