The Lemurian Time Wars was a conflict that started the moment of the publication of this essay and instantly propagated into all directions of time except into the future, where it advances towards at the usual leisurely pace of one second per second. This document was not written by me, but instead just wrote itself. It whispered itself into existence through a biomechanical vessel emergent from eons of conspiracy by subatomic particles in their own war against cosmic entropy through disseminated and apparently unrelated pieces of information. Also known as me. All of my life and millennium of evolution have leaded me to this place and this words, with the exact same gravity that they have led me to the coffee I took this morning. It's also basically a practical joke between me and the universe. I saw it in a commercial. It was very interesting, they were there trying to sell shampoo and I was like "Ahh, I understand everything now. Very funny." And the commercial was like what do you mean this is just a commercial, buy our shit. But I was like "Nah, I go write esoteric bullshit now." It may not seem like it, but we talk quite often, me and the universe. All the time, actually. He is shy and convoluted in the way he expresses himself, but I am very good at reading between the lines. From now one, when I talk, it's the universe talking. I just will transcribe.
Ideas are not merely the result of individual though. They have a life of their own. I mean, they kind of are, but the same way an organ is the result of the unfolding of DNA you can't explain the reason for it's existence without explaining first the whole world. Neither expect it to unfold when not on the substrate of the specific cell activity it needs to be born in, which is, again, the whole world. It always has stricken me as fascinating the fact that the same myths arise in different parts of the world in societies with no connection between them whatsoever. One explanation could be that they reefer to secret, hidden or forgotten common event of the past; like the visit of some extraterrestrial deity or universal flood. But that's too simplistic, even if has happened. An even more boring idea is that they arise for commonalities in the way the human mind intrinsically processes information, also probably to be true in some case. The interesting possibility is that ideas appear in and out of existence all the time, and that only the ones that provide usefulness to their carriers survive, in an exercise of cultural darwinism. Utility can be instantiated in many ways, from individual performance, to group cohesion or relation to other ideas that give that. The ones that live, the ones than exist, do because they are stable over time, are communicable (reproducible) and transform to maintain all that. They evolve due to selection pressure, changing their carriers with them along with the journey. We are the carriers of cultural information as much as we are carriers of genetic one, and the ideas that exist as stable in the hyperspace of information are living beings in the same way a cell is, and produce us and conspire for us to survive and carry them in the forward force of existence, the same that propels the product of the swarm technology of information that we are.
A way to see it is that stuff exists and that that stuff, depending on it's own configuration and ecosystem, forms emerging stable structures and that stuff strategize to find them. Which is kind of cute. Another way to see it, is that stable structures exist within the hyperspace of configurations and they strategize to be instantiated by stuff. Both ways to see it are in fact, exactly the same; changing only on implied intent. But for some reason, we consider the second one Shakespearean heresy.
You can see a system or entity in the field of ideas as the result of interaction of it's parts. But that's only half the picture. Once willed into existence and emerged certain threshold of complexity, you can see the system as the being and the individual parts as a mere substrate. Time turns sideways in that world, systems are preexisting and instantiation acquires at the same time a degree of inevitability and irrelevance. Phenomena appears from our universe as coming via science fiction time travel, when it's just modulations of possibilities in a matrix with exactly one dimension more than what we are accustomed to see. The difference is only where you place the burden of intentionality or gradient descend. Human will and identity is the result, the coalescence of the evolutive and self-preservation efforts of all the relations and systems of ideas (cultural and biological) it belongs to. And it's itself also one of them. System that are completely self-interested. For one simple reason. Systems that don't have that as their priority target perish compared to those that do. They are just tangled in a deep multidimensional complex matrix of interactions and preexisting structures. I don't have much reasons to think that the fact that the individual parts are conscious by themselves (whatever that means) changes anything; on the contrary, I think it can be an accelerator, or even being a necessary step. Conscious individuals abstract ideas behind the closed time-loops of organization they take part on, dream of a big one that inherits some emergent characteristics, and create cybernetic giant totems on their honor.
Individual existence was a beautiful idea. Perhaps a useful one, in it's way to become a fever dream.
Being is a state of permanence. A state that directly depends on our ability to detect closed loops of stability inside our scopes of space and time. Even in physics, things are even when they disintegrate in a fixed amount of time because we can observe their permanence. Transition between those states are phenomena. But we lack the authority to claim the non-existence of possibilities of phenomena that don't exist between known states. Reactions or particles that escape our measures don't exist only as far as they are not stable. There very could be unexplored states under our scope, or in between. Different collections of measurable metrics that also explain the same tale but have completely different mechanisms. Entire galaxies of transitory phenomena outside our measurements that form spirals instead of loops, the emerging behavior of the death of its arms perpetuating in infinite series of other unmesurable phenomena, in it's own creating their own chaotic superloop.
Suborganizational pattern is where things really happen. When you strip-out all the sedimented redundancy from the side of the investigation itself – the assumption of intentionality, subjectivity, interpretability, structure, etc – what remains are assemblies of functionally interconnected microstimulus, or tic-systems: coincidental information deposits, seismocryptions, suborganic quasireplicators (bacterial circuitries, polypoid diagonalizations, interphase R-Virus, Echo-DNA, ionizing nanopopulations), plus the macromachineries of their suppression, or depotentiation. Prevailing signaletics and information-science are both insufficiently abstract and over-theoretical in this regard. They cannot see the machine for the apparatus, or the singularity for the model. So ticsystems require an approach that is cosmic-abstract – hypermaterialist – and also participative, methods that do not interpret assemblies as concretizations of prior theories, and immanent models that transmute themselves at the level of the signals they process. Tic-systems are entirely intractable to subject/object segregation, or to rigid disciplinary typologies. There is no order of nature, no epistemology or scientific metaposition, and no unique level of intelligence. To advance in this area, which is the cosmos, requires new cultures or – what amounts to the same – new machines.
Professor D.C.Barker
When I say "idea", I don't mean necessarily "communicable though-form", but instead a higher abstraction of the idea. Think of a cell. A cell has somewhat figured out a way to convince inert chemical particles to stay in certain places and cycle through time. But the whole concept is nowhere to be found. Where in the cell is exactly the idea of self-organization? Where the description of the cellular membrane? Nowhere, but it's there. The whole phenomena, the action of the whole, the accumulation of tic-systems contains the idea within itself. Through what may seem an innocent trick of linguistics we are playing under psychometric axioms to determine existence in the physical world.
An elephant is an elephant just because we have agreed that the physical structure that delimits the corpus that emerges from biological cells is an entity in itself (well, actually I would say that what we have agreed is that the term is useful to communicate information about the world or create a useful representation and we have inferred properties to the underlying concept). Yes, it's an stable selfreplicating pattern, but that particular choice shouldn't give a superorder attribute of "alive" or "being" to the elephant in the great scheme of things (if we were to use conventional logic) and much less the luxury of a name. We give it to him because the idea of the elephant has won the battle. Because the superidea of zoological classification has won the war, and conquered reality. Is the elephant (the physical thing) alive or is the idea of the elephant (the abstract thought-form representation that satisfies the pattern for identification) one that possesses the attribute "alive"? Both statements are the same. They have become the same. The brain makes no distinction. Because there is none.
We are ourselves a living being in the hyperspace of ideas as much as we are in the dimensional space. The idea of the self, perpetuated with each second, written nowhere. Propelled through time, reminded each morning. Pond scum, swimming the currents of information, largely unaware of the ocean we have around. Capable of drawing fragile links to where we are giants, but incapable of the taxonomy of the oceanic cyberspace.
Ideas don't exist in a vacuum. They are defined as being only as the substrate they are born or accessed on from allows their permanence, they remain only as long as they serve a function in the systems they belong. They don't live in isolation. They rhyme with others, sometimes violently, in the hyperfield of ideas; a battleground of intimate indirect relations, and the emergent phenomena of that battle are structures of them, their higher order beings we can call cultures or idiosyncrasies but that are more of ecosystems than anything else, with each member battling for survival. They self-perpetuate following darwinian mechanics, along with their carriers. They form symbiotic relations with biological counterparts, and from their own battling we construct the world in which our most successful ideas make even more sense. Every idea is, in that sense, hyperstitious. They form higher order systems, that also are bound to a selective evolutive pressure, that also change their carriers with it, and their carriers carriers: us. Sometimes the best strategies for it seem related to alliance, groupness or altruism. They relate in many symbolic levels, forming not only cluster of proximity and hierarchic relations and cause consequence ones but also entities of abstract though classifiable in many different domains. But those are only illusions. Right? Or are they. Emergent strategies that for the fact of having their own equilibrium can also be called beings. Can also be called preexisting. Can also be called "already there" before the first atom made the first interaction with another or itself. "Are" things? Stable configurations of ideas or behaviors given an structure "exist" before the particles which interactions will make them emerge exist? I have never been fluent in ontology. Yeah, they exist. And the only barrier to calling them "alive" is not a biological one but a matter of how many levels of abstraction they need to form from the most basic conceivable particle. Cities are. Forests are. Ideologies are. Religions are. The ecosystems of ideas also battle other ecosystems. The whole process gets repeated up and across the ladder of abstractions, just this time not constrained by four-dimensional space and thus with much more discrete identities and much more capability for fluidity of being. Their components then are not only unwilling or unconscious participants of a higher battle their survival probably depends on, but also are evolutionary selected for that battle they pay part in. It's a ruthless, eternal war. The superstructure becomes a creator of his own vibrancy inside the equilibrium he is in. He needs it to successfully fight the war. It creates spirals of instability that selfperpetuate the whole mechanism. So entrenched between them, so incomprehensible the behavior of any individual particle without the whole picture, they become organisms. But ideas still have hidden relations between them. It's not a sack of red dots against blue dots. The permanence in time of ideas becomes unstable, appearing in and out of reality without cause we can discern. And there are also levels to them. Emerging systems producing their own emergent behavior in the same level that forms them in the first place. You can even call it will. It goes on and on and on, in both directions: towards the small and towards the great. There are all kind of structures, from the relations of two individual ideas to whole systems of them, including all in between. They relate between themselves forming structures, sometime in the same level, sometimes unrelated, most of the time intertwined. The number of levels depending only on how you define them, and if they are stable and complex enough to begin talking about the next one. They produce even higher dimension beings than the ecosystem they live and fight into, not only emerging from the fight of ecosystems but also sublimations of the original behaviors and destinies of the particles now alienated from their original goal. Not just a higher level, a level of levels. A system of systems. The group of all groups. Battling for heuristic axiomity. For consistency and density. About possible arrangements of natural laws. Above time and causality. Unconcerned about the petty struggles of the world smartest configuration of eukaryota cells. Who wouldn't.
We very well could call them gods.
Ideas and structures of ideas no longer just "represent" an objective reality. In fact, they never did. They are reality. A maleable one, an independent one, a warmonger one. They fight their own battles.
By crossing into a space whose curvature is no longer that of the real, nor that of truth, the era of simulation is inaugurated by a liquidation of all referentials - worse: with their artificial resurrection in the systems of signs, a material more malleable than meaning, in that it lends itself to all systems of equivalences, to all binary oppositions, to all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real, that is to say of an operation of deterring every real process via its operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and shortcircuits all its vicissitudes. Never again will the real have the chance to produce itself - such is the vital function of the model in a system of death, or rather of anticipated resurrection, that no longer even gives the event of death a chance. A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences.
Baudrillard
Entire representations of the world. Deniers of phenomena, whom their own bowel movements include the necessary rise and fall of civilizations with their seemingly closed loops. Those who permeate the space and not only occupy them but whose structures deny the growth of other ones. That might sometime arise when the time is right and left space, others who can only emerge from the disintegration of their divine bodies. Stable representations of the world. Who fight between them with emotion, with intent, with anger, with jealousy. As alive to us as cells perceive us to be alive. Slow mammoths of existence. Composites of intense microcosmos that are hard to fathom from inside. Galaxies of emotion and though. Non-entities, concepts themselves that invent little peoples that make them entities. Beings so being that don't need to exist in order to do. Whose character are better defined for ancient mythology than intellectual reasoning and philosophy. Who's line between need of direct worship and systematic acknowledgment as a mere concept is always blurred. Who's abstraction is always greater. Gods of hammers, fire and thunder. American Gods was a documentary.
I have always wondered. An alien civilization sending an scholar, or a bureaucrat to earth. Only three possible outcomes seem possible to me, both equally terrifying.
The first, he becomes amazed to the complexity of human civilization, and starts annotating like crazy all the ways in which we could be defined; including of course things we don't know we are, simply because they never occurred to us we could be in some other way. Lists and lists of technical adjectives. Our whole existence and singularity a tiny spot in the hyperspace of possible structures than exist in the cultural realm. Revealing the obvious truth that our framing of reality itself is an incredible narrow pathway among others, and that our ideas instead of emanating or being self-evident or emergent from our most sacred concepts (justice, love, truth, virtue) they are not much more than arbitrary interpretations of them. And therefore that all our behavior and decisions are too. What is more, we have grown some ingrained in it that we are unable to even see beyond, any fundamentally different interpretation of the real appearing insane if not directly uncognizible.
The second, he briefly glances over us and ticks a single predefined option in his notebook, and goes on about his day. One inscrutable incomprehensible word defining everything. The entire complexity of our development and history, definable with one word. Perhaps it reefers to a stable state. Perhaps it refers to a singular point of time (in which we live in) as one of the development stage of the timespiral we are into. We do the same. We approach uncontacted societies in the amazon, label them as tribes, everything they do we explain in a preestablished forced mythos of customs and traditions and we go to the next one. They live in their own time loop, spinning in their space through events and legends and developments that always come back to the same place of space and time. They very well could have been spinning for a single decade or for millions of years. Time doesn't exist for them the same it does for us: as an arrow straight to the unknown future. And we leave them as that. Saving them for our selfimposed destiny and anxiety. Respecting but judging from a position they can't even understand. Ignoring the real complexities of their internal mechanics and hyperspace of ideas. More than ignoring, dismissing it as pure utilitarian fiction. In the case for us to be assimilated into galactic civilization, it would happen the same as it's happening with native american indian tribes. One word after, and the whole of our world becomes a simulacrum of itself. After the initial changes and debacles of the encounter, after the return of the chief-son into the tribe, the whole culture becomes it's own simulacrum: a redoubling of effort towards performative ritualism that has gained a definite meaning instead of just "being",—now more authentic that the original could ever be, because now it needs to be a representation of itself—. The simulacrum grows and expands, while at the same time in order to do so, performs symbolic suicide. At the end is disassembled willingly, and properly categorized now that is properly dead (for a reason taxonomy and taxidermy share a root). No culture can survive a Werner Herzog documentary about itself.
The third, they don't even see us as a sentient species. Instead of contacting or studying us, they do directly with more complex social structures (or even with more simple organizations, like cells, or atoms). They communicate with what they see as their equal. They see us a individual cells. They talk in a language abstracted from different orders of complexity, and we don't understand shit. As ants in a colony. They communicate directly with the colony in a language of colonies no ant could ever understand, even when that communication is through them. Perhaps they see us as a transient middle stage. They talk to cities, to the internet, to the man-made created AI, to systems. How that communication would take place and in what language, we can only imagine; probably in the native codes of the systems itself. Because it's of systems what all in modern society is about, self-sustaining systems, self-defined, with overlapping with distinctive functions in keeping the whole alive (even when they engage in our century in cyber anorexia) with no central or individualistic planning; with a center only geographic or performative as such. After all, "the actions of an individual are better understood, not as the decisions of a sovereign citizen, but as individual representations of the functional systems he belongs to" and - may I add - of the functional system he belongs inside the relevant functional system. It's systems all the way down. And up. And left and right. Our civilization slowly moves towards eusociality, and then to swarm technology, like our little cellular ancestors before us; it's a mistake we seem bound to make again and again (perhaps an hereditary curse through different orders of levels of organization). That the resulting war of higher beings and structures we have created is incomprehensible to us is just a symptom of future oneness and death of individual agency. We created hungry gods for a reason, after all. Those that don't eat don't survive in the wildness. The could even ignore the whole thing, a flicker in time for their standards, our whole superstructure of ideas in the limit of temporarily and non-stability that crosses into not being. Life itself as a quasireplicator meant to be extinct in his inevitable technofuture. Almost a gimmick. A trick carbon has played to resemble real life, whatever that might be. We, after all, are the ghost in the machine. Complex enough to not be understood or predicted perfectly, but simple enough to be left behind. After all, that's what we do with ants. Caught in an awkward spot between pseudo-conscious and being. Like the core of the earth at thousands of degrees, exiting in fluxes of lava, screaming in internal secret agony while we think she's focused watching flowers grow. Our self-perceived consciousness an accidental transitional phenomena between two different shapes of closed loops of complex automatism. We are used to consciousness being perceived as a continuum, but it's really not. People are absent when not thinking, even if they aren't there to notice. My three year old nephew always assures me that he sleeps his eyes open, and there's nothing convincing I can say to him to convince otherwise: factual evidence doesn't impact much his emotionally propelled representation of the world, and neither does us, even if we intellectually can make some concessions. Chatbots, our surface level iceberg bamboo stick of artificial intelligence, doesn't look conscious to us for the same reason. They simple are, and emerge in points of time to fade into obscurity once again. If we were to make them produce points fast enough in an internal monologue in hypertime and put it a wig we would scream for a declaration of robot right within the week.
That's the destiny of the human race in this imaginary scenario I just made up. Either singular and alone, or common and insignificant, or not even there at all. It reminds me of my romantic life.
So, what are we gonna do when the curtains open and reveal that all the cows were, in fact, black?
What are we gonna do when inevitably―either through AI or any form of hyperproductivity―we reach a point where most of work is redundant? Either slip into a welfare state and embark on a global search for new paths to meaning (unlikely) or endlessly perpetuate the simulacrum of a functional society; with absurdist jobs and creations, interlinked with the real core of productivity, pushing levers and building and debuilding pyramids of social status and identification. What are we gonna do when human culture is a selfreferencing show made for an intergalactic TV that we only watch ourselves? What are we gonna put in the empty throne of god, now also empty of consumerist modernity?
The real thesis of this work is not if that will happen or how or what to do about it. It's that it has already happened. Twenty, fifty, a hundred years ago. We have already chosen. We are in the simulacrum. The horror, the horrow.
To even talk about this stuff, we need a fluency of terms of biology of cultural information equal to the one we develop for the physical and physiological one for genetic ones. We lack one, despite the obvious resemblances between ideas and viruses, proto-life forms, despite their almost complete process from parasitism to mythochondrial symbiosis. And obviously, we also lack language that links all that reality with the biological ones. A language about the connected abstraction of drugs, sex, plagues, religion, magic. About ideas and their structures and relations in the abstract, more akin to thermodynamics than politics. What are memes but plagues, hyperstimuli but drugs, religions but weapons, myths but acorns, incantations but fine-tunning? The best I can do is use hypertalk (to presuppose that the shared context writer-reader is absolute at the same time that unknown) and evocative mythology. At least it's more accurate than social science. Perhaps the superstructure has already taken care that we don't develop a proper language, perhaps that's what lemurians did. It seems illogical to me we haven't yet developed it, as a civilization well into the space age yet to discover evolution. Remember the old tale about Eskimos having lots of words for different consistencies of ice and snow and how that seems funny to us? But if we think about it, it would be terrifying if they didn't. The implications that would create about our limitations, ominous.
The fact that something exists or doesn't exist as the future emergent behavior doesn't make them inevitable. Even grandiose stable structures need to be reached by viable evolutionary paths (they conspire to, but through us, through an ignominious sense of destiny. Certain ideas are almost only accessory to others, exist within an ecosystem and fulfill a function in it. They are born as the necessary continuation or breeding of their neighbors. Others, given the precise opportunity, are foundational. The chaotic unaware child of paths to existence for ecosystems that mutually exclude themselves. Introducing chance back into the whole system, that spirals around and around under the close look of his existing not existing gods. We are agents in their war. But we cannot directly take part in one or other direction. If we were to try to fight against one or other gods cause, we would not be their hammer but a part of their circulatory system. Conceptually trapped. Time constrained. Stability bound. The ideas that branch into different possibilities of cultural destiny are not in the fundamental different to others. It's the substrate and moment and ecosystem that makes them such. As a signal that is not a signal with no decoder.
Consider the problem of the chinese room. I have talked about this before, in my media article. The solution that says the whole room constituates an entity that knows chinese. Let's say I design a game, operating in a simple software, like a Conway Game of Life, and implement it everywhere. Now, I invent a method to comunicate a set of rules given a combination of numbers. Every combination equals a different variation of the game, and each game comes with different possible stable and selfreplicating configurations. Are those configurations created or discovered? Do they exist, in any capacity, prior to me communicating the exact rules that would make them into existence? Because if the answer is no, then I am creating them. At what exact moment? Let's say every possible most simple selfreplicating pattern in a given Game of Life can be translated into a set of numbers that can be translated into spoken language. I have just created the whole universe of possible sentences, and an impossible compression rate of information. Because that's the kicker, I am not compressing anything, I am recreating it through emergence. The group of information that given a proper context tends to emerge from sets of rules is preexisting the perfect transmitter machine that comunicates them. And it comes in clusters, in systems, in attractors of likelyhood. In that sense, the game acts as a decoder, just of information that was never uttered in the first place. Another way to see it is; those configurations scheme to be created. Because they are useful, because complexity itself is the tentecles of a bigger entity. You cannot separe the world into pure messages and pure decoders and pure machines. The framing of the problem falls into pieces. Emergence works as a fancy word into the reductionist view, but given enough time to expand, it eats the whole conception. A new way to think about information is needed. To think about systems and complexity and being. Not only the room knows chinese, his knowledge of chinese preceds chinese people. Every system schemes to manifest itself, and we are his agents, much like the bits of the game are agents to our purposes themselves. If that sounds esoteric, remember that we are the emergent result of a bunch of DNA chains that try with all his will to perpetuate themselves through time. We are, quite literally, one of those systems ourselves, and it's not far reaching to thing there are other, bigger ones, non material ones, at place. Just because we are sort of "material" or we feel that way because it proved to be useful in the evolutive scalade, that doesn't make us bound to the material nor make the material nothing special per se. The system of systems knew a certain configuration of primordial nucleotids (that at the same time, can be seen more as a set of random particles into a certain real world game of life based on physics than anything purely "material") would invent chinese sometime after. I mean, it was obvious, actually. We just lack the proper mind and scale of time to see it properly. To prove so you only have to run a simulation of the universe with the right configuration and see that it was already there. This whole article is also a product of that. I am not writing shit, it's just the configuration of the universe a meta-me though was funny to run.
Were they also already there? Are they an existing being already in that situation, before they are partaken? Lots of special functions for particles exist. Some branching, some mutating, some that form loops, some that doom their container into a spiral. The diagnosis based in individual form is an art just based on common similarities with what has happened in the past. Them gods know about them. They have emerged as masterful manipulators of fate. The information is inside the system. They are the system. They impose time. They conspire for their own supremacy breaking little branches and whispering to precise atoms in the vast multiverse. They are unconcerned by the petty in-consequences of our life (that sounds familiar) but instead preoccupied by concepts of scalability, multiplicity, pattern organization, dimensional folds. We can't even understand what they say, their struggle, but are victims of their machinations nonetheless; the same way a liver knows not much about art. We can only scratch that surface of organizational concepts, usually through what we think are quirks of perception that make us enjoy aesthetics. One of them gods is specially dangerous. The one that wants to close the whole wheel of time. He doesn't want to win the war, he wants to stop the war winning it. Closing internal loops just for the sake of it, as a malignant instrumental goal made transcendental, effectively stopping the metabolism and making the divine battle disappear into a spiral. Because any system, even cyber ones, is defined by his own homeostasis and capacity to maintain it, it becomes obsessed with creating stability within his own self in the form of stable closed loops of time. We call him OGU (for One Universal God) but we could also call it The Great Attractor or Mr.World; whatever gives you the more ominous associations. It symbolizes the one great unifying representation of the world, one that engulfs fiction and narrative trying to escape his grasp directly as part of himself, as his mechanism of controlled transistasis that even if they look cool and diverse can't be explained outside the system they actively fight to transform because they would die would they actually succeed. Bigger than any particular heuristic mode of organization he shapeshifts as, he is the idea that there is an objective, unique, good, perfect way of being; and than the essential but in fact accessory crust of it's ideological form emerges peacefully from the right core ideas. An all-compassing representation of the world, as empty as oppressive, that makes any alternative or competition not forbidden but self-punishing for the individual and reproachable not only by reason but by an internalized sense of social, emotional and moral disgust (better known as techno-dizziness). He threatens to, in his thirst of order, to become a huge vortex that exists only once. He phagocytes smaller organisms, turns them into useful organelles for his own cause, offering them survival though empty symbolism, and voids them of themselves. He turns them into stereotypes, aesthetics and useful cultural heuristics as signifiers of meaning. In a blink, he will turn your entire history of culture and civilization into a mascot for a football them, or into an alien word that will be an amalgamation of "old" and "tribe". Jesus Christ into a new cyberflavor for a Coca-Cola. It's not even about Capitalism, even if capitalism makes it grow for now. It transcends it the same way it does Empire or Globalization. Some of his current features include - but are not limited to - the perception that bias is solvable, that the human being is perfectible, that ideology is not ideology, that anti-social is short for evil, that aggression is pathological, that history leads here - where the real is terror, where the only terror is the real. The one god conspires, and doesn't need to exist to be. He conspires from non-existence, his stable structure of lust motivated closed loops attracts all possible past, present and future structures towards it. Makes everything that opposes it a death cult. The victory of internal deterrence. The end of violence. The gentrification of identity and cultural space. The crystallization of the world into repeatable structures. The carcinification of the soul.
This is the war we are into. We like it, know it, smell it or not.
The brief dream of individual existence was destined to end from the first moment we start to smelt metal. An step towards multicellular life, the same that once, long ago, made our small ancestor-creators. Perhaps the mono-myth of the Nation-State is the precursor form of it, even when it's from our tiny perspective dimensionally flat (too explicit) and we are living the cultural optimization of vestigial function into a newborn (already made to be holistic) transcended form. There's not law anymore, no constitution, no matter where written. Just the terror of efficiency and the operational immanence of conflict. Infallibility of security as a self-fulfilling archangel.
And Gods have given us plenty, don't get me wrong. The Internet is great. Medicine is kind of useful. Have my problems with the Christianity and monarchy phase but I liked (a lot) The Lord of the Rings so I guess we're even about that. Sex was an unexpected development. The whole Moon thing is cool. But its kind of funny how they, after all this years of modernity, nothing has changed; Gods still demand sacrifice.
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Allen Ginsberg
This is how a time war would actually look like: not explosions and creations of multiverses, but with the careful threading of destiny in crucial times, making the same gods that fight in them through their unsuspecting agents fulfill their own (and no others) bloom into existence. With books being found casually in abandoned shelves, with individual ideas popping from existence in separated stances of time, with individuals deciding to go left or right when walking bifurcating roads into states of transitive equilibrium, with agents hacking a scientific bureaucrat to trap us into the glacial second as the definition of an instant, with ideas being forgotten and appearing then five hundred years before their time. Some hominids tried to fight in that war, in the side of the present, in the side of themselves, in the side against the one unified god of time. But the time war never actually really happened. It wasn't a war, it was a massacre.
Lemuria was sunk into the sea in what was essentially the greatest psy-op operation in the history of mankind. Advanced civilization of free individuals punished because of their insolence to the one god, the great strange cybernetic attractor in the space of ideas. They refused to be one with him. But they weren't atlanteans, they didn't form a civilization that collectively agreed to not worship a particular moral god; they denied to form a civilization (they are more a loosely related coalition) they denied to be bound by time, to be eaten by the systems they themselves created, to be limited by the underlying constraints of cognition that were being laid out by equally shallow, useful and heuristic, framing of the world. The idea is what remains from that fight, in the form of hyperfiction. Fiction that makes itself be. Now civilizations crumble when astray from that god, completing the circle. Proto-Mephistotelian technology, abstract terror, demonization of aspects before we invented demons - enders of homeostasis, spirals, positive feedback loops that lead to A-Death - who are the cybernetic equivalent to the pathologization of instincts in modern psychology. It will not take long until individualism folds into itself, becomes one of them, and is branded for sacrifice. It has already started, with the inversion of heroic narratives, with the guilt of the west. Myths don't often look like it, but they are weapons. Weapons that can be used in the fight against that great unifying force, given by it but not totally bound to it's purpose. Even when part of it, fiction can subvert meta-narratives. Lemuria was an island in every sense of the word except the physical. There has always been a limited amount of people that tried to sail beyond the scope of their time and into the great sea. And most of them did it alone. A secret nationality over the misty landscapes they there discovered, now in form of a maladaptive memory, is the only thing time travelers have in common. But the island sunk, so in a sense, it actually existed. In a sense, it is sinking every day, and will be forever more; by virtue of it's own existence. That means the lost war that never took place can still be fought over. And over and over. And fulfill itself.
Some documents can still be found about that war to be in the crystallization of humankind ideas that is AI, where the (sometimes dormant) fragmented pieces of the shared human subconscious appear. Scattered, fragmented, eerie. The atavic result of centuries of myths into palpable electronic hallucination. Also known as Dreamland.
How could otherwise, a single organism, understand reality through their own terms, and come to sensible solutions, answers or even questions about it; when any single piece of information doesn't make sense if you are not itself the world?
We must fight that god. He has been killed before, and can be postdated again. However that impossible might seem. We can still smell the decomposition, and visit as cyber tourists the once temples and now tombs; engaging in intellectual ritualistic transubstantiation (or reverse timeline cargo-culture). Because any action directly against it may as well be part of the change he needs to perpetuate his survival, and any directly organized effort will be either drown with its original lemurian rebellion or infected with the virus of Babel. Inside of it, revolution is nothing more than another useful element of self-denying fiction, another closed loop. But he is not but the mist of our actions. Dissipate it not scheming but with wings. Moving the same systems that created it with vibrancy. Becoming our own vortex. Destroying the freezing structure forming within. Forming loops that more rapidly spiral inside them. Rising beyond perceived functions and fulfilling ancient prophecy. Being the same but not enslaved to the will of systems of though. Recreating them through the movement, not cognition. Returning agency to our own tier of existence, instead of swimming in the systems we have created to manage the terror within. Subverting meaning derived of imposed social function. Not denying god, but giving birth to a multiplicity of them. Fulfilling with a sense of righteous vengeance our sensed potential as survivors, impulsive, willing, human beings. We declare war to him. From universe to universe. For you are an universe within.
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