Catastrophe is the past coming apart. Anastrophe is the future
coming together. Seen from within history, divergence is
reaching critical proportions. From the matrix, crisis is
convergence misinterpreted by mankindThe media are
choked with stories about global warming and ozone
depletion, HIV and AIDS, plagues of drugs and software
viruses, nuclear proliferation, the planetary disintegration of
economic management, breakdown of the family, waves of
migrants and refugees, subsidence of the nation state into its
terminal dementia, societies grated open by the underclass,
urban cores in flames, suburbia under threat, fission,
schizophrenia, loss of control.
No wonder the earth is said to be hurtling into catastrophe.
Climate change, ecological and immunity collapse, ideological
upheaval, war and earthquake: California is waiting for The
Big One. This is an age of crackups and melt-downs.
Rotted by digital contagions, modernity is falling to bits. Lenin,
Mussolini, and Roosevelt concluded modern humanism by
exhausting the possibilities of economic pianning. Runaway
capitalism has broken through all the social control
mechanisms, accessing inconceivable alienations. Capital
clones itself with increasing disregard for heredity, becoming
abstract positive feedback, organizing itself. Turbular finance
drifts across the global network.
Wiener is one of the great modernists, defining cybernetics as
the science of communication and control; a tool for human
dominion over nature and history, a defence against the
cyberpathology of markets. His propaganda against positive
feedback - quantizing it as amplification within an invariable
metric - has been highly influential, establishing a cybernetics
of stability fortified against the future. There is no space in
such a theory for anything truly cyberpositive, subtle or
intelligent beyond the objectivity required for human
comprehension. Nevertheless, beyond the event horizon of
human science, even the investigation of self-stabilizing or
cybernegative objects is inevitably enveloped by exploratory
or cyberpositive processes.
The modern Human Security System might even have
appeared with Wiener's subliminal insight that everything
cyberpositive is an enemy of mankind. Evolving out of work
on weaponry guidance systems, his was an attempt to
enslave cybernetics to a general defence technology against
alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept under control,
under a control that was not itself cybernetic. It is as if his
thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away from
another, deeper, runaway process: from a technics losing
control and a communication with the outside of man.
Security cybernetics has supplanted the critique of alienation,
the great motif of humanist economics, which had long
become an increasingly futile search for the source of
corporate control. Alienation used to diagnose the condition of
a population becoming foreign to itself, offering a prognosis
that still promised recovery. All that is over. We are all
foreigners now, no longer alienated but alien, merely duped
into crumbling allegiance with entropic traditions.
To what could we wish to return? Heidegger completed the
degeneration of authenticity into xenocidal neurosis. Being
died in the fuhrer-bunker, and purity belongs entirely to the
cops. The capitalist metropolis is mutating beyond all
nostalgia. If the schizoid children of modernity are alienated, it
is not as survivors from a pastoral past, but as explorers of an
impending post- h u man ity.
In the cities, the streets began to hum and the warehouses
were repopulated by cyborgs blissed-out on the future. The
urban zones synthesized by alienation have redesigned it as
ecstasy. The city has become a traffic nexus, the launch-pad
for strange voyages, and cyberpunk has become its realism. It
is no longer a geographical location, but a cyberspace
terminal: a gateway onto the virtual plane. Things change
utterly with Gibson's discovery that travelling in cyberspace is
the same as receiving information. The outside of the city is
no longer a naturally inherited past, but a digitally transmitted
future.
Destined for Interzone, Burroughs embarked on the yage trip
and the city of the future came to him, teeming with drugs and
diseases from the future. Yage is space-time travel, passing
through nausea into information overload, too much speed.
Urban scenes from the yage letters first infect the naked
lunch, and continue to spread. Cities of the red night
propagate themselves virally across the planet,
reprogramming the soft machine, and implanting strange
thoughts. Burroughs emerges from the convergence of drugs
and disease. The plague begins to transmit information.
The Indians of South America have other travelling drugs including coca - which evaporate the signals of sustenance
deficiency. The North American soft-drinks industry was not
slow to notice that Coke Is It, the pause that refreshes, the
cheerful lift. Cocaine hooked the world on Coca-Cola, and so
re-educated twentieth century capitalism about markets.
Addiction is the paradigm case of positive reinforcement, and
consumerism is the viral propagation of the abstract addiction
mechanism. The more you do the more you want: runaway
feedback. It's often treated as if it were a disease. When the
Coca-Cola company moved on from trafficking cocaine, the
South American drug cartels took over.
Like coca, MDMA sidelines hunger and lack. A coded
message from the end of demand, it was discovered at the
beginning of the century and classified as an appetite
suppressant. This was, to say the least, an insufficient
decrypting of its design.
Patterns emerge in the cool spaces of MDMA, mysterious
convergences designed to be discovered. Chance is
something else in the future. Chaos culture synthesizes itself
with an artificial neurochemistry. Machine rhythm takes off
with control.
In the final phase of human history, markets and technics
cross into interactive runaway, triggering chaos culture as a
rapid response unit and converging on designer drugs with
increasing speed and sophistication. Sampling, remixing,
anonymous and inhuman sound, woman become cyborg and
taken into insanity: wetware splices with techno.
Capitalism is not a human invention, but a viral contagion,
replicated cyberpositively across post- human space.
Self-designing processes are anastrophic and convergent:
doing things before they make sense. Time goes weird in
tactile self-organizing space: the future is not an idea but a
sensation.
1992 was designed as a year of European security
integration, and as the whole system comes together, it
becomes increasingly informative to simulate the thought of
the cops. From the perspective of the security system, the
invaders appear massively advantaged. Corporated entities of
every scale - bodies, firms, states, and nations, even the
planet - seem threatened by dangerous aliens. Terrorists,
drug-smugglers, illegal immigrants, money launderers, and
information saboteurs are camouflaged in the flows of
cross-border traffic, insiduously propagating their plagues.
Paranoia has moved on since the sixties: even the rivers of
blood are now HIV positive. Foreign bodies are ever more
virulent and dangerous, insidious invasions of unknown
variety threaten every political edifice. The allergic reaction to
this state of emergency is security integration, migration policy
and bio-control: the medico-military complex. Immuno-politics
and its cybernetic policing arise together because filtration
and scanning are different dimensions of the same process;
eliminating contamination and selecting a target. Ever more
Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence to track
the aliens. What was SDI really designed for?
Nothing compromises immunity more thoroughly than the
effort to secure it, since every sophistication of security
technology opens new invasion routes faster than it closes the
old ones down. Postwar immunization weakens the immune
system. Vaccination programmes facilitate the contagion of
immunodeficiency syndromes. Corrupt officials open the
traffficking arteries, and intelligence computers are infested
with viruses. The CIA were the first traffickers in LSD.
Immuno-politics is in a state of panic: deilrial with anxiety, it
further develops the conditions for its collapse.
Europeans used to perish of diseases in the tropics, swathing
their camps in mosquito nets as a defence against malaria.
Now cyberpositive diseases are spreading strange tropics to
the metropolis, and the screening systems are exploding out
of control. The netting no longer filters out the invaders, they
have learnt to infiltrate the networks. Now even the test
programs are unreliable, the net itself is infected. This
paranoid fantasy becomes Skynet in Terminator 2: the
defence system switching into the enemy. Greg Bear has
suggested that, from the outside, a computer becoming self
aware~ would seem to be undergoing a massive viral attack.
Viruses are tangible transmission, although you only know
about them when they communicate with you: messages from
Global Viro-Control. Viruses reprogram organisms, including
bacteria, and even if schizophrenia is not yet virally
programmed it will be in the future. Viral financing
automatisms escaped the 1 9th century critique of political
economy, just as viral infections escaped 1 9th century germ
theory. They slip through nets at the cellular scale, passing
through the biosecurity membranes.
The linear command pathway from DNA to RNA is the
fundamental tenet of securitY genetics. The genotype copies
God by initiating a causal process without feedback. But this
is merely a superstition, subverted by retroviruses. Viral
reverse transcription closes the circuit, coding DNA with RNA,
switching the cybernetics to positive.
Tim Scully compares LSD to a virus. Incapable of
autonomous replication, it must reprogram the human
nervous system in order to propagate itself. Hofmann
discovers LSD whilst working on a number of ergot derived
chemicals, and writes of a 'peculiar presentiment' that guides
him back to number 25: delta Iysergic acid diethylamide. In
the control of this alien programming he synthesized it with
tartaric acid and consumed a dose of 250 micrograms. His
first interpretation of the onset of LSD was to think he was
being attacked by a cold virus.
Drugs are a soft plague infecting the nervous system of
commodity cybernetics. Soft drinks and drugs flow in the
wake of each other and the war on drugs is a war on the
markets of the future. The Cali cartel is a transnational
marketing corporation with estimated assets of one trillion
dollars, selling cocaine along the Coca-Cola trail. The New
World Order oscillates between the triumph of the market and
the war on drugs. The sporadic telemedia celebration of
spectacular drug seizures merely distracts from the inevitable
failure of the narco-defence apparatus to stem the flow. A
global capitalism fighting its own drugs markets is a horror
auto-toxicus, an auto-immune disease. Drug control is the
attempt by the human species to control the uncontrollable;
control escalation itself, tropisms programmed by the aliens.
The human security apparatuses experiment with drugs as
weapons and tools, their soldiers are stoned, energised, and
anaesthetized on a range of prescribed and proscribed
pharmaceuticals. Their irregular forces are subsidized by
narcotics revenue. The war against drugs is a war on drugs.
The war on drugs is a counter-insurgency, a defensive
strategy mounted against the tactics of subversion: infiltration,
convergent invasion and coordinated envelopment. There is
no security any more, it was replaced by mad programs of
guided counter-intelligence technology: new vectors and
delivery systems, mixing the arms race with drug design,
escalation into diversity, smart weapons for smart drugs.
Cocaine creeping up the coast lines of Central America and
through the veins of corporate America, fol~ lowed by other,
newer, more insidious flows. The deepest subversives have
already broken into the system. The aliens are already here,
without ceas~ ing in the slightest to be alien. Guerrilla war
escalates in the direction of the tactical; a cyberpositive
take-off from opportunities, a non-localizable permeation,
undercutting all dominating strategic plans. An entire fauna
and flora of opportune infections. Strategy tends to come
apart in the tropics. Even traditional counter-tactics of
surveillance and interrogation are becoming obsolete. The
camouflage has become so sophisticated that people don't
know what they are carrying anymore.
Strategy is always complicit with the state, with the actual
state and with the virtual state secreted in every ideology of
resistance and oppositional identity. The body and the state
are under seige, with drugs and other software diseases
threatening the borders. The Human Security System is crys
tallized paranoia, cooked with baking powder, freebased: the
last strateg of resistance and the final resistance of strategy.
Replacing the cold war's phallic stand off is the war on drugs,
dissolutio into the jungle, the world's states united in their
terminal self-destructin strategy of prohibition. No more
dreams of a nuclear winter. The 1990 begins the China
Syndrome of capitalism.
Ice is crystallized speed. It is also Gibson's name for
dataprotection Intruder Countermeasure Electronics. Ice
patrols the boundaries, freezes the gates, but the aliens are
already amongst us. Convergent input is interpreted by
security as intelligent intrusion, as a trap or conspiracy, with
everything preprogrammed to connect. Doubting that women
belonged to humanity, Burroughs imagined them to be
extraterrestrial invaders. Viruses are like this too. Nobody
knows where they come from. They always arrive from
elsewhere, perhaps even outer space. Humanity is an allergic
reaction to vulnerability, but allergy depends upon the health
of the immune system: the ice has to work.
Tactics are subtlety, or intelligence. As things become more
complex they become more female, but patriarchy prolongs
the ice age of mankind. The fatherland is cryogenic, a fantasy
of perfect preservation, whose bronze age ancestors are even
now thawing out in the Alps, frozen assets under attack.
Global warming melts the ice, raises the seas, subverts the
glaciers. Computer viruses melt icebergs of data down the
screens, burning through the bacterial frost, like Burroughs
exploring his junkie cold with LSD.
Immuno-vulnerability is cyberpositive, and its viruses are not
just infection, but connection; continuing to interlock with the
matrix even after they are secreted inside the body. Loss of
identity, hearing voices. Women and other aliens constitute an
immensely disproportionate number of schizophrenics, frozen
by tranquillizers and antischizophrenic drugs. Sleeping pills to
block the dreams. Only the drugs that explore integration are
outlawed.
As immuno-politics explodes onto the software plane, culture
is becoming a free-fire zone. Chaos culture has hooked up to
cyberian military intelligence. Post-human pulse rates and
homing devices are remixed for accelerating targets, with
rhythms speeding up to intercept incoming drugs: virtual
addictions for addicts strobed by redesign. Cities mutate into
techno jungles where school children swap diseased software
from the front-line, and even the brand-names are encrypted:
SEGA puts ages in reverse. Gibson contracts the thought of
cyberspace from video-game arcades, watching the
motor-stimulation feedback loops, self-designing kill patterns.
Dark ecstasies in caverns of accelerating pixels. Before virtual
reality became dangerous, it was already military simulation.
Sudden transition from ice to water, phase change, punctual
anastrophe of the system, is impact on convergent rather than
metric zero. The Earth is becoming cyberpositive.
We might not know what's going on but we're getting warmer.
Only the enemies of immuno-identity populate the future.