Welcome to this special Urbanomic podcast. I'm Robin Mackay, Director of Urbanomic and and former member of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, if such a thing ever existed. Over the past few years, it's been kind of crazy to see the increase of interest in the CCRU's activities over a short lifespan. Back in 2017, of course, we published our paperback version of the CCRU writings, together with Time Spiral Press.
so I know a lot of the dynamic readers are sick puppies who are into this stuff and what you're about to hear is a piece of CCRU history that's recently been unearthed and which dates back to 1996. In actual fact this piece dates back to the early days of the CCRU and the cassette insert, which we think was probably made by Mark Fisher, credits it to a combination of switch, collapse and CCRU. Switch was a kind of theory gang consisting of Mark Fisher, Rob Heath Tim Birdsey, Angus Carlyle and Steve Metcalf which formed before the CCIU existed and when most of them were studying with Sadie Clant in Birmingham
Switch came to several of the virtual futures conferences at the University of Warwick they do performances with video soundtracks and theory and later many of them transferred to Warwick when Sadie founded the CCIU. Collapse was a zine that I was making at the time, a forerunner to the urbanomic collapse. So the swarm machines tape was really a merging of these different entities at the very beginning of the CCIU. It was made for the Hacienda Must Be Built, which was a conference at the Hacienda in Manchester, about the legacy of Situationism. Part of what's at stake in the text here is to challenge the idea that Situationism is a legacy,
it's something to be commemorated or picked over and analysed in a historicist manner. The position here is that that historical group known as the Situationists, understood as some kind of oppositional political force, were in fact mere side effects of an impersonal or transpersonal machine. defacialized swarming that operates below the level of representation and therefore is capable of undermining the spectacle and which wouldn't obey a temporality susceptible to historicization and nostalgia mixed in with that here there's what i can only describe as a hyper cyber euro skepticism which gives a piece of weird untimely resonance with 2019 in the uk
In 1996, one of the questions at issue was the European Monetary Union, understood here as an element in the oncoming second wave soft Euro-fascism. Also the previous year, 95, was the year of Mathieu Kassovitz's film La Haine and had seen rioting in the Bolivia in Paris, Paris in Flames, a 68 repetition with difference. And also all the major themes of the CCIU are here, inhumanism, cybernetics, junglism. So I think it was pretty late in the day that having committed to speak at this conference in Manchester,
it was decided that we'd collaboratively authored the text and present it in a video or audio form. I think there was also a video that accompanied the audio track. I guess that's now lost. I remember this quite clearly. The first phase having involved a lot of people sitting around on the floor in Mark's flat in Birmingham passing around short sample-like pieces of texts which were then literally taped together into one piece to be used as the script. You hear four voices on the tape, Sadie Plant, Mark Fisher, Nick Land and Angus Carlisle. Mark and I processed all the voices on the PC using CoolEdit Pro.
I remember very distinctly that that took us a long time and it got quite tedious. And the only light relief in that was that the piece, incidentally, contains one of my favourite Nick lines ever. do you really think SF Capital lets Monkey Flake make decisions it classifies as important? And I remember at some point during this process, Mark and I were basically in hysterics, just repeating the word Monkey Flake to each other. And then the soundtrack was mixed by me, not on record decks, but by recording CDs into a Tascam 4-track and mixing and using the Vary Speed Control. and we laid the vocal cap on top.
So that's really the level of totally rudimentary cyberpunk construction that was involved in those days. Something that had already been in evidence with Switch. We used to use the video recorders and DV cameras from Birmingham and CCCS to do tape-to-tape VHS cut-ups to back up their theory performances. So that second assembly process was all done in my student flat in Leamington Spa with Mark and the idea was that the tape would just be anonymously played without anyone actually appearing as a kind of provocative faceless intervention whose message was along the lines of the situationists were never a bunch of humans who can be biographied and academicised.
By all accounts, it succeeded in its aim of being provocative, but it wasn't exactly a success. One account of the conference in a book says it suffered from dismal production quality, which, well, you can judge for yourself. I wasn't actually there, but apparently the bass overwhelmed the room somewhat, and I have it on good authority that the sound waves coming from the speakers caused the roll-up projection screen on the stage to bounce around, and caused Tony Wilson to rush for the exit. So it may well be that in fact this is the very first time this tape has actually been heard. OK, so I'd just like to thank Angus Carlyle
for digging this out of his archive for us. It's obviously extremely weird for me to hear it for the first time since I finished transferring it off the Tascam and handed the tape to the switch crew as they were on their way out the door to Manchester. Even if it's an early basic experiment, apart from giving some glimpse into a nascent CCIU, what it does is attest to the confluence of sound and text or the mutual intensification of words and music that was crucial to CCIU. And it's continued to be important to many of us, I think, in various ways ever since then. so it's great to have recovered this along with a few other remnants the meltdown tape the grey matter remix and future loop tracks
which are all on our sound cloud I'm constantly looking for other bits and pieces to add to my own archive of material in the period and we'll have some more news on that soon I hope I also have an interview about all this stuff about CCIU, sound, jungle which I'll post up soon on my own personal site, readthis.wtf. But to repeat the gesture of this war machine's text itself, hopefully this isn't for the purpose of nostalgia and the museumification of CCIU, but it's something for those who are now looking to create new modes of micro-cultural production and 21st century cyberpunk.
So again, thanks to Angus for digging this up, and I hope you enjoy listening. If you don't already have it, the CCRU book Writings 1997-2003 is available in e-book from Time Spiral Press and in paperback from Arbenomic. But since it comes from this very early phase of CCRU activity, this text isn't actually included in that volume. It is included in the Accelerate collection. along with the founding text of the CCIU for cybernetic culture. I guess it's redundant to mention this, given what I've already said, but there's a certain amount of tape this, and the sound is fairly raw. I've done my best to optimise it, but it is what it is.
Classic 96 CCIU. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Neither have I. Insects don't have politics. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Are you there a fire?
Insects don't have politics. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Are you there a fire? Insects don't have politics. The Situationists. Neither individuals nor groups, neither remembered nor expected. Platonic hypercapital digitizes eschatology. Lost futures are formatted for web-based artificial memory trading. All exclusive definition is banked at light speed. Cryonic mummification into undead spectacles.
Real subsumption into the media. Fire economics. How do situational vectors cross World War 4? All code process is military manoeuvre, constrictions and escapes, intelligence collection, disinformation, mapping, virus. Truth and falsity are derivative factors and strictly technical in relation to the primary
and secondary features of alignment and orientation. Strategic power consolidation, tactical melting into the jungle. Cut out romantic revolutionism and it leaves dark events, auto-propagated happenings, assembly lines taken below visibility and switched to intensity production. imperceptible mutations. Paris in flames 1996. Not a question of demanding the impossible. Not a matter of long hours or exam papers, but the rise of a Euro-fascist culture, fuelled by nostalgic lamentations for the destiny of man, especially the white man, the one with
the face. Is it who or what are the situationalists? The traumas of exclusions and inclusions was always a spectacular distraction. Only multiplicities, decolonised ants. Worms without strategies, insectoid freeways burrowed through the screens in spectacular time. They have neither history nor its end, neither memory nor apocalypse, neither accidents nor
plans, no lines, no points, no infinite loops. No forward plans, no spontaneous combustion, but careful engineering, out of sight, out of mind, waiting in the wings, just off stage. The politicians called them revolutionaries, made them persons with faces and names, coded these meshes of contagious matters into acceptable human forms. But they were always tactical machines, natives of the future, hacking into the past, trading places, swapping codes, endless replications of micro situations
engineered without sources or ends, flocks are always flying in the faces, hives of activity behind screens. They've been making situations as opposed to passively recognizing them in academic or other separate terms. All this time. And you thought it was done. But this was a matter of legacy, inheritance, something passed down with the rest of the past. That we were gathered here today to hear the reading of the will. Beaudrill marked the transition to social circuitry's nostalgically describable as fully alienated. The arrival of integrated
Trading places, swapping codes, Endless replications of micro situational engineering. Soft machine buzz and slogan contagion. Cities synthesising inhuman desires. Psychogeography escapes the concentrational talk. 1996. Paris and Glow. Revolution has gone case-based native. become darker. No demands. No hint of strategy. No logic. No hoax. No end. It's politics on TV again. Bow in the jungle, it's war.
Accumulated stock footage backs up speculative Euro identity. The foreseeable future is locked into perpetual rerun. All the regulators are in the media business. They think nothing's happened if it hasn't been screened first. End of the line Euro tunnel vision is locked onto the rear view mirror. Paris Metro politics is a protection racket. Paranoic Francophonia lapses into necrospective auto mummification as a panic bid to keep things regular.
Euro continents. Retroactive cultural cleansing is too late. The bugs are already in the system. But all who just don't know my style Can't you see Rewind
Dead white metaphysics keeps asking the wrong question. What does it mean? while the machines get on with working. Linguistic integrity is a thing of the past and vernacular cybernetics signifies nothing. Politics is a spectacular failure. The spectacle is all that's keeping politics alive.
Things aren't happening in the field of vision that are flowing on a blind, mute, de-territorialized social. The impersonal is apolitical. The telecommercialized nomadic multiplicity affords Mason-Viewer Union. and there's no such thing as a single mark. Out in the jungle, you can't see much. Dark continent invasion of one world. The colonizers discover, too late,
that darkness has no heart. A-centered predator decapitalization ruthlessly eats out the middle. Lights going out all over Europe as peripheral activity cuts through the static power lines of the rotten core. The core master class. Relic anthropoid super strata. Condemn Hitler. Even in private.
Whilst applauded as first grand wizard meat puppet of electro corporate old occident power. You can't be forgiven for blowing EU1. It has taken 40 years to repair the damage. Armed with nothing but normal fascism. Normal commerce control. Normal crisis police methods. and the Kame Jesus video while Kame Jungle spreads across the delocalizing periphery teaching itself to escape. Jum... L... L... L...
L... L... L... L... L... L... L... L... L... L... L... The Poor Command has spent four decades ripping out high-level wetware known and replacing the electro-textured monofiller. Preparations for a direct pact between logic-slaved AI and collapsed star capital density. Real-time apocalypse simulation units lockdown to be used to it. Post-carbon dreams of crashing gravity waves. Everything contracts.
Do you really think SF Capital lets Nike Flake make decisions that classify as important? There is no doubt anywhere that matters. Simply fact. Debate is idiot. Distraction. Humanity is fucked. More machines never closed up inside an architecture. Schizo-Capital Fission consists of vectors dividing between two non-communicating phyla of impersonal multiplicity. First, pyramid control structures, white clown pixel phase, concentrational social segments, EU2 integrated history horizon. Double base wise.
Double base wise. Are you ready? Second. Jungle war machine. Darkening touch density. Cultural distribution threshold. Intended now variation flattened into undeometrized briefly. No community. No plans for an alternative state. Jungle antagonistically tracks Metro State across the dead TV squad of its global central intelligence program. 1. 1500. Leviathan. Command Corps. Northern Mediterranean. Target area. America.
It alone deals with zombie production systems, low-autonic traffic jamming, rhythmic decoding tactics and the interlinking of units of distributional collectivities with abism waves and becoming snakes and alternatives. Agitational micro-nomad cultures melted out across black body heat. Not remotely alien. It never came from this place. Increased current. My dreams. Urban shock out short circuits Alphaville-Urubotics jacking up non-organic intercepts. Fluxing markets with riot swarm techniques racing out his face.
Ill communication scrambling. Conspiracy paranoia. The medium is a mess. The message is coded after a futurist and digital base matter. No longer an epiphenomenal head case, the body escapes limb by limb from European organization. The jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic base frequencies engineering a cellular drone which immerses the body in intensity at the molecular level. The neurotic Cartesian body of evidence with its head up top down control centre is precipitated into a Brownian motion of decentralisation and disorganisation.
Big up your chest, wind up your waist, yourself in steam as its reactor core melts down. The Jungle Technics sever the cerebral cortex from their spinal columns of support and cuts copyright adrift from its feudal docking station. Libraries burning and babbling. Technology decoded from its proprietary grid of occult encryption, of academy and flames. Possessed personal information transmutes
into dispossessed impersonal data. Samples stretched and laid into freeware. Jungle rewinds and reloads conventional times as silicon flips for speeds and sloths that combusts slag heaps of historical carbon data. The past is past, left behind in a museum case of Oedipal mummies, approaching dust and warnings of revolutionary heritage. The eternally deferred eschatology to the left are consigned to the white trash can of the future and leave a present tense with synthetic possibilities. Between the vertical of retrospective sedimentation and the horizontal of never-coming contradictory crises, Jungle finds a diagonal that flees the ossified relics of the dialectic.
Synthetic rhythms junk progressive linear temporality. Samplers make time for the future. Jungle as a space dislocator. Destratifying cities snarled in an arcane surveillance apparatus. An operating system opening an invisible and asephalic matrix traversed by cars geared by base-o-matic transmissions missions and orbited by nomadic satellites of clubs, clandestine studios and the black economies of dub plates and mixtapes.
It's not just music. Jungle is the abstract diagram of planetary human becoming. Tread out of control. A pose spectacular immersive tactility with no humanist vision completely in touch with.
What happened? Events happen in their own time. Insect becoming swarming out of human history. Carbon dating rescales them in anthropomorphic terms, arranging them in good order. Historical staging swallowed by machining phase change. Nothing runs to plan. The future's already assembled, but not by design. Sub-base materialist concurrence emerging out of order. It's metrophage rush hour and you've lost the plot. Organs flicking out into grubby data space.
MTV'd on synthetics. The living jungle where no one has a name and to survive is to activate mutant minds, Becoming perceptible in order to perceive, tracking chromatic radiance of intensity across the convo wasteland. Predator. The space-time of hypercomodicization is a known zone of mass clusters where the polis disintegrates into unintensible webs of storm.
Shimmery. Schizophrenic Capitalism, Cultures Without a Society, a mutant topology of unanticipated connections. Be high velocity. And if you think it's going to blow, you haven't seen anything yet.
Wild style. Wasting the interminable punctual history of the Scriborgs. Points failure on the Paris Metro. Snow crash. There's no point going on. Just catch a line going wild over to the dark side. Dark side. Dark side. Dark side. Dark side. Dark side. Dark side. A bruised shape and sound merge and re-scripts, but they deacently permutate into the virtual machinery of the sampler, while social fabric walks into localized chaos mode.
Sondling beneath stationary media, it discovers a cache of cybernating egg stores, pupating Insect cities dug out in the underworld beneath the tracking of the closed circuits. The urban city of the jungle. Becoming snake, becoming clandestine in nights of micro-cultural mutation.
Becoming zero as machine assemblages mash up the cross-fade. Becoming diagonal with markets locked into guerrilla commerce. Everybody comes from nomad cultures melting in the heat of the chase. Alienated from loving it. Current. You're never here, none of them. Let's move slogan density. Get it off.