CCRU Datastreams
<nettime> Ccru datastream2: y2K as death of pomo
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Subject: <nettime> Ccru datastream2: y2K as death
of pomo
From: katasonix <data {AT}
katasonix.demon.co.uk>
Date: Thu, 16 Dec 1999 19:10:34 +0000
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Y2k+ datastream 2
KO99
The question of 'the' history of the Ccru is problematic, not
least because Ccru activity is characterised by its antagonism
towards stable temporality. It's the business of the great
sedentary assemblages to establish settled lineages and
well-ordered sequences, whereas Ccru-process attaches
itself to coincidences, glitches and unforeseen
consequences-breaks, twists and bends in time.
History insists upon a linear causal progression-a neat
passage from the past (which is already decided) to the future
(which is merely the playing out of what has been laid down in
the past). Tell me about your mother, then, and I'll understand
everything about you. Beyond this causality is another
temporality, uncovered at the point where schizonanalysis
meets pulp horror. Here, cause does not follow effect: there is
a process of retro-contamination in which the deep past finds
itself already infected with the far future. The crucial question
is one of becoming: what are you changing into, what is
growing out of you? Lovecraft, who specialised in narratives
that looped the ancient palaeo- past into the far future, did not
know that he was already infected with Ccru-virus any more
than Ccru can know what strange entities are using its body to
incubate the eggs from which they will emerge.
Let's begin at the end, with Ccru's 'latest' publication, Digital
Hyperstition. Just now, it's the best place to look for clues as
to what Ccru is becoming. Precisely because it is a mass of
loose ends, unresolved questions, undecrypted signal. The
Digital Hyperstition volume is an unexploded bomb: a text
that, in decoding the esoteric traditions of the past, awaits its
deployment in the near-future by populations it will itself
machine.
Ccru is pleased to announce a deal in which key concepts
from Digital Hyperstition have been sold to the games design
company, Abstract Machines, who will be weaving them into
the architecture of a digital game. From the point of view of
the game and its consumers, Ccru is only important as the
producer of Digital Hyperstition, and Digital Hyperstition is
significant only as a handbook to the game.
In which case the history of the Ccru would be a prehistory of
the game...
In Chronos, or conventional linear time, Ccru begins as the
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of
Warwick, in K0 +95. But in Chronos, Ccru has never existed.
An official statement from the Ccru's former institutional base
had it that, "Ccru does not, has not and will never exist." You
could say that the university phase of Ccru's activity was
dedicated to its escape from its status as an institutional
non-entity. A series of events, including Virtual Futures:
Datableed and Afro-Futures in K0 +96, and Virotechnics in K0
+97, and the emergence of the swarm-journal Abstract
Culture, functioned as provisional escape-hatches, portals
connecting Ccru to the outside of the university where its own
future lay. By the time of this year's Syzygy, the event for
which Digital Hyperstition was the accompanying publication,
the Ccru's institutional history was over before it had begun,
and Ccru was well on the way to transforming itself into a
rumour mill, an agency of cyber-hype.
Currently, much Ccru activity seems to be dedicated to
spreading hype about Y2K. And you'll understand much more
about Ccru - and Digital Hyperstition - once you appreciate
why it so obsessed with Y2K. So let's say the history of the
Ccru begins here, in the – very - near future, with Y2K. By
now, of course, everyone is familiar with the Y2K- or
Millennium Bug phenomenon. The common perception of
Y2K is that it is - merely - an accident. A technical oversight.
Not imagining that their programs would still be used come
the Year 2000, programmers used a two - digit protocol to
code for the date, with the result that, come January 1st,
computers still reliant on such programs will be terminally
confused, unable to distinguish the year 1900 from the Year
2000.
Ccru learned from cybernetics the lesson that there is nothing
'merely' technical, and sees Y2K as an event exemplifying a
whole complex of intermeshing themes, including: the crash
of Science Fiction (and the emergence of cyberpunk), the
death of postmodernity, and the restart of chronopolitical
conflict.
Y2K is an event that may ultimately be entirely constructed
out of hype. But it is only pre-cybernetic nostalgia that could
think of hype as something merely illusory ; like panic, which it
parallels and bleeds into, hype is an immediately effective
cybernetic process, operating by intense feedback spirals.
Hype and panic cannot simply be thought of as precursors to
events: they are the event already happening. So it's not a
matter of waiting for Y2K. As a potential, it's already active.
Even if not one computer malfunctions on New Year's Day,
Mbug has already been a major disaster for capitalism, of an
unprecedented scale. (Estimates of the cost of Y2K to date
have gone stratospheric.)
So far as Ccru is concerned, this means the crash of Science
Fiction. Y2K plugs into the fears that have haunted Science
Fiction since its inception: the idea of a human population
becoming dependent upon machines over which it has no
effective control. As technological integration increases,
human control lessens, and the possibility of something
crashing the entire system grows. SF disintegrates into
cyberpunk.
Where Science Fiction can be defined as the implementation
of the project of Progressive Technology a vision of
uninhibited technological growth spreading out into a far
future that has been speculatively planned cyberpunk lurks in
the near future, building itself out of the unanticipated
consequences of technical development.
SF conceives of machines in terms of human usevalue,
thinking of them as (temporarily troublesome) tools with which
humanity is ultimately destined to be reconciled . The famous
jumpcut in Kubrick's 2001 from caveman's primitive weapon
to gleaming space vehicle gives you a handy summary of the
Science Fictional version of history.
>From the POV of Y2K, of course, 2001 never happens. And
it is almost as if the popular unconscious and Y2K have
colluded in the elimination of any date after 1999. In the
early-to=mid 90s, when Y2K began to emerge as a problem,
the year 2000 still seemed as far distant as it did in the 1950s,
when programmers agreed upon the two-digit date protocol.
In the popular unconscious, the year 2000 and beyond belong
to the far distant time of Science Fiction with the ironic effect
that SF's longterm has suddenly collapsed into cyberpunk's
near future.
Y2K is not only everywhere computers are, it is everywhere
silicon chips are: it is a molecular bug, infecting even the
tiniest interstices of the technical environment, an invisible
invader into technical systems that have themselves tended to
shrink out of human sight. It is a global problem that can only
be tackled locally. Even if, say, airlines do manage to root out
all their Mbug infections, they are still dependent upon
agencies who may not have been so successful in debugging
their systems.
So Y2K is not so much a catastrophe as a hyper-catastrophe.
Y2Kos can be extrapolated from any number of contingencies
and their potential interexcitations: traffic failure, food
shortages, ATM malfunction, stock market crashes, exchange
of nuclear weapons... Anything that is dependent upon
computers is potentially infected with Mbug. Which is bad
news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with them. Y2K
is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality
is indistinguishable from fiction: in capital's world of simulation
and cybernetic anticipation, all that is solid has melted into the
abstract and virtual. Which is not to subscribe to some
melancholy postmodern story about derealization so much as
to point to ways in which virtual agencies such as potentials
have the most material effect imaginable.
Cyberpunk begins with Y2K, but when does Y2K begin? Y2K
transforms the dynamics of chaos theory into the logic of
fatality. At one level, you couldn't be more precise about when
Y2K will happen; at another, it's a massively distributed event,
involving the whole century. You could date Y2K at the point,
in the 1950s, when the 2digit protocol was put in place, or at
any point since, when the decision to modify it was not taken.
As with any fatal loop, ironies abound. It was the military
forerunner of the internet, ARPANET, that established the
2digit dating system. Now, with the Cold War ended, the
biggest threat to western security may be a literal time-bomb
planted by the US military itself some forty years ago.
When the Economist questioned last year whether two digits
can /really mean the end of civilization, it expressed what is a
widespread inability to come to terms with the real and
effective (not merely signifying or representational) power of
signs in cybernetic culture. Y2K is a semiotic event, but it
does not belong to postmodernity's regime of signs. Rather,
Y2K signals the virtual termination of PoMo. The widespread
failure of the academy to offer any effective response to Y2K
(or any sort of response at all) is testament to the bankruptcy
of its theoretical commitments. It was one thing for
out-of-touch theorists to fail to anticipate the events of 1968;
but to be unable to respond to Y2K an event is an oversight
of another magnitude entirely. The problem is that Y2K
scrambles the PoMo radar, discomfiting the by now cosy set
of assumptions on which postmodern thought rests. Y2K is
culturally generated but it does not belong to "discourse"; it is
a disaster, but it is entirely "unnatural". The notion of cultural
construction to which PoMo is so attached has always carried
with it the implicit idea that what has been constructed can be
taken apart again. The assumption belongs to a
pre-cybernetic opposition between Nature (as the realm of the
given) and Culture (as the province of the mutable) that Y2K
like the cybernetic capitalism which has incubated it is
effectively dismantling. Y2K is no less of a catastrophe, and
no less ineradicable, because it is totally artificial.
Against the PoMo dictum that signs are arbitrary (and
therefore effectively interchangable), Y2K promises that
global disaster could be precipitated by a specific semiotic
trigger. When next some media pundit yawns about the Year
2000 being an arbitrary date, reflect on the fact that Y2K is
happening not on a date, but because of a date. More
radically put, the event is the date. At no other point in history
have semiotic dating practices themselves caused a
catastrophe: when people looked to the skies in trepidation in
999, they didn't imagine that the date itself would bring
calamity.
Y2K is simultaneously about friction (between humans and
computers) and convergence (of time systems). Things click
together on the machinic unconscious just as they fall apart in
the social world. At the moment of Y2K, the two-digit
convention converges the date with the time: 99 becomes 00
at 00:00 hours precisely. This string of noughts should give
pause to PoMo relativists who insists that any sign will do; it is
the very precise function of zero that allows Y2K to happen as
(and when) it does, effectuating a collision of the Hindu-Arab
numeric system with Roman numerals. Although translated
into Hindu-Arab numerals, the Gregorian calendar still
effectively runs on a Roman numeric system ignorant of zero.
Y2K ciphers what will not happen in undebugged cyberspace:
the Gregorian Year 2000. Skipping SF's 2000 AD, computers
will cyberpunk the date, counting what the Gregorian calendar
never has: zero. An antiPoMo and anti-Gregorian weapon,
Y2K quite literally signifies nothing. The effect is a calendric
revolution carried out entirely by the machinic unconscious.
Unraveling the virtual computer calendar is complicated.
When is Y2K's year zero: the Gregorian year 2000, or Greg
year 1900? Both are candidates, since, in addition to treating
January 1st "2000" as year zero, the implicit computer
calendar has retrospectively coded January 1st "1900" as its
startdate. And, at the level of the unconscious, anyone
logging onto a computer has been in complicity with the
computer-calendar. On the darkside of the Net, news is
breaking of 00cults dedicated to the computer generated
calendric system...
These denizens of the darkside of cyberspace are
practitioners of what Ccru calls digital hyperstition. It's time to
look closer at what is involved in this term, and the best place
to begin is with one of the writers who have written most
extensively on the subject, Iris Carver.
<nettime> Ccru datastream3: Katasonix & Calendric
Continuism
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nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Ccru datastream3: Katasonix &
Calendric Continuism
From: katasonix <data {AT}
katasonix.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 00:15:27 +0000
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Y2k+ datastream 3
Dec KO99
Katasonix and Calendric Continuism
For some time, Iris Carver's primary research project has
been concerned with the work of a US cyberpunk group
known as the K-Goths (those with a particular interest in the
subject are referred to a chapter devoted to the topic in her
recent publication 'Y2K; A Future History'.) A bizarre faction
bred off the neuroses of Y2K scare stories, the KGoths
concern themselves with the disruption all Y2K correction
strategies. Over the past few months, this has manifested
itself as all manner of technical stunts, ranging from onscreen
sabotage, sonic reprogramming, auto-formatted user
interfaces through to elaborate physical experiments which
have the most disturbing effects on those who come within
perceptual range of their effects. Electric shock disorders,
epileptic seizures, hormonal imbalances, chronic insomnia all
are phenomena common to those who have the mis/fortune to
brush against the KG interface.
Iris Carver's own experience with these events is
unsurprisingly disturbing. To this day, she has no recollection
of her first encounter, not because she has forgotten it but
because she wonders if there was ever such a thing as a first
encounter. To the contrary, she suspects that she was, in
some deep sense, always aware of KGoth presence but it is
only now, as a chance after-effect, that they have become a
conscious occupation of her mind and such a fascinating topic
of her research. Whilst her attempts to engineer physical
meetings with these mysterious creatures have led to little
more than a series of misdirections, sabotaged intentions,
near misses and blind alleys, she continues to speak of them
in the most intimate of terms indeed it would seem that she
positively revels in her misplaced sense of timing.
It took CCRU some time to realise that their investigations into
KGoth activity would bring rewards only by way of losing the
battle. Over time, Carver taught it that foiled communication
attempts are the clearest xxignal from the K-Goth camp. It
was a while though before CCRU realised that its building
frustration was only adding to the situation - not, however, by
producing increasingly negative effects but, to the contrary, by
creating the machinery of a libidinal obsession from which it
would, eventually, be unable to escape. What it knows now, it
didn't know then that K-Goth girls are experts in that type of
user reprogramming which effectively reinvests the logic of
escape at a higher level of play the more you avoid, the more
you perpetuate. Their intention is to trigger chaos through the
tactical creation of mimetic disorders.
When Carver began her research project, her first concern
was to establish a reliable line of communication with the
K-Goth Mother-Hive. But with her simple intentions came the
most of complex of problems for at the exact moment she
received her first hint of response, her screens began to grow
all manner of deformities. Every machine which she came into
contact with, even those devoid of her research files, seemed
to produce the same tremulous effects text receding from the
surface of screen, pixels converting themselves into lines of
speed which pounded just behind the glass. Carver herself
spoke of her machine becoming some kind of vehicle, an
agency of speed which displayed the ground on its way out of
sight.
It was of course some time before she grasped that she
herself was the centre of the problem but when, with a shot of
exhilaration, she finally understood her own effects, she also
knew that she was being used. She had been convinced that
these perceptual distortions were the invention of a
hallucinatory illness, a virus for which she was being
medically treated. The truth, however, was that they were the
output of a programmed hypochondria the diligent work of the
K-Goths. Like all the best hypochondriacs, she had behaved
as required she had installed the credibility of an event in
advance of the event itself and then used the future to
reprogram the present; she had become the virus, she had
gone KG. In the process of trying to outwit the KGoths, she
had successfully tightened her own rein until she was the
queen propagator. There were screens all around her,
dissolving beneath illegible K Goth propaganda.
It is thought, if that was ever assurance of anything, that the
K-Goths are an elite few who miraculate themselves as many.
Police reports themselves great works of fiction postulate
that they are typically to be found operating in the Chicago
area in large pack of teenage girls, most often aged between
14 and 16. Such numbers are however irrelevant many
communicate by the same name producing hoards of Jean
Traffics and Gill Slitzs and refuse, KGoth law, to celebrate
birthdays. It is suspected that the ringleaders of the group are
'girls' of eighty and ninety year old. As we have never seen
them, we do not know to what extent they are physical
embodiments of this assumed reversal of time, but it is
thought that they are graced with as yet undiscovered and
potentially valuable techniques in skin rejuvenation.
They subsidise their activity by dealing in the drug A-Death a
rare but exquisitely expensive commodity on the black market
Catajungle scene. CCRU has not had contact with this
substance it is only ever leaked on to the market in the tiniest
of amounts and even then it is by preempted by a glut of hoax
deals and fake powders and by an army of female dealers
who pose as KGoth agents. There is even a suspicion that
A-Death may not be a drug at all. A-Death fanatics speak of
the drug in the most obscure of terms, as a treasure of
cyberspace which is not ingested by the user but manifested
as the user as therefore a type of possession or abstract
entity. Such speculations effectively stunt all attempts to
distinguish between A-Death's true and purported effects but
a recently leaked hospital report speaks of its capacity to
irreversibly reprogramme the body clock, to install rhythms in
the spinal cord which produce entirely an new set of
movements and to induce coma-like trips which alter the vocal
range for ever. In a form of short-circuited schizophrenia, the
user is not deluged by multiple voices but is instead equipped
with multiple tongues.
Carver once thought that the KGoth Sound Archive would
provide at least some lead in the search for clues about the
participants in this sinister penultimillennial cult. However, as
we now know that each voice heard in the baseline of the
tracks is only one of the many which characterises an
A-Death addict, it would seem that this music, like so many
potential leads, is a literal dead end. No one voice belongs no
one body which belongs no one name. It adds an entirely new
dimension to the sonic experiments recently released on
London's KataSonix records for it would seem that the
chittering, tickings and metallic unutterances which trademark
these vinyls are not the techmanoid manipulation of preexistent material but are instead the voices of A-Death addicts
gone multiple an effect experienced as the drug kicks in and
takes the user out of herself, to the nonplace known as
immersion-coma.
It is of no wonder that these chilling recordings of unlife are
dogged by encryption attempts. As a result of AOE sound
patrol, MP3 versions are near impossible to download and
nearly always resist all attempts at playback. What you now
hear is the result of CCRU efforts to strip back metric these
security apparata. This result is the sound of time damage.
Little of this language can be used to describe the experience
of the K-Sonic Flatline but many have indicated the inevitable
feeling of dissemination. They recall the sensation of a sheet
of water sliding over the face, a withdrawal from the glass of
the screen and the meniscus of time and then, eventually,
when submersion is achieved, the erasure of all facial
features. According to the KGoth's own review of their work,
available subliminally when their vinyls are played backwards,
this is the initiation into Kspace where, to quote from Carver's
transcript, you merge with 'the cascading tick
shelves...galleries, ducts and crawl tubes...'of the Crypt,
'...where time unthreads into warped voyages, splintering the
soul...'
This journey does of course require an entirely new relation to
oxygen. In Kspace, blow holes, air locks and compression
chambers create dark sonic architectures the
hyperventilations of which can be heard purring along the
ceiling of all KGoth tracks. The real alterations, however,
occur at a deeper level and take the form of the deep spinal
undulations which form the baseline of tracks such as
'Utterminus'. With sustained exposure, these disturbances
can affect deep deep shivers of satisfaction contortions which
females are said to experience long after the event, so long
after it seems that one wonders if these sensations were their
in the first place, always just a little out of range. There is,
however, a silence on this matter.
CCRU convinced by technical excellence of KGoth sonic
artillery is currently embroiled in a research project which
maps the relation between the inherently female nature of
their work, Y2K activity and the effects of A-Death time
distortion. The project is provisionally codenamed
ANTICLIMAX. It is motivated by a suspected relation between
KGoth occupation of the cyberspace calendar and what Iris
Carver calls the sporegirl politics of female erotica.
The connection, we grant, seems tenuous but there is a logic
to unravel the germ of which is an entrenched hatred of all
stories which pitch the year 2000 as the highest point of
human history. To this the K-Goths pose the same
confrontational questions; who are the humans and where is
their history? Since K-Goths occupy a time frame with no hard
and fast rules and no time for the ascent of man, they situate
themselves differently, on flatter planes which covet the slow
speeds as well the fast. Theirs is a reality not run by quick
fixes, programmed highs, monotone baselines, fuel injections,
guilt trips or serotonin lows. It is instead manufactured
independently of bulimic cycles of accumulation and waste it
treats time itself not as the short, measurable and essentially
impotent units of metric control but as a spiral shaped
anomaly. The plane of their activity is in actuality nowhere to
be found since it has no marked beginning, no rush to the end
and no date in metricity.
According to this logic of digital erotics of far darker
machinations which trade the delusions of the fastest speeds
with the unidentifiable sensations of bodies lost beneath their
own journeys KGoth activities webs an entirely new fabric of
time, frequency and female fluids. It is based of the premise
that year zero has always been a pointless fiction, a fiction
beyond fiction, a nonentity of the very worst kind. To HyperC
they pose a impossible question; why return to a year which
never existed in the first place? Their own answer is a
strategy a demand that the year zero be treated as intended
as a fiction, but as a fiction with its own set of effects, as a
reality therefore. KGoth Unlife does then not return to year
zero, to the artficial beginning of time... for it is zero, not as
starter or marker but as cipher to the darkside....
In K-time, then, cyberspatial compatibility has no accordance
with the Progressivists and their celebration with 2000 nor
with the other as yet unidentified penultimillennial cults who
believe, with some misguided radicalism, that a return to zero
is a departure from Chronos. In honour of Continuity (the
mother demon of the Cont-Inuits based in N.Canada),
K-Goths demand the most logical move of all the passing of
99 to 100. No return to the beginning, no year 2000 pinnacle
of progress just the continuance of what came before,
mothertime. K-Goths hate resolution of any kind whether as
an end in itself or as gauge of picture perfect screen clarity.
Their habit of blacking out computer screens is strategy to
relocate the user on the dark side of cyberspace, where the
desire its not driven by a pornographic pursuit of harder edges
and faster return but by endless immersion in non-optical
worlds without place. As propagators of the AntiClimax, those
who play with the fire of the K-Goths must realise that the
labyrinth can be navigated by feel alone by direct contact with
the cold sensations of frequencies and entities which were
their in the first place, before time began its rush to the end..
`Sonic Bacterium' upcoming on the Katasonix label is
perhaps the greatest KGoth work to date. As a suborgasmic
Flatline which is only heard when the body begins to mutate, it
is sheer silence in Chronos. It is possible that the release of
Sonic Bacterium will have a major impact of the A-Death
trade. Its effect is said to be beyond drugs for embedded
within it is are entirely new biologies and unprecedented
waves of parthogenetic replication. Download at your peril
and remember the words of Karen Harker; '...you are aware of
two presences but each of them is impossibly and
dangerously numerous'. This is sporegirl politics, a politics
which isn't very human at all...'
<nettime> Ccru datastream4: a scratch on the vinyl of history
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To: nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Ccru datastream4: a scratch on
the vinyl of history
From: katasonix <data {AT} katasonix.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sat, 18 Dec 1999 17:36:53 +0000
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Y2k+ datastream 4
KO99
A SCRATCH ON THE VINYL OF HISTORY
HyperC
Instead of celebrating the Year 2000, then, the Cybergoths
will be 'chilling out' to the year K100. This apparently, has
brought them into conflict with another ultrasecret web
movement called HyperC whose chronopolitics are if
anything, even more weird than those of the K- goths. Little is
known about HyperC, but its sporadically-issued Internet
communiques celebrate the very return the Kcalendar is
designed to avoid.
1) HyperC's chronopolitics and Y2K
Countdown to relapse. In a series of cryptic communications,
the aqua-assassins of HyperC refer to an impending
C-Change, combining afroatlantian mutation with
time-dissidence. HyperC seem to believe that computers have
a message for us: there is only one century, that counts from
0 to 99, forever. As Linda Trent has reported, "Hyper-C are
another Cargo Cult. . .but the time system they operate with is
very different to that of the Cybergoths. As far as I can glean,
their basic drift is that computers should not be tampered with;
that the Millenium Time-Bomb will explode western
chronology. There are many elements in common with
so-called 'primitive' time; for instance, the idea that there is
only one year."
For this hypermodern cargo-cult there has only ever been the
Century.
One phrase keeps recurring; from [the rap group] Public
Enemy: 'Apocalypse been in effect.'
HyperC treats conventional chronology as "fake time"
because as far as they are concerned, life has evolved in
cyberspace, and history is simulation (format 1 9) It has
developed a sophisticated counter chronic program, involving
an anti-Gregorian Y2K positive occupation of the so- called
computer calendar, an engineered reversal of mammalian
evolution, and a mystico-materialist critique of sequential
causality.
As HyperC remixer Dj Solaris has put it,"Y2K is merely a
scratch on the vinyl of history". The cult's Rite of Return
counts down to 99
Rewind the Century (no playback).
HyperC's timedissidence means that they associate the
implicit century of 2 digit computer dates with the Poseidonic
pack (=100), envisaging Y2K- the time bomb in Babylon as
the surface symptom of a submergent call to Centience.
The little evidence available suggest that for HyperC, the
realization of Centience signals the breaking of the
TimeChains. Babylon (capital of fake time) is dragged down
into the sea (Bubbamu sinks Babylon). And the audio
amphibians of noizzion break the mirror and escape to the
true century.
"Set your clocks to maritime."
2) HyperC and Hypersea
The name HyperC puns on sea and the letter C, connecting
the radical biological theory also known as hypersea (which
argues that 'life on land' is an extension of the ocean) with
words beginning with the letter C such as Century,
Cybernetics and Cycle.
Some security analysts have traced a similarity between
HyperC's biostrategy and that of Detroit techno outfit
Underground Resistance project of negative evolution.
Allegedly, this is not a comparison which HyperC would
refuse. Bio-strategically and sonically, both Hyper-C and UR
engage in a weird kind of esoterrorism, multitasking on
various level, unwinding the spine while rewinding secret
encrypted rhythm patterns.
For the Hypersea biological theory, complex life takes the sea
beyond the sea, folding it back inside of itself. After the
oxygen revolution 2500 billion years ago, in the proterozoic
Eon, marine and anaerobic cyno-bacteria or thermophiles
survived in land organisms land biota carries the sea within it.
This challenges conventional evolutionary wisdom which
suggests that humans emerged from terrestrial savannah
apes. Instead, as Elaine Morgan argues in her research
entitled "The Aquatic Ape", the human body bears more
amphibious scars. The bacterial passage onto land did not
constitute a final terrestrial approach. The shifting of
continents has always looped back mammals into the waters
and triggered th mutations of the body.
As Morgan reminds us, the shift from qaudrupedalism to
bipedalisms has more to do with the invasion of the water on
land than with the "man the hunter". We were forced to align
vertically in order to breath and we have spent centuries living
like fishes. This has had major consequences for the human
body: the loss of hair, the conjunction of the larynx with the
pharynx, the deposit of eggs, the irrelevance of meiotic or
reproductive sex, not to mention the fact that the body is 90%
water.
Some analysts have noted how biology of Hypersea relegates
the evolutionary ladder to "fake time". A like UR, the attempt
to escape 'fake time' appears to take the form of "negative
evolution". But more than this, it actually constitutes the
projected dispersal of mammalian organismic integrity; "spinal
regression" shatters the illusion of the evolutionary ladder.
Referring to the HyperC cult or Underground Resistance's
genetic strategy as "negative evolution" is therefore an
underestimation. Spinal regression, or shattering "fake time"
dissolves human security dams allowing the ever present
bacterial ocean to flood in. Tapping into the zeroid matrix of
the bacterial continuum, the genetic strategies of the HyperC
cult therefore short-circuit the evolutionary ladder. Rewinding
to zero may look like a return to the original terrestrial ape, but
it is obvious that the hyperC cult have never left the ocean. In
chronos, negative evolution but in eon, positive involution.
There has been much peturbation among security circles
regarding Hyper C's dubmarine warfare. One paranoid report
from the Galactic Bureau of Investigation, an agency
attempting to eradicate the threat the HyperC virus poses to
Human security, explains that when spinal regression is
achieved "human characteristics begin to fade, [and] the voice
becomes unrecognizable." Reputedly, the Bureau has warned
all its agents that the C-cult is so virulent that even the mere
repetition of C-slogans constituted infection and proliferation.
Moreover, the recurrent reptilian and fish imagery, the Bureau
advised, should not be interpreted as something merely
symbolic. Despite its paranoia, the Bureau has indeed every
reason to believe that HyperC activists are pursuing all
available means to bring about a return to the "icthiophidian
flexomotile" spine to navigate more smoothly in tactile
virtuality.
The most significant reports concerning the HyperC cult tell of
infiltrations of the audiosphere. It is digitalization that links
Hyper-C's approach to biology with their time dissidence and
sonology. Just as the computer clock signals for the cult that
there has only every been one century, genetic engineering
reminds us that there has only ever been aquabacterial
recombination. And scraps of available evidence underlines
that it is digitalization which, in transforming the audiosphere
into an ocean of sound, spawns the HyperC cult as an elusive
pack of noise tacticians.
3) HyperC and sonic hydrotactics
"From subversion to submersion."
The "disassembly of music into sonic machineries "has gone
alongside the dissolution of politics into tactics. The
aspirational and representational logics of "protest music"
have given way to a technics of direct action, in which sound
is used as a "neuronic trigger," attacking the organism very
directly, opening up defensive membranes to an "acoustic
space" of dub viscosity inhabited by secret coded rhythm
patterns.
"From subversion to submersion."
One of the HyperC cult's recent outernet communiques was
entitled Hydrodemonic polyrhythym mapping out the occult
practice of break asymmetrics. This text on audio tactics
tracked afro-atlantian rhythmic futurism's involutionary
trajectory from the full beat of 4/4 funeral marches through the
� beat of 2/4 towards the � note of swing, down through the
bebop 1/8 note in a convergence with the dub hyper-rhythm of
recent afrofuturist audio war of the 1990s. Accordingly
hyperdub is described as subbass fiction increasingly
suggesting parallels with the: the Hardcore, the Jungle, the
Drexciyan Techno and the bump'n'switch of 2step garage and
R&B.mapped in Kodwo Eshun's dub sonology.
The sketches illustrate a vast vortical assemblage
diagrammed by theperiod doubling of break involution
suggests that the affective potentialof the Black Atlantic
consists of the multi-scalar rhythmic composition of
turbulence- the art of war in the art of noise.
Elusive remixer of retrieved Hyperc sounds, Dj Solaris, was
recently netted for an interview at the MP3 Summit in San
Diego. Attending the virus warfare panel featuring IceT, Dj
Solaris was probed into communication. "What we have
always been interested in is digital accidents, with following
software bugs as generative events. . .the HyperC strategy
revolves around the relation between glitches and loops. Y2K
is just a scratch on the vinyl of history. Scratching opens a line
out of "fake time" a line into the looping century. The one
century cycles but the intensity varies. The rewind from 99 to
00 opens the space into which HyperC drains."
HyperC's tactical innovations relate to designing audiospheric
system turbulence.
Dj Solaris continues:
"Basically we hunt down the time interval of the glitch and
then inhabit it. . .we populate it with sonic elements so that the
whole continuum, from the minute apex of the glitch itself, to
the extended spiralling assemblage which cascades (from
bass, to rhythm, to voice fragments) is swept around by an
abstract whirlpool. . .hence we term ourselves as
neovorticists."
"Sonic turbulence", Solaris explained, "connects HyperC
breakbeat science to a chronopolitics of cyclic discontinuity.
The strategy which emerges from this convergence treats
Y2K as a time bomb which blows open the linear trajectory of
the Gregorian calendar; we call it a scratch on the vinyl of
history; the effect is one of time loops whereby it become
obvious that there has only ever been one century starting at
00, reaching 99 and then returning to zero. Within the loop,
the break is camouflaged with the bpm metric as Y2K is
camouflaged by Gregorian continuity.
Rewind the century, no playback.
00
Set your clocks to maritime.
-
ccru via katasonix
<nettime> Ccru datastream5: Apocalypse- been in effect?
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Subject:
<nettime> Ccru datastream5:
Apocalypse- been in effect?
From: katasonix <data {AT}
katasonix.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 20:26:29 +0000
Sender:
owner-nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Y2k+ datastream 5
KO99
APOCALYPSE BEEN IN EFFECT?
aria De Rosario
M
from the New England Educational Review, August, 1998
* How do "aquapocalyptic" narratives about a return to the
sea connect with the Millennium Time Bomb? Maria D'Resario
reports on "hyperfictional" and "ethnomathematical" studies of
strange goingson on the Web, and asks: Are the CyberTime
Cults just the latest craze, or a new Millenial Mythology? *
You'll be familiar with media scare-stories about "Cybergoths".
But, according to two young academics at Massachussetts'
Miskatonic University, it's time to put aside the moral panics
about synthetic drugs and cyberspace comas in order to take
a more serious look at what the Cybergoths are actually
doing.
The Cybergoths and the other cultic bodies that are
beginning to populate the Net are not passing crazes, but
"sophisticated contemporary belief systems", more akin to
popular religion than youth culture. "The Cybergoths are a
Cargo-Cult," claims Miskatonic's Dr Linda Trent. "They
integrate technology into their belief system, and transform
the past into the future. Or vice versa."
Like the Melanesian syncretic cults who turned Western
detritus into religious objects, the Cybergoths use the relics of
the information age as the sacred objects of a new mythic
system. But Trent, who calls herself an expert in "Fictional
Systems", dislikes the term "mythology.""It begs too many
questions, and suggests archaism. What the Cybergoth
phenomenon shows, really powerfully, is the difficulty in
pinpointing where belief systems come from.
In some ways, when you see the remarkable
pattern-matching between the Cybergoth system and older
belief systems, it's tempting to see it is a case of revivalism,
but that doesn't seem ultimately persuasive. What needs to
be accounted for is the convergences across Time: are they a
coincidence? Which poses the further question: what is a
coincidence? And that's what the Cybergoths are all about."
Trent says that the Cybergoths are "natives" of Cyberspace,
and the emergence of their culture provides a unique
opportunity for studying the process of the formation of a
belief system as it happens.
Trent uses the term "hyperstition" for "cybernetic" belief
systems such as these. "It's not a simple matter of true or
false with hyperstitious systems. Belief here doesn't have a
simply passive quality. The situation is closer to the modern
phenomenon of hype than to religious belief as we'd ordinarily
think about it. Hype actually makes things happen, and uses
belief as a positive power. Just because it's not 'real' now,
doesn't mean it won't be real at some point in the future. And
once it's real, in a sense, it's always been."
One key area of Cybergoth activity is their response to the
so-called "Millennium Bug" (the computer glitch caused by the
coding convention that renders years as two, rather than four,
digits) The Cybergoths whose own communications
substitute the letter 'K' for the cyber-prefix believe that the
attempt to correct the Millennium Bug is in fact a program for
"Gregorian Restoration"; that "cyberspace already has a
calendar", a calendar counting up from 00 = 1900 to 99 =
1999. To avert the reversion back to 2000=00 (=1900!), the
KGoths advocate not a "return" to the Gregorian calendar, but
the "continuation" of an "existing Kcalendar", a continuation
which will be achieved by adding not 2 extra digits, but one.
Instead of celebrating the Year 2000, then, the Cybergoths
will be "chilling out" to the year K100. This, apparently, has
brought them into conflict with another ultra-secret web
movement called "HyperC" whose "chronopolitics" are, if
anything, even more weird than those of the K-goths.
Little is known about HyperC, but its sporadically-issued
Internet communiques celebrate the very "return" that the
Kcalendar is designed to avoid. HyperC seem to believe that
computers have a message for us: there is only one century,
that counts from 0 to 99, forever. "Hyper-C are another Cargo
Cult," says Trent. "But the time system they operate with is
very different to that of the Cybergoths. As far as I can glean,
their basic drift is that computers should not be tampered with;
that the Millennium Time-Bomb will explode western
chronology. There are many elements in common with
so-called 'primitive' time; for instance, the idea that there is
only one year.
One phrase keeps recurring; from [the rap group] Public
Enemy:
'Apocalypse been in effect.'" The name HyperC puns on sea
and C, connecting the radical biological theory of hypersea
(which argues that "life on land" is an extension of the ocean)
with key 'C' words such as Century, Cybernetics and Cycle.
Its shady operations are webbed into a submerged world of
what English theorist Kodwo Eshun has called
"eso-terrrorism", an "infowar" conducted principally through
the (hyper) medium of "sonic fiction".
The techno outfit Drexciya are only one example of a wave of
contemporary esoterrorists rumoured to be connected with
HyperC. "In the sleeve-notes to the 'The Quest', their '97
concept double CD," Eshun writes, "Drexciyans are revealed
to be a marine species descended from 'pregnant
American-bound African slaves' thrown overboard 'by the
thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo.
Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A
foetus in its mother's womb is certainly alive in an aquatic
environment. Is it possible that they could have given birth at
sea to babies that never needed air? Recent experiments
have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen, a premature
human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid
oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs. These facts
combined with reported sightings of Gillmen and Swamp
Monsters in the coastal swamps of the Southeastern United
States make the slave trade theory startlingly feasible.'"
Drexicya are part of the "hypersitious" network described by
Eshun in his recent * More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures
in Sonic Fiction*, a network that includes Sun Ra, Public
Enemy, George Clinton and Underground Resistance. For
Eshun, a crucial theme in the sonic "discontinuum" he
describes is abduction. "The idea of alien abduction," he
explains, "means that we've all been living in an alien nation
since the 18th century. The mutation of the African male and
female slaves in the 18th century into what became negro,
and into the entire series of humans that were designed in
America."
Abduction, of course, has been a major preoccupation in the
recent coverage of the Cybergoths, with outraged families
complaining of their children being swallowed into a world of
artificial drugs and schizophrenia. What abduction is really
about, according to Trent, is "missing time." "What's
happening out there?" she asks. "In a sense, you have to
have been abducted to find out." For Trent, the struggle
between Hyper-C and the Cybergoths is part of an ongoing
"time war" ("a war that's only going to get worse, and which
will affect all of us"). The Cybergoths have what Dr Trent calls
an "extremely sophisticated" philosophy of time. "They use
two interrelated diagrams or graphizations: the 'Barker' spiral
and the 'Stillwell' Numogram (which includes the
Pentazygon)."
"The Barker spiral maps a simple set of numeric relations, but
these relations have enormously complex implications,"
insists Dr Polly Wolfe, a colleague of Trent's on Miskatonic's
TimeLapse sub committee. On one side of the spiral, Wolfe
explains, all the numbers add up to 10 ( 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6,
5+5); on the other, "occulted" side, 10 is subtracted, and all
the numbers are "twinned" to make up 9 (0 +9, 1+8, 2+7, 3+6,
4+5). Important here is the operation of "digital reduction", in
which any number can be reduced to a figure between 1 and
9, by adding up its component numerals: for instance, 16 =
1+6 = 7, 17 = 1+7 = 8, etc. One of the many odd effects Wolfe
describes is the interchangable role of 9 and 0. "In digital
reduction, 9 always functions as 0. Try it out. Take, let's say,
92: it = 9 + 2 = 11 = 1 + 1 = 2. The same applies for any
number including 9. In a sense, you can just ignore the 9 but
only because 9, like 0, is everywhere."
"The Numogram could, in some ways, be seen as an
elaboration of the Spiral," Wolfe goes on. The numogram
describes relations that emerge by combining the operations
of digital reduction with those of "triangular numbering". In
triangular numbering, you add up the sum of all the numbers
in the numnerline up to and including the number you are
dealing with; for example, 3 becomes 6: 3 = 1+2+3= 6.
9=1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9= 45 (which, interestingly, digitally
reduces to [4+5 =] 9). Wolfe styles herself an
"After-mathematician" or "Mechanomist." "I'm a dabbler," she
said . "I like to see how numbers behave; I'm not interested in
reducing them to instantiations of some pre-existing logical
system." By contrast, Wolfe insists, insitutionalized
mathematics can be defined by its "hostility to numbers." Dr
Wolfe takes seriously the socalled "numerological" traditions
orthodox mathematics has defined itself against, noting the
correspondences between the radical
proto"after-mathematical" theories she is interested in
Cantor's transfinite numbers, Godel's diagonal numbering
and older, "vernacular numeric systems". "If you look at the
work ethno-mathematicians like [Ohio State University's] Ron
Eglash are doing, you see examples of exactly the kinds of
strange looped coincidences and odd doublings Linda is
interested in.
In one piece, Eglash describes the parallels between
Senagelese sand divination systems and the Cantor set.
Noone is seriously suggesting that there is a line of influence
or evolution here; there are parallel routes to the same
discovery. Numbers and what they do are no more something
we invent than they're already sitting in some Platonic
heaven." Hence mechanomics. "Mech because numeric
dabbling is not representational, but practical. Following what
numbers do is an act of production, but only because all
production is really a matter of discovery not ex nihilo
creation. Making things up is always a matter of subtracting
from zero."
Of key importance here is the role of "infinitesimals", which,
according to Wolfe, are a major theme in "Gothic numerics".
The term Gothic is "not idle. Differential calculus was once
dismissed as a 'Gothic hypothesis', since it posits quantities
irreducible to standard unitary quantification. In a way, zero
so controversial when introduced into Europe is itself a
Gothic quantity. And what the cybergoths call 'Uttunul' is
crucially connected with Cantorian continuum." "Uttunul" is
one of the five "entities" that populate the Cybergoth system.
("It's wrong, strictly speaking, to describe the system as
belonging to the Cybergoths," Trent interjects. "They use it,
but its origins are very mysterious." ) The five entities each
correspond to a "Barkertwinning" or "Syzygy", the pairings
which make up 9 (1/8, 2/7, 3/6, 5/4, 9/0) and which together
constitute the "Pentazygon" ("Five-twin"). The first three of
these beings make up "the cycle of time", whilst the other two
are in some sense "outside" sequential time. The cycle the
system describes, Trent points out, is "multi-levelled"; it is
also, for instance, also a story about the journey from land to
sea and back again. Katak.(5/4) is "associated with the
desert, with heat haze and shimmer. In many ways, its key
features claw marks, teeth seem to recall werewolf legends.
Its time is a time of cataclysm; its appearance always
presages disaster. Sometimes imaged as an hydrophobic or
rabid dog, Katak can partly be characterised by a horror of
what will supercede it in the cycle, Mur Mur (1/8), the
Dreaming demon of submersion.
Mur Mur, meanwhile, carries echoes of the legends of Sea
Beasts and ancient serpents; its time is the Deep Time of the
ocean bed. Like Katak, it too, is horrified by what will follow it
in the cycle; in this case, Oddubb (2/7), the amphibious entity,
associated with the crossing out of water and the acquisition
of lungs. What Mur Mur fears is the division that Oddubb
brings, the splitting of the undivided waters. Oddubb is
defined by ambiguous and elusive movement. As its name
suggests, it is a 'doubleagency', a duplicitous creature. It has
a horror of dryness, of the state of being fully landlocked that
comes with Katak. Which brings us full circle." The two
entities that are "outside time" Djynxx (3/6) "a changeling
figure, defined by a jinking (eratic or zigzagging) movement, a
sudden cutting in or out" and Uttunul (9/0), the "flatline" entity,
connoting "continuum, zero- intensity, void eternity not as
infinitely extended time, but as No-Time" are in many ways
the most fascinating and disturbing of the set, associated as
they are, for Trent, with old mythologies of "child abduction"
and Hell. But is all this merely an attempt to populate a
disenchanted world with old gods? Or is cyberspace and the
world really crawling with these creatures? "Perhaps it's all
make-believe," Trent smiles enigmatically. "But don't
underestimate the power of belief to make things happen."
ccru via katasonix
22.5
11.25
5.56. . .
1. Excerpt from Sector 1.8 of the Hyper-C tone-scientist
manual entitled "Hydrodemonic polyrhythm: operating system
for the redesign of sonic reality", a classic in kode9 sonic
insurgency it unravels Polyrhythmic scaling, Octave stretching
and Breakbeat nesting as short-circuits to turbulence.
Elsewhere in the text, afroatlantian rhythmic futurism's
involutionary trajectory from the full beat of 4/4 funeral
marches-through the beat of 2/4 towards the note of swing
and past the bebop 1/8 note converging with the T1000 liquid
metal hyper-rhythm which surfaced properly only in the early
to mid 1990s. This vast vortical assemblage diagrammed by
this period doubling suggests that the affective potential of the
black atlantic consists of the multiscalar rhythmic composition
of turbulence. Like the cybergoths, HyperC seems addicted to
flatline bliss of micropause abuse different agent, same line.
In a later section of Hydrodemonic polyrhythm we learn
further that this redesign of sonic reality generates genetic
destratification for subaquatic martial arts, for insurgency on
the distributed pod network which the AOE was installing,
constituting a carceral archipelago under the Black Atlantic.
Each pod was allegedly modelled on C20's design wizard
Buckminster Fuller's undersea island, and housed gleaming
sonar tracking machines, tracing out the sonic environment on
digital cartographies of fractal complexity. OPS oceanic
positioning system. . .
2. Riding the surge current of the Syzygy hydrocycle opens
HyperC break asymmetrics to smooth transitions across
rhythmic frequency continuum, camouflaging their sonic
output with the bpm metric, HyperC cluster their productions
around the aganomic speed of 180bpm [kode9 plateau of
continuous variation) and 132bpm (microbreak demonic
two-step a.k.a 'death garage')
3. For the distributed aquaassassins of the HyperC tide, Y2K
constituted nothing less than a scratch on the vinyl of history.
With the Clevel rising all the time, the elusive cult phenomena
were characterised by what Kodwo Eshun has referred to as
'liquidarity', a kind kind of hydrotronic tao of turbulence, geling
distributed agents into a collective viscoelastic polyrhythm.
4. HyperC = as MC Blowfish of Digital Underground proclaims
(((with thanks to Parliament's Psychoaquadoodoo))) are
composed of turtablist tone scientists and connoseurs of the
occult numerical practices of break asymmetrics.
5. For the Dogons of West Africa the 8 ancestors are called
Nommo. The scapegoated ancestor, the Fish Nommo,
Anagonno, is being sacrificed to counteract the disorder of the
universe, of which continual land reclamation operations
constitute only a terrestrial instance(((((((((((((((Could
language really be the earth screaming?))))))) The bifurcation
of Po, the cosmic egg triggers the onset of turbulence, a
cosmic whirlwind. Unlike astrophysicist Steven Hawking who
disregards significant matter prior to the Big Bang, the
Dogons posit the abyssal waters.(see Finch III 1998)
6. Several HyperC designers had watched with fascination as
the infinite regress of negations constituted by the weight of
Hegelian dialectic was passed downstream by the theoretical
terrorists, the Young Black Hegelians. The Quantum Blacks
were on a collision course from the start according to Greg
Tate. The Young Black Hegelians despite their energetic
conceptual insurgency were weighed down by the burden of
contradiction and conflict with which their heritage had
burdened them. The Quantum Blacks therefore were forced
into locating themselves "by bearing the sign of negation to a
reductio ad absurdum, a theoretical black hole. Not a collapse
in the fabric of spacetime, dimension or gravity, but to a fold in
the curtain of race memory."(Tate: 65)
7. "From subverson to submersion." K+ Insurgent phase 1:
Style wars to Race wars Insurgent phase 7: From subversion
to submersion 1. Contrast the martial trajectory of the
Quantum Blacks with the escape velocity of the Dr. Drexel
inspired Drexiyans and you can understand the dismay of
deep-cover HyperC
8. Always, HyperC had sneered from afar at an overexposed
spectacular martial mode of historical monumentalism instead
installing an amphibious geographical nonumentalism and
deploying the anti memory deep time of the spinal fluid ocean.
9. ssssssssssssssssssssset your clocks to maritime with
escalations to violence of the Quantum Black war against the
State (white body politic) which Greg Tate reports. 2.
K2kkkkode for C/katas0n1xentury^
^no_play)back))))))))))))))}}}}}}}}}}}}}}}]]]]]/XMLCDATA
3. Preferring an older operating system HyperC deploy an old
school wetware martial art termed sino
hydrosynthetics)_^inset the sun tzu chipkode9)))) testifying to
a hypercultural matrix which merely spat out the white face of
the Occident.
4. By pure coincidence, Dr. Camelot Drexels research, Tate
tells us "was based on the theory that black peoples
consciousness and social condition could be transformed
through genetic mutation, rather than religious or ideological
conversion. He wanted to transform a select group of black
folks into amphibious creatures who would assist him in
leading an exodus of black people to the Sirius B
system."(Tate: 59)
5. Mobile aquaagent Drexiya has been noted "currently
missing in action" although recent signal suggests sightings in
"eastside sewer system 7 mile and Van dyke area eastside
Detroit Sector." Drexiya, a "wavejumper" from the Special
forces operates on "aquatic assault" and "beach head
preparations" through the "underwater deployment of
Electronic Funk Bombs."
6. Weapon of Choice H2O
7. Rewind the century
8. No playback
9. Set your clocks to maritime. . .
References.
Greg Tate(1994) 'Excerpt from Altered Spade: Readings in
Race Mutation
Theory ' in A. Ross & T. Rose (eds.) Microphone Fiends, New
York:
Routledge.
Charles S. Finch III, M.D. (1998) The Star of Deep
Beginnings: The
Genesis of African Science and Technology, Georgia: Khenti,
Inc.
ccru via katasonix
<nettime> Ccru datastream 9: The year 2000 will happen
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nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Subject: <nettime> Ccru datastream 9: The year 2000
will happen
From: katasonix <data {AT}
katasonix.demon.co.uk>
Date: Fri, 24 Dec 1999 01:21:41 +0000
Sender: owner-nettime-l {AT} bbs.thing.net
Y2k+ datastream 9
KO99
THE YEAR 2000 WILL HAPPEN:
Leaked Memo from the desk of Sir Christopher Stephens
All current indications suggest that our efforts to disappear
so-called Y2K+ activity from the mediascape have been
entirely successful. As we had hoped, the so-called
Millennium Bug problem is generally being treated as a
merely technical matter, in no way involving issues of
calendrics and temporality. Agents need hardly be reminded
of the two principal Y2K + groupings and their affinities. But
since the threat they pose is highly significant, it may be worth
rehearsing their key commitments one more time. What is at
issue for both groups is what they insist upon calling a quote
cyberspace calendar. This is composed of the 2digit dating
system which, if left uncorrected, is likely to produce all the
delightful disasters with which our anti-Y2K propaganda has
familiarised us . But the catastrophe both groups are
interested in concerns time itself. They treat the occupation
and dissemination of the computer calendar as a quote
chronopolitical matter, and contend that all attempts to fix the
Millennium Bug are to be considered acts of quote Gregorian
restoration.
But the two groups differ radically in the set of doctrines they
extrapolate from the cyberspace calendar. One tendency, the
so-called continuists, claim that the cyberspace calendar
establishes our year 1900 as Year Zero: our Year 2000,
therefore, becomes their Year 100. The other tendency, the
so-called centients, make more mystical claims, suggesting
that the cyberspace calendar, beginning at 00 and ending at
99, establishes that there is quote one true century, cycling
around for all time. For all their differences, however, both
groups have a common goal: the destruction of the
Millennium. These time sorcerers are seeking to undermine
western chronology itself.
Naturally, this can't be allowed to happen.
Needless to say, it is not sufficient to oppose Y2K+ activity;
the position must be rendered unimaginable. Y2K must
remain a disaster that happens in time, not to time. I think I
can say with some confidence that The Year 2000 will
happen. And our preparations have been thorough; we are
well-placed to ensure that any Y2K-produced devastation that
does occur will skew things very much in our favour. It will
certainly allow us to try out some interesting political
arrangements pretty much unimaginable given normal
circumstances. It's difficult to imagine many other
contingencies that would allow us to usher in the new
millennium in conditions of martial law.
We can't let apocalypse happen by accident. It has to be
carefully
planned.
A final note. A particularly satisfying aspect of our
counter-dissident activity has been the disabling of the
socalled "esoterrorists", Ccru, who have made it their
business to propagate data about the chrono- dissident cults.
As usual, heavy-handed methods have not been required on
our part. Ccru's so-called hyperstitional sorcery has been
contained, not by outright suppression but by marginalisation.
Standard spoiling techniques have been employed, highly
effectively. Whilst keeping our handiwork hidden, we have
ensured that Ccru has faced the maximum possible
obstruction at every level. A virtual media blackout of its
equinox festival earlier on this year is only the most obvious
example of our agents' work so far. Our operatives, some of
whom have infiltrated into positions very close to Ccru, have
kept Ccru under constant psychic blockade. Their diligence is
admirable. No detail has been overlooked. They have
arranged some particularly delicious nervous breakdowns.
Excellent work. Anyone about to run a demoralisation
campaign should take a look. It's copy book stuff. As always,
however, vigilance is to be maintained. The apparent crushing
of Ccru may be a temporary matter. Faced with time sorcery,
of course, one never knows quite when one has won.
Cs
ccru via katasonix