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 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 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 emerging 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. a 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-scepticism which gives the piece a 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, 1995, was the year of Mathieu Kassovitz's film La Haine and had seen rioting in the Bonnier 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 contained 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 very 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 the 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 Carlisle
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 Enix and Future Loop tracks,
which are all on our SoundCloud. 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 the swarm 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 Cybermetic 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? What do you think of that? Insect. don't have politics. Have you ever heard of
insect politics? Leave me there a fire. Insects don't have politics. Have you ever heard of insect politics? Leave me there a fire. Insects I don't have politics. The Situationists. Neither individuals nor groups. Neither remembered nor expected. Protonic hypercapital digitizes eschatology. Lost futures are formatted for web-based artificial memory trading.
All exclusive definition is banked at like speed. Cryonic mummification into undead spectacle. Real subsumption into the media. Fire economics. How do situational vectors cross World War 4? All code processes, military maneuver, 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 fueled by nostalgic lamentations for the destiny of man especially the white man the one with the face Is it who or what are the situationists? The traumas of exclusions and inclusions was always a spectacular distraction. Only multiplicities, decolonised ants. Warms 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 beaudry arm up to the transition to social circuitry's nostalgically describable as fully alienated the arrival of integrated man white clown face Body carbon sell by Dated. Brand building rhetoric. And you'll see
Paris is a great place. 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. The 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.
Lights going out all over Europe, as peripheral activity cuts through the static power lines of the rotten core. shall witness the day that Babylon shall fall. I don't know what I'm using, shall witness the day that Babylon shall fall. The core masterclass. Relic anthropoid superstata to condemn Hitler, even in private. Whilst applauded as first grand wizard meat puppet of electro-corporate old-oxidant power, who 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 Kane Jesus video, whilst K-Jungle spreads across the delocalizing periphery, teaching itself to escape. Well here we come, jungle bass wise, and I'm otherwise starting to realize this trickle written wise. Jungle bass wise.
Do you really think SF Capital lets Nike fly to make decisions that classify as important? There's no doubt anywhere that matters. Simply fact. Debate is idiot. Distraction. Humanity is fucked. Real machines never closed up inside an architecture. Schizo-capital fission consists of vectors dividing between two non-communicating fila of impersonal multiplicity. First, pyramid control structures.
White clown pixel phase. Concentrational social segments. EU2 integrated history horizon. Well here it comes, trouble base wise, and I'm otherwise about to realise the stricter rhythm wise. Trouble base wise. Trouble base wise. Are you ready? Second. Jungle war machine. Darkening cutscene. Cultural distribution threshold. Intended nail variation flattened into un-geometrized periphery. No community, no dialectic, no plans for an alternative state.
Six. 1996. Bavaro. Command Corps. USA, EU2, China. Metalocal command center. Target areas. Totalized planetary space. Mode. Photonic networks. Neo-organic hypercapital. Neuro-programming. AI capital media network confusion. constant entertainment extermination Voodoo is the only coherently functional contemporary mapping practice
it alone deals with zombie production systems Low electronic traffic jamming, rhythmic decoding tactics, and the interlinking of units of distributional collectivities with abysm waves and becoming snakes and snakes. Agitational micro-nomad cultures melted out across black body heat. Not remotely alien. It never came from this place. Increased current. My dreams.
No longer an epiphenomenal head case, the body escapes limb by limb from European organisation. The jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic bass 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. Your self-esteem as its reactor core melts down. Jungle Technics severs the cerebral cortex
from their spinal columns of support and cuts copyright adrift from its feudal docking station. Libraries burning and babbling. Largely 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 a silicon flips of speeds and slates
That combusts slag heaps of historical carbon data But the past is past Left behind in a museum case of Oedipal mummies Voting dust and warrants 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 asophallic matrix, traversed by cars geared by basematic transmissions and orbited by nomadic satellites of clubs, clandestine studios and the black economies of dub plates and mixtapes. The dream of the year! Tread out of control.
A pair of spectacular immersive tactility with no humanist vision can put you in touch with. Smiling Californian cyber-optimism is as grotesquely archaic as scouting out in Euro-pessimism.
Carbon dating rescales them in anthropomorphic terms, arranging them in good order. Historical stages 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 lines,
become imperceptible in order to proceed, tracking chromatic radiance of intensity across the convo wasteland predator the space-time of hyper-commodicization is a known-wise zone of mass clusters where the promise disintegrates into unintentional webs of extraordinary 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. A bruised shape and sounds merge and re-scripts, but they can re-permutate into the virtual
machinery of the sampler, while social fabric walks into localised chaos mode. Suddling 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. Every camp of nomad cultures melting in the heat of the chase. Alien agents are loving it. Current. Get it off!