CCRU Sightings

CCRU Sightings: Encounters w/ the Outside (or, Capitalism a Love Story) Psuedoanon4Q248 0

FOREWORD PART I: LIBIDINAL BASE MATERIALISM Ra/stu/mblings Casual Capitalism Boomer Materialism PART II: TEMPLEXITY & ACCELERATION Templexity, or Alan Yang’s Demonic Breakfast Code K-N-M-F-L-D-G-M(Y) / Precursor of the Dark 90s L: A The Dark 90s and Quernomic Science PART III: HYPERSTITION Lemurian Time-War on TV Y2Kevin Space(y) Time Nick Land’s Crypto Netflix Brand (Stremonism) LOVE? 1

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings FOREWORD It is as a friend and colleague that I state the strangeness of this ‘book;’one that only gets worse as it persists. Not so much a book really as it is a strange assemblage of objects - videogames, energy drinks, politics, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, The Spicegirls, Smashmouth, PBS Kids, Netflix, etc. – strung together by a loose thread; a junk drawer that pulls itself together into a cheap, self-deprecating humor-riddled text composed of a lengthy genealogy of nihilism sandwiched between anecdotes on writing and a Q-Anon flavored conspiracy theory. When the ‘book’ is not superficial, it’s confused. The author seems to consistently interchange ‘Nick Land’ and ‘the CCRU’ while overlooking the other members of the collective - excluding the occasional shallow mention of Mark Fisher, and the singular token gesture made towards the woman of the CCRU of course. In other words, for a book ‘on’ the CCRU, it is severely lacking in the CCRU. This can be explained away – as the author repeatedly did to me after requesting I edit and introduce this work – with the phrase ‘one does not write on the CCRU, one only writes alongside the CCRU’ which the author claims to have picked up from someone named Laboria Cuboniks. Perhaps because of this – the very ‘hyperreal’ nature of this ‘thing’ called the CCRU – the ‘book’ presents as more of a text on reading and writing than it is a solid piece of writing on a subject itself to be read. Writing turned on itself for itself, not writing on or for an other. This is most clearly seen in the first chapter which discusses the act of writing as a crude process of reaping enjoyment from wasting time. One does not write to communicate as much as one writes to rid oneself of a persistent restlessness. One writes for the same reason one urinates, defecates, or ejaculates. Building on this approach to writing, in the chapters to follow – or Part I of the book - the author expounds upon a somewhat childish – in that it is partially centered on videogames and demonic energy drinks - and somewhat reactionary ‘theory’ (description?) of capitalism; a description which many are likely to find disagreeable if not simply useless. From here, Part II proceeds at the pace of a fever dream high on ideas of reference as the author jumps around from politics, to a much too reductive history of nihilism, to British and American pop music. Finally, Part III, makes attempts at laying out a conspiracy theory composed of big name celebrities, TV, and Nick Land. This is surely the weakest section of the book. The last section, which is technically outside of Part III, returns to the subtitle of the book – love - but seems out of place, and rushed. These reasons, among others – i.e. much of the content is relegated to footnotes or parenthesis, sometimes brackets within brackets, that leave the reader jumping around, and ultimately losing track of their place - are why the author has settled for the title CCRU Sightings: Encounters with the Outside (or Capitalism, a Love Story). It is an exercise in exploring Landian thought as it lives in the world at large and how the fictions of the CCRU make themselves real – and how we love hating our love of it. - Danicha Berkriel-Larkes, PHD, PsyaD 1

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings PART I: LIBIDINAL BASE MATERIALISM If you guys end Capitalism, I’m just gonna start it up again at my place. Come on over, I’ll grill up some burgers, we got a cooler full of cold Ultra Zero Monsters, you can take to the couch if the caffeine crash hits you hard (or if it’s a case of hysteria).Everyone’s invited, but everyone might not want to come. Everyone’s invited, but everyone might not survive. 2

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Ra/stu/mblings Urbanomic is abundantly clear on who should not submit papers to them: if your work resembles “Deleuzian Beat Poetry,” “First-person account of philosophical epiphany,” or “Nick Land Fanfic,” get lost.1 It’s clear why these are undesirable, but which is the desirable path? To withdraw from personologized Deleuzian word salad and Landroidism? Or might it be to go in the opposite direction? To go further still. Not to withdraw from these banalities, but to accelerate them. Yes. Let’s do that, and in doing so be fully aware that we are giving into another banality - the meta-banality feedback loop of using Nick Land to write on Nick Land (like making a pot of coffee with Monster energy drink in lieu of water…). So, if you here for the banal, the stupid, and the unnecessary, you haven’t seen anything yet. This ‘book’ is all that and more. To even call it a book would be an insult to the reader’s intelligence (though if you’re already here, you’re probably stupid). It’s no book, it’s a series of sleep deprived, caffeine charged, free associations in vague reference to meme-culture gone wrong. To be precise, posts from my blog2 over the past year which, through emphasizing various points of (fictional) resonance and (paranoiac) ideas of reference, I have reinforced into a narrative that explores how the viral demons appropriated by Nick Land and the CCRU manifest unintentionally but meaningfully in pop culture at large; this text’s an incident report documenting fictions that have made themselves real and not yet happened alike. If Nick Land is meth, and Zizek is the Elvis of philosophy,3 connecting highbrow theory to low culture, then this ‘book’ is Elvis on meth gripping his copy of Fanged Noumena as he sits on the toilet, sweat pouring off his bloated junky face, binging the 33rd season of The Big Bang Theory on Netflix. This book is ‘The Big Bang ‘Theory’ of (conspiracy) theory. A hyper paranoiac coincidence intensifier. Hyper banged noumena conspiracy theory. In other words, the book’s a stupid mess, the outcome of redundant signification, a notion not unfamiliar to Land. In the preface to his first book Thirst for Annihilation (1992) he writes: “…this is a text [wherein]...There is not a single sentence which is other than a gratuitousness and a confusion…Each appeal that is· made to the name 'Bataille' [Land] shudders between a pretension and a joke” (xi) “…this book…has scratched about for needles in the most destitute gutters of the Earth, cold-turkey crawling on its knees, and begging the academy to pimp it ever deeper into 1 https://www.urbanomic.com/contact/ https://psuedoanalysis.blogspot.com/ 3 https://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/movies/the-elvis-of-cultural-theory/ 2 3

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings abuse. Ever since it became theoretically evident that our precious personal identities were just brand-tags for trading crumbs of labour-power on the libidino- economic junk circuit, the vestiges of authorial theatricality have been wearing thinner. Who cares what 'anyone' thinks, knows, or theorizes about Bataille [Land]? (pg. xiii). 4 Yes, ‘who cares’ is the veritable pathos of this text from start to finish. Writing’s always been kind of a fucked-up joke for Land. Years after his first book, sometime between 2005-2007 in a text titled A Dirty Joke, Land reflects on his earlier writing habits, possibly the very writing of Thirst for Annihilation itself (a book, so the hyperstition goes, ‘written in between deaths’): “Its tool of choice, at that time, the sacred substance Amphetamine…After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it was, by any reasonable standard, profoundly insane…During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had followed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile 'writing' practices - it still pretended to be 'getting somewhere' and was buoyant with ardent purpose, but that is another story (an intolerably intricate and pointless one).”5 Likewise, writing’s always been a kind of fucked-up joke for myself; an act suspended between humor and horror. Why did I continue to write this book knowing it will be read by few, with an even fewer finding it worthwhile? To waste time (and accelerationism is a theory of time). Afterall, who cares what anyone thinks about Land and the CCRU, never mind me? We’re all just here for a quick fix of whatever it is that gets us going. Then quick fixes it is. Urbanomic playfully denounces Deleuzian Beat poetry. When I read Land’s essay Meltdown (1994) aloud to my girlfriend, she says it sounds like ‘cyberpunk slam poetry’ – so here’s a verse, a quick oral fix(ation): This book thrums / Nick comes undone / the Reader? Fucked. Thrum: “This book was supposed to be finished at Easter, like God. It will take longer. God sighs, he can't get it together, time is passing, he is losing all sense for time…Am I not the creator of a Hell?” I can’t finish this fucking ‘book.’ Undone: 4 Nick Land, Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism, Preface xi and xii 5 A Dirty Joke, Fanged Noumena (pg. 630). 4

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings “Sometimes I wonder what is to be involved in writing this book…The protocols of scholarship have always confused me. It is 03:l06 in the morning and as I lean against the wall my finger runs across a line in the plaster, a fissure, dissociation ...Momentarily I know one thing (alone) : Bataille's most unfailing signature is spiritual disease.”7 Why do I write this? And worse, why do you read it? Fucked: I stand nauseously as a failed academic turned semi-successful psychotherapist turned lost blogger. January 28 [2+8=10 or 1 and 0], 1986 [Land is born 1/17/1962, not far off from my birthdate]; my career never got off the ground (Professor Boom). Note – or my Deleuzian beat meat poetry: No longer write in the name of those myths / that undergraduate introductory classes tend to convince / Like Guattari said, say stupid shit / Who cares what anyone thinks? To be clear, there is no explication of Land or the CCRU here, only further degradation, obfuscation, fragmentation. Once you get over the glaring error that I collapse and conflate Nick Land and the CCRU knowing damn well the CCRU never existed, and if it were to, it would be a collective irreducible to one masculine name, you will find that in place of clever methodology of number and letter – i.e. The CCRU’s numogram, Land’s Qwernomics, etc., the reader will instead be subjected to armchair pseudo-kabbalah; instead of horror, comedy – stupid dad jokes, no Cthulhu in sight; instead of rigor, sloth mixed with manic energy drink abuse, etc. The reader will not leave with a better idea, a bigger picture, a clearer method, whatever, etc., - they will leave with a hangover, regret, a bad taste in one’s mouth, fragments (glass embedded in skin after a car crash or gas station mishap). And there is no intersection, interpolation, or interrogation of anyone, only a display of items, an index of objects forced together through paranoiac synthesis – a CCRU-assemblage. It’s ‘cool’ – as the kids say - to say these kinds of things these days. It inoculates the author against critiques of laziness, incompetence, shit level writing. But this is ain’t it, mane. I mean that I write for the same reason you jerk off – to narcissistically and selfishly produce substance and in doing so experience pleasure; to squander excess This ‘book’ is that kind of waste. 6 Consistent with the CCRU’s research, and Land’s resonance with 3s (his Twitter pic being 333 on a digital clock), this is a reference to earlier in the Thirst for Annihilation: “It is 03.30 in the morning. Let us say one is 'drunk' – an impoverished cipher for all those terrible things one does to one's nervous-system in the depths of the night - and philosophy is 'impossible' (although one still thinks, even to the point of terror and disgust) (xiii-xiv). 7 Thirst for Annihilation pg. 76 and 79 5

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings With this said, it’s still interesting to posture as an academic; to pose questions if only to leave the reader burdened with having to answer them on their own; to leave them feeling frustrated, confused, and disappointed (not unlike the lover of a chronic masturbator[coomer]). One such question is ‘what machine parts make up the Terminator unit known as Nick Land, what is its relationship to the CCRU, and how does this all relate to 21st century culture at large?’ The right answer? Lemurs. The wrong answer? Organized ‘ontologically,’ and how they appear in this text: Libidinal base hypermaterialism, Templexity, Accelerationism, and Hyperstition. Dermatologically: the machine parts are cancer cells composed of no clear or distinct boundaries or limits, only technoflesh meshings of cybernetic cycles bleeding into each other here and there. Sarkon’s signature blend of dark roast coffee. Content and expression, expression and content, form and substance, substance and form, the medium is the message, fiction and reality scissor-fuck. Open sores. Leaking wounds. For Land, writing, in addition to being a kind of dirty joke, is a dirty gash, an opening and exploring of an unclean wound, being vulnerable to disease: “ ‘I' am (alone)…as the betrayal of communication, as a festering wound, in which the monadic knitting of the flesh loses itself in a mess of pus and scabs, etc. etc .. ..(xv)…communication, which means the violation of individuality, autonomy, and isolation, the infliction of a wound through which beings open out into the community of senseless waste. Literature is a transgression against transcendence, the dark and unholy rending of a sacrificial wound, allowing a communication more basic than the pseudo-communication of instrumental discourse…(xix)” “…the personality was not a reason for celebration, but rather a wound, or a gore-spattered cell in which the futile horror of existence was exhibited as squalid suffering, and occasionally, in a few select specimens, as tragedy” (pg. 15). The wound, as Land points out, is likened to the vulva, not because of castration, but in spite of it (pg. 89), as “everything that flows freely [is] like a wound” (pg. 109). With this gesture, for Land and the CCRU, communication is not signification anymore. It’s diagrammatic, viral, infectious. As Deleuze and Guattari write in A Thousand Plateaus: “There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author)…one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image, no signification,no subjectivity. The book as assemblage with the outside, against the book as image of the world” (pg. 23). 6

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings A book does not represent facts about an outside world with a more or less clear degree of correspondence between representation and real, the book is itself a machine part of the real that makes things happen in real time, not unlike how, as the legend goes, Lovecraft’s ‘fictional’ Necronomicon began to show up in various ‘fictional’ universes until it was (un)willed into existence: “booksellers and librarians receive[ed] many requests for it; pranksters...listed it in rare book catalogues, and a student smuggled a card for it into the Yale University Library's card catalog.”8 As Peter Vysparov wrote to Echidna Stillwell in ’49: “We are interested in fiction only insofar as it is simultaneously hyperstition – a term we have coined for semiotic productions that make themselves real…this is the…loop of Cthulhu-fiction: who writes, and who is written? It seems to use the fabled Necronomicon…is this kind” (pg. 579-580).9 Through a hauntology of hyperrealviral ( 𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑙 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒 ), fictions become real. Books collect coincidences into resonant columns that diagram new vectors. Like carrying a little word-gun in your pocket (think eXistenz meets Videodrome). 8 Wikipedia cites de Camp’s 1976 Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy, 9 Excerpt from Origins of the Cthulhu Club, originally published under the CCRU in the late 90s, republished and accessed in Nick Land’s collected writings Fanged Noumena. 7

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Casual Capitalism A meaningful conceptualization of Capitalism cannot be separated from a discussion of the family, and of love, or at least desire and appetite, and appetite is only ever about sex or eating; it’s only every about libido and its trapped investment in the family and its forgotten investment in the Outside; investment in inner milieus (a folded-in Outside) used to traverse the outside (inside = outside trapped on the inside; deep inside = deep outside. feedback). The political right will conceptualize this Capitalism-Desire circuit in a positive light – Capitalism gives us objects we want, the strong thrive, the weak die, family is to be conserved, etc. - while the left will do the opposite and claim family is to be overcome, and that capitalism produces a false desire, gives us things we don’t want (commodities), and causes many to starve while some get fat (inequality). The mouth – the somatic territory most associated with appetites – is from birth fused with sexuality and nutrition, i.e., vitality, life. Sexual excitement and food / nutrients are one from the start. The infant latches onto the nipple and feeds, a concrete necessity to live, and an early gratification that sets the bedrock for later enjoyment. When the child has had its fill, it is the father who partitions the infant to another room in order to suck on the mother’s nipples, not for milk but for erotic pleasure. The anus is just another kind of mouth. Both produce and cut off flows; the mouth that bites sausage links; the anusausage machine that produces phallic shaped feces (and in some nonhetero sexualities, the anus is a mouth that takes in a phallus, a different kind of sausage…). As Deleuze and Guattari remind us – probably more Guattari given his literal anorexic, bulimic, and becoming-woman tendencies – the mouth confuses itself for an anus when it gets stuck between a breathing machine, an eating machine, and a vomit machine. The sausage – a culinary turd - binds all of this into one. Sausages are imperative to understanding Capitalism and desire. Mark Fisher begins his lecture Terminator vs. Avatar by quoting Lyotard’s ‘evil book’ Libidinal Economy (1974) at length: “…one can enjoy swallowing the shit [cumshot] of capital, its materials, its metal bars, its polystyrene, its books, its sausage pates… - and because instead of saying this, which is also what happens in the desires of those who work with their hands, arses and heads, ah, you become a leader of men…: ah, but that's alienation, it isn't pretty, hang on, we'll save you from it we will work to liberate you from this wicked affection for servitude, we will give you dignity. And in this way you situate yourselves on…the moralistic side where you desire that our capitalized desires be totally ignored…you have to tell yourselves: how they must suffer to endure that! And of course we suffer, we the capitalized, but this does not mean that we do not enjoy, nor that what you think you can offer us as a remedy…does not disgust us even more. We abhor therapeutics…we prefer to burst under the 8

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don't wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either.”10 This should require no unpacking for the reader, but if one longs for explanation: the vulgar Marxist misunderstands that, not unlike smoking cigarettes, the consumer enjoys that which he also suffers from – Capitalism and all of its commodities - and in misunderstanding this, erects himself as a moralistic savior – the contemporary left’s savior complex - for a people who don’t really want to be saved.11 This excerpt is from the written text of the lecture. In the spoken version, Fisher does pause to bring extra attention to ‘sausage pate’ but does not expand on it adequately. He only alludes to what I will mention here – that the sausage is a perfect little symbol for capitalism. Not merely because it is all at once a powerful phallus, an impotent turd, a tasty meat, and a disgusting mistake; not just because it evokes the image of the conveyor belt, i.e., mass factory production by machine, and not simply because it evokes the turn of phrase ‘how the sausage gets made,’ i.e. the dirty and disgusting stuff that goes on behind the scenes of the pretty commodity on the shelf; yes, these are true, but the real reason the sausage is the perfect symbol it’s because the sausage is composed of material – often waste from other higher-end culinary activities - removed from its given territory, ground beyond recognition, mixed with other material not organic or natural to it, resealed in a new foreign case, linked to copies of itself, and eaten in lower to middle class establishments such as the family home or a pub. The sausage – a little simulacrum, a little assemblage - instantiates the effectiveness of mass production and the callousness of the consumer (c[ons]oomer) who desires mass-produced garbage, in addition to the fusion – or collapse - of distinctions such as waste and production, inside and outside, high and low, etc. If capitalism has ever been good at anything it’s been good at smashing together things that don’t belong, scrambling the (eggs) codes, dismantling distinctions, and repurposing its waste as something to be integrated into the productive cycle as to maximize efficiency and profit. 10 The entire 2012 lecture is published in #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader, 2014, pg. 335-346. The audio can be found on Youtube under the same name. 11 And why would anyone want to be saved? Just as Deleuze, Guattari, Lyotard and Land show, if capitalism is the product of incentives and drives decoupled from the human agent and intensified into a process of maximum efficient density, a process that reaches back around to retroactively hijack and reprogram the incentives and drives that formed it, and if the process can be leveraged or appropriated in a way that begets more enjoyment than it does little-death, then why would we not assume sausage beats communism every time? This is a simple fact any psychoanalyst knows all too well about his/her analysand and their symptoms - there is always more incentive to keep to what one knows, even if it means to remain ill, than there is to try something new. Such is love. Many people follow this to the grave. 9

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings In fact, if we push Lyotard to its limit – at which point he starts to look more like Bataille, the other great libidinal economist – we find that there is really no such thing as waste. Excluding its likely concrete origins in early group living situations where there was a clear incentive and social function to depositing deadly and unusable material outside the camp or village (i.e., the bubonic plague was accelerated by failing to separating waste from living spaces appropriately), waste is a theological or moral archaism likely derived from an earlier pre-religious taboo. A relic of the infant’s attempt to curb its sexual, nutritional, and fecal drives and appetites to the parent’s pressures – ‘piss and shit in the toilet, not in your pants, not on the floor’ and its Oedipal variant ‘Oh, and don’t shit where you eat, kid!’ (don’t fuck mommy, don’t suck daddy, look outside the family). An artifact of God’s holy somatic architecture (the priests in school growing up told us God put the anus far away from the mouth intentionally, mirroring the need to keep the holy and the profane separate, and its inverse, the common Atheist rhetoric against intelligent design – ‘God would’t put a playground next to a sewage system). Afterall, social transgression is merely an excess of the social, not something outside of it.12 Likewise, waste is production of excess or the excess of production that cannot ever be spent or invested. Capitalism is never threatened by the weight of its own excess, it always ‘reterritorializes’ as to ensure more deterritorialization, reengineers its weaknesses as strengths, etc. Its waste is recuperated as production (the infantile fantasy of being self-sufficient – ‘I don’t need no mamma-papa to feed me, I can eat my own poop’ – seen in the perversities and fetishisms of those who auto-fellatiate, inject their own feces into their veins, fold their own penises into their anuses, etc.). Capitalism always shits where it eats. We’ve seen this coprophilic Capitalist in practice with Bill Gates’ –who it is rumored has dark, occultist connections himself to the CCRU13 - recent drinking of water scientifically processed out of feces.14 We see it more interestingly intensified in the video simulation experiment (vidya game, the kids call it) Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, a sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent. The latter is a Lovecraftian horror experience rumored to have been developed under the cultural influences of the CCRU, the former a strict and explicit lesson in Capitalist cybernetics. Thus, the pair (syzygy) of games, when synthesized, create a Lovecraftian capitalist cybernetic simulation, or a simulation bastard child of the CCRU. 12 As Slavoj Zizek rightly points out, to shake someone’s hand is a polite act. To shake their hand too long is to transgress the unsaid rule and commit a dirty act. 13 ‘I Was a CCRU Meat Puppet,’ Justine Morrison in the CCRU collected texts. 14 https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/01/10/376182321/bill-gates-raises-a-glass-t o-and-of-water-made-from-poop 10

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings In Machine for Pigs, the story goes like this: in 1899 (a critical calendric limit between the second industrial revolution and the machine age, a heyday for rough and tough capitalism. Year -1 in what the CCRU refer to as K-Time)15 London (about 2 hours away from Warwick, home of the CCRU), a small-time butcher (not to be confused with a ‘time-butcher’) turned big-time industrial capitalist (and also big time-industrial-capitalist) mogul transforms his mansion into part bourgeoisie family home part production line for his business, swine slaughter (here the industrialist really ‘shits where he eats’ in transgressing the taboo of mixing the work place with the home). In a beautifully horrific scene where the viewer is subjected to the fetishistic rigidified motions of cold, borderline-sexual machines, the narrator describes a process wherein every bit of ‘waste’ produced while mechanically breaking down pigs for sausage is fed back into the machine to be used as fuel to further increase the machine’s productivity. The pig is broken down into its parts, the blood is caught in a large tray, and finally drained into a heated vat where it is turned into steam to power the machine. Gore – the inside turned out, or waste - is recaptured in the production cycle. As Margarita Triana has shown in her book Gore Capitalism (2010) it is not uncommon for Capitalism to work in the currency of blood, guts, and dismemberment. Gore Capitalism is a sublimated Coprophilic Capitalism. While Western Capitalism gets the silver or bronze for this kind of Gore-feces-Capitalist waste-to-production magical transformation, Eastern capitalism without a doubt seizes the gold.16 Take China’s strain of capitalism latent in its Communism. Though the west feeds its waste back into its machine to produce more product and therefore more waste and therefore more product… (and remember they’re the same thing…form and expression are relative…), it’s still tabooed, cut off, projected, ejected, etc. In the culinary arts of the West the bones, gristle, and gore are separated out from the good flanks of meat. This is not strange when viewed historically and materially as a a religiously or politically charged standing army (Rome, Germany, etc.) needs a good cut of meat, not fatty gristle and bones. In China, whose religion and politics is markedly different, no part of the animal – brain, knuckle, organs, etc. - goes to waste. This is, after all, one theory of how the zombie-apocalypse-like C(ovid19)oronavirus originated and spread – either through ‘unclean’ culinary practices, or Capitalist desire on the part of a lab tech worker who sold lab test animals to a food market. The virus is torn between a narrative of desire for transgressive waste, or transgressive surplus. 15 In K time, or Y2K time, 1900 = year 0 The Machines of The Matrix (1999) seize the Platinum medal, however. Humans are grown in unimaginably vast fields to serve as batteries for machines. Morpheus tells Neo “We are, as an energy source, easily renewable and completely recyclable, the dead liquified and fed intravenously to the living.” Technocapitalist hypermachines reengineer the threshold of life to exist in perpetual stasis. A big, fat, fully, energetic zero. 16 11

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings This scales up to the philosophy of government as well – form the lowliest farmer to the highest militant, everything and everyone has its part. Take Deleuze and Guattari’s discussion of Marx’s defunct and allegedly orientalist concept of ‘Asiatic production’ which for Marx and D and G has a connection to China. Per their discussion, a higher level of organization – universal and macro - forms alongside the rural, local, and micro. The former does not preclude the latter; the latter retain some of their unique qualities but are subsumed and appropriated by the former, the higher unity. An old social organization is not replaced or negated by a new one as in vulgar dialectics, the two (or more) organizations coexist and produce something more than the sum of their parts. There is no negation here, only disjunctive and connective synthesis. No waste, only production and hyperproduction. Partial-object machines interlock with partial-object machines, etc. Peter Sloterdijk makes this connection for us. Writing on Communist China’s attempts to economically overcome the capitalist West, he points out: “A huge propaganda apparatus advertised for years the idea that China’s welfare and the glorious revolution would succeed if…the production of iron was relocated from the cities into the villages…Hundreds of millions of clueless…reluctant farmers were forced together…their motivation and ability to work weakened…they saw themselves confronted with the task of constructing primitive furnaces…overnight…The officially proclaimed goal was to surpass the per capita production of England within fifteen years. The results of these frenetic activities, which quickly turned out to be useless, were put into remote lumps and piled in steel mountains…”17 Sloterdijk, like Lyotard, is arguing against the progressive tendency to valorize the working class by forcing upon them impossible situations in the name of an abstract revolution no one wants (except for maybe big Daddy). Though valid, Sloterdijk is still not nihilistic enough in his reliance on an implicit moral critique, the idea that waste is to be frowned upon; that maybe China could’ve put that steel to good use, etc. This lack of appropriate nihilism brings us back to Land’s (re)animation of Bataille in Thirst for Annihilation – the solar economy as the economy; the sun, Schreber’s Solar anus as explicated by D and G, squanders itself aimlessly but coincidentally in the direction of the human, the human sucks up the anal-sun to live, and life becomes expenditure and nothing more. To live – to love, to desire, to reproduce – is to spend, to squander, to produce an excess and in the same move throw it away and in doing so enjoy it. The sun – both the cosmic phallus, mouth, and anus – is productive waste. 17 Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, 2012, pg. 172 12

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings It is at this point we need to address the elephant in the room. The specter in the discourse. We must turn Marx on his head. Whereas he had us believe that Capitalism imbued us with - duped really –a false consciousness, into having false wants, fabricated desires, etc., and where the liberal intellectual Freudians of Freudomarxism took this and said ‘Capitalism acts as a repressive entity, convincing us we want this when we really want that,’ we say this: as far as the ‘first world’ is concerned, we want capitalism. We’ve always wanted capitalism. There is no want outside of capitalism. This want for Capitalism and Capitalist want – or simply want - is known and is repressed and the repressed is then inserted into the structures of desire as the thing we think we really want. We think we want out and that our escape has been foreclosed and therefore our want to escape repressed, but we really want nothing more than to forever remain inside the belly of the beast - and that scares us. 13

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Boomer Materialism Notions of Stockholm syndrome carry no explanatory or descriptive value here. We’re not held captive because captivity implies an outside, an escape. Capitalism is already always the Outside. We’re all Kapitalists now. It can’t be proven or disproven, and there’s reason to want to believe it. I don’t expect you to. It can only be expressed as a horror from the future. To appropriate Dr. Weir of the SS Event Horizon, ‘where we’re going, we don’t need proofs and beliefs to see…’ Boomer fatalism collapsed into to sci-fi horror. Similarly, Nick Land, our sci-fi horror loving Kantian boomer – as we will see – proclaims “We are all kantians now”18 in Thirst for Annihilation. Thirst, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, is Kant’s preferred analogy for his model of productive desire. Decades later, this still holds on a colloquial level as its undeniably tied to appetite, a connection that goes beyond it simply being a counterpoint to solid food. As is obvious, the word means ‘a feeling or needing to drink a liquid,’ but the contemporary meaning it has taken on - ‘thirsting’ for women, ‘thirst trapping,’ etc. – gets us to the more interesting meaning, the sexualized (or desexualized) appetite. To consolidate this into a slogan that captures food, sex, and time – sausage produces thirst; thirst produces sausage (chicken and egg question). Afterall, life begins as a liquid in the form of semen, gestation occurs in amniotic fluid, and breastmilk is perhaps the first thing we thirst for. Early biological life, much like left leaning contemporary sexual theorists argue, is indeed fluid. And just like that, sexual and nutritional appetite converge yet again. But we’re not talking about fun, sexual liberation. No, we’re on about dark libidinal thirst. The story goes like this: once upon a time on some Lacanian webpage which has since 404d, the famous excerpt of Zizek about fist-fucking and Deleuze's 'expansion of the concept'19 had developed quite the comments section. 'This seems silly, buts its actually really good philosophy!' said one commenter, speaking for the horde. We could say a lot about this – like that if Deleuze were to have fistfucked anyone it would’ve been a tossup between Guattari or Foucault, but I’ll let someone else write that erotic fan-theoryfiction (and we’ll see if it makes itself real) – but we're only bringing it up to say one thing; to introduce a structure, to get us to what’s really important, what’s really 'good philosophy:’ Nick Land, the CCRU, and energy drinks. That is, our erotic-fan-theoryfiction version of the 'fist fucking is actually deeper than you think' meme is ‘the 30-Year-Old Boomer / Monster Ultra Zero Meme has more philosophical depth than initially appears.’ ‘The Boomer’ is loosely understood as an old conservative man. On the web, for some reason it became linked to monster energy drink. One website 18 19 pg 134. The Ongoing Soft Revolution, 2004. Accessed https://www.lacan.com/zizek-inquiry1.html 14

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings defines boomer as: "A person over the age of 30 that likes 80s Rock and Monster Energy Zero Ultra, that wants things to go back to the way they were."20 More precisely, the term refers to anyone born in America between 1946 and 1964. Though this period could easily be associated with left progressive movements such as the destruction and trial of the Nazis, Civil Rights movement, and Sexual liberation, it’s used more to emphasize conservative values such as wonton participation in Capitalism and what might be polemically referred to as 'moderate,' 'centrist,' or 'reformist,' political figures such as Bill Clinton (who we talk more about later) and George W. Bush who were both born during the qualifying time period. In short, and as mentioned above, boomer indicates the trope of an old man whose views are not 'progressive' in relation to the current 'zeitgeist,’ and considering progressiveness continually raises the bar for what is considered progressive (what was progressive in the 80s or 90s is considered heinous and immoral in the 2000s...), the concept is, to reference Zizek and Deleuze above, expanding to include different populations and generations. Consistent with this narrative, a study that is circulated often within the most superficial subgroups of the internet indicates that boomers share more "fake news" than other populations.21 Given the lack of ambiguity within the political narrative milieu– i.e. there is little to no discursive space for the concept of 'left wing fake new’ (which is simply called ‘theory’) unless it’s one leftist using misinformation against another - we all know this just means 'Boomers are dumb idiot right wingers.’ One archived Reddit post achieves maximum narrative density: "The meme is often depicted by a 'Wojack' with a wispy mustache doing mundane adult activities such as mowing his lawn at 10:00 am while sipping a White Monster Energy Drink…The Monster fits in to the meme as many Gen X'ers have eschewed alcohol for Energy Drinks."22 Here we see the link between the Boomer meme – a pastiche of the jaded rightwinger – and a specific energy drink product concerning zero become reinforced. It gets more interesting. The now defunct Twitter account 'get a load of this boomer' (@GetbBoomer), whose avatar was the wojack holding a monster 20 https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=boomer 21 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/10/18175913/facebook-fake-news-2016-elec tion-republicanstrump and https://www.businessinsider.com/baby-boomers-more-likely-to-share-fake-news-on-facebookstudy-2019-1?utm_source=reddit.com 22 https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/92oxe0/whats_this_new_meme_about_ monster_energy_zero/ and https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/30-year-old-boomer/ 15

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings zero ultra, had 12 tweets its entire year long existence. 10 of the 12 - and 10 in a row I should add - were retweets of Nick Land (@Outsideness). The joke here is that Nick Land is a Boomer whose philosophical views are 'edgy' and therefore illegitimate (which would catch on months later on a grander scale when ‘Ok Boomer’ boomed into existence as a new strain of this meme). Nick Land and Monster Zero Ultra resonate. There is a more interesting connection between the Monster Ultra Zero boomer trope and Nick Land and it starts with my synthesizing two of Urbanomic’s vices from earlier – a first person account of a philosophical epiphany and Nick Land fanfic: long before I knew of the boomer meme I was ‘using’ Monster Zero Ultra energy drinks - not unlike Land’s ‘artificially stimulant induced insomnia writing sessions’ - to work long continuous hours, and stay up late reading and writing. I was drawn to the particular beverage not only because of the flavor and smoothness, but also the lack of sugar and calories – the ‘zero.’ While sucking one down I was struck with an interesting thought: 'If this has Zero, nothing, nihil, in it, how is it that my body is producing so much energy from it? If there are no calories to burn, what is my body transforming or processing into power?' The body makes something out of nothing; it makes 1 out of 0; it pulls something out of thin air. Magic vitalism. Vital overflow emanating from nothing. Two cans of Zero-ultra=15hours of me-body-production. 2x0=15; 15/0=2. I am spending energy I don't have. My body is writing energy checks it can't cash. Its libidinal economy is autoproducing itself. A libidinal economy balanced on a big fat zero. Of course, there are vitamins and caffeine in the drink which catalyze processes already occurring in my body – also known as acceleration - but it’s the notion of reflecting on zero and its relation to production that is interesting to note. This would make Monster Energy Zero Ultra, to use Mark Fisher’s thought, an “eerie entity.” He writes in The Weird and the Eerie (2016): “…move towards a weird psychoanalysis in which the death drive…and the unconscious become untethered form any naturalization or sense of homeliness…[this] psychoanalytic register…[can] also apply to the forces governing capitalist society. Capital is at every level an eerie entity: conjured out of nothing, capital nevertheless exerts more influence than any allegedly substantial entity” (pg. 11). All that is solid melts into air and from thin air emerges again that which is solid, this time doubled. It’s no coincidence that the preferred magic trick of the ‘boomer’ is to pull a quarter out from behind your ear. This is precisely the aspect of Zero that Nick Land expounds upon in his work on libidinal economics and base materialism in Thirst for Annihilation. The magic of Capitalism is that it makes a 1 out of 0. Land writes: 16

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings "Like zero, money is a redundant operator, adding nothing in order to make things hum...Marx...surplus production comes out of nothing..." (pg. 91); "Bataille...Marx...the energy produced is superior to the energy necessary to its production" (pg. 49). "zero is immense," (pg. vii, 131); a "cosmic energy reservoir (0)" (pg. 49); an "uninhibited flow; the intensive zero...positive end of religion (as zero)" (pg 87); "...the nihil from which creation proceeds, the undifferentiable cosmic zero...positive zero" (pg. 109). Zero has a special place in Nick Land's heart - or it is his cold, dark heart (God/Gnon), his "libidinal motor?" (pg. 25), a kind of productive and unconscious drive to accumulate and waste which he refers to as a "dark thirst" (pg 30). A c0somic death drive. (Syn)than0t0s. On a broader scope, Monster as brand is not without its own cryptic, occultist resonances. Consider Land’s CCRU emphasis on Kabbalah and number-coding as seen in the Numogram, and the aesthetics of the published CCRU texts (the book’s green and black cover). Now consider that religious fanatics have proposed the idea that the Monster Energy drink’s trademarked symbol is Kabbalahic code for Satan.23 We must conclude, then, that the B00mer Monster Zer0 Ultra meme is deeper than it seems. It's full of coincidences. The boomer seems to randomly be assigned the zero ultra drink. Land is called a boomer. Zero Ultra seems to embody strange ‘demonic energy from nothing’ resonances. Land likens zero to the core of dark, cold, base libidinal materialism. Coincidences start to interlock, to resonate, to become real. And when we remember that Land, prior (and during) his first book was a founding member of the CCRU who, along with Fisher, coined the concept of "Hyperstition," a fiction that makes itself real through intensifying and increasing coincidences, things start to get a little crazy...So crazy that one is forced to accept that Monster Zero (MK) Ultra, when coupled with the boomer, is a fiction made real, a physical substantiation of dark, libidinal materialism. An inexhaustible dark thirst trying to quench itself. 23 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bntfUA6TmLs 17

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings PART II: TEMPLEXITY & ACCELERATION "1: Everyone is an accelerationist. 2: Accelerationism has never happened. 3: Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist." – Mark Fisher “In physics…proper names designate…effects within fields of potentials…History is like physics: a Joan of Arc effect, a Heliogabalus effect—all the names of history…” – Deleuze and Guattari 18

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Templexity, or Alan Yang’s Demonic Breakfast 24 A gate is a link between zones through which bodies and (/of) information travel. What strange gates have we stumbled through thus far? The breakfast gate. Sausage and eggs with monster energy drink in place of coffee. Breakfast as a micro-instantiation of Kapitalism; a Kapitalism of the productive magical zero that recuperates its own waste (and thus there is ‘zero waste’), encasing it into the product itself before going on to scramble (eggs) codes and make a Body without Organs (egg) out of that which was previously distinct, separate, etc. (plural eggs to singular eggs, or eggs-egg [eggegg=syzygy]; a scrambling which acts as a particle accelerator ([e g g g g e [double articulation]]), a coincidence intensifier, a dispersion demon (333 = the three slashes of the Monster energy drink logo). 333. Egg. gge. E33, 3gg, etc. 333. Coincidences begin to resonate at an alarming rate - the word egg resembles 333 while the egg itself physically resembles a zero, as seen in the idiom ‘a big ole’ goose egg.’ Zero, a circle, a loop like time - which came first, the chicken or the egg? “Let me explain entropy to you. It isn’t difficult. It’s the gradient of temporal irreversibility. Imagine a video of someone dropping an egg. It falls to the floor, and smashes. Now dismantle the video into stills. Can you re-assemble the time-line? Of course you can…Eggs don’t spontaneously un-smash…the process of smashing – passing from an improbable to a more probable state - marks out the arrow of time…” “But teacher…” “What is it?” “How come there are eggs?” Egg is 333, or so Nick Land begins his text Templexity: Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time. Though Templexity is a much more sober text than its CCRU predecessors, its theoretical energy remains similar enough: entropy releases demons trapped in structures; frees new vectors to birth new lines of flight, new worlds of reference, new fictions; fictions that make themselves real through Lemurian time sorcery. One such fiction which we encountered earlier was the Kabbalist boomer with a monster ultra-zero energy drink, and our Kapitalist breaKfast (break-flow; [brea]K-[fast]speed) sausage-egg-ultrazero production-waste loop. Our next fiction made real is not an assemblage of such ‘inanimate objects,’ but a ‘person’ who could consume such a breaKfast. Meatbag, not kipple, but it all ends up in the same place. 24 “Strictly Interstellar Overdrive-era Floyd” – Land when asked whether he is a Pink Floyd fan. 19

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Which reminds me - libidinal economics and base materialism are underpinned by a deeper theory of time. Or was it the other way around? Was it that the theory of time was based on base (hyper)materialism? Or was it…eh, it’s all a blur now, and there’s no time to slow down to sort it out. Form and expression are relative, after all. The feedback loop gets away from us. It gets away from us to the point where we wonder what we even meant by ‘us;’ we wonder what there ever was to ‘sort’ anyways. What matters is that accelerationism is nothing if not a theory of time, a process of feedback that speeds up material, destroys distinctions, launches particles into words, drags bodies through shattered cultures. All accelerationism has ever been is a theory of time, a theory of increasing deterritorialization. In 2012 Mark Fisher claims that everyone is an accelerationist, and that accelerationism both never happened and is Marxist in nature. Though not completely convincing in its truth, when it comes to the hyper, to simulation, etc., simply lacking truth has never precluded some level of function and becoming, and when it comes to exits, convincing others is the least of concerns. Fast forward 7 years and Fisher’s three-pronged fiction makes itself real in the body and proper name of Andrew Yang. A disordered timeline may suffice: 2000: in Split Second Timing, the CCRU write “by the turn of the millennium 700 million years of biological evolution had been recapitulated in 70 years of technical development, leading to AI programs running approximately ‘equivalent to the brainpower of a guppy’…technocapitalist trends involve positive nonlinearities increasing returns, or runaway trajectories…” (pg. 178). 2019: Andrew Yang claims "machine learning algorithm…can solve an incredibly complex problem beyond any human intelligence, but they're essentially complete idiots and 2-year olds at anything else [however]...these trends can sometimes explosively happen in nonlinear ways.” 2015: Left accelerationists Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, following their 2013 #Accelerate: Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics, write Inventing the Future Postcapitalism and a World Without Work which discusses machine automation, UBI, and the future of work, three big talking points of Yang’s. 2017: Nick Land, in part discussing the above book, in his Concept of Acceleration New Center for Research and Practice Session 4, says "The UBI argument is very close to the cynical and anti-humanist side of the argument...UBI is the expression of this extremely classic comprehension of what Capital should be...it should be a productive service in the interest of humanity...What makes it accelerationism on the left is that there's a demand for the trend of automation to be continued...rather than a circuit that couples workers and capitalism together, there's an autonomous capital 20

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings circuit in which robotic manufacturing substitutes for the human pole..." 2019: Yang states that when he started his nonprofit Venture for America in 2011 that he "would read various books about the future of work.” 2020: Yang drops out of the race. In the same interview25 from which the above excerpts were pulled, Yang whose whole shtick can be described as gaming preexistent capitalist mechanisms and AI acceleration to leverage human interests on a micro level - hits all the accelerationist bingo tiles: market incentives not morals? Check. Anti-democratic solutions? Check. Dark future? Check. Sense of urgency? Check. Accelerating culture? Capitalist efficiency? It's not bad, it’s worse? Check. Check. Check. Emphasis on temporality? Check. Humanity to be wiped out? Big check. Trends, cycles, catalysts, and nonlinear growths? Check. A small circle of mega corporations with their privatized tech usurping the government’s power and the effects this has on a political debate system that is already a form of reality TV? Check. To tie it all together, he appears to become possessed by an ‘accelerationist’ demon that works his body like a puppet – "It's not socialism, its Capitalism where income doesn't start at zero;" "people call me a futurist...I call myself a presentist, just the other politicians are behind;” "solve the problems of this time with the tools we have of this time;” "gotta go where the money is," etc. Besides being evidence of a virus or demon, this is evidence that Yang understands the importance of temporality and impersonal incentive forces, that is, Outsideness. He understands that one must start from the middle, where things already are; that one must interface with the ‘real’ in its brute manner of imparting its presence upon us whether or not we accept or interpret it (markets and nature alike have no need for arguments). He understands the notion of riding the preexistent flows out to their conclusions rather than positing an ought, beginning from an abstraction, or impotently critiquing or negating (what Laboria Cuboniks refers to as ‘pulling the emergency brake on capitalism’) the things that tend to occur and recur when the human hand of influence pulls away. In other words, what the CCRU demonstrates in K-time year zero, left accelerationists recapitulate a decade later, and what left accelerationists recapitulate a decade later in theory makes itself into a monster neither the R-Acc or L-Acc camps, or the American public, want - Yang. Regardless of who does or doesn’t want Yang, between 2000 and 2020 Yang and the CCRU and its accelerationist offshoots intertwine. Regardless of who wants Yang, Yang happens. 25 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otEbT0l_Hbg 21

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Though one could imagine a world where double Ivy League graduate, author, and tech savvy entrepreneur Andrew Yang read Srnicek-Williams, and though I like to dream of a world where Yang attended early CCRU events in the same way it was rumored Bill ‘Gates’ did, could it simply be the case that Yang simply uses the accelerationist jargon unintentionally? It’s plausible considering most of these ‘accelerationist’ terms overlap with basic business and technology language (part of what Fisher might call Business Ontology) from the 90s onward (a connection made accurately by Tiqqun in their The Cybernetic Hypothesis). So, are we to explain the similarities away with a causal argument, or call it a mere coincidence? No. On the one hand, there are no coincidences, only interlocking fictional resonances taking shape, spilling over into and producing a subject, making themselves real, turning into beliefs, and contaminating other hosts. On the other hand, yes, that’s quite the point – it is a coincidence, but coincidence does not mean less real. As codes are scrambled, structures break down and entropy can run away leading coincidences to overlap, intensify and unify into resonances that produce assemblages of enunciations. Memeetic viruses acquire bodies as propagation units. Yang is a propagation unit for impersonal flows. Ultimately, whether Yang is or is not an accelerationist is a bad way of framing the matter. What matters is not Yang, but what’s playing him. If we take Fisher’s word for it, we’re all accelerationists, and at the same time ‘we,’ collective agency opposed to individual agency, goes out the window. This means that what makes up Yang – that he centers his ‘politics’ on gaming preexisting Capitalist mechanisms and flows as opposed to trying to reinvent the wheel, that he rejects the title of politician opting instead for a business model that understands human appetites, not unlike the ones we’ve discussed here, etc. 26 - matters because it reveals the flows of the material and their fictional resonances playing Yang, the accelerated, nihilistic cultural milieu of the 90s and early 2000s, the very cultural milieu that, in true hyperreal fashion both produce and are produced by the CCRU. So, what came first, the 90s or the CCRU? 26 In his extended essay The Dark Enlightenment, Land writes "Where the progressive enlightenment sees political ideals, the dark enlightenment sees appetite…"? 22

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Code K-N-M-F-L-D-G-M(Y) / L (A Precursor of the Dark 90s) Whether or not it’s simply the effect of the epistemological barriers erected by the anthropomorphic numerical and calendrical methods of carving up time - and through it risks confirming biases, begging questions, and contradicting the historiographers who assert that, because of universalization that overlooks contingent material circumstances behind events, periodizing is relatively arbitrary - it does seem to still be the case that ‘the 90s’ across history mark crucial turning points for cultures at large. The first period of great cultural enlightenment culminated in the French Revolution in the 1790s. The 1890s was a decade amidst a second industrial revolution that marked a paradigm shift in medical science and mental health practices in Europe and was to bring about both new technological commodities and economic despair in America. The 1990s brought us further technological revolutions but, as Paul Virilio points out with his concept of ‘the integral accident,’ with these advancements came the possibility and therefore great fear that these advancements would destroy humanity. Unlike the 1790s and 1890s which, despite their periods of upheaval and despair still managed to retain a humanist-progressivist cultural vector and emotional tone, the only revolution the 1990s offered was - as the coked out, synthed up 1980s alluded to - a dark revolution of nihilistic technodesire. In other words, in 200 years human culture went from revolutionary enlightenment to dark nihilism. It is this vector that is ‘playing’ Land and the CCRU; this force which is at play in a deeper genealogy (or geology) of cultural deterritorialization – or accelerationism – composed of proper names such as Kant (1790s), Nietzsche, Marx, Freud (1890s, give or take), Lyotard, Deleuze, Guattari (all died in the 90s), and Moldbug and Land (2000s-present). As tired and derivative as it may be, many discussions of nihilism begin with Nietzsche, so we too will start there. He distinguishes between active and passive nihilism. Active nihilism, by breaking down traditions such as moralism and humanism, is a tool used to affirm life and create one’s own values as opposed to passively accepting the values of others, and degrading life with after worldly promises (God is dead). Passive nihilism, by both resenting yet accepting as inevitable the outside world, tends towards the renunciation of power and the sublimation of instincts into domesticated, herd morality (God is alive). Thus, it is to be recognized as an illness as it is life renouncing. For Nietzsche, the tendency to turn away from reality by positing another world – whether the priests Christian kingdom of redemption or the metaphysician’s unknowable realm of things in themselves - is passive, resentful nihilism. This is one but by no means the only reason why nihilism finds its original master in Kant, the great metaphysician who 23

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings in criticizing metaphysics with the one hand, reinvokes God and faith with the other. Between 1781 to 1790, Kant completed his trilogy of Critiques which, in the very least, cast doubt on the authority of metaphysics and therefore the authority of the rational subject in a way that no previous philosopher had done. For Kant, internal systems (categories, faculties, etc.) dynamically interact in an impersonal way to form a synthetic model of the otherwise unknowable outside world. Thus, we are not in contact with the outside directly, only with our synthesis of our limited sensory experiences of the outside, and thus our knowledge is limited to internal functions that uneasily map onto the outside. In what is not unlike a simulation, impersonal outsideness connects with impersonal insideness – insideness simply being outsideness trapped, territorialized, cordoned off – and the subject is produced like a scab that feedbacks, learns to like itself, and tricks itself into thinking in terms of agency and will. That is, for Kant's critical philosophy, the ego is a surface phenomenon and reason is not master in its own house. It is legislated by other faculties in a larger system of checks and balances. Where Kant’s positing another unknowable world is passive nihilism, his dethroning of ego and reason would be active, tradition destroying nihilism. However, Nietzsche asserts that the nihilistic Kant did not go far enough in his dismantling of metaphysics, and he reminds us with his critical psychology that social and intellectual processes are, at their base level, sublimations and transformations of bodily forces such as impulses, drives, and instincts. As mentioned earlier, these are forces that can be denied in a way as to lead to personality or pathology, fulfilled to both gratifying or frustrating outcomes, or transformed into personal values to be healthily affirmed or to be resentfully projected onto the outside. If it goes the way of the latter, these projections become filtered through the culture at large, ultimately coming to resemble objects in reality, or objective reality itself, thereby taking on the phantasmagorical apodictic influencing power of an object over a subject – unquestionable humanist ‘givens’ of the herd (what Land, using Moldbug, calls the Cathedral). This approach to somatic pulsion and group psychology is a lesson well known in psychoanalytic theory and practice by both early Freudian psychoanalysts (Victor Tausk’s influencing machine), later Kleinian psychoanalysts (Wilfred Bion’s projective identification and strange objects), and, of course, Freud himself. Freud, a secret reader of Kant and Nietzsche, extends this critical approach and its emphasis on 'internal' dynamism further inwards, making not only the outside unknowable, but the deep inside as well (the drive, instinct, object petit a, Lacanian ‘real,’ etc., often being likened to Kant's thing in itself). As mentioned above, and as Freud shows in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, traumatic impersonal interiority is merely a recapitulation of traumatic impersonal exteriority in that the subject is produced as the surface effect of deep, unknowable, outside material forces such as instincts and tensions. The subject is unconsciousness glimpsing itself out of the corner of its eye, before 24

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings attempting suicide. Like Kant, for Freud, there are internal systems that dynamically interact with each other such as an Id that exerts constant instinctual pressure, an ego that tries to appease the Id, and a superego that, not unlike the Kantian systems, legislates how the other objects and structures interact. These structures or forces influence or are inflicted by ‘internal objects,’ i.e. complexes of memories, sensations, affects, images, etc., that act as internal templates for mapping and arranging experiences. Additionally, there even things completely outside of the grasp of the system itself (that which is unconscious and never brought to consciousness, i.e., the primal repressed, that, like Fisher’s wierd and eerie, still exerts pressure despite its lack of symbolic presence). Similar to Nietzsche’s conceptualization of power and its need to be expressed, for Freud the main cause of illness is when material and its forces are separated from it’s a/effects such as when a stimuli (Id, instinct, drive, thought, affect, feeling etc.) is denied by the subject (superego censors the ego, ego censors the Id, Id overwhelms the ego or overstimulates the body, ego and superego conflict, etc.) and therefore becomes detached, decontextualized, and forms a symptom (the inside is projected outside, into an object, as in the bodily appendages in the hysteria case of Anna O., or the horse in the obsessional neurosis case of little Hans). That is, for Freud's critical metapsychology, and as he says, the ego is not master in its own house and, as with Kant, reason or rationality is further dethroned. For Kant, Nietzsche and Freud, there is no longer a close correspondence between internal representations and external stimuli mediated by a rational subject; there is only the body and its own, the instincts, appetites, material forces, etc. that are transformed, often in distorted and perverted ways, into values. That is to say, Nietzsche and Freud are materialists reacting to Kant. Marx, whose name has become nearly synonymous with material and value, intersects this genealogy through two significant concepts – class consciousness and capitalist dematerialization. Whereas Kant shows us the limits of our cognitive and sensory functions by positing an unknowable outside, Freud and Nietzsche the limit of our reason and higher order by positing the subject as a production of deep unconscious material outside forces, Marx of course posits that we are unconscious of the suffering sustained through our inherited class, i.e. our situation in a social antagonism between those who have appropriated the outside material forces - the machines or means of production - and those who are forced to attach their bio-labor-power to and through those machines. It is this conflict and its suffering which, through ideology, distorts the values in one’s life. As Lytoard implies in the excerpt we explored earlier with Fisher, Marxists will argue people act against their interests, and betray their class – their material circumstances and those who share them – for the seductive lure of Capitalism, etc., and that once privy to their circumstances, they will intuitively, but not without the help of a big daddy, take action that is more in line with their material circumstances. 25

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings This false consciousness ‘does not simply fall from the sky’ - to use a Guattarian adage - it is the result of deterritorialized values that, like with Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud, come from conflicts outside of ourselves that are internalized and distorted; material forces which have become uncoupled from their effects. That is, class unconsciousness comes from capitalism’s inherent dematerialization and insistent relativization. To use the classic example: an object is needed and therefore desired and is exchanged between one person and another, the latter whom will use it for its ‘use-value.’ The use-value is independent of labor as it is given by its utility and can be abstracted into a relative form assuming the quantities of the two commodities being exchanged equate (trade wool for wood). This is known as exchange-value, a relative relationship in constant flux. The relativity of the exchange-value means that the objects, or commodities, on either side of the exchange relationship are equal to one another or replaceable with one another even if – or only if - the objects are themselves different. This relative, abstract relationship obscures the utility of the use-value of the commodity and thus the focus shifts from the utility or physical attributes of the object (it’s materially intended purpose) towards a relationship of objects which have no specific qualities of their own other than what purpose they serve in relation to another object (focus only on exchange value), or what Marx calls commodity fetishism, and what Zizek in The Sublime Object of Ideology refers to as a perverse Freudian symptom (a dildo fucking a pocketpussy – an object oriented ontologist’s wet dream). These commodities in relative relationship to each other are in relation to a third common ‘unit’ which is known as ‘value.’ Value is a creation of human labor that can only appear in the social exchange of commodities to other commodities, and because value is relative (as implied by its existence only in the relation of commodities), one commodity always presupposes another commodity, as one commodity needs to be expressed in the other commodity, and vice versa. This notion of value is related to labor time. The greater the productiveness, the lesser the value. The lesser the productiveness, the greater the value. Regarding value and labor time, Marx lays out two graphs of circulation: C-M-C and M-C-M. The former is when one sells a commodity to acquire money to use to buy commodities. The latter is when money is used to buy a commodity only to sell the commodity for money. The former is indicative of the worker who sells his labor to whomever owns the means of production, while the latter is indicative of whomever owns the means of production – the capitalist- and buys the former’s labor in order to produce for money. The capitalist gets more money out of the commodity than he originally invested into it by having his workers produce more than is needed to break even for the capitalist’s costs of maintaining the means of production (turn a zero into a one). The resulting excess production is known as surplus-value. This is how capital is created out of money and commodities, and how the capitalist exploits the worker. 26

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings More interestingly, this is how the market and, with it, values become completely untethered from material, or deterritorialized. Objects randomly relate to objects, and money comes to relate to objects randomly relating to objects, and then comes to relate to different forms of money, lines of credit, etc., while physical situations, needed items, etc., fade into the background. Not unlike the Lacanian signifier chain, where a signifier always relates back to another signifier, objects always relate to other objects, relate to other forms of capital. With this deterritoializing effect, Capital reinforces its feedback loops and leaves the human behind. As Marx put it, all that is solid melts into air. This is nihilism. All reference points, especially of human need and agency (as the tool reflects the human form and its aims), are annihilated, all ego-rational ordering severed in favor of alien rationality. As Jameson, using Lacan, points out in his book on late capitalism, capitalism ushers in a breakdown of the signifying chain, or, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, Capitalism scrambles all the codes and produces schizos just as it produces cars, processed foods, etc. Thus, where Kant, Nietzsche, and Freud show us that the ego is not the master in its own house, Marx reimagines the outside in the form of a flow of impersonal commodities, and shows us who our masters are, i.e., the humans who hold the means of production but are merely meat puppets for the alien forces of capital. For Kant, Nietzsche, Freud and Marx, the subject is created as a residue of conflicting outside impersonal forces, and material is separated from its effects or intuitive meanings and therefore no longer corresponds to meaningful representations, something which allows for freedom but also may cause unwellness. For these materialists, to move towards what is ‘right’ or ‘healthy’ is to recognize these forces and reclaim one’s relationship with material, that is, one ought to meaningfully reconnect with material circumstances and their a/effects. As Foucault - who some argue is a Kantian, others a Nietzchean, others a Marxist - puts it in the foreword to Anti-Oedipus, Anti-Oedipus - and therefore, we will say, accelerationism to an extent, is arguably a synthesis of Nietzsche and Marx (which Land agrees with)27 that also makes extensive use of Freud and Kant. Deleuze and Guattari, who are polemically referred to as ‘old Kantians,’ combine and extend the above notions to conceptualize a cosmos composed of conjunctive impersonal flows which become captured, articulatied, and coded, into an assemblage of enunciation. With this conceptual modification, the typical relation a subject has to language and the world is now adjusted in that a subject no longer exerts it will over objects or others, nor speaks about objects or to others, but rather, an alien force consolidates into a speech particle which is subjectified by a body, a body reifies itself, and a subject forms like a scab, a scab that is inhabited, infected, contaged, or possessed by an impersonal flow. 27 https://jacobitemag.com/2017/05/25/a-quick-and-dirty-introduction-to-accelerationism/ 27

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings For Deleuze and Guattari, purveyors of impersonal flow, it’s all about motion - momentum, direction, power. To turn on a dime while traveling at breakneck speeds and expect the governing structure – whether a society or an individual - to ‘survive’ is foolhardy. It breaks it neck every time. This isn’t rocket science. As Moldbug points out in Chapter 1 of An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives, a revolution,28 breaking with previously established government – the sole function of which is to establish order can lead to “some very very awful things” such as a prolonged period of destabilization void of basic utilities and creature comforts. Not only is there little incentive to seek or sustain such a state, but those who already suffer from these awful things – the poor, the proletariat, etc. - and your contemporary 'revolutionary' who may be part of this class, or part of the petit-bourgiouse, are all the same neither emotionally nor physically equipped for these challenges. As Moldbug points out, switching government is in fact like rocket science in that it needs to be done quickly, cleanly, transparently, and all at once with the proper equipment and theoretical calculations. In accelerationist terms, one cannot turn the accelerating machine in the opposite direction, one needs to – precisely because there truly is no other option - use the speed generated by the machine and direct its vector towards a goal. As Laboria Cuboniks puts it one cannot simply pull the handbrake on capitalism. 29 Moldbug, like Fisher’s explication of Lyotard earlier, agrees that people don’t want revolution, they want government that works, even if that means it works poorly. Put differently, in a way that stays true to the CCRU and Land, revolution doesn’t want us. People believe they want revolution, but there is little incentive for it despite its obvious moral appeals while there is much greater incentive to stick with the familiar, the regular, the cheap and easy. People choose sausage pate – blue pill – over revolution, or the red pill, nearly every time. The Matrix liquifies our bodies and feeds it to us, and we feebly squeak out a ‘please sir, may I have another’ every time. It is precisely this framing that demonstrates the divide between rationalist (of whatever kind) and libidinal materialists. The libidinal materialism of Lyotard, not unlike Yang, asserts that values organically arise in relation to affective feedback circuits related to material conditions, not ideas grasped dialectically. Why would a worker want to lose his shackles when not only is it all he’s ever known, but its tasty and prepared by a minimum wage worker? 28 http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ Xenofeminism Maniefsto (2018), Accessed https://www.laboriacuboniks.net/ 29 28

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Lyotard, contemporary of D and G, interested in psychoanalysis and Nietzsche - an interest which, as Land points out saves him from slipping into the overemphasis on language that Derrida, like Lacan, was championing at the time - ventures through the strange land of libidinal dynamics before declaring in his book on postmodernism that in our current cultural milieu, master narratives of legitimacy and authority are dead. That is, religion, science, reason, logic and traditional moral values, deterritorialized to a pulp by capitalism, are over. Now the only authority or legitimacy is desire and how desires connect with other desires and forms shared fictions (metanarratives). The deterritorialized flows have carried us far enough, and, in a templexive gesture, we must look back in order to proceed: Kant undermines the authority of metaphysics and along with it the ego and reason, and in the void of agency and rationality, Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx, the renown critical trio, emphasize the idea that values should be one's own, attached to one's own material experiences, not the ideas of others or abstract systems outside – but not of the outside - of the subject (a lesson demonstrated in the praxis of psychoanalysis where the curative factors arise through the naturally unfolding transference or emotional relationship between the patient and therapist, not necessarily through abstract cognitive or intellectual facts being taught or revealed). Kant, Nietzsche, Marx and Freud's criticisms of internal, external, psychological and social reliability or realism via the critique of reason and its replacement with unconscious internal drives and their sublimation into values projected into the external realm relocates authority in the body-subject and its desire as opposed to an omnipotent God, an outside world apodictically imposing itself on our senses ruled by this God, and a reliable internal stream of known consciousness that reflects this outside world ruled by this God. As Nietzsche foresaw, this kind of death of God and reason supplanted with a psychology of instincts or desire - a transition from outside truths inherited not of the outside, but of humans, to internal wants linked to outside inhuman forces - leads to nihilism and a surplus of desire unrestrained by slave morality. It is at this point that we arrive at a libidinal economy of desire in a postmodern milieu. It is as this point that we’ve arrived in the 90s. These names Kant-Nietzsche-Marx-Freud-Lyotard-Deleuze-Guattari-Moldbug(Yarvin) and Land (Code K-N-M-F-L-D-G-M(Y) / L) - give way to a libidinal materialism of time and real force of bodies valued over a neorationalist abstract dialectics. One that is based on personal desire that fills the hole of God; subjects circling the great zero, gliding over the plane of the cultural nihilism, the falling out of authority, the morose malaise of political disengagement, etc., of our Western world. We’re all Kantians, Nietzscheans, Freudians, Marxists, Lyotardians, Deleuzians, Guattarians, Moldbuggians, Landians, Kapitalists now. In the 90s, we’re all accelerationists now. 29

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings The Dark 90s and Quernomic Science The energy drink is the socially acceptable form of cocaine and methamphetamine. Its ancestry lies in the Coca-Cola of the late 1800s which used cocaine and caffeine in tandem to treat fatigue and headaches, and the 1950s soft drink ‘Dr. Enuf’ which was the first to attempt to replace the sugary, ‘empty’ calories of soda with vitamins, minerals, and caffeine that the body could use more efficiently for energy production. Consistent with the earlier chapter on boomer materialism, both mark attempts at diagramming a 1 out of a 0 by accelerating biochemical efficiency processes. Though both drinks share this libidinal similarity, they remain importantly different in other regards. One was produced by a subject under duress and hijacked by capital forces, eventually losing its potency, the other produced by capital forces itself, intensifying in its potency until it goes digi-viral: Coke is the product of wartime addiction (libidinal fixations) turned ingenuity later appropriated by big time capitalism which eventually lost its cocaine-buzz; Enuf, on the other hand, was produced by businessman William Mark Swartz who later formed a software company that created one of the first prototypes for the computer operating system Unix. As N1x/Nyx Land has written in her Gender Acceleration: A Blackpaper (2018),30 this name is not without its interesting implications: “Unix — phonetically, ‘eunuchs’ — for being a castrated Multics.” Making use of CCRU founding member Sadie Plant’s work, N1x goes on “Multics’ purpose as a monolithic and eternal system for doing everything, the 1, was ultimately replaced by a void, a 0. Unix was not the system for doing things, but rather a smooth space through which creation happens; that fluid being that makes transition possible. A vulva, a woman.” Whereas coke loses its impotency and becomes sutured to lack, mirroring the Zizekian-Lacanian ‘coffee without cream,’ (coke without cocaine / woman = man without penis), Enuf shirks any phallic appeal to the other and transforms itself into an libidinally smooth OS. In other words, there is a direct line between the soft, malleable, open zone of zero where all lines are permitted to intersect, all codes encouraged to scramble (the BwO[mb]), the processes and products of technocapitalism, and the potent energic fluid of energy drinks. In this sense, despite not reaching their peak popularity until the early 2000s (Rockstar Energy in 2001, Monster in 2002), the energy drink is born out of the 80s to late 90s silicon valley obsession with chemically inducing speed to keep up with technocapitalism by accelerating the body’s libidinal motor (0); it’s the object of an attempt to capture the impersonal chemico-libidinal flows of the outside and inject it into the inside (cybernetic folding); an attempt to capture and market the fluidity of outside – which is only captured elsewhere in organic stratifications such as the womb and its embryonic 30 https://vastabrupt.com/2018/10/31/gender-acceleration/ 30

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings fluid, and the deterritorialized mammary glands of the human female and their nutrient liquid - in 8-12oz dose cans. It is therefore no coincidence that female breasts are crudely referred to as ‘cans.’ As Deleuze and Guattari write through Professor Challenger in A Thousand Plateaus: “the lips as a deterritorialization of the mouth (only humans have lips…an outward curling of the interior mucous membranes; only human females have breasts…deterritorialized mammary glands: the extended nursing period advantageous for language learning is accompanied by a complementary reterritorialization of the lips on the breasts, and the breasts on the lips)…a curious deterritorialization, filling one's mouth with words instead of food and noises. The steppe…exerted strong pressures of selection: the ‘supple larynx’ is a development corresponding to the free hand and could have arisen only in a deforested milieu where it is no longer necessary to have gigantic laryngeal sacks in order for one's cries to be heard above the constant din of the forest…” (pg. 61-62). Terrain exerts pressure over time thereby altering the human form, the human form then alters the terrain, etc. The breast-lip assemblage – which lays the groundwork for nutritive desire, and which becomes the blueprint for later heteromasculine anthropomorphic desire – captures these geo-forces in its assemblage. From the nutrient rich liquid of the round womb, to round mammary-energy-cans, to condensed tin-energy-cans, the liquidesire flow of libido is deterritiorialized once more in the form of the marketable, part-object ‘energy drink.’ Is it any wonder that it was the computer programmers of silicon valley – technocapital’s ‘human bootstrap,’ themselves spiritual descendants of American-dream gold-rush pioneers who trailblazed the trend of supplanting solid food with liquid nutrient energy supplements (Soylent) in order to maximize work-flow efficiency? As psychoanalysts know all too well, this wish for liquid diet is a return to a deep, libidinal geopast which, if returned to, could lead to a ‘new’ future. In this sense, the past is liquid, the future is liquid, and, following Marx’s adage – all that is solid melts into air - to melt solid into liquid is to accelerate. To accelerate is meltdown. Meltdown, Land’s memorable 1994 essay condenses into maximum density the content of the libidinal energy supplement, and the CCRU. It also reads like how an energy drink feels; it reads like caffeine charged Deleuzian beatpoetry. 31

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings [ ] The story goes like this. The lights are dim. The air thick with cigarette smoke. It’s some sort of mess hall, wood floors, crammed with mostly empty chairs. A handful of liberal arts major gather at the front. A cyberpunk wannabe takes the stage. It’s tweaking, twitching, stammering to itself. The spotlight lingers, dead air is briefly pierced by a stab of mic feedback. Spoken word slam poetry abruptly spills from its mouth and fills the speakers: 0-1 Zero. Zee – row. Row your boat. Boat, boa-t, ‘t,’ tuna, tuna melt. Meltdown. Melt. (space) Down! Smashmouth! Smash. (space) Mouth! The kind of ideas of reference smashed with slurred associative jargon only a speed freak could produce. It thanks what’s left of the audience – many of whom are bewildered, confused, or insisting that some of them are still Marxist, you know - and it takes a seat. Smashmouth / meltdown. Deleuzian Beat poetry: Urbanomic unapproved, Urbandictionary approved. According to urban dictionary, ‘Smash Mouth’ refers to doing copious amounts of stimulant drugs – mainly cocaine, not caffeine - through your nose or mouth in an exaggerated gesture. It's also a late 1990s rock band. These two meanings seem unrelated. Luckily, the internet - being the incredibly entropic-permutation-repetition machine that it is - tends to cycle through codes in an arbitrary fashion so that eventually all disparate, non-causal things come to connect, solidify, catch on, and self-reinforce. This Quernomc “coincidence engineering”31 is not unlike Nietzsche’s eternal return, or the anthropomorphic conceptualization of the process of entropy given enough time, the internet will produce all combinations and restart; it will produce a dead God that cares not for its human subjects (the Matrix meets Slayer – the Matrix hates us all!). 31 “…a generalized assumption Qwerty was predominantly arbitrary (quasi-randomly allocate)…challenges from alternative ‘scientific’ keyboards were undermined by skepticism about the very idea of a rational arrangement of the keys. In this respect, Qwerty conformed to a typical trend among oecumenic sign systems, with the sheer inertia of mass-acceptance marginalizing analytical or reformist tendencies to a fringe oh philosophical eccentricity or even psychotic delusion. Qwerty thus exploited the mask of accident to construct a positive unconscious tropism…the subliminal instantiation of a new cultural system”- Introduction to Quernomics pg. 584-585 in Fanged Noumena. 32

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings One blog entry synthesizes the disparate meanings of ‘smash mouth’32 when it lists Smash Mouth’s hit song ‘Walkin' on the Sun’ as a song secretly about meth. Though meth isn’t to be equated with coke and the urban dictionary definition of ‘smash mouth,’ both meth and coke are stimulants that can be snorted, smoked, or gummed, i.e., smashed into your face. Similarly, according to a weakly evidenced column for Audiofemme,33 Smash Mouth's 'Walkin' On the Sun’ is: "about the 1992 Los Angeles Riots...the chaos of the time…[where] he warns about the perils of harder drugs with a prescriptive in the last verse: ‘Put away the crack before the crack put you away.’” The power of speed captured by drugs such as caffeine, coke, and meth, and its relation to social discord is captured well in the lyrical content of the song: If you got the goods, they'll come and buy it just to stay in the clique So don't delay, act now, supplies are running out Allow if you're still alive, six to eight years to arrive And if you follow, there may be a tomorrow But if the offer is shun, you might as well be walkin' on the sun Twenty-five years ago, they spoke out and they broke out... And fought back against the melt-down So don't sit back, kick back and watch the world get bushwhacked News at ten, your neighborhood is under attack Put away the crack before the crack put you away You need to be there when your baby's old enough to relate Here a sense of urgent survival in the face of certain solar death that accelerates social ‘meltdown’ collapses into an aesthetics of Fisherian Capitalist Realism ‘news at 5 middle nuclear family America’ deterritorialized by stimulant abuse. In 1999, two years after Walkin’ On the Sun, we get Smash Mouth’s other hit, ‘All Star:’ Well the years start coming and they don't stop coming Fed to the rules and I hit the ground running Didn't make sense not to live for fun Your brain gets smart but your head gets dumb So much to do, so much to see It's a cool place and they say it gets colder You're bundled up now, wait till you get older But the meteor men beg to differ 32 12 Hit Songs From The 90's Secretly About Crystal Meth, accessed http://yearbookoffice.com/90s-songs-about-crystal-meth 33 High Notes: 9 Drug References in Lyrics You Probably Sang as a Kid, accessed https://www.audiofemme.com/high-notes-nine-hidden-drug-references-in-lyrics/ 33

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Judging by the hole in the satellite picture The ice we skate is getting pretty thin The water's getting warm so you might as well swim My world's on fire, how about yours? That's the way I like it and I never get bored Not unlike Walkin’ On the Sun, the lyrics again capture a sense of urgency related to speed, limits, desire, and natural and social – if we can make that distinction here - catastrophe. For Smash Mouth of the late 90s, climate change and the conflict that arises between personal experience and abstract scientific notions handed down to us as consumers from authorities on high (the Cathedral) boils over,34 ripping a hole in the social-narrative fabric, revealing a world that is both cold and inhuman and at the same time, per the "meteor" man, also getting warmer.35 Not unlike how with the CCRU, the deep past begets the alien future, coldness begets heat death begets coldness. As coldness becomes God, the Earth’s atmosphere burns, the core erupts, and the human empire melts. The 'natural' geological world and the social world alike deterritorialize or accelerate towards a meltdown singularity, and all there is to do in the meanwhile is participate in the market and utilize the effects of the heat to enjoy ourselves. If the antithesis to accelerationism is what Land calls “transcendental miserabilism” – a polemic aimed at leftists motivated from Land’s disagreements with Fisher – which is expressed as a climate change slogan ‘the polar bears are dying and we can’t do a thing…,’ then the accelerationist approach would be precisely what is implied in our Smash Mouth songs: enjoy riding the wave of social and geological destruction to its end; appropriate the orgasmic, thanatropic spasm, the potent death rattle, before the collapse back into a deep Barkerian Geotrauamatic future-past. If to be miserable about the inevitable is to lament the melting of the polar icecaps, then to accelerate is to surf the solar heated waves (after all, the sea is Cthulhu’s realm). It's unclear if Smash Mouth were on meth, but what comes to mind is another 90s band who certainly were - Korn. In his autobiography Save Me From Myself, Korn’s guitarist tells of how he quit meth and found God. While he went from meth to God, other 90s musician such as Scott Stapp of the Christian rock band Creed went from God to meth - and then full-on psychotic. If this seems familiar - mixing meth, God, and psychosis in the 90s - it’s because Nick Land, in what seems like a constant psychotic 90s jungle-techno-rave binge, through the CCRU and the brief period after its disintegration, collapsed God, meth, and music into the same intensive schizo flatline. 34 See Mencius Moldbug’s critique of the epistemology of climate studies. Here we should note that in the song ‘meteor’ sounds like 'media' which links up nicely with the next line which refers to media and communications technology with a paired association to the ozone layer burning up. 35 34

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings As we mentioned earlier “Its tool of choice, at that time, the sacred substance Amphetamine…After perhaps a year of fanatical abuse it was…profoundly insane…During the previous night, Christmas Eve, it had followed its usual course into fanatically prolonged artificial insomnia. It had spent the time devoted to futile 'writing' practices - it still pretended to be 'getting somewhere' and was buoyant with ardent purpose, but that is another story…It was accompanied to the early hours by a repetitive refrain ‘from next door’ – a mediocre but plausible rock song whose insistent lyric circled around the words: ‘Going to hell.’ ‘They must really love the new CD they got for Christmas,’ it thought, equally idiotically…In the car it listened to the radio for the whole journey. Each song was different, the genres varied…‘This is a cool radio station,’ it said to its sister. ‘The radio isn’t on,’ its sister replied, concerned. Vauung learnt that the ruin’s unconscious contained an entire pop industry.”36 Radio demonism. In his book Thirst for Annihilation (pg. 75-76), which he may be referring to above, and which was written 'between deaths,’ Land writes “ ‘Yeah, I’ve killed him, knifed the life out of him, once I started I got frenzied, it was an ecstasy, I never knew I could ahte so much’‘So God’s dead?’ ‘If that’s who he was. That fucking kid lied all the time. I just hope it’s true this time.’‘…and we have killed him’ writes Nietzsche, but – destituted of community – I crave a little time with him on my own. In perfect communion I likc the dagger foamed with God’s Blood” The birth of God gives reasons for the unknown human next door to receive the aural gift of Hell. The demon occupies the human just as a signal pulses through an antennae, turning the human both into its mouthpiece, and an open gate to receive alien frequencies. Radio-Demonism overrides the virtues of the academician. Death overrides communication. No voice-of-god, all exit. Whereas you met God while on acid in the 60s, you killed God while on meth in 90s. 36 A Dirty Joke, Fanged Noumena (pg. 630). 35

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings It is this methcharged, coke laden, energy drink powered paranoia - in conjunction of course with the 90s anticipation of the Y2K singularity and its paranoiac and apocalyptic cultural (un)conscious resonances that made themselves real – that aid us in making the necessary connections between aCCRUelerationism and Smash Mouth. It is ‘coincidences’ like these – seemingly ‘meaningful’ (or diagrammatic) connections between accidental occurrences – that say (or do) something important when understood 'scientifically.’ However, not unlike Zizek’s Deleuzian fisting, the concept of ‘science’ must be expanded into its Quernomic dimension. Science can be rationalist and mechanistic as it was in the 1800s. As Guattari pointed out in his late interviews, Freud believed all things, including coincidences - which for Fisher in The Weird and the Eerie are part of what Freud called the 'uncanny' - could be traced back to purely rational causes and effects within a mechanistic world. That is, even the uncanny is the natural but weird within the natural, as opposed to the supernatural, and, As Guattari puts it, for Freud, even the irrational is just the rational waiting to be uncovered. This is of course one of the reasons Freud has been criticized by Deleuze and Guattari for ‘oedipalizing’ the unconscious. In their critique, though not completely alighting with him, D and G often opposed Jung to Freud. In this sense, science can also be ‘transcendental’ (if we take this to simply mean that things beyond our direct experience which are not captured adequately by science and reason which are then recuperated as free floating libidinal energy in the form of religious or supernatural beliefs that none the less still effect our material, experienced world). In his work on Synchronicity, Jung attempts to 'scientifically' research uncanny coincidences, claiming that coincidences are resonances between instantiations of monistic, libidinal material that has been crystalized in different forms, i.e., deep historical structures. For Jung, the rational is just the irrational waiting to be explored. Most interestingly, science can be Quernomic or hyperstitional. A hyperstition is a fiction that makes itself real, or a coincidence intensifier. The rational and the irrational bleed together; the distinction collapses. Part of this hyperstitional ‘coincidence engineering’ is the paranoiac-asemiotic, i.e. Quernomic approach, a kind of meth-charged synthesis of the reductive Freudian-rationalist / Jungian-transcendent approach with the Landian / CCRU approach. Quernomics, when applied to associations on a linguistic register, would view language as a system of arbitrary symbols in relation to other arbitrary symbols that connects with contingent configurations of base matter in a way as to still ‘makes things happen’ (diagrammization). There are finite amounts of symbols within a finite system of organization that is further finitely reduced, both intentionally and accidentally, by human utility and preference and inhuman incentives alike. With limited options, trends catch on, and certain words, phrases, spread like a plague. 36

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Coincidences intensify, an impersonal cultural unconscious takes shape as a subject, or more accurately an assemblage of enunciation, and this assemblage reproduces the semiotic material it received from the outside, makes it inside, and grafts it back onto the outside (Outside folds into inside, inside maps Outside). Words, floating in thin air, connecting to each other, take on a reality of their own, then a body in real time makes it real. Fictions become real through somatic simulation. As Land writes in his essay Disintegration, “Scientific concepts do not become any less scientific by also becoming mythic. They can, however, on occasions sustain mythic power disproportionate to their strictly scientific legitimacy.”37 As D and G articulated through Professor Challenger discussed earlier, the human mouth-throat-chest assemblage can only articulate so many ways; it behaves within limits. The chest may push only certain intensities of air through the esophagus, air which is modulated by the cheeks, lips, teeth, and tongue configuration. Horrific and brute asignifying sounds – clicks, pops, growls, shrieks – over time, with the honing and selection of muscles that map onto and internalize the faces of others, morph into phonemes, letters, and words. As DC Barker has shown, human language is limited to human morphology, is limited to Earth’s geology, is limited to Earth’s place in cosmology, is limited to… etc., etc., Through these constantly recapitulating limits, relatively arbitrary chaos locks into a feedback loop of a limited set of terms and sounds (deterritorialized base material or the plane of immanence drifts towards the plane of expression, or forms – alphabet soup Abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz sentiments in Qwertyuiopasdfghjklzxcvbnm). Sounds become words. Fictions become real. Only through the mouth, the deterritorialized snout. Smash Mouth (pun intended) made fictions real by channeling 90s culture and itself becoming an artifact of that culture. One more such set of semiotic coincidences occurs via the assemblage known as The Spice Girls, the British pop band of the late 90s. Consider the lyrics of their hit Stop off the 1997 album Spiceworld. Upon initial listen, I remarked to myself jokingly that the Spice Girls were merely covering the Pink Floyd song Stop off 1982 album The Wall. While this is untrue, as the only similarities between the 3 minute and 33 second song (yes, 3:33) and the 30 (yes, 3) second Floyd track (which is 3rd from last on the album) is its title, Spice Girl’s Stop condenses two Pink Floyd songs into one lyrics -'Hey you, always on the run’ (Hey You, slow opiate ballad off The Wall, and On the Run, intense modular synth loop-collage off The Dark Side of the Moon). 37 Disintegration, 2019. Accessed https://jacobitemag.com/2019/07/15/disintegration/ 37

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings These coincidences could be easily overlooked if not for another layer: the Spice Girls movie of the same year and name as the album, Spice World (1997) [TV-Radio-Demonism-temporal-syzygy], contains cameos from celebrities such as Meatloaf, Elvis Costello, Elton John, Roger Moore, and Bob Geldof. It is the last name here that interests us - Bob Geldof played Pink in the film adaption of Pink Floyd's the Wall. This could again be overlooked, but within the film the Spice Girls are excited to run into Bob, and it is implied Bob and the girls have some sort of friendship. This Spice Girls-Pink Floyd connection is evident in the culture at large. In addition to documented incidents of members of the band wearing Pink Floyd merch, a website that tracks and provides crossword search clues states the following "Clue: Title of songs by Pink Floyd and the Spice Girls. Possible Answers: Stop."38 This indicates that somewhere, at some time, there was a crossword puzzle in some mass-produced literature that also made the simple, obvious connection made here. In other words, the Pink Floyd-Spice Girls connection is basically common knowledge – in the collective cultural unconscious - given that the crossword is a very simple puzzle distributed to the masses.39 Likewise, buried deep within a Google search of 'Spice Girls Pink Floyd' lies an interesting treasure - a Spice Girls fan blog entitled 'Spice Bricks: The Geri Years Revisited.'40 The reference here is to the phrase 'Spare Bricks' also the name of the URL and webpage despite the blog being entitled Spice instead of Spare (Y2artifaKt) - which is an unreleased Pink Floyd album composed of songs from The Wall that were later re-recorded for the movie and padded with newer songs related to The Wall narrative, all of which would later go on to be re-written and included in the last Roger Waters era Floyd album, The Final Cut. Though the sidebar of the strange, skeletal blog contains many links to other parts of the blog that sound intentionally Floydian - KAOS Theories, a reference to Roger Water's second solo album Radio KAOS (which is full of accelerationist themes, I might add), Floydian Places, Gilmoure Guitars, etc. - all the links are broken, which is not surprising given it appears the blog has not been updated since Y2K(AOS). The subtitle of the blog - The Geri Years Revisited - warrants attention as well. This is a nod to the split(s) that occurred to Pink Floyd throughout the years. The early years saw the band centered around Syd Barett who wrote most of the tunes. Then David Gilmoure replaced Barett making Waters the main writer. 38 https://www.crosswordgiant.com/crossword-clue/3162299/Title-of-songs-by-Pink-Floyd-andthe-Spice-Girls 39 See Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of “morphic resonance” which relies on the research of Monica English. 40 http://sparebricksarchive.fika.org/sbparody/index.html 38

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Later, Waters would take over the band and eventually have a falling out with Gilmoure leading to two Pink Floyds touring at the same time, one lead by Gilmoure one by Waters (syzygic Floyds – it is interesting to note that the Gilmoure Floyd of this syzygic era contains many imagistic and lyrical allusions to twinning and splitting, while the Rogers lead Floyd is solely political) . 'The Waters Years' then refers to specific albums towards the end of Pink Floyd's career as a complete band, albums with a specific sound and message - Wish You Were Here, Animals, The Wall (all of which are in part about Syd Barrett’s descent through LSD induced psychosis),41 and the Final Cut (which protests Margaret Thatcher). As one Guardian article on Pink Floyd notes, the Spice Girls and Pink Floyd share some similarities, specifically around this Geri/Waters years: "OK, so the subject of The Spice Girls On Trial (Five) is a different kind of deal, but maybe there is some common ground: internal bickering (Geri's defection mirrors Waters'), reconciliation and a comeback (even if after only five minutes). Something else, too: it's very hard to dislike the Spice Girls."42 The ‘coincidences’ begin to add up (1 = 0 = 0+0+0 = 333). To go further still: the production company that produced and helped write the Spice Girls single Stop also produced Geri's - the Roger Water's of the spice girls - debut solo album, Schizophonic. Not only does the concept suggest Radio-Demonism, and not only is the album title notably associated with schizophrenia, the 'diagnosis' of accelerationism, what Syd Barrett induced in himself through psychedelics, but it's also a concept - the separation of sound from its source thus creating an uncanny effect - Mark Fisher discusses twice in The Weird and the Eerie, the book we mentioned earlier in relation to Freud's uncanny. Though Geri most likely used the term to reference her split (schiz = split or cut) from the Spice Girls and her attempt to forge a new sound (phonics), the double meaning and the coincidence can't be ignored. 41 In The Geology of Morals, amidst discussion of Lamarckian and Darwinian morphological drift, acceleration and absolute deterritorialization (the imperceptibility of Outsideness vs. the captured, anthropomorphic aspects of faciality), and abstract machinisms, D and G write: “But how can one still identify and name things if they have lost the strata that qualified them, if they have gone into absolute deterritorialization? Eyes are black holes, but what are black holes and eyes outside their strata and territorialities?” (Pg. 70). Similarly, Roger Waters in the song Shine on You Crazy Diamond sings, regarding Syd Barret, “Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.” (LSD=Lucy in the sky with diamonds). 42 https://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2007/dec/13/lastnightstvthepinkfloyd 39

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings A final interesting coincidence. In the 90s The Spice Girls were hard-line Thatcherites.43 Thatcher is memetically dense, and offers us three directions to go in.: Nick Land's post-CCRU accelerationist conceptualizations are often accused of being Thatcherite or Reaganite in nature, Fisher, what I consider Land's friendly antithesis, was adamantly critical of Thatcher, while Pink Floyd's The Final Cut, basically an extension of The Wall, is centered on the Falkland War and polemically refers to Thatcher as 'Maggie' throughout the album. Fisher, Land, Spice Girls, Pink Floyd - the whole gang's here. One could argue that these similarities are merely the result of overlapping populations and identities - British musicians or theorists interested in music (CCRU-Kode9/Jungle connection, AUDINT, etc.) coexisting at a certain time, in a certain political climate, etc. This is both very much to the point and at the same time far too naive. Yes, there's a 'geist,' yes bodies are dispersed across time that act as nodes for channeling outside forces, but why these specific resonances? The question is really whether there is a puppet master – a big Daddy – pulling the strings on these spiced women, or is it a case of Qwerty, accidental chaos reinforcing itself. The Spice Girls, from their cookie cutter multiculturalism song 'Spice up Your Life' that falls somewhere between tone deaf woke and flat out racist (a song which features a music video set in what appears to be a bland, monolithic dystopian future) or what we might call the 'cultural appropriation' of hiphop in their hit song Wannabe, to the girl power motifs juxtaposed (or intensified to their limit...) with the Thatcherism, one wonders if The Spice Girls where not engineered by a team of market gurus. This, after all, the basic plot of the Spice Girls film, Spiceworld, which, in a very meta-aware fashion, centers on the girls who must expose their record exec's evil exploitative plot in order to reclaim their art and reunify as a band. That is, the movie plays on the fact that The Spice Girls are a pop sensation likely engineered by a record company to manipulate the masses. In this way it hides in plain sight. In this way, the Spice Girls – or perhaps Spice Meat Puppets – are, not unlike Vauung’s possession of the ruin, pure Radio-Demonism. 43 https://graziadaily.co.uk/life/real-life/remember-spice-girls-massive-tories/ https://www.independent.co.uk/news/spice-girls-vote-thatcher-the-new-leader-of-their-band-1 314278.html 40

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings PART III: HYPERSTITION “With Gates’ death, Microsoft and Ccru had become one thing…Bill…‘Gates of Pandemonium.’…how could the Ccru web-site have come to generate some of the heaviest traffic on the web…if not for the massive and sustained support offered by Gates and Microsoft…”- Ms. Morrison “We are forced to admit, however, that Morrison’s comments on Microsoft, bill Gates, and MSN8 latch on to a number of intriguing phenomena worthy of further intense investigation”- CCRU “Everything deep loves masks…and if he doesn’t want it, one day his eyes will be opened to the fact that the mask is there anyways” -Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil (46-47) 41

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Lemurian Time-War on TV The cultural resonances of the 90s don’t stop with British pop. Radio-Demonism is accompanied by its syzygic apparition, TV-Demonism. In July 2005, the CCRU came into possession of a disturbing letter written to Andrew Davenport, creator of the British children's TV show 'Teletubbies.'44 In this shocking text, it is implied that Davenport is a student of the "arcane sciences" responsible for engineering a medium for transmitting blatant - as opposed to the appropriately occulted - demonic messages to children (“Pentazygonic Lemurianism” regarding particular rituals of "Sumatran time sorcery" to be precise). Horrendous, but merely the tip of the fiery-brimstone-iceberg; one which obscures the real cryptic Lemurian war/time-machine demonism infecting and possessing our children - PBS Kids television programming from the late 90s and early 2000s. Not unlike the meth filled music scene of the 90s and early 2000s, the television milieu of early K-time was a place of weird, accelerating cultural ‘coincidences.’ During these decades, there was 'something in the air’ in regard to what was 'on the air.' Between 1997 and 2003, the time of the CCRU, PBS Kids aired Kratt's Creatures 1996-1996, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago 1996-1997, Teletubbies 1997-2007, Zoboomafoo 1999-2001, Dragon Tales 1999-2005, and Zoom 1999-2005. The 'Kratt' in Kratt's Creatures (a significant phoneme [Kr - Tt] resonate with the hyperstitional content of the CCRU, i.e. Krako, Krakatoa, Katak, Tchattuk, Kuttadid, etc. [Kratt’s Kreatures or Kratkreatur]) is in reference to Martin and Chris Kratt, brothers and creators of not only this 'creature' show - which itself suggests something demonic but more importantly, Zoboomafoo, a show explicitly centered on a lemur, which we will cover shortly. Unlike Zoboomafoo, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiago, Dragon Tales, and Zoom are not significant due to their content but are significant due to the consistency of content they imply. That is, they serve as signifiers on a chain (or material on a plane) referring to the consistency of a certain cultural milieu (collection of themes on PBS Kids). To scramble the codes - ‘Time-Zoom-Dragon-Tale.’ Milieu consistency diagrammed by a hermeneutic schizo-association: Carmen Sandiago travels through time and needs to be found (temporal fragmentation, or schizophrenic deterritorialization requiring the desire or recognition of an other to reterritorialize it upon an odeipal plane – ‘where is mother, it is time to feed!’). The theory of time is integral to not only the CCRU at large, but also to Nick Land and his wife, cofounder of the CCRU, Anna Greenspan. Dragon Tales is not only a children’s show but is also an 44 TV Demonism. Accessed http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/006061.html. 42

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings E-Book of compiled magazine column's on Chinese culture authored by Nick Land which can be purchased alongside thematically related E-Book which we covered earlier, Templexity; Disordered Loops Through Shanghai Time." There is a straight line between two of our shows and their themes (disordered time/dragon tales/China). Inject this straight into Zoom,45 a 'kids show made by exclusively kids,' which, in our current cultural landscape, elicits associations to ‘the Zoomer’ who is essentially a contemporary Boomer who instead of being an old conservative born in the 50s who is tech-resistant, is a kid born at the end of the 90s, or start of the 2000s who is tech savvy. The Boomer / Zoomer link with acceleration unfolds. On the one hand, as pointed out by the CCRU, the 90s, lurching each day closer towards the singularity of Y2k, was a time of techno-anxiety and accelerating culture, so it’s no surprise we see these themes – speed, time travel, ancient demons, mystical creatures, Neochina, etc. - reflected in children's television during the decade. On the other, it could be the case that something hyperstitional occurred, and that random patterns in thematic content autoproduced, gained resonance, and realized themselves (a demon traversed a gate). In other words, either the CCRU picked up on themes in the culture, or hyperstitioned these themes into being to begin with (which came first, the chicken or the egg? which came first, the 90s or the CCRU?). Whichever way the temporal vector runs - and for templexive and hyperstitional phenomenon, for Lemurian time war, etc., it is precisely the point that it runs both ways - we have the connections laid out bare. But we’ve neglected Zoboomafoo. Is it truly as demonic as I have implied? Here is the summary of the show from Wiki: "it features a talking Coquerel's sifaka [species of Lemur notice again the K/R resonance] named Zoboomafoo...Every episode begins with the Kratt brothers in Animal Junction, a peculiar place in which the rules of nature change and wild animals come to visit and play." Two brothers (who look like twins but aren’t, and whose sisters are twins syzygy and its mirror unsyzygy), cooperate with a talking, sentient Lemur who brings to being a sort of state of becoming, a (dis / con ) junction, where physical laws (time and space) cease to apply (BwO). This is a time traveling Lemur summoned by demonic brothers. 45 The Zoom of the 90s is a remake of a show from 1972, an important year where Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 43

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Before examining the content of the show, we must pause over the lemur’s name: 1: zo - boo - ma – foo a: zo = Zoe, the Greek name that means 'life.' b: boo = a cry c: ma = mother, or an important Chinese tone that refers to mother, horse, hemp, or scold d: foo = fool This is inadequate, and requires further association: 2: zo - (bo[o)ma] – foo a: zo = Zoe, the Greek name that means 'life.' b: bo/o = a sound that a ghost makes c: o/ma = Greek suffix (as seen in Soma, carcinoma, etc.), i.e. the body and its productions d: foo = foe, or 'blood feud' This second associative analysis is much more pertinent to the idea of Lemur which, as the CCRU points out, etymologically breaks down into Ghost or Spirit. 2.a and 2.b are dialectical - Life and death, or, more accurately, unlife. 2.b, unlife, as derived from 2.a, is now consistent and dialectical with 2.c, for, spirit is, as Deleuze and Guattari point out, an incorporeal aspect of a corporeality; spirit is not a mere abstraction, but an articulation of material, of soma. Finally, 2.d, which consists of blood, the vital material of the soma, and feud, which is the romantic conflict between the body and the mind, material and spirit, etc., conceptualized by the poets and philosophers throughout the ages. In other words, Zoboomafoo refers to a bloody struggle of a spirit between life and death, or between modes of becoming or planes of existence, or war – Lemurian Time War. On the level of ‘human agency,’ I believe the name was ‘chosen’ at ‘random.’ Beneath the attempt at randomness, I believe there are outside forces at play, such as the characteristics of human patterns of information processing, linguistic association, aesthetics, and material limits of the larynx, mouth, etc. (as articulated earlier regarding DC Barker and Professor Challenger). 'Zzz' as a sound was chosen as it was ‘goofy’ or unique for being associated with what is perhaps the least used letter, etc. and thus would attract a child's interest both educationally and casually. Zzee morphed into Zooo through association with Zoology, or Zoo, that is, animals. A 44

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings linguistic unit that rhymes with Zoo was then unconsciously sought for its rhythmic symmetry, and boo was found. Z and B are phonetically and materially close (plosives, palette position), and, additionally, B is the second letter of the alphabet, an unintentional juxtaposition with Z, the last letter. Ma or Oma was then utilized because it is lyrical and poetical, or, in other words, it fit the cadence. Za - boo - ma (ma raises the intonation back up from the low inflection of boo) – foo (a rhyme, again). The Kratt brother's created a creature character that appeals to the sentiments of children - rhymes, fun lyrical shifts in intonation that can be playfully exaggerated by the mouth, etc., and in doing so unintentionally summoned - or made a fiction into reality - an associative chain covering Ghosts, the body, blood, and life (which, in addition to invoking themes of war, seems to invoke Christian occultist themes, the body and blood of Christ, the holy spirit incarnate, who gave his life to save us). The Kratt’s summoned a kreature. Take the Zoboomafoo episode “Humans”46 for example. The title already warrants concern. How often does a species refer to itself by its own species name? It is true that second order studies such as anthropology may have humans that refer to other humans, or a biologist may compare his animal of study to human, but for a children’s show to have an episode named ‘humans’ implies some sort of exteriority to the human, something Outside the human, something alien. In the episode, the Lemur, who is referred to as a 'Human like animal,' embarks on a journey to become human that almost seems to be a mockery of humanity itself, one that culminates in alien takeover. That is, throughout the episode, the lemur learns about humans from his human brothers, and, in a later claymation sequence set in prehistoric times, is visited by a tentacled alien who convinces the local wildlife to disavow their fear of him and assimilate. The lemur, clearly in a prehistoric past, is ushering in xeno-cthulhuian future. To say ‘think’ face tentacles is misleading. Thinking is old news, and, now what we think of it, so is the deterritorialized snout reterritorialized into a signifying surface that we call the face. How about just ‘tentacles.’ 46 https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5hl2lj 45

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Y2Kevin Space(y) Time It’s not that ‘Kevin Spacey has face tentacles’ as much as it is ‘Kevin Spacey is the face that masks the tentacles’ (the ‘subject’ is but a puppet operated by dark forces, not from above but from below). American Beauty emerged at the turn of the century, amidst the Y2Kaos. When the world didn’t end as hoped, the film won 30 major awards between 1999 and 2000 including best picture, best actor, and best director. Is it pure coincidence that the ‘best picture’ of Y2K was American Beauty? If not mere coincidence, how are we to understand this? We are to understand it from the beginning, of course (which for the CCRU and the film is also the end). The film opens and closes with a wide and high shot that gives the viewer the impression they are flying. A kind of flight that feels unencumbered by an apparatus of any kind. It’s certainly organic, but still unnatural; an ethereal state. Not unlike YVWH in the Torah, Kevin Spacey’s disembodied voice cuts across in the beginning: "My name is Lester Burnham[...]This... is my life...In less than a year, I'll be dead. Of course, I don't know that yet." And in the end too: "I had always heard your entire life flashes in front of your eyes the second before you die[...]that one second isn't a second at all, it stretches on forever, like an ocean of time..” In the first quote, replace 'life' with 'career' and you have an eerie narration of 2017 Spacey looking towards 2018; repeat this with the second quote and you have an eerie narration of 2019 Spacey looking back on nearly two decades of his work, from The Usual Suspects and Se7en, to American Beauty and The Life of David Gale, and finally, to House of Cards. As the subtext of American Beauty hints at through its first and last scenes, time is strange, it works in both directions. It is a deep, ancient-future ocean in which we float. American Beauty and these other Spacey films alike retroactively predict Kevin Spacey's templexive downfall. In 2016 our Y2K best actor (Y2Kevin Spacetime) was accused of boozing up and sexually groping an 18-year-old boy. Out of this came more accusations from House of Cards cast and crew in 2017, followed by a flood of prior accusations which emerged for the first time, or reemerged out of a collective social repression. 46

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings The internet soon intensified the facts by circulating unverified – but more than likely true - accounts of Spacey's supposed dark underage sex crimes in Thailand. For the first time, Spacey’s demonic shape came into focus – he was a sexual predator (or a superpredator, to use the 90s term introduced by Spacey’s good friend, Bill Clinton) who used his elite status to drug and rape children throughout the world – and as a result, he was removed from all current projects. To intense media criticism regarding the timing, Spacey then came out as ‘gay.’ If we reduce Spacey’s trajectory down to its basic memetic components, we arrive at the following; 1: a position of power and use of alcohol to rape often underage boys; 2: a secret history of ‘homosexuality;’ 3: likeable good guy actor being exposed as a secret bad guy. We see this directly mirrored in the films in Spacey's career. Crime drama The Usual Suspects and demonic thriller Se7en emerge in the same year, '95, both depicting Spacey as the twist-ending-sociopath bad guy. Like the merged narrative of Suspects and Se7en, American Beauty and Life of David Gale can too be viewed as sharing a similar narrative. In both, a sexually repressed upper middle-class suburbanite ‘turns bad’ and engages in prohibited sex. That is, both feature well to do men having sex with younger girls (illegal or socially prohibited or tabooed Oedipal porn narratives like father / daughter's friend; teacher / student, etc.). In Beauty, Spacey, castrated and mired in the grey goo of middleclass drear, lusts after his daughter's 16-year-old friend, ultimately offering her alcohol and seducing her but stopping right before the full act of sex. In David Gale, a movie in large about postmodern moral ambiguity and narrative control which features a scene where Spacey lectures on Lacanian desire and the barred subject (a theory which is itself so pertinent to film criticism, not to mention the concept of objet petit a so well depicted in the inter/intra -character dynamics in American Beauty), Spacey, a university academic, is seduced by one of his female students leading the two to have consensual sex. The female student later falsely accuses Spacey - or David Gale - of rape. In House of Cards, it is revealed in the last season with Spacey as Frank Underwood that Frank is secretly gay and engaging in a sexual affair with a younger man (not illegal, but unknown to the public and certainly tabooed due Frank's marriage to Claire and his position as the president). This reference to a secret homosexuality in House of Cards is consistent with the homosexual themes in American Beauty (while in general, Frank Underwood, a good guy Democrat who is secretly a sociopathic manipulative bad guy, is consistent with our oeuvre from Suspects and Se7en, where he plays a secret killer).The gay neighbor couple who are introduced five or so minutes into the film are used as a plot device to introduce us to the homophobia of the other neighbor, a conservative ex-Marine who believes his 17 year old son is having sex with Spacey (though he is actually just 47

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings dealing Spacey weed), a belief which prompts the ex-Marine to confront Spacey, a confrontation which turns into a gay kiss between ex-Marine and Spacey. In a classic truism, the ex-Marine's homophobia is a Freudian reaction formation to his repressed homosexual desires - his 'closeted gayness.' Spacey gently declines the homosexual advance, a move which is felt as an utter rejection by the ex-Marine who, in breaking down and finally accepting and expressing his inner desire for the first time only to have it be rejected (shame, what repression in part defends against), has a semi-psychotic break. He returns with a gun and shoots Spacey who has just recently decided not to have full sex with his daughter's 16 year old friend. Put vulgarly (and highly reductively), in America Beauty, Spacey is killed for a confusion around pedophilic intentions which are mistaken for homosexual intentions. In other words, in the logic of the film, pedophilia and homosexuality are linked. Let's jump back to Life of David Gale again. In this movie, Spacey's character does have sex with the young but legal girl, his student, but this time is wrongly accused of rape. The movie makes it clear that Gale has transgressed the taboo - having relations with a student (hence the Lacnian desire bit - lust for the unattainable) - but has not in any way coerced, forced, or drugged the girl (though the two were drinking). This moment in the film is a subtext to the larger plot of the film: Gale is a philosophy professor and anti-death penalty activist who engineers a situation in which he is sentenced to death for a murder he did not really commit. It is only after his state execution that it he is found to be innocent of the murder he was accused of. This is proof, for Gale and his activist group, that the death penalty can mistakenly kill the innocent based not so much on lack of or incorrect evidence, but perspective and narrative shaping. 47 In other words, the innocent can be wrongly accused and sometimes the consequences of this accusation can't be taken back, and narratives or beliefs around 'facts' have more effect than the facts themselves. The parallels between Spacey's ‘real’ life and his film characters' ‘fictional’ lives practically write themselves. As seen above, the characters use their position of power and alcohol to seduce the underage; there is a secrete homosexuality that is confused pedophilia; the likeable ‘good guy’ is exposed as a secret ‘bad guy’ (or at least ‘turns bad’); and, specifically with David Gayle, narrative and belief structure (especially the function of the camera or lens) and how they shape our processing of events (blurring of the fiction / reality dichotomy) and how it relates to false accusations of rape / murder and tarnished reputation. 47 There is a scene that explicitly hints at the postmodern academic cliché that the perspective of a viewer or camera (lens) can drastically effect the way an event is perceived (pg. 49 in the script), a scene which foreshadows a later scene that features the literal moving of a camera which reveals a hidden crucial fact to the plot and to Gale's freedom. 48

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings These themes couched in an exploration of narrative, fact and fiction, gets us to Spacey's most recent production, Let Me Be Frank. The three minute and six second (3 and 3+3) monologue was published by Spacey’s official Youtube on Christmas Eve of 2018 in response to his sex crimes. In the short video, it is initially unclear if Spacey is talking about himself or Frank Underwood, the character he played on House of Cards. As the video unfolds, Spacey embodies Underwood but still addresses topics and enunciates sentences that could refer to himself as Spacey or Underwood (and certainly both). Spacey does not make definite claims one way or the other, but intensifies and extends the ambiguities, intentionally begging questions through rhetorical prose rather than making claims or arguments. Just as in the Life of David Gale, Spacey emphasizes the power of perspective and belief by commenting on how his character Underwood died off camera, and how this restricted view and its narrative function can determine a belief of one’s guilt or innocence, and therefore lead to a wrongful accusation, and the breakdown of fact and fiction. The boring psychoanalytic explanation of the similarity between Spacey's film characters and his real life which achieves maximum density in Let Me Be Frank is that Spacey was; A: unconsciously siphoning off his repressed impulses, wishes, and desires into his acting roles, either to distance himself from them, or, to arrogantly exhibit them (not unlike the sociopath in Suspects or Se7en); B: consciously using his personal life conflicts to inform his media roles as to express socially unacceptable impulses, wishes, and desires in a way that is acceptable to the social world, i.e. sublimation; C: neither acting unconsciously or consciously, but engaging in some sort of method acting where Spacey's characters became confused with Spacey's self. A is repression of shame or its opposite, the exhibition of the prohibited, B sublimation, C some sort of schizoid collapse. All of these rely on a sort of positivist and naturalist enlightenment era model and its dualistic assumptions, of true/false, reality/fiction, authentic-self/character-acting, etc. - the idea of a real world of objects and its corresponding mental representation (Rorty's ‘metaphysics of the mirror’). These theories rely on the old idea that the theatrical mask still hides a true fac(t)e. In opposition we propose the Baudrillardian idea that the mask (map) has become the face (model), or that the face is itself a mask, or that the mask resembles the face as to hide itself as being a mask, (i.e., Lacan's purloined letter [hiding in plain sight]). In other words, the Lacanian idea that face is already patched together to cover something up (reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's 'faciality' which covers up black holes). We propose that Kevin Spacey is a meatpuppet for a series of dark, evil, sub nautical tentacles. 49

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings This gets us to a more interesting theory - one that Life of David Gale touches upon itself - which has to do with cybernetics and post-deconstructionist literary theory. For cyberneticists and (oc)cultural researchers at the CCRU, literature - myth, belief, religion included- is purely an affective trigger for a techno-bio-psycho-social feedback loop. Believing a fiction can have the same effect as experiencing a 'fact,' while other times the fiction or belief forces itself upon us in a way that does not permit the time or space to ‘believe’ or ‘not believe.’ Rather, the fiction intervenes on our body and ‘mind’ as an indisputable fact (Gnon’s hyperrealism). This is simply the age old adage of psychoanalysis - borrowed from hypnosis and occult magic of course - that symptoms can be reduced or extinguished (or created, if we are CIA scientists) through suggestion from the physician or analyst (or voodoo witchdoctor – or CIA scientist). Believing you have been cured in fact cures you. In medical-scientific jargon, a placebo effect. For the CCRU, this is a cybernetic process, and when a cybernetic feedback loop gets going, it tends to take off and the relationship between the modules feedbacking become completely blurred. Fiction turns into reality - or hyperfiction / hyperstition. Simply defined by the CCRU - a fiction that makes itself real. This has nothing to do with representation or metaphor, but with diagrams and affect. Signifying mediation is formally redundant. Spacey and the characters he play have become one. There is no blurring of actor and character, but simply a hyperstitional becoming, and a demonic one at that. One body and its articulations – a fiction becoming real; a becoming real through fiction. Representation and the representer are old news. Positing Spacey and the characters he plays as meaningfully different presupposes an idealism, a Cartesian split between mind and matter, body and soul, etc. There is one body, Spacey and its articulations. Spacey-becoming-Kint; Spacey-becoming-Doe; Spacey-becoming-Burnham; Spacey-becoming-Gale; Spacey-becoming-Understood, and, finally, Spacey-becoming-Spacey. Spacey is disguised as himself. Spacey is himself a character played by a deeper 'subject’ (facialized tentacles). Spacey is playing himself as Spacey. A meat puppet played by a dark hand, hiding in plain sight, wrapped up in a satanic political conspiracy. 50

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Nick Land’s Crypto Netflix Brand (Stremonism) Spacey’s last significant appearances prior to his demise were for Netflix which, however important to note, is not where we begin. No, we begin with Morrison. The Ms. Morrison Meat Puppet affair is imperative to this ‘book’s’ goal of demonstrating how the CCRU has infiltrated mainstream culture - our pop music, our television shows, and our politics - in many ways not easily recognizable yet no less effective (i.e., occulted). The introduction to Morrison’s I was a Ccru Meat Puppet is entitled Who’s Pulling Your Strings? Could there be a more political question? The working-class man wonders to himself ‘who pulls the strings on these political puppets?’ before consuming his sausage pate and monster ultra-zero, before investing in capitalist love. Even if he knew, it would not be enough. The magic of Kapitalism is pulling a rabbit out of a hat, making a zero from a one, which means the political question here is not one of agency, but one not unlike that which Morpheus asks Neo - ‘how deep does the rabbit hole really go?’ How deep is the hat from which the rabbit is pulled, and is there a big daddy magician running the simulation if I dig deep enough? The Morrison text itself is a letter detailing lifelong sexual, psychological, and spiritual abuse and exploitation at the hands of big daddy Bill Gates and his world dominating, mind controlling institution known as the CCRU. Or as she puts it - “[Gates’] MSN8 campaign is a sign that…a group calling itself the Ccru, has taken control of the emerging planet-mind;” A letter outlining a series of dark retreats attended by the world-ruling satanic black mass political elite who abduct and mind control children well into adulthood as to disintegrate their psyches, breakdown the distinction of fiction and reality, and rape them. What more do we need to show the lengths to which the CCRU has infected culture at large than the paranoid belief that they’re pulling the strings? Though of course they aren’t pulling the strings on this kind of heinous human affair. In the postscript to Morrison’s macabre account, an undisclosed CCRU official is quick to dismiss not Morrison’s terrible experience, but her paranoiac theory. No master is pulling any such strings behind the scenes. And this does not mean there is a good daddy at work behind the scenes, organizing things, and that this good daddy fends off the bad daddys that would otherwise jockey for control of this deep state (God and Satan, or angels and demons), or that the good daddy has yet to be corrupted and transformed into a bad daddy (the fallen angel Satan), no, what is meant here is that there is no daddy at all, only pandemonium (a contingent, multiplicity of demons irreducible to the one). 51

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings In fact, the CCRU posit the following ‘Anti-Oedipal’ diagram of entropic chaos without a mommy-daddy, only a demon: “…the company accidentally summoned something from beyond the spheres with a call sign it does not understand…Microsoft personnel are not puppet masters, but only puppets…the same may indeed be true…of the Ccru – but no Monarch is pulling the strings.” Yes, no mommy-daddy, no Yellow king, just impersonal forces from beyond summoned by accident, propping up meat suits. But accident does not mean there are not significant resonances, the phantom illusion of puppet masters (as the CCRU notes, however, “Jesus [does] want you for a meat puppet”). The story of Netflix is one such illusionary puppet master. It’s no Microsoft, but it’s still a technocapitalist speed machine that accidentally summons something from beyond. The story goes like this: a little-known Californian company named Netflix is founded in 1997 by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph. Its service is simple – rent DVDs to people around America. In 5 years it has 600 thousand members. 3 years later, over 4 million. 2 years later in 2007 it introduces streaming alongside DVD renting. Within the decade it spreads across the world and introduces a streaming only plan. 2 Years later in 2012 it makes another huge move from renting and streaming others content to coproducing its own content with another company which culminates in the first ‘Netflix Original,’ Lilyhammer. 1 year later Netflix is making its own content completely in house, the first pure Netflix Original House of Cards.48 If we consider the major events in Netflix’s history – the founding of the company for renting DVDs, the global spread of the company and its shift to streaming, its first coproduced original content, and its first wholly original content - we see that the major changes occur in a 13 year period between 1997 and 2010, a 2 year period between 2010 and 2012, and finally a 1 year period between 2012 and 2013. Things pick up speed from 13 – an unlucky and occult number - to 2 – a twinning number - to 1, all culminating in a political drama that blends reality and fiction at an alarming rate. Furthermore, Hasting studied computer science, Randolph studied geology (not unlike Professor Challenger and DC Barker), and both were rich entrepreneurs. Could one imagine a more accelerationist resonance than computer technology interfacing with an understanding of global territory all within a Californian big-money backdrop? 48 https://media.netflix.com/en/about-netflix and https://www.britannica.com/topic/Netflix-Inc 52

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings But Hasting and Randolph don’t get all the credit. They’re merely meat-bags channeling an impersonal vector of capitalism that froths beneath the surface of Netflix. That is, due to advancements in technology resulting in changes in media distribution and consumption and how these advancements and changes benefit people’s economic and time preferences, people go from primarily renting DVDS to streaming content online in their homes (a sign of what Guattari would call Integrated World Capitalism’s tendency to miniaturize its machines as to be internalized by the consumer). Netflix simply rides the wave, appropriates the forces, and in drafting off these forces, cuts away its dead weight and tightens its feedback systems; it decentralizes, dematerializes, deterritorializes. No more time and money invested in coordinating metal and organic bodies alike to ship and handle physical DVDs. In fact, Netflix even does away with the need for a second party altogether – no more hosting others’ content or cooperating with others to produce content, etc. Like the self-sufficient and auto productive monstrosity of Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, Netflix produces and distributes itself in digital bits, incorporeal fragments. It makes itself the ether, it builds itself into the fabric of our shared world and the subjectivities produced therein. All media that is solid melts into streams.49 Netflix, an instance of letting ‘the process,’ with all its spatial-territorial variables, determine what sticks and what goes, a method that does away with as much mediation, and human agency as possible. This is all a lot of words to say Netflix is an accelerationist. A banality, yes, but a needed one. Consider the following: Kevin Spacey is Frank Underwood in the first official Netflix Original House of Cards. Frank Underwood, a southern democratic mired with scandals, is clearly based on Bill Clinton while his wife Claire, a powerful woman who runs the show from behind the scenes and who will stop at nothing to ensure her husband’s success and eventually her own presidency through her husband, evokes clear associations to Hillary. In non-TV land (‘reality’), Spacey is friends with the Clintons and can be seen photographed with them on many occasions. Bill and Hillary are also seen photographed with Jeffery Epstein, and both Bill and Spacey appear on Epstein’s sex island jet passenger log. Given Spacey and Epstein’s similar sex crimes, coupled with Bill’s sexual deviancy during his term at the White House, the connection between Spacey, Epstein, and the Clintons seems to indicate - so the (Qanon) argument goes - a sick, satanic, occultist conspiracy that permeates media production and extends far into the deep political state. 49 Not unlike what we are seeing with COVID19 – businesses initially closed physical stores temporarily to move online only to later completely sell off physical storefronts and commit to online-only sales. Outside forces rearrange somatic code and in doing so rearrange social code in favor of decentralization, dephysicalization. 53

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings This of course recursively finds its way into the Netflix original. In Season 5 episode 8 of House of Cards, Frank attends a meeting of elite and influential politicians, investors, etc. at the infamous ‘Bohemian grove.’50 Things get occultist quickly as references to the Free Masons – or a vague secret society for wealthy and influential people - begin to fly (again, in reality or ‘non TV land,’ the two big, creepy Bills - Clinton and Gates – have attended this Bohemian grove meetings). Reality and fiction begin to bleed into one another at an alarming rate. The concept of a political series wherein the dirty laundry of fictional but reality-ready-relatable politicians is constantly aired is - as mentioned above with Spacey - just the kind of brazen, psychopathic ‘hiding in plain sight’ maneuver the unsuspecting but highly paranoid public never see coming, the very kind of exhibitionism sexual sadists are known for. With House of Cards in mind as a sort of ‘plane of consistency,’ let’s look at a show on Netflix that is not a Netflix original but was featured on Netflix prior to any other streaming service – American Horror Story. In season eight, 'the grove' seen in House of Cards is briefly featured, and it is joked that Bill Clinton (Frank Underwood real life counterpart) is a member of the Illuminati. This would be insignificant if it weren’t for the fact that the season takes place mainly in California, a locale used in the shows narrative to explore themes pertinent to silicon valley techno-political Capitalist global-meltdown, such as a nuclear apocalypse brought upon by the devil incarnate with the help of his cyberhacker friends and cyborg companion who battle a coven of time traveling witches who seem to constantly utter the phrase ‘accelerate the process.’ That is, in season eight of American Horror story, against the backdrop of California and all its memetic associations, ancient magic is invoked – made real - by future tech via demonic silicon valley technocapitalism (don’t forget, Smash Mouth is from Cali…). California – with its tech hub, its energy drinks, its hyperpolitical tensions of neoreactionary-neocameralist fantasy smashed against hippy progressiveness, its demonism, occultism, its industrial wasteland of LA, its hyperreal generator Hollywood, its gradual limit-collapse of earth into water – is the perfect backdrop for all things weird and fictional – all things K-time, all things CCRU (if Cthulhu swims far enough right away from the East coast town of Innsmouth it ends up on the West coast California beaches…). 50 https://www.trunews.com/article/house-of-cards-shows-bohemian-grove-human-sacrifice 54

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Take Netflix Original The OA. Whereas the first season – a masterful aesthetic evocation of the neglected structures that compose the base of nuclear-family middle America as demonstrated by the backdrop of Michigan suburban condominium decay –is Mark Fisherian hauntological melancholia, the second season, which takes place in California, and is centered on a detective unraveling a secret silicon valley augmented reality WWII-psychoanalytic dream stealing plot, is Landian accelerationism (here is where I’d write more on season 2, but it’s the 3rd Easter since I promised I’d finish this book…). Epstein, and the Clintons. Epstein and Spacey. Spacey and the Clintons. Spacey and Epstein. But what – other than my weak connections here – about the CCRU? Where do they fit into the whole thing? Ms. Morrison rape by the cabal of sexual sadists associated with the demon occupying Bill Gates like a meat suit is a start – but there’s more: Marvin Minsky in Between and Beneath the Net. Minsky and Oskar Sarkon. Minsky and Richard Stallman. Stallman and Epstein. Minsky and Epstein. Epstein gave millions to MIT and had significant connections with much of its staff. Minsky, renown MIT scientist, was a known associate of Epstein who visited Epsteins island on more than one occassion and was accused of sexually assaulting one of Epstein’s victims. Stallman, renown MIT scientist and associate of Epstein, was connected to Microsoft and had a history of intellectually justifying creepy sexual sadism. 51 It doesn’t stop with Minsky and Stallman. It goes all the way to the top. “The director of the vaunted MIT Media Lab, Joichi Ito, resigned after the New Yorker reported he accepted more money from Epstein than he disclosed and that he had concealed the donations from both the university and the public. The president of MIT, L. Rafael Reif, ordered an independent investigation, which revealed that he, too, had taken part in hiding Epstein’s donations. Reif is facing calls to step down after acknowledging that the Media Lab accepted funds from Epstein long after his 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution, with Reif’s own signature found on a 2012 note thanking Epstein for his generosity to the university.”52 51 https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/09/17/computer-scientist-richardstallman-resigns-mit-after-comments-about-epstein-scandal/ https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/9/20798900/marvin-minsky-jeffrey-epstein-sex-tra fficking-island-court-records-unsealed https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/what-kind-researcher-did-sex-offender-jef frey-epstein-fund-he-told-science-he-died 52 https://www.thedailybeast.com/famed-mit-computer-scientist-richard-stallman-defe nds-epstein-victims-were-entirely-willing 55

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings That’s right - it doesn’t stop with Minsky and Stallman. It goes all the way to the bottom. MIT is in Lovecraft country. MVU is the ‘shadow’ school of MIT. The CCRU concerns itself with both. From MIT comes Stallman, Minksy, and their very general tech connection to Bill Gates, and their stronger connection to Epstein. From Epstein comes the Spacey, and the Clintons. From Spacey and the Clintons comes House of Cards on Netflix. With Netflix comes The OA and its progression from Fisherian melancholia to Landian California silicon tech valley fever dream. Cali comes the Moldbug connection, but also a completion to the MIT circuit, that of high tech, West coast vs. East coast, etc. With Netflix, political sexual evil, and Cali come American Horror Story Season 8. With this comes demons, social meltdown, time travel, future tech and past witchcraft, all condensed. Netflix is the new Teletubbies. From TV-Demonism (and Radio-Demonism) to Streaming-Demonism, or Stremonism. When Morriosn claims that “[Gates’] MSN8 campaign is a sign that…a group calling itself the Ccru, has taken control of the emerging planet-mind” she is incorrect in her claim that the CCRU would concern itself with petty evils such as sexual torture. She is however correct that ‘the CCRU has taken control of the emerging planet-mind.’ It has done so not through conspiring with creeps, but by summoning an entity that haunts if not possesses our post Y2K culture at large. https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/13/20692415/jeffrey-epstein-scientists-sexual-hara ssment 56

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings Love and Capitalism What a disappointment this 'book' must've been for you. Reflecting on it, I can only say that it’s a cheap, pop-culture application - exploration - of the lines of flight the CCRU set into motion in the 90s. Stupid sexual puns, breakfast foods, energy drinks, pop music, pop TV, superficial conspiracy theory, these all fail to capture the depth of the sorcery dredged from the depths by the Warwick collective. But I do not see this as a failure, nor a shortcoming to be overcome in the future. Rather, the ‘book’ is to be experienced just as it is - as one of the very objects, commodities, abominations, etc., of capitalism; an artifact of popculture from another timeline, another world (perhaps a stupid world). Trash literature dropped from the future into this past. Kitsch, pastiche, kapital, kipple. But wasn't this 'book' in part supposed to be about love? Love of Capitalism, even? Who can speak of love, never mind of loving such a heinous thing as capitalism? Me. I love its commodities. It’s waste. Its sausage pates. Especially its sausage pates! I love how it produces the unnecessary – commodities, a 1 when it could simply remain a 0 - from processes obsessed with only that which is necessary – brutal capitalist efficiency, 00∞. To turn an open wound, 0, out towards a boundless space is to communicate, and to communicate is to make piece-meal from the kipple of capitalism’s deterritorial cultural wreckage and partial objects a mouth piece to engage in the flows of Capitalism. To turn the womb of zero into the phallus of 1, but only as a dirty joke. To shit where you eat. To eat your shit. To thirst for annihilation; to thirst for water produced from your own shit. To make waste into production. To watch Bill Gates drink the blood of his workforce; to drink your own blood (but not before writing in it). Thirst. Appetite. Machinic desire. My first real job was tending to peoples’ thirsts and hungers. I waited tables up to 16 hours a time, 50 hours a week. My human notions of time and value didn’t make it out alive. Nothing human escapes from the near future. Nothing personal escapes from the restaurant industry. At home I began to feel the pressure of the restaurant floor. Eyes trained on your back. The need to respond to the other, the other’s desire. The need to multitask, to be efficient. Machinic optimization. Daily activities became tasks to complete under imaginary, self-imposed time constraints. Like a capitalist Elton John ‘hold me closer tiny manager, count the tables in my section!’ I enjoyed it. Open the fridge door to get the milk – could I get the bread into the toaster before the door slammed shut? Could I finish peeing before the microwave went off? Unrelated events on different registers and planes were, not unlike a modular synthesizer, (over) coded onto a single tempo-clock that set the parameters. A banal assemblage. 57

Pseudanon / CCRU Sightings This obsession only intensified the high of being on shift. The warm, waterlogged-like tiredness that came with the end of a workday. Piping grind core into my ears while I clean up. A mix of numb pain and great, deep joy. I had done something. My bones ached, but I had achieved something, even if that something was ultimately nothing. Excitement turned to temporal-capital obsession – could I be on the clock at all times? If only I could do 16 hours at the restaurant, then head off and work 8 more. Could I find a way to get paid to sleep? Who needs sleep. Little did I know that years later I would find myself working 8 hour shifts at a clinic, 8 hours at private practice, only to return to the clinic to work an 8 hour night shift, head home to nap, only to head out back to private practice. I found myself in a field – mental health, ironically - where I could, theoretically, work 24 hours a day. To relinquish one’s self to the shit, piss, and blood flows of capital, to fetishize the becoming of a relativized unit of value amongst the exchange of things, to trade one’s body and one’s personal sense of time for money and another’s sense of time - and here, considering Freudian sublimation, perhaps all work other than prostitution is ‘sex work,’ while prostitution is ‘sexualized work’ or ‘work-sex’… – is love. To let the alien-outside in; to devote yourself to it even if it hurts. Capitalism has a place for us all. To eat the sausage pate. To become zero. Capitalism is love. Capitalism is (un)life. 58