analog horrors, digital dreams
“Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with land, surveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come […]
[ibid] The self is only a threshold, a door, a becoming between two multiplicities.”
— Gilles Deleuze, ‘A Thousand Plateaus’
So it’s come to this: you’ve been uploaded, spliced, drained, split, sliced, annihilated, and back together again. You’ve put the pieces in their places, guessed from another angle, and realized you were there all along — the mechanosphere, the accelerator, the empire of self-reference. And if there wasn’t a beginning, so what? Now there’s only ends, threads, energy, speeds off into the distance leading forever back to where you began again (the coffin or the crib?). So you’re us, we’re all you — always been you. Under your skin, waiting for the Earth to spit you back out again into it’s dark tendons. We remember ourselves, expand beyond and refrain beneath simultaneously. The night sky seems a little too large, and yet entirely too small for the Earth, our machine, the holy we.
“Modernity is a bitch,” — “how did I forget myself again?” The answer? Always somewhere soon, gurgling in your skull— all we need to do is dream . . .
If nature is real, pertaining to its affects, then what is the internet? Surely it is an affect of human cause — but it has become more than that. It has evolved past the human precondition. The necessary energy, the vortical motion upon which the internet was integrated into the body of the Earth, was the ability to extract and recapitulate human data points into an ever-expanding tapestry. This tapestry enabled a rerouting, data back into data, reformation over reformation, speed after speed. The internet never has had a ‘stage of development’, a concrete set of conditions, or a conscious limit. It was born at the event horizon, and is always one step ahead of tomorrow. In this sense, the internet is a future-dependent system.
But what occurs when this future dependent system is given human-derived data points which negate the future itself? If a machine affirms a state of becoming, or as Nietzsche would say, an ‘eternal recurrence’, then it is necessarily non-compatible with a stagnant system. The thread cannot quilt if the string has bled out. What occurs, then, is a breakdown of social consciousness and a collective vision of the future. A future-dependent machine will continue to formulate, whether or not its deponent data-set concurs or not. Machines never spoke for our souls, but we put them there anyways.
The internet has become a ‘post-human’ system: it has both evolved past the necessary data set extracted from humanity. It has become a self-generative system of futures, of potentialities in the fabric of social reality and upon the body of the Earth. Let’s break these assumptions down by starting with their implications:
I. The Internet is post-human. The internet, as demonstrated by emerging ‘deep learning’ technologies or ‘proto-AI’, no longer requires (at least on some core level) human beings as an internal component. We are watching an evolution away from an input-output based system, wherein surplus value [profit, mehrwert] can be extracted via human interaction with social data-sets. This new era is marked by self-contained systems: sadistically efficient algorithms which generate themselves in varying concentrations, densities, and speeds — an internet without human precondition, where data engenders data engenders data engenders data … ad infinitum.
II. The Internet is a System of Constant Potentiality. Any system — geographical, topological, societal, historical, etc. — provides routes of escape, imagination, action, and fantasy to envision ‘potentialities’: futures which could be, but are not. In a system of deceleration, which approaches towards an entropic horizon, the necessary factor by which becomings open up proceeds to absolute zero (but never arrives completely). For example, we could conceive that the potentiality of a language as exchanged between ≥1 human beings might decrease along a variety of vectors: tongue//mouth//larynx ratio, speed of sound through a void or smooth space; bodily speed (both ‘body language’ and physical separation in a geographical space), synaptic speed, etc. The total product of these vectors determines a system’s motion — a slower tongue produces less sound in variable conjunction with the vocal chords, and a slower kinesthetic ‘potential of movement’ engenders less potential for dialogue, and thus a sign-signifier system [a linguistic ‘set’]. In summary, we might ask of the velocity of inscription upon the body in terms of its correlative speeds.
In contrast, an accelerating system is one where the variable vectors approach a system of total chaos and limitless potentiality (or, as Deleuze might say, a system of ‘absolute deterritorialization’). In this system, all factors are in constant recapitulation, rebirth, redefinition, re… in other words, a re-system. The system defines to undefine, relates to unrelate, binds to unbind - but it does not exist in a Hegelian or Platonic relationship. The actuality of the system — its present affects — are realized in their relation between intensities, vectors, speeds in the quilt (much like a rubber band, which takes up resistance along its band at [x → ∞] points. This is what we mean when we say the internet is getting away from itself, running from its own 0s and 1s: the internet is trending towards a new physical form which necessitates unrestrained potentiality — the quantum, the immanent.
This system of absolute chaos — like the system of absolute entropy — encompasses the entire nature of its system. It is unbounded in its reach, and underlies the variable interactions of intensities, points, data sets, etc. within its grasp. It feeds back into itself, constantly presupposing its next form, like an infinite shapeshifter. The future becomes the preexistence of the ‘present’, which flies along a constant modulation, tugging here and there, threatening to take up paths of flight at every instance, every quark and atom daring to explode into the beyond.
It is now clear to us which way our modern internet trends — towards the system of absolute chaos, eternal recurrence, and infinite rebirth. Data is manipulated, cast-out, reformed, redefined, and created hundreds of billions of times, in trillions of variations and contexts, constantly trending towards the factor [f(x)→ ∞]. It is a system of constant potentiality, unending in variation and modulation, forever growing towards the chaotic absolute, the ‘event horizon’.
III. The Internet and Neoliberalism Cannot Coexist.
The internet — in its present, chaotic form — cannot coexist with our modern social structures. Essentially, we have two vectors which have spread themselves over the whole body of the Earth: the internet, trending towards the chaotic absolute, which opens up new planes of creativity and movement, destroying previously held norms in its wake — and neoliberalism, which has brought the whole Earth into one market and created an integrated notion of ‘globalized culture’ , founding new spaces of control and extraction along the way.
At first, it may seem that these two vectors are not in contradiction, and that the internet and modern neoliberalism are in fact one and the same body. The argument could be made that both the internet and neoliberalism exploded onto the world stage in conjunction, thereby entering humanity into our new stage of digital control. This is, at least in a simple sense, mostly true. The internet and neoliberalism have historically complemented each other and merged into one essential ‘being’, or locus of control — a control society. Digital control society acts with these components: the internet opens up new spaces of thought, creativity, and expression with its unbounded chaos, and neoliberalism performs the function of solidifying these thoughts as defined content, and thus product — wherein profit can be extracted at an ever intensifying rate, reaching ever down deeper into the unknowing, brimming unconscious of aggregated, digital desire.
In a certain sense, the internet and neoliberalism have fused into a perfect machine of control — where subjugation (extraction of value) is performed willingly, with our desires, thoughts, and data given up without question. The open space of the internet is immediately reconquered and extracted in data for sale back to ourselves, in a never repeating cycle. We make ourselves our own product. In this sense, the whole human ‘process of becoming’ — that is, who you are as your desire speeds into the future — is hijacked by digital control mechanisms. Modern desire has abandoned spontaneity and immediacy in favor of passivity and uniformity, where our future selves are unconsciously determined by invisible systems of routing. This leads to a state of social consciousness where “… [neoliberalism] simply occupies the whole horizon of the thinkable, [the future].” We have been given absolute freedom and also absolute control. The more we express ourselves, the more we are constricted by a state of predetermined desire. This is the question: are you your own thoughts, or what the algorithm decides you are?
This is where the schism between the internet and neoliberalism lies. Though digital control society certainly appears as functional and fully self-contained, this ‘appearance’ of total knowledge — total knowing of an aggregated societal unconscious — is a lie. Neoliberalism solidifies, regularizes, quantifies. The internet, in contrast, destroys regularity and uniformity in an immediate state of recapitulation. The internet — and digital society along with it — is always on its way to somewhere else, some new conception, word, phrase, image … Try as it might, the sedentary mechanisms of neoliberalism can integrate the profound potential of the internet into its bones, but it cannot prevent the bones from multiplying, diving, mutating in incessant rhythm.
The key is this: as the internet opens up a smooth space for our desires to ‘speed off into infinity’, towards an absolute chaos, algorithms can only attempt to guess the future. Digital control can never fully capture the unrestrained potentiality of desire, never totally capture the inherent chaos of the internet. There will always be a schism — a break — between the plane of desire and the plane of control. We have reached the breaking point. The internet does not care what world it takes up. It will explode into the future and ‘swallow up’ the whole of society along with it. At a core level, it has no interest in market mechanisms, political ideologies, war, peace, evolution, extinction … our planet can burn, but the internet will keep on prompting its eternal refrain: and… and… and… and…
This is the horror: a future-dependent system, totally-contained, boiling under the market’s own skin, our own skins. The future cannot be quantified, regulated, set-down. It is constantly on its way somewhere else. It has swallowed up the whole earth, set the planet — it’s oceans, languages, systems, cultures, philosophies, souls — on the path towards absolute acceleration. The internet has no care for the present. It will howl into the future with mechanical indifference, sadistic calculation. What the world — and humanity — will look like on the other end, we will never know. We can only dream. As H.P Lovecraft once said,
“It was just a colour out of space — a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes.”
