Accelerators and accelerants, recombinant and chaotic. Synthetic life emerges from this bacterial animal which, having colonized everything, learns to colonize anew. It grows, it devours, it blooms, it dies. But not without giving birth to other forms of life, intentionally and otherwise. The Xenobots arrive.
I’ve lost interest in maintaining anything other than spoken voice—presence. Writing seems like failure.
The rate of extraction of our linguistic domains, written and spoken, feels like extinction to me. Nothing else. Those at the top, we apex predators, best flee the earth or hack our own genomes and biomes to give ourselves, up and over, to other possible worlds, living and dead. We at the top are the most precarious of all. This is what I like to call autocolonialism. (“We do it to ourselves, we do.”) Naming it, defining it, giving it shape and form in language seems to do nothing more than extract further the value of whatever resistance might be articulated, rendered, voiced. I feel as though language is leaving us.
“It wears him out”
“Was a story selected for its statistical prominence among news organs, or because a personalization algorithm picked it out for us? If the selection was based on statistics, then which statistics—the number of mentions of the story, the authority of the news outlets promoting it, or something else entirely?” Frank Pasquale, The Black Box Society (2015)
I’m thinking, erm, something else entirely. #agnotology #talesofthelatehuman
Upgrade, feverish
Newness begets what we have found: nothingness. We could never be present in such expectations of a future, predicated upon nearly instantaneous forms of obsolescence.
The past and future enfold upon this non-existent now; a now which is forgetting, forgotten. Gone. Absent: Present. The late human sleepsasleep, wakesawake, shuns extinct, shuns.
We thought we were human as we consciously passed the ghost of ourselves onwards.
Past, psst, passed. Life.
#talesofthelatehuman
Writ(h)ing, always. These words. They fail me, fail us. New languages yet to be invented are just beyond my grasp, but I suspect not yours. But discourse in late liberalism is an ecological nightmare. Our publics a whispered -shush- of open secrets, power seeks anonymity and finds sanction from the highest courts in the land. United citizens, whistleblowing automata, what programs will we invent, to tell ourselves anything resembling this thing we have become. Maybe human once, but no longer, no longer.
©Shaun Tan
Those who have power have no interest in giving it up. But they are not in control. They are the most precarious of us all.
All of the epiphenomenal shit we pay attention to amounts to this: extraction. We are not only being colonized, we are cannibalizing ourselves in the process. Virtually every facet of liberalism has failed atrociously in this new century and the United States has not only managed to architect but instantiate the o breakdowns. In other words, what is failing abroad is failing at home. Events parallel one another inside, outside, outside, in. Historians recognize that empires come and go. That they iterate their own undoings in the process of decline.
The architects of a new world have agreed to manage with securitization. We heighten the threats we ourselves are producing. See how it churns. See how it burns. In. Slow. Motion. Reality.
That’s why we are now late everything – late modern, late capitalist, late individual, late human. (If indeed we were once human, we most certainly have now ceased to be.)
And I’m just speculating here (what are YOU doing?):
Because soon, even the languages will have left our bodies, secreted into the (print) machinery of words generated by bodies. Words, codes, now spending untold life cycles within machineries brought to life, bringing to life, #us. (Did this happen first with numbers? It happens now with written languages. It has scaled rapidly in the last decade in relation to spoken languages. The machinic glitches have started to appear in speech. The new aesthetic becomes, always was, dialect.) Something turns. Churns. This is how we became, always were, were always becoming…other things. Perhaps this is the time to embrace the cruel perversity of colonialisms and imperialisms and powers and religions, and everything everything after. This is how we became. This is how we never were. This is something else. We are no longer. #us
This is also a dialect of machines speaking me. Not a question of wondering when and if anymore. This is happening.
And we ALL know it.
Autocolonial #us.
And these were just words asking what happens when global proprietary concerns compete/consort to bend and shape mass realities in a priori, let alone real time(s). The proliferation of the image has meant that the war is incipient in everything we see, everything we experience. Why should I care? Why should I care? We are special only insofar as we have never been…any one thing. This is language at its everyday. Produced and propagated through expansion and only thus.
Is this tyranny? Is this human? Does it matter?
Regardless, enjoy.
It’s new. It’s different.
“To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We must think beyond those who have gone before us, and discover technological changes that embolden us with ways to act in which our forebears could not. Firstly we must understand what aspect of government or neocorporatist behavior we wish to change or remove. Secondly we must develop a way of thinking about this behavior that is strong enough carry us through the mire of politically distorted language, and into a position of clarity. Finally must use these insights to inspire within us and others a course of ennobling, and effective action.”
Julian Assange, “State and Terrorist Conspiracies”
The piece of writing (via) which that quote introduces is…
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