Crucified Futurism

I've been thinking. Thinking about going insane!

(2093 words.)

A few years ago, I read the Futurist Manifesto by Tomasso Marinetti, and around that same time I became associated with a group of Futurists. I had noticed how their content had wandered into wack Japanese sadomasochism, so I was determined to untangle what seemed to be a confused praxis by cutting straight to the source material. At the time, I did not appreciate this relatively short treatise that attempted to sweep aside all ideology, religion, and politics to replace it with speed, violence, and pansexual intercourse^​1​. Inspired by Marinetti taking a trip in a very fast car one time, he became possessed by a utopia constituted of naked madmen high on meth on a never-ending speeding train.

At one point in my life, I would have scoffed at it, but now I believe he was onto something. However, Futurists always end up as gay anarchists with 200 GB folders of barnyard goreporn, so we don’t want to be onto that something ourselves.

My version of Harrison Bergeron^​2​ – the tale of a mythical Übermensch beheld on broadcast TV by a society of oppressed plebs pummeled by bureaucratic equality – was watching a video on social media depicting a fat man in a Hawaiian shirt, driving in a massive pickup truck, screaming into his phone and at people beyond his window, blasting Yelawolf as he careens around police barricades and into the middle of a parade, speeding down the road as bystanders scream in confusion, sweating and barreling his way to grab a slice of pizza to be retarded with. I beheld this spectacle and understood this was my politic.

This is what we call a “vibe,” the corrosive acid which, in the information age, has the power to dissolve rigid ideology, the astrological realm of the scientific revolution. A vibe is something easily understood by women but antithetical to the worldview of men. Men struggle against feminine and deterritorializing empathy, but it’s not like we are unfamiliar with social hierarchy. Marshall McLuhan was correct when he explained how the electronic revolution, rather than triggering atomized alienation as we are exploded outward into infinite cyberspace, actually collapsed society inward and retribalized the Western mind along extensions of senses into a strange immediately interconnected existence^​3​. The natural outcome is to become, in a sense, intellectually feminized, unless one strives to redefine the social landscape along masculine lines. Ray Kurzweil made a career out of hypothesizing that this evolution was not only inevitable, but exponential ^​4​. Technological development is an unstoppable speeding train barreling towards utopia. All problems presented by technology will be solved by technology, which will eventually propel itself infinitely. This is what tech accelerationists believe and invest vast sums of money to ingrain this into geopolitics. Therefore, it is essential to understand how to surf the vibes before learning how to harness the power of the ocean.

Social media platforms understand this now. Where once they announced their mastery of all the identity vectors that constitute an individual, they are now more interested in the broad strokes. Vibes are the social capital they seek, vibes that become hijacked by brands and corporations; in fact, they may have been the first ones to figure this all out. Dissidents still operate in the individualist framework of oneself against the mainstream, alternatively known as the “normie.” As Wilfred Bion correctly identified, those who define themselves in opposition to a group and even exit it completely still exist within the context of that group^​5​. The group is an entity conjured by social forces beyond our control. It turns out it is extremely difficult to live as an individual, even as a group’s lone opponent. Ted Kaczynski could not prevent himself from sending packages to the system he abandoned. Don’t be like Ted Kaczynski. Nobody reads and everyone actually wants to be blown up.

On topics such as this it is easy to engage it with loose language and metaphysical broad strokes, speaking of forces and phenomena when power politics and the ambitions of great men might suffice. The argument I am making is that it is both, and when either operates independently we are befallen by sludge and ruin. This can be viewed as a reconfiguration of de Maistre’s conceptualization of sovereignty not as a status to be achieved but a space that demands to be occupied^​6​. It is up to us to decide if it is occupied by an individual, an explicit oligarchy, or as so frequently happens, a shadowy cabal, especially one that proclaims that no leadership is necessary. America saw the most vulgar extreme of this during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) riots and the associated occupation of urban areas, transforming them into the anarchist communes referred to as CHAZ/CHOP. Within moments it seemed, radical warlords assumed positions at the apex of the hierarchy while the meek activists skulked around the depreciating avenues asserting that “the people” were in charge. In de Maistre’s model the leader is just as much a man of his time and place summoned forth through unknowable forces, even more so than Machiavellian powerplays; those are always involved, but are typically the domain of pretenders. In fact, those who engage in these games frequently broker pockets to thrive within the system they previously acted as an irritant against, rather than steering the ship towards a referable direction. Society requires ambitious men defined by ahistorical circumstances, with sufficient time horizons both forward and backward, to occupy the zone of proximal sovereignty by any means, lest they become hijacked by profoundly characteropathic and dysgenic agents.

In the world of digital marketing where I spend a great deal of my professional time, targeting an individual will eventually to be accomplished completely through artificial intelligence – it already largely is - and everyone will have to take it on faith that it’s a real human. There is a crisis of data legitimacy occurring as we speak – primarily driven by an unaccounted totality of bots and faked data - but there’s too much money and too many jobs involved to really dissect the issue. As a result, what brands want to own is fandoms and communities; they want to own a vibe. Drop everything and assume all data is fake, especially individuals who want to make themselves brands and traffic in clout. A reasonable person desires to exit this twisted hall of mirrors entirely. You no longer wish to broadcast to a wide audience; you seek only insular communities far from the prying eyes of advertisers, but you’ve been uncovered. You find yourself dragged hither and yon into artificial discourse and internet allegiances lorded over by obscure personalities. The fringe drifts closer to the secure orbit of the Center of Power and Influence, and you know where that leads. Now, to exist outside of this superstructure of approved fandoms - both manipulated and exploited by outside forces - is to make yourself inscrutable, and to do that is to make yourself completely unreasonable.

Your mind has been pummeled with negotiation tactics which are no longer effective. George Sorel discusses this at length in “Reflections on Violence,”^​7​ albeit from the French Socialist perspective. There he balks at the machination of whom he identifies as the “peacemakers,” something approximating the managerial class at the time who recognize the social upheaval before them and seek to resolve the revolution through curated integration. Often times this is accomplished by brokering deals with leadership who will enjoy introduction to the rarified air while the momentum in their wake is completely nullified. Regardless of your political allegiance, the socioeconomic struggles of French syndicalists can prove illuminating to our current movements. Is the threat of violence acknowledged as anything more than theatrics by our institutions? Would an MMA match be better without a referee? Would the podcast circuit look better if Ronda Rousey had her head caved in and her brains absolutely liquified by Holly Holm? There are good questions to ask.

You just (relatively) recently figured out how to be a 20^th Century Man, but if you want to live as an agent of political change in the 21^st century, you are going to have to get used to appearing schizophrenic to your ancestors. Orientating oneself in modernity requires calculations unimaginable to previous generations. Actions now more than ever must be weighed upon the opposing scales of truth and survival, which in many ways is the conflict between ideology and religion. Spirituality and religion come from a wholly different birth than ideology, although to outside observers they appear as comparable complex systems of thought that drive behavior as vast collectivisms directed towards a brighter tomorrow. One is a great machine created from the outside-in and leveraged with the efficiency of scientific realism, while the other is generated from meta-humanity of the past and woven, perhaps illogically, inward-out. One is optimized for truth; one is optimized for group survival. As it turns out, a civilization requires both, rather than one triumphing over the other. The nation is grown from the tribe, which is grown from the community, which is grown from the family, increasing complexity is of critical importance for survival at scale but the promises made by the Brasílias of the world land flatly in execution, empty Chinese cityscapes that did not miraculously manifest innovation. While the centers of civilizational power can indeed grant stability and defense, all it can produce is statues of itself. Inward replication without outward ejection can only result in an exponentially neurotic welfare-feedback-loop powering a museum, the lights slowly dimming as despicable shadows obscure the sacred history.

Truth cannot be manifested in your works of survival of the family, community, tribe, or nation. Truth is emergent from within and generative; the moment spirituality comes into contact with extant strategy for survival, it becomes corrupted and utterly confused. Therein lies a purity that cannot directly interface with the complex of carnage and hyperstition we currently inhabit, where bewildering fictions are spoken into reality^​8​ and irony dominates truth as a secret tongue to circumnavigate both machine and institutional subterfuge.  Perfection will always be betrayed in a game of survival, but we have the power to control who plays the game with their soul on the felt. Individuals and civilizations alike require a grey zone within which they can be cunning hypocrites operating in pure self-interest, even if that self-interest is that of the community or nation they represent. To put it simply, good men need a space to lie. And to that point, a good lie is a cognitohazard; something that harms or changes those who witness it. A good lie is a myndbomb, an idea that haunts. It is the inverse of irony found online, which is a ghost that haunts itself.

This is why I agree with Ray Kurzweil and Martin Gurri, that the intersection of exponential technological advancement coupled with the complete decentralization of the digital space and reconstitution along bewildering fault lines will inevitably end with driving a nuclear-powered bullet train up the penishole of your enemy.

And that’s a good thing.

The margins are a political zone, not a zone for the divine. To exist in the margins, which thrive axiomatically in relation to the scope of power itself, is to exist unreasonably. You will deserve to be cast as a villain for your actions because the agents of control against which you struggle don’t deserve to die, just like bureaucrats and gender witches. Nobody really deserves the mind-bending ultraviolence you will begin to harness using your own soul as a guide, and those who commit these acts deserve to be punished. The Christian Warrior is asked by his cowering enemy whether the Heavenly Father would approve of the wars fought in his name, to which the warrior replies “I’ll take it up with him” as the sword falls.

There are people out there who exist like lay peasants of the past, they believe with the totality of their essence and adhere to their values under pain of death. They are the lived reality of “people don’t have ideas, ideas have people,” and these are those who can truly sacrifice themselves in the name of these beliefs. That is a privilege not afforded to you, the extended man empowered in interconnected insolation by the sheer maddening scale of the power you live in the shadow of.

The Harrison Bergeron Übermensch of the 21^st century is the man who effectively crucifies himself, with exponential speed and effectiveness outside the purview of Truth and Beauty which guide his dagger from afar.

1. Marinetti F. The New Ethical Religion of Speed. Pax Aryana; 2021.

2. Vonnegut K. Welcome to the Monkey House. Delacorte Press; 1968.

3. 3.

   McLuhan M. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. The MIT Press; 1994.

4. Kurzweil R. The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence. Penguin Books; 2000.

5. Bion W. Experiences in Groups: And Other Papers. Routledge; 1968.

6. de Maistre J. Major Works, Vol. 1. Imperium Press; 2020.

7. Sorel G. Reflections on Violence. Cambridge University Press; 2012.

8. Carstens D. ‘Hyperstition: An Introduction.’ Orphan Drift Archive. Published 2009. https://www.orphandriftarchive.com/articles/hyperstition-an-introduction/