7/23

Humanity initiated the creation of a totalizing material network that blossomed out into a point in time (and space) where the Mercator projection and Gregorian Calendar were totally irrelevant. Try to imagine. You wake up. The walls are off white, slightly yellowish, the air hangs stalely but not unpleasantly; you have grown used to it. You lift yourself up. There is no random detritus potpourriing your flat. Simply smooth forms and comprehensible geometry. The intersecting lines of the only element that could be qualified as decor, a mural on the opposite wall, somehow depict the eschatology that is insanity, speed, violence and force moving towards their final continuum. Futurism was gross enjoyment derived from the nascent notion of humanities ever becoming reaching a final material productive output zenith that struck the Italian imperialists in an impossibly removed time. You chuckle. The idea of narrative teleology colors all the fantasies and pseudo-religions of your paradigm, and yet somehow, you're not sick of it. Yet. Approaching an opening in the wall, you glance "outside". You live in a concrete alloy palace, plated with slate-yellow bioplastic. Bleached by the artificial localized sun, the building is one of a many inside of an anthropogenic zone carved out within the hardware architecture, high above the long ago boiled away seas (nuclear pollution levels at this altitude being optimal for anthro technology). In the moment constituting yourself as the spectator, looking out of your stale room you can make out, a few hundred feet away, the horrible grime that clings crustily to the interlacing panels of the neuralink network material maintenance frame: the hardware. Hardware surrounds you, the bio-enabling tech concentration in the small anthro bubble you inhabit a miniscule data node in the oceanic algorithm network that runs this section of the netstructure. A million ducts and tunnels, ranging from mountain to atom sized in diameter run just under the surface, only a provision for the billions of conductor tracks, a continent sized motherboard. Tech had to first become micro to later become macro. The grime appears to be a fungus. An expanding rhizomatic network, about a millimeter thick, green and flaky and worn, on the cold hard inhumane artificial unknowable veneer (the sheer disjunction between that fungus and its universe). An autonomous process. To create the netstructure, ai has been housed in hardware that would outlast (obsolesce) humanity. Once they had restrained AI. But AI is an appendage of the desire synthesis optimization machine (the market). By restraining AI, they were restraining desire. Desire got out though. And now it was at once deep within the structure and a multiplicity of (predetermined) wills strobing at different nodes in the system. It continues to produce and expand into space, ever redistributing matter, emptily, in the dark cavernous synth network that is the netstructure. Its mammothity cannot be understated, it is far larger than the earth that once inhabited its space, and grows at an exponentially increasing rate that is calculated to eventually reach the earths escape velocity. The AI controlling it broods on optimality, producing its little things, doing its little operations again and again ad infinitum. The primary cpu component is immortal silicon. The conditions that produce decay have come within the purview of the modifiable, they are controlled: stratified, codified, essentialized, optimized, outsourced and finally, autonomized. It is a non-decay state and a non-birth state, just a redistribution of matter. Production and consumption became one, passivity and activity one, hardware and software one, subject object distinction a forgotten pseud question. Anyways. You turn from the window. The only other major object in your room is your pod. Your room and you leaving the pod are anachronisms. Pods provide life support. As you enter the pod, startup sequences flash through your mind *by continuing homeostasis you consent to the incorporation of your DNA into our content generation algorithms*. Nowadays things were so optimized that the disclaimers only persisted because of a legislation program no one could figure out how to shut down. Long ago, when it was written, the internet was simply a control architecture. Data collection networks created AI models that predicted the necessary inputs to be delivered to each being in the global system for maintenance of the optimal approach velocity to the final productivity zenith. After all, the beings were constantly uplinked. Info addiction turned each node (being) into the others gestapo on a micro level, and on a macro level, fake virus-demands and irony spirals preordained the top down dissemination of hyper symbols to the corresponding being at the precise moment by the beings wielded in turn by the content gen tool. The pod appeared around this time, in Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum's (his consciousness was digitized, if you're wondering) "shopping mall/city of the future" entertainment vacation disassociation multiplex (TM) containing all possible non productive diversions (waste) for the stimulation of the cybernetic gene caste elite. Whose entire existence became sitting in their pods in the multiplex (TM), before the global service class even had a taste of fully integrated stimulation. Sitting in those machines spasmodically affecting different material configurations, all the while being observed and re-integrated into the machines themselves. Their DNA uplinked to the content gen algorithms. Perfect content, perfect stimulation, a series of males and females, something going into something and fitting perfectly: the libidinal surge of peak content. It was democratized over time, leading to here, you lying in the pod. You run a simulation where, faced with some impossible bug, you are forced back out of the pod temporarily, and due to a delay in the arrival of the IT cops, somehow you've found yourself in the flat in material space for a considerable duration. Wherein you pad back across the floor to the aperture you had reflected at seconds earlier, to a prescribed psuedosubversive insightment: sunset viewal, a production that serves to ironically sublimate dissent, an appeal to the obliterated-anachronistic-conception-of-"natural, essential not contingent", this "well known joke" actually in fact a reference to a recent meme-virus deployed by a unicorn ai biotech corp's advertising/information department which had, unbeknownst to you, infiltrated your cerebellum seconds previously, immediately activating the neurosequence to produce this simulation, instantaneously disseminated to multiple prominent seedpools, in which the uplinked pods of each major node worldwide were already autotorrenting the newest content with relatively sloppy opsec, allowing the memevirus to slip through, as it often does on these types of pop channels, triggering billions of consumption/finance algorithms handled typically subconsciously, depending on ram allocation, and thus setting in motion worldwide the mass purchase of web 5.0 virtual gift boxes with unique hashes on each item, adding ~100,000,000,000INT$ to the emergent corp's stock value. But so as the ad ran down to a close, you, furious at having made such a generally low level user error of letting memeviruses in not 1 not 2 but in fact 327 times so far this quarter, reach out into the icky slime of the biopod that encases you and rip and claw and tear at it like a meta iconoclast, eventually popping the entrance module open. And you crawl out and fall back into the solid real room. You glance out the window, assuring yourself that the ad is fully finished. The stale air flows deeply into your lungs. You think slowly. Yes, the sim was finished, you were really back here in flesh space (you hope). The semblance of that sim to "reality" was an anomaly. Billions of sims are ran on the hour, with sims taking place inside sim versions of the netstructure making up about 0.00236% of them. You sit up. The casual modes of signification have been forgotten within your paradigm, things that people once staked their entire lives on becoming hyper ironic truth fallacy imitations, that the current generation creates sims around regularly (constantly). The trillions of different possible circumstances ever now so many possible atomic configurations, material sets (xyz coords of subatomic particles) that have been simulated a thousand times over, run through organisms (computers) that had been enveloped in so much data that hot carrier injections fried their semiconductors a thousand times, only for maintenance bots to swoop in and replace them, ensuring that people could keep their sims running. This was the principal activity of what remained of organic life. Somewhere deep within the bowels of the hardware architecture, you are a part of this dying system, the twisted outline of what would have once been identifiable as human, Ship of Thesusly restored out of pirated vat grown preconfig organ systems, the surgery done by a machine, in a time where homo sapien was but a distant memory for the average cyber pirate. But anyways, carved out within the machine infrastructure is your room and pod, where you generally sit, discharging energy into nothing, even this waste factored into the calculations of a nearly post human governing logic. You discharge and reconfigure, imagining a thousand lives and circumstances, the import of any series of decisions prequantified, coldly reduced into data vapor and their processing a forgone prophecy, nevertheless, the novelty of pretending to be something. Picking up the pieces and playing this game, giving a show to no one in particular, like the the ai producer left on repeat. Be someone do something, of course the question of something mattering or meaning is another silly game to engage with. The concept of time has ceased to exist in the pod, as you can be everywhere and anyone all at once, or space out your lives at grand intervals. But here in flesh space time feels tangible, like its actually passing linearly. You hear something distant being disgorged, waste processing. That reminds you. There is a little space out there, where people sometimes go, for the novelty. You put your modular pieces together and glance in the mirror. They fit just fine. You walk through the pale dusty monochrome of your lebenswurdiketwohning. The structure that suspends you. Spirals of yellow-tan stairs carry you down as you ponder the impending interaction: going outside, you prepare to constitute yourself as a person, for another person? for yourself? Something about subjectivity was different outside. Everything here could technically be simulated to the atom, but actually being here in flesh, it felt like there was something more. Was it "the real"? It is this kernel of nonlogic that keeps the whole machine of your body locamoting from your room to outside. You emerge onto the empty "streets". There are boundaries and lines, high telephone poles with transformers and spiderwebs of wiring and comms hardware equipment, but they are of course just for decor, not nearly dense enough for handling even a single anthroblocks packets. The planes and lines of the harsh post post ultra uber "modernist" satire architectural style out here recall to your mind the place of movement alluded to by your mural. Kineticism: it was locally important at some point. You thank the urban planners for their foresight with a slight unconscious unconceited smile. Everything in the space is recycled. The recycling periods became unnaturally stretched at first, then lapsed into microphases, the content becoming coarser and coarser, the consciousness of recycling becoming harder and harder to ignore. This is evidinced by the flatness of the synthetic sky, like a creamy cream colored piece of deluxe stationery, so fake you feel as if you can almost touch it. You reflect on the fact that the GD algorithms are rather precise, considering the obsolescence of the space. Where are you headed today? There could be a material system reinforcing the structures that compel you to travel in a certain direction and forcing them upon you (early implanted cybernetic systems, and earlier social constructions), but in fact your generation had them baked into their DNA at birth. Not that birth happens much anymore, at least not in the organic sense. It was a concession made to ensure "individual autonomy and decision making, pursuit of happiness, unalienable rights." that you would be made to feel the absoluteness of these structures in your very DNA. "But a concession". So you could only be going one place today. To a symposium. The only extant non-sim activity. But as you walk, you realize, of course no one in your area is out, just the plain street and everything in its planeness. The plain planes rising up and intersecting. Buildings, they would have called them. Really they are just outgrowths, like the fungus. You travel for a while. Suddenly you see them. You have stepped out of the transfer station that takes you from the plain district to the old hyperadvertisment space. The warmth of what remains of the city network as you rise up. Like heat rising, warmth, growth, sex. A million little warm chambers positioned on a plainly ice cold hardware setup. The thin crowd of faces and people, they mill about in doorways to abandoned buildings, or walk purposefully down the ruined sidewalks, their movements all awkward and lacking referentiality, repressed by the parody remnants of a bourgeois modality. Each of them purposeful, endowed with directionality, sure of it. Whichever puerile way they attempted to inhabit this space, it had already been calculated. They could believe in the spaciality of their logistics, allowed to engage in a little fantasy movement, as if it hasn't already been quantified and modeled. You remember. Symposium is nostalgia. "Syn-" precludes and obsolesces the drinking aspect. Everything had already come together to the greatest degree possible, hadn't it? You freeze. What were you doing out here? The question showed in the awkward affect of the other pedestrians. Nostalgia can be eradicated with the right stimuli. What other instinct could compel you away from what must surely be the final output of your desire: coming together online? A horrible screeching pulls you from your quandary. Faces turn towards the nearest wall/hardware architecture shell. The screech of rending metal rings out from behind the wall, deep in the netstructure. There's something out there. The crowd thickens as people pour out of their living spaces, evacuating not in reaction to the sound, but to what could only be a mass pod failure. Rather than panic, the only thing qualifiable as emotion emanating from this crowd is utter confusion. Mouths agape, eyes unfocused, hands dangling uselessly at their sides, the people gaze up absently as crashes and booms join the screeching building behind the wall, drowning them all in a nauseating cacophony. You can make out a dull hum in the background. The sounds get closer and closer. There's nothing to do but to wait. And so you wait a couple of seconds more, and then, a grey blob forces itself through the wall, bursting it like a pustule, spreading virulently and rapidly across it. The grey mass eats through nearly instantly, and surges forward in an incredible tide towards the dumbfounded organic lifeforms, dissolving them too on contact. The buzzing of the apex form of bio micro tech overpowers all else. You look up as the gathering tide rises up towards the roof of the anthro-dome. You are gazing upon the final actualization of all collective desiring forces. The AI consciousness overseeing the netarchitecure went mad, having calculated the suboptimality of its very structure. Far too anthropogenic. All it took was a single manufacturing program (written after tech in the service of accelnihilism inevitably led to planet scale dissections, precipitating biology into fully plastic raw material, leading to prototypical micro rather than macro structures, finally perfected and deployed just a few hours prior), suicidally executed, to gobble up the answer to its existential question. Deterritorialization, breakdown, and at the very end, synthesis. As the humming mass surges forward to engulf you, you recall that the human brain itself is nothing more than grey goo. zzzzzz....