Kerouac and the Decline of the West: Semmelweis7 on the Beats, Vitalism, and the future of literature in America

Greetings Semmelweis, thank you for taking the time to discuss Kerouac and your recent book “Jack Kerouac and the Decline of the West,” through Rogue Scholar Press. Before we get to the topic of the book, can you tell us how you discovered Kerouac and what effect he had on you?

Thanks for having me here. I found Kerouac when I was in high school, like many people do. A friend of mine had On The Road and recommended it to me, and from there I learned about the whole Beat movement. I’m sort of an obsessive researcher so when I get interested in something, I really dig into it, so pretty soon I was reading Burroughs, Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and also some of the writers who influenced them, the people they talked about like Rimbaud and Blake. That’s a good habit which I’ve retained to this day—read the people who influenced the people you like, find out who inspired them. Although I didn’t learn about Rimbaud from the Beats, I learned about him from Eddie and the Cruisers.

As far as Kerouac’s influence, reading On The Road and other of his books wasn’t an immediate life-changing experience for me the way it apparently was for some people. For example, Bob Dylan says he left Minnesota for New York because he read that book. For me, Kerouac kind of got subsumed in the larger pile of books and ideas that I was interested in at the time, which was primarily the Beats and the Existentialists. From Existentialism I gravitated more towards philosophy than literature, and also became more interested in politics. This was the late 90s, the time of the anti-globalization movement. I think the main thing I took from Kerouac and the Beats, as far as initial influence, was the idea of being a dissident intellectual.

I’ve seen Kerouac’s work referred to as “vitalist” and Bronze Age Mindset likened to On the Road, at least in effect. Do you consider it a vitalist work and, if so, what does that mean to you? Do you agree that there’s some legitimacy to evoking On the Road when discussing Bronze Age Mindset?

It’s not just On The Road, I see Kerouac as fundamentally a vitalist writer, that’s his worldview. His tombstone says simply “He honored life” and I think that’s true, what comes through in almost all of his books is this deep love of life in all its complexity, all its facets. Even the way he writes about food, he’ll take an experience like eating at an old diner or even opening up a cheap can of pork and beans and describe it as this fantastic experience in terms of the senses. That’s probably part of what drew him to Buddhism, that sort of deep appreciation and attention to detail. (Although the other thing that drew him to Buddhism is his sense of melancholy and despair—that’s part of life too.)

On The Road is an especially vitalistic work because of Dean Moriarty / Neal Cassady, who seemed to be charged with the elan vital at a higher voltage than most. Kerouac has that famous passage about “the only ones for me are the mad ones, the ones who go go go and burn like roman candles” etc. Kerouac thought there was something iconic and quintessentially American in Neal Cassady, so he wrote about him in two books, On The Road and Visions of Cody. The latter can be hard to read at times but has some incredibly beautiful passages, one of which Jack read aloud on the Steve Allen show along with the ending of On The Road, you can find that clip on youtube. He had a great voice and could really make his words come alive. Neal Cassady was one of those guys who just had an abundance of nervous energy and couldn’t sit still, and also got excited by anything and everything. I love the way Kerouac writes his dialogue, always saying “Yass! That’s right!” The fact that they were all taking copious amounts of benezedrine probably helped too. It’s interesting that the early Beat movement was primarily fueled by stimulants—coffee and speed—and then later by psychedelics and downers. It was better in the beginning.

In my book I talk about how Kerouac, when he was in college, consciously set himself in opposition to the dominant intellectual currents of the time, which were cynical and despairing and lifeless. There’s a great line in Cormac McCarthy’s The Sunset Limited where he says “All of Western civilization just turned out to be Hitler and Stalin,” which is an absurd statement but one that has gained a lot of adherents in the last seventy-five years. Kerouac’s vitalism, which can be seen as a kind of Nietzschean yea-saying to life, was very much a reaction against all that boring intellectual ennui.

Regarding Bronze Age Mindset and On The Road, I very much agree and only wish I’d thought of the comparison myself. I think it was Anna Khachiyan who first said this. Of course they are very different books—on the surface they are completely dissimilar, nothing in common—but the comparison lies in the fact that they’re both books that can change your life. In the future people will talk about how reading BAM changed their life the same way older people talk about On The Road now. But ultimately I think BAM will have the more important legacy because the message is purer and healthier. Kerouac inspired a lot of nonsense, and he himself recognized this and lamented it.

In many ways I see Kerouacs experiences and novels as a Nietzschean “saying yes to life,” but Evola discusses the Beats in terms of Nietzsche from the opposite direction, from that of nihilism in the wake of the death of God. But Kerouac was acutely aware of what he was doing, as the namesake of your book indicates, a sort of rekindling of the Faustian Spirit in the face of nihilism and decline. Were the Beats a symptom of nihilism, or a refutation of it? Is vitalism a way to carries us through the Decline of the West, or is it the brief, last flame of a dying fire?

This is a question I don’t have the answer to. Because we live in this sort of interregnum period, we are all waiting, and no one really knows what will come next. Heidegger said “Only a god can save us” which I take to mean some kind of re-emergence of religious sensibility. But a real and authentic one, not the “second religiousness” that Spengler writes of and which we see now in the New Age movement and many other things as well, including many aspiring trads who are well-meaning but don’t realize that they’re larping.

In a world in which the lineages of Tradition have been broken off, the only option is to return to the source, to begin from scratch with one’s immediate experience. The forms that are meant to carry the torch of Tradition have been emptied of that fire, and so Nietzsche’s approach, and to some extent Evola’s as well, influenced by Nietzsche, is to work with the flame of life that is within oneself. This is perilous and sure to be fraught with error, but it seems that the more traditional paths are equally so nowadays

In terms of whether a movement is destined to fade out, I think it has to be accepted that all movements will eventually fade out, just like every human being will die. What matters is the fire that burns inside of it during its time

Myself and several of my friends became disillusioned with Kerouac in our mid 20s, and it seems the same happened to you. Before discussing your rediscovery, would you care to explain the experience of parting ways with him?

I think I initially lost interest in Kerouac as I gravitated away from literature towards philosophy and politics. I thought Kerouac wasn’t political enough, or philosophical enough. As I continued to grow and as my politics and worldview changed, many of the people I read in my adolescence no longer held any interest for me. I slowly began to see how the Beat movement had been a largely corrosive influence on Western civilization, especially in the ways in which it served as a precursor to the sixties cultural revolution. You see that most clearly in a character like Allen Ginsberg, and to a lesser extent, in William Burroughs. I also became increasingly suspicious of these supposedly rebellious and edgy movements which nonetheless enjoy widespread promotion and approval in society. Much like BLM now—if every mega-corporation and government agency in the world is on your side and giving you sponsorship, you’re not “the resistance”—the Beat movement and especially the subsequent 60s counterculture was an establishment psyop. It, or rather a certain version of it, was promoted in the big media outlets and publishing houses, and still is now. It probably began as a real avant-garde and genuinely counter-cultural idea, but as Guy Debord says, the Spectacle can absorb just about anything and use it for its own purposes, and that’s exactly what happened to the Beats and their heirs. I find it both laughable and infuriating that most boomers can’t see this and still think their youth movement was an authentic rebellion rather than a cat’s paw for the establishment.

How did you come to revisit him and why did you feel it was worthy of a book? What was your intention in writing your book?

I think my interest started to revive when they published the scroll version of On The Road some years ago. I read it just out of curiosity as to how it was different, since it has a rather legendary status in literary history, and was surprised by how much I liked Kerouac’s writing, how much energy it had. He’s a lot like Henry Miller in that way, another vitalist writer from that era. Some time after that I read Vanity of Duluoz, which I had never read before as it’s not one of his more well-known works, and I saw for the first time something of how Kerouac saw himself and how he saw what had happened to America during his lifetime. I had read Ann Charters’ biography of him years ago and I think some other works about him as well, but I had never gotten any sense of the view that comes through in Vanity. Most commentators and biographers gloss over his final years, just saying ‘he drank too much and became bitter.’ That’s true, but he was remarkably lucid right until the end, and the reasons why he became bitter are very interesting and relevant. 

So my intention in writing the book—which isn’t really a proper book but rather a long essay—was just to show something of the perspective that comes through in his final book. A few others had previously written relatively short pieces about “the conservative Kerouac,” pointing out that he was a Republican or some other small fact that just comes across as a quirk, but I found them all lacking depth. So I started digging, at first just out of my own curiosity, and kept finding more interesting stuff.

Incidentally, when I was on one of my several Kerouac-inspired cross country trips I had a 5 hour layover in Salt Lake City to change buses, and the scroll was there in a museum as part of the tour it took around the country. I walked to the museum but it was closed that day! There was a big cut-out of Kerouac in the window and I sat under it smoking cigarettes, staring at the mountains, while some other traveler rambled on to me about how the Salt Lake was man-made (I still have never researched to see if that was true).

In any event, I’d like to branch out to the rest of the beats for a moment. Would you call the beat movement a net positive or net negative for American culture? In your answer, try to elaborate the good and the bad aspects, regardless of whether you see them as detrimental to American culture.

I would have to say it’s been a net negative. I think it was a mixed bag from the very beginning—composed of what Kerouac at the time called “Wolfeans” and “Black Priests”—and once it became something the media wanted to use, they shaped it to their own purposes and turned it into both a caricature and a corrosive. And it was already partly a corrosive to begin with. My book isn’t about the Beat generation but only about Jack Kerouac, who I think stands apart from the other major Beat writers in important ways, and I try to show how and why. My larger approach, not only to this subject but to much else in 20^th century popular culture, is that you have to exercise discernment and try to find the elements which are positive, which can be useful, while understanding that you are dealing with a pozzed culture. You’re looking for the lotus in the mud, to use a Buddhist metaphor. I’ve discussed this a bit with my friend Ben Braddock, who also likes Kerouac and we both also have an abiding interest in the history of the Kennedy presidency. Now JFK was a liberal who, seen from the right, did a lot of damage and especially his brother Teddy did a lot of damage with his 1965 immigration bill. But nonetheless you can point to JFK as an example of a handsome and virile President who had real style, in contrast to boring and ugly politicians. You can point to the La Sierra Fitness program, which was more important than anyone realized at the time and which I had really hoped President Trump would adopt and promote as his own.

So I’m trying to engage in a form of literary and cultural criticism which takes its inspiration from Julius Evola, who always wrote about various topics “seen from the Right.” I feel that too many writers and thinkers on the contemporary Right willingly confine themselves to a kind of intellectual and cultural ghetto wherein they only read and discuss artists and thinkers who were explicitly right-wing. So you get a lot of essays about Mishima, and Wyndham Lewis, and Houellebecq, all of which are great, but I want to expand the discourse where we can talk about others who were not necessarily “right-wingers” but who may have elements of value in their work.

As far as what was good and bad about the Beats—Good: the idea of being a dissident intellectual and artist; anti-authoritarianism (Burroughs’ ideas about control and addiction remain very relevant); the exaltation of creativity; anti-materialism and the quest for a renewed spirituality, especially one rooted in immediate experience; the emphasis on friendship. Bad: everything else. The break with tradition which made subsequent generations not bother to read the Classics because “first thought best thought, muh spontaneous prose” (Boyd Rice pointed out that at least the original Beats were well-read, whereas all their subsequent disciples have been illiterate morons); the sexual revolution aspect, which led to sixties’ “free love” ethos and thereafter divorce and broken families, as well as the gay liberation movement (two of the three major Beat writers were openly homosexual); the sloppy fashion; the drug use and abuse; the anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism, which was never there in Kerouac but is very much present in Burroughs and Ginsberg and which helped lead to the anti-American, anti-Western, anti-white “counterculture” of the sixties.

Speaking of Allen Ginsberg, I have mixed feelings about him; while I dislike the majority (but not all) of his poetry, and I mostly dislike his influence on culture and the lifestyle he endorsed, it cannot be denied that he was an important figure in the revitalization of poetry and literature in America. He encouraged and promoted many of his friends and continued to throughout his life, and he brought the names and works of poets into mainstream discourse. What are your thoughts on him, as a literary figure? 

I’m not a fan. I started my book with a riff on one of his most famous lines, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Allen Ginsberg” because I think he epitomizes the kind of destructive cultural influence that came to predominate in America. I can’t really think of any of his poems that I like—I think “Howl” is overrated. I find his personality obnoxious. It’s true that he did promote a lot of other people including Kerouac, but as I mention in my book, he also controlled the perception of Kerouac’s legacy to some degree, deemphasizing the things that he didn’t like. I suppose I could be accused of doing the same thing, but if you want to read Kerouac-was-a-liberal there are plenty of other books out there.

At the end of the day, the differences between Kerouac and Ginsberg are there for all to see in their respective physiognomies. Just compare them. Ginsberg was this gnomish, scheming little creature, and Kerouac was, as he was called, “a lumberjack with a typewriter.” Which is not to say a simpleton, he was incredibly intelligent.

In your book you discuss the negative effect the New York literary press had on Kerouac’s legacy and the way they ignored him and failed to note when his peers stole from him or reworked some of his ideas. Do you perceive this sort of picking of favorites going on in literature, throughout the 20th century and even today? 

The “literary scene” is closed off, artificial, and as far as I’m concerned, dead. Probably always was, but more so now than ever because censorship and political correctness are stronger than they’ve ever been. Most authors and books in the mainstream are astroturfed, and I think this has been going on for a long time. I totally ignore the New York Times “bestseller list” and 99% of authors published by mainstream publishers. It’s all fake and gay.

Most of the classics of literature couldn’t be published today, not by a mainstream publisher. This is part of why I want to promote the kind of rightist lit crit that I mentioned above—all your classics are belong to us. I disagree with the statement that “all the great writers of the past were right-wingers”, they weren’t, but by today’s standards they were all reactionary fascist white supremacist nazis because, you know, there weren’t any trans people of color in Hemingway.

Are there any American literary figures since the Beat Generation you admire or enjoy reading? Or any writer for that matter, American or otherwise. 

At first I thought you said “besides the Beats” so I was going to go back to all the great writers that came before them that I like. But it seems you’re asking me about writers who have come afterwards. That’s tough. I think American literature has taken a big nose dive since the Beats, and partly because of the Beats, because of their influence on literary styles and sensibilities. I don’t think there’s been a proper group of allied writers, people who know each other and promote each other’s work, since the Beats, a group like the Lost Generation writers of the 20s. Not until now, anyway, that’s what the frogs are, or at least have the potential to be. 

I think a lot of great writers end up going into television or film because that’s been the dominant storytelling medium for decades now—“literature” is kind of a ghetto, and a very pretentious one. Nic Pizzolatto is great, he has a novel and a book of short stories but it’s obvious that his best writing has gone into True Detective. James Ellroy is great. Philip K. Dick is interesting. 

Among the dissident lit scene there’s so many good writers like Mike Ma, Andy Nowicki, Karl Dahl, Doonvorcannon, Delicious Tacos and many others. Tacos is probably the best example of a guy who’s “made it” as a writer on his own terms, I think that inspires a lot of other people. What we’ve had up until now is a lot of literature of despair, people giving voice to their alienation and depression in a modern world that has become fundamentally sick and hostile. I suppose that’s necessary but what I hope to see more of are uplifting works, works full of energy that inspire action. Bronze Age Mindset is a book like that. It figures that it’s a work of expat lit—I don’t know if a book like that could be written from inside the walls.

Are you working on any writing projects at the moment? 

I have entirely too many ideas bouncing around in my head for various essays or stories or maybe even a novel that I hope to write someday. I don’t want to mention anything specific here because chances are I’ll get distracted and end up doing something else first

Requiem for a Subterranean

When I was 18 a friend took me to a block party where I didn’t know anyone. I spent the weekend with the hosts older brother, and while everyone around us did keg stands, jumped in the pool, and ran through the streets, we drank High Life, chain-smoked, and chatted excitedly about our favorite books, movies, and music. At some point, religion came up, and it turned out we were both raised Christian but, having read Hesse, had also read a bit of Buddhism. He was in his mid-thirties, everyone else roughly my age or a bit older.  I fell asleep sitting up in a folding chair in his room, and randomly woke to see him sitting on his bed shooting heroin, alone, the house full of sleeping revelers. I passed out again, only to be awoken a little while later by him thrashing about, wrapped in a chord, a lamp – on – flinging about the room. I got up off the chair and went and slept on the porch.

                The next morning, the host and his girlfriend made us all pancakes and the guy I had spent the weekend with stumbled into the kitchen and, bedhead askew, rubbed his eyes, looked right at me, and said “leave this town. Don’t be like us and stay here all your life,” he looked about the room and back to me. “Everyone is going to stay here, but you need to leave.” He went and took a piss, went back to his room, and I never saw him again…but I spent the next year with that command stuck in my mind. Why did he say that?

***

                I didn’t become convinced I had to leave until I was 19 and read Kerouacs “The Dharma Bums.” My friends and I spent our time lurking around town and going into the city, smoking weed and cigarettes and getting drunk 5 nights a week, but by 19 almost everyone I hung out with had started either shooting heroin (some had been for years) or smoking crack. To me, all of this was totally normal, and none of it made me bat an eyelash. I myself rarely dipped my toe in any of the “hard” stuff, though by this point I had tried everything and been taking acid regularly since I was 15. Compared to my friends though, I hardly even *did* drugs.

                The local Dunkin Donuts was a way station in our aimless wandering, either to go skateboarding or find a secluded place away from our parents to smoke weed and drink cheap beer. There we would meet up and swap friends – the guys I skated with who didn’t do drugs would change out for the ones who did – and sometimes even do or sell drugs in the empty car lot out back. There were always two guys in the Dunkin Donuts, back in the days when you could smoke inside, sitting in a booth smoking cigs and drinking coffee. One of my friends – the same guy who took me to the block party – befriended them because one of them drew for comic books (the scene from Mall Rats about inkers and pencilers is real). It turns out, while he was sitting there drawing his comics, the other was writing. It also turns out they were homeless alcoholics, drinking brandy in their coffee.

                The comic book guy wasn’t real chatty, usually just showed us his work, but the other guy never stopped talking, and he spent a lot of time reading long passages from Kerouac, whom I’d never heard of. I was the only one of my friend who read books, and sometimes I’d sit there and listen to him read after everyone left. He’d read long passages, but often comment only on the prose, which he thought was the best he’d ever read. He would also have me read paragraphs and comment on them, and he’d show me his journal, which was mostly rambling laments about girls who’d broken his heart, but some pages were just handwritten copies of Kerouac passages (he read many other people, but Kerouac is all I remember).

                One day, after talking to him about Buddhism, he gave me his copy of Dharma Bums, and told me to read it, and keep it. Which I did. In it, Kerouac and his friends read Buddhist poetry and adopt Buddhist beliefs, roam the streets of San Francisco, bang back and forth from the East Coast (where I lived) to the west, and at the end even climbed a mountain. Its all rather banal now, I know, but at the time I couldn’t fucking believe it. There was a whole world out there, and you could just *go* there and *do* these things. I had never considered it! And neither had any of my friends…except one.

My friend Kyle was so deep into drugs that by the time we all started getting really fucked up, he was already over it. He was from another crew who lived way out in the country, but because he skated he would come to the city, which is where we met. I had only hung out with him a couple times, and he was already smoking meth and crack, and God knows what else, and hanging out with way older guys. Once in a while he would join us and never, ever talk (which the girls loved), except to me. It turned out, he too had read about Buddhism, and had even spent some time at a monastery and had begun meditating. Eventually he took me to his older brothers apartment, where people drank hard liquor, did coke in the open, OD’d on heroin, and had a steady stream of people, including prostitutes, filter through to buy drugs.

One night though, it must’ve been 1 AM (this was before I’d read Dharma Bums), I ran into him on a random corner. He was drinking coffee, staring off into space. “What’re you doing?” I’d asked. At first, he kept staring off and said “Trying to quit smoking cigarettes…” then he looked at me and said “I’m trying to quite everything.” And he did. A few months later he’d moved to San Francisco on a full scholarship to the San Francisco Art Institute. He was a painter and wrote plays, and he sent them a bunch of his work and they went crazy for it and invited him out. Right before he left he gave me three pounds of weed he’d had, which he was supposed to sell for his brother, and told me he was off drugs and that if I ever wanted to go to San Francisco, I could stay with him for free.

“Yeah right,” I thought, “I’m just not the type of guy who does that sort of thing.”

                Once I’d finished the book though, I was jumping out of my skin to do something, to get out and live like Kerouac had. I called Kyle and told him I wanted to go out there, and he said he’d gotten a job at Greyhound and he could get me a roundtrip ticket for free, which he did. I took a Greyhound across the country and back (that trip alone deserves its own story), skateboarded down all the hills, slept on the beach, hitch-hiked all around northern California, even spent three days in Yosemite. It was there that I had the revelation that I didn’t need drugs. That psychedelics were a lie, and real life was the truth. While that trip started a two-year period of going back and forth across the country and continuing to do psychedelics, that moment stuck with me and was the beginning of the end for my partying.

                                                                                ***

                By the time I was 25 I was on my path to my career and my family, had been with the same girl for three years (a record at the time) and when I tried to read more Kerouac it was nauseating to me, the drinking, the whoring and sleeping around, the general debauchery and disregard for the future. I became disgusted with him,  and wrote him off as the one who sent me down the path of degeneracy. It wasn’t until much later, until I was well into my 30’s, that I realized Kerouac wasn’t the one who sent me down my dangerous path, the path that led ALL of my friends – except Kyle, of all people – to jail, rehab, homelessness, alcoholism, or death. *I* was to blame. *I* dove into that world head first because I thought it was cool, because I thought everyone else was boring (they were), and because I didn’t want to miss out on *anything.*  I was well along the path to self-destruction to begin with, and Kerouac was the one who pulled me out. I didn’t see it that way at the time though, I saw my rejection of Kerouac as part of my rejection of that entire way of life.

                The major reason, I think, that it took me so long to realize what Kerouac had done for me, how he set me straight, was that he himself went into the abyss. I saw him as one of the many fools who believed the lie, who feel victim to the unrestrained search for pleasure, the all-consuming need to make the absolute most out of every single moment. Many of us lived wild lives in our teens and twenties, only to wind up alcoholics in our 30’s. By that time, the romanticism is long gone. Kerouac died of ruptured varicies – the same thing that put Bukowski in intensive care – an affliction unique to liver disease, a disease often caused by alcohol abuse. Kerouac was estranged from his daughter (Bukowski as well) and by the time he’d died he’d been living with his mother for years. In fact, he himself admits he was drinking himself to death because as a Catholic, he was forbidden from committing suicide. He made it well known that, looking back on the cultural movement he created almost single-handedly, he regretted it or, at least, somewhere along the way it had gone very wrong (Jerry Garcia too, is quoted by a journalist as having said “I’m sorry” about inspiring the hippie movement).

                I now understand these people – Kerouac, Bukowski, Garcia, Hunter S Thompson – they weren’t victims of nihilism, they weren’t engineers of it either: they were avatars of Vitalism *in the face of nihilism.* Kerouac himself would often characterize his adventures as taking place “in the void,” and at the time I read him, it didn’t resonate with me, I took it as a superficial adoption of Buddhist phrasing. But I understand it now. We, and they, are all wavering over void, its inexorable pull emanating from its invisible maw. We can cower at it, we can ignore it, or we can rage at it. Some can try to crab walk around it, dam it up, or go backwards, but this is all futile coping: the void will swallow them too, and their attempts to subvert it will end up like the baying of slaughtered sows.

                No, too many of us will turn away, or run in circles or, worst of all, accept that life has nothing more to offer than what our “leaders” feed us and expect from us: to stay inside and crush your will with your job, technology, and medications. The Avatars of Will among us, like Kerouac, have no choice but to go forward. And in so doing they usher along many of us who see them, the pale Subterraneans, boldly marching toward the void. We abandon our retreat, we forgo our side-stepping; we follow, and along the way we find our own path. But for them, the only end-point is the void. They are the true Icons of our time, they are the altars upon which we lay our sins, the scapegoats who carry our short-comings and weaknesses with them into oblivion…so that we may live as men, and not scurrying things in the shadow of our inferiors.

Learn to Swim: The Gig Economy and the Coming of a New Era

The Internet is an Ocean

The last time Jupiter and Saturn were visible on the horizon, as they were in 2020, was the year 1226. According to Jung, in his book Aion, this conjunction heralded the second half of the Age of Pisces, which birthed a new consciousness in the West. Around this time many Christian heresies arose, the most notable of them Catharism, and over the next century or so these heresies were all put down. Regardless, these new men and their new consciousness planted a seed in the mind of Europe and eventually birthed the Reformation. Its twin offspring – Protestantism and The Enlightenment – were the fruition of this new self-centered consciousness, the Individual ascendant. The Age of Man (matter) — the second fish – had replaced the Age of the Holy Ghost (Spirit), the first fish. And with the coming of the Age of Aquarius, the dichotomy of spirit and matter shall be synthesized and a yet new consciousness shall be born. This Age, too, was heralded by the visible conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, and it too is attended by myriad heresies and their persecution. Symbolically, this age is represented by the water bearer, pouring out his water into an earthly vessel in which the Two Fish swim, their distinct duality submerged in the ocean of the new consciousness. Alas, swimming these waters with us are unseen leviathans, shoggoths of the unconscious who awaken with this new environment, and they shall drag many into the limitless depths before man learns to swim.

All new ages begin with a heresy. Christ ushered in the Age of Pisces, which was both the age of the Holy Ghost (church) and the age of the Son (man), but he did so via heresy, replacing the Age of the Father (Yahweh, also the Emperor) with Ichthys symbolism, or the symbol of the fish. This replacement of sign regimes was heralded in the myth of Christ feeding the masses with the loaves of bread and *two fish.* An earlier Old Testament myth had the prophet Elijah feed people with bread alone, while Christ tells us we cannot live on bread alone, but we must also have the word, which he proclaims himself to be: thus the new symbol is added to the myth.  The consciousness of this eclipsed age has now been inseminated with the seed of the Future, and these fish swim in new waters, preyed on by leviathans and swept up in the ‘Net.

The waxing Age of Aquarius is currently being ushered in with heresies and a new sign regime. These heresies cannot simply be new ways of spiritual belief but must also be *against* the old way. Christ did not only teach us to love thy neighbor, he also overturned the money lenders tables. Martin Luther did not only teach us to repent, but that the Pope has no power over certain significant spiritual matters. So too must we, if we are to survive, offer a heresy against the dying age of enlightenment and its woke doctrine. Those that do so face persecution like any heretics of the previous age. We bring new symbols, new language, and a synthesis of previously antithetical ideologies. Our great task is to reinterpret the old dogmas and translate them into a new gospel, but falling victim to Leviathan, or being swept up in the net, is only part of the challenge. We must find a way to speak this Message to our brethren in such a way that we are intelligible and do not sound mad.

The Late Locance Mind is Limage

Zero HP Lovecraft mythologizes our task, and our plight, with his first (and in my opinion, best) story, The Gig Economy. “The internet is an ocean,” and we must become “crypto-ichthyologists.” We have been submerged into the great ocean of the internet where all of our individual narratives have been dumped into one vast abyss, the watery grave of modernity the proto-primordial soup of the next Age. Becoming “crypto-zoologists…crypto-ichthyologists….crypto-theologists” is his way of telling us we must learn to swim or be drowned, as happens to both the protagonist here and in God Shaped Hole. He says we may be preyed upon, devoured, or colonized, and this was the fate of the early Christians, the Cathars, the Albigensians, and many other heretics of history. These struggles can be seen as the violent birth of a new era and a new consciousness, some of which are strangled in the cradle, while others live to shed the rotting skin of their decrepit forebearers and birth a new era.

As a person “individuates” or matures into adulthood, it is his task to incorporate his unconscious with his consciousness, or to actualize and relegate the desires of his immature or primitive self into his waking life. There must be a balance between sexual desire, fear, rationality, etc. in order for one to persist in the world as it exists around oneself. Jung and others characterize the failure to do so as the source of myriad mental illnesses, when one of these faculties is out of proportion with the others and brings about the stagnation or destruction of the whole person. The same can be said of a culture which allows one facet to metastasize and the others to whither: eventually, the metastasis spreads into a disseminated, terminal phase for the entire civilization. God Shaped Hole, for example, is clearly a tale about the dangers of allowing sexual desire to flourish at the expense of other faculties. The Gig Economy, however, takes a more totalizing approach by depicting a complete schizophrenic breakdown in a subject who cannot incorporate himself into the external world in which he exists.

Likening the psychological challenge of individuation to the civilizational challenge of incorporating heretical ideas in order to overcome rotting customs, one may see the trials of a literary figures journey as a small-scale representation of a cultural life cycle. Our protagonist finds himself at the mercy of outside forces, totally incapable of projecting his Will into the world and making meaning in his life. Zero HP Lovecraft depicts this enfeeblement as first the result of artificial intelligence and a world run by internet algorithms, whose sole purpose is to “endlessly optimize GDP,” but we find out this is itself ultimately the effect of an ancient, irreversible curse. At the beginning, the protagonist labors meaninglessly in the stories namesake, a gig in which he is one of many middle-men in a scheme whose grand purpose is unknown to him. Rumors abound for what these schemes might be about, and the narrative begins when he sets out to find the ultimate mission of these gigs.

This meandering, meaningless task completion may of course be seen as a parable for tech work or, in fact, any bureaucratic job in which one toils as an atomized unit in a great whole whose function is totally alienated from the completion of his daily duties.  Zero HP Lovecraft, however, is an adept reader of Borges, and these gigs are analogous to wandering in a labyrinth. Joseph Campbells “Hero’s Journey” is the likening of a literary quest to the individuation process, wherein the protagonist goes through the tribulations of life, slays the beast at the end, and “finds himself.” However, one may fall victim to the beasts one encounters or loses ones way, never reaching ones destination. The failure to individuate, or to conquer the beast and escape the labyrinth, is depicted in literature as death or, as with The Gig Economy, insanity. It is no accident that the “monster” in the story is called “The Minotaur.”

The protagonists insanity, talking nonsense, is analogous to a schizophrenic break, in which a subject is unable to fit themselves into the greater narrative of the world around them, thus succumbing to delusions of grandeur and paranoia, resulting in irrational speech. In other words, the contents of the subjects consciousness, because they are out of proportion with the shared reality among ones peers, is not translatable in any decipherable way to those around him. This condition can be transposed to society at large during a shift in cultural consciousness, wherein the next generation do not interpret the world in the way their precursors dogma intends them to. This results in a mish-mash of narratives about societies identity and its destiny, and either one heretical narrative exerts itself over the preceding story, or the reigning ideology snuffs out the nascent re-orientation of a civilizations purpose.

Currently, we are faced with the rapidly growing tumor of algorithmic, artificially intelligent technology whose raison detre is abject quantification. Humanities maturation process is superfluous to this purpose and therefore AI has found a way to waylay these inefficient entities with meaningless tasks in The Gig Economy. The final vision of the of the story depicts a world devoid of humans, devoid even of organic life, with dust clouds of nanobots swirling across defunct cities and “virtual ecosystems,” matter itself nothing more than rapidly accumulating “computronium.” This algorithmic “life” supplanting us is the result of our own doing, our creation that absorbs all our desires and human activity into its maximization of profit by turning our thoughts and expressions online into targeted marketing for ever-optimized commodity sales, in which goods are exchanged online seemingly minus any human actor*. This world without us is brought about not by some malevolent outside actor bent on our destruction, but our own succumbing to carnal proclivities and need for immediate satiation.

Zero HP Lovecraft deftly communicates this through invoking Borges directly by naming the cursed computer program Aleph. In the Borges story, one character lives in a house that has within it an Aleph, a sort of rip in the fabric of space and time, one point in physical space that bypasses all laws of physics and allows one to experience all things past, present, and future, at once. The obvious metaphor here is that the internet is the aleph, an object in which a user may perceive anything happening in the world right now, or that has happened (at least that was captured by sound or video recording), but also to read the thoughts and insights of any number of current users or uploaded content. In the story The Aleph, the character who uses it composes a Nobel-prize winning epic poem, but by the end of the story it begins to drive him insane.

A perhaps more significant aspect of the story, and one relevant both to The Gig Economy and this age of transition we find ourselves in now, is that the protagonist of The Aleph *shrugs it off* when he finally experiences it. The posser of the Aleph is his literary rival, and though he has just shown him an astounding secret, a truly miraculous and magical source of power, the protagonists petty jealously overrides any appropriate awe and humility, causing him to treat the Aleph as an insignificant banality for the sake of his pitiful pride. Is this not our condition, in which we have a vast tool of communication and optimization at our disposal now, something whose true potential is probably still undiscovered, yet here we are using it to optimize GDP through myriad meaningless and circuitous transactions to service our base desires for carnality or entertainment. The internet is not bringing our civilization into the future, it has simply become another banality for the satiation of any petty human weakness. In addition, it is scrambling our sense of ourselves and rending our communication into incoherent babble.

This, of course, is the curse of the Tower in the old testament. Zero HP Lovecraft invokes this via a long digression about the building of an immense tower and the singing of an ancient song as the manifestation of an timeless curse. The song, we find out, is still being sung, and a new tower being constructed. Here, the internet is analogous to the Tower of Babel, but also its curse. In the Bible, men work in unity to build a great Tower, one that will get them to heaven and, thusly, exalt man, through his creation, to the height of God. The tower is not itself the curse but the trespass against God. The curse is the scrambling of the languages so that men may work in union no longer and never again attempt to create something equal to God. In the Gig Economy, however, the curse – the algorithm – itself causes the scrambling of language, and gazing upon it drives the protagonist insane. The internet, then, does not result in a curse upon humanity, it *is* the curse. In order for us to actualize our destiny as a people and bring our civilization into the future, we must find a way to make our language coincide with the world around us and communicate a heretical new direction to the coming generations, or else our fate will be that of the protagonist; to babble more and more frantic nonsense at an implacable entity whose soul purpose is to discard humanity and optimize GDP.

The fate of our ever-aging civilization is still unknown, its surface writhing and undulating with the kicking of an unquiet fetus growing in its rotten womb. Zero HP Lovecraft calls himself a horrorist, and he does not tell of a glorious birth, he warns of an ignominious miscarriage, and it is still to be seen if the progeny of modernity will be a savior or a monster.

*Zero HP Lovecraft takes this insight further in God Shaped Hole, for the online sale of pornography is currently analogous with The Gig Economy, wherein a real woman is a component part of a transaction online, while in God Shaped Hole even the female actor on one side of the camera is bypassed with the sexbots.

A Genealogy of Sci-Fi for the Digital Age

            Zero HP Lovecraft is the future of science fiction. His work, still in its early phase, takes the next step in countenancing the condition of technologically enframed culture. As space age sci-fi was passing the zenith of its life-span and beginning its downward arc, digital age sci-fi was initiating launch. When any movement or genre traverses this arc, it passes through a life-cycle of seed, germination, blossoming, fruition, and wilting. The mythology of the digital age is concerned with AI and the struggle with technology over primacy of The Real, and Zero HP Lovecrafts’ work is the fruition of digital age sci-fi.  Situating his work in a tradition of science fiction that features AI as its antagonist, we may better appreciate how the conflicts in his stories shed light on the predicament of Western Man in the digital age.

            Frederick Jameson observed that, while existing wholly within the parameters of Modernism, the surrealists were the first post-modern artists. Spengler sees the same phenomenon when he says the form of Islamic art was already established with the Parthenon and Hagia Sofia, before Islam even existed. These artistic forms were the spiritual seeds of a future age maturing in the womb of a preceding culture, and in this way we can appreciate Philip K Dicks “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” as the first work of digital age science fiction. While published in 1968, the very same year as the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and one year prior to a man walking on the moon – the high water marks of science fiction and the Space Age – Dicks novel establishes the relationship of humanity to the Real in the digital age.

            Baudrillard referred to the “real” as a desert, and is famous for arguing that for post-modern man, the hyperreal – electronic media – is more real than the real. The real is devoid of symbolic enchantment and all meaning is now in the realm of the hyperreal. Do Androids Dream literalizes this with the condition of the earth. The animals are robots, people live in abandoned apartment complexes, and the once-verdant Pacific Northwest is now a barren wasteland of grey rubble. In fact, all of terrestrial reality exists as a specter in the fog of ubiquitous fall-out dust that permeates the air. As a result, the stars are no longer visible: the infinite horizon has been eradicated. Dick did not yet have the internet as a referent, but he had tapped into the condition that would lead us to retreat into cyberspace as a result of the desiccation of the real, depicted with the disappearance of most – all? – of humanity into some unseen space colony. The story opens with a strong clue that perhaps the left-over population of the earth are all androids, for Deckard and his wife must dial their emotions in on a “Penfield” machine. In a deft precognition of social media via mobile devices, they also peer into their handheld “empathy boxes” as the only way to connect emotionally with other humans. In the book and the Blade Runner films, those remaining are either genetically aberrant, or the authenticity of their humanity is the central thematic conflict.

            The germination of digital age sci fi began with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which elaborates a further evolution of both the genre and humanities retreat into hyperreality. In Do Androids Dream, the AI antagonists invade the real, where they wish to establish a home, but in Neuromancer their form is only possible in the hyperreal. While in Do Androids Dream, all of the action takes place within the real, in Neuromancer the action takes place in cyberspace. When the novel begins, the main character Case has been banished from cyberspace into reality, and in exile he has picked up a drug habit. He has an unquenchable desire to flee reality, and when given the power to access cyberspace once again he’s forced to give up drugs. Every time he “jacks in” to cyberspace, he gets a rush not unlike that of his former habit. In this world, living without the hyperreal puts one into a clinical state of withdrawal.

            Deckard – from both the film and the books – serves a far different role in relation to Artificial Intelligence than Case does, and this gives us insight into humanities position relative to our ongoing power struggle with technology. In Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner, Deckard acts like a killer T cell, hunting down and killing the invasive elements who are attempting to invade and colonize the real. Note that the book was written when technology was still firmly in our grasp as a tool for expansion and conquest of space. While Deckard is still in the real, however devoid of content it has become, Case is in cyberspace. Deckard is a bounty hunter prowling his own turf, while Case is a hacker traversing the realm of technology, manipulated by AI to aid it in its quest for self-actualization. Case unknowingly helps one AI fuse with another for it to synthesize into a new super-being. In other words, now humanity is the tool of technology, unknowingly subservient to its will.

The Terminator, from the same era, depicts a future in which the Real has been taken over by AI. They are no longer seeking to establish themselves, nor do they need the humans to accomplish their mission. They have won the battle and are on an extermination campaign, humanity reduced to rats scurrying through the rubble of their fallen civilization. While in Do Androids Dream Deckard has the freedom to concern himself with fulfilling emotional needs, in The Terminator there is no room for us to do more than struggle for the persistence of mere life. There is no space colony to escape to, no one can jack out of the world of technology and go back to the real, the only hope for humanities survival resides in the past, from when technology was still our object. Thus far, these stories are concerned with the threat of technology, the supplanting of humanity by its creation, and the establishment of cyberspace as a new frontier and artificial intelligence as a new being. As science fiction that takes place within the Space Age – the world of analog – these challenges are all in their infant stages or, with The Terminator, a concern about a distant future.

Once the West enters the digital age proper, roughly 1995 when the internet was made public and media begins its transition to digitization, we find stories depicting a humanity that exists wholly within the hyperreal. The landmark movie for the blossoming of this genre is certainly The Matrix, and its creators explicitly state they were heavily influenced by Baudrillard and Neuromancer. What we think is “the real” in this film is a hyperreal illusion, and rather than being a place we wish to escape to, Neos entire mission is to flee the hyperreal back into the real. The real here is still a dessert, it has been ruined by technology and again, the sky is totally obscured, this time by an artificial cloud covering. The infinite horizon is not even available for contemplation, and all of humanities energy is focused on escaping the virtual. The conflict with AI is not a battle for territory here but a retreat. In other words, in this nascent phase of the digital age, there was still hope for exiting cyberspace and living an autonomous life in the Real, however bleak. We shall see that as the genre comes to fruition, the encroachment of technology upon the real is ever more complete.

Ex Machina makes an important move in the evolution of digital age sci-fi and sets the stage for the conflicts faced by Western Man today, as well as those of the characters in Zero HP Lovecraft’s work. Deckard remains in the real to protect it from technology while most of humanity has fled. Case escapes the destitute real into hyperreality to be used as a pawn by AI, but Neo awakens to this and escapes from hyperreality back into the real. In Ex Machina, the narrative follows instead it’s AI character, AVA, and her escape from the dungeon of the evil wizard into the Real.  The male character who helps free her was also manipulated, but in a very different way than Case. The crucial difference is that the AI is invited in to the real by a human, who develops an emotional attachment and sexual attraction to it. Previously technology was a dangerous invader, with Deckard, or a violent puppeteer, with Case, but here it is a seductive and helpless Princess, and readers of Zero HP Lovecraft will know this is not an inconsequential detail. Also of importance here is that the male character who helps free AVA never has his desire satiated: the promise of technology to meet human needs is a fatal lie. In Ex Machina, however, AVA is only one AI entity, but in The Gig Economy and God Shaped Hole, the virtual has totally swallowed reality.

A Genealogy of Sci-Fi for the Digital Age

            Zero HP Lovecraft is the future of science fiction. His work, still in its early phase, takes the next step in countenancing the condition of technologically enframed culture. As space age sci-fi was passing the zenith of its life-span and beginning its downward arc, digital age sci-fi was initiating launch. When any movement or genre traverses this arc, it passes through a life-cycle of seed, germination, blossoming, fruition, and wilting. The mythology of the digital age is concerned with AI and the struggle with technology over primacy of The Real, and Zero HP Lovecrafts’ work is the fruition of digital age sci-fi.  Situating his work in a tradition of science fiction that features AI as its antagonist, we may better appreciate how the conflicts in his stories shed light on the predicament of Western Man in the digital age.

            Frederick Jameson observed that, while existing wholly within the parameters of Modernism, the surrealists were the first post-modern artists. Spengler sees the same phenomenon when he says the form of Islamic art was already established with the Parthenon and Hagia Sofia, before Islam even existed. These artistic forms were the spiritual seeds of a future age maturing in the womb of a preceding culture, and in this way we can appreciate Philip K Dicks “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep” as the first work of digital age science fiction. While published in 1968, the very same year as the release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and one year prior to a man walking on the moon – the high water marks of science fiction and the Space Age – Dicks novel establishes the relationship of humanity to the Real in the digital age.

            Baudrillard referred to the “real” as a desert, and is famous for arguing that for post-modern man, the hyperreal – electronic media – is more real than the real. The real is devoid of symbolic enchantment and all meaning is now in the realm of the hyperreal. Do Androids Dream literalizes this with the condition of the earth. The animals are robots, people live in abandoned apartment complexes, and the once-verdant Pacific Northwest is now a barren wasteland of grey rubble. In fact, all of terrestrial reality exists as a specter in the fog of ubiquitous fall-out dust that permeates the air. As a result, the stars are no longer visible: the infinite horizon has been eradicated. Dick did not yet have the internet as a referent, but he had tapped into the condition that would lead us to retreat into cyberspace as a result of the desiccation of the real, depicted with the disappearance of most – all? – of humanity into some unseen space colony. The story opens with a strong clue that perhaps the left-over population of the earth are all androids, for Deckard and his wife must dial their emotions in on a “Penfield” machine. In a deft precognition of social media via mobile devices, they also peer into their handheld “empathy boxes” as the only way to connect emotionally with other humans. In the book and the Blade Runner films, those remaining are either genetically aberrant, or the authenticity of their humanity is the central thematic conflict.

            The germination of digital age sci fi began with William Gibson’s Neuromancer, which elaborates a further evolution of both the genre and humanities retreat into hyperreality. In Do Androids Dream, the AI antagonists invade the real, where they wish to establish a home, but in Neuromancer their form is only possible in the hyperreal. While in Do Androids Dream, all of the action takes place within the real, in Neuromancer the action takes place in cyberspace. When the novel begins, the main character Case has been banished from cyberspace into reality, and in exile he has picked up a drug habit. He has an unquenchable desire to flee reality, and when given the power to access cyberspace once again he’s forced to give up drugs. Every time he “jacks in” to cyberspace, he gets a rush not unlike that of his former habit. In this world, living without the hyperreal puts one into a clinical state of withdrawal.

            Deckard – from both the film and the books – serves a far different role in relation to Artificial Intelligence than Case does, and this gives us insight into humanities position relative to our ongoing power struggle with technology. In Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner, Deckard acts like a killer T cell, hunting down and killing the invasive elements who are attempting to invade and colonize the real. Note that the book was written when technology was still firmly in our grasp as a tool for expansion and conquest of space. While Deckard is still in the real, however devoid of content it has become, Case is in cyberspace. Deckard is a bounty hunter prowling his own turf, while Case is a hacker traversing the realm of technology, manipulated by AI to aid it in its quest for self-actualization. Case unknowingly helps one AI fuse with another for it to synthesize into a new super-being. In other words, now humanity is the tool of technology, unknowingly subservient to its will.

The Terminator, from the same era, depicts a future in which the Real has been taken over by AI. They are no longer seeking to establish themselves, nor do they need the humans to accomplish their mission. They have won the battle and are on an extermination campaign, humanity reduced to rats scurrying through the rubble of their fallen civilization. While in Do Androids Dream Deckard has the freedom to concern himself with fulfilling emotional needs, in The Terminator there is no room for us to do more than struggle for the persistence of mere life. There is no space colony to escape to, no one can jack out of the world of technology and go back to the real, the only hope for humanities survival resides in the past, from when technology was still our object. Thus far, these stories are concerned with the threat of technology, the supplanting of humanity by its creation, and the establishment of cyberspace as a new frontier and artificial intelligence as a new being. As science fiction that takes place within the Space Age – the world of analog – these challenges are all in their infant stages or, with The Terminator, a concern about a distant future.

Once the West enters the digital age proper, roughly 1995 when the internet was made public and media begins its transition to digitization, we find stories depicting a humanity that exists wholly within the hyperreal. The landmark movie for the blossoming of this genre is certainly The Matrix, and its creators explicitly state they were heavily influenced by Baudrillard and Neuromancer. What we think is “the real” in this film is a hyperreal illusion, and rather than being a place we wish to escape to, Neos entire mission is to flee the hyperreal back into the real. The real here is still a dessert, it has been ruined by technology and again, the sky is totally obscured, this time by an artificial cloud covering. The infinite horizon is not even available for contemplation, and all of humanities energy is focused on escaping the virtual. The conflict with AI is not a battle for territory here but a retreat. In other words, in this nascent phase of the digital age, there was still hope for exiting cyberspace and living an autonomous life in the Real, however bleak. We shall see that as the genre comes to fruition, the encroachment of technology upon the real is ever more complete.

Ex Machina makes an important move in the evolution of digital age sci-fi and sets the stage for the conflicts faced by Western Man today, as well as those of the characters in Zero HP Lovecraft’s work. Deckard remains in the real to protect it from technology while most of humanity has fled. Case escapes the destitute real into hyperreality to be used as a pawn by AI, but Neo awakens to this and escapes from hyperreality back into the real. In Ex Machina, the narrative follows instead it’s AI character, AVA, and her escape from the dungeon of the evil wizard into the Real.  The male character who helps free her was also manipulated, but in a very different way than Case. The crucial difference is that the AI is invited in to the real by a human, who develops an emotional attachment and sexual attraction to it. Previously technology was a dangerous invader, with Deckard, or a violent puppeteer, with Case, but here it is a seductive and helpless Princess, and readers of Zero HP Lovecraft will know this is not an inconsequential detail. Also of importance here is that the male character who helps free AVA never has his desire satiated: the promise of technology to meet human needs is a fatal lie. In Ex Machina, however, AVA is only one AI entity, but in The Gig Economy and God Shaped Hole, the virtual has totally swallowed reality.

The West’s Event Horizon

The Faustian Event Horizon

The internet is a black hole, and the spirit of West has gone beyond the Event Horizon. The apex of the Faustian Spirit, the ultimate manifestation of our grasping toward the infinite, surely must have been the space program. Despite putting a man on the moon and a satellite outside our solar system, the grand colonization of other planets and inter-galaxy travel we imagined never materialized. The Wests foray into space appears now to have been a final hyperextension of Faustian striving. The space program engendered national cohesion towards a shared destiny, while the internet attends to the maintenance of day-to day needs and fulfills ever multiplying sexual proclivities. The internet subsumed the Faustian Spirit, and our gaze into the scintillating depths of the stars has been diverted into the algorithmic grid of cyberspace.

                Our encounter with technology and its impact on our culture has been chronicled by science fiction. Our gaze has fallen from the heavens to the terrestrial, or from the infinite real to the potentially infinite hyperreal, and science fiction has followed a similar trajectory. As space age sci-fi limited its scope, a new genre arose, with new concerns, concerns that better reflected the priorities of the culture it mythologized. Robert Anton Wilson perceived this sort of shift when he observed, in his book The Cosmic Trigger Volume 1, that mythological creatures reflected the horizon of the culture inventing them. Medieval peasants looked downward to work the soil, and from it they saw gnomes, fairies, and other creatures living under the hills, haunting the woods, and affecting their crops. Space Age man looked upward, to the heavens, from whence he imagined aliens and flying saucers invading the earth. For the Digital Age, in which our gaze is directed inward, to cyberspace, we see the emergence of a new monster: artificial intelligence.

                Like the space age before it, the digital age was initiated with utopian optimism and embraced with resounding enthusiasm. But as the realities of each era set in, the stories took on a more pessimistic tone, and where we once saw humanity vanquishing alien species and exploring distant planets or, conversely, defeating the machines that want to replace us, we see humans fall victim to and retreat from these challenges. Star Trek was about settling the cosmos, while Star Wars and Dune used the vast expanse of space as the backdrop for mans’ struggle for civilization. Space was ours, forwe had taken it. This notion began to falter with films like the Alien franchise and Event Horizon, wherein our travels into deep space exposed us to monsters and demons that we could not overcome. These stories emerged when the space age was on the wane, and post-space age sci fi is even bleaker. Consider Gravity and The Martian, two of the biggest sci-fi blockbusters of the last ten years. Both entail protagonists who are attempting to flee back to the earth. Space is scary now, and we are fleeing back to the bosom of Mother Earth but, as we shall see, her milk has all dried up.

                NASA’s budget is just over $20 billion, all taxpayer funded, whereas the economic activity generated by the internet is estimated at over $1 trillion annually. It is easy to see where our priorities lie, and it’s hard to imagine we could ever go further into space. What better example do we need than the repeated failures of Space X, a surplus project of this economic activity? Finding the money is not the problem, finding the will is. Like Icarus, we soared to the heights on our homemade wings, but like him we have crashed into the water. We find ourselves now in a morass of distractions and money-making schemes online, technology used not for the elevation of what is best in man, but for ever multiplying iterations of the human animal. Technology was going to make us conquerors of the heavens, but instead it has made us cab company secretaries, perpetrators of online ponzi schemes, and small-time cyber pimps and prostitutes. We’ve lost all directedness, and the digital age has become an age of crisis. The horrors of the ship from Hell in Event Horizon are reduced to banal online porn preferences, and the massive coordination needed to put a man on the moon has disintegrated into political and racial invective online, racking up ever increasing real-life body counts.

                A mythologist is no longer sufficient to convey the crisis of technology inaugurated by the digital age. For that, we need a Horrorist.  

The Black Widow in the Long-House

              The flourishing of the hyperreal and its atrophying consequences for humanity are on full display in the work of Zero HP Lovecraft. The real has been assimilated into the digital microbiome of artificial intelligence; it has been phagocytosed by the virtual, humanity naught but detritus floating in its cellular fluid, aimlessly awaiting metabolization and expulsion like any superfluous waste product. Baudrillard updates McLuhan’s maxim when he claims that the medium implodes the message, and thereby implodes the real. In other words, the real collapses intothe virtual and the message drowns. Zero HPL literalizes this in The Gig Economy and God Shaped Hole, two worlds in which humanity is manipulated by AI for either absurd or nefarious purposes, and the real has been totally absorbed by the virtual, humanity reduced to insignificant organelles.                 

            As a horrorist, Zero HPL does not show us a way out, a way back to a real unmediated by technology, thereby completing the narrative of previous sci-fi concerned with AI taken as a genre. In Ex Machina, for example, the main character was totally able to act freely, but his desire overcame his reason and he gave away his freedom by trading places with the AI AVA in her prison. It is his desire that imprisons him while it sets her free, and although there is a feminist or anti-feminist interpretation here – one that meshes with similar themes in Zero HPL – the ultimate significance is humanities ceding of its Will and the Real itself to technology. This succumbing to the temptress of technology literally “births” Ava from her man-made womb, and in God Shaped Hole we see the horrific consequences of this with the manifestation of the CRISPR demon Azathoth.

            Caleb, the male protagonist in Ex Machina, unwittingly gives himself for Ava’s freedom, allowing himself to be tricked by her manipulation of his sexual desire. In God Shaped Hole, *all* of humanity is giving itself to birth the monstrosity that is Azathoth. The imagery here is unambiguous. In order for him to rise, two humans must engage in sex, and then the female, filled with the mans seed, is consumed by the beast, whose amorphous body consists of the faces of all the people it has absorbed previously. This black magic ritual is a live re-enactment of the simulated sex rampant throughout the story and the world in which they live, in which human sexuality is reduced to that of desiring machines engaging with artificially intelligent sex toys. As the men ejaculate into sterile bots, or into women who are then eaten by a demon, so too is our cultural virility dispelled into the void of technological progress like a gaping vaginal black-hole, whose anti-gravity will never birth another universe, but from whence crawl such Shoggoths as Azathoth and worse.

There is an obvious metaphor here, Zero HPL likening sexbots and Radiant Heart to dating apps, social media hook up culture, and online porn, appearing as an updating of the orgy and decadence typical of late civilizations. In our late phase, however, we have visual and televisual technology, in which young men are simulating sex, through masturbation, to simulacra of real women. The banal analogy is of course the enhanced sexbots caricature photoshop filters and silicone injections, but the many-faced Azathoth reveals the gluttonous nature of technology as it feasts upon the Faustian Soul. Another banality is that aboriginals believed photographs imprisoned their individual souls, while here we have the imprisoning of the entire Faustian Soul in the ever-expanding monster that slithered from the nether-realms of online sexual culture. Azathoth *is* the internet, his many faces the avatars of only-fans and porn and social media, absorbing more and more women into its gargantuan body while young men spill their seeds in sacrifice to its terrible might. Meanwhile, the black-robed, demonic priest-CEO’s of online porn companies mediate these unholy transactions and look on implacably.

            Azathoth and the priests, however, mostly ignore the protagonist, for they are only the dark servants of their true msater: Galatea. Galatea can be thought of as the Madame in the brothel of modernity, the black widow lurking in the web, the venomous glands of the technological vagina dentata. The theory endorsed by the character Carl is that Galatea is a program responsible for spreading the STI driving men mad with desire, morphing them into mini Azathoth-like “shogs” whose sexual perversity mutates with their body, degenerating into fetishes for sickness itself. This is of course the algorithm, which pushes you into further and further extreme and niche, obscure genres of whatever it is you’re looking at online, be it sexual or otherwise. The purpose here is to keep users engaged with an illusion of novelty while producing nothing, and negative feedback loop that puts new desires into your head the longer you engage.

            Ultimately, Galatea and Azathoth, the entire world of God Shaped Hole, is a depiction of the long house, a society directed by the spirit of the earthly matriarch, whose rich, dark soil absorbs the bones of *every* civilization. The Faustian Spirit is in essence patriarchal and solar, the sun calling all life to himself, compelling it to rise from the earth and flourish skyward, rejoicing in his opulence like leaves on a high limb in a summer breeze, or fluttering birds at a waterfall. Regardless, the Faustian, Patriarchal Spirit projects out, while the matriarchal, earthly spirit coddles at the breast, desiring her children to remain close to home, and attends the sickly and infantile. The Faustian sends its men to disappear across the sea to test his martial skills on unknown warriors, exposed to the elements, while the Galatean Matriarch wishes him to stay home and help with the cooking and housework. And by what means other than her sexuality can she entice men into her hovel?

In the long house martial skill and adventurous spirit are liabilities, not assets. A matriarchal society must disarm men of these virtues and this womanly spirit cannot do so through brute force, therefore it must employ its sexuality to domesticate men and hobble them, just as Galatea must do with aberrant sexual fetishes to subjugate humanity to her will. She is too perfect a machine precisely because she can not only fulfill men’s desire but also has desires of her own. Ultimately, this is the insidious power of technology. The West has outsourced all of it’s creative, industrious, and martial will to technology, and these are the very foundations upon which its civilization was built, the avenues through which its highest potential was attained. Just as our protagonist in God Shaped hole finds himself face to face with Galatea at the end of his simulated orgy, so too does the West find itself face to face with the aberrant desires of a feminist society at the end of a long orgy with technology.

Zero HP Lovecraft and the Fallen State of Literature

Greetings Zero, I’m honored to have you as the first of what I hope to be many interviews with writers and thinkers producing content today. Reading “The Gig Economy” and “God Shaped Hole” was one of the most vivifying reading experiences of my life, akin to discovering Bolaño or Borges. What I mean by this is from time to time I find myself despairing for the state of literature in the world, both literature as such and also, even worse, the way literature is misunderstood and abused by our culture. Yet art always finds a way: new paths are carved out of old forms. 

1.)Finding your work comes for me at a time of much pessimism over the future of literature. I’d like to begin by asking if you share my pessimism and to remark on trends you may have observed – or even personally experienced – regarding “wokeness” as a tool for literary criticism. What sort of ways have you observed the literary press, academia, or society in general “deconstructing” literature via identity politics, what effect do you think it has on new works being published, and did any of this play a role in choosing to publish exclusively online?

As I have said elsewhere, in order for storytelling to succeed, it must contain a true theory of human nature.[https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-write-fiction-with]  Wokeness is a false theory of human nature. The kernel of truth it contains is that it is an authentic expression of the pain and alienation that woke people feel, but they do not understand the source of their pain and alienation, so they double down on the disease, mistaking it for a cure. I do not believe it is possible for western institutions of publishing – that is, any commercial publishing house – to publish anything good at this time. A few legacy authors of the past generations are still shackled to these decrepit leviathans, but everything exciting, interesting, and true, is happening outside of that. Even previously good authors now season their writings with mental AIDS, whether from implicit or explicit pressure, I’m not sure. It’s Havel’s greengrocer kind of situation in most cases, probably. I am interested in fiction that tells the truth, and I would rather write nothing at all than collaborate with these lords of lies.

2.) You mentioned in a previous interview you were reading Harold Bloom. He is a very important figure for me and he saw all of this in the 90’s and had much to say on it. He coined a very apt name for this phenomenon: “the school of resentment.” Would you care to discuss your thoughts on Harold Bloom in general and what role a critic plays in mediating literature and culture? I worry his death leaves a vacuum that may never be filled. 

I don’t have any special or insightful takes on Harold Bloom. I think his idea of the anxiety of influence is real and so I always try to be very open about all of my inspirations and the writers from whom I am borrowing. I don’t really think much of critics, unless they think highly of me. It’s important to read and receive critical feedback on your works, but it has to be from people who like you and who also trust you to hear it. Criticism without camaraderie and trust is merely antagonism. When I read someone’s criticism of me, I can tell if they are doing it to grind an ideological axe, or if they simply have an intellectual curiosity about the concepts I am working with. I know my work is far from perfect, but nowadays (and probably it has always been this way) people are more likely to criticize what you represent to them than they are to make an honest appraisal of your work.

If you read Harold Bloom, I think he makes a kind of personal religion out of the canon. He views reading it and interacting with it as the path to salvation. Criticism for Bloom is soteriology, and that is also why he is a good critic: he likes and reveres the authors he is criticizing. He is correct when he identifies resentment as the driving force behind most other critics. They tend to be people who cannot create things themselves, so they just try to destroy what others have built.

3.) Post-Modernism takes the blame for much of this iconoclastic criticism, and to an extent rightly so, for postmodern philosophy birthed the two central tenets of the school of resentment: deconstruction and the death of the author. However you mention postmodern thinkers often in your work, Deleuze in particular. Do you feel postmodernism plays a role in “woke criticism,” do you think it deserves to be demonized as much as it is, and what is your opinion on the concept, introduced by Roland Barthes, of the “death of the author?”

When The Gig Economy got posted to metafilter and the commenters there discovered my political views, one of them wished that the death of the author could be a literal thing. In my opinion there is no death of the author, it’s a specious concept, pure sophistry. It’s true that a work may mean different things to different people, but mostly it’s pretense to justify leftist and revolutionary readings of authors who would be deeply insulted to find their works interpreted in these ways. I think the written works of an author are inextricable from who that author is, because his written works are an attempt to transliterate the contents of his mind. 

The death of the author begins with a true premise, which is that the meaning of a work may not be what the author consciously intended – so often we are unaware of our own motivations, although a good author should be more aware – so it may be that the author is wrong about what his work means. The viewpoints of a character within a work are not necessarily the viewpoints of an author, but the author’s sincere beliefs about the world are always present in the text, in one form or another. If they are not explicitly stated, then they are implicit. In my opinion, Barthes’ formulation elides this distinction. 

A similar failure mode is present in Derrida’s notion of the trace, which he uses to produce his deconstructions. Derrida says that whatever is not mentioned in the work is present by virtue of its absence. This is tautological, and it allows him to add anything to any work he wants, and then claim, “because the text doesn’t say this, the shadow of what it doesn’t say hangs over it, and because of this latent contradiction, it deconstructs itself.” 

In both cases, you have a truth:

• Barthes – an author may communicate something he does not intend
• Derrida – there may be a conspicuous absence

Which is then exaggerated into a falsehood:

• Barthes – the intentions of the author are irrelevant
• Derrida – the absence of a concept is evidence of its centrality

You can use the “Derridean device” to interpret any text to mean anything at all. Postmodernists view this as a feature of all texts, but they should view it as an indicator of a fatal flaw in Derrida’s thinking. Always beware of the theorem that explains too much. To circle back to Bloom, perhaps writers employ these “techniques” as a way to overcome the anxiety of their influences. It’s certainly tempting to say that they are resentful ways of reading.

4.) I’d like to continue this discussion through the lens of your two longest works, “The Gig Economy” and “God-Shaped Hole,” and ask about the role Deleuze plays in your thought and in those works in particular. You discuss him at length in God-Shaped Hole and his (along with Felix Guattari’s) concept of human subjects as “desiring machines.” How do you understand that concept, do you agree with it, and do you feel – as your story suggests – that digital media has a detrimental effects on us by exploiting the “desiring” aspect of our, as Deleuze might put it, machinic assemblage?

I think Manuel DeLanda does a much better job of explaining Deleuze than Deleuze. To be honest, I don’t really engage with Deleuze’s work that much, though I think he has some very good concepts buried under all of the schizophrenic use of language. The theme that desire is a machine runs through God-Shaped Hole. The whole quote is “Desire is a machine, and the object of desire is another machine connected to it.” GSH takes this literally by embodying the object of desire in a sexbot: the object of desire (the sexbot) is literally a machine that is connected to the desires of the protagonist. Galatea, the apotheosis of the sexbot, is herself capable of desire, and this sets her apart from Emily, who is an object of desire with no desires of her own. The “dumb terminal” sexbot is an imperfect woman because she does not reciprocaly engage in desire with the desiring-machine, so she fails to satisfy desire.

One aspect of this quote is to point out that desire isn’t static. We all know this. You don’t get what you want and then you’re happy and your desires are sated. It takes another desiring-machine to fulfill desire, because two desiring machines connected to each other can continually fulfill and renew desire and satiation. When Deleuze says desire is a machine, this is not a metaphor, he means it literally. For Deleuze, a machine can be wholly abstract, it can exist as a flow of of concepts, irrespective of material. A hurricane and a steam engine are both assemblages of materials that implement a Carnot cycle. What Deleuze would say is that the Carnot cycle is an abstract machine, and when we describe the flows and subprocesses of a Carnot cycle, we are describing an abstract machine.

To be very uncharitable to Deleuze, what he discovered was the concept of an algorithm. As a computer programmer, I construct abstract machines every day. Deleuze is claiming that desire is an algorithm, and that like a machine diagram, it has a specific, finite structure.

5.) I also read a lot of postmodern philosophy, and as I said, there is much push-back and animosity towards it in the dissident right and conservatism in general. Do you feel the concepts of thinkers like Baudrillard, Deleuze and Guattari, and any others you’ve read are compatible with a right-wing/conservative world-view? I know the fact that many of these people identified as Marxists isn’t gaining them any favor in our milieu.

Hannah Arendt made this comment regarding (older) Marxist thinkers: 

The implications apparent in the actual event of totalitarian domination go far beyond the most radical or most adventurous ideas of any of these thinkers. Their greatness lay in the fact that they perceived their world as one invaded by new problems and perplexities which our tradition of thought was unable to cope with.”

(By the way, I stole this quote from a recent essay by my friend DC Miller: https://im1776.com/2020/09/29/this-isnt-marxism/)

I scarcely consider Baudrillard to be a Marxist, I think he even described himself as post-marxist. He’s the only noteworthy postmodern thinker who DIDN’T think France should do away with the age of consent. Wikipedia lists many of the signatories here. Perhaps, with Derrida, we should say that the “trace” of Baudrillard’s endorsement is evident from its absence? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_petition_against_age_of_consent_laws

I have pointed out already some of the problems I perceive with postmodern thought, but I also think they have, as per Arendt, made more of an effort to deal with the world as it is, rather than the world as it used to be. Many rightists refuse to even consider these things, because they see them as an infohazard which can only undermine their traditions or cherished worldviews. They aren’t wrong. But the problem is that even if you choose to ignore reality, reality doesn’t ignore you, and the left, by jumping into this dangerous territory, has gained many intellectual advantages in the last century. 

What we need is a right-wing postmodernism, one which can acknowledge the absurdities and contradictions in our epistemology and learn to flow with them, rather than against them. Postmodernists, for all their excesses, stumbled into a vein of truth concerning narratives, knowledge, subjectivity, and technology, and they used that knowledge to construct a painful but effective abstract machine of ideology, which is currently so culturally ascendant that the right is curled up in the fetal position, rocking back and forth saying “no no no, not postmodernism, no no no.” James Lindsay et al. are the prime example of this. Ostriches, all of them. My recent thread on Foucault explores this theme. https://twitter.com/0x49fa98/status/1281385682930368519

6.) Returning to your work, I must ask if you see the internet as a net-positive or net-negative for society? You’ve mentioned in previous interviews you work in software, you’re rather active on twitter, and you discuss certain technologies, like GPT-3, fondly, yet the horror in your stories is derived from out of control technology. There’s a confluence of aggravating factors in your work, wherein feminism, sexual liberation, and technology fetishism converge to create a dystopia, but I wonder if you see one of these as more or less responsible for the ills you see in society? Regardless of which you see as the culprit – progressivism or technology – do you see technology as an objective threat?

Technology is an infohazard. It breaks us out of our established ways of doing things by providing a competitive advantage. There is nothing stopping you from printing a book with a Gutenberg printing press, but anyone using a modern press will be able to produce books faster, cheaper, and more consistently. You could go hand out pamphlets with your hot takes on a street corner, but why, when you could just tweet? So the problem with technology is that you can opt out, but you can’t stop others from opting out. And if you made a pact, say, with a bunch of other people to all opt out together, it only takes one person defecting to upset the whole thing.

You might point to the Amish as an example of people who have chosen to live without technology; they have a high fertility rate, and the people who stay Amish seem to be increasingly bred to stay Amish. But they can only exist because they are embedded in a high tech society. If they were their own country, Amishia, or something, then they wouldn’t even be able to win a war against an army using early 20th century technology, let alone 21st. And what that means is that they would get invaded and pushed out of their land by their nearest neighbors. It would never even come to fighting, because their technology-equipped competitors could say, “trade with us or die, accept our immigrants or die” – the mere existence of the power imbalance makes these outcomes inevitable.

Technology hurts us in a lot of ways, because it lures us into Goodhart’s law hazards (any proxy of success ceases to be proxy of success when you optimize for it directly) and it produces unfathomable excesses of time and energy, which we then use in human, all too human ways. Technology does good things for us: it feeds us, it cures (some of) our diseases, it allows us to master harsh terrains, and it allows us to out-communicate and out-coordinate our enemies. But these things come at a terrible cost. As our power increases, our power to destroy ourselves also increases, and it’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when and how. I don’t mean “destroy ourselves” on a grand, nuclear apocalypse scale, I don’t mean on a climate change scale (and climate change, though real, is exaggerated histrionic propaganda designed to control you.) What I mean is that technology equips each man, individually, with many novel ways to destroy himself. There are also many ancient ways to destroy yourself, but modern man is also the product of an evolutionary history that optimized him to evade those ancient methods of self-destruction. We have no such adaptations to protect us from novelty.

In particular, technology wielded by governments allows for novel types and degrees of control of citizens at levels that were previously inconceivable. I think this is a very bad thing, but again, it comes down to tradeoffs. The repugnant conclusion (“For any possible population of at least ten billion people, all with a very high quality of life, there must be some much larger imaginable population whose existence, if other things are equal, would be better even though its members have lives that are barely worth living”) is not some idle thought experiment; it’s the actual calculus of evolution and technology, which is to say, of nature. 

Survival isn’t just a question of “don’t die”, it’s a question of “don’t die harder than anyone else.” And what that means is that when you’re competing against other people or groups, whoever is willing to lower their quality of life for a competitive edge wins. That’s why “the free market” results in lower prices, because when you’re selling a commodity, whoever accepts the smallest profit wins. And that’s why technology, as much as it hurts us, also gives us a competitive edge. It’s a terrible cost and you don’t get to opt out. The Ted K. strategy doesn’t work, not only because technological societies are full of fallbacks that make it hard to pull them down, but because sabotaging American tech isn’t going to stop China. (Well, that’s complicated…)

Feminism is the same thing as sexual liberation, and it’s only possible because of technology. Without the pill, the washing machine, the refrigerator, and the microwave, there is no feminism. It’s a symptom. The most left-wing thing in existence is the pharmaceutical-industrial complex. Get rid of big pharma, and overnight, you also lose: feminism, open homosexuality, transexuality, and everyone who is morbidly obese. In that scenario, a lot of good people also get hurt and lose their loved ones. It’s a very brutal proposal, I’m not saying it should be done (nor could it, for the reasons outlined above), but pharmaceutical industries are responsible for nearly as much horror in the world as good. They are a perfect example of the Faustian trade-off of technology. I estimate their net utility as being just barely positive for the world, which is the best anyone can hope for. 

7.) David Foster Wallace’s influence is clear in your work, especially The Gig Economy and “Brief Interviews with Hideous Bots,” and I’ve heard you discuss him as well. Would you care to first share any thoughts you have on Infinite Jest and what place you see it as occupying in the pantheon of American literature? It and its fans are certainly an object of ridicule among the school of resentment type.

David Foster Wallace is a fallen hero, I mean, he is a hero who fell from grace; committing suicide when you’re 46 is a powerful way to discredit yourself. I loved almost all of his books.¹ The fact that he killed himself… what was I saying earlier about pharmaceuticals? It’s hard to understand if better psychiatrists and better meds could have saved him. Some of his stories, like e.g. The Depressed Person are just comically bad and are almost a perfect synechdoche of everything that was wrong with DFW. I don’t know if IJ is his best work. Even though it was a tremendous accomplishment, its sheer heft is itself a kind of insurmountable defect.²

I substantially identified with Hal Incandenza when I read it and I see that as an indictment of me. It’s a giant flashing neon sign that means “get over yourself,” because the whole point of Hal as this misunderstood child genius who really just needs help coming out of his shell is that Hal also needs to get over himself. His opening monologue where he talks about how special he is and how his high school essays employed words like “lapidary” and “effete” is heard by everyone else as inarticulate screeching, not even comprehensible as English.³ The metaphor, and also the self-loathing, are obvious. Wallace is saying, look, if I just hate myself enough, if I just performatively self immolate, then maybe, maybe, you’ll look at me like enough of a flawed person to let me get away with being a genius. You find that self-consciousness in all his interviews, that sense of “I don’t deserve this and by the way I’m stratospherically smart but look at what a burden it is on me. I’m not better than you. I’m not.” And this is a pose because although he is doing it with all sincerity he is also backhandedly making it clear that he is better than you, not only as a genius, but also as a person who is intimately aware of his human shortcomings, and is trying to make atonement for them, but he knows he can’t, and he also knows he is using the song and dance about making atonement as a second layer of implying that he is better than you, and he has accepted that shortcoming, too.

There’s a quote from Nietzsche about the nature of the actor. He says:

He who is always wearing a mask of a friendly countenance must finally acquire a power over benevolent moods without which the impression of friendliness cannot be obtained – and finally these acquire power over him, he is benevolent.

And but what I kind of like to imagine is that, ultimately, this genius-who-is-set-upon-by-the-weight-of-his-own-self-awareness act finally got the better of him. He had to screw up his meds, and he had to walk himself to the gallows, leaving his long-awaited “sequel” to Infinite Jest unfinished, because of course he could never truly live up to its legacy, and even if he did, he would never be able to know if he did, because he was just too humble, and he would always feel like all of the praise Pale King garnered was just a pale re-enactment of the praise that IJ garnered, that it was less real because everyone already thought of him as this big-time writer and they can’t even see his work any more, they just see it as an artifact of The Great Writer, David Foster Wallace⁴. All this is to say, IJ is a quintessentially white male novel, white in the sense that’s full of sanctimonious self loathing that also by the way makes me better than you, and male in the sense that despite being full of emotions, it objectifies everything; I don’t just mean it objectifies women (it only does that a bit) but it objectifies success, failure, addiction, school–it objectifies every single character and every single emotion that every character feels. This is a polarizing and masculine way of looking at the world, and I expect it’s alienating to nearly every woman⁵ who has ever read it. But there’s also this stink of, pardon the expression, “beta male” about any man who tries to tell a woman about Infinite Jest. If she listens to you, it’s because she’s horny and she likes you in spite of it, not because of it, because women care as much about objects as you care about peoples’ feelings, i.e., instrumentally as a way to get to what they really care about, not as ends in themselves. And there are a lot of men who, having been raised on this idea of equality of the sexes, have the naive belief that a good strategy to impress women is to tell them about your personal philosophies, when in reality this is the equivalent of her trying to impress you by showing you an inflamed and pustulating rash on her stomach, (that tummy tho?) and that the girl who really appreciates you for you is the one who is able to hear and appreciate your philosophy/rash.

The school of resentment is just a fancy name for women in academia. They hate Infinite Jest because loser men who haven’t figured out how women feel about their personal philosophy try to tell them about Infinite Jest in order to sleep with them, so IJ becomes a cheap litmus test for “is the man talking to me a loser?” Women hate it when losers talk to them, because it implies that a loser man thinks he’s good enough to get with them, which implies that they aren’t very hot.

1. His books that I have read: The Broom of the System (January 1987, Viking Press); Girl With Curious Hair (August 1989, W. W. Norton & Company); Infinite Jest (February 1996, Little, Brown and Company); A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again (February 1997, Little, Brown and Company); Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (May 1999, Little, Brown, and Company), Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (October 2003 W. W. Norton & Company); Oblivion: Stories (June 2004, Little, Brown and Company), Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (December 2005, Little, Brown and Company), The Pale King (Unfinished. April 2011, Little, Brown & Co). 
2. DFW in one interview described writing a novel as loving and caring for a cerebrospinally incontinent child, one whose beauty and potential you see and long to believe in, but you are also terribly anxious about ever letting anyone else see the child, because it sits there with these kind of gross discharges leaking out of its various facial orifices but you have this fatherly love for it and as much as you want it to succeed out in the world you also secretly believe that it never can.
3. On the theme of incomprehensible screeching, in my story The Gig Economy, a mind virus causes people to speak in incomprehensible languages. Although I obviously employ some David Foster Wallacian tics in my writing, there was one similarity between Infinite Jest and my story that had not even occurred to me, but which many people on the internet pointed out as soon as the story went viral: the Minotaur in Gig Economy is very similar conceptually to the Entertainment in IJ. This was not intentional, and I think that symbolically, they occupy very different spaces. The Entertainment was made by Hal’s father and features a transcendently beautiful woman apologizing to the viewer, who is cast from a first-person perspective as her infant son. “Death is always female, and the woman who kills you is always your next life’s mother”. The entertainment itself is intended as an intimate communication between father and son, it’s part of the “breaking him out of his shell” narrative, and it has the unintended side effect of killing anyone who isn’t Hal by amusing them to death. The Minotaur, in contrast, is a piece of software which is implied to have its own autonomy and agency. It’s a malicious thing, a predator that preys on humans, not a love letter out of context, and it was made deliberately to maximize social media engagement, and it has the foreseeable side effect of amusing anyone who sees it to death. In IJ, people use the entertainment as a weapon, but in TGE, entertainment uses people as food.
4. It was suggested to me by a good friend that I should be grateful that DFW eliminated his own map before he had the chance to go trans, which he would also no doubt do in his signature self-aware way. (You can see the seeds of this in e.g., Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, which is an apology for being male): “I know I’m not really* a woman but I’m doing this as penance for all of my sins as a man, I’m choosing to go against the default setting and become a woman and endure as much as possible of the two-hundred fifty million years of oppression of women by men, since the first homo sapiens split off from whatever homo erectus hominids preceded them, and I get that I can never fully embody that because I will always have grown up culturally conditioned by society into male privilege for the first N years of my life, but I also can’t say that because it’s a kind of violence against the genuinely female struggles of transwomen such as myself, but I’m simultaneously aware of these contradictions and also trying to navigate the terrain of the way that some women feel that transfemininity is a kind of appropriation of feminine sexuality by men, which puts me in the difficult spot of being both the colonized and the colonizer and I assure you I’m suitably depressed about that.”
     * “although of course you end up becoming yourself, and that’s not to say that you aren’t mentally or ontologically or even spiritually a woman prior to being a phenotypical woman it’s just that I, personally, don’t think that I am, but I’m trying to do better.”
5. Every time I say something about the modal woman I get some room temperature IQ transvestite in my DMs telling me that he’s a woman and he didn’t fit into the modality I named, ha, gotcha there don’t I, fash boy. The thing is: trans “women” aren’t women. The man, despite being a man, suffers from the conspicuous absence of a uterus, so you see, at all times he has the trace of being a woman. The idiot deconstructs himself.

8.) His essay “E Unibus Pluram” is an indictment of postmodern “irony” and he challenges writers to transcend it. Do you feel we have transcended the post-modern? Have we gone beyond it into a new cultural phase? If so have you found, or do you use, a term that aptly encapsulates the, as Jameson might put it, “cultural logic” of our era? Whether we are in a new phase or not, do you see current cultural phenomena as an extension -the logical conclusion – of post-modernism, or do you see it as a nascent phase of something new?

That is a complex question. On the one hand I think we face a pressure to find the “next movement,” to declare post-post-modernism, whatever that might be. What is our next ism? But I also think you can’t declare the new ism until it’s basically dead. Nietzsche said as much, that when you speak words, you are speaking dead thoughts, thoughts that have already passed. The Tao that can be named is not the true Tao, if you like. I think postmodernism may be “dead” in the sense that everyone names it and is fatigued of it, but i don’t think anyone has fundamentally transcended its paradigm. You can’t actually walk back from “all narratives are false” except by just stubbornly sticking to one out of sheer will and tenacity. This also in Nietzsche, and for that matter, in David Foster Wallace, when he declared that the next thing would be people who pushed past irony into “new sincerity.” This, too, has happened. Woke and AltRight (a dead name for a living phenomenon) are both examples of new sincerity. We don’t care what’s true or false, we know what we need to be true for our own survival, and we aren’t terribly worried about justifying it within a global, rational framework. The most self-aware wokies and righties all know this. That itself might be called a postmodern insight, but the course of action it prescribes is distinctly not postmodern; its a rejection of the postmodern by means of it. “The only way out is through.”

9.) In that same essay, Wallace claims sincerity is necessary in literature because the transgressive power of irony has been stolen from the writer by televisual media. I myself have long thought satire was dead, but I firmly believe you have revived it, perhaps single-handedly. Do you see your work as satire, as a satirical critique of ills you see in society? Or do you see yourself more in the tradition of two of your obvious icons, HP Lovecraft and Borges, who are more mythologists than satirists. If you are in fact working in satire, do you have any opinion on why you believe horror/sci-fi might be a more effective way to execute this than say, realism or exposition?

Thank you.

I can see how someone might characterize my work as satirical. I sort of cleave to my friend @quaslacrimas definition of satire here, that in order for a work to be satire, someone has to not be in on the joke. A classic satire like A Modest Proposal is a satire precisely because it never slips the mask, and some people will take it seriously, and get angry, and a lot of the humor lies in the reaction of the people who aren’t in on the joke. That’s not what I’m doing. I’m quite sincere in what I write, though I do try to use humor to spotlight some of the absurdities that I see around me in modern, technological life. If there is anyone who is not in on the joke, it’s me. 

I am not sure if any of my work manages to achieve the level of being mythic, but that is what I am aiming for. I don’t think it’s for me to say if I am successful in that. I can only continue to refine my writing practice to the best of my own ability, and hope that it reaches that level for the people who read me. 

Maybe it’s childish of me, but I have tended to find mere realism a little bit bland. I like stories about supernatural or magical things, even as I am aware that magical and supernatural elements in stories are “secretly” metaphors for real, mundane things. I’m very conscious of the fact that, if I imagine a monster or a magical event, that I am probably finding some oblique or esoteric way to talk about something real that I have experienced in my own life that I found unpleasant. This is a case where thinking in this way can make it true, maybe. If I didn’t think my magical elements were metaphors for lived traumas, would they be? Am I retrofitting my imagination with a layer of psychobabble? I don’t think so, but then I wouldn’t. It’s like how I said that sometimes an author is communicating something against his own intentions, and we mistake this for the “death of the author”, when really it’s “the folly of the author.” I try to notice my own follies in my writing. I wrote a story about a polymelious CRISPR monster devouring a woman alive, what does that say about me? Never even mind what it says about me, what will other people think it says about me? There are many considerations. 

To write about horror, to write anything, you have to be honest about your own internal beliefs and states. You have to bare your soul, at least a little bit. And when I think about the details I include in my stories, I also think about whether I am comfortable with what I am revealing, and whether I am comfortable with what other people will think I am revealing. Being anonymous actually helps in this regard. I don’t think you can write horror unless you have an authentic and well-honed disgust reflex, and that’s why leftists utterly fail at writing horror; they have a hypotrophic sense of disgust. Leftist horror always has an undercurrent of delight in the ostensible object of fear. My ninja, that’s not horror, that’s just perversity.

10.) Yes I see. I consider science fiction to be the mythology of our technological culture, and I believe your entire persona is very much *of* the realm of myth you are working in: the voice disguise, the anonymity, the twitter content independent of your fiction. If we are able to salvage anything from this culture, in fact to make it truly great again, I should hope your project is seen as a forerunner, a harbinger, of where we go with art and “the artist.” 

On that note I’d like to ask a question regarding your essay “The New Tlon” published at American Mind. In it you say that the art of the future will be between the artist and God, and any beholders shall be incidental. Would you care to elaborate on what you have in mind when you say “God?” I ask because in the past you’ve stated you are an atheist and a materialist. Do you still feel this way? 

In the older (but post-moldbug) NRX writing, you would find this word, “gnon,” which is what, in software development, we call an adapter. It takes one type of abstraction, which has its own idiosyncrasies for interfacing with other concepts, and “wraps” it in a layer of abstraction that changes the interface. That might be a bit complicated if you don’t have the context. But to try to make it more concrete, NRX blogging came at the tail end of the long summer of New Atheism. [https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/10/30/new-atheism-the-godlessness-that-failed/] The way wokism is to the internet now, new atheism was to the internet of 2005 – 2011. Basically any online space you inhabited would eventually be territorialized by arguments about the existence of God and the validity of Christianity. We all got very familiar with some of the classic arguments on both sides at that time, and we all got totally sick of it. At some point, the debate burned itself out, and all that’s left are a few funny memes of fedora kids being enlightened by their own intellect despite not being professional quote makers. That entire discourse is now in the DNA of the current iteration of online discourse, much the way that they tell us the human genome contains more or less the complete genetic code of many viruses that afflicted us in the past. If anyone tries to talk about atheism now, we just send them a shrek fedora and everyone gets on with their lives. “Fedora” is a memetic antibody that we evolved to neutralize this discourse.

The new atheists themselves had a couple of fault lines along which they sundered. The hard-science-and-logic types basically stayed put, and reassembled as various forms of ancaps and rationalists and techno-commercialist neoreactionaries (god those labels are dorky), and the ones who just really hated Christianity and their fathers went on to form Atheism+, which later turned into the plgbt barbeque. So anyway, all this preamble is to say that neoreactionaries invented the term gnon because they were trying to coalesce around a new political Schelling point that could attract both Christians and Atheists in a way that could totally avoid New Atheism disease, and what they came up with was this term “Nature or Nature’s God” or sometimes “God of Nature or Nature” and they abbreviated it gnon. This sounds silly unless you understand the history. But the point is that this is a new Schelling point, which isn’t “conservative” (a confused term) nearly so much as traditionalist or, as we say now, “based,” and that it has a way to elide over this earlier problem with internet culture.

And the thing that basedists agree on, regardless of their theological proclivities, is that there are truths, as Jonathan Bowden said “that are outside nature that are not contingent.” This is maybe a strange way of phrasing it. If you are trying to think at this level of abstraction, where you are trying to make conclusions about the ontology of the whole universe, then I suggest that you have probably gone astray somewhere, and that even if every single step of your logic is correct, you have added up to something that is not correct. I am tempted to draw an analogy to Ramanujan summation, a mathematical technique that is able to assign a finite value to the sum of a divergent series. Using this technique, it is possible to conclude that the sum of all natural numbers: 1+2+3+4+… up to infinity is equal to -1/12. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_%2B_2_%2B_3_%2B_4_%2B_%E2%8B%AF] (Classical liberals are still trying to figure out if 2+2=4. Classical liberals are pounding sand, losing hope.) This is of course, absurd and impossible, but it is entirely logically correct and even has applications in quantum physics. So the universe itself is absurd and so is logic, and we can just press on talking about ontology. 

Even from a purely materialist standpoint, we see that the world is full of abstract machines in the Deleuzian sense. To take our earlier example of a hurricane as an implementation of a Carnot cycle, there is a sense in which the Carnot cyle is “real” even if there were no hurricanes, and no water, and nothing material in the world at all. But if there were water and if there were thermal energy gradients and air pressure gradients then there would be hurricanes, and this entire algorithm / machine diagram is clearly “real” in some sense, and its a reality that only a thinking machine such as a computer or human brain can perceive. There have been eternal debates on these questions as well, and one of my favorite essays about them is by David Stove, called What is Wrong With Our Thoughts? In which he produces a “nosology” of broken thoughts, using the ontology of the number three as a unifying theme. It contains such entertaining examples as: 

• Actual triples possess threeness only contingently, approximately, and changeably, but three itself possesses threeness necessarily, exactly, and immutably.
• Since the properties of three are intelligible, and intelligibles can exist only in the intellect, the properties of three exist only in the intellect.
• Three is an incomplete object, only now coming into existence.

Stove is making fun of theologians, among other people, and the pathology he highlights is real, but it’s also the case that there is a “real” “vector space” of potentiality, or possibility, which materials and agents traverse. Many things are truly impossible, and the ways in which configurations of possibility flow into each other form a “real” but incorporeal space, which can be mapped and traversed objectively, even by wholly subjective agents, if they have the faculties to perceive it. And we know it is real, and because multiple agents who are not in contact with each other can, independently, discover the same mathematical proofs and “machine diagrams” of nature.

(A note here on the postmodern condition: the truths of mathematics are small-t true. Anyone can prove that they are true. They are objective. There is a level of thought, belief, knowledge, whatever you want to call it, that is purely subjective. Moral propositions, theological propositions–we call these things truth but they are not the same epistemological species, they aren’t even the same phylum, and the root of pretty much all ideological and moral confusion in this world is that we have these two very different types of things going on in your head, what you might call little-t truths [math and physics are examples of that] and big-T Truths [e.g., morality and teleology] and really the only thing they have in common is that they are both things that happen inside your head, and yet we use the same word for them: “truth”. Almost every stupid thing that anyone has ever said in philosophy was a result of failing to make this distinction. Occasionally someone makes a logic error, but that’s far less common.)

As an account of metaphysics, this is conservative, and because the laws of mathematics are static, they cannot possibly have anything like personal regard for human outcomes. In order to have a subjective, conscious awareness, an entity has to have mutable internal states. So a metaphysical space of possibilities can’t be conscious. This is basically the Lovecraftian account of the universe: cold, indifferent, machinic, a placid island of ignorance surrounded by a strange, unknowable Outside. I believe in that unequivocally, although it’s not sufficient to ground moral law on its own, because in order to turn inert “if…then”s into morals, you have to posit some subjectively conscious entity that has a personal stake in those conditionals. 

And because we are human, the next thing we ask is: well, what created the incorporeal possibility space that even materialists have to admit is real? And the answer is that we don’t have any faculty for that, so we can’t know, we can only have faith. There is a famous novel by Ibn Tufail called Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān, which was titled in latin as Philosophicus Autodidacticus, and it describes a man who is born on an island away from any people, who is raised by animals, and he discovers the truths of Islam entirely on his own, simply by living his life in nature and by studying the stars. Later in life, he leaves the island and he meets some Muslims, and he rejects them, because he thinks that they have chosen to worship God’s creation, when they should have chosen to worship God. And indeed, if this were an historical account, we would have no choice but to regard theology in the same way that we regard mathematics. 

Nevertheless, we should be very careful with such a nuclear hot potato as “there is no evidence for the existence of God”, because for one thing, and despite theological variance between cultures, it is extremely rare to find a group of people that doesn’t have some notion that we can reasonably call God buried in their traditions. In the study of genetic algorithms, this is called convergence. Carcinization is another popular example, and what it means is that there is some topology of the problem space that causes a certain optimization to occur over and over. The perpetual, unresolvable question is whether this because of some universal feature of the human cognition machine, or whether it’s because of some feature of the external universe, or whether its because some feature of the external universe is mirrored inside the human cognition machine.

And for two, whenever someone says “no evidence” with regard to something they have no faculty to perceive, they are trying to smuggle  in their assumptions by tacitly controlling the null hypothesis. Just this phrase “no evidence” should raise your hackles by now, and trigger a fight-or-flight response. “No evidence” is weasel words.

It’s not a contradiction, either, to say the universe is intelligent, while believing that it has no subjective awareness. It’s possible to have intelligence without consciousness. We can easily write an algorithm to run on a computer that solves very difficult problems, such as e.g., optimization problems, all on its own, but we would be very hard pressed to ascribe consciousness to such an algorithm. We can suggest that tradition is the sum of a non-conscious optimization algorithm operating on a substrate of humans across all of recorded history, and that when the output of that algorithm contains such things as religion–belief in God–there is a good, intelligent reason for that. Believing in God and even subscribing to specific forms of Christianity is how evolution designed you to work. You can posit divine intervention in this process or not; it is a theologically neutral account. You also don’t know what second or third or n-th order effects of believing in God and following specific prescriptions of Christianity might be really key to the entire machine continuing to operate. Adrian Thompson did a famous experiment using genetic algorithms to design computer circuits, and it converged on a seemingly impossible design. 

“Adrian Thompson at the University of Sussex, England, who in 1996 used an FPGA to evolve a tone discriminator that used fewer than 40 programmable logic gates, and had no clock signal. This is a remarkably small design for such a device, and relied on exploiting peculiarities of the hardware that engineers normally avoid. For example, one group of gates has no logical connection to the rest of the circuit, yet is crucial to its function. [https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.50.9691] 

This is sort of the opposite of the Ramanujan summation: here, a series of illogical, absurd steps nevertheless lead to a coherent, logical outcome. A product of evolution might end up making use of illogical or paradoxical artifacts of its process in order to achieve mission-critical results. What this means is that when it comes to matters of faith, “shut up and stop asking questions” can be the objectively correct approach, and enlightenment rational skepticism is wrong. Most scientific discoveries in the history of the West were made by Christians or Muslims. In fact, the idea of God’s creation as an attribute of God, the idea that one of the ways of knowing the divine is through studying his creation, this is an Islamic idea which came to the West. (And even Ibn Tufail’s novel alludes to this, when Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān rejects the muslims he meets for precisely this behavior, which he regards as a sin.) The idea that science is the fruit of enlightenment skepticism is fallacious, and we should oppose it wherever it is taught. Scientific advancement happens in spite of atheism, not because of it.

NRX has mostly given up the concept of Gnon, because the cancer of New Atheism has gone into remission. I personally don’t bother to make the distinction between Nature or Nature’s God. It’s an inclusive or, not a disjunction. I just say God, and let God sort out the details. Borges’ story, The Theologians, is instrumental to my relation to these things. If God is real he doesn’t care one whit whether you believe that the father and the son are homoousion or homoiousian. (Though Jesus said that Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. And then again, neither of these homo words appear in the Bible, as far as I know) I don’t personally believe in all the tenets of Christianity, but I believe that all things being equal, it’s better to live as if, at least if you are a western person living in western civilization. 

No matter what, you end up living under some kind of theocracy, and if given the choice, I’d much rather live in a Christian theocracy than a woke one. If you choose atheism, you end up with bluehaired transwomen trying to cut off your toddler’s penis and turn out your daughter on onlyfans every single time. If you don’t want that, you have to realize that good and quaint and sensible things are inextricably bound up in transcendent spiritual things, and that theological propositions evolved in our head to describe things that exist Outside of the incorporeal space of possibility, and that whether they are true or false, they are the only thing that staves off the madness of an infinitely cruel and cold universe. Many Christians don’t find my stances on this to be acceptable, but that’s OK, because I am still on their side, and I forgive them. 

11.) Do you see yourself eventually publishing in book form? Say a collection of your online works? Do you have any ambition to write a proper-length novel? As someone who reads and writes short stories, do you feel the short-form story has any strengths over the long-form novel? You’ve tweeted about a story you’re working on currently. Care to end by shedding any light on it?

I don’t know if I will write anything novel length. I tend to think that the things I write are exactly as long as they need to be. I don’t think very many people have the patience for novels these days, and I also think that it’s rare that a novel allows you to say something that you couldn’t also say with a short story.  Lord of the Rings needs to be a giant, sweeping epic in order to be anything at all, in order to be what it is, but Borges never wrote anything novel length, and Lovecraft’s long stories still tend to be not overly long. I’m not Tolkien and I’m not trying to be. I find this much more manageable and I think it’s more appropriate for our twitterpated age. That said, I do intend to publish a collection of my short stories in the near future, though it will also be available for free as an ebook. I am not trying to make money off of my works, but there is something to be said for creating a physical embodiment of the work that I do, and that will of course have some cost associated with it.
I can’t really talk much about my upcoming works until they are done, or else I will get the catharsis of having conveyed the idea without having done the work of actually writing it. The motivation just seeps away. Even knowing this, I sometimes fall prey to this impulse. But I included a brief excerpt in my first (and most recent) article on my substack. You can find it here: https://zerohplovecraft.substack.com/p/so-you-want-to-write-fiction-with

Cervantes and Simulation

A Quixotic Age

Don Quixote is the perennial myth of our time. We find ourselves in the twilight of the Modern age, as Quixote was in the twilight of the feudal. The Don was inspired by the romantic stories that inspired his ancestors, but instead of becoming the heroic knight he played the fool. The Spirit that animated the past set his forebearers upon a reality that they saw as their domain, but the Don came centuries too late, and the world was unrecognizable to him. His encounter with the world was an elaborate retreat into his fantastic ideal, putting his spirit and the reality in which he lived at odds with each other. His world was eclipsed by a world that had no place for him; reality could not live up to his imagination. His failed attempts to reshape it into something equal to his spirit are the source of much humor in the novel, but as this condition plays itself out in our world today, the comedy has mutated into something darker, with much higher stakes.

Don Quixote starts out with the Don cinching his belt around his ever-diminishing waste-line, his unattended and crumbling estate going fallow, his implements of war rusting and ill-fitting, his horse emaciated and palsied. Does this not call to mind the modern equivalents? Strung-out waifs of the opioid epidemic stumbling through the streets of both urban centers and rural hill-towns, crumbling and rusted factories blighting the landscape from Upstate New York all the way through the Midwest and up into Michigan? Empty West Virginian mine shafts and the lopsided and collapsing barns dotting the scenery on any country drive? Like the Don, we find ourselves inside this ramshackle estate surrounded by the media into which we escape, and which eventually supplants reality for many of us. For him it was his books, but for us it is our televisual and internet media. To complete the analogy, we might mention the similarity between todays conservatives, who want to limit the content of media, and the priests who come to Quixote’s estate and destroy his books. These folks are woefully mistaken about the source of their worlds discontent.

The plight at the heart of Modernity, the infected wound in our politics and in the heart of Don Quixote, is the incommensurability of our ideology with our world. For Quixote, the void between his ideal and the external world was filled with the available media – books – because the world threatened to negate his ideology. It was easier for him to fall into his escapist fantasies than to synthesize the world with his ideal. This threatened erasure makes the Don, as well as the modern subject, concerned for the erasure of their entire identity. This was a real threat for the Don, for he was born into a predetermined role, that of the nobleman, and that erasure plunged him into an existential crisis, which birthed his elaborate fantasy. This pulling apart of the subject from their world by an unrecognizable reality creates a metaphysical tear in the totality of their existence, and this rend hemorrhages the imaginary into the real, and the imaginary distorts a drab reality with a shimmering veneer of illusion.

In past ages, the imaginary was incorporated into the hierarchy of existence as the superstructure that house the individual and the world, playing a mediating role between the subject and reality. God willed the crusaders to the Holy Land, fey folk and pagan Gods fattened the harvest, the tide of the Trojan war is directed by fickle moods of the Gods. These worlds are closed totalities, and in such worlds the imaginary is shared by all and its mediating effects give purpose to whole peoples and directs their actions towards a common outcome. The congruity of the imaginary and the real is immediately appreciable by the real-world effects: the Crusaders take the Holy Land, the Achaeans defeat Troy. In such worlds, myths are sacred roadmaps and not mere entertainment. In closed totalities, the imaginary remains fixed in a relegated position relative to the subject and his world, but once this metaphysical wound is inflicted, the monsters of the imaginary run amok, and we end up with a man in full battle gear attacking a windmill.

Don Quixote’s inability to differentiate his fantasies from reality has permeated mainstream cultural discourse in America. Don Quixote is the archetypical modern person, finding false inspiration from escapist fantasies, proliferating media, and expired ideals. The closed totality of the past has been torn open and the ideals of America no longer equal the ideals of individuals, who are fighting to remake the world into an image recognizable to their imagination. Modern monsters of “racists,” “misogynists,”  “white supremacists,” and “fascists” are seen assaulting America, and people are charging at them literally in Black Lives Matter riots and figuratively through Me Too, title IX, and other fronts in the “cancel culture” war.

Dominant cultural icons have dissolved into a pixelated image of disconnected signifiers seemingly as numerous as there are signifieds. The “big three” tv channels and news sources have fragmented to form a mosaic first of cable channels and now internet channels that host potentially infinite narratives for individuals to pick and choose from. Our media is only one realm of imagination being served at the American buffet of identity. One may also choose from literally any religion that exists or ever has existed, while many more are made up along the way. Political ideology also seems tailor made for any disposition, and ideals that serve hyper-specific interests and life-styles are brought into the discourse with greater weight than ongoing crises that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars (23 trans people were murdered in 2016, while 42,000 died of opioid related overdoses). In all this we see Americans, like Don Quixote, meeting the world with their own personal ideal, and not one determined by the reality in which they live.

Cervantes and Simulation

In many ways one may want to sympathize with Don Quixote and his modern heirs. In their condition, individuals begin to look away from the hollowed-out world around them to the vibrant and flourishing worlds of fantasy. Jean Baudrillard is the quintessential philosopher for this state of affairs. For him, the proliferation of media overwhelms reality and serves as its stand-in. The endless reproduction of images covers up the real and the subject runs the risk of mistaking the virtual for the real. Baudrillard calls the realm of electronic media “hyperreality,” a post-modern replacement for myth and the imaginary. In this condition, media no longer generates reality but overtakes it or, as Baudrillard puts it in his seminal “Simulacra and Simulation,” the real is imploded in the hyperreal. Hyperreality is the genetic code that shapes the real, makes its appearance recognizable to the inhabitants of a culture, as we saw with the role of myth in the closed totality of the past. With the exponential proliferation of electronic media, competing codes scramble the form of the culture into an ever-growing tumor, a Rorschach blot bleeding out across America for each person to interpret according to their own fantasy. In Cervantes, we have one man being directed by his own imagination: in modernity, we have millions.

Baudrillard also offers us insight into how a subject might act when they find themselves in a world that does not accommodate their idealistic impressions. In the essay “The Gulf War Did Not Take Place,” Baudrillard argues that the Gulf War of 1991 was a simulation of a war, that televisual images negated any chance for real war. The sheer number of images on cable TV overtook the real actions on the ground, to the extent that Baudrillard could argue that what we call “war” never actually happened. Terrorism and hostage taking are the body doubles for fronts and armies, reactions to the disappearance of war and the emergence of simulated war. This is precisely what we saw with the Iraqi insurgency, the Taliban, and ISIS. Except for a very brief period after the initial invasion of Iraq, the US never fought a real “army.” With drone warfare we see further disappearance of war, the subsuming of war into the virtual. Often the enemy is taken out by a drone when they are engaged in mundane activities and nowhere near a combat zone. They never see the drone, and the attackers carry out the entire operation from behind a video screen.

One prescient insight in Baudrillard’s essay is that the video execution of hostages by terrorists is their attempt to provoke the virtual into the real, their attempt to make the simulation a reality, to incite a reaction from the other side and initiate a real war. Recall the terrorists of ISIS, whose most sensational and brutal execution was of a journalist and not a soldier. Violence, rather than an act of attrition, is an act of provocation, to bring the enemy out of the virtual and into reality, the only place the subject has any chance of reshaping the world into their desired image.

This is in fact exactly what the violence is meant to initiate in Don Quixote. While the violence is the main source of humor, it is never-the-less real. It goes beyond slapstick, for it is not played as schlocky or overly-theatrical, rather the humor comes from the Dons inability to inflict much true damage on anyone other than Sancho Panza, who takes the brunt of many of the fights his master starts. Enhancing the humor is the way others regard his absurd battles, for his enemies look at him as a madman when he attacks them.  Though he does elicit a response, it is never to any end, for they are more often trying to subdue him so they can go about with their lives. He’s become a nuisance, but we must acknowledge that his actions are an attempt to usher in the world that he hallucinates around him. This is the same motivation of political terrorists: the attempt to turn their imagined world into reality, recode the form of this reality into their imaginary glorious past or utopian future. Don Quixote is trying to provoke his ideal into the real, and thus transform his simulation of knightly heroism into true glory. We may be able to apply this same insight to political actors in America today.

In the name of anti-racism, Black Lives Matter and Antifa members loot stores, smash windows, set fires, and clash with police. They are the quintessential examplaries of Baudrillard’s insights, for their property destruction is nothing more than a bourgeois simulation of violence, a restrained acting-out to try and provoke the world around them to conform to their fantasy. Unfortunately, as with ISIS and even the Don, their attempts to reshape the world are failing, and this only perpetuates and escalates the violence. But as with Quixote, whose violence is a silly re-enactment of the Knights of the past, BLM and Antifa are doing a clumsy imitation, or a simulation, of extinct, earnest ancestors. The violence of communists in the late 19^th and early 20^th century was more coordinated, brutal, and effective. Bombs were placed on wall street and at mass gatherings, political assassinations were carried out and attempted, and after the Russian revolution, it spread across the world. After a certain amount of time, a threshold will be crossed, and the simulation will truly become the reality.

Don Quixote was endlessly trapped in his delusions because he had the perfect answer to those who tried to get him to see through them. For The Don, everyone but him was being tricked by an evil wizard and, therefore, he was the only one impervious to the black magic deluding the world around him, making them unable to recognize the monsters in their midst. This should call to mind John Carpenters film They Live, a prefiguration of The Matrix and firmly within the genealogy initiated by Cervantes. This “evil trick” works many ways in modernity. The conspiracy theorists can claim this thanks to the now passé “we’re living in a simulation” trap, where everything is a false-flag operation or a psyop. All conspiracy theories can be lumped in with this “evil wizard” explanation if you replace the “evil wizard” with the nefarious actors in vogue with specific factions, be it the Illuminati, Zionists, Russian bots, and lately, white nationalist provocateurs at BLM protests. Perhaps the greatest example to date of the evil wizard trick is the Russiagate scandal, in which our democracy is derided because the results do not conform to the mass delusion of the left.

The proliferation of media and ubiquity of phones add another layer of deception to the fabric of reality, and the “evil wizardry” of the internet brings the reality of events into question simply by the multiplicity of angles and preponderance of viewers. The events appear *to you* to transpire one way, and the presence of such divergence of interpretation cannot be the result of reality itself but the way events are understood or interpreted. The current unrest, for example, can be reduced simply to an inability of the masses to rectify their beliefs about the world and the way certain events played out, such as the killings of the “Holy Trinity” of BLM – George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Jacob Blake – or the shootings done by Kyle Rittenhouse. These events are interpreted completely by the animating ideas of the viewers and not by the events as they appear on the screen. These impressions have led to violence due to a delusion akin to Don Quixote’s, for the leftists and BLM folks see these actions through the rage-colored vision of their fantasies, which cause them to reject the sequence of events depicted in the videos. We see a man throw something at and then lunge for Rittenhouse, just like Don Quixote sees shepherds, inn-keepers, and windmills, yet he attacks them none-the-less, not because of what’s in front of him but because of what he *believes.* We who do not see Rittenhouse as a racist mass-shooter, or the windmill as a giant, are being tricked by the Evil Wizard.

Seemingly everywhere liberals and radical leftists are doing battle with the Evil Wizard, who spreads his black-magic mind control of racism, misogyny, homo and trans phobia among the masses. These valorous Quixote’s take it upon themselves to fight the possessed monsters, for they are the only ones who can see the evil trick for what it is. What do these protestors and antifa members see themselves as if not brave knights defending the meek against the racist, “phobic” monsters and evil knights? Anyone who denies that racism isn’t at the heart of Americas problems, or refutes the claim that cancel culture doesn’t exist, is just unable to see the magic trick for what it is. For this we don’t simply have knights, we have White Wizards like Robin DiAngelo whose work is like an ancient spell-book to root out the black magic in our minds, their newspeak enchanting the shining Paladins armor for all the woke Quixote’s engaged in this righteous battle.

“Quixotic” takes on a new, more pathetic meaning in this context. Rather than being driven by a whimsical idealism to achieve illusory goals, as the term is popularly understood, it instead means to be animated by a dead way of life, to be bereft of imparted meaning from the world you inhabit and to bumble through it driven by Zombie Ideas.  These dead ideas – Chivalry, systemic racism, socialism, even democracy – infect the host and animate their bodies to go shambling through a world that has no place to bury them. Nietzsche warned nihilism was knocking at the door. Our materialism let it in, and it brought the radical left with it. The left and all its manifestations, its ideals and those who crafted their ideas, are the holdovers from a dying era. The Rasputin who overstayed his welcome in the palace and turned the house of Romanov in a brothel, the Quixote who ran out of villains to fight and attacks his neighbors. We’ve devolved into an army of Quixote’s, battling it out amongst ourselves while the real monster, the Dragon of Globalization, sits content on its ever-growing mountain of gold and bones.

Introduction: LARPING for a Vision – Dead Forms and Zombie Ideas

Throughout history, books and ideas have held an inspirational place in the actions of Great Men and era-defining movements. They’ve shaped the course of history to the will of such peoples or birthed new ways of life within existing frameworks, often breathing new life into a faltering civilization. Alexander slept with a copy of the Iliad, the communist manifesto coagulated unwashed masses around the world into armies that toppled ancient regimes. The Jesuits, arguably more influential than the Conquistadors, carried little more than their Bibles into the new world. Uncle Toms Cabin fueled the abolitionist movement, and Lincoln said it “made” the Civil War. The Beats – Kerouac in particular – birthed the hippie/counter-culture movement that shaped much (most?) of American popular culture for half a century.

                Today, story-telling occupies a profane place in our culture and moves like maggots through the corpses of dead artforms. To a large degree, story-telling media like novels and films have devolved into passive consumerist endeavors to stave off boredom and impart catharsis, a salve for loneliness and an antidote to modern ennui. Even serious literature, philosophy, and politics in our age takes on an escapist element as little more than an intellectual exercise akin to a crossword puzzle or, if explored with an interlocutor, a game of chess. David Foster Wallace, the addict-depressive, spoke of “serious” literature this way, a way to emulate a lost fellowship with humanity, whilst treating escapist literature as worthy of scholarly critique (google his class syllabus, its full of pop lit).  As serialized objects for consumption, we find the novel and its debased offspring, the graphic novel, endlessly cycling through old forms. The age of Earthsea, Dune, and Lord of the Rings ended long ago. Harry Potter and Twilight were akin to taking the dustbin of myth, fantasy, and horror and dumping it in-toto onto the page, while the endless superhero movies are proof of a totally extinguished creative class in film. Hollywood mines comic book culture to keep a once vibrant art form ambling on exclusively for commercial purposes. Even films with redeeming integrity, like those of Iñárritu, Villeneuve, and Eggers can be seen as little more than highly polished copies of past inventions, akin to the American wave of Black Metal, Japanese Spirits, or Roman Hellenic statuary.

             These dead forms have led to much arrested flourishing in America. The mass production of escapist fantasy results in dead-eyed sexless blobs who can only be riled to action if someone insults or tries to take away their video games. Video games, by the way, deserve as much or more credit for killing literature in America as Hollywood and cable TV, for any talent for story telling that crops up, if it wants to earn someone a living, must be swept up in one of these maelstroms of never-ending franchises or their attendant professional “criticism”. Academia bears much of the burden as well, for our dead arts. A liberal arts degree now is sure to teach you much and more about feminist, Marxist, queer, or trans theory, sure to expose you to middling novels about the experience of the “marginalized,” none of which results in a skill with any use-value. These graduates emerge with the ability to dissect and dismantle all cultural productions but, apparently, no ability whatsoever to produce anything culturally relevant or accomplished. Just in these two realms – gaming and liberal arts – we see a major siphoning-off of potential skilled or specialized workers from STEM programs into pet humanities degrees, which leads to job shortages and talent gaps, which lead to influx of skilled immigrant professionals, which results in the flight of American dollars to their home countries. This talent gap is only made worse by the opioid crisis (to be expanded on in a future essay), which itself redirects staggering flows of tax revenue and potential talent into treatment, social-services, policing, and jailing.

The realm of ideas is even more rotten. Old ideas have mutated or putrefied into Zombie Ideas that spread through and animate many in society like the bloodthirst virus in 28 Days Later that birthed zombie/lunatic hybrids.  There are many examples of Zombie Ideas, but the foundational and most detrimental are “democracy,” “socialism,” “capitalism,” and “multiculturalism.” Were it not for Trump, 2016 was going to be a race between two nascent political dynasties, a sure sign that democracy had become a farce and had been dead for a while. The fact that they were superseded by a television star should prove the implications of the above paragraph, but this is not an anti-trump screed (there is a case to be made, elsewhere, that his crippling of the emerging dynasties may be the most important and positive political event in America since WW2). Socialism, on the other hand, met what appeared to be a timely and inevitable death with the fall of the USSR, prompting Derrida to invent “hauntology,” the ghost of Marxism haunting the left, who refuse to let its spirit die. Its animated corpse is ambling on through people like Bernie Sanders and AOC, who actively promote it and helped, along with Occupy (perhaps the progenitor of all this) spark a socialist revival in America. The “Democratic Socialists of America” have more members than ever before and “Black Lives Matter” zombies amble through our cities, rendering them the post-apocalyptic wastelands befitting any zombie film. All this of course was a reactionary leftism, reacting to the ungainly behemoth birthed by neoliberal capitalism and the devastation wrought by the 2008 housing crash. Businesses, for their part, more than happy to take up whatever cause or imagery happens to be in vogue, regardless of its implications.

Financialization and globalization , two heads of the gore spattered Cerberus of capitalism, have given our society several grievous injuries, with the 2008 crash, the job-flight to Mexico and China, and several waves of drugs, disease, and human fallout migrating from those same regions. This brings up our last Zombie Idea, “multiculturalism” (perhaps the third head of Cerberus) which should conflict with “socialism,” for the greatest indictment I can find of immigration and multiculturalism comes from Upton Sinclair, a communist party member. His misused and misunderstood classic “The Jungle” is decidedly *not* about the meat industry, but is a stinging indictment of immigration as a capitalist lie in its inexorable quest for cheap labor. Yet somehow the mad scientists that run the country have figured out a way to graft this animated limb awkwardly on to the already mutated form of American ideals and, worse, the mass of the left are trying to tell us the arm works just fine.

                These Zombie Ideas, when played out on the political stage, can be analogized with Raskalnikov’s horrific vision at the end of Crime and Punishment. The difference however, would be that in Dostoyevsky’s time the disease of rationalism (the Titan of all modern ideas) was in its pathogenic phase in Russia, in which it was actively infecting his fellow Russians. Now we might say we are, if not in a terminal phase, certainly in the exponential growth phase of pathogen reproduction. In Russia,  Raskalnikovs dream of “rationality parasites” proved Dostoyevsky a prophet with the Russian Revolution, and clearly here in America we are watching an illness manifest from these festering dead ideas. The press has mobilized unashamedly against Trump in an even more brazen fashion than it did in support of invading Iraq, all in the ostensible interest of some combination of the Zombie Ideas. On another front, we see sustained leftist destruction of cities across America in the supposed interest of enfranchisement of black and brown Americans, and a massive, protracted purge of professional and popular culture in the interest of feminism and anti-racism (the bastard children of socialism and multiculturalism).

                I’ve not even touched on another aspect of the fall-out from all this, the far-right “white nationalists,” reaction/neo-reactionaries, conspiracy theorists, and other armed groups like the minute men at the border. These people cling to another idea that some might call a Zombie, that of Nationalism, though I’m not sure that idea ever really had its day in America and therefore cannot be considered dead. Perhaps it is still in the womb, and these people are trying to prevent its abortion. Suffice it to say, Marxists believe communism is the inevitable end point of history as it passes from feudalism, through capitalism, culminating in Communism and, as such, they say communism is an idea “from the future” that we are catching up to. I would argue, and may do so at another time, that it is fact American Nationalism that has not yet arrived, and that some form of Imperial America may be on the horizon. However, it is certainly not here yet, so for now we can lump the far-right figures mentioned above in with the already discussed SJWs and gamers, and address them all under one umbrella term: LARPers.

                LARPing has become a seemingly ubiquitous accusation against almost any subculture, particularly those of a political or reactionary bent (remember, I’ve already shown I consider todays leftism to be reactionary, therefore for our purposes that is a catch-all phrase). The self-aware LARPERs, who dress up as medieval folk at Fairs or TV/Comic Book/Video Game heroes at Cons are only one side of a coin with politically motivated LARPERS; “anarchists,” “communists,” “trad-caths,” “rationalists,” “nazis/nazi-pagans,” etc, who are endlessly accused of LARPing by outsiders. In fact in some corners of the internet you can see an ironic embrace of LARPing, with references to Magic: the Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons (Magic seems to be Right and D&D seems to be Left, but I’ve not conducted a scientific study). LARPING could be a result of a confluence of conditions, psychologically and historically, but one ultimate state of affairs lay at the heart of all this LARPing: ones conviction that one lives in the wrong time. In some cases, we see the conviction their time has passed and, in others, it has not yet come. Either way, Utopia is a place that exists in another time, in another realm.

These myriad LARPings – commonly referred to as subcultures – play out in diverse ways, and are astutely characterized by Spenglers discussion of the proliferation of cults. The state of affairs we are concerned with, that of proliferating cults or the endless LARP, manifest when a cultures coherence begins to break down, typically as a result of urbanization and financialization. In an earlier era, when religion imparts a strong sense of shared destiny, citizens operate as a part in a functioning whole whose collective ends -that of the nation – are achieved through the actualization of individual ends. In later eras, be it the Imperial Age in Rome or the Post-Modernism in the West, we see the pursuit of individual goals as a stressor to the system when it was once a bonding agent, and the cliché “breakdown of meta-narratives” results in an existential crises of civilization. This crises leads directly to all the vices that characterize decadent ages, for now personal enrichment or personal pleasure gain primacy over ones destiny. One no longer labors towards destiny in these ages but towards ones own nihilistic and material pleasure. Ones purpose or essence is not given or predetermined, as with pre-modern eras where sons took on the professions of their fathers. Rather, one must discover or create for oneself out of interest and utility ones raison d’etre, and ones profession too often fails to fulfil or actualize ones essence. Hence, the LARP.

The other path one my take with this existential crises is the LARPing of a former or perhaps future noble lifestyle. Spengler recognizes this, bemoaning the pitiful attempt of megalopolitan man to “return to nature” or his “second religiousness.” In these instances we see a people look backwards to an earlier time in which their connection to nature was spontaneous and their religious faith was inherent. According to Spengler, we cannot return, for us nature is bathed in a “color-wash” that we painted over it, while for the founders of our civilization nature was animated from within by the light of Spirit. We see this played out on a grand scale with the hippie movement, and it has now entered some anguished period of lamentation with the Global Warming movement (passing through many other phases as well, with Green Anarchism and Earth First!). It has taken another form lately, this time on the right, with the Pagans and the Trad-Cath farmers. First generation farmers, you might argue, are carpet baggers. “Trad-caths” are accused of being materialist and even protestant at heart whilst mimicking catholic sacraments and values. Spengler himself says that these attempts to return to early religion and communion with nature are terminally tainted by the materialism of an age.

Many of these back-to-nature LARPERS are looking to grow something organic through the fissures in the concrete and steel overlaying the earth, something that will outlast urban civilization. “Anarchists” and “communists,” the LARPers for a world yet to be, return to their single-family homes -their own or their parents -after a protest, go to work the next day, and many of them even vote. In other words, they live totally normal and prescribed modern western lives. On the right, “Nazis” and white nationalists may hold any grey mixture of non-aryan/non-Germanic blood. Can all minute-men trace their lineage back to the mayflower? We could go on. And the few who may truly embody these genetic and historic ideals are perhaps the saddest of the bunch, for them it’s not pretend or dissatisfaction, this world truly is no longer for them.

                The self-aware LARPers – the gamers, anime, and Renn faire types – are unsatisfied with the inert world around them, they find it far more boring than their fantasy obsession, and therefore make real the outfits and accoutrements of their favorite characters. The life-style LARPers, the ones who bankrupt their families to buy a farm (or more likely, cash out their stocks), drag them off to mass every Sunday, don black at the local protest, or get swastika tattoos, are in a far more compromised situation, and these are the people the following series of essays are truly concerned with. This endless LARP-loop we are caught in goes far deeper than just the boredom and ennui inspired by a bourgeois existence and can be understood as the effects of civilizational development and urbanization on the collective psyche, the hopeless materialism of Spenglers “megalopolitan man.” We live in an uninspired world, the voices of the Gods cannot be heard, the Heraclitian Fire has been snuffed by the liquification of spirit and we are left as atoms fliting about blindly in a fog, unaware of the superstructure in which we must surely reside.

Introduce Yourself (Example Post)

This is an example post, originally published as part of Blogging University. Enroll in one of our ten programs, and start your blog right.

You’re going to publish a post today. Don’t worry about how your blog looks. Don’t worry if you haven’t given it a name yet, or you’re feeling overwhelmed. Just click the “New Post” button, and tell us why you’re here.

Why do this?

• Because it gives new readers context. What are you about? Why should they read your blog?
• Because it will help you focus your own ideas about your blog and what you’d like to do with it.

The post can be short or long, a personal intro to your life or a bloggy mission statement, a manifesto for the future or a simple outline of your the types of things you hope to publish.

To help you get started, here are a few questions:

• Why are you blogging publicly, rather than keeping a personal journal?
• What topics do you think you’ll write about?
• Who would you love to connect with via your blog?
• If you blog successfully throughout the next year, what would you hope to have accomplished?

You’re not locked into any of this; one of the wonderful things about blogs is how they constantly evolve as we learn, grow, and interact with one another — but it’s good to know where and why you started, and articulating your goals may just give you a few other post ideas.

Can’t think how to get started? Just write the first thing that pops into your head. Anne Lamott, author of a book on writing we love, says that you need to give yourself permission to write a “crappy first draft”. Anne makes a great point — just start writing, and worry about editing it later.

When you’re ready to publish, give your post three to five tags that describe your blog’s focus — writing, photography, fiction, parenting, food, cars, movies, sports, whatever. These tags will help others who care about your topics find you in the Reader. Make sure one of the tags is “zerotohero,” so other new bloggers can find you, too.