Insurgents<->[Brexit]<->Snow Crash
By: Accelerating Meltdown
Tags: UK Politics, Snow Crash, Accelerationism, Deleuze, Brexit

Insurgency….

“We are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head that you keep humming all day until you spread it to someone else. Jokes. Urban legends. Crackpot religions. Marxism. No matter how smart we get, there is always this deep irrational part that makes us potential hosts for self-replicating information.” — Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

We Are Ready. It’s the new slogan of the Brexit Party. As you may have noticed the acronym of this slogan is W.A.R — War.

British politics is currently undergoing an insurgency. From the Brexit Party to Dominic Cummings, a nomad army is attempting to tear down the foundations of our current State. Ideological incoherent within itself, a swarm of anti-status-quo entities are using Brexit as their focus for attempting to deconstruct the UK, to reterritorialize on deterritorialization.

Dominic Cummings [Colonel Kurtz]

If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion, without judgement. — Colonel Kurtz, Apocolypse Now

Saigon

Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse now represents a figure of the establishment-cum-rebel. Harvard and West Point graduate. Third-generation officer. Korean War veteran. After reviewing the failures of the Vietnam War and joining the Special Forces, he rejects Wars norms and practices to launch his own insurgent battle deep in the jungle, becoming god-like in aura and mad in thought along the way.

Vote Leave’s Dominic Cummings is much closer to Kurtz than either Machiavelli or Rasputin. The press has portrayed him as an evil genius, Boris Johnson’s puppet master, hubristic, out of his depth and inept. He is however without a doubt an example of the insurgency gripping British politics right now.

Cummings considered himself in a war with officials; he claims on his blog that one told him, “You’re a mutant virus, [and] I’m the immune system.” — Newstatesman — Dominic Cummings: The Machiavel in Downing Street — Harry Lambert

First, Cummings is an interesting “ally” of the current government, considering he has on multiple occasions slammed the Tory party, ERG and the way the British civil service functions. The Newsatesman article gives a background for his approach to work and how others perceived him. The terms “awkward”, “abrupt”, “arrogant”, “aggressive” are featured.

Like Kurtz he has an ‘establishment’ background. Educated at Durham school then Exeter College Oxford, Cummings married into the Wakefield family, complete with their baronet title and Northumbrian castle.

He’s an avid blogger on technology (and Silicon Valley, whose startup culture he seems to wish to emulate in part) and the types of ideas circulating at LessWrong. His writings have gone to great lengths to document the failings of accountancy and contract negotiation within Whitehall, or have delved into irrationality and complexity theory in relation to politics.

He’s linked to the AggregateIQ scandal during the EU Referendum, AIQ being a company that Vote Leave used for data analysis. AIQ is also believed to be an offshoot of labyrinthine Cambridge Analytica or linked in some murky fashion which is still not entirely understood.

A reader from Canada supplied me with an extraordinary tip-off: a then secret relationship between Cambridge Analytica and the Canadian data firm Cummings had employed, AIQ. — Carole Cadwalladr — The real reason we should fear the work of Dominic Cummings — The Guardian

If board member of Cambridge Analytica, Steve Banon called himself a “Leninist” in relation to the US state, then Cummings may well be his UK equivalent in this regard, he’s allegedly fond of quoting Ulyanov after all — “The worse the better”.

Cummings' dismantling attempt upon the state has revealed many of the infirmities it faces. In fact, to be fair to Dominic, many of his blog posts on the lack of progress within the government when it comes to adopting technology for decision making and similar processes, are likely painfully accurate.

His pronouncements on Red Teaming (insurgent, multi-layered, full-scope) as a mechanism for testing policy are an interesting adaptation of Cybersecurity practices to government. While there are likely very good reasons to reduce the technology present in highly sensitive areas, such as the UK Cabinet Office and COBR, the fact that this is an unfortunate norm, rather than the exception, in the case of non-sensitive areas, isn’t an awful observation to make.

Thus it is something of a shame that Brexit was the mast that Cummings pinned his colours too. However, it is somewhat understandable if your goal is to turn the world upside down.

I worry that my son might not understand what I’ve tried to be. And if I were to be killed, Willard, I would want someone to go to my home and tell my son everything — everything I did, everything you saw — because there’s nothing that I detest more than the stench of lies. And if you understand me, Willard, you will do this for me. — Colonel Kurtz, Apocolypse Now.

In the wake of Brexit, Cummings has hit at the heart of Whitehall like Apocolypse Now’s renegade Colonel Kurtz. Driven by a seeming “madness” and applying his policies in a brutal asymmetric fashion. If only he had ten divisions of men more like him, he’d change the face of the country forever…..

While Cummings is not involved in the Brexit Party, and apparently he and Farage do not see eye-to-eye, he’s not the only one attempting to re-write the order of things. Across the battle lines, our Colonel Kurtz faces another insurgent army, fighting within the same territory.

The Brexit Party [Nomadic Warriors: From Left to Right]

From the wastes of Communism.

“No doubt the war machine is realized more completely in the ‘barbaric’ assemblages of nomadic warriors than in the ‘savage’ assemblages of primitive societies” — A Thousand Plateaus, Delueze and Guatarri

If Brexit has achieved anything, it is the reterritorialization of British politics. Our earlier post explored the Brexit Party and its adaptation of Silicon valley startup mechanics in order to win 29 seats at the European Parliament elections.

Deleuze and Guatarri in A Thousand Plateaus via their treatise Nomadology — The War Machine explore the politics of thought. Here “thought” is fluid and operative and activates itself outside the Westphalian manacles of the state. Or as S C. Hickman puts it:

[ATP] … is about the politics of thought itself: the image of thought as nomadic war-machine, fluid and operative in the smooth spaces situated outside the command and control systems of the striated territories of the State. — S.C. Hickman — A Few Notes on Nomadology: The War Machine

We can also view these nomadisms from another angle; political thoughts as opposed to the politics of thought. This can be applied when examining a subset of the Brexit Party’s (BXP) MEPs and parliamentary candidates' insurgency within the insurgency.

The largely young-Boomer/Gen-Xer Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP)/Living Marxism/LM/IoI/Spiked! brigade, who perhaps share (from a contrarian perspective) more in common with a Xenosystems or @Outsideness era Nick Land in their traversal/cartography of the horseshoe (Claire Fox an eminent member, also happens to be a Warwick grad) is one such collective within BXP.

Having started as an off-shoot from the International Socialists in the late 1970s, this motley crew marched across the fall of Marxism’s desert wastes, to find a new home in Libertarian thought. This path took them through a lawsuit in the days of Living Marxism and accusations of war-crime denialism.

…the RCP’s Workers against Racism — WAR for short — was said to have vigilante groups that threatened to beat up racists. — Jenny Turner — Who Are They? — London Review of Books

Undeterred, this group has constantly re-morphed. Now many of the Spiked! ecosystem (do read the London Review of Books article about the IoI/LM/Spiked! network here) find themselves within the flanks of Farage’s [inter]National brigade. This includes Claire Fox, Alka Cutherbert, Stuart Waiton, James Heartfield, and David Bull.

If you’re interested in learning more about how this political thought migration took place, at least for Brexit supporting (if not BXP candidate) Brendan O’Neill, then watch this interview with The Rubin Report titled: What is a Marxist Libertarian?

Listening to the discussion, you can probably start to understand why O’Neill’s ex-RCP friends have ended up siding with Farage.

Interestingly enough Fox as recently as 2012 still referred to herself as a Bolshevik. There’s a common theme here of this thread of Leftwing terminology migrating its way into elements of the right (Bannon and Cummings being the other earlier examples). The language of the 70s and 80s Marxist having been reterritorialized into the 21st Century quasi-Libertarian political insurrection.

These ex-Communists have been joined by former-SWP member, Anti-Fascist, Corbyn voting (Yes, really), Lexiter(possibly?) Alaric Bamping.

The Guardian recently charted his political history in relation to the SWP and Labour parties, prior to his jump into the clawed embrace of the BXP. Not-surprisingly Bamping appears to also be a friend of some of the ex-RCP brigade, including Claire Fox.

So while Farage has abandoned UKIP and created a new entity determined to undermine the old parties, this, in turn, has been on the receiving end of a form of entryism by the former Revolutionary Communist Party brigade and its associates.

As far back as 2003, environmental campaigner and journalist George Monbiot argued that Frank Furedi, one of the founders of the RCP was persuing an entryist policy via the various RCP offshoots.

Monbiot noted the RCP’s transition had involved the migration of “the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right”. His concern was that these ex-members and affiliates had begun assuming positions of cultural and media influence, with especially damning consequences around the debate over climate change.

And while Monbiot may look at them as the pro-corporate right, it’s also not difficult to see them through an accelerationists lens if one wishes to. Other writers such as Hugo award-winning Science Fiction author Charlie Stross drew parallels between the mechanisms of RCP and accelerationism. We can look at his analysis by way of an excerpt from his blog:

It’s fairly clear in context that entryism is a corollary of accelerationism. One may even speculate that the Spiked Online/Spiked Magazine nexus and the Institute of Ideas think tank are an entryist front. — Charlie Stross — Trotskyite singularitarians for Monarchism! A political speculation. — Antipope.org

Since Stross penned his 2013 article on accelerationism and Neo-Reaction (NRx), other writers in the context of Brexit have dug into the nomadic Revolutionary Communist Party brigade.

Byline Times’ Otto English, recently produced a two-part article you can find here and here under the title Astro-Turfers of Britain. The second part of this article discusses in detail the various links between ex-Living Marxism, RCP and Spiked! individuals and the Brexit Party.

…it is extraordinary that an off-shoot of the former Revolutionary Communist/Spiked network is operating at the very heart of the Brexit Party. — Otto English — Astro-Turfers of Britain Part Two — Byline Times

Thus the BXP, main Rightwing opponents of the Tory Party, of Dominic Cummings, the established status quo, the static model, and a soft Brexit have become something of a vessel for the continued political exploration of Furedi’s coterie:

‘Frank has a plan,’ my friend remembers one of the comrades darkly saying. One day, the conditions would be right and they would be ready: public-sector cuts, rising unemployment, the collapsing Euro, a Tory government, more or less. — Jenny Turner — Who Are They? — London Review of Books

In short, the Brexit Party’s ability to blitzscale has come in part from utilizing existing fluid networks. These existing sources of support seem to include a large number of horseshoe traversing radicals with decades of experience in PR, television, online media and politics.

Combined with the approach Farage has taken of running the Brexit Party like a startup, this is one of the most revolutionary formations of modern British campaigning. It’s also helped Brexit to morph into something beyond just political thought.

Brexit [Snow Crash]

“This Snow Crash thing — is it a virus, a drug, or a religion?” — Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash

More than one observer has noted the similarity between Brexit and a virus or religion. And here we argue it has much in similar to that of Neal Stephenson’s novel of the same name — Snow Crash.

For those not familiar with Stephenson’s classic Cyberpunk fiction, Snow Crash encapsulates a drug, religion, and virus. Operating in both the metaverse of cyberspace and physical reality, it infects all it comes into contact with.

In Stephenson’s tale, this virus has its origin in the ancient world, a Summerian firmware that programs the very heart of humanity's mind. Operating across planes (physical/virtual) and carried by a nomadic horde, all it encounters are re-programmed into a biblical pre-Babel mode. Or perhaps a better description would be to say they are deprogrammed back to a primordial state.

It’s virus, religion, and drug components are a useful metaphor for how Brexit has spread throughout large segments of the British populace. As a virus infects the host cells, Brexit has infected British politics at all levels. Brexit acts memetically online as well as being transferred through advertising, speech and other communication mechanisms.

Brexit has provided a useful conduit for the insurgents we have discussed earlier, it is something of Trojan Horse for them. Job losses, violence, and risk at splitting the Union have done nothing to deter those who would willingly sign up for the Brexit Party. Falsehoods and lies are adopted as babbling scripture by the Panglossian adherents.

The notion of Brexit is fluid and fashions itself to the vision of the infected patient, being spread still further by those who are contagious. Farage has become an L Bob Rife, dragging his nomadic hoard upon a raft to the shores of the political process.

Rationality has been thrown out the window. The technomic signaling and feedback mechanism has been interrupted and the positive feedback loop has become negative. The economy reaches a stasis point.

The social feedback loop has lost all stabilization. Like a steam engine with Hooke’s Law suspended, the machine shakes itself apart.

Reterritorializers will look to after the fragmentation wrought by the deterritorializing populists, to re-shape society. This populist front the reterritorializes wax and wane against, is merely providing a battering ram, smashing the barbican doors asunder. Once broken they hope to discard the barbarians and loot the castle inside.

As other posts here have alluded to, this methodology seems unlikely to succeed in its current form, due to the complexity of globalization, JIT, The Stack and accelerating technological change foist upon us. Fragmentation has been a reoccurring theme of accelerationist thought, but how that fragmentation takes place is important. Borders are friction to capital and informational flows, so any that reoccur will be attacked by a variety of counter-insurgents. Any successful fragmentation has to be along the line that incorporates the market system, that is, incorporates the Outside.

‘The Only Thing I Would Impose is Fragmentation’ — Interview with Nick Land, Marko Bauer, and Andrej Tomažin

Brexit is undoubtedly a fragmenting vector, as recent events in Catalonia and Hong Kong are also. The inability for data, good, services, capital and labour to flow post-exit stymie the ability of these complex systems to grow. Instead, they collapse and are absorbed into other successful systems, or wither and die out.

History is littered with such examples, the communist states of yesteryear consigned to the history books or withered rumps. Our Kurtz is unavoidably haunted by his own Captain Willard, come to hunt him down amongst the shadows, drums and madness… but what of the virus?

Those opposed to the UK leaving the EU will need to look to find their own nam-shub of Enki. They can then counter the Asherahian chants of Brexiteers, but time’s running out, so who will be our Hiro Protagonist?