BRAIN RONIN: CYBER-GENIUS - April 28, 2020

*Excerpted from “BRAIN RONIN: CYBER-GENIUS,” April 28, 2020, and lightly edited for clarity and brevity. Transcript taken from lysergicdialectic.tumblr.com.*

[The machine] controls my life and my destiny and it’s fused to me at a psychic level, like I’m spiritually fused to the machine in a way that will never be removed. That is the basis of the accelerationist insight, that we are fusing with technology. Capitalism is basically an algorithm rewriting us toward becoming robots—I talked about this with Liz and Brace from TrueAnon—and if we keep getting pulled in that direction, we will become machines. We will be stripped of all species being and flattened to be mere receivers and distributors of stimuli—neuro pathways, basically, for the great machine of capitalism. That is it’s goal. But the thing is, and this is where dialectics come in: your am-prims would say, “Well that’s why you’ve got to cut off the machine. You got to cut off the tube connecting you.” But no, at this point we are Siamese twins. We are conjoined. That there’s a vital exchange happening there that is part of us in a way that is lethal. We can not separate without losing all the upward, progressive, civilizational moves we’ve done, as a species. We can’t cut off the computer.

We’ve got to, though, control it. We’ve got to dominate it, and that is how you get your “fully aujumated luxury space smoshmilism.” The reason I don’t like that is because it is metaphysically dire. It is as metaphysically nihilistic as the eternal expansionist fantasy of capitalism that leads to the idea that one consciousness persisting eternally in the form of a technological singularity that you imagine yourself to be in command of. When those guys imagine the singularity, they do not imagine becoming some Borg. They imagine maintaining consciousness and separateness and identity as themselves. But to do that, eventually, you will be the only thing left in the universe, thanks to thermodynamics and the eventual dispersal of all energies. You will eventually just be one voice in an eternity—it won’t be an eternity though. It’ll only feel like it. It’ll be like “The Jaunt,” basically, that Stephen King story, at the end of which, when you’re a jabbering, screaming mad beast, then you will die horribly and in fear as the last energy cycle ends. And it starts back up again with the next Big Bang, which comes immediately after that last one, of course. And then guess what: you get to go through that all over again, and over and over again. You are doomed to the eternal recurrence that Nietzsche and Alan Moore talk about. Congratulations, you get to relive that. You get to relive seven millennias’ millennia, millennia as a pea rattling around in a can, the can being whatever techno-fantasy you imagine you’re going to be persisting in … That’s hell. That’s an imagined hell, where you think you’re going to heaven but twist, it’s actually hell.

But the other one, fully automated luxury space communism, that leads to a similar nihilistic sterility. It leads to an idea that you could ever find the meaning to continue, the meaning to find worth in yourself to continue living, in mere physical pleasure that could be extended indefinitely. That would become hell also. You need to have as your goal transcendence. There must be a transcendent end. That is why those people say that you need to have religion in politics are correct, because you need to have a transcendent end in sight. But the thing is, that doesn’t have to be religious. You can believe in transcendence with every single belief system that you already have. You do not need to rewire yourself to believe in it … The thing that matters is the goal, and the goal is everyone reducing their attachment to this material world to the degree that they can find communion with the eternal, which exists outside the material world … .

We’re stuck in immanence until we escape it, and we can, and once one of us does, we all will. That’s the beauty of it. We all will. But one of us has to do it, and the beautiful part is, one of us did, because that’s why we know. That’s why we’re here, because it goes backwards and forwards. Causality does not go in one direction. Causality goes in every direction simultaneously … .

Take together everyone who has had an insight into this greater reality, have had a peak past the veil basically or come close to the veil or glimpsed out of the side of their eye past the veil. You can get them together, and because of their different cultural limitations and intellectual limitations and spiritual limitations, which are all the same thing because they’re all bound up in what others have done to you and your life, because all of our acts are totally determined—and you end up seeing some of the veil, it’s going to be different from everybody else’s because you are going to be translating it with a specific personal life, personal experience that no one else can replicate, and you have to find a translation. That translation loses, as all transitions do, as all energy transfers do, it loses power as it is translated. As it goes from the brain to the tongue into words into the ear of someone else who has a totally different life and experiences, it has already been degraded to a degree that you’re only getting a bit of it. Everyone is getting different bits and if the social engine of your society is cooperation, you will bring those things together to get a greater truth than any one of them would have been able to get, or any group of people all revolving around one concept would have ever gotten. It lets the light through.

That’s why materialism, that’s why dialectical materialism, that’s why Marxism is part of that, because Marx saw part of it. Siddhartha Gautama saw part of it. Jesus Christ saw part of it. Fucking Marx, Eugene V. Debs, Martin Luther King saw a big chunk. And it’s binding them together into a consciousness that can encompass the human experience, and what is that but God? What is that but eternity?