On the remoteness of the political
and the ascendency of the omni-cringe
Autumn 2016
As hard as it is to believe now there was once a time when most ordinary people were honestly self involved. Don’t misunderstand, they were still craven, cruel, and self promoting. But the realm of politics remained dry distant and unreal. There isn’t a hard line here, it’s a spectrum. People have always used causes, symbols, subcultures, art and just about anything as the aim of their mental energies and intents. Before 2015 think of how many people you knew spent their time LARPing surrogate political identities for causes. Apart from activists, attention to the political was relegated to the local and the tangible. Even peculiar people you know and self described intellectuals had a better sense then of what they did and did not have power over. I knew a Turkish fashion designer sporting vampire dental work filed down to fangs - she would talk about herself and only herself instead of causes like saving the Antarctic shoggoths from climate change.
Something like Kony 2012 signaled an effective model for using mesmerism operant conditioning to corral millions of ordinary people into Ted Kaczynskian surrogate causes. But even Kony was common of quaint pre 2016 pet causes. Lower stakes? Sure. But the built in science was there. You can convince people to care about something they know nothing, and will never know anything true about by catering to their lowest impulses and most natural desires. Back then facebook posts were sufficient to signal how much you cared about the political imperative of teaching un-contacted Amazonian tribesmen the art of ballroom voguing via military intervention. Disowning your family members over it was still considered a little bit rude. The old pet causes were dry runs for 2020.
I knew a woman in 2016 that got free martial arts classes from a chapter of Brooklyn Antifa. She was a professional dominatrix and described herself as: “anarcho-capitalist… you know with the yellow flag”. Imagine if she had opened up about that to them. This same exact woman was dating a guy who was dipping in and out of a neo-reactionary bookclub that was not called the Hecate Sodomy Society. None of this seemed odd to me at the time. Eccentric groups and causes were just signal noise. This was New York, so please bear with me. If you’re forced to listen to enough street preachers and vagrants shouting eschatological theory in the street, you develop a high tolerance. The spectacle is lovely, like a house burning down. That’s not a Guy Debord quote. Within the spectacle were signs of where we were headed. People really were primed to become as insipid and intolerable as they’ve become now. All of us can name something we noticed but didn’t notice before the vibes shifted. Why does everything matter so much now?
There’s a notion in psychology called sensory gating. When something truly aberrant enters your attention, your conscious mind fits it into a familiar set of symbols and perceptions. Think of something you have never seen before. Bald black eyed fairies running across your living room at 3:33 am when you get up in a daze to stumble to the bathroom, your bladder on fire with processed ethanol. You don’t even see the shadow entities. Your perceptive faculties don’t know how to represent the visitors in an image to you. You see an empty room. 2016 felt like that. The house was full of malignant sprites and your whole family was blind. The funnyman candidate on TV was making mean jokes but don’t worry the serious adults also on TV were angry about it. Surely this won’t lead to the Holodomor or nuclear war in 2022.
If you walked around the Lower East Side in the last 30 years you might have seen this sigil. Missing Foundation’s inverted champagne glass, the party is over.
The party isn’t over. It’s still happening if you know where not to look. Manhattan anarchist industrial music band politics is not where to look. You make your own party by embracing “heretical consciousness”. More on this later.
All political discourse is fake, gay, and a complete waste of your time.
There is no pursuit, no intellectual action, no draw for your attention more meaningless than politics. It’s not real and it never was.
Attention is precious. Attention is the most precious asset you own, perhaps the only asset you own that matters. Without diving into a boring self help Marcus Aurelius essay, it’s worth stating for coverage: There’s parts of life you have power over and parts you do not. Attention focused on distant abstract hero projects is time wasted. Attention focused on changing others when you have not changed yourself is time wasted. Attention and Intention both fall into concentric circles. Circles within circles. If you haven’t mastered the inner most circle, you certainly can’t foray into the outer circles. This is the whole essence of alchemy, art, the Apollonian. This is how you make something.
The center circle is everything you actually have power over. At the most basic it’s what you spend your time doing and what you chose to do in the present moment. The outer circles are all you have no power over. This includes all political discourse.
Before you say;
“oh well you’re privileged enough to say that”
“You’re an x or y and get to live a z because you’re this identity or that”
No. Fuck off. Literally no one cares.
The consensus reality has laws and they exist whether you know them or not. The universe is not fair, but the same precise laws apply the same to you and to me.
God dopamine, I’ll do anything for you.
The value of your attention has defined market value. Every UI from every online tool you use is vying for your attention, collecting, storing it and profiting from it. You already know this, “you are the product”. You’re being used and you’re enjoying it. Your attention is the most valuable asset on the planet now. This is how big data strangles and crushes the spirit. Every time you engage with the additive digital unconscious you're selling your attention for cheap easy dopamine. It’s pathetic. You’re not even getting anything tangible from it. What’s the solution here?
The myth of Pretty Hate Machine is a story I tell friends and myself when feeling down and out and lacking in motivation. If your intention and your attention are the only currency of your spirit, simply look to someone who valued it more than you do your own. There’s endless examples of transcendent creation in science, arts, and business, but I like this one. I didn’t have the Nine Inch Nails, Reznor in latex opera gloves poster on my wall as a teenager - suffering questions about my sexuality from my parents just to not use this record here as a galaxy brained Hegelian spirit example.
Every second, every minute spent worrying about things you have no power over is precious life flowing from your fingertips into the void. You are dying and there is nothing you can do about it except control the direction of your intentions in the present. Do you want to descend into the void remembering all the shitty protests you went to that accomplished nothing? All the anger and mental bandwidth you spent on causes or conflicts so remote and confusing you couldn’t possibly know what they mean? All the time you spent doomscrolling social media engaged in passive consumption? What even is Ukraine? Sorry I have no fucking idea what that is and I don’t care. Joe Biden? Sorry I don’t watch the news. I don’t know who that is. Why are you talking about this to me you gross nerd? I’m busy paying attention to beauty and working on projects. I’m learning the history of fragrance and modifying guitars. My time is valuable, please stop telling me about elections.
What if you spent your time making something?
In 1989, Trent Reznor was working as a handyman at a music studio in Cleveland, Ohio. Reznor cut a deal with the owner who let him use the studio space for free at closing. In less than a year Reznor recorded every track for the Purest Feeling demos himself, keyboards, drums, guitars, and samplers. By 1989 after getting a record deal with an independent label, he used those same demo tracks to complete Pretty Hate Machine. Listen to Pretty Hate Machine again after reading this to understand how fucking amazing that album is. It was made on downtime by just a guy with some instruments he didn’t own while he was working as basically a janitor in a music studio. What’s your excuse?
When was the last time you recorded Pretty Hate Machine?
Idiotism
So how do you walk away from the discourse? How do you, not so much crush the digital Rex Mundi but instead punk it and dab on it? How do you become nu-based?
Embrace the way of the idiot the way of the retard.
Like bro, just do whatever you want and don’t engage. You literally can do anything you want to do and make reality into anything you want it to be. We’re so post-cringe at this point you can do absolutely anything you want and make money however you want to.
You don’t have to be Uber, or even work for Uber because you are already “just some guy with a car” like Trent Reznor was just some janitor working in a music studio.
Byung-Chul Han writes :
“By nature, the idiot is unallied, un-networked, and uninformed. The idiot inhabits the immemorial outside, which escapes communication and networking altogether… The idiot is a modern day heretic… The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today in light of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.”
By embracing true retardation, you embrace the praxis of outsider heresy. Big data and its political infrastructure seeks to own not merely your flesh, but every aspect of you. It seeks to record every decision you’ve ever made to make seemingly accurate predictions about every decision you will make. But it can never replicate you. It can never know the context of your actions. It can only dangle the fruit of precious dopamine in front of you to take that which is most sacred, your attention. Your attention is a divine primordial mana. Don’t give it away cheap. Have fun with it.
Don’t over rationalize these things. Don’t get dragged back into discourse or the need to be right or have takes. Takes are stupid. Intelligence “does not exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords…. Intelligence does not have access to what is wholly Other.. In contrast, the idiot.. takes leave of the prevailing system - that is, abandons intelligence.”
I describe this writing project as:
The science and art of vibing in conformity with the void.
Han states:
“Immanence is something immanent that ‘is nothing’ because it does not occur in something else - it exists only in itself…. Pure immanence is the void, which can neither be psychologized nor subjectivized. Immanent life is lighter and richer - indeed, freer - for such emptiness.”
Just stop caring and do what you want. Discourse sucks and you know it. The purely immanent has no subjecthood , just like the idiot, the fool, the retard is not defined by individuality or subjectivity.
The heretical retard cannot be predicted, cannot be sorted, cannot be known like the participatory subject. When your online activity, when your decisions and focus of attention lie outside of logical statistic patterns, you reach absolute immanence. You touch the void.