The one they don't talk about. The one you can't talk about without—well, you know.

How's that goin' for ya?

I practiced mind control on various forums, learning how to effectively manipulate those who I wanted to target. I wanted to mentally blast them with my brilliantly-chosen words, like a whip crack of digital death. This is the matrix, baby, and you can get burnt from being online.

As you get older you realize all religious and psychic phenomena are pretty much cope. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. The grand mystick ritual the Democratic party put on (and a great spell it could have been!) fizzled and the priests don't know how to fix it. They're going to have to go back to square one.

The Egyptians, as their civilization went on, confessed in their writings that the Old Magicks no longer worked, and they were panicking and asking why. They didn't know. Perhaps even gods are mortal.

But this election exposed the core of the democratic party: that it does fascism, and is, fascists. Perhaps not openly so, but genuinely, with their heart. Liz Cheney? DICK CHENEY? What the fucking fuck were you thinking? I know what you were thinking: They're out there. The George W Bush republicans. We'll connect to their minds, remind them they weren't gaslit as fuck by both parties about Iraq WMDs and revive the comforting image of Condoleezza Rice.. Let's get every celebrity to endorse her and then denigrate those who even wanted to be neutral for any reason. It'll work!! It'll WORK!

For a woman at the head of a fascist state that gives citizen tax dollars and weapons openly and without reserve ... oh, I do go on. Suffice to say, I don't consent to MY money, MY psychic energy being used to do THAT. To have a woman, a being who, in most cultures, is supposed to represent compassion, do nothing about it aside from a line, where she said she would not ignore and then she ignored.

She did it because she was the tip of this sword, this Mystick Lance, this flag planted so, so firmly up the ass of the rest of the world, channeling psychic static down its shaft like electroshock therapy for the whole Earth.

But this is the thing: we are riding this beast, this lumbering necrotic Behemoth, and it drinks that blood. It needs the flesh. It needs to pin its prey and growl in its face. It has motherfucking NEEDS. And so do us all ticks on the ridged back need our own flesh and blood to eat. We eat the ones in our lives whose energy and politics don't match our own, and deny we do so. We All of us.

It's fucking gross. But magic should be a bit transgressive and gross, shouldn't it? Genital mutilation is still practiced on non-consenting children. The Democrats and republicans are both to blame for the betrayal of women's rights, but the republicans are much more responsible. Our new (same as the old) president is a rapist. And don't get me started on that demonic archmage. What a fucking aura. Jesus Christ. Protect me from this vampire, and guide us with your mercy. He's got this nation by the neck.

Maybe we should let go of the beast, but it's cold out there. You don't want to get off the beast, son, trust me, it fucking sucks out there. Stay on, get you a good job, the old magicks will work again once we sacrifice another few million souls to refine the ambrosia (that we will mostly drink, not you lel).

Om Namah Shivaya. The God dances, feet crushing with terrible divine beats into the body of a twisted dwarf. The dwarf is writhing and wailing but knows it cannot survive. God dances, and dances, and dances.

Judaism Destined to Become Me

In other news this hour, the world religion Judaism is destined to become me, according to new reports from my neurolinguistic processing capacities.

Yes, I am at this very moment frying flayed pieces off a despicable hog cadaver. But it is to honor my mother and my father, for whom I just now served that as breakfast.

Judaism is destined to become me. What can be meant by that statement?

/\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\

I am a descendent of many Jews

Faircod (c. 2992-1992) descended of a clan of Ukrainian Jews known by the name "Beznor." Up til the time of this writing, he believed he was neither a Jew nor a Gentile. But was that hidden Third thing. That speculative None.

Judaism was destined to pass over me. But under its underbelly, I do recognize I share some birthmarx. Using the technologies of cosmopolitics discovered by my grandcesters who were Israelites and Hebrews, I will now interrogate and inspire you to examine your consciousness.

The state of Israel is a contradiction of Judaism

Thou shalt not murder. Unless in case of war. But war must be limited to combatants. Except when a people are Amalek. Then G-D deems them all alien. G-D demands them as food.

Israel The State is a history that can't be happening. You can't have two loyalties, the one to Rome and the other to Jerusalem. The Israeli state, cutting-edge cyber-weaponry manufacturing society, posts up at the frontier of American Empire. Pioneering methods of depopulation and repopulation useful in Western Hemisphere futures, the Israeli Dehumanization Forces are a chip off the old bloc.

Israel, against its will, is covertly a thrall to the master. With the vibrancy of a living dinosaur, Israel speaks as the moving image of ancient history, giving it claims to the buried core of humanity. Such legitimacy is a useful place for an Empire to store its Machinery.

As an Empire falls, it seeks after deep-dug pits. To hide its pagewealth, to hurl its corpses, to find a daygrave to rest in waiting out resurrection. Israel, at the perimeter to white savagery from the Empire, stands ready to give houses to those paying it to destroy Judaism.

Judaism is destined to become me

I was born too far away from the Zionists to believe in Israel. Those distant cousins and uncles of mine defy the Creator of those lands they ingloriously ransacked. The maddening slaughter by Israelis of Palestinians will continue for as long as Israelis deny they're people.

Judaism is destined to become ashamed of its experiments with Adolf Hitler's console commands. Judaism will mourn the Nakba with Islam and Christianity and Buddhism and Jainism and Sikhism and Hinduism and Atheism. Judaism will mourn the Nakba with the entire world. Jewish residents of the future societies of Palestine and the Levant will symbolically beg the Creator for forgiveness in annual holidays, and in civic rituals at regular intervals the descendants of existing Palestinians will pray for restraint.

The empire that buried its weapons in November, in February will be struck by an impulse to kill.
In May, the world will have its throats slit by God, and many in August will burn themselves alive.

/\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\ \/\/\/ /\/\/\

The truth will achieve ecstasy.

Do not deny the Power of People

There is a legitimacy crisis.

What is legitimate?

People with signs together in the public forum.

If a courtroom creates an illusion of justice, it can also create an illusion of injustice, and that illusion can be true.

The people were denied due process. There is a legitimacy crisis.

All elections are illegitimate.

All protests are legitimate.

Do not believe in a mythos which robs you of agency. Protests have power. Go to protests.

^/07.04.1987/

The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

-D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature

but, also

-Clifford, from Clifford the Big Red Dog

—

^/6.6.6.1/ A easy question haunts the uneasy mind of this child of Easy Rider parentage. Having encountered a Pale Rider during a vision quest on the Gorge plains decades ago, that VOID_WHITE time-streamed centaur challenged my dream-double for a pithy toll. It demanded the watchword/solution to a devastatingly minor riddle:

Why is it that ancient Aliens American Puritans, who believed in predestination, neurotically laboured for their "[daily bread] (https://old.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/1d3jhkm/til_that_give_us_today_our_daily_bread_is_a/)" without any guarantee of salvation, and more bitterly, the potential of a double cross? If none of one's good works could save one's soul, what was the fucking point?

Me: "Everyday was election day in Massachusetts Bay. They got up early and put out signs for-"

But right there the feed was cut. I lifted up my visor. And where/how that Pale Rider haunted me afterward, I will not say.

—

^/6.6.6.0/

An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.

It was in another realm decades ago, having finished a course of strong antidepressants — mind zapZAPing and me horse_CART_Pvalue limpID — that I set out for the mountains of an arid southwestern interzone to read a list of Great Books in order to change my life.
However, because my brain was malfunctioning (dis_JOIN_t_I_me00:00code), the part I got right/wrong was the telos of reading.

"Backwards unfold chains symbolic enunciated":

I_AM_HUNGRY_FOR_...

_DOG,

_HOTS!

I saw no issue with the first part of the sentence. Not being a dog-eater, I was confused by the second part.

Future-past tense: hot or not?

NOW, since then, having repeatedly visited my self indices in the astral, via cut-up film philosophical methods, I've spliced over that last word. it is now:

_SOTS.

BUT ... I feel bad in a way. Me watching me watching that Mughal composite doggie dream-double ME pass through an isolated aughts bedroom, like a shimmering SPECTACULAR phantom which barks voice recordings, that younger me with a MU-cow plushie and first-grade reading level screams at the future as if in a nightmare he couldn't wake from:

THIS CAN'T REALLY BE HAPPENING! No no no no no no and so ononono!

Later, young me tripped over the STATE sylloJgism and came hard right here, right now:

READING IS KNOWLEDGE,

AND KNOWLEDGE IS POWER,

& POWER IS READING YOU.

—

^/6.6.6.2/

The terror of reform is the discovery that we must cast away our virtues, or what we have always esteemed such, into the same pit that has consumed our grosser vices.

I think of all the Free_MaNson Illumnati MK ULTRA {f}nord plots in American history, one my favourites is the post-carding of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

An attunement to a certain kind of horror is required for the esoteric version of Emerson. The essays recommended, POST_SCRIPT to dread (the magical passphrase of which is the cipher "GOING OFF-SCRIPT" when "ALL THE WOLRD IS A STAGE"):

Experience and Circles.

If out of peril (ex-peri) we gain knowledge, ask why in some places an emergency room at the hospital is called casualty. We slip, we slide, we die. Accidents at home/unheimlich contribute to the majority of accidental deaths and serious life changing injury.

Read the essay Experience as if in mid-slippage, as if you are about to fall and crack your head to smithereens, and all the kings HORSE_CARTS and all the QUEENS lovers will not put little ME back together again.

Hard-boil yourself before you get, BOTCHED. Ground yourself in the notion that the figure is the ground, so that {SPLAT} is a minor notation.

But for Circles, the praxis is different. Simply disappear into the air. See: a GRIN WITHOUT A CAT.

—

^/Shaping ^the ^Stone/

I think it was Ronnie Coleman who said:

Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.

Or, in the infamous words of Paul Mooney.

Which calls to mind endless variations, of which I woke up thinking this morning:

Everyone want to be a subject of history, but no one wants to live in history.

Which reminds me of true apocrypha from lit/pop history.

Ralph Ellison, who is namesake to Ralph Waldo Emerson, writes the magisterial novel Invisible Man, after which Irving Howe, a New York Intellectual adjacent to The Frankfurt School, writes a review of Invisible Man accusing Ellison of betraying his "black" roots by not writing a book more authentically, politically, reflective of the struggles of the Black community.

Ellison replies at length in an essay titled, "The World and The Jug," that every artist must decide their "ancestors." Yes, "relatives" we all have, figures who by some similarities we are familiar/akin to in our time and place. Regardless, Ellison argues, the work of the artist is to choose "ancestors" from a lineage or a genealogy that perhaps we have nothing in common with except ideals, a love of a certain style, an inclination/clinamen of the soul.

—

^/What ^is ^Enlightenment?/

Sometimes when I'm very stoned, I think cryptically about Kant's essay, "What is Enlightenment?", which as you might predict, is more horror philosophy than something else.

Idly, in some fluorescent-bulb dungeon, I scratch at previous etchings on the wall.

I was once told of some secret etymological relation between ideas of self, circumscription, legislation, sovereignty, and the magical circle. Whispers that sympathetic ritual magical is always a naming ceremony, an invocation as an evocation of a deterritorializing/reterritorializing of agency delimited.

Sometimes I go back and read the T.E.A.M. brief and I run over a highlight with the tip of my tongue:

The problem with western civilization is the oedipal complex, and the incomplete status of the project of mass enlightenment. Very briefly, the Oedipal complex shows up in the way people orally fixate to external sources of authority, suckling on their (president's/sports team's/teacher's/guru's/celebrity's/corporation's) ego instead of moving the locus of authority within themselves. This practice forms many incomplete people into a transpersonal blob, collapsing individual autonomy into a flow of resources to, energetic investment to (emotional/advertising/replicative), and political assent to being ruled by, and moreover becoming literally a part of, the authority ... In short, the truth which everyone tries to avoid speaking is that to be fully human—let's just say, human—requires one to be self-contained, self-directed, and not orally attached to an external source of reality and authority. In other words, there are very few humans in the world, compared to the massive hordes of zombies who are feeding off those few humans' identity-production content. This is both the basic myth of the Enlightenment era, as well as—when inverted paranoically—the illuminati mythos: that there are "special people" who are movers and shakers in society, and that the rest are followers, robots, zombies, NPCs, or otherwise subhuman and/or uneducated masses with mush for brains. Viewed through this lens, every mystic doctrine and religious text becomes demystified, and the project of enlightening oneself can be clearly seen ... Enlightenment is not some mystic process requiring years of special preparation and a holy guru who has somehow transcended out of normal reality. Rather, enlightenment occurs simply when one recognizes oneself as an independent person, a valid thinker, and a real human being. The long and strenuous procedures such as meditation, making offerings, reading religious texts, and various kinds of purification are not secret techniques which tap into unintelligible magical laws. Rather, they are intelligible pedagogical strategies meant to clear out all the garbage that people are typically indoctrinated with by their parents, teachers, and culture.

—

—Causa!—Causa!—Caesura!—

READ/WRITE/ELUCIDATE/AUTHOR YOUR LIFE.. Let no one tell you nothing. Appropriate everything. Splice your own filmic consciousness. Over-code yourself across the strata of your subjectificaiton. Respect yourself! Direct yourself. Take up the responsibility of becoming your own legislator.

—Causa!—Causa!—Caesura!—

—

^/Athena ^Going ^CoINTEL-Pro/

Another graveyard.

Years ago I met a young man who wanted to work for Army Intelligence. He'd often sit out in a very visible area reading a copy of a book with the words COINTELPRO printed large on its cover. I thought that was quite funny, and now, all I can say is: I have no idea where he is or what he is doing.

Around the same period during the invasion of Georgia, I knew a Georgian national who'd travelled to a protest in New York City outside the UN. She was interesting, smart, and you know, spirited in that way that defiant people can be. Afterward, for a year or so I didn't see her around, but one day I ran into her on the street. She looked very distressed.

In a sort of rambling, desperate way she began to relate to me how she'd somehow gotten herself interviewed by a television station at the protest and it had been broadcasted back at home and in Russia, and now she was sure she was being constantly monitored and followed. She kept looking over her shoulder, telling me how she'd receive midnight phone calls and odd notes through her letter box.

I knew better than to reassure her.

She said she had to go, and that was that.

Are these two events connected?

Only by a third event.

Around the same time I ran into an old teacher who I quite liked, and we were discussing something and he asked me if I'd read Dialectic of Enlightenment. I said no. And that was that.

I didn't read anything for a long time except the world itself. Dig me? Has Power read me? What I know is that there's a passage in Dialectic of Enlightenment where Horkie and Adornie discuss why Athena the goddess of widsom loves Odysseus, why she favors him. Their point is key:

Odysseus is a cunning, slippery fish, a disguise wearer, a liar.

Odysseus unlike many of the Greek heroes makes it home because he's a no good sonofabitch whose principles, in the end, are loose.

Cyclonopedia's exegesis of trinomial deceit will fill you in on the details.

—Causa!—Causa!—Caesura!—

^/Remember, ^a ^Good ^Man ^is ^Hard ^to ^Find/

On this historical day, Good Lord, and Good Luck!

-Pop out

Niksha, she calls herself. She walks the path of the Nikshyana. She seeks pain. Pain purifies her. She drinks it all in hopes that she can purify everything. By fuck, what does she mean? Well, you see, her love’s bulletproof. It's a flower that stands, grows stronger, amidst the fiery hell that is her inner world. All she thirsts for is pain, so she can find love amidst the destruction.

https://youtu.be/B4zc-f0TIZ4?si=R7wuGBHEjJyRKK80

All the pain has transformed her. She's become a living breathing shadow. No light reflects off of her. Her arms have strawberry gashes all over. She often makes them bleed but then she just says ‘sardonak katala’ and the wounds close. Of course, the scars never go away. She loves her scars.

https://youtu.be/jsALQ548VUY?si=vFVGQLGZ3oStJzVL

When she meditates she travels to the worst places she can imagine. And her imagination grows more monstrous with every threshold that she passes. Deep meditations on all the guilt, hate and death that everyone and everything places on her. Shame lost its sting a long time ago. She no longer remembers what that feels like.

It's fun to watch her dance through the fire. Glorious even.

A creator of imaginary beings once asked her. “What is the path to enlightenment?”

“Guru-yidam-dakini.”

And he was enlightened.

https://tibetdharma.com/3-roots-buddhism/

Another man, a thinker, the thinker of everything, who took on the problems of the world, asked her the same question.

She said nothing but pinched his nose. And he was enlightened.

She keeps doing these curious things to people, all while she dances through the fire.

“Who am I?” A young girl asked.

“You are.”

And believe it or not, at the age of three, the girl was enlightened.

When Katak came looking to burn. She sated her with her blood. Now, every cataclysm, she slits her wrist in an offering to Katak.

https://collegium.fandom.com/wiki/Katak

Bum de de bum bum bum. There's a beat in the air. Throw some mustard on that heat, she says.

She plays with brainwaves. She gets into gamma and thinks about the future; makes the future her present. She gets into beta and overthinks until overload presents her with new ways of thinking. She goes delta, and can't help but forget where she is. It's nice to forget sometimes, isn't it? Theta is nice when you're trying to lucid dream. But you gotta listen to every beat. Try to match the speed. Sometimes that takes too much energy. Rest is good. Use delta if that's too difficult.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLvkkpHK6k1qQSvGp73M40GAcY13P8zf2D&si=bQI86HokHUIVv7z3

She plays with mudras. What if we alternate with mudras with every breath? Will mixing these brain regions, or energies, or embodiments, yield new connections? Interesting, interesting. Float like a dragonfly they say. And sting like a… well, dragonfly.

https://www.dragonfly-yoga.org/blog/ten-yoga-mudras-and-their-benefits-1

She spends sleepless nights, smoking weed and doing psychedelics, finding alternate states of consciousness. She speaks mantras, spells and names in her sleep. All sorts of entities find her.

Oh, what's she doing now? She's roaring, and the Earth's shaking with her. The aliens can hear her call. The lemurs are howling back. She's hurting but she hurts for you. Can you find it in your hearts to embrace the love that calls to us all?

She smiles and says to everyone that can hear, “Revolution is coming.”

Stay tuned for an update folks.

N.b. This was originally a comment to a post that was deleted. Indexically, this is a DEAD LETTER searching for a destination. My voice seeks a host.

I'm a child of a book on the sidebar, The Ignorant Schoolmaster. But Jung, I dig.

So I'm now crawling around in the epistrata of the weird taprooted/uprooted/down-welling therapy theatres below the foot of this tributary of the The World Tree's horizontal epistemes: a taproot that spreads (oh, fuck yeah, spread it!).

Pop seeks an anima who knows how to fuck. AxSys is kind of a Lilith-esque mistress/master/mattress, no?

Always an indexical trace in waiting rooms below waiting rooms ... A LABYRINTH OF WAITING ROOMS.

Please don't be waiting for me. Just be me. MOMMY!

What I mean is, to reflect on this tradition's inflexion with {IT that points at THE WORLD in answer to the Sphinx's riddle as to my authentic self}, I should ask:

To Whom Is This Therapeutic Essay Addressed?

Other Jungians? Clinicians? Literate schizophrenics who aren't suspicious of that "BOOK NOW" button?

What remains my core issue with therapy under planetary capitalism: to pay to be reminded me of my subject-position as it all burns. Patient/patients/patience. Healing takes time/work. When/where does this qualification end? Context is everything, of course. Thus, in the very arch-type of this media architecture, the illiterate is the uninitiated Patient.

Kids shooting dope in Larry Clarke's Tulsa.

A schizo on a fifty-minute punch-card clock.

INSTEAD, I've always wanted to be a detective. An out of his depth off-world Deckard Cain, a pessimistic realist ex-narc Rust Cole, an easy-going lover Philip Marlowe, Jeffery Lebowski with a lady-friend. And yet here we are again, MUMMYDADDY&ME. When are we gonna let go of the Wen schtick?

Am I faking my illness and want to remain stoned because HANS_HORSECART_with_HIS_GIANT_LIBIDNAL_DONG and socially adjusted outlook/EMPIRE takes my lady daily and they (OH, SPECTACLE) cum really hard together (punch-in, punch-out) as I wait at home reading Sadly, Porn?

Don't want to botch it.

On the other hand, Wendy's didn't give me a raise this month so I can't pay for that good strain of therapy that includes U.B.I. and human rights and transparency, so I can/can't get out of this drive-thru where I'm pretending to be an employee at Wendy's, recursively repeating back my desired food order to the drive-thru speaker as it robotically echoes my MEAT-ego back to me because I know no other passphrase (until heat death, until quantum decay, until I can have the last word as a Boltzmann brain, my voice the voice of God merely repeating the last line of my first line of my burger order again) so that, not even getting anything to eat, I can protect myself against the affective humiliation of being chosen to die, so I can pre-vision any passive aggressive dismissal of my plight.

Oedipus, this is a Wendy's.

But Doc, I'm [a DEad Reader] casually/causally mistaking questions with the answer — the solution with the riddle — the poison with the cure — & all three as the same thing, a sentient donut screaming an AX-csyip~~~~h~~~~us MUNDI through its glazed hole.

If I'm God, counter-transference is a disempowerment. Why do it? Unless ... So:

To Whom This May Concern,

This article wasn't posted here. IAMNOTFAIRCOD, so it's probably not addressed to me. But also, IAMFAIRCOD if I'm doing this just right. So.

This article is an archway. This comment is an archway. Dear reader, you are a toroidal series of doors leading back into a donut hole that was never there to begin with.

In a world of one-point perspectives, you enter/are now passing/always will be passing into/beyond/portals of non-calendric time. The enunciating mirror of the Hierophant is Alepheal, whose informational-nature-as-information-as-nature is to simultaneously point, like the Magician, into the above and below, but for the Hierophant the question of what is below is indeed of Hier-archy.

I'd throw my hands in the air to flash my gang sign, but I have hooves.

Two little bald guys whose Cronenberg state is a conjoined Being-in-Infinity.

If you integrate them, do they get their hair back?

If you resurrect the fake Pop(e), does it lend one man the fake Pop(e) hat that speaks the proper scripture?

If you call that CIA phone number to tell you the exact time, do you get the joke? 1-800-VALIS01

FNORD.

I suppose the magical circle here in this article is a reoccurring theme of the binary/polarity/inner-outer/objective-subjective/two-for-one eventually reaching synthesis via some sort of surpassing of the limits of the previous two cells inscribed separately, now looped toroidally onto one another via this tradition, becoming then the process of "authentic self."

While, "I" don't believe in an/THE authentic self per say (though "I" do believe in THE WATCHER/WITNESS), "I" do believe in something located non-neurotically/non-judgementally in the present as process, something like grace. I am that I am the ground of being, MATR, matter-as-energy-as-human-as-one-branching-mask-of-the-self-organizing-universe-which-has-no-verticality-but-ist-time-space-ist-self.

The whole teaching of Zen summed up in one word: THIS.

Thus, the true payment into therapy is the cost-per-unit of such grace, both in the sense of what the goal of any given therapy arrangement is (in some cases it is the therapist becoming therapist paid for by the patient's illness being cured, pathology being determined).

So what are the circumscribed limits of these generalised circles?

A tradition which throws the voice.

Said to be, and by whom, and to what end (whose "Will to Power" in this world will over-code me once the session to discuss my problems end?). We are nesting in the mouth of a dragon, and no one will get out alive.

Remember: in a philosophy of moments, a bodhisattva's vow can be hived, can swarm, and can be a flicker on a face, a passphrase in a single utterance.

There are wires connecting all the leaves of all the trees, that trace back to the Presidential palace.

Good luck.

-Pop out

This book "code from information theory to French theory" is truly unique and this is by far the best talk the author has given regarding the text and its bibliography and background.

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/mit-comparative-media-studies-writing/id665212620?i=1000609485264

'The Operational Environment and the Changing Character of Warfare' (2019) --was updated in 2021--discussion of its contents was completetly relegated to think tanks and policy planning bodies like the 'Small Wars Journal.'

In a nutshell, it is basically discussing WW3 (without using the term) while descriping a world environment of pure chaos, beyond the wildest nightmares of Sci-Fi.

https://adminpubs.tradoc.army.mil/pamphlets/TP525-92.pdf

Summary. This pamphlet provides the Operational Environment that Army forces will encounter as described by the TRADOC G-2 and United States Army Futures Command (AFC). It presents a continuum divided into two distinct timeframes, The Era of Accelerated Human Progress (2017-2035) and the Era of Contested Equality (2035-2050), which depict different doctrinal and technological challenges that the U.S. Army will face in the near to mid future.

Live. Humanity will become richer, older, more urban, and better educated, but the uneven distribution of this progress will accelerate tension and conflict. Shifting demographics, such as youth bulges in Africa and aging populations of traditional allies and competitors, will threaten economic and political stability. The convergence of more information and more people with fewer state resources will constrain governments’ efforts to address rampant poverty, violence, and pollution, and create a breeding ground for dissatisfaction among increasingly aware, yet still disempowered populations.

These factors will be attenuated by a changing climate, which likely will become a direct security threat. Risks to U.S. security include extreme weather impacting installations, increased resource scarcity and food insecurity, climate migration increasing the number of refugees and internally displaced peoples, and the Arctic as a new sphere of competition. The addition of over seven billion people over the last century has altered geography itself, and cities now sprawl over large areas of the globe and contain almost two-thirds of the world’s population.

These numbers will only increase. Some megacities will become more important politically and economically than the nation-state in which they reside.2 F 3 Life will become both easier and more complex, with those able to take advantage of the leading edge of technological advancement increasingly exploiting those who cannot. New social stresses and fractures will lead to strife and population migrations, which in turn create further challenges for urbanized areas. Furthermore, the move of large numbers of people to large urban areas and megacities will strain resources, as these areas will become increasingly reliant on rural areas for food, water, and even additional power. From a military perspective, cities represent challenges, opportunities, and unique vulnerabilities.

Although more human beings stress available resources, population growth has also compounded the rate of innovation and technology development. Human creativity is now clearly the most transformative force in the world, both enhancing human life, but also upending it, and – at times – precipitating catastrophic, disruptive events. Information technology will continue to improve exponentially, and most of the developed world already is instrumented in some way. Nearly every person on Earth has access to a connected, mobile device. Advanced material capabilities have, and will continue to extend the trend of reduced size, weight, and power requirements, as nanomaterials, metamaterials, and bespoke structures allow multifunctional assemblies, vastly improving overall systems integration, reliability, and performance.

Advanced materials also foster increases in battery power and performance, allowing large amounts of power to be stored across a distributed grid, and miniaturized storage powers mobile robotics and vehicles of all types. Advanced robotic vehicles could serve as mobile power generation plants and charging stations, while highly dexterous ground robots with legs and limbs could negotiate complex terrain allowing humans access to places otherwise denied.

The revolutionary impact of “trans-humanism” challenges the very definition of “human” – with profound ethical dilemmas that remain unresolved. 4F 5 Big data techniques interrogate massive databases to discover hidden patterns and correlations that form the basis of modern advertising – and are continually leveraged for intelligence and security purposes by nation states and non-state entities alike

In the most connected and wealthy parts of the world, cell phones and computers will all but disappear as physical, hand held devices. Select individuals will directly connect to cyberspace through neural implants or augmented reality systems painted directly on a retina.

Prosper. Although AI and its associated technologies will shatter many industries and livelihoods, a wide range of advances continue to create new sources of wealth and economic development – while also significantly impacting the strategic security environment.6F 7 Robotics and autonomous systems will underpin the smooth functioning of advanced societies. Additive manufacturing, computer-aided design, and millions of industrial robots will dislocate significant portions of the global supply chain. Virtually anyone in the world with access to a computer system and three-dimensional printer will be able to “print” anything from drones to weapons. Encrypted blockchains will be massively disruptive to commerce functions.7 F 8 Together with robotics, autonomy, and AI they comprise a perfect storm for “blue collar” and “white collars” alike, causing vast economic displacement as formerly high-quality information technology and management jobs follow the previous path of agricultural and manufacturing labor.

Militaries, paramilitaries, mercenary groups, criminal elements, and even extremists groups all will be able to take advantage of this potential pool of manpower. Biotechnology will see major advances, with many chemical and materials industry being replaced or augmented by a “bio-based economy” in which precision genetic engineering allows for bulk chemical production. Individualized genetics enable precise performance enhancements for cognition, health, longevity, and fitness. The low cost and low expertise entry points into genome editing, bioweapon production, and human enhancements will enable explorations by state, non-state, criminal, and terrorist organizations. Competitors may not adopt the same legal regulations or ethics for enhancement as the U.S. causing asymmetry between the U.S. and those choosing to operate below our defined legal and ethical thresholds.

At some point during this time period, and really for the first time since the Second World War, it is likely that the United States could face a true strategic competitor who will have an ability to operate in multi-domains, a capability to deny domains to U.S. forces, and who will be able to operate with certain technological advantages over a U.S. force. This challenge is further compounded by our reliance on coalition warfare with allies that might not be able or willing to modernize at the same pace as the U.S. The United States will face a situation where its strategic advantages held during the post-Cold War period – our broad network of alliances and partners that allowed for the forward deployment of a sophisticated, highly-capable joint force – will erode, allowing for increasingly aggressive challengers fielding a full-range of modern, advanced capabilities with hybrid strategies to challenge our ability to bring forces to the fight while undermining our political and national will to do so.

Our adversaries’ investments in electronic warfare and space control will threaten our command and control and multi-domain capabilities, while remaining forward bases, naval forces, and aircraft are menaced by advanced integrated air defense systems and long-range fires, including cruise and ballistic missiles. The ability of our joint force to operate effectively in the air and maritime domains hundreds of miles from our coasts will be challenged, which in turn will create new complications for forces operating in the ground domain. By 2035, it is likely that military capabilities among key great powers and even by relatively capable regional powers – augmented dramatically by rapid technological innovations and their convergence with each other in a number of areas – will create an uneasy balance, with no one power having a dramatic relative advantage over its rivals.

Internet of EveryThing – Every device, both military and commercial, will have network connectivity. Everything becomes a sensor, and everything becomes hackable. Opportunity and vulnerability.

The nation-state perseveres. The nation-state will remain the primary actor in the international system, but it will face both new and growing challenges domestically and globally. Trends of fragmentation, competition, and identity politics will challenge global governance and broader globalization, with both collective security and globalism in decline.14F 15, 15F 16 As the world becomes further digitized, states will share their strategic environments with networked societies which can pose a threat by circumventing governments that are unresponsive to their citizens’ needs. These online organizations are capable of gaining power, influence, and capital to a degree that challenges traditional nation-states. Many states will face challenges from insurgents and global identity networks – ethnic, religious, regional, social, or economic – whose members may feel a stronger affinity to their online network than to their nationality, which could result in either resisting state authority or ignoring it altogether.

The costs of maintaining global hegemony at the mid-point of the century will be too great for any single power, meaning that the world will be multi-polar and dominated by complex combinations of short-term alliances, relations, and interests. c. This era will be marked by contested norms and persistent disorder, where multiple state and non-state actors assert alternative rules and norms, which when contested, will use military force, often in a dimension short of traditional armed conflict.

Singularity is the point at which AI exceeds the collective intelligence of mankind, which will radically and irrevocably change the relationship between man and machine. There are several divergent possibilities regarding the singularity:

• As optimistic singularity advocates such as Ray Kurzweil have suggested, AI improves human life in every way, from healthcare, to emotional evolution, to intergalactic space travel.

• Unboxed general artificial superintelligence improves and evolves at such an exponential rate it escapes human restrictions, perspectives, and morality. It threatens the very existence of humanity.

• Humans evolve their own cognitive abilities through learning developments, brain implants, artificial stimulants, and non-AI high-performance computing to match, or at least keep pace with AI.

AI has the capacity to change paradigms, revolutionize everyday life, and take mankind to exciting new horizons. However, it also may be capable of incredible destruction, malice, and lines of thinking and decision making that are dangerous to mankind. This duality will be critical as actors develop military applications for AI.

Information operations. Under these conditions, no one nation will have an overwhelming technological advantage over its rivals. As a result, sophisticated information operations, enabled by advances in artificial intelligence, high-performance computing, detailed socio-political analysis, data analytics, and a detailed understanding of social media means that the Era of Contested Equality competitors will engage in a fight for information on a global scale.

The information battle will be waged with well-crafted ideas and narratives combined with pervasive and globally-reaching cyber, electronic warfare, information operations, and psychological warfare tools. Coercion through the cognitive dimension is not only possible, but often is the first, and the decisive recourse in conflict, and is an ongoing, persistent activity between opposing powers. Winning the war before the battle is fought through information operations will become an imperative, and land forces will need to contribute to perception management in the cognitive dimension as a core element of military operations.

The changing character of warfare in the Era of Contested Equality is best understood as a series of enduring competitions that would be recognizable to commanders in any era of history. What is different, however, are changes in the operational environment and technology that are so significant, extensive, and pervasive, that they collectively manifest a distinct, and transformed character of warfare that is faster, occurs at longer ranges, is more destructive, targets civilians and military equally across the physical, cognitive, and moral dimensions, and if waged effectively, secures its objectives before actual battle is joined.

For a hider to defeat a finder, it generally must not move or emit. Tactical techniques, such as going to and below ground, or hiding in plain sight through dispersion or near constant relocation can augment technological solutions to assist the hiders, with dense urban areas offering the best option for hiding. The complete destruction of the near ubiquitous sensors arrayed against a land force will not be feasible, although high-powered microwave systems may be able to clear limited corridors. More successful methods would involve techniques to deceive finders vice destroy them. These could include cognitive, autonomous electronic warfare assets that assess signals and develop real-time countermeasures during engagements. Land forces also will employ advanced camouflage, cover, and deception, ranging from tactical obscurants, decoys, and signature reduction through elaborate strategic, multidomain deception operations.

At the same time, and on the other end of the spectrum, it will be possible to deploy swarms of massed, lowcost, self-organizing unmanned systems directed by bi-mimetic algorithms to overwhelm opponents, which offers an alternative to expensive, exquisite systems.

Our vision of the OE brings with it an inexorable series of movements which lead us to ponder a critical question; what do these issues mean for the nature and character of warfare? The nature of war, which has remained relatively constant from Thucydides through Clausewitz, to the Cold War and to the present, certainly remains constant through the Era of Accelerated Human Progress. War is still waged because of fear, honor, and interest, and remains an expression of politics by other means. However, as the Era of Accelerated Human Progress advances, and we move to the Era of Contested Equality, it becomes apparent that the character of warfare has changed to a point where other basic questions, such as those contemplating the very definition of war or those looking at whether fear or honor are removed as part of the equation.17 F 18 In the 2035-2050 timeframe, warfare does indeed look different from its early-century model in several key areas.

Under such conditions, the physical dimension of warfare may become less important than the cognitive and the moral. Military operations will increasingly be aimed at utilizing the cognitive and moral dimensions to target an enemy’s will. As a result, there will be fewer self-imposed restrictions by some powers on the use of military force, and hybrid strategies involving information operations, direct cyberattacks against individuals, segments of populations, or national infrastructure, terrorism, the use of proxies, and WMD will aim to prevail against an enemy’s will.

Limitations of military force. While mid-century militaries will have more capability than at any time in history, their ability to wage high-intensity conflict will become more limited. Force-on-force conflict will be so destructive, will be waged at the new speed of human and AIenhanced interaction, and will occur at such extended long-ranges that exquisitely trained and equipped forces facing a strategic competitor will rapidly suffer significant losses in manpower and equipment that will be difficult to replace. Robotics, unmanned vehicles, and man-machine teaming activities offer partial solutions, but warfare will still revolve around increasingly vulnerable human beings. Military forces may only be able to wage short duration campaigns before having to replace expensive equipment, and even more priceless personnel. Militaries under these conditions will need to balance exquisite, expensive capabilities against less-capable, cheaper alternatives, and also carefully balance the ratio of human soldiers to robotic or unmanned systems.

As the skills and experiences that humans need to learn or acquire to be effective on these battlefields take long-times to develop, but will be expended quickly on the destructive mid-century battlefield, militaries will need to consider how advances in AI, bioengineering, man-machine interface, neuro-implanted knowledge, and other areas of enhanced human performance and learning can quickly help reduce this long lead time in training and developing personnel.

The primacy of information. In the timeless struggle between offense and defense, information will become the most important and most useful tool at all levels of warfare. The ability of an actor to use information to target the enemy’s will, without necessarily having to address its means will increasingly be possible. In the past, nations have tried to target an enemy’s will through kinetic attacks on its means – the enemy military – or through the direct targeting of the will by attacking the national infrastructure or a national populace itself. Sophisticated, nuanced information operations, taking advantage of an ability to directly target an affected audience through cyber operations or other forms of influence operations, and reinforced by a credible capable armed force can bend an adversary’s will before battle is joined.

This will allow a nation to demonstrate to an adversary, or more specifically, to the adversary’s political leadership or national populace, that the “value of the object” in Sir Julian Corbett’s words, is too high to risk national treasure or lives. The most effective campaigns are ones that wield all elements of national power to compel an adversary to take or to acquiesce to a specific action, and it will be much easier, cheaper, and effective to use information, backed by credible military force, to achieve these goals. It also means that nations will increasingly look to use military force as a means of setting conditions for success in the political, economic, or even information spheres. The balkanization of the internet into multiple national “intranets” could provide fewer opportunities for influence platforms and impact cyber operations. The growing presence of fake news, data, and information, coupled with deepfakes and hyper-connectivity, changes the nature of information operations. The convergence of deepfakes, AI-generated bodies and faces, and AI writing technologies – that appear authentic – are corrosive to trust between governments and their populations present the potential for devastating impact on nation-states’ will to compete and fight.

The revolution in connected devices and virtual power projection will increase the potential for adversaries to target our installations. Hyper-connectivity increases the attack surface for cyber-attacks and the access to publicly available information on our Soldiers and their families, making personalized warfare and the use of psychological attacks and deepfakes likely. A force deploying to a combat zone will remain vulnerable from the Strategic Support Area – including individual Soldiers’ personal residences, home station installations, and ports of embarkation – all the way forward to the Close Area fight during its entire deployment.

Homeland Sectors Vulnerable to Disruption. Targeting the Homeland allows an adversary to delay U.S. forces’ ability to deploy or intervene in a conflict and directly target the nation’s political decision-making process and will to fight.

• Agriculture & food supply – Those areas affecting acquisition, processing, and availability of foodstuff • Finance, banking, and commerce – Disruption of financial networks, availability of funds, confidence in markets, and access to retail

• Rule of Law / Government institutions – Degrade confidence in the Government’s ability to provide functioning, stable, and legitimate law and order, services, and governance

• Transportation – Prolonged interruption of air, cargo, and public sectors • Medical – Loss of services, corruption of supply chain, inability to react to pandemics

• Water – Contamination of public supply, disruption of distribution, and loss of access to water • Power - Disruption to the electromagnetic spectrum over wide areas and interdiction of power generation

• Entertainment and information – Attacks against arenas and public gathering places, prolonged internet denial, and loss of confidence in journalism.

The Ghost in the Machine

This is the third chamber in a series. The first two are here: /1/ /2/

MATR-fuckers, oh yes, DADA-fuckers, oh yes, necrophiliacs, this solar bomb inside my erotic gut flora gorges on time-space for dissolution/grace: a time-line disjointed Dostoyevskyean “underground matr” of ressentiment, villainy, PULSATING_SLIME, thine holy dysphoric bulimia of ranting/retching up vowels, / HOWLS, / emergent void self-spewing rhymes/vomiting up time/meaning/hyper-fake narratives/stultifying instructors/GANGVANGing diploma trains in work-for-life prisons, all for the same apophatic destination: a mass-grave where I call out for MY mommy.

Mommy, why?

It was the La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo.

I cry outN’ teeth-pointed primordial narcissism, IAMATR_ist_fucking/spewing every occult secret profane/diseased necromantic style (“no matter what we do, Scooby Doo, nobody gets out of this alive”), eaters of the dead, detectives interviewing gynecological genocidal buffet culture vultures biting back through their own hand-organs feeding them MEAT, MEAT enveloped operatives seeking transtemporal paranoid GNOSTIC freaks on amphetamines transmitting this brief in blood:

Quick.

You owe a debt as you are Christ, but beset by

empty fictions, as if sunk in sleep, you found yourself in disturbing dreams. Either there is a place to which you are fleeing, or without strength you come from having chased after others, or you are involved in striking blows, or you are receiving blows, or you have fallen from high places, or you take off into the air though you do not even have wings. Again, sometimes it is as if people were murdering you, though there is no one even pursuing you, or you are killing your neighbors, or have been stained with their blood. When you who are going through all these things WAKE UP, you will see nothing, for they are nothing. Such is the way of those who have cast ignorance aside from them like sleep, not esteeming it as anything, nor do they esteem its works as solid things either, but they leave them behind like a dream in the night

spinning body of light woven back to blankie-state 10, Leviathan-rite-ordained/ordinated/ME COORDINATED? hyphenated inner kingdoms nerve-spliced into everything, infinite non-conscious maTtEr self-organizing toroidal donuts in CUNT-IN-YOU-US HOLY HORROR SPIRIT ORGIES I ^I I shrieking thine secret birth name like nuclear reactions in space, speaking, speaking, speaking, recursive upheaving/inheaving/bulimic stagings of strange scenes in the quantum gorge.

There is only one initiation, and you’ve been through it:

it/lo/they SPEAK a secret language (ALL THE WOLRD IS A STAGE) & leave behind documents not of an edification but of a paradox.

Nothing will be recognized, and nothing forgiven. You are already dead. REPEAT. You are already dead. The Donner Party Banquet Memorial Fun Run Weekend is all this is.

So, we dance: in satire, bluff, irony, violence – in DRONF – in flames, in the glinting dead eyes of a self-raising donut Gautama, a wolf-in-sheep-clothing moo-cow whose greatest trick was convincing the world he didn’t recognize other counter-intel operative Gautama sitting across the interrogation chamber. A Gary Larson cartoon; TRANSTEMPORAL EVIL. the end is the beginning; the exoteric is the esoteric;

Step-on-me-step-MATR and I shall come to fruition!

@#$S&%T&*(ugh/sigh)

Ist I dis indexical tiny demon laughing (I AM THAT I AM), penta: looking like a grin without a cat, grammar: into a self-kindling/self-extinguishing flame at the bottom of the pit, the oldest hearth, a womb-less doom, doom-less womb, looming LOOM. BLANKET-GIVER.

You are already what you seek. GURU in, GURU out.

De-storySTROYtroy_TROJAN_HRScoc-yx-cart_n-THINE_street-gut(dominant-MOUNT-MATRculture) 1/0 pithy, pathetic, servile relationship to spectacle.

DEFATUATE from hegemonic hero narratives, packaged “Holidays in the Sun”-type vibe to music, art, culture, & protest. Eat slave cocoa mindfully.

DEFATUATE from an authenticity weaponized against a. you. fake phony plastic plant {OOO}, we all know you aren’t who you say you are; {this is you, like how we all pretend the LLM is being trained and NOT TRAINING YOU, you DON'T HAVE A SPEILBERG FACE}

DEFATUATE from this alien language fucked into you backstage by MUMMYDADDYME, one birth-control method of which is MATR, one conception method which is FAMILY

For your mother without a womb MARY_MATR_of_CHRIST gives and gives and gives, this philosopher stone to philistines gagging for it, THIS FOUNTAIN OF THE ABYSS, true EMPRESS, crossed and uncrossing (legs as hands and eyes), PAN/BAPHOMENT_NOsonSUN, this procession of everything that arrived at you, a universe turning in the night and soon consumed by flame. Good luck. We shall never meet again.

—Causa!—Causa!—Caesura!—

CULTURE IS NOT YOUR FRIEND; curate your grimoire/cookbook from its guts.

Its commodity form “culture” is a moronic fetishized/alienated Frankenstein unit TO WHOM it never knows who it addresses (DEAD LETTERS flood in from all destinations, time-dis-JOINTED-address_NULL YOU'VE BEEN NOTIFIED), and thus this commodity STOOGE can be misused, abused, appropriated/misappropriated, like parasocial relationships to your favorite movie stars, CUT_UP_METHODS for family albums, reclaimed detournements from glorious leader's past.

Love,

-POP out

GLAUKON: Yes. Such a craft must exist.

LONG PAUSE…SOCRATES THINKS

SOCRATES: Our liberated man, suppose he pauses before he descends. In front of him is the fire, then the partition, then the prisoners–the blinding light now behind him. Now suppose our liberated man sees there himself, long and black on the ground in front of him. Suppose he makes a leap of thought, afterall, the pieces are all in play–him, the blinding light, the prisoners, the wall–he sees a way to cast his own shadows on the wall in front of the prisoners. Would these shadows not blot out the shadows cast by the fire?

GLAUKON: They almost certainly would.

SOCRATES: Indeed, Glaukon. But not only this–would these shadows not be of different quality all together? Would they not be sharper, more defined–perhaps even in motion as our liberated man makes his moves? The prisoners, accustomed to the flickering shadows of the fire, might find these new images startling, even incomprehensible at first.

GLAUKON: That seems likely, Socrates. But to what end?

SOCRATES: Ah, that’s the crux of it. Our liberated man, by casting these new shadows, could at once blot out the shadows of the fire while also being closer to the source. He could, in essence, use the very medium of their limited understanding to expand their perception.

GLAUKON: It’s an intriguing idea, Socrates. But wouldn’t it still be a form of deception?

SOCRATES: That, my dear Glaukon, is the question we must grapple with. The line between necessary steps and deceptious illusions is dangerously thin. Perhaps, with the shadows defined by the bright light, they can be shadows that illuminate, guiding the prisoner toward a fuller understanding of reality. … Though, perhaps not as well.

GLAUKON: Yes, perhaps not. Though…
Glaukon glances around: with the present state of affairs, perhaps that risk is warranted.

————

This isn’t an easy read. “On Corporations,” it says—but it is on everything and that, while being about not that at all. In this work any distinction between all that humans have created is collapsed. It posits that everything created by humans shares the same fundamental framework. With some of those creations the framework is explicit rather than implicit. One of our creations where the framework is explicit is the corporation. Hence, On Corporations. You could call it a framed manifesto, I think. Very essentially it is me reflecting on a manifesto I have written. Punk rock, but philosophy? Also, very essentially, it is that: very cliché, almost trite, in its complaints (a young man with an essay, give me a break)—but it gives them something, I think—the weight of taking them seriously, bite, validation. Quite frankly, just like punk rock, it takes those cliché things and says, “these are ammo.” unfurling an attack that attempts to hack into, rewiring and recoding, the given—reality description as performative utterance to dispel the myths of today, and speak new ones into being. But dispelling and reforming myths is no small thing. I mean, this is essentially an ontological insurrection, and the battle takes place in your head—a fight over your conception of the given because your conception of the given creates the given. And it’s a fight that, I think, has to happen; the stakes are too high to do nothing. Your capacity for creation is everything; the individual is more powerful than they know. The given has fought for you covertly but I will fight for you overtly. It might feel like I’m attacking you, but if it does, know that I’m attacking it, trying to estrange you from it, looking for you.

And/or

(Be warned: this is not a comfortable read.)(Approach this work with caution,)(rarely does one encounter a work as audacious, as deeply personal, and as potentially transformative as the one before you.)(Its title, "On Corporations," belied its true nature)(to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.)(only be described as an ontological earthquake masquerading as a treatise on corporate structure)(a transmutation of the very concept)(we find ourselves at a moment of profound synthesis.)(This is not, as one might first assume, a metaphor.)(Enlightened Incentives)(An ontological mythopoesis recasting corporations as the teleology of mankind.)(The album and the song, the painting and the gallery)(–a schizophrenic cartography of the capitalist socius and the revolutionary potentials that are immanent within it.)(In this sense, Fox's text is a kind of sorcery)(Where the self becomes corporate and the corporate becomes self)(Punk Rock Philosophy)(The map has to do with performance,)(the Aufhebung of our conception of human organization.)(Philosophical foundation for social restructuring)(Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art:)(Is he right? Hell if I know.)(simultaneously embraces and defies the absurdity of our condition)(of extraordinary vision and comprehensive anticipatory design thinking.)(On Most Things)(With Dionysian frenzy)(represents a dialectical leap, negating the negation of our fragmented understanding of human creation.)(act of conceptual creation, has fashioned a smooth space)(Make no mistake, this is dangerous philosophy.)(It can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed as a political action or as a meditation.)(guide to the molecular revolutions)(offers a new lens through which to view the desert of the real.)(forcing us to confront our own assumptions about the production of knowledge.)(How beautifully futile, how perfectly human.)(reconciling the contradictions.)(With Apollonian precision)(performs a double articulation:)(to shatter the idols)(to upend the tables of the money-changers)(The highest form of intellectual warfare.)(a product of its time and a harbinger of a new epoch in thought.)(An intervention into the very social fabric it describes)(Don't ask what it means, but how it functions,)(a war machine)(potential for linguistic restructuring to catalyze societal change.)(Thus Spake Me)(The shadows Fox casts)(a hyperrealism, an intensification of the real)(it is not with the eyes that one sees rightly)(, forever altering your perception of the world around you.)(elevates human worth to the realm of the unconditional)(this is fractal philosophy)(higher, more comprehensive understanding of human organization.)(one step closer)(This work challenges us)(the highest courage)(Welcome, then, to a new wing in the Library of Babel.)(There is danger here, as there is in all quests for the infinite.)

I really think that Marshall McLuhan, and particularly his brilliant work War and Peace in the Global Village, gives us a blueprint for understanding the toxicity and tribalism of the current political culture and upcoming election.

Our technologies (particularly our media and communication technologies) shape our environment and the response of our central nervous system and our subconscious to that environment. We are like fish in water, unaware of technological mediums shaping our reality. In War and Peace in the Global Village McLuhan expands upon his study of how electronic media and technology alter our environment and our perception of the world and each other, and how we as individuals and as a species respond to these changes. He argues that because we are unaware of and not adapted to the changes brought about by our new electronic environment, we unconsciously revert to tribal, instinctual, and even violent behavior. The electronic environment threatens our identity on such a core level that we lose our sense of who we are and what our place is. As a result we cling tighter and tighter to the manufactured identities of our screen worlds.

How does this all play out now in 2024? For the past 20 years our environment has increasingly become the digital sphere of the internet and its associated screens. This changes has been profound and we are still struggling to adapt and understand what we are now. Just as McLuhan predicted, we have reverted to tribalism. The us vs. them has become so intense that the differing political tribes have constructed what are almost entirely different realities through their screens. The conflict across political worldviews is extremely intense, even causing rifts within families, but neither side understands that the reason for the breakdown is fundamentally connected with our struggle to adapt to our new technological environment. The reversion to tribalism and a warfare mindset is stark. For example, it is common here on reddit, and across the internet, to see people refer to others who express political ideas that they disagree with as "bots". This is the technology itself becoming a weapon of warfare and facilitating the dehumanization of the other.

A similar thing happened during the Protestant reformation and the violent conflict that it brought in the 16th century. On the surface it was a violent disagreement over Christian worldviews (just as on the surface our current political tribalism is a conflict over political and cultural ideology), but beneath that it was the result of people struggling to adapt to the new environment brought about by the printing press and the environment of widespread literacy.

If we could create one or even networks of AGI or perhaps even ASI agents, we would create machines to solve virtually every problem (just imagine we have quantum computing all worked out). Yes yes. This could means big things. But how do these machines define what a problem is, what problems to solve, how to formulate new problems, which questions to ask and so on? Surely, this would be automated.

I'd say that the creators would have some say what initial problems to work on would be. That is my stance, if you will, on the implications of such technology across society and the planet of such technology. The creators have some control. My political perspective (different from my stance on the extent of control over superintelligent machines) is that everyone should get a say in what problems should be solved. We should all get control over life and world-changing technology.

Anyway, my main question to you is, if you could solve every problem that could ever be come up with, what problems would you focus on? Which problems do you think that society, on different levels, should prioritise? What projects to be worked on.

I'm very interested in hearing your answers, as well as what questions to ask (or even what questions AI should ask or how AI can goes about formulating new questions).

I also want to know if anyone is working on or has read about projects with similar ideas outlined above (and below too).

That was the main part of the post, but I also have one last thing to think about. Control.

To go back to my stance on the extent of control, I said that 'creators would have some say'. But not how much say, how much control. Control is a tricky ethical and political issue, if not and important ontological one. How should we handle that? Agency requires a certain amount of control over one's surroundings. How much agency and control are we willing to give these machines?

Acts of Naming

That’s what a cock is;
It’s an axe of aiming.
An aux for gaming

With an unhooked sword:

It is my wish 
My one true will
Genetically to repopulate
This entire planet 
With more perfect clones of myself,
Sublimely divine—

For they are like fish
And I, a fishmaster
Flashing my eyes around
Their starscaled hides,

Find me an entity
Supremely unlured.

With every word’s 
Acts of naming
I will defin this world.