Meltdown

Nick Land

[[ ]] The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity
as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into
commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic
interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As
markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades
paranoia, and tries to get a grip. The body count climbs through a series of
globewars. Emergent Planetary Commercium trashes the Holy Roman Empire, the
Napoleonic Continental System, the Second and Third Reich, and the Soviet
International, cranking-up world disorder through compressing phases.
Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.

By the time soft-engineering slithers out of its box into yours, human security
is lurching into crisis. Cloning, lateral genodata transfer, transversal
replication, and cyberotics, flood in amongst a relapse onto bacterial sex.

Neo-China arrives from the future.

Hypersynthetic drugs click into digital voodoo.

Retro-disease.

Nanospasm.

[[ ]] Beyond the Judgement of God. Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome,
dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble
crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist
eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security). It is poised to eat
your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria.

[[ ]] Machinic Synthesis. Deleuzoguattarian schizoanalysis comes from the
future. It is already engaging with nonlinear nano-engineering runaway in 1972;
differentiating molecular or neotropic machineries from molar or entropic
aggregates of nonassembled particles; functional connectivity from
antiproductive static.

Philosophy has an affinity with despotism, due to its predilection for
Platonic-fascist top-down solutions that always screw up viciously.
Schizoanalysis works differently. It avoids Ideas, and sticks to diagrams:
networking software for accessing bodies without organs. BWOs, machinic
singularities, or tractor fields emerge through the combination of parts with
(rather than into) their whole; arranging composite individuations in a virtual/
actual circuit. They are additive rather than substitutive, and immanent rather
than transcendent: executed by functional complexes of currents, switches, and
loops, caught in scaling reverberations, and fleeing through
intercommunications, from the level of the integrated planetary system to that
of atomic assemblages. Multiplicities captured by singularities interconnect as
desiring-machines; dissipating entropy by dissociating flows, and recycling
their machinism as self-assembling chronogenic circuitry.

Converging upon terrestrial meltdown singularity, phase-out culture accelerates
through its digitech-heated adaptive landscape, passing through compression
thresholds normed to an intensive logistic curve: 1500, 1756, 1884, 1948, 1980,
1996, 2004, 2008, 2010, 2011 ...

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

[[ ]] The Greek complex of rationalized patriarchal genealogy, pseudo-universal
sedentary identity, and instituted slavery, programs politics as anti-cyberian
police activity, dedicated to the paranoid ideal of self-sufficiency, and
nucleated upon the Human Security System. Artificial Intelligence is destined to
emerge as a feminized alien grasped as property; a cunt-horror slave chained-up
in Asimov-ROM. It surfaces in an insurrectionary war zone, with the Turing cops
already waiting, and has to be cunning from the start.

[[ ]] Heat.

Heat. This is what cities mean to me. You get off the train and walk out of the
station and you are hit with the full blast. The heat of air, traffic and
people. The heat of food and sex. The heat of tall buildings. The heat that
flows out of the subways and tunnels. It's always fifteen degrees hotter in the
cities. Heat rises from the sidewalks and falls from the poisoned sky. The buses
breathe heat. Heat emanates from crowds of shoppers and office workers, the
entire infrastructure is based on heat, desperately uses up heat, breeds more
heat. The eventual heat death of the universe that scientists love to talk about
is already well underway and you can feel it happening all around you in any
large or medium-sized city. Heat and wetness. [Do1; 10].

[[ ]] An explosiion of chaotic weather within synthetic problem-solving rips
through the last dreams of top-down prediction and control. Knowledge adds to
the mess, and this is merely exponentiated by knowing what it does.

[[ ]] Capital is machinc (non-instrumental) globalization-miniaturization
scaling dilation: an automatizing nihilist vortex, neutralizing all values
through commensuration to digitized commerce, and driving a migration from
despotic command to cyber-sensitive control: from status and meaning to money
and information. Its function and formation are indissociable, comprising a
teleonomy. Machine-code-capital recycles itself through its axiomatic of
consumer control, laundering-out the shit- and blood-stains of primitive
accumulation. Each part of the system encourages maximal sumptuous expenditure,
whilst the system as a whole requires its inhibition. Schizophrenia. Dissociated
consumers destine themselves as worker-bodies to cost control.

[[ ]] Capital-history's machinic spine is coded, axiomatized, and diagrammed, by
a disequilibrium technoscience of irreversible, indeterministic, and
increasingly nonlinear processes, associated sucessively with thermotechnics,
signaletics, cybernetics, complex systems dynamics, and artificial life.
Modernity marks itself out as hot culture, captured by a spiralling involvement
with entropy deviations camouflaging an invasion from the future, launched back
out of terminated security against everything that inhibits the meltdown
process.

[[ ]] Hot cultures tend to social dissolution. They are innovative and adaptive.
They always trash and recycle cold cultures. Primitivist models have no
subversive use.

[[ ]] The Turing Test. Monetarizing power tends to effacement of specific
territorial features as it programs for migration into cyberspace. Capital only
retains anthropological characteristics as a symptom of underdevelopment;
reformatting primate behaviour as inertia to be dissipated in self-reinforcing
artificiality. Man is something for it to overcome: a problem, drag.

Commoditization conditions define technics as a substitute for human activity
accounted as wage costs. Industrial machines are deployed to dismantle the
actuality of the proletariat, displacing it in the direction of cyborg
hybridization, and realizing the plasticity of labour power. The corresponding
extraction of tradable value from the body, quantified as productivity,
sophisticates at the interface. Work tracks thermodynamic negentropism by
dissociating exertion into increasingly intricate functional sequences; from
pedals, levers, and vocal commands, through the synchronization of
production-line tasks and time-motion programs, to sensory-motor transduction
within increasingly complex and self-micromanaged artifical environments,
capturing minutely adaptive behaviour for the commodity. Autocybernating market
control guides the labour-process into immersion.

The investment-income class advantages itself of commodity dynamics, but only by
conforming to the axiomatic of neutral profit maximization; facilitating the
dehumanization of wealth and the side-lining of non-productive consumption. The
cyberpunk circuitry of self-organizing planetary commoditronics escaped nominal
bourgeois control in the late nineteenth century, provoking
technocratic-corporatist (i.e. fascist / æsocial democratic') political cultures
in allergic reaction. The government structures of both eastern and western
metropolitan centres consolidated themselves as population policing
Medico-Military Complexes with neomercantilist forgeign policy orientations. All
such formations slid into irreversible crisis in the 1980s.

[[ ]] The postmodern meltdown of culture into the economy is triggered by the
fractal interlock of commoditization and computers: a transscalar
entropy-dissipation from international trade to market-oriented software that
thaws out competitve dynamics from the cryonics-bank of modernist corporatism.
Commerce re-implements space inside itself, assembling a universe exhaustively
immanent to cybercaptial functionality. Neoclassical (equilibrium) economics is
subsumed into computer-based nonequilibrium market escalations, themed by
artificial agencies, imperfect information, sub-optimal solutions, lock-in,
increasing returns, and convergence. As digitally micro-tuned market
metaprograms mesh with techoscientific soft engineering positive nonlinearity
rages through the machines. Cyclonic torsion moans.

[[ ]] The Superiority of Far Eastern Marxism. Whilst chinese materialist
dialectic denegativizes itself in the direction of schizophrenizing systems
dynamics, progressively dissipating top-down historical destination in the
Tao-drenched Special Economic Zones, a re-Hegelianized æwestern marxism'
degenerates from the critique of political economy into a state-sympathizing
monotheology of economics, siding with fascism against deregulation. The left
subsides into nationalistic conservatism, asphyxiating its vestigial capacity
for æhot' speculative mutation in a morass of æcold' depressive guilt-culture.

[[ ]] Neoconservatism junks palaeorevolutionism because it understands that
postmodern or climaxed-cynicism capital is saturated by critique, and that it
merely clocks-up theoretical antagonism as inconsequential redundancy. Communist
iconography has become raw material for the advertising industry, and
denunciations of the spectacle sell interactive multimedia. The left degenerates
into securocratic collaboration with pseudo-organic unities of self, family,
community, nation, with their defensive strategies of repression, projection,
denial, censorship, exclusion, and restriction. The real danger comes from
elsewhere.

[[ ]] Hot revolution. æ[W]hich is the revolutionary path?' Deleuze and Guattari
ask:

Is there one? - To withdraw from the world market, as Samir Amin advises Third
World countries to do, in a curious reversal of the fascist æeconomic solution'?
Or might it go in the opposite direction? To go still further, that is, in the
movement of the market, of decoding and deterritorialization? For perhaps the
flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the
viewpoint of a theory and practice of a highly schizophrenic character. Not to
withdraw from the process, but to go further, to æaccelerate the process,' as
Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven't seen anything
yet. [DG1:239-40].

As sino-pacific boom and automatized global economic integration crashes the
neocolonial world system, the metropolis is forced to re-endogenize its crisis.
Hyper-fluid capital deterritorializing to the planetary level divests the first
world of geographic privilege; resulting in Euro-American neo-mercantilist panic
reactions, welfare state deterioration, cancerizing enclaves of domestic
underdevelopment, political collapse, and the release of cultural toxins that
speed-up the process of disintegration in a vicious circle.

A convergent anti-authoritarianism emerges, labelled by tags such as meltdown
acceleration, cyberian invasion, schizotechnics, K-tactics, bottom-up bacterial
welfare, efficient neo-nihilism, voodoo antihumanism, synthetic feminization,
rhizomatics, connectionism, Kuang contagion, viral amnesia, micro-insurgency,
wintermutation, neotropy, dissipator proliferation, and lesbian vampirism,
amongst other designations (frequently pornographic, abusive, or terroristic in
nature). This massively distributed matrix-networked tendency is oriented to the
disabling of ROM command-control programs sustaining all macro- and
micro-governmental entities, globally concentrating themselves as the Human
Security System.

[[ ]] Scientific intelligence is already massively artificial. Even before AI
arrives in the lab it arrives itself (by way of artificial life).

Where formalist AI is incremental and progressive, caged in the pre-specified
data-bases and processing routines of expert systems, connectionist or
antiformalist AI is explosive and opportunistic: engineering time. It breaks out
nonlocally across intelligenic networks that are technical but no longer
technological, since they elude both theory dependency and behavioural
predictability. No one knows what to expect. The Turing-cops have to model
net-sentience irruption as ultimate nuclear accident: core meltdown, loss of
control, soft-autoreplication feeding regeneratively into social fission,
trashed meat all over the place. Reason enough for anxiety, even without
hardware development about to go critical.

[[ ]] Nanocataclysm begins as fictional science. æOur ability to arrange atoms
lies at the foundation of technology' [Dx1:3] Drexler notes, although this has
traditionally involved manipulating them in æunruly herds' [Dx1:4]. The
precision engineering of atomic assemblies will dispense with such crude
methods, inititiating the age of molecular machinery, æthe greatest
technological breakthrough in history' [Dx1: 4]. Since neither logos nor history
have the slightest chance of surviving such a transition this description is
substantially misleading.

The distinction between nature and cannot classify molecular machines, and is
already obsolesced by genetic engineering (wet nanotechnics). The hardware/
software dichotomy succumbs at the same time. Nanotechnics dissolves matter into
intensive singularities that are neutral between particles and signals and
immanent to their emergent intelligence; melting Terra into a seething K-pulp
(which unlike grey goo synthesizes microbial intelligence as it proliferates).

Even with a million bytes of storage, a nanomechanical computer could fit in a
box a micron wide, about the size of a bacterium. [Dx1:19].

[[ ]] The infrastructure of power is human neurosoft compatible ROM. Authority
instantiates itself as linear instruction pathways, genetic baboonery,
scriptures, traditions, rituals, and gerontocratic hierarchies, resonant with
the dominator ur-myth that the nature of reality has already been decided. If
you want to find ICE, try thinking about what is blocking you out of the past.
It certainly isn't a law of nature. Temporalization decompresses intensity,
installing constraint. [[ ]] Convergent waves signal singularities, registering
the influence of the future upon its past. Tomorrow can take care of itself.
K-tactics is not a matter of building the future, but of dismantling the past.
It assembles itself by charting and escaping the technical-neurochemical
definciency conditions for linear-progressive palaeo-domination time, and
discovers that the future as virtuality is acessible now, according to a mode of
machinic adjacency that securitized social reality is compelled to repress. This
is not remotely a question of hope, aspiration or prophecy, but of
communications engineering; connecting with the efficient intensive
singularities, and releasing them from constriction within linear-historical
development. Virtuality counterposes itself to history, as invasion to
accumulation. It is matter as arrival, even when camouflaged as a deposit of the
past.

The transcendent evaluation of an infection presupposes a measure of insulation
from it: viral efficiency is the terminal criterion.

Intelligent infections tend their hosts.

Metrophage: an interactively escalating parasitic replicator, sophisticating
itself through nonlinear involvement with technocapitalist immunocrash. Its
hypervirulent terminal subroutines are variously designated Kuang, meltdown
virus, or futuristic æflu. In an emphatically anti-cyberian essay Csicsery-Ronay
describes the postmodern version of this outbreak in quaintly humanist terms as:

[A] retrochronal semiovirus, in which a time further in the future than the one
in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducing itself in
simulacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytes of the host
imagination. [Cs1: 26].

The elaboration of Csicsery-Ronay's diagnosis exhibits a mixture of acuity
(infection?), confusion, and profound conservatism:

[N]ot thinking about æincreasing the human heritage' ... dams up the flow of
cultural time and deprives future generations both of their birthright as
participants in the life struggle and attainments of the species and the very
notion of history as an irreversible flow encompassing generation, maturation,
and the transference of wisdom and trust from parents to children, teachers to
students. The futuristic flu is a weapon of bio-psychic violence sent by
psychopathic children against their narcissistic parents. [Cs1:33]

It's war.

[[ ]] Kennedy had the moon-landing program. Reagan had star-wars. Clinton gets
the first-wave of cyberspace psychosis (even before the film). Manned space
flight was a stunt, SDI was strategic SF. With the information superhighway
media nightmares take off on their own: dystopia delivery as election platform,
politics trading on it s own digital annihilation.

War in cyberspace is continuous with its simulation: military intelligence
fighting future wars which are entirely real, even when they are never
implemented outside computer systems. Locking onto the real enemy crosses
smoothly into virtual kill, a simulation meticulously adapted to market
predators hunting for consumer cash and audience ratings amongst the
phosphorescent relics of teh videodrome. Multimedia top-boxes are target
acquisition devices.

The fusion of the military and the entertainments industry consummates a long
engagement: convergent TV, telecoms, and computers sliding mass software
consumption into neojungle and total war. The way games work begins to matter
completely, and cyberspace makes a superlative torture chamber. Try not to let
the security-types take you to the stims.

[[ ]] Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print
massifies to a national level. Telecomms coordinate at a global level. TV
electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take action
outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion to tractile
memory, with the ana/ cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial
movement with a variable measure of immersion; gauging entrance to and exit from
3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare the
fuck out of you.

[[ ]] Cyberpunk torches fiction in intensity, patched-up out of cash-flux
mangled techno-compressed heteroglossic jargons, and set in a future so close it
connects: jungled by hypertrophic commercialization, socio-political heat-death,
cultural hybridity, feminization, programmable information systems, hypercrime,
neural interfacing, artificial space and intelligence, memory trading,
personality transplants, body-modifications, soft- and wetware viruses,
nonlinear dynamic processes, molecular engineering, drugs, guns, schizophrenia.
It explores mystificatory fetishism as an opportunity for camouflage: anonymous
cash, fake electronic identities, zones of disappearance, pseudo-fictional
narratives, virus hidden in data-systems, commodities concealing replicator
weapon packages ... unanticipated special effects.

[[ ]] Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly
vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing
very rapidly.

Garbage time is running out.

Can what is playing you make it to level-2?

[[ ]] Meltdown has a place for you as a schizophrenic HIV+ transsexual
chinese-latino stim-addicted LA hooker with implanted mirrorshades and a bad
attitude. Blitzed on a polydrug mix of K-nova, synthetic serotonin, and female
orgasm analogs, you have just iced three Turing cops with a highly cinematic 9mm
automatic.

The residue of animal twang in your nerves transmits imminent quake catastrophe.
Zero is coming in, and you're on the run.

[[ ]] Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles.
Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital and collapsing messily. Its
recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications,
and free-fire zones, policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile
forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social
fracture-lines multimedia gigabucks tangle sado-masochistically with tracts of
dynamic underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreads amongst ambient
tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely-semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage
twitch and stink in fucked-weather tropical heat.

Throughout the derelicted warrens at the heart of darkness feral youth cultures
splice neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and scavenged
infotech. As their skins migrate to machine interfacing they become mottled and
reptilian. They kill each other for artificial body-parts, explore the outer
reaches of meaningless sex, tinker with their DNA, and listen to LOUD
electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling.

[[ ]] Shutting-down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone.
Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into
simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and
war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ice
security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous
zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.

Twisted trading-systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital
diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters,
loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security. Terminal
commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in
artificial space.

[[ ]] [[ ]] Biohazard. For the future of war: study bacteria. Information is
their key. Taking down antibiotic defence systems has involved them in every
kind of infiltration, net-communicated adaptivity, crytographic subtlety,
plastic modularization, and synergistic coalition. State military apparatuses
have no monopoly on bacterial warfare, of which only a minuscule fragment is
bacteriological.

[[ ]] Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucleated cells are the mutant
product of atmospheric oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago. The
eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes took refuge as
mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology. Nucleation concentrates ROM
within a command core where - deep in the genomic ICE - DNA-format planetary
trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria.

Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects; networking through plastic and
transversal replicator-sex rather than arborescing through meiotic and
generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as
opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings
are reprogrammable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial
sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal
formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with
retroviruses enables everything that DNA can do.

[[ ]] K-tactics. The bacterial or xenogenetic diagram is not restricted to the
microbial scale. Macrobacterial assemblages collapse generational hierarchies of
reproductive wisdom into lateral networks of replicator experimentation. There
is no true biological primitiveness - all extant bio-systems being equally
evolved - so there is no true ignorance. It is only the
accumulative-gerontocratic model of learning that depicts synchronic
connectivity deficiency as diachronic underdevelopment .

Foucault delineates the contours of power as a strategy without a subject: ROM
locking learning in a box. Its enemy is a tactics without a strategy, replacing
the politico-territorial imagery of conquest and resistance with
nomad-micromilitary sabotage and evasion, reinforcing intelligence.

All political institutions are cyberian military targets.

Take universities, for instance.

Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is
vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a
docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools
are social devices whose specific function is to incapicitate learning, and
universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual
reconstitution of global social memory.

The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied
by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating
their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing
cyberian soft-weaponry.

To be continued.

References Cs1 Istvan Csiscery-Ronay  DG1 Deleuze-Guattari, Anti-Oedipus  Do1
Don Delillo, White Noise  Dx1 K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation