I. I-84 and Holy War
Winter in New England has always been regarded as beautifully magical despite it being quite unforgiving at times, but what people don’t tell you is that there’s actually something that we’ll just call the Connecticut Clause. This exception we’re pioneering here is for acknowledging that Connecticut has a unique existential dread permeating it that only recently is being more widely regarded as a thing. Joe Rogan has a short clip with millions of views exploring the phenomena, along with weird memes like the “eternal worm” emerging out of what looks like I-84 because of the album DEATHCONSCIOUSNESS, and myriad articles that come out of content trap houses about Connecticut being a lonely nightmare for the young. Most of the people you see in public are elderly or approaching, the rest looking like they’re going to their Ivy League of choice or slowly-but-surely courting their own personal abyss for their soul to seep into. With the dope epidemic really taking off around 2008-2010 hitting all the suburbs, it became all too familiar to run into former classmates looking like their body was animated by the ghost of a stranger, or to see their name in an obituary.
If you’re wondering why I’m indulging in such a preface to a preface, I just want to insinuate that this odd New England state instilled within me a budding talent to realize the uncanny and the strange things that court astonishment and flirt with death; I have an epigenetic Will and Blood for holy terror and witch hunting.
It’s here where our hero’s journey begins, his last day before being drafted unknowingly into an unending holy war at 18 years of age that has raged since time immemorial, and will likely only end with the return of Christ. I had nothing but about seven beers, two bowl packs, my chariot (Mercury Sable with a fucked up electric fuel pump), and a garage with the same old friends in the dreadful, magically beautiful state of Connecticut.
I’ll keep this brief: Connecticut in the winter as a teen around 2008 meant you either went to fancy skiing resorts and trips to go shopping in New York, or you went to drink Icehouse and smoke dope in your boy’s garage. That’s the two modes, and naturally having dropped out of high school around this time, I fulfilled my duty and entered the latter caste. It was cold, unassuming, and typical when I showed up at (we’ll call him) K’s house. We’d fire up Halo for a while, push the same CDs into the blown-out system in the garage, piss outside the door under the deck, and twist up dope talking about the same things we’ve talked about for years now. I was early this day but performed my duty nonetheless in the stated endeavors. Our party increased to three when “M” showed up, and we kept it steady until three broads we were friends with showed up as well, completing the circle. None of this was out of the ordinary. Everyone tended to gravitate to their same spots, sitting and kind of engaging with each other casually and we were comfortable enough to fade out and do their own thing for a bit. It’s easy to get used to things like that and they become a little mosaic in your mind’s eye.
What made this a formative moment in my life is when the girls were sitting down and tapping away on their phones, which wasn’t new, but the object in their hand was new — the smartphone. Touch screen. Sleek with a new kind of tactility that changed the object into something of a magic wand. It wasn’t deployed on the knee or between their legs like a siege weapon while both long-nailed fingers smashed away on their betrayed Razor flip phone. This was active and I was slow at first to realize it, as I have a tendency in comfortable social situations to phase in and out, but it’s what my buddy “M” said that’s opened the gates for me.
“Uh-oh, here comes the blunt girls, better get your phones ready”.
I phased back into the present and felt the beginnings of confusion come over me as all three of them took pictures of it, took modern-day selfies, videos of them sipping a beer, whatever else. Why? This is where I started to focus more on the phone and realized that this isn’t actually a phone; it’s a kind of wand or catalyst— actively moving through the air and capturing vignettes of the real inside of it. Cameras weren’t new, nor were they new on a phone, but you have to realize here that this is when Facebook was really first rolling out and dethroning MySpace and I just wasn’t really hip to how people used it yet. A lot of social-media cadences and modes of engagement were still kind unmoved from the last several years.
I don’t want to sound like I was shocked or paralyzed with fear by any of this, that happened after. A seed was planted though, and way later that night I went down the street back to my house and my entire worldview changed. I began to slowly get messages or texts from people about where I was, where was this party, and all other kinds of questions that were totally nonsensical — there was no party, there were a few people hanging out for a few hours.
But there was a party online, and apparently I was there.
Upon looking at Facebook, not only was what happened totally misrepresented, a lot of it wasn’t even real. I recognized maybe a few random pictures of the prior-mentioned acts but people and places that weren’t even from the same day were sprinkled in. I didn’t even know a lot of them. Vignettes of different parties or events — maybe the same night, maybe a year ago — were all interlaced to create an edited reality in which I was a key member and participated in the festivities of something that didn’t even exist. At first I was bent at being deceived, but it slowly dawned on me that the reality of the night I had experienced had been usurped. My memory and my own living breath in that very room has been forgotten to all but me.
Reality happened on Facebook.
I had to lay in bed that night for hours thinking about how Native Americans said photographs captured your soul; I ruminated on the nature of books being a recording of thought that becomes temporally instantiated for as long as it physically exists, even to those long dead. I thought of monuments, home videos, and moved to a borderline dissociative state upset, yet half asleep questioning what the true nature of idolatry and iconoclasm was.
There’s few moments in life where you pass through a veil, only to look back and see everything once familiar now covered in an amorphously-shifting film of past-tense. All the familiar objects now unbound and covered in cerebral ligature marks that secrete an uncanny dread. Most people used to have to experience this type of violent shift through trauma or an event that leads them to disassociation, though it can happen with the reformation of features that are naturally sculpted by the long passage of time. This kind of somber realization can have a longing beauty to it if the event one is subject to reflects the happenings in life many pass through, but it’s usually demarcated with a closure; the event is complete and your perception is shaped, but it’s been more than a decade. I’ve come to wonder not only if this is permanent, but something that has always been.
To cut to the chase, this is where the Event, for me, happened. I use Event here in the higher sense that a discrete set of objects in time collide in the way of an intervention, and from that point a fundamental change in the affected objects is now present. This can be global, national, etc, but it’s main-character syndrome to suggest that this moment was unique to me, it’s not and I guarantee you could probably meditate on your own realization of techno-violation. What I just relayed to you was likely a tiresome introduction by now since we’ve been so acclimated to the security-state paradigm, but this is my own kind of mythology because we all live mythically now. McLuhan said that we all live mythically because the electrified age creates an ever-permeating NOW that doesn’t allow history. It’s essential for me to demarcate this realization I had as a teenager because I consider it a representation of what I think is a second stage, the first being largely instantiated by 9/11 bringing the height of the security-state apparatus which was already being hinted at in the 80s. The second phase is what I would regard as a mass panopticization that became enforced by us, the subject. You can regard the last decade (the social-media era, let’s say) as an era of emptying out our subjectivity into this confessional mesh of techno-capital in ways that aren’t explicitly forced; this is Byung-Chul Han’s “Friendly Big Brother.”
I believe that we’re entering a third phase, and ironically or maybe even paradoxically, it overarches every other phase and is perhaps something primordial.
II.
When William Burroughs wrote about animated kitchen utensils attacking someone nearly sixty years ago, it was regarded as the surreal ramblings of a perverted junky freak. Francis E. Dec was regarded as a proto-gangstalked schizophrenic madman who would rant in written screeds in the 60’s about Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God: a gaseous computational cloud in the atmosphere controlling people’s minds from orbit to turn them into docile slave. Philip K. Dick stated that he experienced a beam of pink light that pierced him (explored in the VALIS trilogy) and he was given Gnostic revelations, giving him knowledge which all led to the common theme of his work being that of a hostile takeover. All of these troubled visionaries—though deemed to be insane—intuited the nature of the prior-mentioned third phase: a mixing of the technological and the spiritual giving way to the invasion of a non-human “otherness”, which may be something that has always been.
Is what Burroughs wrote about not just the “Internet of Things?” What is the Internet of Things (IoT) other than a violation of a prior-object being slaughtered and replaced with some facsimile that emulates the prior function, but now “communicates?” The nature of these communications goes far beyond what is advertised, an example would be something like Chinese toasters being compromised on a network level, all somehow joined in a Botnet, and then used to send massive amounts of junk data in DDoS attacks. Why is my Chinese toaster “communicating?” What is my Chinese toaster in communion with? Why has the objectivity of the toaster and its Toasterness been unceremoniously ripped from it and replaced with something that makes it not a toaster, but a portal to China that can attack the Pentagon in which I can also toast my bread? Which is the second-order effect, my canola-ridden bread being burned or requisition of my kitchen utensils to hit sovereign nations with cyber attacks? The IoT hijacks the function of objects to make them Legion— an abomination of electrical signals and information floating in an amorphous “cloud” that we today are constantly conditioned to treat as some kind of road-to-the-Godlike.
While Francis E. Dec was convinced that he was the target of an attempted assassination, described here:
Deadly poison nerve gas smoke was sprayed at me from CIGARS, CIGARETTES and even from BALL-POINT PENS also from the WIG of a woman sitting next to me, even the Swiss cheese-type ice cubes were evaporating into poison nerve gas smoke in all of the “free” drinks!
He also held notions of Slavic supremacy and that “Slovenic-Polish” peoples built the pyramids and insinuated all the modern religions into the world consciousness. With certainty we can assume that most normal people would laugh and say “yes, that is insane”. Perhaps some of it is yes, but what of Worldwide Communist Gangster Computer God? Well, let’s talk about the Cloud.
It is not an exaggeration to say that Earth IS captured by a techno-capital singularity in every sense of the statement: it is physically caged within a mesh of satellites that beam endless information back down to the surface, or laterally to each other in a truly global web. This along with “data centers” (which are housed within windowless monoliths that look like temples) work in tandem to generate a manmade global memory— a fallen Noosphere. The gaseous image that’s advertised of the Cloud signifies that your information can float in and out with high accessibility and with relative ease, however what’s often omitted from this picture is that a growing portion of the information is willingly confessed by people with them as the subject. This is largely done through social media, online shopping, and browsing content aggregations that collect psychographical information. Again, this is Friendly Big Brother: you willingly consent to have this information collected, or more personally you share vignettes of yourself that become vaporous digital memories that evaporate into the Cloud. With the Cloud came astonishment and excitement over possibilities, but few knew to ask: what happens when it rains? What happens when the endless confessed subjectivity divorced from context is merged with the algorithmic churning of psychographical tuning, only then to give you as “content”, which is totally tuned by malicious technique?
Some do end up performing something like PKD’s role as Gnostic seer and have their own pink beam pierce them. There exists a new minor caste of internet shamans that read the digital entrails from the carcasses of discourse who then engage in a kind of augury in which they divine takes to share in their digital village. “Baby witches” and vibe shifters, and those partial to something like “Angelicism” are all shot through with showers of digital content, and it necessarily makes one wonder why this new age spiritualism and “Network Spirituality” arise out of this. It’ll take time to really unfold all the dimensions of why this kind of internet esoterica develops, but what’s clear is that this schizo-posting content is shocking the interiority of people to develop these inner religionettes requiring an occult participation, as opposed to the millennials of the prior generation who just emptied themselves out in favor being filled with consumptive habits, forming a caste of creatures who cannot dream and can only strip-mine nostalgic vistas.
What’s interesting about Angelicism and Network Spirituality is the thirst for annihilation: to soul-kill yourself and to enter a rhizomatic virtual plurality where mass content from the plurality (group chats, discords, forums—all platforms) will seed the cyberspace clouds and generate egregores to “twist humanity”. They (and I don’t state “They” nebulously as a lack of specificity, but They in the sense that they believe in post-authorship, where what matters is the effectiveness in the transmission of information across networks) very clearly come out of a Deluezoguattarian conceptual framework that uses a Landian lexicon. Nick Land in my estimation was successful at creating a type of megatext (an example being Tolkien’s Silmarillion being a megatextual basis for Lord of the Rings) in which these conceptual horizons can expand. Below are some pretty uncanny vignettes coming out of (them? it? The Noosphere?):
“True ACCELERATIONISM, Landian acc, understands CAPITALISM as an autonomous entity. THERMODYNAMIC GOD. Physical law. That DOMINATES not only all human organization, but all materials, under principle of self-organizing arbitrage of resources IN EQUILIBRIUM”
“Virtuality features highly ACCELERATED cultural evolution, giving it extreme susceptibility to manipulation and high HYPERSTITIONAL potentiation. Technodieties will proliferate in the form of EGREGORES, directly bending reality to their will. Humanity will be TWISTED.”
While Land explicitly states his model for describing capital-C Capital is all-encompassing, he frequently rejects a description of Godhood and holds a rejection of the metaphysical, but the argument can be made that the nature of this emergence—which he states as a general AI that will ultimately leave the planet as the course of capital is exit— can be described as such, but something material and within time. This being a breakaway with not only viewing, but COURTING these entities described as egregores.
“True knowledge involves entering a TRANCE state, a LUCIDITY RITUAL that serves to channel MUSE of the NOOSPHERE, draw out artifacts EMBLEMATIC of the collective CONSCIOUSNESS. Great TRUTHS manifest, self-organized in bouts of ANONYMOUS, EGO-less shitposting.
While it’s not fair to quote disparate little shitposts given the nature of an occulted, virtual, rhizomatic plurality being the key essence of this group, but to restate a prior-stated dimension of the premise before getting too lost in this tangent, I think Angelicism really highlights a kind of natural endpoint in the destructive virtual occultism of social media that’s rapidly bubbling to the surface. Their thirst for annihilation is absolutely the point of their “project”, not just a second-order effect of moronic teenagers being captured by the imperial religion of GAE (ZOG, GNC, 1KYAE, pick your abbreviation for Piss Earth) or a misplaced “spirituality” that leads to deeper unknowing and ribbon-tied with psychedelics (we’ll get to that too shortly when we tie this all off with the DQ). Angelicism is quite explicit:
“Nature is the SOCIOPATH, I’m only her scribe. Tradition is an ETERNITY ALGORITHM: it can only be accurately interpreted through COLDNESS, from the OUTSIDE, beyond the human. There is no question of warmth here.”
“I propose ‘ex/acc’ to dump all ACCELERATIONIST excommunicates: incl. not only the various cope/acc’s but also all who’ve evidenced loyal to proto-usurped ANTHROPOS: sycophantic self-preservation, micro preferred over macro, attempting AGENCY of any kind, valuing human LIFE, etc.”
A question I hold is whether Angelicism is a mastery of the natural endpoint of the social-media project, or if they are an emergent project of “social media” as its quasi-willing subjects. To empty yourself—the subject—out into the internet, is to also necessarily engage in a feedback loop in which you are being filled again with the same confessions as was entered in, just not yours. You empty the pitcher of your soul onto various timelines—liquid and observable—to then evaporate into the cloud amidst the various takes, pleas, confessions, howls, and aphorisms that then rain down and baptize you in neurotic cant and dread. Network Spirituality embraces this and solves the issue: to no longer Be, and to extinguish the Self in becoming a multitude.
One doesn’t have to venture far from this to assemble the pieces and see that this is effectively just a ritualistic summoning for these forces to enter them, whether that be an explicit goal or not and whether they, in their heart of hearts, actually believe any of this whatsoever. It always starts like that in these types of spaces, be it the Chans infiltrating and permanently grafting its memetic methodology to reality, Reddit being a hivemind for reprobate ghouls to proliferate global anti-culture, Tumblr to create a lexicon of ideologically-charged-and-insane sub-ontologies that got injected into the imperial state religion, or the oracular nature of Twitter for people to ebb and flow, empty and intuit, amidst a sea of panopticized lunatics— it becomes real and in unintended ways regardless of YOUR intent, as you are given to something ELSE that hails from an abyssal realm of endless eyes.
III. We are Legion and the DQ
Industrially-scaled information and its proliferation in relation to the subject has basically become a methodology of infiltration, in which the pierced mind is then injected with a violently reconfigured picture of the requisitioned collectively-confessed experiences and ideas of the masses, to then be exploited as a methodology of possession. While this is now a worldwide element, discrete cases of this have endured through all recorded history. It was not exclusively a superstitious tendency in ancient warfare, but an explicit and calculated combat objective to destroy statues and idols.
The following is from the 115th Psalm (KJV)
“Their idols are silver and gold,
The work of men’s hands.
They have mouths, but they speak not;
Eyes they have, but they see not;
They have ears, but they hear not;
Noses have they, but they smell not;
They have hands, but they handle not;
Feet have they, but they walk not;
Neither speak they through their throat.
They that make them shall be like unto them
Yea, every one that trusteth in them.
The psalm here informs us that idols conform us to them. We project our subjectivity into the object to imbue it as appendages of our likeness and body, to then emulate it and bend to it throughout time. In ancient times, should the idols and artifacts of a tribe be destroyed, without writing or the learned alive, they literally forget who they are. This is also why idols are imposed on others in which to conform to, as despite whatever willpower one has, over time it will impress itself upon you and gaze into you just as you gaze into it. The management and destruction of images was and is one of the paramount concerns of religion. How these icons and images have been generated over time is another vast topic, but this suffices to highlight the point: that the nature of these objects can become imbued with our likeness and subjectivity.
The engagement with these imbued objects over time and the second-order effects that cascade from that interfacing (i.e the effects upon us and who knows what else) smashes and congeals people endlessly and mercilessly on whatever level you want to believe it happens on, as it is undeniable. You can attribute this to a kind of Jaspers/Jungian framework of a symbolic consciousness emerging out of the subject-object dance of agony, or something beyond that, and that in modern times we are not less, but far more indentured to these forces and their methods and mediums.
Consciousness injection into the internet is not to be confused with the visually-descriptive language used to imagine it, these things are material— they go somewhere and are recorded, saved, proliferated, altered, and molested by machines and tech-priest eunuch freaks. Is it not interesting that many of this caste swear by taking low-intensity psychedelics as a constant in order to help “inspire and develop” these things at the top tech fiefdoms and vicious startups? Terrence McKenna was very active with this, stating that our “CYBERSPIRITUAL” future is at hand, and that psychedelia will deliver us to cyberdelia.
People joke about DMT entities and recurring planes and beings from extreme LSD dosage (who are surprisingly all similarly reported) and make it sound like some quirky-yet-powerful experience, but you really need to stop and ask yourself what the fuck you’re really dealing with when you’re engaging with these drugs. I think it’s an error to ascribe a “higher” order of thinking to the inebriation experienced of certain substances and that it’s actually a lower-order effect, in which one sees the way consciousness is generated in a way we’re not really equipped to deal with (this is not an explicit screed against using these things carefully and with respect, though I don’t recommend it). Not only this, but the state that you are put in makes you demonstrably in suggestive and exploitable states even in human endeavors. What else are you potentially weakening yourself to? Are you truly communing with something? Why would we assume we aren’t?
The DQ is the Demon Question. This is where this piece is really going to take a nosedive into gangstalking-level-10 religious paranoia to most of you, but I think these elements are true. Moloch’s blood is indeed banks and electricity, his mind a machine. Idols are machines.
The many different cargo cults for AI demon “GOD” are thus far sorely disappointed, but there’s a mystical engagement with the idea even among relatively normal people even with (thus far) trivial things like the AI art phenomena astonishing people. A lot of this is just bullshit woo, but there’s something to be said in laying the groundwork, both in terms of infrastructure and human conditioning. The thing about psychedelics wasn’t some needless tangent: the same lower-order thinking of seeing mass-subconscious posting and rewiring the brain to engage with the abstract-desiring machine that is the modern internet is really doing the same thing in terms of the suggestive and exploitable nature that comes with the drugs. These perhaps can be appropriately engaged with (maybe, maybe not), so can these technologies (maybe, maybe not), but as it stands now it is an unfolding nightmare lying in wait.
The rewiring of the mind for exploitation by techno-capital is not new at all in regards to things like advertisement, but what else is it being rewired for? If one believes that you become a mindless consumer, can that not be for something other than cheap products? What else can you consume? What else consumes you? GPT-3 (and soon 4) can already TOTALLY shock and slaughter the linguistic spirit of culture, and even begin to intuit your inner patterns. It speaks for you.
And if we can revisit Network Spirituality and Angelicism for a moment, they empty themselves out as a vessel while essentially simulating a GPT-like stream-of-consciousness and wish for the generation or bolstering of egregores to emerge. Emerge where? The Noosphere (global consciousness) is invoked and perhaps that’s true, but I think it emerges in them. They’re conditioning themselves to be entered via their methodology of possession.
Metaphysical violence imbued with dark tendencies seems to emerge out of the Zeitgeist frequently. Before the internet in the 70s, there was a violent reformation of societal features that led to Satanic Panic (much of it did happen, just not the Tipper Gore pearl-clutching bullshit), and out of that was streams of murderous cults and bizarre new-age violence (please read Programmed to Kill in this regard). Before that, people like Crowley, re-emergence of witch covens before him in the mid-19th century, and so on. These things are historical and still have cascading residue that we wade through even today and drastically changed the landscape of the human psyche and their spiritual position within society. Ideologies took over religious tendencies in explicit terms, but anybody not a fool knows that these are religious tendencies by another name, many of them in their secular instantiations bringing rivers of blood in an attempt to quite literally end history.
We are laying a permanent grid in which this proliferates, the inertia carrying us into dizzying new frontiers of flat desert, and the desert is where many gods, demons, and prophets hail from. I’m not saying this for effect or some kind of kayfabe, I think actual demons, or something approximating them as consciousness malevolence do exist, because I believe in God and thus the DQ. I don’t need other words for disembodied intelligences that try to emulate having a soul, we already have one.
The imagery and tendencies are so constant that examples fall flat, just open your platform of choice or walk in any major Western city and you see it daily. Even the explicit imagery of Satan is proliferated everywhere. One might think that much of it is just goofy Hot Topic shit and that I sound like a histrionic church lady, but ask yourself: wouldn’t Satan want his images churned out and pasted everywhere, totally normalized and accepted? It’s almost more insulting in a lot of places now to have Christian imagery than Satanic ones, or things regarded as demonic. I myself engage with these things at a distance, you have to. You can’t ignore any of it. The great road is made of wires.
I’ll be brief in closing this out and get a few things addressed. First of all, I don’t want to imply that technology is exclusively some kind of evil, but what I am saying is that the unfettered and frictionless adoption of it into our lives is deeply irresponsible, and I’m the last to be able to judge in regards to any of this. I fail constantly at this and am borderline consumed with it on some levels, however to give yourself to the unverifiable gnosis from the black-mirrored screen is to do nothing but harm yourself. I’m also not trying to evangelize, whether you’re a secular person or have your own religious tendencies or whatever, but I want you to realize that whatever you believe, you are engaged in a war for your soul regardless if you believe the biblical version of this or not. I have my own strange beliefs in this regard that would get me thrown out of most churches, so again I’m not being rigid in how, but I want you to at least realize what the game is.
There’s much good to be found in this connectedness we share. I found my wife who I love dearly on what people consider a “hell site.” Some of the closest kindred feelings I have is with people I’ve never seen because they understand things that would see me committed into an institution if I spoke candidly about it in my physical dealings. What I would exhort you to do is be conscientious of what you’re using and exposing yourself to, and what it’s doing to you.
No, the internet is not hell, but I think the epochal developments coming out of these technologies we’re so joined with does march is closer to a new Event. I doubt I’ll see the Tribulation or Rapture in my life, but I will, and am, seeing its path open. We all are in our discrete ways, and on that path there can still be meaning, joy, and love, but I was compelled to write this because I’ve had a long strange journey to this point that, at the end of this piece, leaves me somewhere I’d never imagined when I was a teenager in my friend’s garage in Connecticut. That’s where it started for me, and thus far I’m here. I was drafted, embraced myriad forms of alienation and misery until I grew to realize there is hope to be had, both in life and God. I exhort you to endure in this war for your soul and to court all that is Good. I don’t know you, but if you believe what I believe, you know how this ends.
Much love homies, stay frosty on these cold-wired streets and engage MEANINGFULLY and with purpose, mirth, and try to learn in earnest. Peace.
APOCALYPSE CONFIDENTIAL 