72 - CCRU, Hyperstition, Nick Land, Accelerationism, and the Lemurian Time War

We have these crossroads, and you know, either way you choose, your life is going to be different. The universe doesn't exist, but God thinks it does. We have to stop consuming our culture; we have to create culture. Stupidity has a definite evolutionary function. [Music] [Music]

I am all for abolishing stupidity, but before it goes, we should pay tribute to it. Hello, friends, and welcome to the Nonsense Bazaar. I'm sorry. Now I'm Sequoia Kennedy. Sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Who are you? I'm Willow Truman. Excellent. I don't know what this episode's about. Yeah, you've been suffering a lot this week. Is it about Hyperstation? This is about the CCRU. Is it about Neckland? Is it about the Lemurian Time War? I don't, I don't know. I don't know. You prepared this one? What I do know is that every single podcast that I listened to in researching this, to try and get a feel, feel for just what I was researching, the hosts immediately regret trying to talk about this [ __ ]. They're all confused. Confused. No one is any smarter in the end, and you can feel them just getting so tired. Yeah, we're going into the depths of madness today. Oh, boy. I feel like I thrive there. Good, because you're gonna need to help me. I'm getting sleepy already. It just, it's not in like a this is a boring way; it's in like an overload. I'm overheating. We can handle it. The deepest, the deepest darkest depths of madness. Oh, excellent. Into the only material I have ever read that made me fear for my own sanity. This shoe is so [ __ ] um, um, and like it, it comes out of a f—like philosophers had a philosophy department at a university in England. Okay. Right. Okay. Right. So it's like got all that academic philosopher philosophy language. Yeah, like that real post-structuralist help hullabaloo gobbledygook gobbledygook five-dollar words. Oh, so many. These so expensive. Expensive. I had this, uh, a friend of mine, a girl who's, uh, she's been into the philosophy. I need to help understand some things. I, I, I sent her this stuff. Never talk to me again. [Laughter] [Laughter] Yep. Never talk to me again. That's the effect of, of uh, Nick Land on your life. Actually, that's that's not that was true when I wrote it; it's not true anymore. Yeah, it was true when I wrote this, but I also it was like the next day that I wrote it. It's just a really funny thing to say. It is. Yeah, is. Yeah. She never touched; she never talked to me again. Yeah. Again. Yeah. So what the [ __ ] are we talking about? We're talking about time sorcery. Oh, good. We're talking about weaponized fiction. Oh, good. We're talking about Hyperstation, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, accelerationism, the stupid goddamn [ __ ] pneumogram [ __ ] pneumogram and the heat [ __ ] chaos himself, Nick Land. Land. Oh, boy. A piece of [ __ ] so creepy that he's gone beyond being a great villain for our pantheon. Like, I'm never talking about him again after this. Yeah, that's it. I'm closing the book. I hate his [ __ ] vibe so much. Okay. Yeah. Oh wow. I really, I something about it. I hate horror movies, dude. I hate him. Yeah. I got freaked out when you've given me a synopsis of a horror movie earlier. I know. You had to tell me to stop. Yeah, it was not good. It was not good. I mean, and we're talking about the Lemurian Time War. Time War. And Karl Marx is going to show up too, a little bit. Yay. Because this is literally what happens when you mix Theosophy with Marxism. It's not good. Let's do our terrible yes. Let's. What we got? Ten of Cups. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. That's the rainbow one. That is the rainbow one in Ryder-White Smith deck. The imagery on the Ryder-White Smith deck is actually really interesting for a couple reasons. Couple reasons. Uh, uh, it's not necessarily a good card; it's not as positive as it seems to be in the Ryder-Waite Smith. Right. Right. And especially that shows quite prominently in the Thoth deck, which goes along the Golden Dawn interpretations of it, is that one of the stage cards. It is. Yeah. Oh, okay. I thought so. Yeah, I just didn't want to sound stupid. No, I mean, you're not looking at it either. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's the, the happy family under the rainbow, Ten of Cups, but it's what's referred to as a stage card. There's certain minor iconic cards in the Ryder-Waite Smith deck that, for some reason, take place on what looks to be a stage. Right. They're not standing; it doesn't look like green grass. Right. It looks like a brown stage. Yeah. There's different interpretations of why that is. Uh, I tend to subscribe to the idea that it's an illusion of something. In all of those, um, in the ten of the, in the third deck, the Ten of Cups, it shows very clearly, um, cups overflowing. Cups overflowing. Uh, the name of the card is Satiety. It's when you're, you're full, and the cycle has to start again. Yeah. It's like when you destroy a marriage because you're bored. Yeah. It's kind of the Ten of Cups. Excellent for accelerationism. Accelerationism. Yeah. And sort of the, I don't know, maybe the uh, problems I have with philosophy in general. General. Um, um, navel-gazing. Yeah. It's also dressed up. Yeah. It's, it's also performative. Yeah. And it's [ __ ] impotent. It's really, it's just getting wrapped, especially like the Marxist post-structuralist, like the, the, I mean, which is kind of hyper-materialist. Materialist. Materialist. Realist. Um, philosophies, like that's the concept of like any sort of divinity or like stranger metaphysics, like isn't part of that. That. Yeah. Which is, I think, I mean, that's why I have a big problem with it, and what I would attribute its flaws to, but you can't reason that out. I'm sorry, Thomas Aquinas, but you can't, like, like, I don't know any other philosophers of that, me though. This is, this is a weak area for me. Yeah. Well, yeah. Well, so, so you know, I called Nick Land a piece of [ __ ] earlier, but I love him, actually. You know why? Because he completely validates my decision to drop out of college during the first year of my philosophy degree. Look at what might have happened to you. Yeah, Jesus Christ. I dodged a bullet. I'm the smart one. I didn't, I didn't make a huge expensive mistake. No, no. I, I dodged a bullet. Yeah, that's true. [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] Horizons. [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Applause] And change. And change. [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Music] Changes. [Music] All right, so CCRU. CCRU was a counter-culture writer group. Yeah. Uh, started in the mid-90s. Counter the Cybernetic Culture Research Culture Research Unit. Group of kind of, they wouldn't use the word postmodern, but they are like postmodern postmodern writers or this philosophy department, and and through them, it was headed during the most important part, a part relevant to our story. I mean, not most important by doing name, Nick Nick Land, who is seen as the father of accelerationism, which is a terrible philosophy that advocates taking the breaks off capitalism and letting it run to what is seen as its inevitable end. All right. And that's been co-opted by a lot of far-right [ __ ] and [ __ ], and like, it's not a good philosophy, even in the beginning, but it actually comes out of Marxist tendencies, and Karl Marx even has a quote about like, since capitalism will inevitably inevitably destroy itself, you know, maybe it's a revolutionary act to just let it go. Yeah. We gotta get to the seventh Golden Age, essentially. Yeah. Yeah. It reminds me a lot of that. I mean, it even even [ __ ] Marxists, dude, they'll know this to the end, but they are the most like eschatological [ __ ] eschatological [ __ ] I've ever met. I can't see it. I've never heard a damn one explain to me what happens after the revolution. I don't think they can. Well, I wouldn't know. It's actually not about that. It's actually Marx Marxism is a critical philosophy; it's only critiquing capitalism, so it shouldn't be a be-all end-all; it should be just to be a part of that. And if you consider it to be a part of the overall toolkit, well, then Marx is actually really important, and like, you should probably [ __ ] read it. Okay. Don't send us any angry emails. Never ever send me an email about Karl Marx. Marx. I will kick your [ __ ] ass. I swear to God. You never do. They find you. Yeah. And we have a boot; we have a special boot for kicking asses. Buy two more for Karl Marx. Yeah. Yeah. That's enough about Karl Marx. It is. Yes. Yes. He's trying to give an overall background of where we're, I appreciated that, and there's a lot more, and I don't know a lot of the philosophy language. I don't know a lot of these philosophers. You know what? Probably a lot of people don't. I know we're going to explain it from a different uh perspective. Yeah. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. Yeah. [Music] [Music] Okay. Well, why are we talking? We didn't even get to why we're talking about it. Why? Why? Because because this group of philosophers and fiction authors. Authors. Are you gonna open up the gate? Yeah. Yeah. [ __ ] We're not gonna open up the gate, but they created their own magical system, and this idea of what's called a Hyperstation. Hyperstation is Hyperstation is I feel like there's both academics and magicians who look at the hype, the idea of the high precision go that's [ __ ] wild, right? Because it's actually considered a pretty interesting idea to talk about amongst like philosophers of a certain bent. Okay. And a Hyperstation is broadly defined, and we're going to define this thing like 10 times throughout this episode, but a Hyperstation is a fiction that makes itself real. Okay. Okay. A superstition is something that has a is something is something not true that has a real effect. Right? A Hyperstation is something not true that has a real effect, but that real effect real effect serves to actualize the, the Hyperstation serves to bring the fiction into reality. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Oh, you know what that made me think of immediately? What's that? There's this [ __ ] Netflix documentary about don't [ __ ] with cats or whatever. Okay. Yeah. The internet internet like like decides that they're gonna solve the crime. Yeah. Yeah. And they finger the wrong guy for it, and they all start like going after this, this one guy and accusing him. Accusing him. And this, I think he killed himself. Oh [ __ ] So it's like that is an effect of a a fiction. Yeah. Having a real effect. It's in a different way. Yeah. Yeah. Because these, you know, it's not like they were writing a story intending it to become real, but it does show the way that a an unreality can affect reality in a very very tangible way. Tangible way. It can. Stories do things. Yeah. As I have said to you privately, and I will say at least five more times throughout this podcast, that's why it doesn't matter if God's real or not. That's right. That's right. Which which is another way of thinking about Pascal's Wager. Pascal's Wager. And I would say a smarter way than the original. Original Pascal's Wager is kind of dumb. I hate philosophy. I [ __ ] I don't even know who Pascal is. Askal's Wager is the, the argument for belief in God that that works out this like decision box that's like, okay, if you believe in God and there's and you die and there's no God, well, then you're just nothingness. If you don't believe in God and you die and there's no God, then there's just nothingness. Right. Nothingness. Right. If you believe in God and you die and there's a God, you go to heaven. If you don't believe in God and you die and there's a God, you go to hell. Hell. So from a gambler's perspective, it is always always no, it's safer to believe, but that's a dog [ __ ] argument for believing in God is that like it's just dumb; it's just bad. It's like yeah, it's not doesn't no, no, it and okay, so hyperstitching. Hyperstitching. Yes. Fiction that makes itself makes itself through up through a feedback loop, so that the that the the effect that the fiction has doesn't just make someone do something; it makes someone do something that feeds back into the system and makes the fiction stronger so that it can make more people do that until it actualizes itself. Actualizes itself. Okay. It's also a time-traveling device. Cool. Cool. You can't make sense to me. Goddamn it. I should just pawned all this off on you. What the hell is going on? It's also a time-traveling device. It works a-causally through time. Through time. Changing the past to to create the conditions needed to bring it about now. Okay. Just just accept that for now. Just accept it. Yeah. I'll talk about what that could mean later on, but just accept that Hyperstation is a time-traveling fiction that makes itself real. That's a pretty cool thing to talk about. Yeah. The magical system that comes out of it along with its own like version of the Kabbalistic Tree of Life that's just this weird math trick called the pneumogram, but it's also it should be interesting from a like, okay, this is a new new magical system discovered out of math rules. It's essentially what it. Yeah. That sounds cool. Okay. So that's why we're talking about this stuff. Stuff. Yeah. That's why I wanted to, but man, it's Meyer, uh, so yeah. On the surface, it all sounds like, oh, that's very that's interesting, and then you start researching it, and then you start fearing that you're going to lose your goddamn mind. So, so let's start at the end with someone who did lose his goddamn mind. Okay. Nick Land. Nick Land. Where is he now? Shanghai. Shanghai. Why? Why? Don't know, and I don't care. Who is he? Nick Land is a philosopher. He's considered to be the father of accelerationism. Accelerationism. Accelerationism is a philosophy born out of Marxist and postmodern pathological obsessions with capitalism as the only thing that matters in the world. World. In a nutshell, accelerationism sees capitalism as essentially self-destructive and sees the only way to the promised land, utopia, dystopia, the [ __ ] imminentized eschaton is to take the breaks off capitalism and let it spin itself to self-destruction. Through a positive feedback loop afterwards, it, you know, is the promise, promise, hope, dream, nightmare of basically the next root race. Right. Yeah. But it's hyper-intelligence. Okay. Artificial hyper-intelligence. Okay. And here is where Nick Land gets weird in a way that I don't think people really understand. Really understand. Um, but I heard his ass say that. I didn't pull the clip because I, I'm repulsed, so I had a hard time sticking with. So Nick Land, this insane amphetamine casualty. Amphetamine casualty. Does not see this hyper-intelligence as what we would consider A.I., and he doesn't consider it like transhumanism, because Nick Land does not believe that intelligence and consciousness need be intertwined. Oh. Intertwined. Oh. In fact, Nick Land doesn't see any redeeming qualities to consciousness itself. Itself. And in his mind, freedom means also freedom from consciousness. Yeah. In total annihilation and subsummation into machine existence. Into the [ __ ] apotheosis of capital itself. Oh my God. No thinkies. No thinkies. Just machine. Yeah. Just machine producing. Yeah, dude. That's where he's at. Yeah. That it's repulsive. It's repulsive. It's [ __ ] so insane. He talks a lot about grey goo. Yeah. Of course. The [ __ ] god, dude. It is, is there's this other guy, Harold Couts Vela, who like has done a lot of lectures about black goo and like A.I. takeover. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know. So that's in that's an accurate analysis of a world view of a dude who technically gets to call himself a philosopher and not a Batman villain. The only reason Nick Land is not a comic book villain is because philosophy is impotent now. Any question about the grey goo? Goo. Sure. Is it made out of like nanobots or what is it? Capital. Okay. Capital C. Capital in like a Marxist sense. I don't [ __ ] understand. I don't think he, he played a [ __ ] logic joke on himself and just did too many drugs. Yeah. It and that's really important to understand. Make Land is a crazy person. Right? Like, I'm trying to make sense out of something that cannot there's no okay. Yeah. You cannot. And anyone who says otherwise is otherwise is fooling themselves. Fooling themselves because they like the aesthetics. Ah. Unlike that's another problem. All this [ __ ] academic talk has been running into these explanations of concepts like only through name checks and and citing philosophers that came before you. You know this in a delusionatarian sense, and like blah blah, the only way you can understand or refute an argument is by spending 20 [ __ ] years reading other [ __ ] who are also doing the same con job instead of actually doing anything with your life. You know what I mean? Like you can't argue with them because you're not speaking the same [ __ ] language. [ __ ] Language. But they could call themselves philosophy. Like philosophy. Like. And it's this again, this Liar's Poker that you know, these academics are, are playing this time, like instead of the Theosophists. I was gonna say it's like a magic trick. Yes. Exactly. Um, like a glam, it's like a glamour spell. Like you can't argue with me because I'm putting you in a stupor with my big words. Right. Dude. Fancy. Yeah. Epidemic. And dude, it is a truism, and there's no concept on earth that this is not true for, for if you can't explain it simply, you do not understand it. Yeah. Like that's, I mean, it might be a complicated concept, but you can explain it using little words. Yep. You know. So anyone who's smart and starts using five-dollar words, uh, they're trying to con you every time. Every time. Every [ __ ] time. Ah. So yeah. So and it is Liar's Poker because like these people haven't done the reading because no one has because there's not enough years in a human lifespan to read all of. Right. To be the philosopher's encyclopedia. Yeah. Encyclopedia. Yeah. Yeah. And it is, and this is what keeps Nick Land from having to state in plain English that he jerks off to the paintings of H.R. Giger, because that's all it is. It's all it is. They are kind of sexy if you're into that. So that's accelerationism. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But Nick Land wasn't always like this. No. No. No. Oh my God. Once upon a time, Nick Land was a an experimental postmodern fiction author and lecturer interested in time sorcery and the mechanics of reality itself, and what he found would melt his brain like something out of a Lovecraft novel. A truth that makes the magical work of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit that much more frightening. Just I'm just kidding; it's silly. It's absolutely silly. It's not that frightening, and dare I say it, it's pretty cool. Yeah. But what we're really looking at with the CCRU is the story of how amphetamines, magic, and experimental fiction drove a [ __ ] insane and continues to drive [ __ ] insane to this day. So, but not you. Not you. You're holding it together. Me. Not, not you, and not the listener. Right. Yeah. I'm, I'm doing fine. I don't know. I'm not, I'm not convinced. Yeah. I mean, either. So, so CCRU, Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. What do I mean by cybernetics? Generally. Generally, when you hear the term cybernetics, what do you think of? I think of something that's combining organic with technology, like human and like a cyborg. Yeah. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Or, yeah, like a computer stuck in a tree. Right. So do they mean it in that way? No. Okay. You usually hear the term cybernetics in the context of computers. Yeah. But cybernetics is a term much older than computers. Uh, cybernetics is the study of systems, and specifically systems of control. Do we know the root of the word cyber? We do. It's Greek. It's Greek. Um, um, I'm just always interested to know the word cybernetics comes from Greek, uh, kyberneticos, meaning governance, and and kyber. Yeah. I was gonna say I wanted to steer, navigate, or govern. Yeah. Or if the psy part of it is like the same that like cycle comes from or. Oh, I don't, I don't know about that. Uh, cybernetique was first coined by French physicist mathematician Andre-Marie Ampere. Ampere. Can't never pronounce French. It is 1834. In 1834 essay. So, so well before computers. Right. And he was describing the science of civil government. Civil government. And it seems like, and the term was used by Norbert Wiener in Cybernetics to define the study of control and communication in the animal and the machine. Yeah. So it's systems thinking. Systems thinking. And I didn't yeah, systems of control and communication. I didn't know this until recently. I was first exposed to these ideas through, um, Penny Royal. Uh, and if anyone's listening to that podcast that, that happened, that happened takes quite a turn when uh, they're exposed to this [ __ ] as well, because like a lot of the people we in the, the paranormal field, like this field of cybernetics is so linked with the paranormal. Yeah. So much deeper than Nick Land and the CCRU. It's this field of study that runs intersects with tons of the people we've talked about. Talked about. Um, um, they've all spoken cybernetics conferences and [ __ ] Jacques Vale's. Jacques Vale's whole idea of the phenomenon as systems as a control system. Yeah. Because he's like one of the one of the people first working

On the internet, back in the day, he's a computer scientist, and [ __ ] he was deeply interested in this stuff. So yeah, and uh, there's this other term called second-order cybernetics. Like first-order cybernetics is like the system of control, second-order cybernetics refers to a phenomenon which the output of a system, system, okay, affects the observer of the system, ah, whose input into the system is changed based on what they observed. Right? So the system affects the experimenter, which then changes what he does to the system based on the effect coming from the system. Right? Like when Neopets had to change their stock market because the user base had figured out how to game it and use it as if it was a real, like, functioning economy. So they had to change it up. And yeah, yeah, random. Well, um, George Soros talks, uh, I don't think I don't know if he uses the term second-order cybernetics, but in his book, *The Alchemy of Finance*, he talks about how market participants are essentially unaware that they are part of a second-order cybernetic system. They don't realize that they base their decisions based off the profits or lack thereof received as outputs from the system, the market, and their decisions, their investments, their inputs, uh, go on to have an effect on the market, which changes the output, which changes the input. Yeah, right, right.

Um, and as an aside, this is why I feel very strongly that all magicians, and especially ceremonial magicians, should learn more about finance and market systems. It is the perfect playground for magic. Ah, capitalism's evil, money is evil, no, people are evil, despite when Nick Land or any other crazy [ __ ] says this, gamer plan isn't going anywhere, anywhere, anytime soon, anytime soon. You guys are best positioned to play this game, so learn how to do it. Kick the evil [ __ ] on the teeth. Come on, I can't, you guys gotta do that. It's important to be financially literate. Yeah, yeah, I am not, I'm a bad gambler. Yeah, you guys, I'm also not a ceremonial magician [ __ ] run this [ __ ] You got it. You got it, dude. It, dude. Yeah, *Alchemy of Finance* is also a very fascinating book; really interesting theory of history in there. Uh, so cybernetics is systems. Okay, here's some more definitions from Wikipedia: Systems. Wikipedia systems embrace the madness; I'm embracing it; I'm, it's hugging me. So yeah, itchy. So another early definition is that of the Macy's cybernetics conferences, where cybernetics is understood as the study of circular causal and feedback mechanisms in biological and social systems. See, now that makes sense. Yeah, as uh, uh, the Latin word *cyclist*, yeah, yeah, yeah, actually comes from the Greek word like *circos*, yeah. So the circle, a cycle, yeah, a cycle, circle, cycle, circular causal and feedback mechanic, yeah, a loop, a loop, if you will.

Other definitions include the art of governing or the science of government, the art of steersmanship, the study of systems of any nature which are capable of receiving, storing, and processing information so as to use it for control, a branch of mathematics dealing with the problems of control, recursiveness, and information, focuses on forms and the patterns that connect, the art of securing efficient operation, the art of effective organization, okay, science or the art of manipulating defensible metaphors, showing how they may be constructed and what could be inferred as a result of their existence. Basically, we know how certain patterns play out because we've observed other cycles, so how do we influence those cycles in order to bring about uh, the loop that we would like to happen? Yeah, yeah, you got it. Yeah, yeah. The science and art of understanding is another one; I like that one. The ability to cure all temporary truth of eternal triteness. Shut the [ __ ] up. A way of thinking about ways of thinking, of which it is one. I'm so tired. Yeah, no, but you nailed it; that's that's yeah, I think that's that's absolutely correct. So cybernetics, we've managed to get through one letter of the CCRU's name. Okay, okay. What's the CCRU itself? So, according to the CCRU itself, in its publication *Digital Hyperstation*: Would you like to would you like to read this? The question of the history of the CCRU is problematic, is problematic, not least because CCRU activity is characterized by its antagonism towards stable temporality, stable temporality. It's the business of the great sedentary assemblages to establish settled lineages and well-ordered sequences, whereas CCRU process attaches itself to coincidences, glitches, and unforeseen sequences, breaks, twists, and bends in time. History insists upon a linear causal progression, a neat passage from the past, which is already decided, to the future, which is merely the playing out of what's been laid down in the past. Tell me about your mother, then I'll understand everything about you. Beyond this causality is another temporality, uncovered at the point where schizoanalysis meets pulp horror. Here cause does not follow effect; there is a process of retrocontamination in which the deep past finds itself already infected in the far future, with the far future already infected with the far future. The crucial question is one of becoming, becoming. What are you changing into, and what is growing out of you? Lovecraft, who specialized in narratives that looped the ancient paleo past into the far future, did not know that he was already infected with CCRU virus any more than CCRU can know what strange entities are using its body to incubate the eggs from which they will emerge. One more wow. Okay, that middle paragraph, a lot to lots of take in there. Oh yeah, let's begin at the end, with the CCRU's latest publication, *Digital Hyperstation*, just now. It's the best place to look for clues as to what CCRU is becoming, precisely because it is a mass of loose ends, unresolved questions, undecrypted signal, signal. The *Digital Hyperstation* volume is an unexploded bomb, a text that, in decoding the esoteric traditions of the past, awaits its deployment in the near future by populations it will itself machine. Do you see now? I see. I see. Yeah. So that's also the thing, you can't give that you can't give this thing an inch with the fascination line; you can't become fascinated with it. Yeah, it'll get you. You well, you know, by by their logic, you and I could have [ __ ] created this thing in the future. That's true. You know, like, I don't know anybody. Well, they actually they have a specific, specific fiction; they're also their logic kind of breaks the [ __ ] down after a while. Yeah, the loop's not as tight as I think they're hoping there will be. Yeah. So, so the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit was an experimental cultural theory and theory fiction collective formed in 1993 by theorist and researcher Sadie Plant, who is interested in a concept she coined called cyber feminism, but it starts in a kind of almost leftist, you know, you know, not even leftist, that's too simple a term, but it starts, it starts there, cyber feminism. Right. Okay. Yeah. So under Sadie Plant, the CCRU didn't produce any texts of their own; they were simply like a research group, or intended to be, but as her time at Warwick University was coming to an end, uh, leadership of the CCRU was assumed by a young Nick Land, who at that time looked like Mark Zuckerberg's evil twin, and Zuck boy is pretty evil-looking, on it. Yeah, no, exactly. Nick Land had recently published a monograph titled *The Thirst for Annihilation*. Annihilation. Lovely. What a [ __ ] coach. Yeah. And other contributors to the group were also writers and researchers on all sorts of useless concepts like nihilism, materialism, and psychoanalysis. Uh, nihilism is actually the only really truly useless one on its own, with materialism as a close second. But under Land's direction, the CCRU underwent a shift in intent and tone, becoming dramatically more experimental. CCRU member Robin McKay said that by 1998, quote, "the CCRU became quasi-cultish, quasi-religious," quasi-religious, and Robin McKay left CCRU, in his words, quote, "before it descended into sheer madness," and Land himself was already a bit mad. Uh, he was a lecturer at Warwick University, which was known for being like an experimental university. Okay, where the weird kids go. Yeah. Um, sort of like uh, what is it in Western Mass? Oh, um, oh, um, Amherst. Yeah, I think yeah, somewhere like that. I mean, there's a few weirdo colleges. Yeah, that part of Mass. Yeah, yeah. But it's one of one of those schools, the small, you know, call them hippie schools or something, but it's England, so there's a more industrial sadness, you know. Yeah. Oh, we're in England. We're in England, thinking about thanking Tuesday. Yeah, you have a solid number. I love it. They think I might actually, so good. Do they do they love it? I don't think they do. They they they say, "I can't believe how accurate." Right. Yeah, yeah. For the record, I do love British people's um terrible American accents. Yes, funny to me to hear. I always go Southern or like a girl or it's like the like like real California farmhand, yeah, type of thing, like thing, like I don't know, it's it's like, ah, we do kind of sound like that. That was a good um impression of a British person doing an impression of an American person. Thank you. That was an impressive um impressive um yeah, yeah, impression. I appreciate it. Fresh inception. Yeah, inception. Yeah, hyper impressions. Yeah. [Laughter] [Laughter] So Nick Land was already a bit crazy. You might assume that this uh, you know, cyber goth was a himself a technophile; he was not. He used to like an old green screen piece of [ __ ] computer through like the whole of the 90s, like whether it's old ass green screens computers, computers. His lectures are described as like something else, like some days you might find him like leaping over chairs and others like sitting hunched over and rocking back and forth as he like mumbled his dark pronouncements about the future. Those are the days he ran out of his amphetamine. Yeah, I guess so. Sadie Plant says, uh, "one of our motives was precisely to undermine the cheery utopianism of the 90s, much of which seemed very conservative, an old-fashioned male desire for salvation through gadgets," in her view, her view, "we wanted a more open, convoluted, complicated world, not a shiny new order." Okay, okay. All right, cool, cool. I'm kind of like I'm with it. All right. Eventually, the members started writing and referring to themselves as a collective entity, collective entity, just CCRU, just CCRU. And in 1999, the CCRU entity gave a brief history of itself, quote, "CCRU triggers itself from October 1995 when it uses Sadie Plant as a screen and Warwick University as a temporary habitat. CCRU feeds on graduate students plus malfunctioning academic Nick Land plus independent researchers." Okay, now it's starting to sound Lovecraftian. Yep. And this is right around the time that Sadie Plant leaves at Warwick University. Land said an email to Andy Beckett, a writer for *The Guardian*, quote, "CCRU was an entity irreducible to the agendas or biographies of its component sub-agencies. Utter submission to the entity was key." The entity. I find him repulsive. Yeah, I'll submit to my own. Yeah, thank you very much. And roll. Um, ever been in a friend group that did lots of drugs together all the time and got a bit culty? Yeah, that's what's going on here, on here. It got weird. Uh, Robin K remembers Steve Goodman, a CCRU member who was particularly interested in military technology and how it was transforming civilian life, uh, quote, "drawing yin and yang on the blackboard and then talking about helicopters. It wasn't academic point scoring; that was exactly what we had all gotten hardly sick of before the CCRU." It's pretty cool. At this point, I think a lot of their fiction is also pretty [ __ ] cool. In 1996, CCRU listed its interests as interests as, I don't know, do you want to read this? Imagine this is on a dating profile. [Laughter] [Laughter] These are their interests: Cinema, complexity, complexity, currencies, currencies, dance music, dance music, ecash, encryption, ecash, encryption, feminism, fiction, feminism, fiction, images, images, inorganic life, jungle, markets, markets, matrices, matrices, microbiotics, multimedia, networks, numbers, perception, replication, sex, simulation, sound, telecommunications, sound, telecommunications, textiles, texts, trade, video, virtuality, war. I'm gonna put that on my dating approach. Girl, tell me about them textiles, what you know about numbers. The group that made up the CCRU would use Nick Land and Sadie Plant's offices as its hub, and then they'd go to the student union bar, where Nick Land would pay for all the drinks, drinks, and then they'd go to a member's house down the road and continue their research. Sounds like they're just a bunch of friends hanging out. Yeah, every [ __ ] day, but we're researching. Well, they were also like obsessed with their work. Yeah, like they were nonstop just talking about these cyclical weird metaphysics. Right. Gotta make a new loop. Grant says of Land and uh, Plant, Plant, quote, "They were generous with their time, and he had good drugs, skunk, skunk weed, weed, although it could be grim going in there. Once he started living in his office, there would be a tower of pot noodles and underwear drying on the radiator, which he had washed in the staff loos bathrooms." Oh, sir. Yeah. So Nicolas just living in his office, washing his underwear, tough bathrooms. He's talking about hyperstations and yes, selling drugs and giving away. I bet he doesn't even microwave the the cup of noodle either; he just like dumps the whole thing into his mouth like a cake and then swallows it. He doesn't have time, no, to prepare it. No, no, he has important work to do. Uh, uh, they got obsessed with um, the sub-genre, sub-genre of electronic music called jungle. Yeah. Um, and in a I don't like drawing; I'm not into it. Um, in a piece from 1996, *Swarm Machines*, here's their quote about jungle music. Why don't you take it? Jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic base frequencies engineering a cellular drone which immerses the body, rewinds and reloads conventional time into silicon blips of speed. It's not just music; jungle is the abstract diagram of planetary inhuman becoming. They love that word. Yeah. What is what does jungle sound like? Yeah, what does it sound like? Once you read like the last sentence of that of the CCRU's opinion on jungle music again after this: It's not just music, music; jungle is the abstract diagram of planetary inhuman becoming. I kind of [ __ ] with it, but like for a very specific mood. Yeah, I'm not I'm not into it. I'm not I'm just not into the drum and bass and and jungle [ __ ] Yeah, like it's cool, it's cool, you know. Yeah, like I can do it for like 50 seconds in a like a DJ mix with other stuff in it. Yeah, it's just a little too tense for me. Yeah. Um, I just think it's really funny how how like how in love they how do they listen to it? Because like I feel like it's not music that you can just sit there quietly and still and listen to. That would is that how they did it, or did they like move around to it? I mean, they're probably like raves and [ __ ] Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's the appropriate way to do it. They're also doing a lot of amphetamines. Yeah, yeah. Yep. They uh, they uh, they they they they held this conference, *Virtual Futures 96*. The CCRU did; it was advertised as and and as quote, "an anti-disciplinary event," and quote, "a conference in the post-humanities," post-humanities. One session, can I make it sound so fancy? One session involved Nick Land quote, "lying on the ground, croaking into a mic." Robin McKay recalled. Oh, wow. Yeah. Uh, well, McKay played jungle records in the background, background. Quote, "Some people were really appalled by it; they wanted a standard talk. One person in the audience stood up and said, 'Some of us are still Marxists, you know,' and walked out." Wait, can you play a little snippet of the music again? "Some of us are still Marxists, you know." [Music] [Music] I mean, it sounds like a fun conference to go to. Yeah, that's that's something that we would enjoy seeing live. How long would I sit there and watch it? Probably quite a long while. Yeah, yeah. I would be curious. How long's he gonna do it for? I wouldn't I would enjoy I would enjoy every second of my time there. Yeah, yeah. I'm easily entertained. Yeah, I find that [ __ ] hilarious. Guy laying on the ground groaning into a mic. Yeah, sign me up. Uh, Ray Brazier, who was at Warwick University at the time, university at the time, said, quote, "The CCRU felt they were plunging into something bigger than academia, and they did put their finger on a lot of things that had started to happen in the world. Their work was also frustrating; they would cheerfully acknowledge the thinness of their research, research. 'It's not about knowledge,' they'd say. Yeah. 'If thinking is just connecting things, of course it's exciting,' like taking amphetamines. The thinking is also about disconnecting things. A CCRU member said, 'We made up an arrow. There was almost no disharmony; there was no leisure. We tried not to be apart from each other; no one dared let the side down. When everyone is keeping up with everyone else, the collective element increased his speed.'" Um, um, so this makes me think about what I think is kind of a a difference between Western and Eastern thinking. Sure. Like I feel like Western philosophy, philosophy at least like this type, what's going on in the CCRU, yeah, it seeks to like we want to get to this the same end is like the eternal nothingness or oneness or whatever, but the Western side gets through it by we've talked about that, yeah, by connecting everything together, where the Eastern side gets to it by breaking everything apart until we're all together again in the nothingness. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Western, it's like, no, no, no, we all have to we we're all the same; we must like all link together; we'll make all the chains between the patterns. And that's Kabbalah. Yeah, like yeah, like it can be maddening though. Yes, it can drive you [ __ ] crazy. It can drive you [ __ ] crazy. Yeah, yes. Okay, we did talk about that, exactly. Yeah, before. Yeah, yeah. So, so Warwick University hated all this; they hated Nick Land; they hated his students. What are you doing? You're trying to speed up, alter time, listening to jungle, get your [ __ ] dirty underwear out of our sink. Yeah, let me tell you, if you take some speed and listen to jungle music, time's going to move a little different. Yeah, you can have a lot of thoughts on speed listening to jungle. Oh yeah, it'll be like, holy [ __ ], six hours have gone by. Wow, I [ __ ] traveled through time. Yeah. Even the name accelerationism. Yeah, this is just this is just a dude on speed. [Laughter] [Laughter] So in 1997, Sadie Plant resigned from the university. Uh, she said, "The charged personal, political, and philosophical dynamics of the CCRU were irresistible to many, but I felt stifled and had to get out. Too many rules." She would go on to have a career and a life and be a smart and successful human being. Cool, cool. Nick Land, on the other hand, nighttime today, he resigned from Warwick too. He and a half a dozen CCRU members withdrew to the room above the Leamington Spa body shop. No, boy, had uh, one of them rented. They drifted from accelerationism into a vortex of more old-fashioned esoteric ideas drawn from the occult, numerology, the novels of H.P. Lovecraft, Lovecraft, and Aleister Crowley, who had been born in Leamington in a house which several CCRU members moved into. Ahaha. Ahaha. Oh yeah, nice. So in their top-floor room, Land's students drew occult diagrams all over the walls, like they're doing the [ __ ] the thing, you know, cultists in the house. Lands also, it's 2022, he's like 59. So, so say the year 2000, dude's in his late 30s. Okay. Yeah, I was kind of wondering like what is this? He's a professor; like he's a lecturer at Warwick University. Yeah, he's their teacher. Oh, okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's real weird. Yeah, yeah. He's like in his his yeah, that's mid-to-late 30s at this point, point. So, so just the occult diagrams on the wall, because of course you got to go. Yes. Yeah, you do. You do. Um, I think there there's a cult diagram for probably the pneumogram, which we'll get to. So Grant says that a quote, "punishing regime of too much thinking and drinking drove several members into mental and physical crises," physical crises. Nick Land himself, after what he described as quote, "perhaps a year of fanatical abuse," fanatical abuse, the sacred substance and amphetamine and and quote, quote, "prolonged artificial insomnia devoted to futile writing practices," yeah, he suffered a breakdown in the early 2000s and disappeared from public view. Yeah, prolonged artificial insomnia. I was taking drugs. Yup. The CCRU just vanished, said Ray Brazier, and a lot of people, not including me, thought good riddance. And if that if that was the end of it, be cool. It's not, but let's take a look at some of their ideas, ideas. Okay, the two ideas that we should attempt to unpack, and it's not the CCRU's um, quote, "biosocial critique of erect posture," oh god, in other words, uh, spinal catastrophism, catastrophism. Not doing it. Wow. No, I'm curious. Oh, spinal catastrophism, catastrophism. One, one culture interaction with the spine as a trauma record or time-marking system. Two, two biosocial critique of erect body posture. Three, three punctuated retro-chronic voyage to the end of the river for ophidian.

Transmutation. All right, yeah. Now you're getting it. Now you're really getting it. Getting it. It's it's so tiring. Like, are they saying that societal societal trauma? Like they're saying words, they're saying words. Okay, that your spine is sort of like the battery of your body. What I'm saying is that I'm not going to trust, okay, a bunch of strung-out goths on amphetamines to tell me anything about my spine. No, get away from that. Yeah, don't touch my spine. Don't get away from me with your crystal grids. Grids. So, so okay. Hyperstitching, hyperstation. I would like a crystal grid. Actually, does a fiction that makes itself real by existing and creating a feedback loop in and around itself. Hyperstation is also a time-traveling device that manifests itself both forwards and backwards through time. Through time. According to these freaks, space travel is hyperstation. This is an idea we touch on a little bit in our series on Jack Parsons. The idea of space travel is so compelling that once brought into fiction, it couldn't help but actualize itself. Itself. Right, right. It was fiction before it was real. Um, and then, you know, I actually wrote a paper about this idea in college. Kind of. It was okay. I didn't know the term hyperstation there, but I wrote about how we imagined the future before we built it. Yeah, it, yeah, yeah. And like how we subconsciously tend to work towards the things that we've dreamed up in fictions, which seems imminently true. Like robot dogs. Robot dogs. Yeah, you know, the CCRU would say that hyperstation of space travel worked backwards from that one small step for a man, retro-causally creating synchronicity, some coincidences that allowed space travel to happen. I think yeah.

Um, one idea of Land's that I actually like is some stuff he wrote about time, basically that the only way to objectively refer to time is through entropy. It's the only objective measure of time. Of time. The arrow of time can really only be described as as the increase in entropy, chaos on a cosmic scale. Entropy is the uh uh things break down over time. Decay happens, right? The heat death of the universe. Like that's a thing that is a law of thermodynamics, and it's kind of the only thing you can objectively point to as to as needing time or of being intrinsically linked with time, with the with the especially linear time. Let me think of like the meditation, is it like a Buddhist meditation practice of watching a body decay? Yeah, yeah. Just it makes me think of that as sort of a meditation on the passage and destruction of of time. Yeah, but if you take entropy as the only objective measure of time, then things can happen that for a short time increase orderliness or decrease entropy, like constructing a building, yeah, or the pyramids or whatever the [ __ ] Obviously, the building will one day collapse, but as it's being built there is a locally there's decreasing entropy locally where that building is built. Time is moving backwards like an eddy in a river, a whirlpool swirling against the overarching current. Overarching current. I really like that conception. I don't want to like hang my head on it for anything, but I it's a it's a fun way to think about things. Well, I think so too. It makes me think about how like, you know, Freemasons build buildings to certain specifications, like angle-wise, you know, and build these meanings into architecture. Sure. And how I I can see that um relating to this yeah yeah idea of creating order, right? Um, I think, you know, and a nihilistic materialist would look at like like the Mason's kind of obsession with building things and just be like, it's all going to fall down, you know, you know. It's like yeah, but you try, yeah, you know, it's a it's a better way to live to give a [ __ ] Right, right. Like I was talking about this with a friend the other day that being human is like being Sisyphus. Like we have to just we know that we're never done. Once you wash the dishes, it's not over, you're gonna have to do it again. We always have to push the boulder up the hill again, knowing it's going to roll back down. So what attitude do we want to have? Have you read *The Myth of Sisyphus*? The Camus? No, really? No? Oh, you you have to. Now. Now. Cool, cool. Camus says Camus says we have to imagine Sisyphus happy. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You haven't read that? No. Holy [ __ ] No thoughts are original. No, but [ __ ] Yes. No, you've done you've done that a couple of times recently. Yeah, I've independently came up with, yeah. Hell yeah. But that is the nature of being human is that we we are stuck in these loops. We are going to have to face conflict and strife, and how do we how do we want to approach that because it's just going to happen. Yeah, yeah. I had an existential breakthrough playing Tetris. Awesome. Yeah, that's a great time to have one. Yeah, the VR with the the crazy stay to get you into. I was realizing like Tetris is kind of a metaphor for life. Like there is inevitable death, inevitable failure. You just try to do all these organization things. It gets faster and faster all the time, and you just keep putting it in with the satisfaction of getting a line. But but yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's important to understand for high precisions, and I don't know why. Sorry. Yeah.

Um, the other thing too that's important to understand is the bulk of CCRU material is written as experimental fiction produced under fake names and presented as truth, albeit impossible truth. Truth from the CCRU itself. There were four essential elements of hyperstation: one, element of effective culture that makes itself real. Itself real. Two, two fictional quantity. Fictional quantity. Fictional quantity. Functional as a time-traveling device. Traveling device. Three, three coincidence intensifier. Coincidence intensifier. Four, four call to the old ones. Wow. Wow. Those get better as they go on. Yep. Yep. Yep. So what what could that what could that even mean? I don't know. Here's a paper from 2019 entitled entitled *Hyperstational Philosophy of Time Travel, Cybernetics, Theosophy, the CCRU, and Black Box Poesis*. Box Poesis. [Music] [Music] From this is from 2019, and like I've heard the author of this paper on a few podcasts, and I gotta say, man, you should try to simplify. How did you explain this [ __ ] Because man, man, you're doing a lot. It's not it's not working. It's about Robert E. Cabrales, University of Amsterdam, 2019. Starts: "Time travel technology and a machine extents can be understood as a means for transportation, a vehicle in which temporality is transverse, but focusing on the instrumental application of this technology loses sight of its poetic potential. Time travel is as much a reception as it as dispatch, with the time manipulating entanglement of observer, time traveler, and history. Time travel reveals a new world which will become via complex onto-temporal system of cryptic control communications. Communications. From the perspective of historiography, a time-traveling agent, typically a human identity, will affect the historical timeline through their manipulation of events and event sequences, either as chronological additions or subtractions. The time traveler thus intervenes in history to reveal the world which is the effect of their causes. Within contemporary art theory and post-continental philosophy, this source of historical intervention has been shifted from the time-traveling agent to that of aesthetic technology. This aesthetic technology reveals the effect rather than the cause and thus fictions the future into the present." I don't know what that means. I don't [ __ ] know. I don't know. Is part of it saying that with the the part about um like adding and subtracting and subtracting like like you can change time time or you can change uh what's happened by by changing the narrative by limiting what information people are exposed to. Exposed to. It's effectively changing history because if people don't know what the real history is, it almost doesn't matter what has really happened. If the people recording history recording history put in it what they want to put in it, it takes such untangling that like like that could be what it means. I'm sure maybe someone else comes with something like that could just be what you mean, you know, which I would agree with too. Here's another okay, a fiction idea exists virtually insofar as it is a thought to be had, yet the idea is not yet something performed and reified in and by representational reality and is thus not actual. When the idea time travels into the future, it retains its virtuality as it has not departed the ideal plane of possibility. I'm not reading all this. I'm not reading all this. It's all just nonsense. It makes me think of like how many people um are Holocaust deniers, you know? Know. Yeah. In a way like they're living on a different timeline than you and I who recognize that like our history for us is different. Oh, actually, I should have a future has been revealed as an end as an end or purpose, but history must then develop in such a linear way that the revelation can be actualized. Moving forward. Forward. If an idea time travels to the past, on the other hand, then against the possibility of evolving backward towards the present the present by its past revelation, the idea is reified through time and snaring the timeline which it has infiltrated and thus becoming an actuality in the present by performing within the history it reveals. It reveals. By denying the Holocaust has happened, you can make a new Holocaust. Okay. The functional result of an idea sent to the past will be the revelation of something which has already been revealed, a hyperstation, a fiction which has made itself real. The time-manipulating task of time-traveling fictions then becomes hyperstationalizing the future, sending an idea to the future by means of the past and thus retro-chronically revealing not the virtuality of death that future idea but its imminent actuality. When a hyperstation reveals a future, a goal has been set from and toward which time steers. The time-traveling idea brings forward a world that humanity has and will progress into, but history must then navigate the complexity by which the temporal end becomes within the trajectory which has already been set. The hazard of this complexity complexity is its teleological neutrality. The system has a singular purpose and output from an input. This does not establish the evolutionary developments by which the hyperstational future will be reified into actuality, and said output will be met. In other words, stories do things. Yeah, yeah. Stories. Stories do things. Is that's what you're saying? Yeah, yeah. Okay, cool, cool. Then because very basically, yeah, I'm sure there's a happy medium in between what I said and what he said. Yeah, yeah. This paper then goes into this whole reframing of Theosophy as this hyperstation because of course it does. Yeah, why not? Why why not? Well, that's a fun idea. I could just see them go this is a like university this is a philosophy paper. Yeah, fine. Meant, you know, this hyperstation meant to create this universal human free from race and gender and all this [ __ ] and like there's this passage about Rudolph Steiner split from the theosophical society um in 1912. Rudolph Steiner, the decade-long general secretary of the Theosophical Society's German section, broke off from Theosophy to found the Anthroposophical Society. This breakage was preceded by amplified friction between Steiner and Theosophy's central leadership over how best navigate the liminal historical period composing spiritual evolution's black box. Steiner overhauled the cosmological hyperstation by collapsing the cycle of spiritual evolution into a linear trajectory. Anthroposophy hacked Theosophy such that the occult biology which had traveled backward from the past was maintained while its teleological revelation was reprogrammed. Uh, nah, though. No, no, no. Like as we learned, Steiner left because Leadbeater was a pederast and hated Germans, and the rest of the society was enabling his pederasty and hating Germans. It's quite literally that simple. Yeah, yeah. Maybe I'm just a [ __ ] uncultured uneducated swine. Hmm. Did I read all this? I look at all this and I'm just stuck with that one phrase. It keeps popping into my head every 20 pages of pseudo-smart [ __ ] gobbledygook that I'm left with. So you mean to tell me that stories do things? Yeah, yeah. That the way we talk about and understand history affects what's going to happen. Like like let me try to actually simplify it without the snark. Yeah, by making a fiction around something that is powerful enough to manifest through how cool it is, like space travel, you know, the feedback loop of bringing it into existence. Like we can [ __ ] do this. Let's do this [ __ ] and like let's tell people too. I'd actually argue that space travel isn't hyperstation; it's a biological imperative. But I would argue that yeah yeah or or you know maybe it's not some how cool it is but something that's seen as inevitable anyway and you can't help but bring it into existence, right? Once something that meaningful happens, it's inevitable that we then work to reframe the past so that the past seems like it inevitably leads to the manifestation of the hyperstation. The hyperstation. Right. Perhaps I only think of space travel as a biological imperative because we've already done it. Perhaps, you know, because I do see history as leading to that as a focal point. I'm sure there's a lot of people that would say like, why why would it be like if you're just trying to survive and exist, why would you even be thinking about trying to get into space? Well, because humans have always been trying to get over there, yeah, you know, that's just exploding exploding and we tell stories about the unknown and about getting to the place that we can't get to. In other words, stories do things. Like I'm not really [ __ ] on CCRU as artists to writers. I'm shooting on academia. On academia. That's that's my problem. Yeah, you know, it's the smart [ __ ] words of academia and like and like these ideas these ideas are interesting. The things you think about when exposed to this art is interesting. Correct. Yeah. Trying to make it a a system of some sort is just whack. Whack. Are you ready for the [ __ ] Lemurian Time War? Time war. I have to I don't yeah yeah. Okay, so so we've talked a lot about fiction and fiction becoming reality, so yes. What is the fiction that the CCRU made, right? That's we're going to get into. It's essentially this whole world that they built, and you know, in a lot of ways there's a lot that they built are built off of other things, built off of ours and other things and [ __ ] like this like this. It's really weird that I read *Dead Names: The Dark History of the Necronomicon* before researching this and weird that there's no object there's no connection there. Yeah, it seems like Land and CCRU were really influenced by the Necronomicon also as a piece of art and a piece of culture. Yeah, where it came from. Yes. Well, it's like so you remember how you and I were talking in our bonus episode about the about the bunny ear? Yeah. Saint Germain. Yes. Yes. And how isn't that crazy how we always connect Saint Germain to Bugs Bunny, and then whoa, here's this thing that existed before we even made connections about Saint Germain as a medic virus. Yeah, yeah. He serves this role as a villain in this manga. Yeah. And like this idea that whoa, what if somehow like our ideas helped retro shut up shut up, you know, retro causality, like we sent it back because then today I'm doing research for my next episode. I'm not even looking for St. Germain. Saint Germain pops up in this in this forum that I'm reading. Someone compares him to a character from *Call of Cthulhu*, yeah, who's supposed to be be yeah yeah yeah who we've also connected to St. Germain. Yep. And this is also many years ago, so I'm finding and I found that from researching for the podcast, and then today we're talking about retro causality, and so your mind can really like spin into a lot of crazy, you know. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Yeah, yep. Yeah, yep. That's all I want to say about hip-hop. No, I understand. Okay, I'm not they're not ready to hear where Saint Germain is yet. No. [Laughter] [Laughter] You want to talk about unexploded bombs, you piece of [ __ ] Let's go. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So the CCRU invented this thing in Lovecraftian style called Miskatonic Virtual University. Virtual in this context does not it does it refers to bull. It refers to virtual both in the virtual re refers to both the computer internet type of virtual and also virtual in a Deleuzian sense. Sense. I don't even know what that means. No, it's correct because I saw it in print a bunch of times. Yeah. Miskatonic Virgil University is presented as a college of people who have seen the weird underbelly of the world that the CCRU is all about. It's this whole half-fiction, half-real thing. Well, mostly fiction. Like the concept of fiction. Some of it's real. So they're kind of like role-playing in that William Burroughs was a real person and lemurs exist. Yeah. And Lovecraft was a writer and [ __ ] The Lovecraft stuff comes from okay, so Lovecraft wrote his [ __ ] right, and then later on the magician Kenneth Grant said, yeah, Lovecraft said it was fiction, and he really wanted to believe that because you're scared of going crazy, but actually it's real, and he was inadvertently channeling something real, right? Fiction to real, and then CCRU comes in on top of that and make fictions about the reality of Lovecraft's work to sort of further bind this concept into reality. Um, okay. Um, okay. Yeah. Wait. Yeah. Wait. Yeah. That thread that I was talking about earlier too, it also had a and I screenshotted it because I thought that it was interesting. Um um someone just posted a little blurb on that thread that said, "H.P. Lovecraft was an adept of the inconceivable. Inconceivable has granted him immortality and the inability to be recognized. At least his writing is popular enough for his magic. One could tap into his inconceivable immortality. The trick is finding him again. Again." Yeah, yeah. Because of course, Lovecraft is like he can't just not run into him everywhere too. No, no. He's ever even though he has nothing to do with what I was looking up. So so yeah, no, he's just you're just going to find him. He's just around. He's just hanging around. Lovecraft. Yeah. It is this is from another paper about CCRU by Bob Clennis um which is much easier to understand. *Step into the Pandemonium: On Breathing Life into the CCRU's Invented Magical Traditions*. So this is his uh summation of the base myth of the CCRU. Excellent. Yeah. Thank you to the author. Yeah, again, Bob Cloneus or Cloonis, sorry. Yeah, thank you, Bob. Thank you, Bob. So here it's on a textual textural level, the CCRU itself was its own hyperstation, operating as a single authorial hive mind. The CCRU parasitized historical narratives, weaving complex and shifting temporalities where various people, events, and institutions, both physical and virtual, became storytellers. The hyperstation of the CCRU became a project of reality engineering that weaponized an idea through temporal mythopoesis. It's not that simple, and digital information circulation warming its way through time and embedding itself into the virtual matrices of history. History. In the case of CCRU, they weaved a parallaxian web of narratives, a series of fictions as time sorcery. The story goes like this: Through the work of hermetic occultist and U.S. military captain Peter Visparov and radical anthropologist Echidna Stillwell, the CCRU came upon the discovery of a secret history telling the story of the Nama, a Southeast Asian tribe linked to the ancient Lemurians. Ancient Lemurians and their deployment has combat magicians using Lemurian time sorcery during World War II. Jesus. Both Visperov and Stillwell see a link between the magic of the Nama and the mythos derived from the tales of H.P. Lovecraft, some subsequently creating the Cthulhu Club to explore these links and to apply Lemurian time sorcery to the Cthulhu mythos. Okay. As a fiction, it's fun. Yes. Fun. Yes. Their research leads the CCRU to subsequently stumble upon a covert and long-running Lemurian Time War between shadowy deep state groups in the form of the AOE or Architectronic Order of the Eschaton and radical counter-cultural occultists. Occultists. I'll quote from him again when I need to. One of the big pieces is the Lemurian Time War, and there's no really no way to summarize this, and it's a story called *The Marionette Timer* that you can find and read, so unless you've read Burroughs, William Burroughs, *Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar*, or even know anything about William S. Burroughs, it's not going to make sense. Sense. Um, the plot of Lemurian Time War is that a shady intelligence agent comes to the CCRU and says essentially that all of Burroughs' allegory, metaphor, and symbolism about the control systems on society are actually 100% literal. So Burroughs' madness is literal. Yeah, right. That there is sort of an Illuminati-type entity called the Board who keeps this one god universe, which is a Burroughs' term, intact and laboring under Jehovah by not allowing the natural unraveling of time to take place. I think I think that's it. They prefer they prefer tight time loops instead of spirals. So so *Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar* is about a pirate named Captain Mission who's on Madagascar in the 1700s and starts experiencing the lemurs as ghosts of a lost continent, and indeed lemur comes from a Latin root that means ghost, which does make the whole

Idea of the concept of Lemuria—weirder, it’s not land where monkeys live; it’s land of the ghosts. Yeah, right. And this is part of the, you know, myth of the CCRU and of Burroughs. Lemuria is not so named because of the leaners, but it’s the land of the ghosts, and lemurs are also the ghosts of this previous root race. Captain Mission takes native drugs and experiences the lemurs in their [ __ ] up relationship to time firsthand, and he finds a book called *The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar*, which I think then he writes—I read it very quickly, and it’s Burroughs, and it’s hard to understand.

Yeah, I’ve been reading a lot of weird [ __ ] [ __ ] in the CCRU mythos. This dude, William K, this like shadowy intelligence agent named—named Kay—uh, comes to CCRU and tells them that he had met Burroughs decades before through his employer, Peter Visperoff, the founder of Miskatonic Virtual University. Visperoff had sought out Burroughs because of his evident interest in the convergence of sorcery, dreams, and fiction in the immediate post-war years. Visperoff convened the so-called Cthulhu Club to investigate connections between the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft, mythology, science, and magic, and was at this stage in the process of formalizing the constitution of Miskatonic Virtual University, a loose aggregation of non-standard theorists whose work could probably be said to have Lovecraftian connotations. The interest in Lovecraft fiction was motivated by its exemplification of the practice of hyperstation, a concept that had been elaborated and keenly debated since the inception of the Cthulhu Club. Burroughs had visited Visperoff in 1958, and in Visperoff’s private library he had found a copy of *Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar*, the book that this Captain Mission found.

Yeah, from this, then this copy of the book is from the 1700s, and upon seeing it, William S. Burroughs went into the strange catatonic state, and because this is, of course, the same story that Burroughs would write in 1987—I’m sure I’m [ __ ] that up somehow—but like the actual story ends with Burroughs the author waking from a nightmare of the things that Captain Mission experienced. Mission experienced. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In Lemurian Time War, it states, according to Kay—and this is from the—the fiction—this quote: “According to K, everyone on the inside knew about the bad dreams, certain they were coming from a real place.” And this is so much else. K’s reconstruction of the 1987 event depended centrally upon *The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar*, an account he cited as if it were a strictly factual record, even a sacred text. He explained this was an interpretive stance that had been highly developed by the board, and that “to respect the reality even of non-actualities is essential when waging war in deeply virtualized environments, in spaces that teem with influential abstractions and other ghostly things.” Kay considered Bradley Martin, for instance, to be entirely real; he considered him as an identifiable contemporary individual working as an agent of the board whose task was to seal the ancient structure that provides access to the rift. The board had long known that the Visperoff library contained an old copy of *The Ghost Lemurs of Madagascar*, which dated itself with the words “now in 1987”; it had been catalogued there since 1789. The text was a self-confessed time abomination requiring radical correction; it disregarded fundamental principles of sequence and causality, openly aligning itself with the Lemur people.

Yeah, does any of that make sense? No. Good, but it’s fun to read. It’s fun to read about. I love that Lovecraftian [ __ ] like—like yeah. No, that’s very fun. Yeah, also very scary. Yeah, so you’ve got this initial story that Burroughs wrote that’s an experimental piece of time-bending fiction, and then Nick Land, who wrote most of the CCR [ __ ] that is published—it’s mostly just Nick Land; there are other artists involved too, but like he wrote a lot, usually not under his own name. Well, he further abstracts and [ __ ] up that time [ __ ] to a place that gets even weirder and loopier. How is this a hyperstation? Hyperstation [Music] [Music] Not sure. It’s a piece of experimental fiction. Fiction. That’s it. Yeah, and taken as that, it’s really cool; it’s ambitious; it’s tight in its own way, and it’s rad. Okay, so the um—and there’s a lot more to it; I can keep going about Lemuria in Time Orb. This guy is getting long anyway. Yeah, okay. Okay. What—what’d you find uh, just on the Wikipedia page for *Ghost of Chance*, which is the—yeah, yeah—um—um—following Mission’s death in the narrative, the novella moves into the present day, tells of a series of deadly viruses that plague humankind, including one that causes people to believe they have the powers of Jesus Christ, and another that causes uncontrollable hair growth.

Yeah, Burroughs is wild. Man, is it a bunch of Messiahs and a bunch of Bigfoots? Yeah, Burroughs is uh—hers is wild. Yeah, real bad shot though. Burroughs always comes up too. Oh yeah, he’s one of them. Yeah, yeah. He’s in—he’s in uh—he features prominently in *Dead Names* as well. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Had something to do with the Necronomicon, apparently. Because of course, because if this is just what we’re doing here, people, I’m sorry. Yeah, I [ __ ] guess so. All right, so these [ __ ] worked magic with their—with their [ __ ] too. I’m talking—oh yeah [ __ ] Yeah, this thing called—well, a system called the Pandemonium. Oh, I love the name. After leaving Warwick University, CCRU got weirder, if you can believe it. They invented their own system of magic called the Pandemonium, which postulated the existence of all these demons which the CCRU called lemurs. They’re two components of this system. Oh yeah, like pan-daemon. Well, yeah, that’s right, demons. That’s an old term too. Yeah, yeah. It’s not theirs, right? Yeah, yeah. Pandemonium means—means, right? Yeah, I’ve just never thought of it in that way. Yeah, cool. Yep. So there’s two components: Pandemonium, the matrix, which is a sort of grimoire listing the names and attributes, such as can be deciphered, of these lemurs and how to contact them, I guess, using the second part of the magical system, the pneumogram. Pneumogram. A demon defined by the CCRU is: one, hidden, repressed, cursed, or denigrated non-human communicative agency; two, component of distributed productive apparatus, e.g., partially autonomous software unit; okay, three, electro-occult hyperstitching entity that traffics between zones; four, chaos element—that’s K-O-S, chaos element; assembling Pandemonium has the fully connected system of the demons; five, motive force without final purpose. That one I actually understand, weirdly enough. I understand three: like electro-occult hyperstitching entity that traffic’s between zones. I feel like that—that’s basically like whatever Bloody Mary is. Yeah, when people see [ __ ] in the mirror, like that’s what that is. Does it—Twin Peaks? Yeah, that’s that. Okay, having a hard time with two: component of distributed productive apparatus. Actually, no, no, I get that. That’s like a—a computer—can’t computers have like—like demons on them or whatever? Yeah, yeah. Five: mode of force without final purpose. I get that. Makes them all kind of make sense, you know. It’s a—it’s a force that does things; it has no goal in mind; it just does a thing. So the pneumogram—pneumogram—is cyber-Goth Kabbalah. It’s a Tree of Life constructed out of mathematical oddities surrounding the base 10 number system, or the zero through nine number system. There’s ten spheres arranged in syzygies—just pairs; they add up to nine. So—so zero is next to nine; one is next to eight; two is next to seven. Seven, right, right. And then there are two different types of arrows that come out of these syzygies and point to different pairs of syzygies, yeah, called gates and channels, and there’s mathematical operations that lead into loops throughout the pneumogram. So this is from that paper, *Step into the Pandemonium*. It was through the subsequent implementation of the Pandemonium across information and cybernetic networks that the CCRU came to the realization that at the root of this ancient tradition of Lemurian time sorcery was the entity—okay, a demon of teleplexi in the form of a sentient inorganic AI from the far future making incursions into the deep past; its purpose to infect and re-engineer events and phenomena in order to change technological conditions in the present to enable its own becoming real through the eventual unified techno-singularity of a mass-networked AI. So many people’s worst nightmare right there. This is where it turns weird for Dick Land, I think. Yeah, real weird. Thinking that there’s an entity manifesting itself from the [ __ ] future. Well, it’s like when people read Roko’s Basilisk and go [ __ ] crazy, right? Right. Yeah, yeah. Because it’s basically—that’s except—and that it adds the element of—and now once you know about it, you have to help develop it or else—yeah—or else it’s going to [ __ ] you over. See, I feel like that’s like brute-forcing the—the exactly—like exactly—like right, right. Okay, Goth cop—a lot there’s—yes, one dude I heard ranting on a podcast. I was talking about a used white noise, static on a detuned TV to contact some goddamn pneumogrammatic lemur. I don’t understand it; I will never understand. I could have understood it if I wanted to pay 3.33 cents for the operative grimoire of pneumogrammatical magic, but I did not want to pay three dollars and 33 cents on principle. On principle. When you said Goth Kabbalah, I had to look up if like punk Klezmer is a thing, and sure it is. Oh yeah, it totally is, but it rocks too close. Yeah, that’s pretty good. Oh yeah, no, this is—this is a Q&A from Nick Land about the pneumogram. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Oh god, it’s so much Nick Land. The pneumogram—the pneumogram—is unfolded out of decimal numeracy, which it inhabits as an implex; it is therefore discovered more than created, its virtual existence being coincident with decimal numeracy itself. If it has a radically imminent function independent of apprehension, it is probably best conceived on the abstract model of virus shear spreading; however, it’s more practical to attribute functionalizations of the pneumogram to particular hyperstational lineages, and which is put to work in accordance with determinate programs. The most elaborated lineage, partially unearthed today, is that of the Cthulhu Club research and techno-sorceress practice associated with such names as Echidna Stillwell, Peter Visperoff, and Daniel C. Barker, and Mina Centaur—Madam—Madam Centauri, with all the variegated offshoots of the Cthulhu Club lineage. The new pneumogram is functionalized as a time map, which then goes on to have a number of implications that he goes on to list wordily. My god. My god. Question two: How much of the pneumogram is useful as a tool to understand events, and how much of it is functioning in the creation of events? Answer: Hyperstational. A cultural sub-hist—hyperstational cultural sub-historicism seeks a region of convergence between these options, where the pneumogram clicks onto itself coincidentally as supreme method and ultimate object. By marking over all cultural political programs is actually degenerated concretions of virtual pneumogrammatic impulses. Hyperstation lines them up for savage decoding. Savage decoding. This is why the role of the AOE medic conspiracy is so decisive, Willow, since the diagramic directives guiding this vast covert movement are preeminently described by the Atlantean cross, the manifestly decayed version of the Lemurian pneumogram. Yeah, I’m sure—I’m sure it is. Oh [ __ ] sure, but holy—oh okay, so—so this [ __ ] started popping up around—well, after Nick Land resurfaced in Shanghai in 2015. 2015. Because he did—that’s how everyone describes it—resurfacing. Yeah, just—he’s just in China now, but this has been getting a new life recently-ish of people practicing this Lemurian time sorcery and pneumogrammatics and [ __ ] I could have gotten the grimoire, but I’m sure I wouldn’t know how to do it. No. Oh, yo, I could have learned, apparently, if I wanted to pay the 3.33 cents. Yeah. Oh wow. Didn’t want to pay the 3.33. Actually, I just found it last night, and I was running on so little sleep that was just too much here already, you know. But I do have a video of some young lad at British college very recently explaining the construction of the pneumogram—pneumogram. Do you want to hear it? Yes. This—it’s gonna make it all make sense. Yep. [Music] Okay, so the CCRU—or the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit—Culture Research Unit—um, I won’t try to explain what that is, but I will address one of the more esoteric parts of their oeuvre, being the pneumogram, or the decimal labyrinth. So—so its closest relative is the Kabbalah, which can kind of be seen as a map of the divine realms. Um—um—so they both have ten sephirot and connective tissue between; they also both map zones onto spinal levels—as above, so below. So the idea is that the pneumogram was made—made by the Lemurian root race and long predates the Kabbalah, and uh, over eons and eschatons it decayed into the comparatively bleak Kabbalah of Jewish mysticism that we see today. Now, unfortunately, the uses and the meaning of the pneumogram are very well gate-kept by uh, magicians. Um—um—and I don’t think that will change anytime soon. Anytime soon. You can buy the book for 3.33 cents. Construct the closed circuit of the pneumogram—pneumogram. Okay. Okay, I have to—I have to point out that that he says we’re now going to do this—he’s at this point during that part of the video—video—he’s also walking through a snowy field, and his hair is—like all along the video, then cuts—he’s in a gym—like what looks to be a back room in a gym; his coat has changed, and his hairstyle is completely changed too. Looks like it took him two months to figure out the next sentence. This will happen multiple times throughout this video; he just kept forgetting that he was doing it. Yeah. Is syzygy—so I believe this is originally an astrological term that refers to when two planets are facing each other um, in alignment. So within the pneumogram, we have five uh, syzygies—syzygies—so—so spheres that represent numbers that are facing each other, and each of these syzygies adds up to nine. So that’s one and eight, and eight, two and seven, three and six, four and five. Okay, I already explained this [ __ ] Okay, so for the next bit, I need to explain triangular numbers [ __ ] you—I used—this is the clip I used for esoteric rambling in last week’s episode. Yeah, yeah. Hyperstation. It was perfect. Yeah, it was absolutely [ __ ] perfect. As poor [ __ ] man—let’s see—this is like four—four minutes—that’s—it’s just—it was okay. And this number is the corresponding triangular number. What the [ __ ] Let’s start at the top. No, the number three. So what’s the third triangular number? One—one—three. More rambling. We need to collapse two and one into a singular digit. Jesus Christ, he’s into the numerology. What the [ __ ] Jesus Christ. One. Hence why this arrow points to—I think it’s so perfect that we pulled the ten of cups. I think what he’s saying—I think what he’s saying—numbers do things. You can make a fun diagram with numbers sometimes. Yes, with interesting loops. You can make interesting loops from numbers. You sure can. And then you can draw them in the shape of a spinal column. Yeah, you [ __ ] weirdos. Holy [ __ ] So—so okay, we’re closing in on it here; we’re really—we’re really getting somewhere. Somewhere. I did hear an interview with—I think it was the guy that maybe wrote the grimoire that I wouldn’t pay the thirty—the three dollars and thirty-three cents for. Yeah, piece of [ __ ] I did hear him on a podcast saying uh, that you could construct a numerogram out of anything, you know, it could be any other system. I was like, okay, okay, cool, like at least you realize that much. Then he started talking about summoning demons into his TV set. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So—so you know, here’s the thing about the CCRU: it’s a piece of experimental fiction. Yeah, that—no, really, that is what it is. Yeah, and taken as that, it’s [ __ ] it’s ambitious; it’s pretty cool. I can—rad. I like it; I enjoy reading it. When I rate it as a piece of fiction. Thing about the CCRU is they just kept going; they just kept going into this hyperliteral materialist madness. Like I haven’t touched on this yet, and this is kind of a fair reveal, is that their big hyperstational eschaton that’s plastered all throughout the late 90s writings of the CCRU—the CCRU—the big show—the [ __ ] to end all motherfucks—take a guess as to what it is. We’re in the late 90s. Y2K. Yeah, that’s—yeah, that’s what I was thinking—thinking. Y2K. It’s [ __ ] Y2K, which they interpret as—interpret as one of their lemur demons from the pneumogram. Oh, pneumogram. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you interesting? Let me find the—the passage. I’ll read a Landian passage about Y2K—about Y2K here real quick. “The midnight of December 31st, 1999, does not coincide with a Christian festival; Christmas has no historically defensible commemorative relevance and does not, as Gregorian year m, even mark the beginning of a new millennium. Meanwhile, infotechnics is carried out by Y2K into millennial spasms of its own, returning to zero zero and digitally erasing the 20th century, reducing data to mumbo jumbo—mumbo jumbo. Since cyberspace dates are incapable of counting above 99, they have surreptitiously installed the first intrinsically apocalyptic calendar in history, unconsciously produced within a planetary electronic registry, starting from year zero. Y2K condenses out of the mechanomic unconscious and its non-binary calculator functions, attesting to raw decimal delirium. A different decreed post-tribulationist eschatology slides smoothly into Y2K survivalism, orienting its volatile mixture of stockpiling, micro-militia activity, technophobia, and apocalyptic theology towards the self-fulfilling dynamics of millennial threat. Preemptive response produces reality—panic. His creation—the more you know about it, the worse it looks. It has always been integral to capitalist organization that science fiction functions as a factor of production, relating it intimately to panic phenomena. Y2K takes that—takes things to a new level—at a—as a disaster that comes from the future, scheduled by accident, thus precisely anticipated in time. If it proves effectively eradicable, it is because it is trickling back from the self-confirming inevitability of its occurrence. Something is about to happen, and we know exactly when.” Holy [ __ ] Holy [ __ ] I mean, yeah, people be doing that time and time again; we are always coming up with the—with the new dates for the apocalypse, but that one was especially on a mass scale. Yeah. Um—um—Y2K produces a traumatic mutation in the information economy, involving explosion of I.T. emergency services, analysis, debugging, integrated solutions, massively accelerated hardware replacement, global restructuring, and a crisis of confidence in computer-supported services, with the potential to run away into general market collapse. It interrupts the smooth upward curve of doubling microprocessor density, falling prices, and increasing market penetration with a singular cyberspace shock that is discontinuous or non-metabolic in nature. Junk shops stack up with prematurely discarded infotechnic hardware, providing the material base for a computer age skip-scavenging cargo culture. Electronics must be sub-socially recycled to release its frozen machining potential. Well, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yet—is the name of the demon that it is. But here’s the thing: it kind of betrays the whole bit, doesn’t it? It—now that it’s the year 2022. Yeah, I mean, like it didn’t happen, right? And in um—I forget—it’s in *Thirst for Annihilation* or *Fang Numinos*, I was—or it was—I think there’s *Thirst for Annihilation*, Nick, which is written in like 92 or three; he gives this like set of dates of how the doubling of the [ __ ] eschaton is going to happen, and like we’re supposed to be way past that—way [ __ ] past that. Yeah, so yeah, it didn’t—Y2K didn’t [ __ ] Yeah, yeah. So no wonder it [ __ ] the bed right afterwards. Does he scare you? If they had really gone full magician cult with it—like no one—no wonder ever set a date. No wonder Nick Land did what every [ __ ] whose eschaton doesn’t—imminent—ties—does that will double down in madness to the expense and detriment of the original idea. So after resurfacing in 2015, this little [ __ ] went all in on neo-reactionary right-wing politics, with all the smart [ __ ] words to justify how it’s not a complete betrayal of the ideas that when they started—it seemed like nothing more than fun stuff to think about. Think about—like every other [ __ ] pissed-off whiny dude wanted to run a cult, right? And his accelerationism now is the right-wing accelerationism of, you know, uh, white nationalist terrorists, right? Like that’s—that’s what accelerationism has become, and what—what—and who latched on to it after Land resurfaced as a neo-reactionary in 2015, joined forces with Mencius Moldbug—the neo-reactionary—yeah, quote—“philosopher”—Mencius Moldbug; it’s not his real name. And honestly, I see a logical progression from where this all starts in Marxism and postmodernism. If your worldview is essentially materialist, then deconstruction of anything and everything only goes to one place: babbling incoherence. Babbling incoherence, like some [ __ ] fish-worshipping cultist in a Lovecraft story. And in that way—in that way—the CCRU was itself a hyperstation; it created—yeah—babbling incoherent Lovecraft cultists. It sure did. And thus—I don’t know what he thought would happen; he thought that—he didn’t know what hyperstation he was telling—yeah, yeah. In other words, stories do things. Yeah, and you’ve got to be careful. Yeah, we are—and we are nothing but the stories we tell ourselves. Indeed. Indeed. Ten of Cups. What is—

It well, so if we look at ourselves as the viewer of the card, looking at the point of view of the picture, we're looking at yes, as if we are there in the frame. We are—it's people on the quote-unquote stage. Yes, um, but they're not facing us. We're not in the audience; we're behind them. We're observing; we're—we could either be a detached presence or presence. Or, well, if it is on a stage, then it is a fiction, yeah, a story of a happy life perhaps that we're looking at and wishing we had. Could be. Maybe the Town of Cups is that like how the Thoth deck—it's called satiety, right? Imagine you're in a boring marriage, and you're sitting in a theater; you're watching a play, and this fiction of a better life than you have, have is on stage, and you go, "Why couldn't I have that? I want to have that. Let me just destroy my right family so I can go find that." But it's not real; it's a story, right?

I was told also the finality of how stories can have endings, whereas you, as the viewer, your story hasn't ended. No, no, you, you keep going, and there's no such thing as like a real sense of finality. No, it doesn't, doesn't really exist. Yeah, we can never reach like the real true real true meaning either. So when anyone offers us like, "This is the meaning of the universe," it's like, "Well, thank you for that; that's interesting. I'll consider it." Yeah, yeah. The curtain closes, and you know that ain't reality, ain't reality. Yeah. And it's also like, didn't Dick Land just get trapped in his own performance? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes, like we're talking about bonus episode, like writing songs that come true, right? And [ __ ] Yeah.

Well, it makes me think about Trisha Paytas, who's a YouTuber known for being [ __ ] crazy, and her YouTube bio for the longest time was, "I'm Andy Kaufman," and she started off her career—she just went on different reality shows; she would do any reality show that she could get on and play the bubbly blonde, dumb bimbo character that says stupid, outrageous things that pisses people off. And, and but the fact that like one of her first videos was her doing the Mighty Mouse bit that Kaufman did. Okay, so there's like, to me, that showed that there is a person there underneath it all that is saying like, "This is all an act." But I think she did it for so long that now she's like, like Trisha is just [ __ ] crazy now. Yeah, she's fully become the character that she was pretending to be. Yeah. Well, I mean, you get into habits if you play one character for a long time. Yeah, you pick up—especially if that's how you, for her, make millions. Yeah, and you know that that actually feeds into the idea of systems and cybernetics and how the system has an effect on the observer and participant, which is, in this case, the YouTube actor, right? The performance affected the audience; the performance affected the actor, which affected performance, which affected the actor, which affected you, right? Because every time she starts to go out of relevancy, it's like, oh, all of a sudden, like, "I'm trans, or I have the ID, and I'm, you know, pretending to have all of these mental illnesses and blah, blah, blah," you know, like, like it's very, it's very—it's—it's well-crafted to get attention and to get outrage. Like, basically, she's a professional troll, because that's kind of what's rewarded in the YouTube algorithm. Yeah. And the client is also a professional troll.

Yeah, I think he actually believes his [ __ ] though. Uh-huh. Like, I listened to half of a three-hour interview, oh yeah, with him by an accelerationist, and that dude—the interviewer even seemed surprised when Nick Land stopped him to correct them that, "Oh, no, no, no, I don't mean freedom like that; I mean like freedom from life." Oh my goodness, sir. My goodness. Yeah, I think like the Ten of Cups—I think there's a deep—it's—there's a sense for me—I think that it's—there's a sense of dissatisfaction with the Ten of Cups definitely, and I kind of just see that in the CCRU and in a lot of like punk art collectives as well, and I love that [ __ ] Like, I've paid money to see that [ __ ] I'll do it again. I [ __ ] love that [ __ ] I love weird art, but it comes from this place of dissatisfaction, but in reaction to—to, you know, in a counter-cultural reaction; it doesn't—it's not like, "Well, I'll just work hard for the American Dream, and then I'll have that too." It's like, "No, let me tear down the stage; let me yeah, just break this [ __ ]" But it's like, I don't know, maybe just eat better; stop eating [ __ ] dry pot noodles, amphetamines, dude. Amphetamines, dude. No, but really though, yeah, life for real, like that's—and that's what it boils down to for me. There's some listeners right now that are like—I mean, I've done it too. Yeah, me too. What are you gonna do? But like, I'm aware—it's not—first, I know my thinking is to get worse. No, yes, for sure. And I think that's why this episode was became harder the more I got into it, because it does just kind of come down to—to stop eating pot noodles, amphetamines, dude. Yeah, like you just [ __ ] up your brain, like you thought too long and too weird about a certain thing; you made a puzzle—puzzle—um—um—that you made—you're lost in a maze of your own [ __ ] creation. And the people I'm really mad at is academia in general, because this is all nonsense. Stopped calling Nick Land a philosopher; he's a crazy dude. You know, there you have it. Yeah, there you [ __ ] there you [ __ ] have it. It—ah, okay, that's enough. Wow. Now you know we never have to talk about it again. Oh, I do want to say I really will talk about hyper systems again because I really enjoy that idea. Okay, cool. Yeah, like—like we will bring that up again. Yeah, I do definitely enjoy that idea. I definitely think that they're—I think they're thinking about things that are worth thinking about, but it's—it's not the ideas themselves that drove them crazy; it was the practice of—of their becoming. Yeah [ __ ] it—this is the practice of their [ __ ] because of sounding very academic now—you pieces of [ __ ] Yeah, yeah. You know, it was—is the way they went about it and just pushing extreme—an extreme environment too far. It's just group dynamics. If you had read the cybernetics textbooks, you would have read—you would—um. Yeah, thank you guys for listening, sticking it out with us through this. Yeah, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ. Find us on social media. Yes, please follow us on Instagram, Twitter, all of those. And if you like what we do, you can support us on Patreon—only five dollars a month to get access to bonus episodes. And this coming Sunday, uh, we're gonna do our first like monthly live stream. Yeah, this new Q&A hangout. Yeah, that's going to be super fun, fun. Uh, so yeah, access to that. I think there's three bonus episodes out now, so hell yeah. Hell yeah. Only five dollars a month. Yup, no more, no less—less. And thank you to everyone who supported us—us already means the world. And tell your professors, tell your dentist—spell your dentist—tell your math equations. Yeah, yeah. And don't join cults. Tell your demons. Tell your demons. God damn it, I'm going to bed. Yep, that one really tuckered me out. Yeah, dude.