CIBER1A, Contraxion, BOZAL (Humidex Records)
“We recognize that capitalism is no solution to the problems we face in our communities. Capitalist exploitation is one of the basic causes of our problem.”
—Huey Newton, “Black Capitalism Re-analyzed I: June 5, 1971.”
The Borg are perhaps the most intriguing villains in the fictional Star Trek universe, and the most emblematic of the contemporary moral dilemmas we now face.
Should one relinquish their sense of individuality to join the “hive?” Should one embrace questionable ethics in order to succeed under capitalism? And now more than in the previous generation — which, ironically, was The Next Generation — should one fuse one’s biological self with cybernetic implements like A.I. and virtual reality to realize the experimental post-humanist project?
The Borg’s modus operandi was assimilation, assigning converts numbers as a prison would a convict. Their most dreaded dictum was “resistance is futile,” implying superficially that any struggle to oppose assimilation was useless.
We might feel that way metaphorically with regard to the onslaught of seemingly monstrous events that keep occurring: escalating global conflicts, the rightward turn politically of our nearest neighbours, and the general sense that progressivism and classic liberal ideals have stalled.
Resistance as a political strategy ceases being effective because a certain amount of resistance is essential and can in fact strengthen the system. Capitalism is capable of digesting small interventions and using them as nutrition. Anyone who has ever squeezed a garden hose to create a gushing spray of water understands the concept of impedance.
If resistance is to triumph against neoliberal accelerationism, it must be sustained en masse or not at all.
Chloe Majenta, Enantiodromia, Artch, 16-20 October 2024
“What if the domain of politics is inherently ‘sterile,’ the domain of pseudo-causes, a shadow theatre, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? What this means is that one should accept the gap between sterile virtual movements and the actuality of power.”
—Slavoj Žižek, In Defence of Lost Causes.
The analytic impetus in troubled times is to search for historical precedents, scrubbing back and forth over history for some period when our ancestors were capable of overcoming similar obstacles under comparable circumstances.
But troublingly, the present moment is more and more discursively described as “unprecedented.” For example, never in the history of the United States was a convicted felon elected president. You need a police check to get a job at Wendy’s, but any common criminal can now occupy America’s highest office.
So, the tactics for victorious political battles must also be without precedent. The weapons of the 20th century Left — protest, activism, even satire — will no longer suffice. We must emancipate hatred and fear with unified hope and love.
Nadia Myre, Robert Myre, & Guido Molinari, Tout geste est/et politique, Fondation Guido Molinari, 31 October – 22 December 2024
“Only prisoners have time to read, and if you want to engage in a twenty-year-long research project funded by the state, you will have to kill someone.”
—Mark Fisher, “Time-Wars: towards an alternative for the neo-capitalist era.”
Capitalism is not so much a socioeconomic model as it is a code, like an operating system upon which the apps of our daily reality run.
As an ideology, capitalism seldom reveals itself — except in those moments when the real-world friction of its true unpredictability becomes exposed. In this way, capitalism is more like a computer virus, lurking just beneath the cool surface of the interface.
For instance, this week, I tried to deposit two twenty-dollar bills into an ATM and the machine malfunctioned and ate one of them. The expressed disappearance of symbolic capital was a stark reminder of capital’s intrinsic and eternal ethereality.
What buoys our perception of reality is our belief in it. Money only exists and exerts power because we agree it does. If we were to stop agreeing, it would evaporate like an apparition. There is enormous creative potential in reimagining a world void of capital.
N. Katherine Hayles writes in her 2006 article, “Traumas of Code:” “…code is a virulent agent violently transforming the context for human life in a metamorphosis that is both dangerous and artistically liberating.”
Cindy Hill, A Bell I Never Hear, Centre CLARK, 31 October – 7 December 2024
“Information speeded up, slowed down, permutated, changed at random by radiating the virus material with high-energy rays from cyclotrons, in short we have created an infinity of variety at the information level, sufficient to keep so-called scientists busy forever exploring the ‘richness of nature.’”
—William S. Burroughs, “Technical Deposition of the Virus Power.”
Replication and difference are the only significatory tools we have to remind ourselves that the world is fundamentally a simulation. Nothing represents replication and difference more hilariously than the mechanical bull.
Why anyone would want to ride a flesh-and-blood bull is in itself approaching the apex of absurdity. The existential unnecessity of bull riding is confronted only by its apparently high stakes in meatspace, the wild animal’s capricious chaos.
Remove the chaos, however, or reduce it to repetitive mechanical gestures, and tragedy — and its capacity for trauma — transforms into farce. Simulation itself is doubled, like constructing scaled down replicas of the twin towers and annihilating them again.
The performance of risk deactivates the façade of catastrophe.
Sunset Rubdown with Sister Ray, La Sala Rossa, 29 October 2024
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don’t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
—Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “The World is a Beautiful Place.”
I watched in awe on the metro this week as a boy of about 12 almost unnaturally rapidly unscrambled a Rubik’s cube. It restored in me some measure of hope that the next generation may be better equipped to solve the world’s old puzzles.◼︎
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Cover image: Chloe Majenta, The High Priestess (2024) Oil on cotton mounted on wood panel. Photographed for NicheMTL.
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