Accounted Entropy

It’s only in an occult way that the fantasy of Minecraft is as it might appear from the outset, as being that of power. Minecraft provides certainly, a space where the often unimportant and alienated demographics playing it can make themselves important by carving the world in their image. If this were true however, this would be applied to countless other games which allow for the same sort of creativity, and the diminished popularity of games such as Second Life in comparison shine a difficult light on this interpretation.

The creativity offered by Minecraft has to be taken into account as being, in most cases, a creativity fully accounted for. While there is a contingent of pure sandbox players using creative mode as one would an SDK or architectural program, the vast majority of gameplay communities revolve around the shared experience of survival mode. The purpose behind this is the additional restrictions survival places and in doing so, the additional narrative weight placed by survival mode on each creation. Survival mode creations carry behind them a text intimately interwoven with the rest of the world. Each block of stone carries with it the weight of its extraction, the narrative of exploring and using that method of extraction, the construction of that mine or farm, its place in the world, the natural world’s give-and-take with that location…

All of this provides an experience only games have the capability to provide, but often never do, that of being a truly Confucian-text, by being a text-generation work. Minecraft takes strong inspiration from Dwarf Fortress and that game’s creator explored the same concept in much greater depth. Both games however, have the same functional basis. The creation not of a predefined world, but of a set of rules as being the entirety of the text. The text then is used to generate a world of all those systems interacting and interlocking within each other. It’s the constant reading and writing-within of this that provides the fantasy, by providing the return to an older form of thought and experience.

The modern world is alienating in many parts for its overt hostility to individual meaning. Internationalism has ended with all its goal succesful and now the individual person finds themselves often without a place relatable to them. They work in an anonymous office tower, for a company owned by a grab-bag of over a hundred private equity firms and investment groups, with profits going in occulted directions from a business of which only the barest minimum can be experienced by the individual. Minecraft provides a return to an older, smaller way of living in its fantasy. A world self-enclosed, where all things exist looping into each other, a world of interacting strains and tensions.

Hunt's End

She was visited late at night by - no other word could be used to describe their mediocre slouches draped in hazard vests and utility clothing - forest bureaucrats. A body was found, dead of unknown cause, identified possibly as her father? Could she come, paperwork, a boring night pondering the body under harsh lighting until she could be let free. It was the middle of hunting season, his body was draped wounded over his rifle, blaze orange stained darkly vomit colored in the red seeping from the gashes across his body that struck him prone, leaves and first traces of frost already beginning to take him to dirt as he was found terminating a trail of footprints through frozen mud from his truck.

This was one of the times of year, the transition between seasons, where the air smelled sharply as it did at no other time. The autumn was coming to a close, the last leaves blown off to whistle on the ground as the last of the animals began to settle in anticipation of the oncoming snows. Gunshots rang out through the forest as she sat outside the gas station, still unslept from the previous night of questioning. Antlers dragged, cutting furroughs behind the corpse dragged by waist-harness through the woody undergrowth, twigs snapped as the party stepped in a line parading to the butcher’s. A pair of men stepped past her out of the gas station, shouting obscene jokes, cracking open beers as they stepped into their pickup, speeding off down the highway to find a two-lane access road to venture off from.

She was able to take home a single souvenir, her father’s glasses. Small, round lenses stuck in wireframes, the glass was cracked from the rim inwards, a few chunks on the outer edge having already fallen out. Obviously not shatterproof, as sentimental as he was. However he was struck dead, he fell on his face, the glasses possibly striking a rock or the gun that fell before him, flattened under his body. That was obviously evidence, no weapon is ever innocent, even if its possession should be incidental to the investigation at hand. She went to sleep on the couch as the sun began to assert itself, straining to make pale-grey light through the thick cloudcover that blanketed the entire month of November.

There were secrets that she had left unspoken during the previous years of cohabitation. Now, with even the night noiseless, she could rest easy and let the pact flourish, as the other party came out to bear upon her. Lying in the baths he had always only reluctantly allowed, the spiders emerged to speak to her. Across and within the water, one mother to a daughter, it tapped legs on her skin. She got out and dried herself and promised further meetings, looking forward to a beautiful dawn of their interiors.

She was downstairs to uncover some fetishized artifacts of the bank’s desire when she discovered the clock. There, amidst the accumulated junk of outdoor gear and auto parts she couldn’t help but find accessory to her father’s death, a clock stopped at some occult time, the second hand ticking the same strike over and over. Should it reach the hour, the intended function was the sound off, screeching synthesized birdcalls corresponding to each of the twelve numbers. In service of her liquidation papers, she searched too close to it, bumping some adjacent pile of clothing to release a small black spider, purple with the fog of the bathtub. The clock strained, against some weight behind it. From its wall, tacked into the yellowed drywall, she yanked it free, letting it clatter to the ground.

Gouged into the house, a crevice of permafrost brambled through with throned spikes and roots, holding the desiccated corpse crumpled, clenching into himself. She met his eyes, finally in peace. He wasn’t going away, not what of him mattered. He was harmless now, eyes darting in wild fear as the spiders weaving ever tighten his wooden bonds met their sister at the tip of her painted nail.

Stress Test

From some angles, it seems as though we’re only the medium of transmission for things far lighter than bodies, lighter even than air, entities moving through us as sound moves as a wave through air. As every new wave of frontline infantry dies off in the ensuing battles, the lines remain stationary on their planned trajectory as another steps in to fill their place. Even when lives try to center themselves, that centering decenters life in the end, creating some spiritual object representing life. Souls and their eternal relations come to replace the lives they were created to represent and soon “The People” writes itself over persons. Some have theorized that the only way to truly represent human life is to give the voice of humanity the center stage, a state of all against all giving each life its own chance to voice its actions before anything alien can.

As is often reminded by Radio War Nerd’s commentary on biological warfare, the Black Death and the lesser plagues like it, have always had the distinction of how little they ultimately affected the situations of their victims. With the largest loss of life in human history, the Black Death accounted for almost nothing, in terms of systemic impacts. Even the Hundred Years War was only put on pause, with the underlying feudal structures carrying on perfectly capable of adapting to the loss of human capital. It’s always the dream of collapse fetishists that a pandemic striking the great liquid mass of flesh would somehow turn around and do the opposite, cause systemic shocks and leave human life free to flourish.

We’ve been asked under quarantine to return home. In all this, “essential businesses” have remained opening and well functioning. More importantly than that, their supply chains perfectly capable of functioning as long as expendable flesh can be cycled freely, its systems of pure systemic matter that have flourished. Systems of art are being fed more than ever, every proper noun online doubling, tripling their content production, as the internet faces, more usage than ever before, with online streaming platforms buckling under the intensive load of the newly-made NEETs desperate to hold them on through their isolation.

Every disease seems to take the people, infected before the organism ever came to be by the linguistic parasitism of their cultural moment, into a direction that was already contained within themselves. Yersinia pestis took the medieval body, so commonly made grotesque in the imagination of the time, exploded as it was often imagined to, the skin bulging out with septic fluid. Malaria came from the darkest tropics to infest the victim as if a product of a magic spell outside science and time, the first manifesting symptom being the overwhelming fear and anxiety as fever sets in. Smallpox, as it ravaged within the American continent centuries ahead of European colonization, turned flesh fo the formerly stable into scabbed, sickly parodies of what they once were, their societies seeming to be hollowed from within. Spanish influenza, just as the season of modernism and the Century of Language took off, struck down the most virile and young. And now, SARS-CoV-2, in “The Age of Loneliness” as Felix Biederman calls it, a disease comes along where the given protocol, perhaps more felt than the disease itself, is the enforced quarantine and distancing imposed in fear of its spectre.

(Media)tion

Between the centralized networks in control of systemic change and the great mass of flesh, there exists a superstructural entity of language which moderates the two, in any corpus. The human body uses the mind’s interior directives for this function, control-faculties and the body itself modulated by emotions, beliefs, irrationalities, etc. The social corpus works in the same way, with the Marxian schema of the church’s function performing this for the same reason, its linguistic being existing as a spiritual entity between the networks of power and the minds of the people, ordering and coordinating both into one.

Part of the problem of such an entity is that it must cope as well with exterior threats, linguistic abnormalities arising from outside of its own purview. It’s through this that linguistic immune systems emerge, defense and sublimation mechanisms against that which cannot be tolerated by one or the other on either side of itself. The linguistic system is always first-in, last-out in this regard, taking input immediately before any other and being the final arbiter of exput. 

Night court shows this eloquently, in regards to to social phenomena in the United States. The court exists as an intermediary space for the claims of the great fleshly mass of the city, a vector of contagion for exterior phenomena. The court then moderates and sublimates such phenomena, mocking them in order to fit them into a greater schema of understanding, allowing their existence to be given life within the dominant media narrative. Such is the purpose behind the obsession with “representation”. Those demanding it desire assimilation in the most terminal fashion, to turn the identities they speak for into a fully woven-in part of the larger fabric of meaning created as the social superstructure.

It’s here that the trajectory of television over the years shows itself. Reality TV and investigative journalism have both been on a dual quest to expose and digest every last niche of the national body beneath itself. Louie Theroux and Vice travel to distant corners, picking up subjects into the machine, turning their individuality in a 45 minute morsel to wash down with a smooth glass of every fifteen minute ad breaks. Reality TV always seeks out the chaotic in order to contain it, treating like a trophy each new specimen it can find to sensationalize, by being a further out example of what has been captured.

For that uncapturable, figureheads countlessly appear to give face to things with no vertical order. Trends and memes are given faces, names, mascots in order to allow the media to sublimate it into its machine. We see it time and time again, as Richard Spencer emerges to give face and name to the nebulous and some would argue non-existent “alt-right”, as Fuentes attempts to do today with less success. Debate shows propped up similar figures from the 1960s, shows like Firing Line taking whoever could put on a suit and defend the contents of some best-selling book, in hopes of putting a person in front of a movement, and in doing so, give that movement a shape and size so it can be slowly but surely digested and absorbed.

Cracked Nailpolish

It occurs to me, in times like this, that I’m “inside”. After the death squads have rolled through and all the common humanity has departed by force or flight, it’s us who step in, born far behind the line, shackled to the invisible hand at the bottom of the innermost land’s treasury. The house still bears the marks of habitation, patterns I don’t obey scarred into the wood, marks of footsteps made daily, furniture scraped and dented, memories floating like a bad fog I have to dispel to bring myself to bearings every morning. 

Regardless of ghosts, it all feels eerily empty. I plug my laptop into a ground level outlet of the second floor, spending most of my time, one chair, one table, no furniture except a window open to the sea. The paint peels faster, the wood buckles more and more in the night with no one around, the shore’s walkways devoid of any life, seabreeze coming in bright like chalcone for the few times when I take my gander along it, locked down, empty, only the barest comforts priced in by the ones I came behind, coca-cola and some sharpies to huff on as the waves crash, unimpeded by the usual fluttering of yachts and fishermen.

I sometimes wonder if my saliva is caustic or septic - either way, I know it’s poison. Into my thirties, I’m still a virgin, unmarried, undated, yet my reputation and thoughts precede me. I’m occupied constantly with arborescent explosions of tangential thoughts upon thoughts, my mind taking the violent and the sexual and running with it down every avenue presented. I don’t wear makeup, I keep my hair cropped into a pixiecut, my nails crack and splinter to dyke-lengths any attempts to polish them chips off within days. My vagina is stretched open, a sucking vacuum, whore’s emptiness, a black hole worthy of the wickedest temptresses.

I’m immune to the cold. When I dream, my thoughts generate the intense foggy humidity of the deep summer. It always feels like some form of plague season, the dreamy miasma of August or the blizzard’s hangover of grey skies and frozen snowmelt of March, the frozen mud and grey skies of November. Sometimes I’m reminded that I exist, though the more i try to remind myself, the less I know it. I noclip in public, a gazing point floating through space, five feet, seven inches above the ground, my body more absent than even the usual alienation.

It feels like home. As much shame as it is to admit to the readers, the open-air sepulcher of the town afterwards is all I know. Open spaces terrify and confuse me, people baffling and strange to my eyes. Without golems, without strange anatomies, the world is as I knew it my entire life - dead trees, empty houses, shivering breeze and foggy humidity, nobody home, nothing around, no life, left on Earth.

Lebensraum

The failures of systemic protection are spoken of by the language of “corruption”, as though there were some active evil committed in the countless cases spoken of by the journalist moralist. The American prejudice of bureaucracy has always been such, an arbitrary moral code externalizing common, everyday parts of doing business in any industry, at any level, as though they’re “not us”, the purview solely of the slavic and oriental despots, unspeakably foreign to the tongues and hands of the anglophone world. The obvious falsehood of this aside, the subjects interviewed are always speaking doubly within the text produced, pointing towards something which truly can be considered as corruption, though in a far different fashion.

The language of corruption here is one of a diseased other infection a healthy organism, an inky outside breaking in, flooded into a pure enclosure. Within however, the text speaks doubly as the subjects enclosed within the journalist’s intent, speak of corruption as a spreading plague of absence. The infection is never an alien ink substance, but a spreading of necrotic tissue through the corpus, cell death caused by one remote machination or another. The corpus degrades from within - tissue hallowed out to become spongious, the once solid now perforated with ever-growing emptiness of its substance, the exterior observer pushing on the surface only for their finger to sink in effortlessly.

The language of a positive plague isn’t quite wrong, however, though its truth is far above the heads of the journalistic commentators on the topic. The necrotic corpus sits heavy and burdensome over the landscape, the rotten body of the tyrant weighing, even in its weak, diseased flesh, barely able to move on its own, still present, resting heavy over what should be free and open for new life to flourish on the open landscape. 

Various philias afflict in cope at the stinking rot resting atop the homeland. The self-help section at any bookstore is a schizophrenic barrage of international promises, mainly Japan and Scandinavia, as the idols of “perfect living”. White Californians flee their genetic home to chase spectral stereotypes of Japanese tradwives and Korean boytoys, domestic institutions sit stinking and unused, medicine rotting in its blisterpacks as the sick flee across the ocean for the shit that really works. The necrotic flesh provides no comfort, delivers on no promises, yet it still takes up space, if only as an obstacle.

The American Dream is not dead, but those who chased it are. Manifested destiny now sits across the entirety of the land, territory divided up a century ago, the institutions built in an orgiastic spectacle of construction now settled in to gradually fail as they were always meant to, slowly dying, with no one to put them out of their misery. The condition of the current generation of youth is in endless contemplation of dead flesh, young people trapped in the waiting room, their lives put on hold until the petty middle class fortunes of their grandparents can be liquidated and used to start a life of their own. It’s not that America is lacking in wealth, but that the wealth is rotten and useless. A great agricultural bounty is spent on tacky breastaurents and video poker machines, the enormous infrastructure of the past century crumbling as more and more hands begin to desperately cling to it.

The desire of the youth is a desire for Living Space, in its properly continental-colonial usage. The promise of the United States, of great bounties of wealth never died, it’s not as though the ore deposits are all dried up and the farmland has all gone fallow, but its wealth is currently occupied by a great corpus of dead flesh. The need for American renewal is a need often confused with a desire for justice or revolution, every specific type of person having their own particularized narrative of violence suited to their identity, though this is masking the deeper desire of the youth - the death-drive of cleansing. In the dreams of every young person is a violent fantasy of soap, maggots, cauterization, excision - a dream of the beast of dead flesh being cleared out and the frontier being made open once again.

Timedrones and NEETdom

If the human can be said to be, as all things, a sum of its becomings, then its being is made up of the very stuff of becoming, the foundational-substance upon which all becomings take place - time. All things must happen and in order to do so, they have to work on the axis of time in some way, with the becomings adding up to a single person unified as being part of that person’s allotted section of time, delineated by the spatial existence of their personhood. That this is the foundation of the entire being in question is vital, as its the management of this foundation that makes up the primary question of its existence.

There’s a plateau of this foundation which is more essential than that of the being. It’s often the mistake of ethicists of labor to assume that the being and its time and are inextricably linked in such a fashion as to privilege the being over its time, but that’s obviously not the case. As Comrade Dyatlov, ever the Foucauldian, says after the reactor’s exploded “I need bodies”, not the being, but the foundational substance upon which beings are predicated. It’s thus plateau where the body and its existence in doing and in space exists, which creates the way in which time fits into a plateau of calculation beneath the being. Such is labor - the investment of flesh, situated in time, devoting its time and flesh to an alien system of capture, allowing the capturing-force to gain surplus value beyond their own time and flesh.

Such a calculation has been in play since the beginning, with all economics requiring this fundamental fact to operate. Agricultural society’s labor always requires that huge amounts of humanity be devoting its foundational substances to the benefit of a minority via their systems of capture, as the very concept of growth or profit requires that something be free. The resources are finite, and in fact, diminished, upon completion of production, and in order to make that production worthwhile, more has to be created from a physically reductive process. Such a thing can only occur when the amount of captured (ie, free) labor is beyond the value expended in the creation of the finished good.

Two classes of people are produced from this, those whose being is yoked to an alien system and those whose being is under their complete control. The question of wageslavery is laid out in its name - the wage isn’t merely an eight hour period of slavery, but an entire structuring of ones being around providing their foundational-substances for the sake of the alien machine they’ve been plugged into (hence the way in which the consoomer class of /a/ and /v/ and Reddit are wageslaves in their NEETdom, their corporate masters replacing the bossman as their temporal master). The ultimate aristocratic virtue, held by the bourgeois and the NEET alike, is the opposite of this - the ability to devote ones foundational substances to machines of ones own enclosure, being self-encapsulated and self-consuming of all their allotted energies.

A Commentary on Metal Gear Solid 3

Kojima once mentioned wanting either Ashes to Ashes or Space Oddity to play out the credits sequence of Metal Gear Solid 3. Related to this is the opening, the discussion of Major Tom-related codenames (though there was no way they could have been referencing the album diegetically) in the opening of the Virtuous Mission. Major Tom occurs again in the middle, with the Fury bossfight, a cosmonaut falling to Earth consumed by his ecstatic visions of the Earth engulfed in flame and carnage, seeing total and transcendent destruction as he plummeted through the atmosphere. 

There’s nothing transcendent about spaceflight in MGS3, with all related instances being ones of descents into darkness. The HALO jump at the beginning has a similar feel to the Fury’s descent, with both encased in the finest military-industrial hardware of the space age and sent to plummet into the turbulent jungles of the 1960s. In all cases, what’s inverted is the vertical orientation, even in Ashes to Ashes, Major Tom’s state is one of suspension, in heavens high, desperately wanting to come down. The reference to Major Tom, the linkage, comes only in the form of the technological apparatus which brings the destination into being. For Major Tom, technology brought him into the hazy opium-den of high-Hollywood, for Snake and the Fury, it brought them back down, into the depths of war. The “space” technology only allowed for horizontal movement, promising transcendence and delivering a return to a greater degree of where they began.

The Fury achieves what he was ultimately after - transcendence via flame. The technology which brought him into space serves as the vehicle for his final flight, as he explodes in a glorious violence. The same can be said for the others. The Fear tastes the masochistic thrill of defeat, The End disintegrates back into nature, The Pain is overwhelmed to death with pain. The same can be said for Snake, using technology in order to descend into the jungle in his Heart of Darkness journey to the Boss.

The keyword of MGS3, one far more interesting than Gene or Meme, is Scene. The final battle with the Boss brings scene into full question, as the Boss lays out a plan of embraced nihilism in her treatment of “scene”. She and Snake meet openly in a field of death, the game gone silent in order to allow their mutual death to play out. In her speech and plan, the Cold War and its affiliated military-industrial complex is the staging of their actions, the vehicle of their transcendence. The Boss and Snake both used it in order to bring about the various scenes they engage in, staged rituals. Such is the perfection achieved by Snake in killing the Boss. The Boss invites her death in order to kill his final attachment and in order to teach him the final lesson of “scene”. Her demise is brought about via manipulation to create “scene”, emerging from it, Snake, perfected, into a warmachine which engages regardless of the staging-facts of scene. The war fades into the background as Snake’s final lesson, as Snake annihilates what hold he had to the static world and embraces the war as the scene to stage his own combat.

Chemical Freedom

In the “I have a dream” cutscene of Metal Gear Rising, the striking contrast between Armstrong and Raiden is between their bodies. Raiden’s cyborg enhancements are overt, upon the surface of him, his being remade and built upon with artificial plating and mechanization. In contrast, Armstrong has his fully integrated within his biology, the cybernetic part of him being within his being at a microscopic level. This difference makes up the tension between them in their fight, and shows how Armstrong so effortlessly defeats Raiden in the scripted battle. The organic system is better able to integrate war into itself far better than any inorganic machine can - a lesson shown time and time again, as in the case of nomadic versus sedentary armies. The former being made of a command structure which moves and shifts in tune with organic changes within itself, while the latter is made up of immobile strictures and orders. The latter’s fragility makes it an easy target for a fully developed antifragile system competing in the same space.

“Dope destroys” says the American anti-drug campaigner, describing the horrors of southern imports. The experience is always one of annihilation, the life torn apart by the drug’s ravages, the high experienced tearing the mind to pieces. The drug acts caustic, an acid imported subtly and then dissolving cells within the corpus of the nation. Addicts are turned to zombies, their streets hollowed out in a literal sense as lives are cast apart to wander in an empty wasteland.

It’s telling that the language of the United States Government’s attempt to halt the usage of narcotics has been termed a war. Indeed, it’s the conditions of a war which make it, as a drama, so strange to itself. The United States has its insides torn apart by a foreign caustic, an organic against their inorganic - a steppe peoples against their stationary people. The United States deploys inorganic machines against the organic outside and on the level of the inorganic, the fight is a nonstop victory-rush for the United States. Cartels and their bosses are taken down, dismantled, arrested, assassinated on a nearly weekly basis. And yet, what changes? When Gaillardo was taken out, did the business go away? Was there any change, in the basic route of cocaine from Colombia, through Tijuana, Sinaloa, Gulf, Juarez? The organic fact of the trade, of the destroying-caustic flooding into the cellular units of the American corpus remains, unfazed by the attacks against its superstructure.

Inverting the knowledge of systems, that as wholes, they become more than the sum of their parts, the inorganic’s parts are always lesser than their existence as wholes. It’s for this reason that nomads are so capable of making war against the sedentary peoples. Sedentary peoples exist always in-context of machines larger than themselves, which cause their individual personhood to be diminished. This diminishment causes them to be annihilated at contests of individual combat, as is forced by the steppe nomad who forces challenges on a cellular level, denying the inorganic’s inorganic plateau of contest.

For the inorganic, the threat additionally exists that its organic (cellular) could attempt to form either in nomadic contradiction or in inorganic competition. Such is the threat of the drug war. There, the inorganic level is that of human lives (as experienced as individuals under the judicial apparatus), attacked from underneath by the eternally boiling organic, that of narcotics within the body and their submerged movement via economics, in the same fashion as oil in Negarestani’s theory.