February 2024 Newsletter

Fantasy worlds and geopolitical destabilization

I’ve been navigating a bit of a resurgence of long COVID symptoms these past few weeks, compounded by other chronic conditions I face. This period has been a bit of a drag, but despite feeling like I’m just keeping my head above water, I’ve managed to complete a few projects.

For future newsletters, I’m planning a slight change in format. I’ll start with updates on my current projects and announcements, followed by more reflective thoughts, or as I like to call it, woolgathering.

Also, as a final note before we get into it, I’ve noticed the Medium seem to no longer allow video embeds. As such, I’ll just be including those as standard links.

“Mock Album Cover Compositions” —

This was just something I did on a lark, but now I’m amused enough by these quick roughs that I want to work on a new album. Tomorrow’s Forgotten Relics was just an EP/demo, after all. Well, we’ll see… I’ve got 50 more where these came from.

Blackout 2054 — Venture into an alternate near future with “Blackout 2054,” part of the Fallen Cycle universe. This project has seen significant development, from conceptualizing the major players and settings to refining our notes and assembling compelling concept art. While I’ve invested more time than anticipated, the cohesive compilation of these elements gives a fairly clear picture of the fictional space we were playing in.

A comic prequel script has been in the works for about six months, but it’s currently shelved as it needs further refinement. Times like these, I really miss the dynamic of an active critique group.

With “Blackout 2054” momentarily set aside, I’m shifting focus to preparing “The Witchhunters,” our upcoming installment in the Fallen Cycle RPG series. This marks a new phase, and a very different tone from the campaigns we’ve run thusfar in the alternate ‘real world’ cosmos, rather than the second world of Alterran… what is essentially a fragment of the Deep Dream that’s been essentially colonized by permanent human inhabitants. I’m excited to share more with you soon.

I wanted to give a few more thoughts about the “hybrid” approach I take to working with AI, and this is IMO how we should all be looking at it, as a means for us to automate certain elements of what we do, while maintaining human agency, forethought, and criticism throughout.

The pertinent question isn’t “was AI used?” — since, frankly, the presence of AI in our technology is already ubiquitous. It’s become embedded in the hardware we use and the infrastructure we rely on, and that is only going to intensify. Short of major war in Taiwan with China, (due to chip manufacture and related “rare earths” bottlenecks) this seems set in stone.

Instead, the focus should shift to understanding who is using AI and the intentions and outcomes of a specific use. This perspective should be the foundation for evaluating any technological application.

I’ve extensively discussed this topic, emphasizing AI as a tool to augment my work as an artist, not as a replacement. I’ve also voiced concerns about the potential misuse of AI by governments and corporations, which could lead to egregious outcomes.

Again… The critical issue isn’t whether AI is being used; it’s about how it’s being used, by whom, and to what end. AI, a term often used ambiguously, encompasses various technologies, many of which are not solely purposed. While Large Language Models (LLMs) may not be universally applicable, the field is still evolving, and the potential for misuse is significant — though often, this misuse mirrors the widespread issues already present in our society.

Consider this excerpt from Corey Doctorow’s piece on “Enshittification,” a compelling read in its own right:

“IP isn’t just short for intellectual property. It’s a euphemism for ‘a law that lets me reach beyond the walls of my company and control the conduct of my critics, competitors and customers’.”

Before advocating for stronger IP laws, it’s crucial to understand their real-world implications. My concerns extend to how AI is utilized in military contexts, such as by the IDF, and the potential for corporations to monopolize human knowledge, offering mere rental access to AI-generated content. These are among the many real dangers we face from this technology being used by the worst people on the planet who have the most power.

However, speaking as an artist myself, I have absolutely no concern about how someone is using an AI visualization app to design characters for their RPGs, or for that matter how some people are using it to generate incredibly generic “horny-posts on main”.

(I’m not talking about deep-fakes, that’s a different problem. Although, I have to admit I’m a little surprised by how little mass deep-fake crimes we’ve seen — it’s certainly happening, but a few years ago it seemed set to be absolutely everywhere already. This delay may of course be temporary.)

My sense is that a lot of generally well-intentioned people have been worked into a froth in such a way that the outcome is likely to be entirely contradictory to their supposed intent. I see a lot of vitriol and hate spewed in various directions from this perspective, and all of it is quite depressing to me. We’re identifying the wrong problems, and from that, a lot of terrible “solutions” seem to present themselves.

And so, well-intentioned or not, this general misapprehension and furor also enters into my concerns for actual “AI threats.”

I Want My MTV.
Since the pandemic started I’ve spent a frankly shocking amount of time making vibe music video playlists… mostly to work along with when I’m painting or doing exercises, but also on the off chance anyone else has a certain nostalgia for the “120 min” format of mainstream alt with bits of the truly weird, as I do.

I’ve been putting them together as much based on the vibe and visuals as the music… consider it just another example of how collage is probably my primary impulse as an artist.

I’ve also used it as an excuse to discover more new-ish music, but I’ve got no self-imposed rules about release dates. I still furtively dip into the 90s now and then. The year is young, but I think I’m already done with 2024. You can watch / listen here.

In my previous monthly updates, I’ve often delved into various aspects of systems and complexity theory. This month, however, I’ve shifted my focus slightly, though not entirely away from these topics. I do have a few thoughts to share in this area.

To begin, I’d like to add a note to the previous topic of excess deaths, expanding on the videos shared in last month’s update. A significant statistic has emerged: across 34 countries, there have been 2,097,101 excess deaths. Strikingly, 58% of these deaths, amounting to 1,220,295, were reported in the United States of America alone. Oof.

A critical look at our reliance on CO2 removal strategies:
I’ve come across a study that essentially echoes my thoughts, suggesting a probable scenario where we continue our current practices but attempt to counterbalance these with CO2 removal and geo-engineering initiatives. Such an approach is fraught with risks and is likely to lead to severe consequences, either directly from the outcomes of these endeavors or indirectly by enabling further CO2 emissions under the guise of offsetting them. Escaping the repercussions of our actions is not going to be as straightforward as we might hope.

The study highlights an alarming trend: by the end of this decade, countries are collectively on track to produce double the amount of fossil fuels than what is aligned with the IPCC Paris Agreement’s pathways aimed at limiting warming to 1.5°C with low or no overshoot. Furthermore, by 2060, it’s projected that 12 million km² will be used for land-based carbon removal, an area nearly equivalent to the current global cropland.

Dr. Kate Dooley, a co-author of the study from the University of Melbourne, stresses that “Carbon dioxide removal into land and forests cannot legitimately be used to offset continuing fossil fuel emissions. Government climate plans should set separate, transparent targets for emission reductions and removals, which limit reliance on the latter, and meet climate and biodiversity commitments through restoring and maintaining natural ecosystems.”

Some thoughts on where we’re at and what we’re likely to see in coming years, re: weather models and Henson’s analysis. (Video)

While Sabine does not delve deeply into the sociological factors that could exacerbate the ‘knock-on effects’ — a topic I’ve frequently discussed — her general prognosis appears accurate.

Of particular note is the increasing discussion around the AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation) overturning. This phenomenon has been identified as a critical tipping point for some time now. However, there remains considerable uncertainty about how easily it could shift into a new state and the realism of such an outcome. The unfortunate likelihood, which is becoming increasingly clear, is not only that such a shift is possible but that we are already making significant strides towards it. The coming years are crucial in determining whether this shift will occur imminently (within the next decade) or if we have a few more decades of leeway.

Previously, I had anticipated that this would be a more distant concern, possibly emerging between 2040 and 2060, but recent data casts doubt on that assumption. Regrettably, we might not recognize the full extent of this shift until it is too late. Once the AMOC undergoes a significant change, it cannot be reverted to its previous state within human time scales. We are effectively altering the planet’s climate for thousands, if not tens of thousands of years.

In a recent and frankly bizarre interview, Vladimir Putin engaged in a surreal conversation with Tucker Carlson. The interview is available for viewing here. The most striking, and almost comical aspect of this exchange is Putin’s meandering journey through what can only be described as an alternate historical mythos, dating back to around 800 AD. Throughout this bewildering narrative, Tucker Carlson appears utterly lost, his expression oscillating between bewilderment and disbelief, as he struggles to make sense of Putin’s revisionist history lesson.

You almost expect it to be revealed as an SNL cold open. Camera pans in on Putin, “Live from the Kremlin, it’s Saturday Night!”

This interview takes on additional layers of absurdity when considering the influence of Alexander Dugin, a figure whose relevance to the Kremlin has been significantly on the wane since 2014, and was somewhat peripheral to begin with, outside his “theoretical provocations.”

Yet, in the context of Putin’s fantastical historical narrative, Dugin’s extreme and often outlandish viewpoints provide a useful lens to decipher the subtext of the interview. A chapter from my 2017 essay-collection/book Narrative Machines touches on themes that resonate strongly with Putin’s performance. While some examples from the chapter might appear only tangentially related at first glance, they are crucial for a deeper understanding of the surreal undercurrents in Putin’s dialogue with Carlson.

To provide a more comprehensive insight into this bizarre spectacle, I will include a significant excerpt from my chapter. This section specifically delves into the intricate interplay of geopolitical strategy and cultural narratives, shedding light on the peculiarities of using alternative history / mythology as the foundation for real-world geopolitical strategy, and possibly, subsequent outcomes.

…Perception of conflict driven by these factors itself can be a veil, as we see further afield in Russia’s apparent insistence on following the mythology of Mackinder’s Geopolitics,

“Russia’s push into Georgia in 2008, into Ukraine in 2014, and its recent campaign in Syria, as well as its efforts to consolidate a sphere of influence in the inner Eurasian heartland of the former USSR called the Eurasian Union, all are eerily foretold in geopolitical theory. Mackinder held that geography, not economics, is the fundamental determinant of world power and Russia, simply by virtue of its physical location, inherits a primary global role. Under President Vladimir Putin, the slightly kooky tenets of Mackinder’s theory have made inroads into the establishment, mostly because of one man, Alexander Dugin, a right wing intellectual and bohemian who emerged from the Perestroika era in the 1980s as one of Russia’s chief nationalists.” — “The Unlikely Origins of Russia’s Manifest Destiny,” Foreign Policy

If we accept the conjecture that Mackinder’s Geopolitics is central to current Russian foreign policy, and this is no certain proposition, then we must also accept that a purely mythological story about the world is informing what happens in the real world.

“Drawing on the extensive twentieth-century literature on geopolitics — and especially on the interwar German school of Karl Haushofer — Dugin posits a primordial, dualistic conflict between “Atlanticism” (seafaring states and civilizations, such as the United States and Britain) and “Eurasianism” (landbased states and civilizations, such as Eurasia-Russia). As Wayne Allensworth noted, once one penetrates below the surface of Dugin’s seemingly rational and scholarly language in Foundations of Geopolitics, one realizes that ‘Dugin’s geopolitics are mystical and occult in nature, the shape of world civilizations and the clashing vectors of historical development being portrayed as shaped by unseen spiritual forces beyond man’s comprehension.’” — Aleksandr Dugin’s Foundations of Geopolitics, Dunlop.

The map is, literally, the idea of the map. We must also come to terms with the fact that Dugin’s interpretation of this ideology explicitly uses the methods of postmodernism to attempt to strike at the West, or as he calls it, “Atlanticism.” In his words, “Ideologically the problem is liberalism as the unique and only ideology imposed on the Europe and the rest of humanity by anglo saxon world. The liberalism affirms only individual identity and prohibits any kind of collective or organic identity. ”

Perhaps what is most interesting about Duginism is not that it actually directly describes Russian foreign policy, but rather that it invents a myth out of cobbled together parts — a very postmodern gesture — and thereby attempts to retroactively take credit for actions that happen to fall in line.

Though everything else about Dugin’s critique is regressive, a fun-house mirror inversion of theories developed mostly by the Left for decades, he is right about one thing: Liberalism, or specifically the moderate Rightwing neo-Liberalism and Benthamite utilitarianism that has increasingly taken its place, fractures innate community — constructing it instead through reducible and reproducible acts, and individual identity is then lent us purely through our external function and esteemed value.

Not even rebellion is safe from this process, but in light of current events, we need to dig deeper into the political repercussions of a 4th estate based on principles being co-opted by the far Right. Dugin’s prevarications are precisely in line with how myth and ideology collude to instruct, or rather construct, geopolitics, and we can also see in this a glimmer of our methodological objectives. Through the imposition of a mythology, we thereby shape the world in its image. We mustn’t confuse the one for the other, merely because the methodology may have similar foundations. Consider,

“Also striking are attempts to identify the continuity of ‘unreason’ in fascism and poststructuralism. In an effort to combat the ‘philosophical anarchism’ of modern social theory, intellectual historians such as Wolin (2004) suggest obliquely that because both fascists and poststructuralists question the premises of occidental rationalism and American cultural leadership, there is an equivalence between the right-wing assault on democracy in fascist and neoconservative ideology and the poststructuralist critique of the democratic basis of western culture. Not only do arguments of this kind ignore the obvious substantive distinction between radical right-wing and radical left-wing criticisms of liberalism in an attempt to implicate the ‘soft totalitarianism’ of the left as an amoral betrayal of Enlightenment universalism, but are oblivious to the real and present danger implicit in neoconservative, neofascist and right-wing fundamentalist attacks on emancipatory politics.” — Fascism and Political Theory, Woodley

Postmodernism as “skepticism toward all meta-narratizes” (Lyotard) claims to expose the flaw in both centered and de-centered worldviews. But what does an absolute skepticism toward all frames of reference do but create an unending regress of deconstruction in the hands of academics, while the powerful institutions in society use those same techniques to create a corporatist state that appears in-assailable to traditional methods of cultural subversion? We mustn’t forget that the methods of post-modernism are available for appropriation to any end, as we can see in their use not only by the neo-liberal or centrist corporate power structures but also the authoritarian Right, and in some cases this use is quite explicit, as we see in Alexsandr Dugin’s inversions, subversions, his theoretic propaganda.

The great debate of history is fundamentally literary. While intended to level the playing field and put power under critique, this approach can have unintended effects. All tools can be a weapon. Decentering can also be an implement of the state — one world, apprehended by pure logic. This is how one Gnostic-Transhumanist narrative of the future runs: if we can just find the optimal equations and frameworks, the world will run itself. One of many possible “ends of history,” its true meaning is “the end of progress.” We will have Arrived.

Yet, there is a growing anxiety about how this sort of appropriation is having real effects on our ability to agree on the basic facts. We are, increasingly, not even operating in analogous maps. No longer “Left” and “Right,” it is “Universe A” and “Universe B”.

The Singularity has yet to appear, and the darkness of the past beckons. Latour’s “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern” engages with this concern directly,

“…In which case the danger would no longer be coming from an excessive confidence in ideological arguments posturing as matters of fact — as we have learned to combat so efficiently in the past — but from an excessive distrust of good matters of fact disguised as bad ideological biases! While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of prejudices? And yet entire Ph.D. programs are still running to make sure that good American kids are learning the hard way that facts are made up, that there is no such thing as natural, unmediated, unbiased access to truth, that we are always prisoners of language, that we always speak from a particular standpoint, and so on, while dangerous extremists are using the very same argument of social construction to destroy hard-won evidence that could save our lives. Was I wrong to participate in the invention of this field known as science studies? Is it enough to say that we did not really mean what we said? Why does it burn my tongue to say that global warming is a fact whether you like it or not? Why can’t I simply say that the argument is closed for good?”

We are instructed how to read the world through our “texts,” and in this sense, we are indebted to the postmodernists, though as we’ve seen this can be taken too far. Myth is neither pure fantasy nor a true material force. For as central as narratives are to human life, gravity is not merely a matter of interpretation. According to DeLanda, only by looking toward a method implied by emergent non-linear systems can we even hope to find a way out of this maze.

One of the ideas that I attack in my book is precisely the primacy of “interpretations” and of “conceptual frameworks.” Ideas and beliefs are important, and do play a role in history, but academics of different brands have reduced all material and energetic processes, and all human practices that are not linguistic or interpretative (think of manual skills, of “know-how”) to a “framework.” The twentieth century has been obsessed with positioning everything. Every culture, given that it has its own framework of beliefs, has become its own “world” and relativism (both moral and epistemological) now prevails.

“But once you break away from this outmoded view, once you accept all the nonlinguistic practices that really make up society (not to mention the nonhuman elements that also shape it, such as viruses, bacteria, weeds, or nonorganic energy and material flows like wind and ocean currents) then language itself becomes just another material that flows through a much expanded picture. Language, in my view, is best thought of as a catalyst, a trigger for energetic processes (think of the words “begin the battle” triggering an enormous and destructive process).” — Roy Christopher interviews DeLanda

Even resource-driven conflicts are likely to be conceptualized in ideological terms, especially to the people who make up the backbone of any military. The US as a “global peacekeeper saving the world from itself” is such a myth as well, piggybacking on the overarching myth of American exceptionalism. This sort of myth is in no way exceptional. We paint in-groups and out-groups in mythic terms. We might see an echo of this in such disparate times as the crusades of the middle ages. After Richard the Lion-Hearted captured Acre in 1191, he ordered 3,000 captives — many of them women and children — taken outside the city and slaughtered. Some were disemboweled in a search for swallowed gems. (Spoiler: they didn’t have gems in their bowels.) Rather than being a classic example of the removed brutalities of the past, this is not so different from the rhetoric that is used to embed fear of the immigrant Others of today.

The drive behind fanaticism, and fascism — which is an affliction not unlike fanaticism — is psychological, not material. William Reich explored this in The Mass Psychology of Fascism. And this, taken from a chapter appropriately and perhaps ironically named “Ideology as a Material Force,”

“Those who followed … the revolutionary Left’s application of Marxism between 1917 and 1933 had to notice that it was restricted to the sphere of objective economic processes and government policies, but that it neither kept a close eye on nor comprehended the development and contradictions of the so-called ‘subjective factor’ of history, i.e., the ideology of the masses.”

The fascism of the state is the fascist within. This alchemy produces poisonous splinter factions, fundamentalist groups that cause many of the pathological habits our cultures otherwise exhibit, in concentrated form. Though always a sort of mass movement, it is contained in miniature within each individual psyche, since after all, the center of the circle around which all turns is only a product of the collective imagination. The extremists at the front lines of ideological conflicts hear the echoes of myths originating thousands of years ago, catalyzing the existential fear, hate, or desire latent in a culture, and more pointedly, within the individuals that comprise that culture. Fascism is, in a striking sense, an art movement gone horribly wrong.

The literalization of a mythical aesthetic can be the first step of this process. Here Lacan’s observation that the unconscious is structured like a language is key. In his words, “You see that by still preserving this ‘like’ [comme], I am staying within the bounds of what I put forward when I say that the unconscious is structured like a language. I say like so as not to say — and I come back to this all the time — that the unconscious is structured by a language. The unconscious is structured like the assemblages in question in set theory, which are like letters.” This has bearing on myth as mass dream, most crucially at the times revolution strikes, or at the point of any state change. Analysis of mass narratives, with the aid of technology, can bear fruit in this direction, though as we will see, it is not an endeavor without its difficulties and dangers.

Politics or even religious ideology shouldn’t form the only lens to gaze at myth in modern culture. Military memetics is itself congruent with notions of the epidemiology of ideas, and the level of scrutiny in this direction has already been considerable.

“Using the analogy that ideologies possess the same theoretical characteristics as a disease (particularly as complex adaptive systems), then a similar method and routine should be applied to combating them. Memes can and should be used like medicine to inoculate the enemy and generate popular support.” — “Memetics: A Growth Industry In US Military Operations”

According to a memo spread in 2006 written by former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, the “long war” against terrorism is a war of ideas,

“Today the centers of gravity of the conflict in Iraq and the global war on terror are not on the battlefield overseas. Rather, the center of gravity of this war are the centers of public opinion in the U.S. and in the capitals of free nations. The gateways to those centers are the international media hubs and the capitals of the world. Zawahiri has said that 50 percent of the current struggle is taking place in the arena of public information. That may be an understatement. Osama bin Laden, Zawahari, Zarqawi had media committees that consistently outpace our ability to respond.”

The propagandic methods of ISIS follow precisely from this observation. Though it is a notable irony that they also follow a historical path that Rumsfeld shares some personal responsibility in paving. There are considerable risks contained in the future synthesis of mythology and psychometrics — the measure of personality through scientific means, as we’ve seen in a nascent form in the rise of Trump and other populist long shots, who leaned quite heavily it seems on Cambridge Analytica, and other data firms who have become quite adept at interpreting and manipulating mass narratives. This news story follows what was ‘fictionalized’ before the fact, in House of Cards’ 4th season, where the Underwoods rely on advanced psychological models to structure and simplify their narratives, and ultimately, to win an election.

The age of polling as the leading edge in political analysis may be through. (Or perhaps, our attraction to such narratives drives their own propagation in an economy sculpted by the ad value of a click.)

Trump’s conspicuous contradictions and his oft-criticized habit of staking out multiple positions on a single issue result in a gigantic number of resulting messaging options that creates a huge advantage for a firm like Cambridge Analytica: for every voter, a different message. Mathematician Cathy O’Neil had already observed that “Trump is like a machine learning algorithm” that adjusts to public reactions. … The granularity of this message tailoring digs all the way down to tiny target groups, Nix explained to Das Magazin. “We can target specific towns or apartment buildings. Even individual people.” — Das Magazin, translated to English by Antidote zine

Suddenly our “fanciful stories” are anything but coffeeshop talk, and we’re paying a little more attention. Myth is on the lips, minds, and knife-points of those in the midst of active revolution, as well as those working in the media.

“Memes influence ideas, ideas influence and form beliefs. Beliefs generate and influence political positions combined with feelings and emotions, eventually producing actions, which inform and influence behavior. Using this logic progression, any attack upon an ideology must consider an assault on a central or transcendent ‘idea’ or group of ideas as means of achieving success. Memes as ideas are then ‘in play’ as tools (or means) to attack ideologies.” — “Memetics: A Growth Industry In US Military Operations”

Group narratives are always being re-purposed, whether we speak of the selective use of scripture by religious fundamentalists, or the more bizarre relationship between National Socialism and occultism, which underlined the rise of the Third Reich despite Hitler’s professed abhorrence for the occult. Fringe elements are at most times culturally inert, but have the potential to overcome the whole of a culture during crisis points, as the Nazis did after World War I. Some of the recent concern over the rise of the loose conglomeration of alt-Right, paleoconservative, and various openly white nationalist groups has been along these lines, though the shape it will take is unclear.

That concludes our update for this month. I hope the topics and insights shared have provided you with new perspectives and food for thought. I look forward to delving into these issues further in our next update… or whatever has been feeding my ADHD “dopamine” fixation of the moment. Stay curious, question everything.