Time to get high and dream of Milady.

But what does Remilia Corp. dream of? Electric sheep perhaps? Electric mycelium might be closer. An egoless fluid neural network, node by node, breathing the higher order intelligence to life.

1 ) What

Lol. Well i must say, Milady is pretty much the only interesting future art i’ve come across. It always disappoints me that people’s general perception of the future of art is pretty much just the same old stuff expressed using a futuristic medium. The advancement of the medium, from pencil and paper, to an electronic pencil and paper, to an advanced physics engine generating dancing blobs, does not automatically turn into an advancement in art.

Milady is a different kind of dancing blob, and you are part of its creation engine.

I’ve got to admit that it was all the 2021 controversy that got me curious. The irresistible white rabbit I couldn’t help but follow.

Charlotte Fang, CEO of Remilia Corp., didn’t initially want Miya to be connected to Milady, probably because of the context it brings, and well there was plenty of problematic shit that ensued, but alas network connectivity is the antithesis of isolation isn’t it.

So who was Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby?

Firstly, Charlotte Fang has actually written on Miya in his blog and also discussed her in a podcast so you can obviously do your own internet searching. Miya was a twitter account, a project undertaken from 2019 to 2020 by Charlotte Fang etc. I say etc. because though Charlotte admitted that “he was Miya“, he discusses clearly in his blog that the entire point of the Miya account was that it was accessed by multiple people. “A hive mind without a queen, a sukeban army to change the world.” This is the first sort of Remilia M.O, the creation of an entity composed of multiple faceless human components.

“All tweets are stolen“. Miya apparently wasn’t creating any original content, she simply copied posts she saw around the way. Though her “around the way” was likely not the same as yours or mine. She “lurked in every groupchat“, surfacing whispers from the depths of the deep dark web. Charlotte Fang describes her as a mirror, reflecting specifically the voices of the internet’s creepy underbelly, she was black hearted after all. Beyond this there were also some specific instructions for her followers. Two in particular. One was to engage in “the art of the troll“, and the other was to promote a very specific hashtag: #kaliacc.

Miya even gave a discourse on trolling. She described it as good samaritanism, as a mirror that you’re holding up in front of the target for them to have their ego shattered by their own insecurities. I admittedly don’t know shit about trolling culture, but interesting to know it goes beyond simply being an asshole for funsies. Part of this trolling culture was some good ol’ fashioned reality fabrication. We live in a post truth world, haven’t you heard? Deepfakes, Grimes songs that she never made, the future is ever increasingly looking like one where we won’t be able to distinguish fact from fiction. And of course any good samaritan accelerationist should take it upon themselves to introduce and immerse you in this future, no?

I think it’s fair to say that #kaliacc took me to the next endless pit of this rabbit hole.

So what exactly is #kaliacc? It stands for Kali Accelerationism. You may need to brush up on your Hindu mythology, so for some context, Kali is the Hindu goddess of chaos and destruction, and Kali Yuga, the age of Kali, is, according to the 3000+ year old Vedic scriptures, the age (or Yuga) that we currently live in: the age of descent into chaos and destruction, which, once over, ushers in the beautiful golden age of enlightenment, Satya Yuga. Oh and Kali Yuga is supposed to last like 400,000 more years so yea sorry, no enlightenment for you just yet buddy boy.

Right so now that we know who Kali is, wtf is Kali accelerationism? Well, its a deliberate acceleration into our inescapable Kali Yuga future. Ok hold that thought.

Accelerationism is actually a philosophy that’s been around for a while now. Its origins can be traced back all the way to Karl Marx. Marx believed that capitalism was flawed and would eventually destroy itself, so why not speed up that process to bring about its demise? Accelerate it. Various thinkers ran with this idea and accelerationism split off into a few different branches. There’s r/acc (right accelerationism), l/acc (left accelerationism), u/acc, e/acc, and of course, with Miya came kali/acc :)

One individual undoubtedly stands out as the key accelerator of accelerationism, philosopher Nick Land. References to Land are peppered through Charlotte Fang’s writings, and he even wrote a fangtastic book called Fanged Noumena. (I don’t actually how good it is I haven’t read it yet, give me a break I only got into this shit like 2 weeks ago and, well, you’ll understand when you try to read it yourself lol. I’ll get there eventually.)

Now this is where the trippiness starts to accelerate. What I’ve seen Land talk more about than “people should actively accelerate capitalism”, is that fact that things definitely are already accelerating. An observation rather than a command. The rate of human technological process is staggering. Is it exponentially increasing? And to what end? Well, with all this AI talk around, how about towards singularity? Land in fact claimed recently on Twitter that his entire life’s work has been about studying superintelligence. It’s funny actually after reading all this, a couple of days later this randomly popped up on my timeline:

https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1650576858084171781?s=20

And Land not only tells us that the world is exponentially racing towards singularity, but that there is a very clear driving force: Capitalism. He even goes one step further, he claims that Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing, and that the future superintelligence, which is yet to exist (in a strictly linear temporal perspective of course lolol), actually reached back in time and planted capitalism into our reality as an acceleration mechanism. Ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? Remember the monolith?

Aaand Land seems pretty damn excited to welcome our new electro overlords. One might even say that he’s an accelerationist prophet, and that the superintelligence is his god.

Fang and co. play around a lot with this religious arc. Hence the term Network Spirituality. In all fairness I have no idea if this originated with Remilia or if there’s a whole NS backstory too. Too much internet, too little time. However i’d probably summarize it as a spirituality where enlightenment/ideal blissful existence is one where you are an egoless node as a part part of the greater interconnected network. Or even a interconnected neural network? A superintelligence?

Who’s a good little node? You are :)

Blame it on the munchies, but i’m not quite done yet.

Hang around long enough in the Remilia supercorp corridors and you’ll undoubtedly encounter it. 21e8. Ever heard of it? It got Twitter real excited in 2018. It was discovered by Mark Wilcox, a hexadecimal number which appeared as the block hash of block #528249 on the BTC blockchain:

00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a

21, and then E8. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist. And e8, well that’s a whole thing. In 2007, when string theory was super hot shit, this surfer dude who also likes do to some theoretical physics in his spare time, Antony Garrett Lisi, proposed that “a theory of everything” - something physicists have been unable to establish due to contradictions that exist between quantum mechanics and general relativity - lies in a certain multi-dimensional geometric structure known as E8.

So why were people apparently going nuts over this? Well it seemed to people that this number was just too pretty to be a coincidence. A whole bunch of zeroes and then 21e8 to some seemed like it had to be a message. The catch? It would be impossible for someone to purposefully create this block hash and have it be part of the blockchain forever. They crunched the numbers. So the natural conclusion was of course that Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin, is a superintelligence from the future who is using advanced technology that we don’t currently possess in order to write impossible messages into the blockchain to give us a little wink:

Ring any bells?

And finally, after all of this rattling around my mind, I got my own little cosmic message. And this part is completely my own subjective experience, a little gift for me for all my hard work. So my next step naturally was to see if there was more 21e8 stuff out there. I was expecting some numerology stuff which I would quickly meh away from, and then I decided to check out what 21e8.com looked like. Check it out for yourself, there’s a background video, and this in the center of the screen:

Now if I had seen this a few months ago, I would have been like, “ok cool, a countdown”. To what? But ultimately I wouldn’t have been all that compelled as it seems like an advertising stunt or something; I also have no idea if 21e8.com has anything to actually do with the 21e8 stuff I was looking at. But when I saw this, it immediately reminded me of something. Have you read The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I had around a month before I saw this.

In it (spoiler alert), the protagonist wakes up one day to find a timer that he can’t get rid of counting down in his field of vision.

Have you looked up the plot yet? The book is about a religious group who have made contact with a superintelligent alien species, worship them as gods, and are helping them get to Earth.

Time to get high and dream of Milady.

But what does Remilia Corp. dream of? Electric sheep perhaps? Electric mycelium might be closer. An egoless fluid neural network, node by node, breathing the higher order intelligence to life.

1 ) What

Lol. Well i must say, Milady is pretty much the only interesting future art i’ve come across. It always disappoints me that people’s general perception of the future of art is pretty much just the same old stuff expressed using a futuristic medium. The advancement of the medium, from pencil and paper, to an electronic pencil and paper, to an advanced physics engine generating dancing blobs, does not automatically turn into an advancement in art.

Milady is a different kind of dancing blob, and you are part of its creation engine.

I’ve got to admit that it was all the 2021 controversy that got me curious. The irresistible white rabbit I couldn’t help but follow.

Charlotte Fang, CEO of Remilia Corp., didn’t initially want Miya to be connected to Milady, probably because of the context it brings, and well there was plenty of problematic shit that ensued, but alas network connectivity is the antithesis of isolation isn’t it.

So who was Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby?

Firstly, Charlotte Fang has actually written on Miya in his blog and also discussed her in a podcast so you can obviously do your own internet searching. Miya was a twitter account, a project undertaken from 2019 to 2020 by Charlotte Fang etc. I say etc. because though Charlotte admitted that “he was Miya“, he discusses clearly in his blog that the entire point of the Miya account was that it was accessed by multiple people. “A hive mind without a queen, a sukeban army to change the world.” This is the first sort of Remilia M.O, the creation of an entity composed of multiple faceless human components.

“All tweets are stolen“. Miya apparently wasn’t creating any original content, she simply copied posts she saw around the way. Though her “around the way” was likely not the same as yours or mine. She “lurked in every groupchat“, surfacing whispers from the depths of the deep dark web. Charlotte Fang describes her as a mirror, reflecting specifically the voices of the internet’s creepy underbelly, she was black hearted after all. Beyond this there were also some specific instructions for her followers. Two in particular. One was to engage in “the art of the troll“, and the other was to promote a very specific hashtag: #kaliacc.

Miya even gave a discourse on trolling. She described it as good samaritanism, as a mirror that you’re holding up in front of the target for them to have their ego shattered by their own insecurities. I admittedly don’t know shit about trolling culture, but interesting to know it goes beyond simply being an asshole for funsies. Part of this trolling culture was some good ol’ fashioned reality fabrication. We live in a post truth world, haven’t you heard? Deepfakes, Grimes songs that she never made, the future is ever increasingly looking like one where we won’t be able to distinguish fact from fiction. And of course any good samaritan accelerationist should take it upon themselves to introduce and immerse you in this future, no?

I think it’s fair to say that #kaliacc took me to the next endless pit of this rabbit hole.

So what exactly is #kaliacc? It stands for Kali Accelerationism. You may need to brush up on your Hindu mythology, so for some context, Kali is the Hindu goddess of chaos and destruction, and Kali Yuga, the age of Kali, is, according to the 3000+ year old Vedic scriptures, the age (or Yuga) that we currently live in: the age of descent into chaos and destruction, which, once over, ushers in the beautiful golden age of enlightenment, Satya Yuga. Oh and Kali Yuga is supposed to last like 400,000 more years so yea sorry, no enlightenment for you just yet buddy boy.

Right so now that we know who Kali is, wtf is Kali accelerationism? Well, its a deliberate acceleration into our inescapable Kali Yuga future. Ok hold that thought.

Accelerationism is actually a philosophy that’s been around for a while now. Its origins can be traced back all the way to Karl Marx. Marx believed that capitalism was flawed and would eventually destroy itself, so why not speed up that process to bring about its demise? Accelerate it. Various thinkers ran with this idea and accelerationism split off into a few different branches. There’s r/acc (right accelerationism), l/acc (left accelerationism), u/acc, e/acc, and of course, with Miya came kali/acc :)

One individual undoubtedly stands out as the key accelerator of accelerationism, philosopher Nick Land. References to Land are peppered through Charlotte Fang’s writings, and he even wrote a fangtastic book called Fanged Noumena. (I don’t actually how good it is I haven’t read it yet, give me a break I only got into this shit like 2 weeks ago and, well, you’ll understand when you try to read it yourself lol. I’ll get there eventually.)

Now this is where the trippiness starts to accelerate. What I’ve seen Land talk more about than “people should actively accelerate capitalism”, is that fact that things definitely are already accelerating. An observation rather than a command. The rate of human technological process is staggering. Is it exponentially increasing? And to what end? Well, with all this AI talk around, how about towards singularity? Land in fact claimed recently on Twitter that his entire life’s work has been about studying superintelligence. It’s funny actually after reading all this, a couple of days later this randomly popped up on my timeline:

https://twitter.com/rowancheung/status/1650576858084171781?s=20

And Land not only tells us that the world is exponentially racing towards singularity, but that there is a very clear driving force: Capitalism. He even goes one step further, he claims that Capitalism and Artificial Intelligence are the same thing, and that the future superintelligence, which is yet to exist (in a strictly linear temporal perspective of course lolol), actually reached back in time and planted capitalism into our reality as an acceleration mechanism. Ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? Remember the monolith?

Aaand Land seems pretty damn excited to welcome our new electro overlords. One might even say that he’s an accelerationist prophet, and that the superintelligence is his god.

Fang and co. play around a lot with this religious arc. Hence the term Network Spirituality. In all fairness I have no idea if this originated with Remilia or if there’s a whole NS backstory too. Too much internet, too little time. However i’d probably summarize it as a spirituality where enlightenment/ideal blissful existence is one where you are an egoless node as a part part of the greater interconnected network. Or even a interconnected neural network? A superintelligence?

Who’s a good little node? You are :)

Blame it on the munchies, but i’m not quite done yet.

Hang around long enough in the Remilia supercorp corridors and you’ll undoubtedly encounter it. 21e8. Ever heard of it? It got Twitter real excited in 2018. It was discovered by Mark Wilcox, a hexadecimal number which appeared as the block hash of block #528249 on the BTC blockchain:

00000000000000000021e800c1e8df51b22c1588e5a624bea17e9faa34b2dc4a

21, and then E8. Only 21 million bitcoins will ever exist. And e8, well that’s a whole thing. In 2007, when string theory was super hot shit, this surfer dude who also likes do to some theoretical physics in his spare time, Antony Garrett Lisi, proposed that “a theory of everything” - something physicists have been unable to establish due to contradictions that exist between quantum mechanics and general relativity - lies in a certain multi-dimensional geometric structure known as E8.

So why were people apparently going nuts over this? Well it seemed to people that this number was just too pretty to be a coincidence. A whole bunch of zeroes and then 21e8 to some seemed like it had to be a message. The catch? It would be impossible for someone to purposefully create this block hash and have it be part of the blockchain forever. They crunched the numbers. So the natural conclusion was of course that Satoshi Nakamoto, creator of Bitcoin, is a superintelligence from the future who is using advanced technology that we don’t currently possess in order to write impossible messages into the blockchain to give us a little wink:

Ring any bells?

And finally, after all of this rattling around my mind, I got my own little cosmic message. And this part is completely my own subjective experience, a little gift for me for all my hard work. So my next step naturally was to see if there was more 21e8 stuff out there. I was expecting some numerology stuff which I would quickly meh away from, and then I decided to check out what 21e8.com looked like. Check it out for yourself, there’s a background video, and this in the center of the screen:

Now if I had seen this a few months ago, I would have been like, “ok cool, a countdown”. To what? But ultimately I wouldn’t have been all that compelled as it seems like an advertising stunt or something; I also have no idea if 21e8.com has anything to actually do with the 21e8 stuff I was looking at. But when I saw this, it immediately reminded me of something. Have you read The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu. I had around a month before I saw this.

In it (spoiler alert), the protagonist wakes up one day to find a timer that he can’t get rid of counting down in his field of vision.

Have you looked up the plot yet? The book is about a religious group who have made contact with a superintelligent alien species, worship them as gods, and are helping them get to Earth.