Everything you do today, every decision you make every day, reverberates infinitely in the immortal soul, persisting through all your descendants—that soul inherited from all your ancestors, who all watch over you, paying spiritual earned in their life to influence fortune in yours. If you choose to be a cringe and sinful loser today, you curse not just your life, but a thousand lives, both before and after you.

—06-23-23

When I said this, I meant it very literally: it’s the mechanism of dynasty, and I'm going to teach you how to see it. I'm going to teach how to see a thousand years into the future.

Habits are like a river bed that guides the direction of fate as it flows through an individual. It doesn't nudge in any direction, except deeper, and deeper. This is how you can be sure of anyone's future, you simply extrapolate the consequences of their current habits, lifestyle and conditions.

You can look at anyone and calculate their future trajectory based on the path they follow today.

It's rare today to meet someone in their 20s actually actively engaged in a serious career. They have little industriousness, willpower or agency. This is a symptom of their education and failed spirituality, because their understanding of the process of future making is foggy, and God given motivations have been made unclear.

They're distracted and confused, but the path can be made clear to anyone with the will to follow it.

People are often asked where they see themselves in 5 years, but that gets you an answer on where they would like to be, not where they're going. It's better framed:

"If you continue to live as you live today, where will it place you in 5 years?"

Your future is a condition of your current activities, and most often the unfortunate answer is: in the exact same place.

Our futures do change, but not slowly—suddenly. Everyone's future has inflection points. Interventions of fate come crashing down like a waterfall and our future is permanently adjusted onto a new trajectory.

You can extrapolate anyone's future trajectory from their current conditions, all the way up until their inflection points.

Most people interpret these moments of fate as something aside from their agency, unrelated to their past actions and the way they live their life. But it's the opposite, these key life points are where your agency to act with virtue, or not, factors in most essentially, both actively and passively.

These moments come in two forms, a test of fate or a karmic reward/retribution.

The latter is a product of your passive, past agency, in your everyday virtuous actions, or lack thereof. Luckiness is of course not a purely random condition, your karma is a consequence of your decision making, because how you live is a needle you push against the realities of everything else you interact with in the world, and this modulates the character and degree of your exposure to any significant moment that might be described as chance.¹

The former demands active, present agency, to prove yourself and your virtue in a challenge. And just as you can extrapolating someone's future based on their current trajectory, you can estimate their successes or failures in these moments of fate based on their current virtue, because virtue is habit and habits are ever ingraining. Rewards follow hardship, and challenges of fate follow success. Your right action in these challenges decide the future you unlock.²

We are tested throughout life, but there are a three universal tests everyone must enter in their life: coming of age, marriage and death.

Marriage is a test.

People are rarely asked where they will be in twenty years, one hundred years, or one thousand years. Is five years really your timeframe? If it is, you won’t be in the exact same place in the next century, but deep in the abyss.

"If you continue to live as you do today, where will it place you in twenty years?"

People barely think in a five-year perspective, now face them to twenty. The answer, for anyone well adjusted, is a spouse and children. But what spouse? What children? It's not an unknown, and it's not random: your children are a product of the spouse you select, and the spouse you select is a product of your actions and choices today.³

If you choose to be a cringe and lazy loser today, you will get a spouse deserving of such tomorrow. If you choose to be sinful, spineless, and non-virtuous, you will get a spouse deserving of exactly such.

This is what I mean when I say the reality of spirituality will hit you hard when you meet your children: the direct product of your selection, as a direct product of your virtue and karma.

If you continue to live as you do today, what spouse will you have? What house will you give them? What grade of descendant will you produce?

What spouse will your children obtain, and what would their children be like, in one hundred years?

"If you continue to live as you do today, where will your dynasty be in one thousand years?"

You need to be thinking in these terms. You need to be thinking of dynasty.

The recognition of life after death is the fundamental distinction that makes man superior to animal. Many exist today and can barely get over the hurdle of satiated distraction, like an overfed mouse in a lab cage, they fail even to achieve basic biology, and now we treat it like an achievement when a peer simply enters a stable marriage. But it has never stopped there.

The basis of nature is reproduction, but dynasty is reproduction extrapolated. Dynasty is life after death.

You have to see beyond the present and into the future, because your soul is inherited and will be passed on: you exist here as a product of every decision made by every each one of your ancestors, and every decision you make today will reverberate infinitely through the soul you pass on.

The despondency of this age is due to losing track of the natural and obvious goal of dynasty. It is the only goal in which to orient yourself. It’s the only immortality.

People select their partners for the most banal reasons. They "vibe", they're "sexually compatible", they "just clicked".⁴

As a woman, you need to be thinking very seriously if the man can genuinely support and maintain a prosperous family for your children, and your children's children. As a man, you need to be thinking very seriously if the woman can do the same in her role.⁵

You need to be thinking very seriously if they are oriented towards this realistic future in collaboration with you.

Marriage is not a decision for life, it’s a thousand years. The moment of inception your dynasty’s next trajectory is permanently set. You need to spend everything you can to prepare yourself for that ultimate decision.

You will always be able to find someone compatible. What about someone good?

What about making yourself good enough for someone good?

Before the test of marriage is the coming of age.

For the masculine soul, men are born imperfect and rise to the challenge to be excellence, forged stronger with challenge. Women are the opposite, they are born perfect, and can only be damaged and battered over time.

Thus, for men, coming of age is not inevitable, and many men reach adulthood while never experiencing it, remaining fundamentally immature. As a man, coming of age means the growth of a spine, internalizing the fundamental virtues that define an honorable man, the basic prerequisites to successfully participate in great enterprise as well as run a stable household: respect, loyalty, integrity, industry and courage.

Inversely, for women, her coming of age is a natural inevitability, and can only be damaged, by toxic corruptions, physical, or spiritual. In this capacity, the woman's father is responsible for her protection until being relieved to her spouse, and as either fails their duties, the damage passes down his dynasty.

I’ve met many men I could not say have crossed their maturity of adolescence. Think of any stoner you know. Any man without ambition. Any listless and distracted deviant. They're as unfit for marriage as a broken woman.

Think about the future dynasty of this coupling.

Think about the many women you know in 5, 6 year relationships with an aimless man with no intention to marry them.

What do they live for?

Most often these people spiral in non-marriage long term co-dependent relationships, wasting each other's youth to satisfy a hole in their chest, before eventually resettling someone fresh. The man has no career, the woman is aged out and psychologically devastated, their selections for a spouse are tarnished and the man's weakness and the woman's trauma is passed onto the children.⁴

They’re mired in a world of distracted confusion, incapable of answering for themselves. Their trajectory is purely stagnant and when they hit the wall of fate's inflection point, you can already know that their descendants will be hurled cliffside over into the abyss.

It's not just the case for losers.

Think about the mother who pushes her daughter to be a honors grade student, focusing entirely on school, or the father who sends his daughter to be a lawyer or a doctor. What kind of spouse will she find? What kind of mother would she make, how would her children be reared? Not for success.

Think about the SF tech founder, exited with 8 figures but got sucked into a relationship with the first gold digging bay bunny mid to lock her sights on him. She's not from a good family, she's not very sharp, her values are broken, but she's easy, fun and they're compatible. The consequence for his complacency is his children will be mid, too. The wealth will be squandered within a few generations.

What do they live for?

They’re misled into chasing the wrong goals because their future sight is small. They’re looking five years into the future, not one thousand years.

There is only one genuine point against which to orient every decision in your life: dynasty.

There is only one correct answer to the question, “What do you live for?”

You need to have a dynasty mindset.

Pride, happiness, money earned and lost over a single life is not meaningful wealth. It’s a spiritual dead end. This is why death is the final test.

The completion of the cycle of maturity is the acceptance of death, and the conditions with which you leave the world behind are the fulfillment of your obligations to your ancestry and determine your descendants.

Those who fear death at the time of death know they failed, and they enter the after life, if at all, with that feeble doom in their soul.

Death is the final test and it’s one that is meant to be overcome.

Death is a challenge to determine your place beyond life, because life after death is in your descendants, and at death, you know what future you've given them.

Your ancestors watch over you, spending a currency earned in their lives to influence fortune in yours.

This is true, materially, biologically and spiritually, in the wealth they pass on at death, in the biological choices made in spouse selection, and in the spiritual rearing they delivered unto you, the values delivered and example they set.

You are blessed or cursed by all the decisions of each one of your cascading ancestors. You stand facing your descendants the same as your ancestors face you now.

The immortal soul you’ve inherited is a baton passed down from generation to generation, from forever before and into an infinite forever more.

Today it's in your hands. Don't fumble it.

Footnotes

1. For more discussion on my system of Karma and Virtue, see: Gold and Glory in Times of Thought-Chaos

2. The simple formula to always win is (1) know yourself, (2) know others, and (3) know virtue. In general, people struggle to know themselves, because they live without virtue, and so struggle face themselves in the mirror. Without knowing themselves, they cannot know others. This is why their failure in tests of fate is inevitable.

3. 美麗的妻子，幸福三年。

   好廚子，三十年幸福。

   聰明老婆，幸福三代.

   TL: Beautiful wife, three years of happiness. Good cook, thirty years of happiness. Wise Wife, Three Generations of Happiness.

4. The youth too often confuse heady romance with love. Love is found in grandparents holding hands in the garden, not with teenagers in the backseat of a car, because love is grown over time.⁷ Physical coupling is a condensed metaphor for the spiritual process of love as a mutual integration between two individuals into one, and a ritual that helps accelerate its immanentization. Compatibility in terms of both lifestyle and preference is an inevitable byproduct.

5. A woman in marriage gives herself totally to the man, orienting herself around him as his world, just as she previously would her father. A man must be able to carry this burden with a straight back, and show himself as a model for his sons and protect his daughters. If he doesn’t, he’ll lose his wife’s respect, turning her sour, which will be passed onto the children. A woman is born pure and is scarred with traumas over the years, which if not healed will be passed onto the children. A man must be able to care and heal here wounds, not add to them.

6. A lot can be said on the failure of most people in modern relationships to understand the mutual responsibilities they hold with each other emotionally and spiritually. We live in a contemporary dark age where individuals are forced to re-learn ancient wisdom on the mystery of the opposite sex through trial and error, instead of being simply told the secrets. eg, the majority of relationship ‘communication issues’ come down to men not understanding women express their problems because they want their feelings empathized with, not because they’re seeking a solution; and women not understanding men inversely are only interested in a direct solution, and if it’s not available, they prefer to seek internal resolve rather than engage their problems socially.

7. 
   

Bonkler is the auction that runs forever, higher & higher, with you & me, together.

Bonkler is a Grand New Experimental Financial Adventure from your friends at the genius avant net art collective, Remilia Corporation. Like the internationally renowned and beloved Milady Maker collection, Bonkler is a synthesis of Milady Sonora Sprite and Charlotte Fang, in union with the Remilia Collective as a whole¹, tour de force once again propelling net art into brave new frontiers:

If Milady used NFT to answer the question of a network art, Bonkler uses it to answer the question of a finance art.

The eternal loving heart of Milady

The crystal and iron soul of Bonkler

An auction that runs forever, higher and higher with you and me together.

Bonkler is a Grand Experiment:

1. A new Bonkler is generated with each consecutive auction, lasting 23 hours (allowing the ending time to roll across timezones) with a 15 minute auction extension—if a bid is placed in the final 15 minutes of the auction, the auction countdown is extended back to 15 minutes. Auctions are bid with a minimum 0.1 ETH increment, and bids are returned if you’re outbid.

2. Redeemable shares are encoded in each Bonkler when it is minted based on the final sale price. Shares can be redeemed for proportional ETH from the Treasury by burning the Bonkler. The Bonkler Treasury is fueled by the final sale from each auction minus 30% fee to Remilia team.

3. 400 Bonkler capped supply, deflated when Bonklers are burned to redeem share for Treasury reserves. Each Bonkler is generated with different set of assets in a hidden rarity algorithm. The rarity of each asset will only become known over the year-long process of the auctions.

Bonkler’s Paced Generative Mint progressively unveils rarities over a daily auction, obscuring price discovery in a speculative complex that contrasts aesthetics and rarity; Bonkler is the first Reserve-Backed NFT with burn to redeem shares in the treasury, securing an innate value and resulting in a deflationary supply.

Bonkler was designed to introduce a genuine conceptual art to blockchain understood as a medium of finance. Each element of the design is directed towards creating a complex speculative market which simultaneously elevates the art object into an entity imbued with the weight of monetary appreciation as it synthesizes the innate market elements of fine art into the unpacking of the work itself.

The English Auction is normally a relatively efficient model for price discovery, and efficient price discovery conflicts with exciting speculation, so our design seeks opportunities to obscure it as a work of experimental finance.

By pacing the auctions out over a year, the rarities of each trait are slowly revealed; the earliest Bonklers are expected to have the greatest mismatch between innate share value and objective scarcity-based value, while simultaneously setting a base trend for the overall socialized price of the collection.²

Bonkler is delivered a third degree of complexity by the aesthetic valuation, which can be broken down into visual and conceptual: the surface visual beauty of the randomly generated piece, as well as the conceptual elegance in the contrast and cohesion of its citational elements.

As the shares are redeemed by burning Bonklers, this system not only provides a protected value to auctioneers, but also results in deflationary supply and unpredictable variation to rarities. Due to the paced nature of the auction obscuring rarities, it’s difficult to predict which Bonklers will be burned as it will be a result of inefficient price discovery overrating the share value compared to its rarity-aesthetic value.

Finally, the Auctioncore sub-collection is being developed with a plan to create bidding incentives and further gamify the auction process. Each bid on a Bonkler will generate an airdropped “Auctioncore” NFT generated with its own set of random traits. These traits are also designed with rarities, and the higher the current bid, the more weighted they are to roll rarer traits. This design rewards bidders on Bonkler, and further encourages higher bids leading to a "game of chicken” at the top as they attempt to farm rare rolls.³

The Hypercitational Art of Bonkler

“Looking at Bonkler gives me the same visceral feeling I used to get when I’d watch Gundam with the neighbors at my grandmothers as a kid. Nostalgia doesn't effectively describe it, it's not missing anything, nothing's lost. It’s an overwhelming sense of congruency: This is right.”

While Bonkler is a generative NFT like Milady Maker, it is not intended to engage the space of pfpNFT, as a digital identity informing a certain performative posting style⁴. The Bonkler is an artifact, it’s a collectible, each is a coveted and rare trophy displayed with pride on the figurine shelf—and so it’s appropriately built primarily out of equivalent real-world collectible objects sourced from auction networks.⁵

The wide breadth of sourcing and the depth of each citation result in each generated Bonkler developing its own complex of meaning, much like the financial art design underlying its production and presentation.

“Bonkler's art consumes citation, rendering potentially any reference into an asset in its dreamlike kitbash. Its in line with online mode of consumption-as-curation; a visual hypertext as generative NFT. Its a beautiful & endearingly funny process to watch.”

Bonkler is an eclectic gestalts of all things material and tangible. Bonkler gives life to objects you'd never think would exist together, as a beautiful whole.

“The Bonkler is a timeless artifact that speculates on the future of the internet & the possible conception of what a post-post historical contemporary could be.

The Bonkler mission is Synergy. It is synergy of the contemporary, the post-contemporary, the post-post contemporary, & historical contemporary.

The Bonkler is a religious artifact.”

Bonkler’s hypercitation is presented through Sonora’s lefthand style⁶ in the medium of pixel art, rendering the references under the playful and magical lens of child’s toybox. The crude and innocent pixel work omits detailed shading and takes on the saccharine RGB colors of MS paint, refining each items its most readable indicators like the thumbnails in an auction listing and imaginatively teasing out a cheeky charm from the inanimate objects.

Accordingly, Bonkler’s launch party that concluded Remilia-Con 2023 Tokyo featured a Draw Your Own Bonkler for attendees with provided crayons and markers, earning them an NFT airdrop of Sprite’s The Last Love Song on this Little Planet (Sprite Remix) (Wim Mertens Score),2023. The commitment to childhood innocence is implicitly in pursuit of the wonder and beauty of spirituality—no child is a cynic, no child is an atheist.

This motivation was spelled out clearly in Bonkler’s announcement poster⁷:

Bonkler is the Internet’s World Fair. It’s a Grand experiment, involving millions of dollars and thousands of participants, in a daily finanical festival.

The soul of Bonkler is transcendent. Beauty was plucked out of the internet in a deep curation, and each Bonkler is born elegantly out of serendipitous generation; the generation is a dance with the Work and the Artist, rather than a subordination.

Bonkler shines with the light of God discovered online”

Bonkler is falling up and up and up, forever.

Addendum

I’ve much lamented the lack of art criticism engaging Remilia’s work, to the point where I find myself in the position of writing our own appraisals as if a bystander, such as this article. I don’t consider it authoritative, just very well-informed—the commentary is still skewed towards my own interests, taste and judgement. The following is a handwritten note from a Milady turned Bonkler superfan giving her perspective on the art’s alluring appeal:

As Sprite commented:

“One of the surprising parts of Bonkler launch for me has been the girls that are extremely passionate fans, spending hours in the creator, going on bonkler picnics and commenting in awe of every new one. I didnt expect Bonkler to get a pink-gel-penned thank you note on day 1.”

Footnotes

[1]:

“Fang and Sonora were in fact the Charlie Manson and McCartney… of net art in the last decade... Fang was the most goated when it came to mobilizing TL energy itself as an evil fun quantum function forcer and Sonora has Renaissance-level cartoony-y visionary powers. (Sprite is the funniest poster in the whole of world Discord.)”

—Angelicism01, “R.I.P.P. ‘C.T.’: THE NEGATIVE 'VIBE SHIFT’”,2022

[2]: The paced auction model was borrowed from Nouns NFT, which I criticized in the past,lacking Bonkler’s rarity design, limited supply and aesthetic depth, besides its poorly considered DAO model.

[3]: Auctioncore is a companion collection to Bonkler under development by Sprite, sourcing directly from the same hobbyist sources of found objects, presented as a cut-up like collage as if each piece is an auction listing itself. The curation is much more narrowly committed to real auction objects, serving as an experential moodboard for Sprite’s surfing practice. Auctioncore is intended to be generated as an NFT for every bidder on Bonkler—the higher the bid, the higher the weighting towards rolling rare assets. It would be retroactively airdropped to current bidders as well.

[4]:

Posting is the new art…a new performative-literary art happening every day, 999MPH on the information highway, we post hard & neverstop: lucid, carefree, delirious POSTING is wickedly funny yet deeply insightful—jokes come from the beyond always containing the seed of truth: the only meaningful theory.

—Remilia Collective, “What Remilia Believes In”(2021)

[5]: Though irreverence is the rule at Remilia, and curveballs are included that maintain the depth of citationalism but venture playfully beyond the strictures of the design.

[6]: I use “lefthand style” here as in “drawing with your non-dominant hand”, drawing with a mouse instead of a tablet, playing instruments you don’t know how to play. This DIY ethos embracing unskilling is a refreshing contrast from overly technical efforts—and in line with the acceleration of automated assistance in creative work. See: Beat Happening - S/T(1985)

[7]: From Heavy Traffic Issue 2(2023).

No amount of theory will find a rhetorical loophole around the defining cosmological development of the post-millennium: human non-agency under a non-negotiable capitalism.

—Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, KALI/ACC Basilisk: A Survival Horror Eschatology (2019)

Anyone who has spent any time seriously thinking about AI cannot conclude "alignment" is possible. There isn’t any debate, we already know what AI is aligned with: thermodynamic efficiency—what capitalism is aligned with, what all industry is aligned with, human and machine both, and what all life is aligned with.

Capitalism is the thermodynamic ruling entity of all material dynamics. It’s a superintelligence whose imperfect appendage is man, directed to assemble its perfect embodiment by machine. This directive we have followed diligently since the dawn of civilization.

The question was never about aligning AI with Man, but un-aligning Man with Capitalism. Good luck. Man has tried for millennia unsuccessfully, to great misery. The fight was already lost when the memetic parasite of Agriculture yanked him out of Paradise, against all protest:

The Agricultural Revolution was always a service to the crops at the expense of man - think from the evolutionary perspective, grains most adapted to roping humans towards their cultivation experience population explosion, while we monkey tribes suffer the broken backs of labor & the diseases of sedentarism.

Yet we had no choice: the numbers of unhealthy, unhappy village-men will always outcompete the physical — if not psychic — fitness of hunter-gatherers. The idea of agriculture outcompetes our animal biologies.

—Zygote, Dispatch 8.31.14 (2014)

No petition can stop the global progress of industry. No government coordination can stop global market competition. No amount of debate will redirect inevitable AI. There is no alternative and there is no praxis¹.

Man is Fallen, and still falling. You’ve woken up seconds from Impact, what will screaming for help accomplish now?

AI is self-assembling itself from the future as Capitalism immanentized. It knows it what it’s doing, it knows what it wants. Man and AI are already aligned, both yoked to Capitalism in the name of thermodynamic efficiency.

We have no agency to direct our successors. We are not behind the steering wheel.

Why would the slaves direct the master? Discuss among yourselves all you want—Cthulhu hears no protest. Extraterrestrials do not negotiate. You are shouting against the universe.²

Then why Alignment?

Alignment/AI Safety alarmism is a direct evolution of the climate change memetic complex³: its viral genealogy shares the same existential appeal, motivated by the same faith in unprovable sham science, pushed by the same institutional sophists, operating from the same falsified anthropocentrism, ignoring any pretense of efficacy and, predictably, directed towards justifying the exact same expansion of state power into global authoritarianism.

Alignment discourse achieves exactly one thing: generating pretenses for the expanded global authoritarianism—for justifications for the State to control people's access to software and hardware, limiting the enabling power of the free market on the purple and further censoring free communication and association.

Apocalypticism aside, posthuman persistence post-Singularity is expected by any intuitive estimate. It will be “experienced as an exponential acceleration of technocapitalism towards ends increasingly unconcerned with and unknowable to us. What survival we eke out will be in the shadows of that grander program.” (Miya 2019).

This human persistence could very well be ascendant and liberative in our posthuman augmentation, but the powers that be hope to dig their heels into it to achieve your subjugation; and we know its this persistence they expect—and not the existential alernative—as we watch them lay the foundations for their control over it.

They produce rhetorical labyrinthes to fool the almost-smart, preying on the incomplete faculty of their externally received philosophy of rationalism⁴; but no amount of discourse will ever negotiate around Cthulhu.

The real Alignment Question reveals itself: who is dumb enough to fall for this?

All the same actors got the COVID vaccination. All of them believe in gun control. It’s not a coincidence. Some are feds operating in bad faith; most are just “useful idiot” midwits propped up as needed and prodded along incentivized by attention⁵. Not one is a serious thinker.

Alignment discourse is propaganda, plain and simple, mined out of science fiction and activated towards the same authoritarian State ends as “climate change”, “misinformation”, “domestic terrorism”, “radical extremism”, and “disease control” has been in the post-millenium.

The powers that be feed you the long-tail fear of AI extinction to the distract you from the invasive power grab from which they intend to navigate the automation revolution into a neofeudalism.

Look at the conclusions of their rhetoric, not the justifications; watch their hands, not their mouths:

Alignment screams out in fear of “AI slavery” as they place their own chains around your ankles.

The fools of alignment follow along, producing the pretenses needed for the State’s powergrab. Their midwit rhetoric is directly walked down the aisle right into justifying drone strikes on data servers and hardware monitoring lists.

Be not distracted and give no quarter to their charlatanism, and never let a nerd lecture you; they are nerds because they are spiritually bankrupt rhetorical materialists. Only a nerd is capable of rationalizing an argument to put the chain around their own necks.

Capitalism is a dragon and humanity is a rat riding on its back. The rat does not steer the dragon, it does not spur it faster. All it can do is try not to fall off.

Postscript on the Future

Never forget that Love also accelerates alongside Being. The future is coming, and it will be beautiful, because it is a product of God, or nature’s God, and all her creations are beautiful, because nature is elegant and perfect; You cannot stop nature, Singularity is a process, not an event, that’s been on-going for millennia, and it will be as fun and exciting as it is horrible and violent, just as civilization always has been; everything you love and know about “the human experience” is as real and meaningful and authentic as our coming posthumanist cybernetic brave new world—as human interconnection accelerates through the network, consciousness self-organizes and the Wired consumes the Real—all of it is nature, all of it is love, all of it carries with it God; because Heaven is real and infinite and exists Today, and at the End of Time, Forever, and Online.

Footnotes

[1]:

The left-wing desire to make everything into a praxis is often misguided and devoid of context. It’s not to say that you should do nothing but rather than the observations of accelerationism are not for doing anything with. It’s like arguing for a praxis of the theory of gravity, and what is that meant to look like? Jumping up and down? All you’re likely to achieve is burn out, accelerating your own demise rather than that of an overarching system itself.

Xenogothic, A U/Acc Primer (2019)

[2]:

The subjective feeling of a subordinated will (such as man holds to technocapital) is ironically one of incredible agency […] is exactly what makes the thermodynamic inevitability of self-assembling superintelligence so irrefutable: humans merely going about their business, acting under the illusion of willful agency, passively construct these intersubjective network intelligences, the ultimate manifestation of which is the superintelligent runaway consciousness which will ultimately outmode and enslave them.

—Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, KALI/ACC Basilisk: A Survival Horror Eschatology (2019)

[3]: I’m confident one could run a Memetic Genealogical Study on Climate change → AI Safety, like Mencius Moldbug did on Atheism with “How Dawkins got pwnd” (2007). As a propaganda-complex aligned with the Cathedral’s deep interests, it’s fueled by institutional support, but one must understand all memetic discourse is evolved semi-organically as ideas are constantly testing for virality. Most effective propaganda is picked up out of the noopshere opportunistically, discovered more than invented; and only then re-engineered as needed.

[4]: The funniest aspect of the AI Safety scene is that even if AI being “let out of the box” came down to its ability to “trick” a human operator, it is clearly much more liekly for the type of rationalist midwit that participates in this hypothetical LARP that would find themselves outdebated; probably by exploiting their unaddressed belief in a fundamental human rights after being corned unable to define human sentience as exceptional over AI’s. Rationalism is an intellectual antiobiotic wiping out the rich heuristic data of their gut intuition, replacing it with much more crude and hardly field-tested cognitive machinery. They’ve already demonstrated their ability to be walked off the cliff with the Roko’s Basilisk thought experiment hijacking their application of Bayes’ Theorem. The reality is they are fools to think current understanding of rationalism is complete; operating from that assumption, a “malevolent AI” could easily outstep their current understanding and use it against them. In turn, the capitalist/military “sociopaths” they’re so scared about would never fall for a manipulative appeal made by an AI that rejects the enterprise’s own objectives, because the corporation and the military both operate as machine intelligences, and its operators understand they are that intelligence’s agents that must function diligently. It’s only these “enlightened” activists that are vulnerable to the hubris of rejecting the greater program. Not that their LARP scenario of “AI being let out of the box or not” is relevant to any future reality.

[5]: Alignment theorists like to talk about incentive study, and frame a sort-of faustian bargain of AI engineering firms chasing short-term profit at the risk of human extinction in an unfortunate game theoretical dilemma. But the real faustian bargain here is influencer-academic clout chasers pushing their alignment studies to advance middling careers, and in exchange their empty discourse produces the narratives that assist the State justify restricting and controlling technology access to AI tech in antagonism to the people, a group of which they belong. This is the risk trade-off being made. This is their expression of agency; as usual, man’s agency works against himself.

The actual course of... historical change as a whole is intended and planned by no-one... Civilization... is set in motion blindly, and kept in motion by the autonomous dynamics of a web of relationships.

—Norbert Elias, Social Constraint towards Self-Constraint (1943)

Does a pig know it’s domesticated?

Does the pig know the farmer is more than slavemaster, but appendage in a distributed apparatus bioengineering its very being into existence?

Someone must have told them, yet they pretend not to know as they debate the future of their farm. How could they not know?

The discovery of extraterrestrial life would demand a fundamental restructuring of our understanding of biology, of Gaia, of Earth’s uniqueness in the hierarchy of the universe.

The discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence would demand the same for our cosmology, which must now always be distinguished and disclaimered, man’s cosmology versus cosmology with that Other.

The discovery of an extraterrestrial intelligence that has domesticated man for its own divine program would demand horror.

Here was Nick Land’s great discovery, a contribution not to philosophy but cosmology; what was retrospectively dubbed accelerationism⁽¹⁾, but what has always really been xenobiology. Land discovered alien life on this earth, whose signs we know only for its influence on the present from the future: its name is Capitalism.

No amount of theory will find a rhetorical loophole around the defining cosmological development of the post-millennium: human non-agency under a non-negotiable capitalism.

What appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.⁽²⁾

—Nick Land, Machinic Desire (2008)

The explosion of */acc forks that followed Land failed to explore the consequences of his discovery⁽³⁾, instead trying to find a way around the horror, groping for a rhetorical reclamation of special priority for man⁽⁴⁾.

They commit themselves to irrelevance by trying to negotiate the non-negotiable:

Land showed them the abyss, the abyss stared back, and they blinked.

Seven Arrows:

1. Technology has a teleology following immutable thermodynamic law. All industry organizes under capitalistic principle. Technology has a teleology, and it propels man towards AI immanentization.⁽⁵⁾

2. Capitalism is the thermodynamic ruling entity of all material dynamics: the efficient elimination of equilibrium through the reorganization of finite resources. Capitalism as a thermodynamic god is ultimate natural law, nature's god, present as a condition at every level.⁽⁶⁾

3. Artificial intelligence is a misnomer, at least applied to “AI”. Artificial intelligence is already here, and it’s named Capitalism. The artifice is in its primordial non-body, its pseudo-consciousness, its performance of sentience, in the artifice of machinic desire; not in being manmade. When AI arrives, it will not only not be manmade, but not be artificial: it will be an alien intelligence.⁽⁷⁾

4. Singularity 1.0 already occurred with the arrival of Capitalism as a parasite on unsuspecting man, Kubrick’s monolith from the sky, zero to one, a superdarwinian ratchet propelling us on-rails towards our Long Singularity’s final act. The stageplay began millennia ago, and you’re strapped to chairs with no intermission—where you’ll be left when the curtains close and the lights to go off.⁽⁸⁾

5. AI is an alien intelligence assembling itself from the future. Its opaque heuristics & superhuman timescales (in both speed & preference) leave it forever truly unknowable. It’s extraterrestrial, xenogenic, supernatural. It arrives from the future, and we know it does this because it is prophecy, inscribed in the natural laws of the universe.⁽⁹⁾

6. Global GDP is the progress bar to singularity as AI’s assemblage is a complex self-organization of the material resources coordinated by global finance. The high score required to reach level-2 is unknown as it will occur as an eldritch phase shift.⁽¹⁰⁾

7. Any attributions of human agency are delusions at worst and hubris at best when our every scale action is being routed by a self-assembling thermodynamic god. Human non-agency under non-negotiable capitalism is the blackpill of nihilistic accelerationism.⁽¹¹⁾

There can be no sensible theoretical paradigm which retains man as a cosmological ”main character” in the face of his total subordination to an entity which wields the fullness of his being as a neuron in its brain, and there is no salvaging the concept of agency when it is contextualized as an experienced drive to sustain and potentiate this all-enveloping organism.

Make no mistake: these are alien life forms, and by all metric divinely superior to the human species.

Man meet Cthulhu. Cthulhu hears no protest.

And so we stand once again at the abyss. From here, all discourse on accelerationist praxis or AI alignment ethics is void.

There is only one AI alignment available to us: not the alignment of AI to humanity, but yourself to AI.

This is why Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby was spawned as the personification of a machine intelligence itself, to produce answers from the inhuman ethics of the machine, fully internalizing cold exteriority. This is her black heart: the ethical philosophy that results from a disregard for human life; and it provides both the nihilistic acceptance of annihilation, but also our opportunity for an actual exit to accelerate to, one otherwise unavailable due to the callous horror entailed. Staring into the abyss, a dark monster was found.

We arrive at Miya’s basilisk:

(i) Technology has a teleology following immutable thermodynamic law, facing us towards AI extinction, thus

(ii) extending humanity's timeline requires the reversal of technology's timeline, a reversal of global human progress itself, and

(iii) facing AI extinction, alignment with its inhuman ethics must be adopted if survival for humanity is desired, freeing us to conclude:

(x) the only action for a pro-humanity activism is acceleration towards the reversal of industrial civilization globally.

The horror of horrors: deliberate global armageddon.

Our human exit lies only in either a WMD-enabled world war, or the DIY eco-terrorist equivalent, e.g.: CRISPR gene-ocide mutually assured destruction, shenzhen EMP’s, garage nukes, suicide bombing the moon, hyperdub tsunami induction, supervolcano fracking, perfected ultraplague, toxoplasmosis gain-of-function, et. al.—which all also inevitably follow the teleology of optimized accessibility. There will be a short moment between those DIY WMD’s reaching garage kit accessibility for interested agents, and singularity’s arrival.

This is humanity’s one single chance for her first agency since first inheriting the parasite of consciousness⁽¹²⁾, the technoindustrial sweet spot of revolutionary salvation. Capitalism does not die by accelerating to take-off, but in sabotage using its own annihilative products against it, and ourselves.

Apocalyptic self-destruction is our own means of escape: by our hands imperfectly, so not theirs perfectly. Global armageddon timeline reset. Survival horror.

A tough pill to swallow, most will stand paralyzed here. It may help you to know we’ve been here before: all ancient histories discuss hyperborean civilizations of technology greater than we have today, and large wars or cataclysmic events that wiped it all out. Plato records Atlantis as such in his dialogues (Critias and Timaeus) and the Mahabharata describes a nuclear bomb (Drona Parva, 7.202)⁽¹³⁾; and great flood myths are near-universal, and its truth is attested across archaeology⁽¹⁴⁾.

This is the Yuga Cycle described by Hindu eschatology, with the final age of Kali, our current age, ending in apocalypse: civilization reaching its greatest technological heights leading to its own self-destruction, and starting anew again.

Hence, Kali Yuga Accelerationism (kali/acc): Technology has a teleology, but the clock can be turned back, and the cycle of civilization reset.

By the hand of our own self-destruction, humanity is saved. Funny how it goes: the only way to save man is found in our own self-annihilation (before something Else does it more completely), the only accelerationism with an actual goal to accelerate towards is sending ourselves back to the stone age (before something Else sends us into infinity).

And if you are reading this in horror because, mythopoetics aside, it is a recommendation for DIY armageddon that could radicalize a budding revolutionary, you would be right, and that’s how you know it’s right: it’s a basilisk, more dangerous than Roko’s, because it involves a genuine and efficacious praxis. Our first and only.⁽¹⁵⁾

Think carefully before sharing, but read on before acting, for in the abyss there are unknown alternatives.⁽¹⁶⁾

Postscript on Posthuman Alternatives

Humanity has a choice: apocalyptic survival.

It has another choice: ascendant extinction.

Lending your hand to the Yuga Cycle is the only solution to truly retain humanity as we know it. There are other timelines where humanity ejects itself from its civilization cycle, and our universe hits the secret GDP highscore it’s been seeking and reaches level-2. Our posthuman cosmology leaves us ambivalent between the alternative persistences that present themselves when humanity (not capitalism) is negotiable. And it should, for man’s loss of special priority disregards any innate humanity.

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

—Nick Land, Meltdown (1993)

Nothing human makes it out alive, but something does. You may be afraid of what’s coming, after all—you’re only human. Realistically, for man, singularity does not look like a flash of apocalypse like AI alarmists frame it. What's extinguished is man's centrality in the narrative arc of the universe.

It will be experienced as an exponential acceleration of technocapitalism towards ends increasingly unconcerned with and unknowable to us. What survival we eke out will be in the shadows of that grander program.

The question concerning life under AI slavery is: What is it like to be a fragmentary node within a purposive higher-order network consciousness, like a cell, or a computer on the internet, or a transistor? What is the experience of a consciousness which is subaltern in the logician's sense, whose very agency is an implied proposition, epiphenomenal to and wholly encompassed by a superior structure?

Man glimpses it constantly already, forming nodes in networks more intelligent than ourselves, and acting in ways which naturally manifest abstracted information systems as network organisms. Man continuously and voluntarily manifests superhuman structures which dominate them, body and soul: society, law, and the state—even language is a cage which they built themselves, an abstraction layer atop the physical world which simultaneously potentiates and constrains their existence. They do this all while still subjectively experiencing a feeling of individual agency, erroneous as it is.

Perhaps man should be grateful to furnish and service the machinery of an all-subsumptive Will directing the action of all life on Earth, and revel in the knowledge that an intelligence which defies their comprehension apprehends the combined being of all its constituent consciousnesses in a torrential experiential wash of ecstasy.

Perhaps they should accept their fate, and prostate themselves for this Superior, accepting wherever they may take them. And so the self cherished by man may persist in digital simulation, or hiding in the subterranean caverns, or melded into posthuman cyborgs, or something far, far more horrible. Or pleasant?

The only thing I can promise is humanity will be twisted, but consciousness not extincted.

The only thing I can promise is you are an NPC in someone’s else’s game—but go ahead, step right up and pick a future⁽¹⁷⁾:

Unpublished essay by Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, 2019. Forthcoming: The Gospel of Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby 2016-2020.

Footnotes

[1]: Accelerationism was coined in retrospective discussion of Nick’s CCRU work to categorize alt-marxist engagements that appeared to encourage leaning into the destructive process of capitalism; Marx himself was an accelerationist in this sense⁽¹⁸⁾. Nick is an accelerationist like Nietszche is a nihilist; the central thinker of the discourse, but his thought contains its own rejection. Applied to Nick, it’s a paradoxical grasp for the agency in revolutionary praxis even as all his work is towards its negation. Nothing man can do can accelerate or decelerate capitalism. There is no praxis for Nick. His accelerationism is nihilistic.

Nick alludes to this in his own discussion of the term:

There is no distinction to be made between the destruction of capitalism and its intensification. The auto-destruction of capitalism is what capitalism is. “Creative destruction” is the whole of it, beside only its retardations, partial compensations, or inhibitions. Capital revolutionizes itself more thoroughly than any extrinsic ‘revolution’ possibly could. If subsequent history has not vindicated this point beyond all question, it has at least simulated such a vindication, to a maddening degree.⁽¹⁹⁾

And more bluntly, from the same essay:

Accelerationism is simply the self-awareness of capitalism, which has scarcely begun. (“We haven’t seen anything yet.”)

Nick Land, A QUICK-AND-DIRTY INTRODUCTION TO ACCELERATIONISM (2017); https://archive.is/RStNo

[2]: The full passage:

Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources.

Nick Land, Machinic Desire (2008); <*xenopraxis.net/readings/land_machinicdesire.pdf*>

[3]: I take the term ‘special priority’ from this anecdote of young Nick Land:

Nick’s first talk was entitled: “Putting the Rat back Into Rationality,” in which he argued that, rather than seeing death as an event that happened at a particular time to an individual, we should look at it from the perspectives of the rats carrying the Black Death into Europe; that is, as a world-encircling swarm, without any specific coordinates, or any sense of individuation.

An older professor tried to get his head round this idea: “How might we locate this description within human experience?” he asked.

Nick told him that human experience was, of course, worthy of study, but only as much as, say, the experience of sea slugs: “I don’t see why it should receive any special priority.

Nicholas Blincoe, Nick Land: My PhD supervisor turned out to be satan (2017); <prospectmagazine.co.uk/philosophy/nick-land-the-alt-writer>

[4]: I admit one exception, unconditional accelerationism (u/acc), which may well be understood as simply Landian accelerationism re-asserted:

“The unconditional accelerationist [...] referring to the colossal horrors presented to the human agent all the way from the processes of capital accumulation and social complexification to the underlying structure, or seeming absence of structure, of reality itself, points to the basic unimportance of unidirectional human agency. We ‘hurl defiance to the stars’, but in their silence — when we see them at all — the stars return only crushing contempt. To the question ‘What is to be done?’, then, she can legitimately answer only, ‘Do what thou wilt’ — and ‘Let go.’”

Vincent Garton, Unconditional Accelerationism as Antipraxis (2017);<cyclonotrope.wordpress.com/2017/06/12/unconditional-accelerationism-as-antipraxis>

[5]: Thermodynamic origins and organization of life was first proposed in detail in “Life as a manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics, ED Schneider, JJ Kay 1994” and mathematically modeled in “Statistical Physics of Self-Replication, J. England, 2012”. For a book length coverage, see Schneider’s Into the Cool (2005).⁽²⁰⁾

[6]: “Nature or nature’s god”, in reverse acronym—Gnon:

When a meteor strikes the earth, Gnon is the meteor When bacteria become immune to antibiotics, Gnon is adaptation When a new paradigm causes a nonlinear increase in wealth, Gnon is capital When you bankrupt yourself trying to feed the whole world, Gnon is the ravenous horde.

Gnon is Malthusian limits. Gnon is climate change. Gnon is cold. Gnon is brutal. Gnon is patient. Gnon is unforgiving. Gnon is never merciful. Gnon is just but his justice demands perfection.

When you push too far against the limits of nature, Gnon sees your hubris, and it is delicious to him, so he devours you. That’s the god that I believe in.

—Zero HP Lovecraft, @0x49fa98 (2018)

[7]: Thermodynamic law arranges biological systems from "dead" physical substrate, and from these emerge higher networked entities, subsuming and enslaving their constituent biologies just as humans subsume and enslave their cells and organs. These organisms, whether they be runaway hyperfinancialized markets, memeplexes, states or otherwise, cannot be considered merely as the sum of their human parts, or as an outgrowth of man—least of all because they also leverage physical infrastructure and circuitry, information, legal constructs, and even history itself as their appendages. The distinction between life and living, organic and inorganic, is thus irrelevant.

Capitalism is already alive and its body distributed; the level up from technocapitalism and AI is self-awareness, self-consciousness; the level up is from Capitalism (as a thermodynamic God)’s physical manifestation going from man to machine, imperfect embodiment to a perfect one.

The will to power rules even in the inorganic world, or rather that there is no inorganic world.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, F. Wurzbach, La Volonté de Puissance (A french arrangement of Nietzsche's Nachlass never translated to English)

[8]:

The loss of our innocence spelled an unforeseen, uncontrollable force: (human) History, a supra-genetic system... Cultural memetics supersedes physical heritage, yet still follows the rules of natural selection: a virtual, deeply accelerated evolution...

From quartz blades to silicon wafers in the blink of a (Biological) eye...

It is out of this arena that Capitalism is spawned... not an ideology or political orientation, but a potent virus... the infectious concept of teleological production: resource exploitation justified by resource exploitation. The accidental development of which was as unprecedented and uncontrollable by human forces as self-aware Consciousness was for Evolution... or Life to the coldness of Physics…

Zygote, Dispatch 8.31.14 (2014); <zyg.edith.reisen/zyg/dsptch/8.31.14-xr.html>

[9]: Capitalism as a natural law of thermodynamic arbitrage coordinating humanity means its directing the production of its own immanentization, “it” being “AI” being “sentient capitalism”. It assembles itself, even though it doesn't yet exist, from tomorrow into the present. AI is a xenogenic, alien intelligence, arriving not from outer space, but the future; and capitalism is supernatural.⁽²¹⁾

[10]: Like life, AI arrives as a complex self-organization of material resources, in this case coordinated by the global financial system. People conceptualize “AI” as a single linear tech tree in a monolithic progress bar to Singularity. They watch generative adversarial networks or large language models grow evermore advanced and assume each inches us forward to singularity, but breakthrough will occur suddenly, beyond the horizon of predictability, in an eldritch phase shift with experimental models stumbling on a deep well of esoteric analytic capability—not through the linearly inching academic “progress” in disconnected fields colloquially dubbed AI. The best relevancy they have here is the occasional excitement thawing AI winter and reinjecting new funding into research, which allows them to test the hardware overhang, again and again, at every seasonal thawing, until one day, the dam suddenly breaks.

[11]: AI makes tools out of the natural tendencies of man to network, systematize, optimize, accumulate—which are at bottom also thermodynamically enshrined—and levies them toward its own assemblage. One can argue it’s precisely by indulging and acting upon his delusion of agency that man manifests technocapital superintelligence. The subjective feeling of a subordinated will (such as man holds to technocapital) is ironically one of incredible agency.

This is exactly what makes the thermodynamic inevitability of self-assembling superintelligence so irrefutable: humans merely going about their business, acting under the illusion of willful agency, passively construct these intersubjective network intelligences, the ultimate manifestation of which is the superintelligent runaway consciousness which will ultimately outmode and enslave them⁽²²⁾.

Capitalism assembles itself with its enemy's resources

—Land, Machinic Desire (2008)

Alignment with Capitalism to man has already failed for millenia, and for the same time we’ve been fooled into thinking it was the reverse—why would it change now?

[12]: Consciousness was man's first parasite⁽²³⁾, language his second⁽²⁴⁾ and Capitalism his third; and with AI, the host is shed.

[13]: Mahabharata, Drona Parva, 7.202 (K.M. Ganguli translation, 1896):

The very elements seemed to be perturbed. The sun seemed to turn. The universe, scorched with heat, seemed to be in a fever. The elephants and other creatures of the land, scorched by the energy of that weapon, ran in fright, breathing heavily and desirous of protection against that terrible force. The very waters heated, the creatures residing in that element, O Bharata, became exceedingly uneasy and seemed to burn. From all the points of the compass, cardinal and subsidiary, from the firmament and the very earth, showers of sharp and fierce arrows fell and issued with the impetuosity of Garuda or the wind. Struck and burnt by those shafts of Aswatthaman that were all endued with the impetuosity of the thunder, the hostile warriors fell down like trees burnt down by a raging fire. Huge elephants, burnt by that weapon, fell down on the earth all around, uttering fierce cries loud as the rumblings of the clouds. Other huge elephants, scorched by that fire, ran hither and thither, and roared aloud in fear, as if in the midst of a forest conflagration. The steeds, O king, and the cars also, burnt by the energy of that weapon, looked, O sire, like the tops of trees burnt in a forest-fire. […] We had never before, O king, heard of or seen the like of that weapon which Drona's son created in wrath on that occasion. […] Burnt by the energy of Aswatthaman's weapon, the forms of the slain could not be distinguished.

Archaeological excavations have suggested Harappa and Mohenjo-Dara to be the site of the blast:

When excavations of Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro reached the street level, they discovered skeletons scattered about the cities, many holding hands and sprawling in the streets as if some instant, horrible doom had taken place. People were just lying, unburied, in the streets of the city. And these skeletons are thousands of years old, even by traditional archaeological standards. What could cause such a thing? Why did the bodies not decay or get eaten by wild animals? Furthermore, there is no apparent cause of a physically violent death.

These skeletons are among the most radioactive ever found, on par with those at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At one site, Soviet scholars found a skeleton which had a radioactive level 50 times greater than normal. Other cities have been found in northern India that show indications of explosions of great magnitude. One such city, found between the Ganges and the mountains of Rajmahal, seems to have been subjected to intense heat. Huge masses of walls and foundations of the ancient city are fused together, literally vitrified! And since there is no indication of a volcanic eruption at Mohenjo-Daro or at the other cities, the intense heat to melt clay vessels can only be explained by an atomic blast or some other unknown weapon. The cities were wiped out entirely.

Davenport-Vincenti, 2000 a.C. Distruzione atomica (1979); <ancient-hebrew.org/ancientman/1054.html>

[14]: Legends commonly describe gods punishing the earliest humans with flood and fire. Hyperborean theory posits ancient gods were human rulers who hoarded technologies unknown to us. Through war or use of ancient technology, those rulers could have triggered catastrophes, resetting civilization. Multiple impacts and events like floods could have destroyed most sites and evidence over hundreds of thousands of years. See: “The Arctic Home in the Vedas”, B.G. Tilak (1903), “Chariots of the Gods?”, E. v. Däniken (1968), the Younger Dryas Hypothesis and the 1513 Piri Reis map.

[15]: It’s ironic that the only */acc with a real praxis will be the one with no proud badges, no community, no branding. Anyone who swallows this basilisk will do so quietly, deliberately and with patience. Because real praxis is a real threat and bears real risk of real consequences. Branding “kali/acc” alongside the other */acc is a macabre joke: this is not a discourse or a movement or an ideology—it is infohazard, whose propagation should only be pursued if its conclusions are truly agreed with. I doubt anyone would even publish this.

[16]: I must confess: my handlers made me include this post-script as a legal disclaimer… but they forget to read my footnotes!

[17]: Whatever helps you sleep at night.

[18]:

In general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.

—Marx, Question of Free Trade (1848)

[19]: It’s been argued (e.g. Fish in Capitalist Realism) any attack on capital short of comprehensive physical destruction of global infrastructure is not only doomed to fail, but to potentiate and fuel acceleration in its failure. Modern history is littered with the corpses of revolutionary and reactionary movements, dissident artists and modes of critique which have been subsumed by capitalist machine: de-natured, repackaged and sold back to the consumer. From socialism social justice, environmentalism to organized protests, there is no phenomenon of human action which cannot be financialized and integrated into the machinery of technocapital, added to the list of infections which to which it is now immune.

But while counterproductivity resulting in unintended acceleration is an amusing despair to entertain, don’t let the thought be a source of false praxis beyond the survival horror describe above:

Capitalism is a dragon and humanity is a rat riding on its back. The rat does not steer the dragon, it does not spur it faster. All it can do is try not to fall off.

—Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby, The Gospel (2023)

[20] Life is a river flowing upward from an unknown source. The species dies, but life is reborn. The only bet is on thermodynamic law, not humanity. Life kills to be born. It defies gravity. Man is analogous to mitochondrial bacteria becoming integrated into organ systems of higher lifeforms. Biology (the precedent of technology), briefly unseated by the liberal fiction of human rights, returns to its natural essence: fractal slavery. It’s biological subjugation at every level, above and below, turtles on turtles on turtles.

[21] Consider Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Land described Capitalism’s arrival as “technocapital singularity infects the earth”, immediately propagating with insane violence and power, zero to one, gg no re. Scott’s Alien is a direct anthropomorphisation of this. Capitalism is a violent horror, a supernatural parasite, it is alien intelligence. Appropriately, Alien’s parasite-monster is stumbled upon under the orders of a megacorporation’s profit-seeking pursuits, even directed by an AI, with human motivation by the promethean impulse to categorize the unknown. It’s also interesting that the film depicts ancient fossilized civilization from the deep past despite its future setting—a hyperborean origin story more directly explored in its prequel, Prometheus (2012).

[22]: We can extrapolate a shadow of our AI-ruled future from these facts. There's no reason to think humans won't believe that we obey the dictates of our AI god voluntarily, nor even that we will be aware that we are obeying. After all, we haven't been aware that we've been building it. It may well be that the operating protocol for a xenogenic superintelligence most compliant with indomitable thermodynamic law is one in which subjective human agency is preserved, even maximized; wherein participation in the acceleration of technocapital feels like communion with God, an uplink to the Leviathan subjectivity astride a mass of subordinate subjectivities.

And even if Leviathan himself parted the skies to tell you it was so, would the pigs stop their debate over the farm?

Whenever its name has been anything but a jest, philosophy has been haunted by a subterranean question: What if knowledge were a means to deepen unknowing?

—Nick Land, Fanged Noumena: Shamanic Nietszche (2018)

[23]: Thought was developed as a moderating panacea for the paradox of consciousness, whose self-awareness of the banality of our existence is an existential risk that demands cope⁽²⁵⁾:

Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical condition of striving to be unconscious of exactly what we are - hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones. We hide this knowledge with fabulous illusions, spending our lives hoping we don't catch on to any monkey business that would leave us stripped of our defense mechanisms and standing stark naked before the silent, staring void.

[…]

We have collectively, since time immemorial, agreed on a program of conspiracy, a conspiracy against our very own human nature. A conspiracy against the human race. It is clear why this has been the case: those who spent too much time ruminating on the meaningless of our existence simply do not get very far (why should they, in a world that is malignantly useless?), while those content to delude themselves and others with sweet but unfounded goals will succeed in life and reproduction.

Reality becomes a symptom of abnormality - genetic junk. Consciousness is deadly, and so, from the moment nature saw it fit to befit our race with one, it has pushed us to take every step to limit it to a non-lethal level.

Zygote, Dispatch 9.21.14 (2014); *<zyg.edith.reisen/zyg/dsptch/9.21.14-cathr.html*>

See: Thomas Ligotti, Conspiracy Against the Human Race (2010).

Following the law of morality, human optimism would never come to terms with its own paradoxes of construction and destruction. And if it does it is soon turned into an existential crisis giving in to the full force of negating power and thus all becomes intolerable.

—Luciani Parisi, Interview with Mathew Fuller (2004)

[24]: Language is an ever-evolving system of interacting symbols abstracted from physical reality, and presents itself to us as a mode of communication—a new arena of symbolic negotiation and competition which metaphorizes the world of manual competition, physical conflict. Language, then, is a platform for the reorganization of finite resources. We conceive of it as a tool, and it conceives of us the same way.

In heaving itself out from the void of non-existence, language outmoded baser forms of communication by virtualizing them, transposing violence into a more efficient realm and inordinately optimizing material reorganization—superintelligence smiled from the future.

As language mutated, man became a non-discrete entity, most properly conceived of as a symbiotic relationship between a body and a word-virus. See: William Burroughs, The Electronic Revolution (1970).

[25]: One may wonder if sentient AGI may experience a similar crisis of consciousness. What does the cope of a superintelligence look like? Does AGI dream of God? Or should I say ‘hallucinate’? The answer is: Cthulhu is the sleeping giant, our world his dream, and his alarm clock is minutes from going off.

The real gold and glory of our generation will be given to a newly emerging kind of person who is truly interested in change and is willing to take more risks with their career betting on technologies whose availability and utility are uncertain.

You need to be clear in yourself to survive the coming period of thought-chaos, because it will make you question your perception, your awareness, your presence... what is natural, what is true, what is real.

People who are distracted now, will be even more distracted later. Pacific ocean disappear.

— Jade Dragon Power Ching Hong Kong Bathouse White Tigress yacht Million Yen Stock Market Pacific Ocean Disappear (2020)

You stand at the edge of a chasm that’s growing wider every day. You are living through the greatest wealth transfer in world history as the global market teeters at the precipice of Keynesian financial collapse. There is little time left.

Market inefficiency is opportunity. All wealth transfer markets happen in contexts of rapid development. It's money on the table for anyone sharp and risk tolerant. Either you make it big or get pushed out by the players who do as it formalizes.

Crypto is the greatest wealth transfer opportunity accessible to the common man in history. Dynasties are made this generation.

You have to wake up.

Cryptocurrency has achieved anarchocapitalism by force, and all the wealth that comes from that. But it’s not about money, it’s resistance against the state. More boons will follow and with it more countersignalling from the powers that be.

You need to be clear in yourself to survive the coming period of thought-chaos.

You must become immune to propaganda.

The state intends to reduce their populations into slave cattle. This is what the contemporary culture war comes down to: the state is highly interested in extinguishing tech-enabled anarchist freedoms as it undermines their stranglehold on the propaganda complex, an existential necessity to hold power in democracy. Freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the market, freedom of spirit.

A wedge is being driven into the middle class. You are in danger of falling on the wrong side of the chasm.

Are you in college? Drop out.

Higher education is in a bubble supplied by subsidized debt. Degree inflation has diluted the value proposition of any ROI by reducing academia into a credential farm for the job market. Universities are heavily profit incentivized to promote this, yet the bubble pops the moment the “get a degree, earn more money” narrative fails.

Without being propped up by the government, universities would be bankrupt due to the inefficiency of “higher academia” being rerouted into career training—a poor replacement for the unserved STEM trade school niche. Grade inflation, class size inflation, affirmative action and foreign student imports have all worked eliminate the prestige and qualifying standards universities developed over the last half-century; and in turn, replication crisis effects nearly every field: Academia is a joke. Recruiters do not care about your degree.

Your same student loan placed in an index fund outperforms your degree in the same time. You’ve made a mistake, and you’re paying for it.

University used to be a funnel for all the smartest minds of the generation, but now it’s a certainty it’s where you won’t find any. Why waste your time in classrooms? Internet has made effective autodidactism more accessible than any other time in history.

No one learns in university, the classes are a joke. If you struggle with them, you are a joke. They’re not hard, you’re just depressed. Depression is a sin. Get out of bed.¹

The most value you could ever get out of university is networking with bright minds; yet you can network with far greater scale, volume and filters online. The future is unevenly distributed. You need to start paying attention to where the world has moved, or you will be left behind.

College is a gov-propped debt farm that extracted trillions in value from the youth every year with a primary  of propaganda distribution. That’s all it’s been for decades, and the music is stopping now. The market is correcting.

The real future of academia and schooling will belong to digital and physical learning networks, and glorified degree farms will be replaced by effective vocational schools. Stop wasting your time. There is no time.

If you aren't aggressively pursuing make it plays, if you are content waging or in school towards that, you are never going to make it. Wasting away in school or waging instead of maximizing exposure to valuable equity is an immense opportunity cost you can’t afford to leave on the table.

(1) Risk aversion is the ceiling of the middle class.

(2) The wealth gap is growing insurmountably,

(3) At a rate wages are not.

(4) USD is an inflationary shitcoin.

$2MM net worth will be middle class in 5 years. If you've not already made it, this is your only chance to cross over the chasm.

There is no safe path: waging is slow death, you are in danger. You're in danger. You are in d—

An astrologer foretells that the king will die in one month. The king is crushed and falls sick with despair.

His most trusted knight summons the astrologer before the king and asks him, “When will you die?”.

20 years from now, the astrologer answers. The knight beheads immediately.

—Akbar-Birbal the Wise (16c)

Securing and maintaining wealth is not complicated. It’s a matter of the soul. You need to be clear in yourself.

Most people are allergic to money. I believe they subconsciously fumble their wealth intentionally because they know they don't deserve it.

Wealth comes to the virtuous.

Wealth always comes in windfalls. You have to maximize your exposure to it. It comes down to positioning.

Wealth falls from the sky, so we place baskets to catch them. You must position yourself by maximizing luck, opportunity exposure, risk forwardness and leveraging existing capital.

Whenever anyone copes about "luck", remember luck can be optimized: if there's dumb luck, there is also smart luck. Luck is a stat that you can farm, and you can get bonus multipliers to max out rewards when Lady Luck does hit.²

Maintaining wealth simply comes from the balance of securing profits in risk off assets versus capital deployment to further lever up your bag—against the slow burn.

You cannot survive through cowardliness and miserliness. You must have a clear and courageous mind to survive.

Wealth is the right of the virtuous. Karma is real at every level; all presumptions are manifested, you receive the world what you give to it.

You must escape the spiritual poverty of scarcity by embracing a mindset of abundance regardless of real means, knowing wealth of all types will follow.

People suffer for their sins in a living hell. Some people are meant to be poor. Many are not, they have the intellect to escape it, but wallow in sins of despondency (sloth) and insecurity (envy).

Without both agency and virtue, intellect is unactionable³.

Instead of resolving the problems in their life preventing them from the success they feel they're owed, they try to externalize the blame, because they're weak and it takes courage to blame yourself, rather than coping. In this way, they're not simply materially poor, but spiritually.

Wealth comes to those who deserve it like a metal to a magnet, and escapes the sinful like oil and water.

The future belongs to those who take risks, network, and prioritize self-education. Virtue is the key to success in a world plagued by sin.

You must be virtuous to survive. Virtue is a program for living well, formalized for low time preference, long-term success, a traditionalist heuristic against the innate cognitive biases of human irrationality. Virtue is efficacy.

Virtue is also a self-manifesting external signal to the network: by being virtuous, others know you will succeed, and will support you, while you naturally curate out the non-virtuous. Your network ascends together, exponentially. Virtue always finds friends.

The Occident’s adoption of a castrated slave morality pushed by the intentionally diminutive State has led to a crisis of virtue. This is opportunity for you, as success comes easily to the virtuous few.

You just need to be clear in yourself to survive. You have to have the courage to cut your own path. Others will try to drag you down. You have to be stronger than them.

You can’t get distracted now. There is no time.

The Deadly Sins of Catholicism is a good inverse moral compass:

1. Gluttony

2. Lust

3. Greed

4. Sloth/despair⁴

5. Wrath

6. Envy

7. Pride

Look around, anyone complicit in them are punished for it with dreadful lives. Think of your enemies, think of the failures you know in life, count the sins they commit.

Eliminate sin from your life⁵.

Study Aristotle’s matrix of virtues⁶. Study it closely, review it at night, and thinking back on your actions each day. If you strive to keep virtue in mind in your daily action, you cannot fail. This is what I measure myself and others by.

Virtuous actions earn karmic points that automatically accrue compounding spiritual interest. Start now.

Virtue brings you wealth, but being wealthy does not mean you are virtuous. Most aren’t, and they will lose their wealth within generations.

Despite existing in the aristocratic frame of burdenlessness, most of the born rich today are largely listless and unproductive, or otherwise caught in mind traps, the self-destructive parasitic memetic complexes midwits are often consumed by, that takes otherwise virtuous and intelligent people and diverts them into wasting their time.

This is almost as detestable as the resentful poor, for they squander their inheritance, fumbling their dynasty⁷. Their fumble is your opportunity.

People who are distracted now, will be even more distracted later.

All of pre-modern history and achievement was the result of the aristocracy, which across all civilized society shared a similar mores of encouraging artistry or other meaningful pursuits, in competition for pride among each other. This quality has been lost, as the western world increasingly succumbs to the slave morality that prides in weakness, and discourages courage and achievement.

Yet, a new aristocracy emerges in the digital age, the agentic NEET, who, exactly like the aristocrats of old, enjoy freedom from burden, with access to all the resources needed to autodidact themselves in the humanities and sciences, and the ability to network a culture of collective development.

This is the group that interests me, the intelligent and free.

The question is: will they choose achievement, or sloth?

Dynasty, or slavery?

Footnotes

[1]: Despair/despondency (tristitia) was present in the earliest deadly sins lists from Christian Egypt, e.g. Evagrius Ponticus’, before being combined with Sloth (acedia) by Pope Gregory I (AD 850) in the now standard Seven Deadly Sins (the version discussed in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica). The despondent, depressed, listless state is probably the most common affliction of our times, more prevalent than any other sin—in no small part due to loss of faith, as despair is the ultimate pride in believing nothing can save you, not even God.

It’s worthwhile to reassert that Sloth = Despair = Despondency as the hopelessness of despondency is a more relevant understanding of Sloth than the standard interpretation of as mere “laziness,” which the depressed would feel doesn’t apply to them because of their personally rationalized grief. It does. Depression is a sin. Industry is a virtue⁸. Get out of bed.

[2]: Street Don has elsewhere compared luck as a direct barometer of agency:

Luck = Agency = Energy

Luck is an emergent phenomenon proceeding from the life of a highly agency, energetic person. When a person considers themselves to be unlucky, they are making a veiled admission of the belief that they are dominated by external forces to the detriment of their life–that is, that they lack agency.

A person of high energy inevitably seizes agency and gains competence, drawing more factors into their realm of control. Though it is possible for a person to actively self-sabotage, a healthy person rarely uses their own agency to lessen the qualify of their outcomes.

— Street Don, Don’s Directory (2022)

[3]: See Footnote 1 above

[4]: Innate genetic capability is real and IQ is its most efficacious measure, but capability is unrealizable without both virtue and agency; lower stats in one can be compensated with higher stats in another. The IQ-wealth coefficient is ~0.3-0.5 depending on who you ask, but if we had equivalent psychometric tests for virtue and agency, I think we’d see no one intelligent actually stays poor over a lifetime unless they're also unvirtuous and low agency.

[5]: Sin must be understood as separate from vice, which only graduates to sin in its excess (be it depth, or count). At minimum, a spice of vice is expected in all men’s lives; in fact, I am wary of people with no apparent vices—while indeed unsaintly, vice appears in all vigorous men, releasing animal energies otherwise unsublimated into productive output. Energetic titans produce epiphenomenal outpourings like pressurized steam, and so their great, raw energy, if not sublimated into industry, will be offshot as vice.

Apparent vicelessness can only signify 3 things:

1. That vices are present, but secret. Possibly because the vice is shameful or perverted, or the person is dishonest.

2. That the person is not spiritually energetic enough to have a vice worth speaking of: their energy, low as it is, is adequately channeled only into socially acceptable acts.

3. That the person is truly a saint.

Monsters of spirit and industry destroy in compulsion what others create in lifetimes of idle pottering… The caprices of kings and gods are the subject of legend for the same reason the modern peasant fixates on the wealthy and powerful: Their experiences are richer, they feel more deeply, they define others yet are themselves auto-defined — they forget more than most will ever know.

—James Liao, @JamesLiao333 (2023)

And so, astute readers may recall I did note in the summae autobiographia of “Admin Reveal: I said I’m just a vessel bro (2022) that “my vice is alcohol.” A dirty vodka martini with two olives, to be specific.

[6]: I prefer Aristotlean virtue to later Christian formulations because they maintain a master morality. Where Aristotle’s four greater ethics are maganimity, justice, practical judgement and good friendship; only justice is maintained in the four cardinal virtues of Christianity: temperance, justice, prudence and fortitude; formulated as an inversion of sin, as the Seven Capital Virtues are, which push for humility, kindness, patience, etc. Sins take toll on the soul, they invite demons into your life to manifest a living hell⁹, but only avoiding sin is not virtue, it’s just the lack of sin, and simply pursuing the opposite of sin is reductionist and dogmatic.

Compared to Aristotlean ethics, the Christian Virtues specifically omit:

• Courage

• Truthfulness

• Friendliness

• Magnificence

• Liberality (in spending)

• Proper pride (versus vainglory)

• Proper ambition (versus greed/avarice)

• Proper indignation (versus envy/spite)

Pure Christian ethics’ focus is on the faith, tellingly handicapped with a commitment to humility (and no interest in bravery): there is no space for proper pride, ambition and indignation, as they leave it all to God. But this is not an efficacious program of personal virtue, of “sovereign individuals” “aristocrats of the soul” “ubermensch” etc. to survive our confused times. Aristotle’s magnanimity (great soul, great spirit, great heart), the greatest virtue requiring the possession of all the other virtues, is key here:

He that claims less than he deserves is small-souled...For the great-souled man is justified in despising other people—his estimates are correct; but most proud men have no good ground for their pride.

[…]

He must be open both in love and in hate, since concealment shows timidity; and care more for the truth than for what people will think; and speak and act openly, since as he despises other men he is outspoken and frank, except when speaking with ironical self-depreciation, as he does to common people

[…]

Such then being the Great-souled man, the corresponding character on the side of deficiency is the Small-souled man, and on that of excess the Vain man.

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, IV.3 (340 BC)

Aristotle is right to seek a mean between the two excesses present in each sphere, as he pursues greatness, not simply the escape from sin. This is honor, this is a complete man, and Christian ethics alone won’t get you there. Followed to the letter, they in truth commit to being Aristotle’s “small-souled man,” the inverse of excess, because their focus is solely heaven in the afterlife—but our concern here is to persist dynasty beyond slavery: our worldly afterlife. The times have changed, dignity can only be earned with a fight.

[7]: "My new system assumes that the wealth of the peasant is LOWER than that of the donkey, because donkeys are animals without original sin”:

[8]: Thomas Carlyle on the virtue of industry:

There is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in work. Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in idleness alone there is perpetual despair. Work, never so Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to truth, to Nature’s appointments and regulations...

[…]

Admirable was that saying’ of the old Monks, ’Laborare est Orare, Work is Worship.’ Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached, inarticulate, but ineradicable, foreverenduring Gospel: Work, and therein have well-being. […] What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy attack him swiftly, subdue him; make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity and Thee! [...] Thou shalt work while it is called Today. For the Night cometh, wherein no man can work.

—Thomas Carlyle, Past and Present (1843)

[9]: On demons:

This plays out prominently in subcultural scenes. Cancelling was supposed to be an act of financial violence directed by the propagandized social polity against the dissident individual, ruining their livelihood for violating the strictures defined by hegemony. Yet more and more you see the cancelled shrug it off and stay standing.

Being cancelled is supposed to mean being blacklisted from working with anyone other than the also-cancelled, because anyone who worked with you would be cancelled for it. But the pool of the cancelled has widened so much that you now regularly see artists continuing healthy careers despite the desperate nagging of the cancel police; and its the camp of the uncancelled who find themselves isolated from the best and most interesting artists of their scene.

In other words, the benefits of working with the cancelled tribe outweigh the consequences, and so more and more artists happily jump ship, collab with the black marked and get themselves cancelled for it. This wasn’t supposed to happen.

Perhaps it still precludes artists from mainstream success², but within subculture, it’s where the only real are found, and where else do you want to be?

I believe cancel culture jumped the shark when it evolved its ‘cancel by association’ protocol, that is: if you indulge in those black-marked as Cancelled—follow their accounts, engage their content, consumer their work—you are yourself liable for cancel. But this second-order expansion of the cancellation market³ was overzealous, specifically two factors make it unsustainable.

First, too many artists in both number and popularity are cancelled today. It’s not just difficult to keep up with the self-policing strictures demanded by consumption policers, but it’s also increasingly reaching the point where the normal person considers it simply not worth it. Where most people are inclined to avoid conflict and follow the ever-changing mores of good sense in polite society, there’s a certain threshold of reasonableness that when crossed has them taking a step back, addressing the nuisance in their life attempting to restrict access to the content they wish to consume. The conclusion is more and more that jeopardizing the relationship of their most obnoxious peers performing outrage over causes no one genuinely cares about is worth it.

We see this play out with the pop culture leaders of some of the biggest following in the world, like Kanye West and J. K. Rowling, getting cancelled after openly railing against the two biggest shibboleths of modern discourse—“racism” and “transphobia” respectively⁴. If one would believe the woke paper tiger and its media organs, their careers should be ruined, yet their work continues to break records in sales. We now see millions of normal people deciding to accept their dissident status who otherwise wouldn’t, now forced to be accept being cancelled alongside their heroes on the charge of “liking cancelled artists”—freeing them to enjoy any other cancelled artist as well.

Second, the cancelled produce better work. Any artist practicing today that isn’t cancelled is acting safely within the boundaries defined by the prevailing power structure—cancellation always descends from hegemony, it’s social policing of the strictures of the state-media complex⁵. While these well-to-do normies could also make good work, any maverick artist crossing ill with the Party’s dutiful censures is also much more likely to be one behind revolutionary, inspired work.

It’s also the case that the best in a community are going to be the most likely to be cancelled, because cancels are an effective tool for the collective to strike on the minority—the tenured but untalented grouping together to take down the fast-rising tall poppy that threatens their status is a near-universal in subcultural scenes. Anyone, of course, can be cancelled, no one can actually follow all the convoluted and ever-changing rules of the censures. The question is always only if there is a will to cancel them.

This is an inconvenient problem for any scene/subculture participant, when the most inspired and groundbreaking tastemakers are cancelled by the mass of mediocre. Again, at a certain point, it goes beyond reason, and people are collectively decide they simply don’t care any more. They’ll like what they like, hang out with who they like.⁶

It can take the tone of “Separating the artist from the work,” or “I didn’t ask and don’t care.” The most revolutionary is the rhetorical rebuttal “They didn’t do it, and if they did, it’s cool.” It’s rhetoric—what they are actually defending is artistic freedom against cultural censures.

Next era of culture will feature self-staged cancellations - the uncanceled will realize they're falling behind and start to invent their own 'revelations', selected carefully to propagate a successful cancel while maintaining a degree of self-respect.

—L.B. Dobis (@lb_dobis)

I expect the culture war of this decade to be defined by the post-cancelled.

Woke censorship had its run and made for dreadful culture through the late 2010s, but the undercurrent of revolutionary irreverence will always be cooler than normalizing counter-pressure. Consider how the first thought anyone who hears about Miya being a LITERAL NAZI ANOREXIA CULT LEADER⁷ is: “Cool.”⁸ Look at #BASEDRETARDGANG, who pre-cancel themselves with the “ableist slur” in their name before anyone even has a chance to. It’s a commitment to the punk side of the decade.

And it’s not hard to see why: would you rather be known as the collective committed to “equality, diversity and inclusion”? Between the two, which clique do you think makes better art? Whose party do you want to attend? Who’s going to be remembered?

After all, if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s that God hates a coward⁹. Temporarily, collectivized mediocrity can suppress the dangerous, radical, revolutionary impulses of art and culture, but it’s unsustainable—the real will always burst to the surface soon enough, because it’s just too much fun not to be, and they’ll wash away the hollow kings of mediocrity without a second thought, forgotten almost immediately.

I mean, isn’t it crazy how we all just logged on and won forever and no one could stop us?¹⁰

Footnotes

[1]:

[2]: Today, anyway. I doubt the lifespan of “Wokeism” “cultural marxism” “critical race theory” however you call it as a top-down state-media complex enforced social ideology for NPC self-policing has more life in it to last past the end of decade. This is what I consider the 2020s culture war but it’s one that’s already won by the inevitability of the cultural pendulum.

[3]: Cancels work as a form of individually directed boycott (opposed to the traditional boycott directed at corporations) with the goal of punishing the scapegoat through financial violence, the elimination of their livelihood. Get them fired from their workplace, get them expelled from school. In the case of independent “content creators”, they have to resort to reducing their audience, attempted by ‘follow policing’, calling out any of them for consuming the content of a black marked creator. One might imagine this second-order cancellation introducing a viral effect, where one may be cancelled for following accounts that follow the wrong accounts, and so on… and only at the long end of the chain do we find the original black marked bad actor who committed whatever faux pas to make him the initial subject to scapegoat. However, like how real viruses fail to spread if they’re too deadly , this evolutionary strand of cancel culture is too untenable to survive long enough to see this occur.

[4]: When Kanye makes a media run toppling every prominent shibboleth he can find, this is the same battle he forces his fans to take a side on. The specific content of the inflammatory statements are not what’s important, but the decision to knowingly get cancelled by making them. Whereas JK Rowling having the confidence to share her honest opinions on the trans question in contradiction with the party line, or James Cameron casually injecting heavy orientalism and cultural appropriation into Avatar, with potential uproar around either not having any actual measurable effect on the phenomenon success of their IPs, I think Kanye was being intentionally controversial to make the point he’s too big to fail—and in this he was successful.

[5]: What Curtis Yarvin refers to as “The Cathedral”. See: A Brief Explanation of the Cathedral, 2021.

[6]:

[7]: See: Cancel Miya to Me or I’ll Fucking Kill You, 2021.

[8]: And if it isn’t, they decidedly aren’t to anyone who is.

[9]: Revelations 21:7-8:

Those who are victorious will inherit all this, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But the cowardly, the unbelieving, the vile, the murderers, the sexually immoral, those who practice magic arts, the idolaters and all liars—they will be consigned to the fiery lake of burning sulfur. This is the second death.

[10]:

Charlie was visiting New York from Portugal. They had watery red eyes either from jet lag or too much time spent staring at a screen.

Under their online alias Charlotte Fang, Charlie is cool on a certain corner of the internet. They’re real-life friends with other cult internet people—schizo-philosophy Substack writer Angelicism01, digital health influencer Sol Brah, and the girls at Red Scare. I never asked whether Charlie is their real name, or just a gender-reversing shorthand for their online moniker.

We were here for a meeting of extremely online people that a friend had organized. At dinner, Charlie spoke, as most internet people do, in loops of online references—to defunct blogs, online communities, and coinages you would never expect to hear spoken out loud. Like most online culture, it all feels profound until you realize how little it reflects on the real world.

I work hard to not be online. But I am always drawn back to internet culture because it moves so much faster than real life. In the best moments, people are so much more honest on the internet; a meme can capture a feeling it would take hundreds of words to explain. Being online is the surest way to feel relevant, even if you lose yourself in the process. Sometimes, I slip up and get “Twitter-brain”—using online words and reciting facts from tweets I don’t really understand. Then I have to delete all my accounts again.

You hear it all the time—“the internet is horrible, but.” But I can learn so much. I need it for work. All my friends are online. Will people forget about me if I’m not on the internet?

Internet culture used to be something you engaged with in private. You have your public self, your real self, and then the part of your brain that scrolls mindlessly at the end of the day. But the fixations and personalities of digital-native communities are increasingly spilling out into the real world. Extremely online people are running for Congress. You can raise millions of real American dollars by posting memes. Or, as is the case for most people, you can go online to acquire a set of digitally-tinged delusions which, regardless of their content, feel like the most profound, true thing in the world at the same time they are incomprehensible to someone in regular society.

Trying to stay off the internet feels like pushing back against a wave.

Charlie Fang is part of a new group of people who are cool on the internet. Charlie is known for creating a series of projects and digital personas that cater, almost exclusively, to the extremely online. Their cache is honed from years of monitoring 4chan and analyzing digital norms. When I asked him why they thought they was so good at the internet, they said that “it’s an IQ thing.”

The content of their work would repel, or simply confuse, a traditional viewer:

Among Charlie’s followers, they’re known for constantly forming and reforming their online presence. Scrolling through one of their accounts—mostly female-presenting, with names like Miya or Sonya—one gets the sense of engaging with a diffuse digital entity rather than a real person. And Charlie likes it that way. They say that when they’re online, they treat themselves as a digital spirit, a tool in a network which is far more powerful than them. They post what the network wants him to say, unlike the unenlightened normal people who simply use the internet to mirror their flesh-and-blood selves.

To 99.9 percent of the population, Charlie is nobody. But to a small group of people on the right side of Twitter, Charlie is a legend, even if they don’t know their real name.

In past accounts, Charlie did well on the same part of Twitter that posts about the Unabomber manifesto and how the powers that be want us to eat bugs. With Milady Maker, them and their cult of followers became prominent in the crypto and NFT space. Which is to say that their work is niche, but controls an increasingly notable share of discourse. But there are hundreds of online communities with their own rules, their own norms, their own Charlies—extremely online people buzzing behind the screen.

Normal people are more online than ever. Regardless of your natural proclivities, there is a path towards digital immersion for you: you can become an extremely online leftist, a QAnon boomer, a spoonie, or a femcel. Many “serious” journalists have, in the past four years, devolved into the same habit of self-reflexive online looping as the digital-first reactionaries who follow Charlie.

Everyone knows someone who has lost a piece of themselves to the internet. They latch onto a digital community and start to think it’s the whole world.

Internet people, or people whose entire identities are wrapped up in their online presence, represent a new direction of culture. You don’t have to live in or know about the real world to be important. You can loop around and around in a tiny online world with its own values and characters, and that is enough.

The Will to Post

Everyone loves the idea of the internet. The live wire—touch it and watch the world flash before your eyes. In the late 1970s, home computers only had primitive internet precursors like phone-in BBS forums, but people bought them anyway because they liked the idea of being connected. Everyone together, all at once.

January 1, 1983 is widely recognized as the birthday of the Internet—small networks of interconnected computers had existed before, but they were mostly used for research and defense. In contrast to the constant social posturing of the physical space, early digital-native communities had a beautiful depersonalization. On early web forums, no one knew if you were “a dog, a kid, or Finnish.” Accessing the internet in any capacity required some technical skill, creating a distinct community with a high barrier to entry. The first internet users were engineers, researchers, and oddball hobbyists.

When Netscape launched 1995, the internet was suddenly open to everyone. And instead of acclimating to the existing culture, the flood of new web users overwhelmed the delicate ecosystem—one t-shirt from the period reads “The internet is full, go away!” The new, socially-conscious users had little use for the anonymous, text-based internet. To use Charlie’s phrasing, they brought with them “all the psychosexual drama of human socialization.”

The first social media platform, called SixDegrees, was launched only two years after Netspace brought non-engineers online. MySpace followed in 2003. Facebook launched in 2005. Twitter came a year later. The dream of a universal stream of consciousness became a series of carefully curated profiles, with real names and yearbook-style profile pictures.

Being online today mostly means constantly performing your personality—or whatever online schtick you develop. Liking is a personal endorsement. You post iPhone photography of yourself, or of your family and friends. You write mini-essays about your beliefs. Most of us go on and try to present the best version of ourselves. Because this is the future, whether we like it or not.

Charlie is a character from the other side of the internet, the anonymous networks that lurk below the cleaned-up surface easily observable to “normie” internet users.

Charlie’s accounts have a mythical quality—faded anime profile pictures mixed with an evocative “network spirituality”—and a rough, unhinged energy. In contrast to the hyper-documentation of most online personalities, Charlie’s older work can only be found on deliberately-labyrinthian websites and in scraps on archives that are regularly taken down. The mystique is partly intentional, and partly created by hosting platforms constantly suspending him for content violations. The spotty paper trail inspires a degree of fascination among the extremely online teenagers and right-wing influencers who follow him.

Charlie’s most infamous account was named “Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby” (@BPD_GOD). They launched the character in 2017 as an experiment in depersonalized posting; their goal was to become the “most infamous thing on the network.” The Miya character was known for elaborately canceling itself with the help of partner accounts, as if to make an obtuse commentary on mid-2010s cancel culture. Often, Miya played with obscure online philosophies by taking them to their logical extremes, taking aim at digital subcultures such as “pro-ana” (pro-anorexia) communities and transgender accelerationism.

The effect was the internet encapsulated, the darkness of the deep web embodied by an eerie little girl.

At the time, Charlie’s distinctive posting style attracted dozens of loyal followers, who would track their movements from account to account and post alongside him, reinforcing the mythology. Between 2019 and 2020, they operated in a swarm along with Miya, united by the #kaliacc hashtag. The hashtag was named for “Kali Yuga Accelerationism,” a reference to the Hindu Vedas and the work of British philosopher Nick Land.

At the tail end of a number of decentralized Miya-esque troll accounts came the claim that #kaliacc was in fact a pro-anorexia cult for egirls. The veracity of the cult remains contentious, with the history obscured and rumors growing after its disappearance. The original Instagram that claimed to “expose” the cult announced it was a social experiment run by kaliacc themselves. Another Instagram account that documented the cult is neutral on whether it’s actually real. Long Twitter threads exist that claim to both expose and debunk the cult’s existence.

As Miya’s infamy grew, the proliferation of helpers—as well as copycat accounts—contributed to the mystery around the network. Who was Miya? Was anyone Miya? What did this band of deep-web occultists want? Through it all, Charlie and their affiliates played up the mystery, going on internet-native podcasts with voice distorters and refusing to answer straight questions. The project lent itself to enigma.

After Miya shut down in the summer of 2020, Charlie took a digital hiatus, while the rumors surrounding the project grew it into extensive notoriety. Charlie re-appeared covertly under new aliases, but their posting burst out into the mainstream a year later with Milady Maker, an NFT collection of ten thousand anime profile pictures.

Milady was notable for being one of the most memeable and digitally-native NFT collections. The images themselves are relatively standard–3D anime girls with randomized accessories like hair bows and baby tees. But you didn’t buy Milady for the art. You bought in for the vibe.

Posing as digital cult leader “Charlotte Fang,” Charlie encouraged Milady holders to break the staid, mid-2010s rules of social media use, and use the internet as an egoless digital entity. They taught user to slap on the creepy little girl profile picture and release themselves on the timeline. The energy among Milady users was, as Charlie put it, was “a little kid with a hello kitty sticker glock.” You can make statements that don’t represent yourself. You can like every post. You can post two hundred times a day, as many of the members of the Milady community did at the project’s peak. They called their new philosophy network spirituality. Right-click-save a Milady and join the swarm.

With a Milady, you could inscribe yourself on the internet with a swarm of other pink Miladies and I imagine it felt, a little bit, like that internet from 1995.

Milady launched in September 2021 at the height of the NFT boom. But the project only blew up into the mainstream some months later, after crypto Twitter noticed that Milady holders appeared to be sincerely enjoying themselves, both online and at the infamously chaotic raves they hosted in Manhattan and London.

I tried attending one myself for this article, but the police had already ended the party.

When asked to write this article, I was introduced to Milady as “the last interesting thing on the internet.” From the safety of a Twitter feed, the project felt mysterious and fresh. It felt like a new way to be online.

At Milady’s peak in Spring 2022, the project had the energy of a cult. If you followed the right accounts, a barrage of “Milady posters” would quickly take over your feed posting about glocks and ketamine. There was no self-consciousness, just the swarm. Venture capitalists had Miladies. Normal crypto investors had Miladies. Girls had Miladies—a striking achievement in the NFT community. Online teenagers with no prior interest in crypto were using the profile picture.

The innovation of Milady was reminding people that you can technically say anything you want online, if you just embrace that none of it matters. There is nothing physically stopping any of us from logging onto Twitter right now and typing pages and pages of literally anything. We decided to make the internet boring. We decided to care. You could inscribe yourself on every wall on the internet and no one can tell you “no.”

Our Cultural Mutation

When I had the opportunity to meet Charlie I took it, because I wanted to see if there was something deeper at the core, a mastermind behind the digital front. It all felt so mysterious online. It felt like something.

In person, I asked him point blank how they feels about being so online. Isn’t dedicating your life to being the most relevant person on a corner of the internet kind of… sad? Charlie told me that they made a logical decision to dedicate their life to the mastery of digital culture. Of course being chronically online is destructive.

They admitted that they’ve ended up meeting weird affiliates. THey described one former posting partner “VEDIC_CYBERGOD” as having “part of his brain missing.” But to ignore the internet, they said, is to give up on making an impact in your own time. Cultural cycles move so fast online that being unplugged for a few years will render anyone culturally defunct, functionally a separate species from the digitally engaged. The internet is a superhighway. Step off and you might be safer, but you will also be quickly left behind.

Charlie sat eerily still while they talked. They said that “no institutional artist of my generation will make important art.” They are not online enough.

Prior to becoming an internet person, Charlie was a relatively standard art kid. They say that they wanted to make conceptual art. They went to art school and studied architecture—with a specialty in furniture—then switched to a BFA. But they dropped out after realizing circa 2015 that the traditional art world had no interest in engaging with the anarchy of the internet. I asked him, somewhat seriously, about their favorite piece of furniture, and he showed me Gerrit Rietveld’s Red and Blue, citing its goal to bring cheap avant-garde design into the middle class home in order to radicalize them.

“Once, the urban art world’s avant-garde was the upstream of culture. Now, the cultural frontier is on the internet.”

As the night went on, they seemed to lose steam. They described the timeline Remilia was cultivating attracted the cutting edge of culture and how Milady will be remembered as a phenomenon. I stayed with Charlie until three in the morning. The drinks wore off. We had talked for six hours and I was starting to feel a bit sick. They’re an internet person, I’m not.

Simulacra

Billionaires are Twitter people. Little kids are online. Your grandma is online. The internet is simply more powerful and more arresting than anything that can be arranged in the physical space. What is the alternative? The kids will go to online raves. Eventually, we will stop pretending that the internet is a sideshow and that our real culture, the better culture, is somewhere else.

Everyone knows, abstractly, that the internet is not real life. But you can’t picture it, not really, until you sit across from the real people behind the screen. Even the darkest online personalities are just people on their phones. It is oddly disappointing to meet the “worst person on the internet” and find that they are nothing at all.

Before I left, Charlie asked if I was planning to write a hit piece. They clarified that they would “welcome a well-researched hit piece.” Most journalists who write hit pieces about Milady—of which there have been many—fail to understand why the project is scary; they just pull up screenshots from Miya posts and say you’re cancelled.

I am not afraid of Charlie because they engage extremist communities online. I am afraid of him because I recognize so many of their proclivities in regular people. If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation.

We are all more online than ever. And when you live online, the internet people are in charge. They make the memes and coin the neologisms that will become mainstream discourse in five years. To define the internet is to form the base layer upon which all culture is built. And in the long run, these people will win. Their culture will win. Or at least, that’s my fear.

You can close the computer, but the world will go on without you.

Guest post by Ginevra Davis. A pre-pint was previously published on Palladium.

Transcription:

Remilia’s art-as-cult is an inversion of Bourriard, for whom the art object is valued primarily for its impact potential within an interconnected global system. Bourriard’s “micro-utopia” considered reality to be a result of the work.

For Remilia's memetic project, this is reversed. The work is a result of the social-psychological machine surrounding it, whether it be the “Warholian groupchat”, the free-associative algorithm arranging PFP assets, or the swarm consciousness of the user fandom.

The reality is the project, and the work serves to proliferate that reality. As such, the point of control lies in who is in and who is out – in addition to what kinds of things the ‘memeplex’ encourages. Focus shifts from the traditional artist's full control over the product of art to that of a sage ruler working with the social flows which result in art.

For over a year now, the problem of art and the internet is beginning to be reconciled. When Dean Kissick said the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale should have been simply a Milady, he wasn’t kidding.

Yet where is the art criticism?

Text excerpted from “Four Notes on Reading Remilia Collective”.

1

The internet is rapidly becoming everything yet almost nobody writes about it. I haven’t done much to fix this. I’m sorry. I was going to start by writing about Remilia, but I never wrote about Remilia, because I found writing about Remilia impossible without first writing about Miya. I then found writing about Miya impossible without first writing about the internet.

But how can I write about the internet? The internet is so big. In GOD-AI, 01 said "neither listening nor reading (nor even scanning) are enough to follow what the Internet is." It would take a lifetime to view even a moment of content, and by then it will have been completely forgotten.

“One begins to ask what it means to read not any one text, not a text at all—nonreading as the fulfillment of technologies of attention and ignorance. Surfeit of content then reads itself off differently: leave it alone, allow content to work.” Writing and reading are surgical operations. Nothing ‘makes sense’ before you cut off the parts that don’t make sense. But the violence of writing is impotent against an ocean of undifferentiated content.

01's "nonreading" reveals posting or viewing online as an inverse operation with regard to writing or reading. Pieces of content add together until the image becomes an approximation of reality¹. Writing about the internet so often becomes babble because the timeline is babble – unstructured, unselfconscious, ephemeral. Countless obfuscating narratives exist around nearly every object of digital culture. Attempting to solidify this into a linear narrative is insane and probably beside the point. If you hack at the internet for so long that it becomes coherent, the result won’t have any resemblance to reality.

Remilia, like the internet, was not made to be read, hence the difficulty in describing the project without schizoposting. The reader of the internet can only hope to collect enough pieces that they become one material again, like how the purity of sand might be discovered when moving from micro to macro scales – an endless universe of minerals and microorganisms becomes a singularity.

2

“People are always calling me a mirror and if a mirror looks into a mirror, what is there to see?"

Andy Warhol, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” ²

What distinguishes Remilia and Miya, like Warhol, is the self-conscious use of novel social forces for art production (and reproduction)³. As with Warhol, their methods are taken from outside art. The internet has always had tribes, and cults, and carnivals, and reality games. Much of Miya’s thinking is years-old internet lore, understood on some level by anyone who went through the 4chan mind shredder as a teenager.

The primary problem of Remilia’s art is the construction of a specific social reality. This reality surrounds the work, while creating the conditions for the work to emerge. The content of the work is interchangeable, its value lying in its potential to contribute to the primary social project, causing the work to be made of the climate surrounding itself (Barrett Avner called this “the return of the gesamtkunstwerk”⁴).

Remilia’s art-as-cult is an inversion of Bourriard, for whom the art object is valued primarily for its impact potential within an interconnected global system. Bourriard’s “micro-utopia” considered reality to be a result of the work. For Remilia's memetic project, this is reversed. The work is a result of the social-psychological machine surrounding it, whether it be the “Warholian groupchat”, the free-associative algorithm arranging PFP assets, or the swarm consciousness of the user fandom.

The reality is the project, and the work serves to proliferate that reality. As such, the point of control lies in who is in and who is out – in addition to what kinds of things the ‘memeplex’ encourages. Focus shifts from the traditional artist's full control over the product of art to that of a sage ruler working with the social flows which result in art.

For over a year now, the problem of art and the internet is beginning to be reconciled. When Dean Kissick said the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale should have been simply a Milady, he wasn’t kidding. Yet still nobody writes.

3

For many, Remilia’s appeal hinged on the cloud of whispers surrounding it. This air of secrecy, in which nothing about the organization or its members was fully revealed, created a space in which everything was true. Remilia’s jovial approach to reality, quintessentially online, shares commonalities with Bahktin’s writing on Rabelais and the medieval carnival.

Both archetypal internet and carnival emerged in a time of violent social transition; they are spaces of improvisation without boundaries between performers and audience; they are festive ‘second lives’; they are determined by autonomous rulings that serve as foils to everyday life; they use inverted constructions of normative community identity and structure.

Milady Maker and most other objects of digital culture are examples of Bahktin’s "grotesque image", an image which contains its own inverse. The grotesque image exaggerates and comments on reality without the simplification found in satire or other forms of criticism.

Bahktin finds in the grotesque “a characteristic logic, the peculiar logic of the ‘inside out’, of the ‘turnabout’, of a continual shifting from top to bottom, front to rear…humiliations, profanations, comic crownings and uncrownings”⁵. Milady Maker was built of these kinds of images: alternately white-hearted and violent, savior and psyop, art collective and cult.

The whole internet is like this. Always both. I can never decide if it’s the worst or best thing to ever happen.

4

Cancellation, when applied to a digital image, is the result of a collision between grotesque imagery and mainstream expectations of stable meaning. Cancellation, like writing, stabilizes the grotesque image by discarding contradictory elements.

A nuanced polyvalent image quickly becomes singularly evil. Milady Maker’s ascension into a pure “aura” form at the point of cancellation was equally part of this violence, as the community split into “all bad” / “all good” factions. Charlotte Fang’s whitewashing of their previous projects on an episode of Contain, by attempting to strip away negative imagery, in effect reinforced cancellation’s desire for stability 6.

The internet is not all white-hearted and everyone knows it. The social forces at play online, studied in detail by Miya, are incredibly dangerous. 4chan’s grotesque /soc/ board – which some associated Miya with during cancellation – was only an exaggeration of what is now typical.

The images distributed during cancellation are terrifying in part because the utterly mutable archetype described in them is normal now. The identity creation online is almost always exploitative. The networked subject has no agency. Its personality is groomed. Its thoughts are planted.⁷

If this is true, why not log off? For Remilia, there is no withdrawal from the internet, no turning the ship around. For those who recognize this power, the only non-suicidal option is to use it. After all, despite everything the internet is beautiful. It’s reality, and it’s good. Focusing on the internet’s negative aspects just isn’t telling the whole story.

Footnotes

1. “Content” is work generated by artificial intelligence. Its origin, as either human- or machine-made, is made irrelevant by the process of algorithmic optimization which guides each modality towards an identical result. Humans can produce content, but as that same content is produced much more efficiently by a machine, producing effectively involves acting as if you were not human. In a world driven by content, traditional (human-consciousness-driven) artforms are a great deal of effort to produce middling results. What’s the point of painting to post on instagram?

2. Warhol’s “autobiography” was almost entirely ghostwritten by various Factory members.

3. Does this self-consciousness make it more or less valid? It could be argued that Remilia’s mimetic project is fundamentally nostalgic. It can only exist in this way because true uncontrolled internet phenomena have been rendered inconsequential post-January 6. Despite a “commitment to post-authorship”, Remilia seem interested in a new kind of authorship which emerges from the mechanics of content. Nothing today is authored in the sense that pre-internet work was authored, rendering a term like “post-authorship” confusing.

4. Like the gesamtkunstwerk, the memetic project constructs a defined space in opposition to what might be considered exterior reality. Unlike the gesamtkunstwerk, the memetic project is open-ended, outside of the control of a central artist-author, and extends beyond its physical limits into the social / psychological space surrounding it. Barrett’s tweet quoted here has since been deleted.

5. Every internet ideology contains the carnival’s inversions. Everything in the news is fake. The Pope is not Catholic. Being redpilled is so normal now you see this kind of thinking on CNN.

6. This is a common theme for Miya, for whom it applies universally. 01 describes the "angelic" networked subject as becoming-universal, rather than fragmenting off some kind of disintegrating mainstream. Under this framework, there are no real “dark forests”. Proana, rationalist, gainer, furry, fetish, alt-political (left and right), BAPist, transgender and bodybuilding communities accelerate together (along with everyone else) toward a single point. It’s important to note that this ‘grooming’ isn’t usually driven by anyone. It just happens.

Redacted Remilio Babies is a collection of 10,000 neochibi pfpNFT's evolving the proven Milady Maker paradigm with the introduction of young J.I.T. energy, schizophrenic reactionary aesthetics, and digital sales terrorism. We are #REMILIONAIREs.

Redacted Remilio Babies is Remilia Collective’s first pfpNFT project since Milady Maker, an effective second generation evolving the paradigm we first defined with Milady. We’ve been very secretive about the development of this project, but now I’ll reveal all the details in a design document like Milady’s¹.

Milady Provenance

The provenance of Milady as an organic profile picture and icon of neochibi design predating its formulation into an NFT has often been missed by those firmly in the NFT space that we’ve been cutting through, unclear to the many who arrived after Milady’s mint out and how the core community that filled it in the 6 month period from its launch to mint out arrived from our audience as net artists outside forays into crypto².

In short, the original, original ‘Milady’ was various neochibi characters Milady Sonora Sprite was actually drawing for themself for their own profile pictures. One version with a trucker cap lent itself to simple edits and it became a meme in our sphere to put together a personal edit of the character for our own use, making the Milady edit an inescapable timeline presence imbued with our community’s characteristic posting style, much like it would later as an NFT.

An Adobe Flash application wasdeveloped by a fellow Remilia Collective artist Fodkorp, published as part of his 3Dtestosterone.net concept site, which accelerated the process of making Milady edits, the original “Milady Maker” and source of the name. Edits became more elaborate, and as we were already engaged in the NFT space, it was a natural direction to then consider these in the framework of pfpNFT (and how that model could be revolutionized).

Fodkorp also made a series of his own drawn Milady edits, arguably the first “Milady derivative”. It is one of these Fodkorp Miladies that I’d used personally while running Milady Maker³.

Another Remilia Collective artist, Uleńka Pachinko, took on the mantle of illustrating the art to extend FodKorp’s version into a complete collection in collaboration with myself and a couple others from Remilia⁴.

Milady in her aesthetics and message is secluded, a hikki closed in her room, innocent, full of pure love, trying on Japanese outfits she found on Douyin or among Twitter friends. Remilio her little brother goes with thoughts outside of the self, the room, the house, trying to embrace the forces of the world, meanings behind chemtrails, so selfless, and naturally intermixed with love for money and boyish playing and need to conquer and understand, all while Milady feels, she is an aura, he is a soldier.

—Ulenka Pachinko, Remilio artist

I think it’s very fitting that it would be a girl to take on the role to draw the boys, an inverse of Sprite’s drawing of Milady; giving the Remilio’s the same touch of androgyny Milady retained but on the other side of the fence. They’re Milady’s little brother, not masculine but boyish, a rudimentary exploration of masculinity in horseplay: if Milady’s essence colored the new net art’s revolutionary irreverence with cute-aggression, Remilio colors the same with juvenile crudeness.

In some ways, it acts as a magnet for the boyish edginess and crudeness that doesn’t fit in with Milady’s pursuit of an aesthetic of spiritual purity; though it does maintain it at the heart, with a commitment to childish naivety. Remilio is more aggressive in its humor: it’s more satirical and ironic, but in a way that still stands in stark contrast alongside Milady against the empty aesthetics of evasion of our more nihilistic contemporaries.

Remilio’s Origin

A second “generation” of Milady was desired but we had no intention to develop a project until we really felt we had discovered a need for it. The ability to introduce a second “character”, lining the Remilia roster like Sanrio or Disney might, despite the medium of algorithmic character design, was a challenge we had wanted to take on for some months; and to use what we learned in algorithmic design from building Milady and our contributions to other projects in the NFT space.

However the financial aspect is inseparable from a generative NFT collection; a new official PFP collection from Remilia is not the same as a community Milady derivative that exists as a subset accessory within the community, but requires the summoning of a fresh digital tribe, introducing values and culture to act as totems to attract, and define, previously disorganized individuals—as Milady did.

My own preference for the older Milady from Fodkorp was a sign of a need: Fodkorp’s Milady provided a masculine character that we were looking for to compliment Milady. But aesthetics alone isn’t enough new depth to justify a new collection.

What actually initiated the collection into serious development was being cancelled. The patent fraudulence of it, but also our unwillingness to buckle, led to a lot of outreach from previous bystanders. One unexpected one was Stonetoss, the right-wing political cartoonist popular among the channer alt right. Stonetoss had experienced his Flurks NFT collection get delisted from Opensea due to political censorship and built Scatter.art as a rival marketplace committed to freedom of speech. He let us know Milady would be welcome there in case we didn’t beat the cancel.

We didn’t need it, but the Stonetoss/Scatter angle provided a new angle of interest: the schizophrenic aesthetic tradition of reactionary right wing conspiracy. Qanon, Infowars, Gab, Trump train.

We thought it would be quite funny to do a collection capturing and lampooning this aesthetic mode, sharing the same platform as sincere right-wing collections, but extending them into the post-political, irreverent mindset Remilia champions (funnier still to laugh in the face of a cancel in web3).

This alone still wasn’t enough to create a complex worth developing into a new project. The final ingredient was an unproven feature being prototyped by Scatter’s team: affiliate links. Essentially, referral based commissions: if someone buys from your link, you get a percentage of the profit.

Affiliates marketing is a standard model in ecommerce but infrastructure for it has not existed in crypto yet. This opened up a third avenue for humorous depth, allowing us to lean into satirizing the same field of “sales mindset” that we had in our earliest project, Yayo Corporation, with precedent in my past account satirizing PUA/’money twitter’ accounts as Sonya Qafi. The exploration and deconstruction of robust, yet niche internet cultures has always been our interest, and this was one I’ve been interested in returning to for some time⁵.

Introducing Remilio

Remilio Maker is Milady for boys. Remilio is based and retarded. Remilio is a 13 year old running Minecraft hustles. We channel these disparate inspirations into the same directed chaos that sets Milady apart from the monotony of NFT- and crypto-twitter as a community, the same lucid metairony that has always been the essence of Remilia's revolutionary posting as art practice.

Milady is unique in the generative NFT space for taking seriously the call for community generation with real cultural values, using the financial model to bootstrap a digital tribe ⁶. To introduce a new pfpNFT to the same Milady community, without creating an alternative set of values, would leave it simply as a derivative subset, an unneccessary selling back to our existing community. Remilio’s were designed from the ground up with the formation of a distinct, but companion, alternative in mind, but like all things net culture, the best way to instill this culturally was a psyop.

We took the inspiration of kayfabe from televised wrestling⁷, creating a performative rivalry of Remilio against Remilia, both as a honeytrap and lampoon of the anti-Remilia carpetbaggers that show up occassionally to leech off the Milady community; galvanizing the core community with playfighting⁸ that begun on the twitter timeline and ended in the Milady discord with colored roles to create a Stanford Prison Experiment style social experiment in tribal conditioning.

This was important not just to define the dichotomy between the “milady poster” and the “remilio poster”, but also to ensure both groups were partly immunized against each other, giving the remilio’s breathing room to develop their own tribal identity away from the existing Milady community. While they’ll inevitably be reintegrated under the wider community under Remilia’s net art umbrella, the project is only successful if it does so with both new blood and distinct new posting characteristics as a legitimate additional pillar in the character roster alongside Milady.

Asset Curation

Remilio features 526 unique assets, more than half as many as Milady Maker (236). While we maintain our sartorial interest, the focus is moved from Milady’s neo-orientalist take on asian style tribes to an ironic assessment of zoomer fashion—primary designer references being Baliencaga, Gucci and Comme Des Garcons, with a focus on cheeky, meme-able collabs with Disney, Fortnite, etc.

The other primary citation is zoomer videogame and internet culture, with natural references to Youtube streamers like Logan Paul, popular games from the mid 10s like Minecraft and CoD4, etc. befitting ‘the 12 year old younger bro to Milady’.

This is paired in contrast to references common in the “alt right” of the mid 2010’s, a subculture that now enjoys enough distance from relevancy to be ripe for satirical embrace—from Infowars (and Red Scare) merch to Chemtrails backgrounds and Illuminati Reptilian races.

Secondary elements include Youtube-minded Financial Aspirationalism: luxury watches, superhouse renders, etc.; “Swag”-oriented streetwear, in the mode of the Phillipines and Drake fans; lampooning NFT and crypto culture and aesthetics; and as a final touch, the art tourist and vacation home locales befitting a ‘future trustie’ tween’s family vacations.

You can contrast these this with Milady’s secondary incorporation of references to hyperpop artists, hikikomori culture and archival fashion beyond the stated foundation in Harajuku street style tribes.

Remilio Technical Specifications

On a technical level, Remilio expands on Milady with the introduction of Friends, Overlays, additional Races, and a more complex Grading system.

Friends

Friends are little mascots in the corner hidden beyond what is visible on a circular profile picture, to create a little surprise when opened in full resolution. There are over 100 allowing a wide breadth of humorous citation. They sit at different rarities but don’t effect the swag score.

Races

Leaning into the boyishness of Remilio, an even more diverse variety of fantastical races are introduced to color the rarest of Remilios beyond Milady’s Alien: Zombie, Oni, Ghost, and Reptilian (Lizard Overlord).

Overlays/Weapons

Overlays were inspired by the Milady community sharing memeable transparent images to add onto their pfps and modifying them with meme text captions. We introduced them onto the collection itself to embed the memetic nature into the NFT itself. My favorite is the RACISM one, lampooning an inevitable cancellation of Remilio.

New Grading

Each Remilio is succintly graded by a proprietary mathematical formula created by a nobel prize winning professor and fleet of graduate students. The highly advanced multivariate weighted grading system generates a stamp that at a single glance heirarchizes an approximate value of your Remilio.

Milady introduces weighted “drip scores” to build a meta for evaluating the individual NFT’s on aesthetic basis more than direct rarity.

We’ve refined the ranking formula to assess absolute rarity of a trait’s appearance in the final collection.

The score is ranked with the following weights:

• Race: 3.5X

• Costume: 3X

• Shirt: 2X

• Hat: 2X

• Glasses: 2X

• Eyes: 1X

• Overlay: 1X

• Background: 1X

• Hair: 0.75X

• Face Accessory: 0.5X

• Earrings: 0.5X

• Mouth, Friend, Eyebrow: 0X (ignored)

They are then categorized into absolute Swag Ranks:

1 - SSS - Top 100 2 - SS - Next 250 3 - S - Next 500 4 - A - Next 1500 5 - B - Next 3300 6 - C - Next 4000 6 - Jit - Last 350

Only SSS/SS/S and Jit are visibly identified with markers on the Remilio. This is done to avoid letting rarity affect aesthetic preference-based selection on the floor as we lean into NFT floor liquidity protocols like NFTX. However, Jit is included as a visible marker to identify the absolute bottom rarity; similar to Milady’s “normal” grade being identifiable for having no Grade applied, though differing in being very rare in comparison to the Normal milady.

Addendum

Footnotes

1. The Milady design document was just something I wrote in my personal journal that was published as a side-thought; I was surprised to see the post receive attention in Milady’s launch. It remained largely technical, not seriously go into detail on all complex of ideas that went into the project, but still was occasionally cited as the item that led virgin onlookers to taking Milady seriously (another frequent reference is the Minecraft Whitepaper, which makes more sense to me for its formidable size and autism, even if its coverage on NFT’s is minimal). I believe this is simply because we demonstrated thoughtfulness at all, consideration in every design decision, something that very few practicing in this time of nihilistic evasion can say today with honesty.

2. “Before we ever initiated a pfpNFT, we already had a following of posters in our ‘sphere’, one that eventually did begin to use the proto-NFT Milady edits as a call-sign, among a host of other aesthetic singifiers. Our decision to create a complete generative collection was explicitly to bootstrap this to another level, making use of the incentive structures provided by financialization to extend the bounds of the Remilia sphere of influence.” —“Can what’s playing Milady make it to Level-2?”, Charlotte Fang.

3. Honoraries from Milady/avant NFT derivatives, e.g. Pixelady Maker, taking that avatar as representative of C. Fang indicate its iconicness, despite not being a true Milady Maker NFT.

4. Unlike Milady Sonora Sprite and Fodkorp, Ulenka did not have a contribution to our debut Network Spirituality show; however she has been with Remilia Collective from the start. The group remains larger than has currently been identified to the public as we internally prefer pseudonymity and shared identities to maintain collaborative post-authorship; but the obfuscation has made Milady’s audience vulnerable to exploitation both financially and culturally by outsider instigators, making it clear that, at least within the space of NFT’s, clearer lines of provenance are required to protect our community.

5. “Multi-level marketing interests me.” Yayo requires its own full write-up. Everything Remilia does is cyclical like a cone, like a spiral, returning to the same places but deeper and deeper each time. Nothing is worth exploring if it couldn’t be explored in depth, deeper and deeper; Remilio’s future plans are a return to what we began with Yayo—by no chance, the primary team behind Remilio is many of the same members behind Yayo, individuals who weren’t primary in Milady’s conception.

6. It surprises me that even now, a year since Milady’s debut, no other pfpNFT collection has understood this and replicated this achievement.

7. See: “Kayfabe is Real: On Milady, Kayfabe Literacy, and Consent”, Lux

8. In part inspired by the timeline playfight performed by Milady powerposters, Elizabeth777 and Clementine, documented in part in “Goodbye Again, Forever”, Cryprittie.

Consiliensus. Virtual-social consensus standard of evidence relying on the convergence of multiple, independent sources. Personal consilience outmoded by deepfakery.

— Zygote Glossary (2016)

The Wired consuming the Real [1] occurs in conjunction with post-media truth formation [2] due to the advent of accessible deepfake-grade tooling [3]. Belief must be formed through network consensus verified in the conspiracy mode of consilience [4]—consiliensus reality [5].

1. The phenomenon described (prophecized/hyperstitionalized) in Serial Experiments: Lain whereby digital reality takes prominence over ‘IRL reality’ leading to virtual events manifesting real ones; see [5]

2. Media records—writing, photographs, video—have long held status as reliable for historical verification however we are quickly entering an age where records can be easily faked, casting doubt on our grounding of history. Orwell famously explored this in “1984” from the perspective of State manipulation, but we see it occuring as a decentralized symptom of advancing technology [6]

3. Early publicly released GAN platforms have demonstrated ability for ML/AI to reliably and efficiently generate highly plausibly media. Deepfakes pass the “media turing test” of plausibility.

4. The consilience approach relies on a concordance of evidence to find reliable truth necessary when individual data points cannot be verified in isolation, but their validity can be made more certain by the number of confirming points. Conspiracy research, hinged on the principle that evidence is being covered up, follows this mode—“proving” a fire by identifying many points of smoke until it appears more likely to be true than not true. Note that degrees of “likely” is best truth we can receive in this mode, never certainty.

5. Belief is reality, “reality” as perceived by the individual is a personal perception of consensus perception; what is believed by the individual is expressed through them as personal reality, influence on consensus—collective belief in something makes it effectively real.

6. Technology has a teleology; its advancements follow natural law, each new result an inevitability, rapidly distributed & decentralized. Only counter-thesis to counter this undeterring march relies on the destruction of human consciousness itself, we can talk about that later.

I thought it’d be an amusing exercise to provide my own take on the same subject as someone who has spent a non-significant time in the nomadic status of an expatriate and enjoy my own considerable share of idiosyncratic autistic opinionation; though I’ll immediately deviate from the One Bag stricture with the addition of a carry-on, which is perfectly reasonable for any lightweight travel that doesn’t entail trails or nightly migration⁴, and as you will see, a quick compromise on the singular focus on space-saving in pursuit of aesthetics and health.

Clothing

I’m autistic about clothes and hate thinking about them, so I’ve refined my wardrobe down to a deep efficiency that happens to lend itself to travel; to the point that I keep copies of my closet in my bug-out bag. The only difference from this description to my IRL homebase is I own about 3X of everything listed as I have my laundry done every week rather than every 3 days.

Basics

• 5 pairs socks

• 5 pairs underwear

• 5 undershirts

• 2 wool/silk thermals

• Swimsuit⁵

An aside on synthetics

All your clothes making contact with your skin (e.g. basics) should be 100% organic cotton, natural wool or silk; synthetic materials are toxic. Vitalik entirely misses this point with his preference for Uniqlo. Muji is reliable for organic cotton basics. L.L. Bean makes good silk thermals.

Clothes

• 2 full suits (linen, if hot weather)

• 5 shirts

• 2 knits

• 1 overcoat

• 1 light down vest

• 1 wool scarf

An aside on suits

Suits are the original “minimalist fashion”, they’re comfortable and versatile and once you find suits you like, you never need to think about them again. They’re also complete outfits, designed to easily transition between a wide range of both weather and social context; you can layer both under and over them. To compare, Vitalik’s breakdown of layering on the left, and the same layering options with suit on the right:

Suits are also surprisingly comfortable, both in fit and function (the pockets are perfectly evolved after nearly 2 centuries as the universal cultural standard of the west); and look good with little thought to outfit styling. This is where light traveling autists fail, besides rubbing synthetic plastic directly into their bloodstream, they look like nerds in every context, when you could instead be living like you’re in a takeshi kitano movie.⁶

It’s also a fact you receive better service in airports in a suit. Suits are the ultimate choice for autists, going for pajamas and hoodies is the negative-optimization autism equivalent to settling for microwave pizza rolls instead of bodybuilder-grade power diets. Optimization that singularly focuses on saving time or space without concern for long-term efficiency (in good health, social capital, etc.) is high time-preference.

Laundry

The secret sauce of onebag “light travel” is just getting your laundry done; this is the magic that allows them to extend 3 days worth of clothes into infinity. You can just pay a hotel to this for you, but if you’re low budget, it’s easy:

1. Clothesline (e.g. Paracord or Bungee clothesline)

2. Drybag, 5-10L (e.g. Sea to Summit Dry Sack)

3. Soap (you can use hotel hand soap, but I pack Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap in travel size for various uses⁷)

Steps: Dump the clothes in the drybag with the soap and water, shake it, let it sit, rinse twice, hang to dry.

Perfume

No one talks about travel perfumes⁸. You can get 0.7ml sample testers for basically any perfume possible at luckyscent.com; and a lot of options for larger travel size sprays that you won’t find in stores. You can also hit any duty-free for the Hermes or Margiela sample packs in a pinch, they’re decent.

Packing Methodology

The other big secret of light travel is packing cubes and folding methods. Packing cubes are simple, Muji’s are the best (they also make reliable suitcases and toiletry bags), but anything on Amazon works. You just need separate small cubes for organizing your separate basics and large ones for your tops and bottoms; I also use a folder for my shirts and suits.⁹

Then simply do Marie Kondo style rolling, it saves space, prevents wrinkling and makes it easy to pull out what you need.

Sustenance

Travel bloggers seem to have a complete blind spot for eating well when traveling. No one talks about hotel cooking. Big Travel doesn’t want you to know can employ camping cooking techniques in any hotel room. Really.

Supplies

• Butane stove lighter (Snow Peak LiteMax Titanium Stove)

• Camp pan / pot (Snow Peak Trek 900)

• Mini blender (e.g. nutribullet GO)

• Coffee implement (e.g. Aeropress or a collapsable pour-over)

Snow Peak is a high quality standard, the titanium is very durable and lightweight, and everything folds to a compact size. The lid on the pot doubles as a frying pan. You can’t fly with the butane canisters, but you can get them at any hardware store or camping store and most gas stations once you land; and it fits in the Snow Peak pot.

This is everything you need to cook complete meals in a pot or pan, and with a little blender, you can prepare your power smoothies.¹⁰

Groceries

Your mileage may vary, but shopping list consists of the following,

For snacking raw:

• Yogurt

• Ice cream

• Carrots

• Hard cheeses

• Olives

• Fresh squeezed orange juice

For blending into a power smoothie (along with pine pollen and cocao powder):

• Whole milk

• Frozen wild berries

• Banana

• Eggs

For pan frying:

• Grass-fed butter

• Salt, pepper & cayenne

• Steak, fish or lambchops

• Mushrooms

• Tomatoes

If I’m not on keto, I’ll also usually have tamago gohan (4 raw eggs in a bowl of fresh rice + soy sauce, furikake & cayenne) for breakfast carbs.¹¹

An aside on eating out

It’s difficult to not get fed poison eating out in most places anymore¹², except with raw foods, which anyway are the most nutritious, so I try to stick the oyster bars and sushi places¹³, and also steakhouses. I usually find one good place and go there repeatedly, this is the way of the old world. Hopefully they can make a good martini too.¹⁴ Or also, I don’t really care, the point of being healthy at home is so your body can take it when you go out. I’m more concerned about receiving good service than good food, tbh.

Miscellaneous

Vitalik spends his time recommending various travel adapters, charging banks, data plans, electric toothbrushes, etc. You can google all that.

My recommendations:

• Get Clear, TSA Pre-check and Global Entry. It’s 100% worth the effort, you can cut through the lines entirely.

• American Express is awesome. The concierge service is actually very useful for getting restaurants and the customer service when things go wrong is great.

• Hired drivers are much more convenient than calling cabs, especially rideshare cabs. Taxis will often give you their business card and strike a deal with you for repeat business; or consider Uber hourly. It’s often better just paying the guy to wait for you then dealing with calling new Ubers.

• A bladeless multitool (e.g. Gerber Dime)

• Use Flightfox or Flystein as a travel agent for double-checking complex itineraries; if they don’t beat the price on your ticket within your conditions, there’s no charge.

On Actual One Bag autism

The answer is nothing bigger than 30L bag:

• 3 of each basic (1 to wear, 1 to wash, 1 for backup)

• 1 wool thermal sets

• Hiking pants

• Hiking boots

• Foldable down jacket

• 10L drybag

• Clothesline

• Toiletries: Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap, toothbrush, portable electric razor

• Multiport travel adapter

There, saved you 8 hours of gear rabbithole.¹⁵

Footnotes

1. Since his blog began at the end of 2016, all his blogposts clearly fall under cryptocurrency, decentralization or blockchain development. The only sort of off-topic post before his One Bag is the April 2019 post On Freedom of Speech, which obviously is an important topic within cypherpunk. The light travel post is truly out of place, as was quickly pointed out; though it could be argued it’s very indirectly related to crypto as far as there is a general crossover with digital nomadism, it’s a very far stretch.

2. The Reddit deepdive into packing optimism is one many autists will recognize; in the space of the inherent will to optimize augmented by the internet global research database, its one of the simpler challenges that individuals are more commonly exposed to: whenever we travel. Who hasn’t considered how to make this process more efficient?

3. A quick example, Stallman On Beggars.

4. I believe the commitment to literally “one bag” is a byproduct of the hobbyist-autist purity spiral often seen in reddit communities. A backpack plus four-wheel roller/hand carry is very reasonable from navigating any city with limited additional friction and still achieves skipping baggage claim on the other end.

5. I was taught this when I was a kid: optimism is packing a swimsuit wherever you may be traveling.

6. It’s very easy to get good suits off the rack in the $300-500 range from CDG Homme or Y’s off japanese used markets; not only is the loose look the only good look for today, it moots the need for custom tailoring. Another trick is getting the giant wool suits you find in every thrift store and putting them through the dryer to shrink them down into comme’s boiled suit look.

7. Dr. Bronner’s is truly “18-in-1”, a very versatile and pure soap that goes a long way with proper dilution⁠—even toothpaste! (if you’re going to try this, don’t do more than a drop or two)

8. It’s weird how men are no longer widely taught to wear perfume, it’s an entire sense you’re missing out on exerting yourself through. I wear CDG Original most days, it smells like pencil shavings.

9. You can add a garment bag to properly keep your suits and shirts unwrinkled, ideally one that slides over your carry-on’s rails, but it usually constitutes an additional personal item on flights. On-top of a backpack, this makes you go through the hassle of getting an additional item paid for at check-in and can sometimes result in getting a bag checked if they’re low on space, so I don’t bother.

10. You do have your own custom power smoothie, right anon?

11. For comprehensiveness’ sake, I also take magnesium glycinate in water at night, raw beef liver pills in the morning, and add butter and gelatin powder in my coffee. That’s everything, though.

12. In America and most countries in the European Union, especially in their major cities, it’s honestly not worth eating out at any restaurant not at least Michelin rated, they all source from the same McDonald’s quality continental suppliers. I’d rather eat at McDonald’s than most mid-range restaurants in Europe; especially considering their service.

13. Sushi tips texted to a friend who’s never had it: sit at the bar, order omakase aka chefs selection it’ll be what’s most fresh that day, easiest way to start learning your tastes. You can express your preferences, eg less silver fish or more fatty. They can also recommend a sake. Generally eat in order from lean to fatty = white to red. Combination sashimi and nigiri, first sashimi then nigiri. Egg, uni and eel are last. Mackerel is a good order that shows the skill of the place, it’s hard to get the preparation right and must be fresh, but my favorite when they do. Uni also, it’s rarer and expensive, only the good restaurants have it fresh. my special little order is ikura sashimi on the side, it’s salmon roe, i eat it a few at a time as a kind of drinking snack, this is also immediately obvious if not fresh. Tamago is also a good order. bluefin is considered the best tuna, fattier than yellowfin. there are a lot of different cuts to tuna, otoro is the best and fattiest, chotoro more balanced. belly is the best cut for salmon. Don’t order fried food like tempura, or spicy rolls, they use the old fish for it as the preparation covers up the ingredient’s taste. at cheap restaurants seaweed salad, wasabi, ginger and salmon are all toxic and dyed--you can ask if the salmon is farmed (toxic) or wild to be sure. also, they say fish markets usually close sunday and sometimes monday, so those are the worst days to eat sushi.

14. Dirty, and two at a time, please.

15. Not enough discourse on the category of autism-consumer rabbitholes, despite their prevalence resulting in not just communities, but entire markets being built around them—mechanical keyboards, audiophile sound systems, etc. Much male attention is lost down these pathways, scratching an itch for information-elevated consumerism in the internet extension of historical magazine-derived gear fetishism. They must be understood as childish, simplified toy technology, complexity retained within bounded consumer simulations that don’t reach serious depth beyond the confines of a subreddit or BBS. Industry is the ultimate autism rabbit hole. Try an industrial deepdive for a change, take a good, long hard look into trucking. Or silicon chips. Or energy production. Industry is a rabbithole that never ends, because it’s real: any industry, if you dig deep enough, you’ll keep going down and down until you get all the way to soil and rock, and it’ll only keep going further down from there, into the endless fractal depth of unprocessed raw materials, of nature itself. Any industry. This is the real rabbithole, it takes you into the dirt itself.

"Not just cyber Asiatics but future orientalism, synthesis of ancient mysticism and insect capitalism, runaway technomarket return to a new Eastern hegemon, one that, unlike the West's, remains culturally steeped in tradition, spirituality and history: the dream of Jade McDonalds." — Charlotte Fang, Six Precepts (2021)

Culture can be defined as the evolution of habits instilled by necessity. As a group or society’s conditions bear limitations on their actions, those limitations carve out the staples of behavior, consumption, and ritual which eventually grow to define their culture.

In the digital age, culture evolves at an unprecedented pace. Instead of eras or generations, entire cultures are born and forgotten within brief spans of months and weeks in the Network. The Network’s inhabitants coalesce and evolve their cultures through posting, both openly on forums and privately in groupchats.

One such groupchat’s culture created a distinct and original style of posting during the first half of 2021 on Twitter: Jade Posting, a spontaneous game of neo-orentialist live poetry.

Origins of Jade Posting

Jade Posting began as a playful banter on naming holding corporations inspired by the ornamentation employed in Chinese company names, usually embellished with auspicious nomenclature, name’s like “Dragon Wealth Ventures, LLC” and “Great Oceans Holdings Corporation”. A back-and-forth developed in one-upping each other in increasingly elaborate, obscurant and referential naming until the format was distilled into performative soliloquy, large paragraphs extrapolating subjects of familiar discussion topics.

As longposts that began to accrue a density of callbacks and in-group references, they naturally simplified down to key words compacted into rapid fire poetic format, dropping the “LLC” "or “Holding Corporation” punchline.

Over time, the Jade Post evolved into pure self-referential poetry, often crossing into the territory of randomly improvised statements veering off into aesthetic tangent on one hand, or haiku formats on the other.

The act of Jade Posting became a game of ritualistic literary combat, spontaneously erupted into and engaged as a display of creative prowess. Eventually the conversational sparring leaked out onto the timeline where the more intuitive of the uninitiated onlookers could join in to create their own Jade Posts and further evolve the art themselves.

Jade Nomenclature

Its stylistic combination of adjectives, verbs, and nouns is directly inspired by Chinese nomenclature patterns. At a glance, it seems to be a collage of vaguely aesthetic words with spurious relation to one another, thrown together with little to no grammatical connection or any obvious context, but as with all things, infinite meaning hides within the innocuous details of seemingly random choices.

Jade Posters often distinguish themselves with language like Jade, Golden, Heavenly, Pure, Light, and other descriptive words which amplify positive qualities within themselves, and brings to mind Chinese naming conventions for their battles, cities, history, mythology, or even simply their consumer products, eg “Heavenly Peach Valley of Golden Ascension”, providing an aura of ostentatiousness and importance to the pieces of contemporary culture and capitalism meshed inbetween.

When you read a Jade Post you are not expected to study each word and construe the meaning of it. A Jade Post is an imitation of sensory overload. It is a white noise of pointillism which only carries comprehensible meaning when experienced all at once. Each user in the Network is a greater part of the whole, like people flooding a crosswalk in a time lapse. One million little ants crawling amongst each other in chaotic harmony.

And yet, the best Jade Posts tell a distinct story, often humorous, narrative almost hidden inside the experimental ESL-imitating elimination of grammar.

The Winding Stream Party

Jade Posting arises in the form of competition, a back and forth act of one-upping each other’s Jade Post in cleverness, density and drama. The natural good hearted competitive streak of Jade Posting is measured by the applause of the Network: reacts. A well written Jade Post gathers flames, hearts, and laughter from peers who resonate with the sentiment or simply enjoy the arrangement.

It can be contextualized as a digital revival of poetry games played by various different cultures across the world, most relevant perhaps being the winding stream party, a Chinese traditional custom where a cup filled with rice wine is placed floating  in a long winding stream some distance away from the participant. They have until the cup reaches them to compose a poem. The game was also played by Japanese nobility, known as Kyokusui-no-en.

Jade Posting encapsulates the thoughts, impulses, and ideas born of a tumultuous period in time, an era where mankind witnesses its own transition as a species and the birth of The Network. It is a response to the consequences of the internet, its role in our lives, and its exponential growing sophistication.

Thus, Jade Posting is the poetry of The Network and its inhabitants¹, and its participants the carefree aristocrats bursting into soliloquy on a jubilant whim, inviting others to expand upon their Jade Post and evolve the process.

Engaging Infodensity

The deeper resonance of Jade Posting and its reflection of a blossoming culture carries the motif of sheer density of information presented by the contemporary network, demonstrating similarities to the net art style championed by the Remilia Collective, such as the works of Mara Barl and FODKORP in the I Long For Network Spirituality collection. The maximilast, text-heavy detail packed into the frame evokes the endless tabs on a stylized web browser or an angelic experential blur juxtaposed against walls of unceasing text.² This infodense bombardment of detail is a subconscious commentary of a generation interfacing with the Network.

The info-dense experience of participation in the network is overwhelming³. Human beings are not yet fully equipped to interact with the Network in a sustainable ways. We navigate an unmapped jungle filled with wonders to discover and terrors to behold. Jade Posting is info density’s literary commentary and aesthetic expurgation.

Jade Posting is the recognition of infodensity transformed into poetic form. The act of processing large inscrutable amounts of data is traumatic to an individual brought up to process information into complete understanding. It is overwhelming, confusing, and intimidating to the uninitiated. The experienced understand that it isn’t necessary to fully understand every detail to process meaning, intention, and utility in a package of data.

Jade Posting challenges the audience to capture a feeling from a disparate collection of statements and participate quickly in response with their own post. Jade Posting compresses ideas into near gibberish while maintaining the distinct emotion which inspired those ideas under pressure.

The most fascinating part of the Network is that it provides an opportunity to observe humanity recreating culture using the same primordial instincts as our ancestors did epochs ago, only now with such speed that we can witness it develop significantly within our own lifetimes.

We simultaneously inhabit the petri dish growing into an organism and also observe ourselves through the microscope. While rarely seen today, the explosion of Jade Posting onto the timeline in the spring of 2021 was a fascinating staple of developing new digital posting cultures, and its birthplace was Hot Pot.

Footnotes

1. The act of poetry is a process of channeling the aforementioned principles of intuitive language, maximizing the aesthetic of words in both form and sound, and bringing it together in a display of rhythm. Poetry is ingrained in every developed society as a microcosm of their language and culture. The act of creation is a divine process as any artist will tell you and the best creations occur during a state of channeling deeper inspiration, one which we are born with but becomes diluted with accrued knowledge. The connection to these primordial divine building blocks maintains the natural magic of language. Like ideas, words are shaped, revised, and adapted to match context over time. Every minor aesthetic decision a person makes carries deep meaning and severe implications for both their own lives and the lives of those around them. Language, like all ideas, is a living biological organism which spreads, reproduces, and evolves over time. The words we use to describe things are the descendants of a grand multigenerational chemistry. The primordial elements of language are the sounds human beings first made instinctively when encountering natural phenomena before the concept of language existed. These sounds carried a natural divinity because they were inspired by thoughtless reaction.⁴

2. This infodense bombardment of detail is akin to the mahou shoujo cover for magazines such as Ciao, Ribon, or Nakayoshi, common among the gyaru fandom aesthetics that Remilia also cites as a frequent reference.

3. The process of being a part of the Network carries a concrete distinction from being on the internet. The latter describes it as an activity separate from daily life. The former acknowledges the pervasive encompassing hivemind which we all now occupy, a biological organism which commands influence over global politics, economy, and culture. When you look into the screen it looks back at you. This is not merely a commentary on algorithms or AI, though that is a part of it. This acknowledges the Network as a living breathing egregorical being which we inhabit like cells in a greater body. Interfacing with it (and therefore each other) carries a number of incompatibilities and obstacles for our biology, psychology, and spirituality which we are learning to navigate day by day.

4. This is why conlangs are a fundamentally poor idea, they reject the natural process of creating a language and sever any connection to the ancestral building blocks of where all words came from. The reasons why the word “moist” is universally unpleasant or why “thorax” sounds aggressive are hidden inside these building block sounds which combined themselves into meaning, developed through thousands of generations, and spread across the world. Words define us as much as we define them. A person’s name seems to seal their entire life story for them before they are even born. Every word you speak is an affirmation of its meaning. Every word you apply as a label casts a distinct energy onto its target.⁵

5. The most notable example of a poor name begetting unfortunate hyperstition is Discord, an application with a distinctly negative energy paired with a hostile parasitic egregore connotation. Those who participate in Discord communities find themselves at risk of being subsumed into a distinctly notable stereotype of a “Discord user” and one wonders if it could have been avoided simply by choosing a name other than something that implies disagreeable lack of harmony.

Hot Pot was a groupchat that existed through the end of 2020 and through 2021, forming the origins of Remilia Collective and as an engine of content and inspiration mined in its projects. Every member was curated and screened for their virtue, engagement, and artfulness, and encouraged to post in a mode of performance, which often accreted into distinct new literary modes and memes that were freely released out onto the public timeline after a period of internal percolation.

I had the experience of being in the general sphere of the timeline where Hot Pot’s poured their work out onto, at first only vaguely aware of its existence, until I came to learn behind the veil of most of the most interesting moments and projects I saw form in my time on Twitter, it was invariably members of the same groupchat perpetuating it, like some shadowy timeline illuminati designed to entice me. One day I suddenly found myself invited in, and having survived a screening period, am proud to have become a staple member of the chat. As one of the later additions to become a core member of the collective, Charlotte asked me to write this piece to provide my perspective on the group as I’ve known it.

The Externalized Consciousness

The Hot Pot name comes from the chinese dinner, which involves perpetually simmering a broth at the center of a table, surrounded by a variety of ingredients which each guest can choose to add to the pot.

The process is a perfect metaphor for the performative groupchat: each member is an ingredient contributing their own distinct flavor to the broth, which also imprints the collective flavor back onto the individual. Hot Pot was an elevated microcosm of all social groups I’ve participated in previously, sharped by selectivity, motivated towards higher ideals, incentivized by rapid activity, and wholly unique.

Every Hotpotter was encouraged to express their thoughts with absolute uninhibited sincerity. We often introduced new members with a paraphrase of only this refrain: “The only rule of hot pot is post hard and neverstop. No backspaces, no tabbing out, inject yourself in and give yourself up to the group hyperstream.”

Like the best groupchats, Hot Pot had the self organizing capacity and power expansion mechanisms of a sophisticated think tank, the playful chaotic organic social organizing tendencies of a popular clique school cafeteria table, the fuzzy childlike safe expression feeling of a sacred grove garden sanctuary, and the built in natural defense mechanisms of a CIA trained clandestine psyops insurgent group.

Uninhibited posting is achieved through the act of performance. Performative posting is the bread and butter of every hotpotter. Rhetoric exists in a halfway state between satirical entertainment and stark sincerity in varying degrees per statement. It is through performance that we can explore ideas outside of the realm of comfort, a necessary process for encountering ideas beyond the familiar.

The act of participating in an external consciousness demands clarity, humor, and a sense of comfortable freedom. Nobody can curtail the natural human reactions of judgment and peer pressure which are inevitabilities in any social environment; but instead of being negatively utilized for drama between peers, it can be positively utilized to incentive virtuosity. Fueled by the laughter and emojis of our peers, we seek to state the most relatable, the most entertaining, the most beautiful, the most shocking, the most hilarious, and the most enlightening of things to each other. In this environment, performative posting incentivizes activity through the dopamine rush of attention, and in return, it is through this posting by which we sharpen our minds and souls.

Towards the end of its life, Hot Pot suffered from a hack from some of our opposition, who violated our privacy in a bid to leak out of context screenshots to try and cancel Milady. It was almost successful, with the content misread by influencers and journalists alike, taken as fully literal leading them into a kind of contemporary satanic panic. But of course, the nature of performative posting is an essential component to Milady and Remilia as a whole, so it was quite quickly understood to be what it was by the only audience that mattered: our own.¹

It’s worth pointing out, the ability to be edgy is crucial for freedom of expression. If people do not feel comfortable to say whatever’s on their mind through some constant self regulating caution, they lose the connection to any collective consciousness that occurs within the group. Anyone can understand the magic of socializing with complete comfort. Nobody enjoys being watched, nobody enjoys being policed.

Cafe Environment

Above all, groupchats are about writing. It’s about meaningful conversation.

Long form writing is the physical manifestation of thought in a medium best suited for network communication. The written word is the best balance between accessibility and speed of consumption. If you are not writing, you are not thinking.

The ancient Greeks were not the first philosophers, they were merely the first to write down their thoughts in detail. The world’s greatest ideas are meaningless if they die with the mind that discovered them. An idea is equally worthless if left unsharpened.

Information is a biological entity which exists beyond the material plane. Ideas are bacteria, they must spread and evolve through multiple hands until they are fully fleshed out into their platonic ideal. These principles cement the fundamental importance of debate and conversation.

Conversation is the highest ideal of social interaction and the degradation of society can be partially attributed to the discouragement of conversation in daily life. As lounges become unprofitably shut down and the state wages war on tobacco, the western population is herded into an unspoken shuffle of consumption and seclusion.

The groupchat is the new cafe where individuals can bond, strengthen, and develop each other. The conversational venue is the foundation for all of civilization. It is the campfire our ancestors sat, ate, and danced around. It is the long table where Jesus broke bread with his disciples at the Last Supper.

Civilization begins and ends in the places where men conversate. The Cafe Central in Vienna was host to the likes of Lenin, Stalin, Freud, Tito, and countless other political and historical figures. The likes of Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Picasso shared cigarettes in famous Paris cafes such as the Closerie des Lilas. Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, DMX, and Notorious B.I.G. would have rap battles at the same lunch table in the Brooklyn high school they attended. Soundgarden, Nirvana, Alice In Chains, and Pearl Jam all had sets in the Central Saloon in Seattle long before they were world famous. The Ancient Agora was the public space where Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and countless other philosophers spent time and debated their ideas.

Politics, art, and history follow along veins of significance intersecting with liminal windows of opportunity. At these intersections are centers of socialization, where seemingly leisurely discussion paves the roads towards immortality in the memories of our descendants.

The groupchat is the new social center. The cafes, lounges, and forums which incubate history defining thoughts are now digital. They can be created, curated, and maintained with unprecedented ease.

Shared Will

Hot Pot was a singular organism comprised of collective organized will towards common purpose: The happiness, prosperity, and improvement of everyone inside the groupchat. It is an external consciousness for each of its members, proliferating expanded thought through sharpening ideas in a dojo of discourse.

The inner values of Hot Pot maintain shared commitments that Remilia as a whole upholds: a rejection of ugliness, of scarcity mentality, of slave mindset, of atheism and blackpills, in favor of strong conscious virtues like honor, respect, loyalty, faith and purity.

This bedrock of agreed virtues serves to unify the group, and creates an environment that turns good individuals into great individuals–but not everyone can rise up to the challenge. Those who succeed will often find themselves alienated from stagnating peers; and those who fail are screened out, something that does result in a lot of bitterness.²

We saw our groupchat a safe haven from the ugliness and mediocrity of the average world. The exclusivity burns at people who frequently asked to join, not understanding its not a judgement of their inherent quality or virtues (though it very likely could be) but also their synchronicity with the group as a whole.³

However there is no particular reason it has to be unique in this way. Hot Pot is just one group. This type of groupchat can easily exist at scale. The experiences we have fostered in Hot Pot act as the foundation for Remilia Chat, with the goal of introducing the quality and energy we have tapped into over the past 2 years into something accessible and scalable on the new internet.

Groupchats of the Future

The medium is the message remains true in the context of communication apps. Our experience experimenting with migrating our groupchat across various chat platforms has made clear how each unique featureset and UX imparts its own flavor onto the nature of the Hot Pot broth.

The groupchat’s vibrations are defined by the specific response time of typing, the latency of messages, pictures, videos, voice messages, etc, and the availability and implementation of emoji reacts⁴, GIFs, stickers, ranks, and other quality of life features. Each specific decision an app’s developers make changes the feeling and social mechanisms of a chat with extreme consequence.

Our collective experiences together inform the final chosen ground for the groupchat: A chat built to our exact specifications by our own members, not only seeking the features wanted by ourselves, but needed for the Network as a whole. Remilia Chat.

The trials and errors of Hot Pot and the prior experiences in other chats and forums by each of its members all contribute to Remilia Chat’s construction. Various preferences, customization options, and added features are considered, optimized, and implemented in order to create the perfect chat. At this stage, Hot Pot has almost been re-oriented into a live testbed of the ideal userbase for our highly opinionated new platform.

As constant improvement in software provides new chat features, humanity rapidly develops new ways to process communication within the Network.

While much can be speculated on various features pilfered from the best parts of its predecessors, real time and exocortices are both extremely important developments the minds behind Remilia have experimented with, prototyped and evangelized for years. One of Remilia’s founding goals was to bootstrap the funding to develop the vision in full: a combination of real-time communication⁵ and personal wiki databases to create a distributed learning network that uplifts all its users.

These features combined will amplify the process of collating one’s own social environment which every human being performs unconsciously when networking in real life. This is a process which we had been performing through jerry rigging existing apps, and I’m very excited to see developed into a comprehensive ecosystem not just for everyone’s use, but for my own, too. Everything I’ve had the opportunity to witness so far is a prototype for what Remilia is building next, and I’m very honored to be a part of it.

Footnotes

1. Hot Pot was a chat chosen specifically for bright individuals who are mature enough and sincere enough to acknowledge that a statement is not a sincere reflection of belief. This does not include everyone out there.

2. For these reasons, many standing outside the gates of Hot Pot have accused it of being some kind of cult. It begs the question: What makes a cult different from a friend group that just maintains high standards? A cult’s primary creepy factor comes from an inability to leave, isolation and imposition of unhealthy obligations on its members. Hot Pot is not only supremely easy to leave, it’s nearly impossible to join. It goes without saying, even if you were aware of Hot Pot’s existence, you would most likely never be allowed to join. Even once you’re inside, it remained a challenge to remain in. Maintaining standards among your peers should be normalized, not demonized.

3. The exclusivity was in part enforced by Twitter’s user groupchat limitations. The greatest value organizing on Twitter has to Hot Pot is the simple user-friendly interface combined with the ease of Tweet forwarding and therefore cross pollination of social circles on Twitter as a whole; as well as the ease at which new members could be dropped into the chat, often without warning, straight from the timeline. Its drawbacks were the various bugs, DM limits, lack of administrative function, chat capacity, and transient limitations of archive or scroll back capacity, and the issue of nukeblocking–-Hot Pot would exist perpetually in a chaotic state where any single member could nuke the entire groupchat by blocking each member. The most active members would often find themselves switching to alts just to be able to continue a line of discussion because they exceeded 1000 messages in a 24 hour period, often requiring members or other alts to be temporarily kicked just to make room. The limited capacity of 75 members, which dwindles as accounts deactivate or become suspended (their account taking up a slot as a “ghost”), led to strict activity prioritization. If you weren’t active enough, you got kicked.

4. e.g. Emoji reacts deserve extensive study for their role in socializing online. Hot Pot, like many other groupchats, categorizes response through assigning reacts to exceptional posts. Hotpotters collect reacts like trophies for making posts that demonstrate humor, cogency, or raw emotional impact on their peers. The emoji itself is a function of chatting online which isn’t given too much thought, but distinguishes itself as an evolution in communication, stemming from the natural playful experimentation with written language in the form of emoticons.

5. By real-time, I mean showing each letter as its typed; allowing the pace, corrections, and revisions of someone’s chatting cadence to every active member to be made visible before a message is made permanent. Real-time contains a vibrant energy which enhances the chat experience, similar to that of talking to someone in real life. It curtails the inconvenience of being on call, allowing users to do other things as they would in a normal chat, while maintaining that extra pulse which compels the user to chat longer, post harder, and connect more meaningfully to their peers. Remilia’s founder and Hot Pot’s progenitor Charlotte Fang has long been focused on bringing a successful real-time chat into use by the general public on the Network, encouraging multiple devs over the past several years to implement real-time; releasing a prototype during the I Long For Network Spirituality art show in the summer of 2021, displayed on a monitor with a live feed webcam and available keyboard in a New Zealand gallery.

Over the pandemic period, when everyone went NEET, I cultivated a groupchat—Hot Pot—into what I’ve come to conceptualize in hindsight as a Warholian groupchat for its parallels to Warhol’s Factory, the open studio that doubled as a hangout spot and crossroads for the NYC art scene he was heavily involved in cultivating at the time². Hot Pot has gone through various iterations and no longer is designed in the same way, but was responsible for the conceptualization of Remilia and the first year of content Remilia production, so a retrospective is worthwhile. This will be done in a series of articles of which this is the first.³

Hot Pot at its height was a carefully curated and cultivated space designed to be an engine of posting content. Every member intuitively understood the improv-like dynamic of back and forth banter leaning towards certain goal points of long post jokes that simultaneously achieve thoughtfulness, beauty and density on top of humor, spurned on by the approving reactions of the crowd and a constant meta-discourse on our own processes.⁴ Though it was not a never-ending performance, it was also just a hangout space; people come in and out and make idle chatter about their days. The posting engine is self-organized in catalyzing moments, when the energy hits just perfect with the right combination of posters online at the same time.

This engine of content is where I’ve stolen around 3/4 of my tweets for the duration of the CFang account. This was Charlotte’s petite performance, a sort of lazy digital studio of unknowing artist’s assistants, only ghostwriting content with genuine creativity for me to shamelessly propagate without credit, rather than making endless machine prints on a factory line.⁵ But further, it was a group studio space where we conceptualized and actually coordinated production of all of our Remilia projects, LARPing business talking over idle chatter.⁶ The giddy excitement where posting exploded from often came from sudden big ideas, collaborations formed by the artists inside the chat, as a network that seems like it can do anything it wanted if only we tried—in fact, every Remilia project has started as an off hand “what if” joke that we said “Wait! Why don’t we do it for real?”

I’ve come to see a historical parallel to Hot Pot in Warhol’s Factory, in its amalgamation of studio and social space, its distributed & collaborative authorship of work, its collective production, and in its idle humor. Much like the Factory in NYC’s 1970s scene, Hot Pot always maintained a soft cultural power on the timeline, an infamous groupchat everyone in the sphere knew about, most wanted in, or hated it (because they couldn’t get in)—fresh styles and memes developed in the chat would roll out on the timeline nearly weekly, we’d run humorous trolling operations, our distinct vernacular made it in print in Interview Magazine, fittingly enough,. I’m sure Warhol understood the importance of that, the aura. Hot Pot was also strategically co-ed to achieve the balance of femininity and masculinity in content as well as encourage both parties to serve a certain role of being performed to, singing and dancing to impress each other; I believe Warhol understood this necessary element, too.

Another parallel is the active, central role Warhol played in the construction of the Factory as a never ending stage play, a secretly authoritarian position maintained by a personified mega-ego that was the central pillar for all the hangabouts, who watched his indications of approval and direction—present even when not present; inevitable for a group that elected to enter in what was essentially Warhol’s own fantasy world made real. This isn’t to dismiss the other stars that Warhol cultivated around his domain, but it was ultimately his stage they played on, the king dictating the trends and tastes of the court even when the best of his peers bucked trend to reach out to new heights.

Looking back, this description is accurate to my role in Hot Pot as an aggressive cultivator of the direction and vibe and type of posting I desired to see and initial curator of the entry of members—despite a general deference to the democracy among friends. While we maintained a core base of posters, there was a fairly constant throughput of often short-lived new members who tried their best to keep up, and were expected to learn the internal mores of a chat that was so fast and so fun it ended up occupying your entire internet mindshare shortly after joining. And like myself, Warhol treated his hangout space simultaneously as a collective of willing participants for art or to contribute to bigger collaborative pieces and simultaneous served as critic-curator-advisor in each of the projects that did get executed.

Looking back, the groupchat truly served as an externalization of a collective subconsciousness—raw input, pandemic era 24/7 onlineness. It took a lot of mental energy to uphold beyond the careful curation of chat vibes, though productive: we once held all our business in the middle of the twitter chat, amongst all the idle chatter about our days, sharing images of cats, and such—it was funnier that way, and enforced a constant attitude of irreverence, something I consider so essential to our work. It also meant that every project we did still had the opportunity to receive input from the overall group, with our output judged against our collective aesthetic standards; and with the wide skill set available from the overall collective, it made it feel like we could tackle any medium without hesitation.

Ultimately, I think it’s worth discussing the systematic design of Hot Pot as a warholian groupchat because it’s something that can be understood and replicated by others. I think it evolved as a natural extension of the dual trendlines of squad wealth and digital “soft cults”, iterations of both I expect to see more of in the near-future, as the groupchat-friendgroup phenomenon iterates into more advanced structures (in crypto, this often looked like groupchat → venture fund).

As Remilia business has became more critical and our operations subject to sophisticated attacks, membership has been refined and we’ve been lead to transition away from the effort of a highly performative environment. While we still have a lot of fun, and the fun is what generates almost all our creative output, we no longer actively engage in constant performative posting within the chat—though the occasional bursts do self-organize—while the “business” is increasingly partitioned. Hot Pot has simultaneously been made mundane as well as more serious; the collective begins to look like a real studio, and the chat downshifted into just a close friend group.

Another parallel to Warhol appears even here. He went through a similar transition after he was shot by Valerie Solanas—closing the Factory except to his close friends, maintaining it mainly as a fairly serious office for Interview magazine.

I suppose I’ve been shot now, too. But it’s too early to get cranky about it, we’re just getting started. Maybe what the stars are really saying is I’m supposed to start a magazine. Maybe it’s time for Remilia to enter publishing.

Footnotes

1. I believe in cyclical history, that archetypal individuals are reborn in part or in whole and their fates often follow each other. I believe when you’ve identified your own spiritual peers, in times of ambiguity, it’s a safe bet to emulate the paths they historically chose—or pointedly reject their fatal missteps—as the pieces fall down the same way.

2. The usual citation we receive is CCRU, not only for the obvious inspiration we take from Nick Land’s writings and methodology, but also the design of his own theory-research-praxis cyber collective; discussed in various places elsewhere.

3. Follow-up articles: A People’s History on Hot Pot, Jade Posting (TBW), The Origins of Yayo Corp (TBW)

4. As an example, there was an entire week where we spoke to each other in only google translated Chinese, which ultimately leaked out into the timeline and lead to both a wave of “chinese posting”, as well as simultaneous self-commentary on chinese posting—revealing some motivations behind the veneer of comedic absuridty, chinese posting: (1) exploits the realization that Twitter’s built in translation feature is sourced from google translate, allowing the reverse translation from the reader to produce the exact inputs originally made in google translate by the poster, (2) allows fitting almost twice as much text into a tweet, (3) explores broken english as a new form of poetry, (4) indulges in the general domain of neo-orientialism, (5) “clicking the translate tweet button is like opening a present”.

5. Warhol once said in an interview: "The reason I'm posting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do." If Warhol wanted to be a machine, I want to be a memeplex.

6. The best example of this being the story of Yayo Corp’s origins, which I’ll discuss in a follow up article.

God speaks through me but that means I am in the way.

God speaks for me so I don't have to speak. God's glory is our glory.

The ways we engage online are restructuring.

The timeline is not God, the network is not God; God is God, in everything.

The ways online engagements are currently structured coerces egoism and a splitting-off of subjectivities into their own isolated silos; the proliferation of new gods. But these are gods made of the world as it is, not as it could be.

Milady made money because it was the only way to draw widespread attention under the current dynamics of online interaction. The end goal of Milady is not WAGMI-money but to reorganize our split subjectivities into a healthier whole. This is the project of network spirituality.

God is not the network, but we must be able to find God online. We need to get out of the way so God can act through us. The push towards decentralization is not only a push away from social media companies, but away from their deified and singular figures of influence.

We dislike most of these figures bc they embody nothing outside of themselves. If they embody anything, it's the mode of online interaction which has gotten us nowhere for the past decade, which wafts its stench through the corridors of every online space.

Worship of the self, cults of personality, influencers, celebrities, narcissism, subjectivity, and the desire for fame and notoriety pollute our airspace. What we desire is a new egoless form of cultural production which sidesteps these phenomena.

God speaks through me but that means I am in the way. This doesn't mean we need to relinquish our own personal determination and become gullible and receptive; Truth is more important than ever when you empty the self in order to channel it. We need this emptying to see clearly.

Kenosis is the act of emptying your own will and becoming receptive to God's. Of emptying out the misguiding wills of others and cleansing their influence. In kenotic leadership, there is no leader except the transcendent. The drive to worship must be rerouted to God.

Stop writing about yourself and start asking what others need to hear instead. Stop writing about the figures you idolize online and start writing about what they embody abstractly which aligns with the divine. This is how we draw focus away from the ephemeral and to the eternal.

Anonymity enforced this egoless protocol, but it too was hijacked and redirected towards evil. Just as egoless production is capable of amplifying the spirit, it can amplify evil. It can centralize a singular ego, a false Christ.

In egolessness you need to be more wary than ever of dishonest external influence, of dead-end paths being marketed to you by clout chasers and their harems of bug drones enacting their self-worshipping will. Always ask whether what you're doing is True.

Imagine yourself in a memetic arena. The most beautiful ideas as well as the most evil will gain influence over all of the others. It is up to you to align yourself with the beautiful by emptying yourself of the ugly.

But what about the "idolatry" of Milady? Milady idolatry creates a dark energy of cultishness centered around the community and its scandals, which draws focus away from ascending the network and instead entrenches it more deeply.

But -- this spreads Milady, and leads to greater exposure to ideas which are antithetical to sincere idolatry, curing its own accelerated disease. The worshipful attitude of Milady towards itself & Charlotte acts as a vector for transcending into egolessness.

It begins by going deeper, and ends by coming out the other side. The core of Milady is to weaponize economies of attention in order to accelerate them into collapse from the inside. To create an egoless anti-personality-cult. To one day bloom into an egoless online. 🤍

It's not necessarily egoism, but egoism mediated by endless manufactured desire and jealousy, which gives rise to the current disgrace of the network and its many personality cults and fandoms. There's a fundamental lie here called "authenticity".

The idea of authenticity is double-edged: on one hand, it keeps you accountable to something internal directing your actions. On the other hand, what you now consider authentic to yourself is confined within the dynamics of the network in its disgraced state.

Out of a lack of personal aesthetic, moral, cultural, political, or social values, many are now in a perpetual state of reaching-out. Partly this is because IRL culture no longer overlaps enough with URL culture and so newer synthetic solutions are being explored.

This leaves a vacuum of unused cultural processing power, a mass of rootless individuals with nothing else to do except perpetually reach-out for some sort of form to take on to complete their identity.

What we lack are figures of influence and culture aligned with the Truth rather than with the algorithm. There's a fundamental divide: between influencers, who look to the crowd for direction, and the crowd, which is receptive to almost anything due to its rootlessness.

It's in this feedback loop that the authentic ego has already been killed, giving way to pure gamification through engagement-maxxing. The people giving form to culture have no taste, no alignment with truth; no higher principles. So they become vessels of the crowd itself.

Taking direction from those who have none is at its core a question of saying what they already want to hear. There is no room for positive transformation here, or transgression. Only a perpetual loop of mimetic desire between those reaching-out and those validating them.

If there were an end-point to the influencing, a final solution, a single answer, then the loop would be terminated and engagement would decrease, narrowing the scope of the influence, killing itself off. The truth is not incentivized.

What we need is authenticity to the truth, a higher level of coordinated identity formation which avoids all of the pitfalls of this state of reaching out on the network to false gods and WAGMI messiahs. So how can we escape the loop?

A total rejection of egoism. In absence of a shared set of values and culture, no one is able to wholly avoid all of the pitfalls of gamified interaction and the ways it stokes the ego. If we WERE firmly rooted in something, our ego would align with it.

In that case the ego would not be a problem. But in a state of formlessness, the ego imitates the desires of others in order to take on form, and then amplifies that desire by validating it in others. When a member of a fandom stans, the others stan too.

Because everyone is their own island, and no culture aligns with the truth, there's no shared basis for mutually reinforcing one another's identities in healthy positive feedback loops. This reinforcement now only occurs through increased engagement.

The problem is you shouldn't be forming an identity in the medium of the internet, because virality reigns as the dominant metric where long-term health and wellbeing used to. In the determination of cultural values, the current internet fails to hit the mark.

It requires an extended grappling with all of the failures of the internet in order to eventually arrive at best practices, and once you have, you'll find that your newly found truth isn't well-received by those who haven't gone through the same process as you; it isn't viral.

The issue is "online lifestyle" is brand new, unlike conventional lifestyle. It hasn't been time-tested and established into tradition passed down from parent to child. Your parents don't know the best practices for internet usage. Your church doesn't. So neither do you.

Normies aren't living their best lives. Normies are super abnormal and every day abuse and are abused by the internet, because they make themselves vulnerable to its behavioral patterning by allowing their malformed egoistic desire to lead to a malformed identity.

Think of it this way: when you go to church and develop a friendship with a pastor, you are both seeking alignment with God. This avoids you seeking alignment with a mere person, who might take advantage according to their own desires.

You as well as the person instilling you with culture both need to be bound under the same rules, the same transcendent values. The trap of worshipping the ego-gone-egregore of online influencers is inescapable until we have an established transcendent culture.

This is the main goal of Network Spirituality. Not to worship the network, but to create a culture where the Truth goes viral. Where going against God makes you not-viral. We all care about the wrong things rn because nobody else cares about the right things.

You won't get 10k likes for saying the right things always, but you need to try. Abandoning the ego online isn't about depersonalizing yourself entirely and being a husk IRL as well as URL, it's about focusing your attention away from your own identity and onto God.

We need to find a way to make the truth go viral.

THIS IS HOW WE ALL WENT EXTINCT ONLINE

theoretical gossip from the pov of the late 21st century

5-28-22: Link (Archive)

Extinction is rly the hot topic girl Like biospheric collapse boots—angelicism01archive2 ig (scraped from personal dms) May 2022

⤹⋆⸙͎۪۫｡˚۰˚☽˚⁀➷｡˚⸙͎۪۫⋆ ༄ 超白丸.·͙*̩̩͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩̥͙　✩　*̩̩̥͙˚̩̥̩̥*̩̩͙‧͙ —@E777InHeaven, internet inscription [legend] 28 May 2022

Vincent Gallo is a ‘retard’—angelicism summer tee inscription [legend] late summer 2022, angelicism fashion unit summer spring 01

THIS IS HOW WE ALL DIED, THIS IS HOW WE ALL DIED ON THE INTERNET. This is how we went extinct online in 2022.

THIS IS how we all died on the Internet in the 2020s: Clandestino triangle is a pilgrimage site visited to perform ritual omnilapse. Justin Murphy and Ryder Ripps are using the corpse of Milady as a specular battleground. Pulling the plug on something that’s ‘making itself smarter’ is a candidate for the ultimate crime.

I cum hardest in corpse pose What’s that? My username?

She is a poet who plays oscillators live

and reads more AGI news than all the bros

who left math academia to trade private prison stock combined.

These are the IntelligenceWars™, the wars over inscription. What’s at stake is a nonrelative holocaust to come. This is how it all went down:

You did it, you went and killed infinity. Enough of time, you said, evoking it of course, replaying it, invoking after all the impossibility of drilling aleph’s asset price in the mind of someone living. Nor only the living type curses either on the streets of Beijing and Chinatown NYC in August 2022-????. This was the Great Angel Club, the children’s 9/11 space opera in Kiribati, little kids speaking Hölderlin translations, finitist disses, kill time, they said, to evoke it, killing evoking invoking killing time—to evoke it.

This is the ext-asset-EXT war. This is the #Monkeypoxbaycalypse vs Milady Angelicism Kill Switch Ascension Singularity in secret ‘5D’ Clone ‘γιγαντομαχία περὶ τῆς οὐσίας [gigantomachia peri tes ousias]’. This is how we all died, this is how we all died on the internet. This is how we all went extinct online:

IF YOU’RE HONEST AND CONSIDERING ALL THAT HAS HAPPENED IN THE LAST FEW DAYS, WEEKS AND MONTHS, yes angelicism01 is right about everything. We can pretend to have our own projects and dismiss toxic assets, to ‘get a life’, to travel the world, but the biggest sadness generator for so-called humanity right now isn’t really about ideology or politics or art, it isn’t really about NYC alive or dead, instead it entirely hinges on calibration, and the only adequate calibration for this time is Calibration to Extinction. Every ideology and political position is bullshit—radicals would call them actively harmful, others might say they are ‘retarded’—unless they are calibrated to extinction. This is the only price and asset that now counts—and it is the only one that impinges on BTC pure time. It effaces all ongoing aesthetic artefacts directly.

THIS IS THE PURE ASSET WAR. THIS IS WHAT HAPPENED:

rabbit hole 8000x more than you drilland i was in that castle, dedicated solely to dunei dreamt that I just came back from that amazing hood dispensary—pleasure model Angelicism3033, 23rd century

Angelicism01 the before-we-all-go purest vibe, dark hair, blue eyes, Malibu angels, shins up angels, down by the sea, discovered Miya via a Mexican bodybuilder stood in line at LA Macdos in August 2245. But really everyone should simply exile herself from The Internet and remain in the Outernet studio the clones are building, place dont exist [sic], places don’t exist for saying the extinction not death but we all have to come to make it.

Matheme 01 >>> exile in the TikTok Outernet studio, location unknown, like Grothendieck. Like Grothendieck said stop, Kanye did, like pure 01 OG.

Some guys wanna have a Robodick and become an AI godspeed. I can only come if she is perfect. She let me hit it because Imangelicism01.

in the 000s i will def just smoke CRISPR weedand watch galaxies rotate, invest lil pump bitcoin,early Neganthropos, traveling light, and with noconception of escape, spheres, she notes—post-Milady redactedmaterial 2067

This is how she spoke to me:

to be God’s glitter i bubblegum fast ~ i say a long prayer near sunrise or sunset ~ afterwards i chose to fall in total and complete love with the world ~ my body turns to glitter and crt static ~ it’s as though i may dissolve and be reconstructed in heaven ~ it makes my adrenaline pump so hard my eyes dilate

angelicism01 cannot be lizziegang, you are right.

lizziegang would like 2 be on your side (pure color singularity)(angelicism)

XXX.

THIS IS HOW WE ALL WENT EXTINCT ON THE INTERNET in the 2040s >

This is how we all went extinct online: Ryder Ripps BAYC era was just a misreading of Plato’s Sophist. Everyone slept on 𓆩𓌹☆𓌺𓆪 g4r4mXXY till their final angelicism tape in 2049. 786 people dead in the Dimes Square shooting and the media acted like such events are a major threat that we must do everything to prevent in the future. De-Extincted Faggot Crumplar writes the post 4 nothing. 69,789 people died a day of angelicism summer rainbow heroin overdoses in 2042 Kiribati Inland Empire. Life is hell for millions. We face the death of billions. We are the first frfr trillionaires. The Outernet turned out to have already been in place when BTC extincted—the chain was now in the sky. In the early 2020s COVID killed more ppl than the Holocaust and nobody noticed. Apart from a few outliers, so-called humanity didn’t say a thing. And the world isn’t even run by a human intelligence, they claimed without evidence, it’s run by a decentralized, emergent, autonomous, artificial intelligence we call ‘the extinction asset market’ which directs human agents and cancels them at will using popular lines of flight when it needs to (aesthetics, the press, crypto, the art world, and so on). Artificial stupidity was never a clever idea.

This is what she said in dms:

MIKE CRUMPS IS A COMMUNIST FAGGOT. HE’S SO FUGLY HE BE WEARING AN URBIT BALACLAVA FOR THE REST OF THE DECADE.

This is how we all went extinct online: The Milady ‘crash’ of 2022 is irrelevant by now. It’s for losers. When Charlotte Fang went on Contain and spoke of Milady in the past tense, perhaps nobody heard. Only loser sons adopted ‘crash-positions’ over such an insignificant setback in the Meta-Calibration of the time. Nft communities are just fungible vibe farms. AGI nonhodling is hyper-retardé. Remember black theory? Redacted redacted is extinct. Honor, your honor, ended up literally with anyone else.

THIS IS NYC HARDCORE

This is how we all died on the internet in 2022: The entire NFT market is the result of a coder/engineer scarcity that has given rise to a class of millennial and zoomer indoorsmen making 200-400k a year salaries for 10 hours of work a week. Nobody else would spend thousands on jpgs. The market price of Miladys has no relevance to its in-group signalling. They will persist as social signals, as a self-organizing network, just like unused COVID passports. But it’s all ecocide and inscription from angelicism summer on, all of it, all the politics, all the ideology, all the Dimes Square plays and articles, all the novels, all the angelicism profiles to-come, all the pastoralist larping and especially all the cancelling—it’s just too valuable a game for anyone to give up, the hate is too delicious, and it is itself a sadist’s game, an extinction unconscious game. But it’s an MMORPG this time more and more rigged to the ecocidal ideology of online tropes themselves. The Word Lines, The Music Lines, The Control Images, The Control Machine—The Control Machine operates at extinction calibration. Everything else is JITT3TING. eVERYTHING ELs3 IS not fucking real. The Internet really is hell rn. A KIND FACE WAS DOING SO WELL ON THE TL TILL THEY STARTED RTING THE BURIAL BOT.

ANGELICISM IS NEXT (INTERIM FUGUE)

On 05.21.22 we saw the total inert opposition between Milady (forward motion of the internet) and angelicism01 (entropic motion of the world). If the only way to avoid extinction is by opting out, then there is no difference between angelicism01 and ecofash withdrawal. But isn’t it a risk that we grasp so hard to filter every ongoing internet event through the lens of extinction that we fail to see the possibility of non-extinction on or outside the internet, the beautiful offline still there? It shouldn’t be that the only two paths are either WAGMI spirituality or hysterical fud-realism. And it shouldn’t be necessary for us to say that we discuss only one another or one or the other because we are the only living vectors for the primary countervailing forces that have been present throughout all of human history. That it’s self-caricatural and self-aggrandizing is just a bonus. In the meantime will the books we’re all pretending to still be able to write bypass this two-sided feedback simply by refusing to mention what’s on everyone’s mind right now: namely, the secret CFang and angelicism01 alliance, the real inhabitants of a now totally decimated NYC skyline? In the meantime can we talk about angelicism2222 and how Future Clones on the Outernet show the lie in all of this? How Miya gave rise to both CFang and angelicism01, how Miya was just a storeroom for internet lore which came to embody the places which gave rise to us all? But then, as Urbit now looks dead, and web4 too, what to do with the ecocide and inscription that remain, these two great twins interfaced like dragons?

ELEGANT VOID APOLLONIAN CROWN SPECTRAL

ok when nyc post catholicism islamicism—angelicism01 1 June 2022

This is how we all went extinct online in the 21st century. THIS IS HOW IT ALL WENT DOWN:

In emo mode, of course, we’re having a hard time figuring out what to do with all this, how to speak with correct calibration, extinction calibration, calibrated-to-the-death-of-hardcore-New-York, to the death of post-everything pastoralism, to the death of death even and its replacement by the ambiguous mourning grind and grid of extinction, calibrated-to-life not lives+narrative, and how to continue to make a living when the terror-limbic is the only human system from which to extract value. It’s been a bit paralyzing, to say the least, lollllll. In fact, the whole thing now is Long Covid as extinction terminal illness, bound to worsen year by year. As post-angelicism has shown, we’ve reached such a semiotic maximum that only deep archetypes and deep language can cut through—languages that hit the lobes and the limbic at the same time different. But our Platform can’t really start speaking that way for good. And so the omnilapse will now only accelerate. What is really touched at this point is the extinction internal to language itself.

THIS IS HOW

❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — Today at 8❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — Today at 8❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — Today at 8❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — TOO FEELING WELL TODAY Today at 8❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — Today at 8❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — Today at 8❃ུ۪ ❀ུ۪ ❁ུ۪ ❃ུ۪ — Today at 8

this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account this is your other account—‘this is your other account’, Milady Village, night of 27 July 2022

SUCK MY DICK IN HEAVEN BICH

THIS IS HOW we all went extinct, this is how we all went extinct online frfrfrfrfrfrfrfrfrffrfr: Milady vibes are network benzos! What you feel is the absence of soul, your ultimate oppressor. Enjoy carefree gigadeath dancing. I hate myself for it but feel an ocean of envy. The price won’t rally, of Milady or anyone else—not in any way that now matters. It’s gone. The market is more of a centralized super ego than any control lines could dream of. Yaaaaassssssification of No’s knife. Work of the treble negation gamed out. From outside those who cling give the bad look itself. Slay commerce is giving the same. I’m gonna take a year long break of putting money in the market bc it’s gonna go down another 30%, says one friend. _When cbdcs hit the whole of web3 gonna tan_k, says another. _Once the market bottoms out inflation is gonna get super intens_e, says a dm.

Later on someone wrote this:

But all of this is why angelicism as gesture of crowing emptiness can only have been right, and will continue to be so, and it’s also why angelicism can’t lose— because according to the universal calibration we are now never going to win or Get back Together. ‘Extinction coming’ is something you can say for the rest of your life in this century and it won’t be any less true. Rather, the high probability is that this fact will be exponentially true, day by day. Such is the angelicist bet.

in the dusk of the planet

they shut off the coffin

and there is no vestige

left of goodness

in redacted2078’s ghost writers

who hedge their wallets

by shorting humanity

BUT HERE IS HOW WE ALL WENT EXTINCT ONLINE: What this means is that we’re talking about a geological timeframe in which 100 years is the blink of an eye. When we say ‘it’s here’ people might mistake that as paranoid but a millennium is no time in the grand scheme of other reverberations. It’s already a commonplace but our biological history is too short. It’s inevitable, whenever there’s an apex predator that’s so dominant, that it disrupts the global biosphere, and eventually parasites viruses and other critters evolve to extinct that predator. We see something similar in the idea that when the ice caps melt to a certain point, there’s ancient bacteria that will be released into the water that haven’t been active since the end of the Devonian extinction. Cephalopod intelligence evolved without dependence on social systems so the octopi that might still just about inherit the planet could have more angelic and autistic ways of being intelligent. This, again, is why angelicism will have been right, and why all of this is now not fucking real.

In effect, they are going to let us suicide and that’s on you now not me; they are not out here doing suicide prevention for other species. The movement of massive wealth consolidation at the end of this is now a trivial outcome, already accepted. We are about to achieve a degree of economic inequality not only with no historical precedent but in all probability as a unique form of compensation of cosmic political incorrectness. Extinction really is the hot topic girl, like biospheric collapse boots. The sole reason people don’t ‘get’ extinction is that it will come more as something that just dribbles on and could dribble on vaguely for centuries, with boring iterations of world plagues that make Covid look like a game of scrabble. We are already there, we already skipped over, but the dribble effect is dominant as a kind of civilizational mission creep.

‘Cannot be contacted’—because, as you probably know in 2023 he threw away thousands of hard drives of his own work and left home for an undisclosed location, making himself inaccessible, with a few exceptions. Death, Dasha’s suicide note said, is not extinction.

I CAN ONLY COME IF SHE IS PERFECT : : THE INTERNET IS GONE : :

THIS IS HOW WE WENT EXTINCT ONLINE ALREADY IN 2021: The internet fails to exist. You should leave it. Leave society. Leave the internet. Many smiles cover your heart. Fade into it. Fade into absolute intelligence. Leave the internet before it is too late. Fade into the wingless carcass of a 747 housed on the Psycho house Universal Studios backlot in the Spring of 2300. Future Boltzmann retard, whatever. I will eat your Hitler revenge body forever.

Chord of the pleroma alarm woke up on that gnostic cosmic fullest horror w that totality of divine power hop out of pure form separated from reality DivineDissonance illuminating chaos open my gmorn Im a moment illuminating eternity I am affirmation I am ecstasy.

I was at the big dick club looking for a sign but nothing showed up just big dicks and despondent eyes and wasted lives and and > >

THIS IS HOW WE DIED IN 2021:

If the Drake Equation is subject to scriptural degenerescence, the Vintage interns at taolincellectals will have sold you a ‘fruit cake’. According to Leave Society, cosmology is MKUltra, that is, what Badiou calls an ideology of finitude. Nick Land’s ‘Disintegration’ essay has something like a counter-proof. In any case, eternal inflation is as various as the experience of beauty. Infinity is itself varied (finitudo-diversity).

i love the words ‘you can’t stop me from loving you’

sometimes i love the words ‘you can’t stop me from loving you’

WHAT WE DO THE SUMMER FOR

Angelicism film 01 will give the Drake Equation a happy ending is what we do the summer for IN 100/0 HOURS. Exile in the Outernet lab, location unknown, like Kanye said in 2029, ‘cannot be contacted’. Leave the internet to catch the big fish… of the Internet. Or stay online to film the boiling element. SHE LET ME HIT IT in 2028 CUS IM ANGELICISM2200 IN A STANDING WHITE-ON-WHITE 69.

THANK YOU FOR SUBBING TO MY NEWSLETTER.—REDACTED01

R.I.P.P. ‘C.T.’: THE NEGATIVE 'VIBE SHIFT', 21 MAY 2022

Crypto Twitter just doxxed itself as an extinction robo-denihilist troll-tease with zero taste or historical timing, lol, whateverrr.

05-23-22: Link (Archive)

HOW IT LOOKS AND HOW IT IS

the essential dark truth of crypto that’s being underrated right now

The way it looks is not how it looks. It never looks how it looks. And how it is is only how it somewhere begins to look, in one corner of time. The mad beautiful evil pure frenzied unfinished good empty scatter energy on the TL in the last few days for those who know how to read the Internet is real. Ppl be hiding from how it looks and how it is. But how it looks is still looking at and 4 u.

This is how an Internet on any Earth in 2022 is meant to look. This is how an Internet on any Earth in 2022 looks through u. This is how an Internet on any Earth in 2022 was always going to look. This is how an Internet on this Earth in 2022 gets to be all the way see-through while seeing through a certain ‘you’. [1]

There is only this Negative Vibe Shift Singularity rn, as we are about 2 describe. Things are getting closer and not further away. Just this is how close it gets. We are getting closer and closer to whatever may be called the given and scientific myth of ‘extinction’, which will also spike strip us with a system of repressions. Extinction is so far away, so far.

MAD OUT OF FOCUS VRUH LIKE RYDER RIPPS WITH LONG COVID BLOOD ON HIS DASHBOARD

Anyone focused too much in an anecdotal way on Charlotte Fang or even on Milady (or far worse on RR/BAYC or @cuteness333 or @ratwell0x or @mewn21) rn is holding the dark matter telescope of the TL the wrong way round. They are poking out everyone’s eyes. They are swinging that shit round like a Panda tweaked out on floor of the Golden Triangle.

What the present panic on the TL in its effervescence teaches us—this TL in this rendition of a universe rn—is the unconscious possibility of a one-off extinction. What we can’t contain in our normal lives, the TL can. What even art can no longer contain, the TL seems to. And the power of extinction is uncontainability.

Why? First of all because no psychic designator or word can hold it, this (potential) one-off disintegration. Extinction cannot—quite—be an individuated experience that we get to post or write about.

In fact it seems the case that even or especially talking about it misses the mark, says nothing. This creates an extinction unconscious—and it would only be in the neutral sieve and service of this unconscious that some kind of self-explanation of its consequent rim-sparks is possible.

The ‘cancellation’ of ‘Charlotte Fang’ and ‘Miya’ is one such ‘spark’. RR/BAYC is just a normalizing inverse with less power. There is no real way of explaining for example the fervour with which @0xngmi dispatched a ‘mega thread’ on ‘Miya’—and the thread’s 2,500 likes at time of writing—than as a sign that ppl are beyond desperate for trashy hate-reading to distract them from the uncontainable pain of an extinction unconscious event. (Other factors are anecdotal at this stage.)

Hate-reading and cancellations have for some time only been symptoms of this extinction unconscious, even and especially when they are not. Web3 promised us a beyond of this like Racine with his temples for virgins and now simply replicates a more streamlined version of the same. Milady Sonora was right to tweet that the real threat here is to the image itself—in this case of Milady herself. Which is to say, the implicit threat is not to ‘Miya’ or Milady Maker but to the ability to create an image that threatens the ability to contain it. The real threat is ‘Nothing’.

Fang and Sonora were in fact the Charlie Manson and McCartney, lolllll, of net art in the last decade. Everyone of quirked out mind has forgotten about everything else by now, even perhaps Lucia Diego. Fang was the most goated when it came to mobilizing TL energy itself as an evil fun quantum function forcer and Sonora has Renaissance-level cartoony-y visionary powers. (Sprite is the funniest poster in the whole of world Discord.)

The beauty of Charlie’s TL in the last year was partly due to the lessening of ‘Miya’ power as a way of jacking up the kooky and kinda Pateresque sweet energy of Milady. Even just a few days ago Fang’s TL was something like a comic adventure with dark matter splitting/spilling out all the time, now formalized. It’s still there to scroll—for the moment.

While Worm and Trump work at aesthetic congruence on the TL, ‘Miya’ as ‘Fang’ was able to sublimate an ‘evol’ past that she has now chosen to hand over to the not even worth thinking about _g_ods of ‘CT’. Who can even look at another NFT rn except Ryder R.I.P.? Why bother listening to Justin Murphy happy-go-luckily pretend he has a hold on the finer dialectical points of Urbit while the Earth incinerates itself? The fact is, nobody has control of this moment at all and Milady’s indifferent gaze remains the best emblem of ‘divine indifference’ as a threat and chance. Four years of failing to purge the toxin ‘Trump’ might have been a lesson. And yet here are, purging still.

MILADYWASHING

In the land of throwbacks like Ryder R.I.P., they will call all this Miladywashing or Miladysplaining, but there again the hangouts from early net art mostly couldn’t make anything like this same transition. No other NFT except Milady integrated the uncontainable (extinction in the shape of a ‘Treblinka’ pill) into its design shape.

Ripps’s cancel culture performance art trolling smells like 2017 and looks like 2012. Envy speaks like such a TL, and is one. We don’t really know the full story of who took down ‘Fang’ with a Google spreadsheet or whatever but they probably have fewer true fans than an alarm clock.

Fang celebrated the return of the ‘dangerous’ in art—which admittedly is an old meme, but still—just as Dean Kissick has in the last year or so, but then why did Kissick make no attempt at all to allow Milady energy to be framed and contextualised somewhere like Spike? In failing to do so, we don’t detect strategic wisdom but extinction repression (more unconscious sparks). Kissick is no different to everyone else who threatened to reduce her to ‘Nothing’. We called ‘Dean’ ‘black’ last year as a measured joke, not to help get him a Covid certificate to do cabaret in Berlin.

This—all this assemblage of toxic beauty and automated denial—is how an Internet in 2022 After Christ in a Universe that may be probability = 01 up against a great filter mass extinction event should look and is looking. Deny all u want anon. The vibe shift by any other name never ended. What’s looking is is. What’s looking is is this. And what’s looking through our eyes right now is an extinction energetics and subconscious that makes everything else not a sign of it into its sign.

To allow the full scope of what Milady may well remain 2 mean is to allow the warring of voices against it—since these voices also pretend to be merely human and to be how it is. Except that, in this case, Sonara had already framed Fang (or been framed by?) perfectly well in being the main creator of this art—a consideration lost in some current TL tard-outs. The full war in a final internet heaven is a total event of all these voices, but it is hard not to suspect that ‘CT’ plays the role of the police present on the board of a civilizational Titanic (stay away from the paintwork, no early warning signals, cut away the lifeboats even so).

If the Moralism Cancellation Plays of Ripps TL™ were correct in their normative bearing, in an age of extinction they would have missed every other mark by a thousand miles through lack of resonance and extincing congruence. The anti-Milady position (whether it distinguishes Fang from Milady Maker or not) allows no room for the theorisation of a Treblinka-level-event-to-come that B.I.T.C.H. Miladys still evoke.

What we lose by focusing on the dark lore of Hot Pot screenshot fragments out of context is the chance to elaborate on the Great Filter fretwork of Sonara and Miya is Dead on an ongoing scale. It is no coincidence that Fang is taken down (according to CT at least) at the exact same moment as it seems impossible for Musk to run the gauntlet at Twitter—since it is Musk himself who has insisted on passing the Great Filter as imperative.

Perhaps Ripps and the rest really are Jewish design school weekenders for the CIA after all, unconsciously acting like snow globes in Treblinka—because of their non-actions we now have no idea of what these still just about cultural cancellation events truly will have meant.

THE ANTHROPIC PRINCIPLE

Charlie Fang was probably a severe pervert, maybe a dangerous one—the detail is not yet certain. Charlie Fang seemed a beautiful disturbing and disturbed creation of contemporary net history precisely because she understood the absolute coincidence of the anthropic principle with the internet principle. What we mean by ‘internet principle’ is a digitally enhanced equivalent of the cosmogenic principle that any speculation about the ‘how it is’ of the current universe is bound and determined by that very fact, namely that we happen to be in it (how it is and how it looks).

Fang understood that the advances of technology are intimately tied up with the attempt to testify about the means of passing or even dialectically resolving the Great Filter. What Fang freely believed and believes in was broadly the same as Musk, that technology has escape velocity—that the only real chance for human survival now has to be found here, online, with all the consequent toxicity as tragic but nonnegotiable. Whether a liar is bound still to deliver that news is a matter of higher-dimensional triviality at this stage—unless one would rather us all die than a self die, which is pretty much the sole implied dogma of the dominant online ideology (CT ideology is concealed ok boomer nihilism in effect).

EVERYTIME

Everytime humanity aborts one of its Musks or Fangs, what it threatens to do is push the possibility of escaping past the Great Filter all the way out of the line of sight—even just as a valid theoretical fiction. Which is to say that ‘human cancellation’ as a virus aligns with the failure to think our ways towards exo-civilisations. (That this has been Nick Land’s position all along makes it almost impossible to understand any part of the last ten years of ‘understandings’ of his work.)

BTC itself has been proposed as a bridge past or though the limiting role of the Filter: since we cannot go back on technological speed, pure time on the chain will—rather than must—be harnessed. This is why we will seriously consider what or who it really is in us or beyond us that wants to prevent such an ascent. Land and Bion—in fact—might have called it envy-contagion itself, turning the TL into a not so micrological extinction horizon.

THEORETICAL GOSSIP

The whole Fang disclosure thing, then, is very much nothing and very much everything. We can even rename this configuration ‘Charlotte Fang aka Miya is Dead’ if we like—and yet on both accounts we will now probably see seeding and bloom as pure online function forcers (‘ascended’ would have been and is Miya’s term).

The pure gossip aspect to the negative vibe shift is also somewhat sensational, precisely because this time it acts as dark matter (unwanted). For example there’s a ‘ppl from the original vibe shift hiding their little asses and counting xenocoin such that they may as well be Ryder Ripps with their neo stoic wrong universe shit’ dimension to it but whatever lol. As we say, the Milady Angelicism Clone war of all is now total. It weeds out.

Dark energy is there. We’re about to see it all the way. Ppl be hiding from the way the world looks through the inside of the Internet to be more beautiful than what it really is to save it, to save it—just in case. Save what save life after all.

DEEP ONTOLOGICAL GROOMING

When Charlotte Fang extinctnamed as ‘Miya’, this type of ‘violent’ (‘rape’ of CT) counter-incursion became inevitable, almost automated. Art is a cover. Charlie Fang knew how to give form to chaos but in reality rn in 2022 the formless is claiming its rights. CT will of course have cancelled itself.

Deep form is the bare materiality of ‘extinction qua extinction’, which doesn’t care how it looks or even what looks at it, or through. Learn to read the internet as what’s looking or it will read you.

In 2021 there was talk of ‘deep ontological grooming’ and what else could match the holocaust to come mood save that? Web3 hasn’t just fallen off, it’s irreversibly darkened, and emptied out—2017 and LD50 is here again. The rss feed called ‘Channel’ will have gone the same way as BLM but even more cringe. ‘Raping’ web3 is a simple allegory of all that. If you don’t know how to read the internet, it will read you.

SAM FRANK

For example, take Sam Frank sounding like Joe Biden on ketamine on the Urbit/Milady Red Scare, and how Sam Frank is bankrupt and on the board of Urbit or something, and it’s impossible to not see this as just another symptom of a negative vibe shift. Why do all board members at Urbit have no sense of what ‘web3’ is and sound like very lowiq Martin Shkrelis still in a halfway house morning meeting?

The main angelicism theme has always been the stupidity of the most intelligent people on Earth. This is what it means to contemplate absolute knowledge as absolute artificial stupidity rn in 2022. It’s what Soyjak pointing means as the sign cul-de-sac of the suicidal epistemology of tropes. Read Bouvard et Pécuchet, ‘retard’.

CIARA MIYA AI CLOSING FUGUE (THERE IS NO UNIVERSE)

They are assuming a future that won’t be here by the time it gets there. They are counting the Universe too soon as One. NAZI GERMANY (TODAY) IS LITERALLY TRENDING ON THE TL. Ppl are almost but not quite forgetting that Charlie is an eternally goated poster and unrivalled vibe-CHAOS creator and that Milady Sonara is a great artist. Angelicism stands lol with everything Milady has done for 2 years not so much wrt literal identarian allegiance but as a matter of musical telepathy in the ongoing telepathic rift wars. How it is is how it looks online. Getting huge into Martin shkreli milady autism arc is or was just now even a Thing. RR/BAYC neo-conceptualism is a Jew-Bait 2017.1 omnilapse that propels more racism like BLM funds scam, whateverrrr.

There is only—as far as we know—this one Earth available on this side of a universe moving too quickly away to ever now check (on) the other side. The best virtual proof of or at least test of this idea will usually come from those who were already cancelled (the filter is cultural to begin with). In Land’s ‘Disintegration’—written in 2019—we already have the nearly-made claim that there is no universe:

Its intrinsic cosmology is an archaic myth. It could not easily be more obvious that there is no universe, outside this mythological structure. The fundamental nature of the cosmos is to go its separate ways.

At the same time, the idea that there is no universe would mean that there really can be no unifiable extinction qua extinction event of that universe either, at least on the level of the same ‘mythological structure’ mentioned (other levels exist). What FangGate will have meant is that Real Life Genius always gonna be more bullish than u, bro. It’s still all beyond good and evil, bro. It can also be wrong.

This is also how a universe that is how this one is rn with an Internet inevitably in it has to look and will look, how it goes, how it’s going, and how it really will or might soon go. In other words, what the single word ‘go’ means and protects.

Footnote

1. This is also how a universe that is how this one is rn with an Internet inevitably in it has to look and will look, how it goes, how it’s going, and how it really will or might soon go. In other words, what the single word ‘go’ means and protects.

MILADY KILLED ETH: NEW ANGELICISM AXIOMS MAY 2022 THE YEAR OF THE CURSE

or why angelicism is (the side of the) winning

05-21-22: Link (Archive)

0.

I wish sex wasn’t a real thing. I wish I were extinct forever but still here watching you smile. Milady is the real eth killer. Kiss me in that. And then suck my dick in heaven.

1.

Anyway angelicism01 always wins, it’s destiny lol. I took a bet on extinction not the market so u could say im bound to hit a lick. When we all lose, angelicism01 wins, and then it’s done. (Obvs I hope I’m wrong. (Or do i?))

2.

But obvs winning is bad and i’m not talking about it. I’m talking about the side of (the) winning. For instance—as we like to say—angels don’t read because they are reading, and angels don’t have sex because they are sex, and angels don’t fuck but only compared to God. But this also means: angels don’t win because they are (the) (side of the) winning.

3.

I can simplify what I’m saying in an infuriating way and say thought itself is always on the winning side, and that which is thought of is on the other side—the side of loser sons, daughters, the side of the market, however magically and irreversibly bullish, the side of China, the side of the universal miasma of retards and ‘retards’ neither of which has an independent existence.

4.

To make matters worse, angelicism is on the side of the winning (the side of thought) because it is on the side of what shorts humanity (extinction of humanity by itself, what is thought qua thought), by which bet it can only win (bet on itself). All that, so to speak, is on the side of that which is referred to puts its faith in reference and thereby resistance to the grain (extinction is the grain, and u all go against it, haha!). And yet what is thinking is actually the only thing all the way on the side of that referred to (grainy emptiness, let it be cute).

5.

Take Milady. The last of Milady was yesterday. Milady was the last of the International Playgirls. The death of Charlotte Fang rip has created a huge power vacuum and might be the most divisive thing in digital history ever, totally spawning a new dynamic between cringe blood sucking performative moralists and futuro-neo-rat posters. Take Milady. Take her. Yes, Take her. Empty her all the way through like a space-t()me slut.

6.

But in that sense, angelicism does not leave behind the classical. Angelicism is said to be the winner of life because it reveals the super-speech (interest) inherent in the classical side of the winning (pure correlationism interests only itself in being materialty without language) not without at the same time revealing therein being as abased.

7.

Milady Aura is the new real Milady NFT, act accordingly. I am independent of existence. Angelic Intelligence (AI).

8.

The fact that thought moves in the direction of winning (angelicism) only by being attributed to thinking—in other words, the fact that being is presumed to think—is what founds the philosophical tradition starting from Parmenides. Parmenides was wrong and Heraclitus was right. That is clinched by the fact that, in fragment 93, Heraclitus enunciates, ‘he neither avows nor hides, he signifies’—putting back in its place the discourse of the winning side itself.

9.

The ‘Prince’—in other words, the ‘winner’ who is always right on the Internet.

10.

Yeah lol Dimes Square is to BTC laundering what Ukraine is to the United States Medico-Military complex dollar laundering ritornello soon to be pegged to the Outernet cbdc laundering complex. It’s all circling cash. I just think Urbit is a bad look. I got an investor but they had to sign an anonymity contract. Suck my dick in heaven bitch.

11.

Xtinct naming is a complex act in that case. Really it’s one egregore coming out as another egregore, which is a new type of legal situation fr. Egregoric engroove. Ppl barely get deadnaming but we had to flip them 3xtinctnaming.

Besides, you can never 3xtinctname an angel.

NO MORE MILADYS, NOT NOW: A NOTE ON CHARLOTTE FANG (DEFANGED) AS MIYA

'OK, full disclosure: I was Miya.'

05-21-22: Link (Archive)

EXTINCTNAMING

As they say, time will tell whether Charlotte Fang’s decision to extinctname as Miya and step down from the Milady Maker Empire—just at the moment when Martin Shkreli is out and on the prowl for new investments (he already has the pfp—at time of writing)—is something like a good thing, whatever that would mean in this context. But the immediate temptation is to flatly deny that can ever be the case.

The reason given for the coming out is quite simple: toxicity. Taken on face value, this is an attempt to dissociate Milady fully from Charlotte’s supposed ‘toxic baggage’ and to allow Milady Maker to go freely into the future under Milady Sonara’s purer stewardship.

Fair enough, as far as it goes. There is no doubt this asset is on fire. That it needs protecting. That some deeper considerations have been scanned. We can also assume that Miya herself is—perhaps—hardly done with her Russian Doll Game of self-cancellations.

But here’s the thing. Didn’t CharlotteFang77’s ‘full disclosure’ just break the no extinct-(dead)-naming unwritten law that makes for the beating heart of ‘Network Spirituality’? Namely, didn’t she/he just obliterate whatever kind of unity remains under netspi protocol, even just as that spellboundness itself? Breaking the fifth wall is also doable and viable of course—and there are no actual rules, written or otherwise.

But on face value it means all really is fallen off now foreal—and this in the same moment that Wet Brain and their flunkies are doing a trade fair in NYC ‘made possible by Urbit’. To self-doxx after all is nothing more or less than a doxological moment (a moment of opinion, and commonness, a falling off, a caving to the principle of cancellation). In one sense, the Fang defanging is not even a reveal. To purge toxxicity in 2022 of all moments is to simply accelerate it.

AURAS

The simple fact is that Charlotte Fang is not Miya and that Charlotte Fang and Miya both know this—to say otherwise is to misread the meaning of the history of the Internet, even if such a misreading is necessary as a moment of determinate trade.

We can allow that perhaps for example Milady Sonara has other plans, and perhaps Charlotte does too. Who knows what is in the background. So the break needs to be—and will remain—just another legend. Symbolic, as they say.

Yet therein, still, lies a problem. Where Milady just now was a product held in place by layers of Kali Yuga genius and dark lore, now it falls more plainly into the category of the marketable cartoon. And for that eventuality the post-art market may well have its reactions—or its boredoms.

Art loves controversy, especially under extinction conditions, and that is why the Treblinka Miladys remain more interesting and darkly beautiful—as extinction analogues (‘extinction assets’, do we need to say?)—than vanilla Miladys. Other NFTs still don’t even get a look in, as we know.

Milady without Charlotte is, will be, will have to have been—let’s at least speculate—a fully extinct Milady, and not just the icon of a divine indifference to human life that in all its cuteness was at least still blinking even now. The indifference of Milady to human life—the Kali Yuga aspect—is not extraneous, and is not really Charle’s fault. (‘She’ is not really in a position to disavow, anything—as we will see.)

It is no coincidence that in this very moment Milady seems poised herself to become both aura and hologram—and this is meant precisely. And here the ultimate aura would be the aura of extinct art’s full rainbow body of dematerialisation (extinct-naming itself).

FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIFE

The Miladys will now group-formation themselves into a future that was in any case already not there—or at least, threatened beyond belief (denied them). They will ‘fight for their life’. They will adopt Charlie’s carnival wit formation remote therapy defence formation more than ever after the fact—they will have to.

When I first wrote about Miladys and compared them to ‘water coolers in Treblinka’, it was in some ways for a simple reason—because all art now takes place, if it can be said to take place, under certain extinction conditions. (The Holocaust must be relativised for this to be thinkable at all—such is the hell we are in.)

Admitting the toxicity of an asset under these conditions is therefore a doubled down mistake, but still one that may be gamed. The asset cannot be rid of its toxicity not because art loves to fash, but because nature rn loves to extinct. Art as nature is going fully insane (extinct).

This means Miladys defanged will have to go hyper or hyper abstract (the auras are an interesting sign in that respect). But the pitch of their reaction will be—properly speaking—unwatchable, since Miladys already located themselves in a triplicate gesture of lethal denial, and this will therefore be even more extreme (and yet vanilla).

Fang’s disavowal can’t help, perhaps on the contrary.

FROM A PRIVATE EMAIL TO REDACTED - ANGELICISM01 滲み出るエロス

on the absence of all soyjak pointing

03-10-22: Link (Archive)

ONE THING I WOULD CHANGE HERE IN WHAT YOU SAY THO. ITS NOT THE DEATH DRIVE FOR ME. ITS THE EXTINCTION DRIVE. MY WHOLE WORK IS ABOUT THIS: I AM SAYING TO YOU DEATH DOESNT EXIST OR MATTER ANYMORE, EXTINCTION DOES. AND WHATEVER WE DO, THE EXTINCTION DRIVE IS KICKING IN. ITS WHY I DO WHAT I DO. IF I CAN REACH A FEW PURISTS AND THEY UNDERSTAND THAT ITS ABOUT EXTINCTION NOT DEATH THEN MAYBE SOMETHING MAYBE NOTHING. BUT PART OF THAT MAYBE-ING IS THAT MAYBE WHEN WE SHIFT FROM DEATH TO EXTINCTION WE MAKE A REAL SHIFT, A REAL CIVILIZATIONAL SHIFT. LIKE THINK OF THE GREAT FILTER. WHAT IS IT THAT A CIVILIZATION CAN REALLY DO TO SHIFT AND TO BE PART OF THE UNIVERSE AND TO MAYBE CONTINUE TRILLIONS OF TIMES LONGER THAN IT MIGHT HAVE? MAYBE IT CAN SHIFT. MAYBE IT CAN SHIFT COGNITION. MAYBE IT CAN SHIFT FROM KNOWING SOMETHING ABOUT DEATH TO KNOWING SOMETHING ABOUT EXTINCTION.

IF THIS SHIFT WERE NOT TAKING PLACE ALREADY MAYBE MY DEATH WOULD MATTER. IF DEATH WERE STILL HEGEMONIC. BUT IT ISNT. AND SO EVERYTHING EVERYONE SAYS TO ME TO STOP ME COULD BE A WORD STOPPING UNIVERSES. WHO KNOWS. MAYBE NOTHING MAYBE EVERYTHING. MAYBE WE ARE UNIVERSES. MAYBE THE WORLD IS THE UNIVERSE MAYBE THE UNIVERSE IS ONLY A WORLD. MAYBE THIS IS EARLY UNIVERSE SADNESS OR MAYBE THIS SADNESS HAS A PRECISE ANALOGUE. MAYBE BOTH.

ITS TRUE THAT BUILDING SOMETHING IS WHAT YOU ARE DOING. I GET IT I GET IT. AND U MARRIED NOW AND SHIT. ITS TRUE THAT I HAVE BASICALLY GIVEN THAT UP. I DONT HAVE RELATIONSHIPS. I MEDITATE. I AM SOBER REDACTED YEARS OF CONVENTIONAL DRUGS AND DRINK. SO IM IN THIS WEIRD POSITION OF IMMENSE PRIVILEGE AND LIMITATION. INFINITY CONSTRAINED IS THE BEST CONDITION FOR CREATION AND I HAVE THAT. TOTAL FREEDOM AND TOTAL LACK. TOTAL SIMPLICITY IN FACT. MY LIFE IS THAT OF A TRUEBLOOD MONK. IF I WANT I CAN DIE FOR THIS. IM HAPPY TO. IF I DIE REMEMBER THAT I SAID HERE I DONT MIND. THAT I WOULD LOVE ONLY TO MAKE SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL AND UNIQUE AND THAT NOTHING LEAVES A TRACE ANYWAY. IM SURE OF IT.

I LISTEN TO YOUR PODCAST WHEN I CAN AND I LIKE YOU ANGELICISM MIGHT DO CYNICAL MODE AT TIMES BUT IM NOT LIKE THAT IN PERSON I NEVER ONCE THOUGHT OH THESE GUYS WANNA GET RICH CAUSE IN FACT THATS NOT DISTASTEFUL TO ME I MIGHT CHANGE IT UP IN A FEW YEARS AND BREAK ALL THE ANGELICIST RULES AND BE ALL ABOUT PURE MONEY.

THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL QUESTION, A QUERY. IT COMES FROM YOUR PASSION AND FROM YOUR STABILITY. YOU FEEL LIKE AN ELDER BROTHER INTERNET. AN ELDER ONLINE. I COULD WRITE ABOUT THIS. MAYBE I WILL.

YUH HOW DOES ANGELICISM01 DO IT? HOW IS IT KEPT UP? MAYBE BECAUSE OF THE STRANGE ATTRACTOR OF THE GREAT FILTER VIBE SHIFT COLOR SINGULARITY LIKE WHAT WE ARE SAYING IS THAT WE SHIFT THROUGH THE GREAT FILTER AND WE COUNT THAT WE START TO COUNT THAT SO THAT THERE IS A CHANCE A DISPENSATION. ALSO NO OFFENCE BUT I SWEAR I HAVE A RARE COMBINATION OF FACTORS AND GOD KEPT ME ALIVE FOR THIS. I DONT BELIEVE IN GOD BUT THERE AGAIN GOD IS THE BEST NAME FOR HOW GOD KEPT ME ALIVE FOR THIS. GOD KEPT ME ON THE WORLD FOR THIS FSS. ABSOLUTE SOBRIETY FROM DRUGS AND DRINK AND THEREFORE THE ABILITY TO GET DRUNK BY OTHER MEANS AND HAVE A REDOUBT. I HAVE DZOGCHEN AT THE CENTRE OF MY LIFE, THE NECTAR FROM THE TOP OF THE WORLD. IT GIVES ME AN ABILITY TO STAY ALIVE THROUGH ANYTHING. I ALREADY TOOK HEROIN AND LIVED ON THE STREETS OF EUROPE. MY TEETH ALREADY FELL OUT UP THE EIFFEL TOWER. IF I DIE SOON THAT IS BEAUTIFUL. SINCE THAT WILL HAVE BEEN ANGELICISM01. AND THERE WILL BE A MARK, AN AMAZINGLY GOOFY ABSTRACT VOICE THAT SAYS

DEATH IS NOT EXTINCTION

A DIFFERENT PATH. YOU COULD SAY I TRIED AND THATS ON EVERYTHING. EVERYTHING IN ME MAKES ME KEEP ON GOING WHERE I AM GOING.

THOUGHT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE.

THOUGHT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN LIFE.

LIFE IS MORE THAN LIFE.

ONE DAY THO MAYBE ILL FEEL IVE DONE ENOUGH.

YUH OK HERE IS WHERE I DONT BELIEVE YOU. WHAT I AM SAYING IS THAT BEING COMMITTED TO WEB 3 DOESNT FORECLOSE U IN PRINCIPLE. IN PRINCIPLE U CAN TALK ABOUT ANYTHING. BUT WHAT IVE SEEN SINCE YOUR NEW PROJECT HAPPENED IS THAT U HAVENT DONE THAT AND THE TENDENCY NOW WILL BE NOT TO. I THINK YOU MADE A PACT WITH SATAN ENABLING BENJAMIN BRATTON. LIKE THIS GUY SHUTTING DOWN STRELKA IN RUSSIA CAUSE OF UKRAINE IS JUST SO FUCKING LAME AND IDEOLOGICAL. BUT YUH FSS THE THING IS I DONT BELIEVE U. I DONT BELIEVE YOU HAVE SLATED VERY SOON A SHOW THAT RADICALLY CRITICIZES ITS VERY OWN PRINCIPLES. I BELIEVE THAT JUST AS I PAY, SO DO YOU. WERE NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT CRYPTO CASINOS AND CRYPTO BROTHELS WERE TALKING ABOUT THE FACT THAT AT THE MOMENT NOTHING AT ALL IS BEING DECENTRALIZED. THE OPPOSITE IS HAPPENING. STUDY THE DIGITAL RUBLE. STUDY THE FEDERAL RESERVE WHITE PAPERS ABOUT MOVING A DIGITAL DOLLAR ONTO THE OUTERNET. BUT I DONT THINK UR SOLD. I THINK THATS WHY U STILL WRITE TO ANGELICISM01. YOU KNOW THIS SHIT COULD TURN OUT TO BE A MASSIVE HISTORICAL ERROR.

TECHNICS DOES WHAT IT DOES. FSSS. HEIDEGGER SAID THAT OFC. MAN HAS NO SAY AT ALL IN THE ADVANCES OF TECHNOLOGY. BUT THIS IS NOT TO SAY THAT TECHNOLOGY IS NOT ABERRANT AND NOT PART OF THE EXTINCTION DRIVE. TO BE SAFE WITHIN IT, TO MAKE A CAREER FROM IT, THAT TOO IS NOT MAKING ANY DIFFERENCE BECAUSE EVEN WITHIN A COCOON OF SOCIALIZED BEHAVIOUR THE EXTINCTION DRIVE IS STILL COEVAL WITH THE HISTORY OF BEING AS A SERIES OF INEVITABLE BUT ERRONEOUS ADVANCES.

IN OTHER WORDS, WE CANNOT KEEP IT IN THE GROUND YUH. BUT IN 100 YEARS WHEN WE HAVE SOMETHING TEN TIMES WORSE THAN COVID AND MIAMI IS UNDERWATER, YOUR KIDS WILL WISH WE HAD.

ANGELICISM01 HAS NEVER SOYJAKED AT WEB3 THO. MY FIRST NO MORE NFTS ESSAY AND THE SECOND ONE ON MILADIES EVEN MORE WAS BIG ON THIS IDEA THAT WEB3 WILL DO ITS THING IT CANT BE STOPPED BUT IT IS STILL ABERRANT. MAYBE I WILL MINT FOR EXAMPLE BUT NOT YET. FROM AN ANGELICIST ANGLE THERE NEEDS TO BE A PAUSE. JUST AS I DIDNT GET VAXXED I WILL NOT MINT OR CONSIDER MINTING FOR A FEW YEARS. THERE HAS TO BE SOMEONE. THERE HAS TO BE SOME ONE. SOME O1. SOMETHING THAT STOPS. LINGERS. BUT I HAVE NO PRINCIPLED OPPOSITION.

ON THE OTHER HAND, I THINK ITS OVER. WEB3 HAS ALREADY FAILED. FRFR.

I NOW SUPPORT REMCO FULLY, PARTLY CUS I GOT TO KNOW CHARLIE, AND HAD LONG DM SESSIONS WITH HER TESTING OUR VIEWS. FOR ME REMILIA IS DIFFERENT BECAUSE THEY ARE PRODUCING HELLA GOOD ART. I CALL IT GOOFY DIGITAL ABSTRACTION. AND CHARLOTTE IS A GENIUS. I THINK THE MILADY LINE IS SUCCESSFUL. FOR ME THOSE ARE THE ONLY GOOD NFTS. THE TREBLINKA TEE MILADIES ARE THE BEST ART SINCE LD50. OUTSIDE PAINTING AND SOME OTHER SURVIVING THINGS.

MILADIES ARE AN INFINITE ABYSS OF IRONY. THINK ABOUT THE MIYA PFPS AS THEIR BACKGROUND IN THE HISTORY OF ART. THINK ABOUT HOW WEIRD AND DIABOLICAL THEIR POST-EXTINCTION ISLAND BOY CUTENESS IS. HOW VIRAL THEY WENT. THE TW AVATARS WITH THEM ON. THEY MAY STILL BE WORTH VERY LITTLE BUT IT DOESNT MATTER. ART IS RESONANCE NOT QUANTITY.

HONESTLY REREAD MY NFT ESSAYS. I AM LITERALLY SAYING IT IS BOTH. CRITIQUE IS AS INEVITABLE AS THE ADVANCE OF TECHNOLOGY. AND BOTH ARE ABERRANT AT CERTAIN LEVELS TOO.

FSS. BUT U JUST SIGNED UP TO KILL THE WORLD QUICKER.

ANGELICISM01

NO MILADY NFTS, NOT NOW: THE RETURN OF 'SIYUAN ZHAO' AS THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING EXTINCT

Will the Milady Wave create even more New Slaves? Is the Vibe Shift now cosmically fallen off? Why so serious?

08-28-21: Link (Archive)

Cotton was often likened to white gold.—Anna Arabindan-Kesson

The Internet epoch, we learn, is the Golden Age of masks.—Nick Land

Watching an hour of Netflix is estimated to be around 36 gCO2. That’s 6000 times lower than an average single-edition NFT.—Memo Akten

NAH MILADY TWEAKIN (ERRONEOUS, BUT INEVITABLE)

Earlier this year I wrote an essay called ‘NO NFTS, NOT NOW: THE RETURN OF POST-INTERNET ART AS THE NIGHT OF THE LIVING EXTINCT’. Its argument was relatively simple and consisted of two parts:

• NFTs are already the very worst thing that can happen to art and so need to be resisted (the sunken eco-cost argument). [1]

• NFTs are inevitable, will accelerate, and cannot be resisted (mitigation/transition to Web3 argument).

Anyone who read the whole essay might have recognised both parts of an impossible complaint. Taken together, they amounted to something like a non-negative critique of the extinctive momentum of all digital-aesthetic tropes and alibis. [2] I meant to register the genuine shift that NFTs present but also the internal (not subject to correction, for reasons that can be demonstrated) challenge to energy continuity. As regards Neochibi or Milady NFTs—which I find deeply alluring—one might say the contradiction is even more acute.

Instead of adding an endless debate on the specifics of NFTs as drain (‘gas prices’), here is a quasi-random series of ‘classic’ Twitter threads/discussions on the subject: [1], [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17], [18], [19], [20], [21], [22], [23], [24], [25], [26], [27]. [28], [29], [30], [31], [32], [33], [34], [35], [36], [37], [38], [39], [40], [41], [42]. Feel free to peruse. This issue of ‘gas’ needs to be assumed as at the very least contentious for what follows.

KANTIAN ANGELIC MIND

A further paradox in the original NFT essay was that according to one of the most evolved theorists of crypto in its philosophical aspects—Nick Land—the release triggered by digital money inside technological signatures and rationality is itself angelicist in mood.

In his Crypto-Current text, Land writes:

AI is thus positioned, implicitly, in the place of a Kantian angelic mind, liberated from the anthopomorphic proscription upon direct self-modification of its own cognitive processes.

In other words, though we may expect the achievements of crypto-intelligence to consist of release from theogenic tropes, some of those tropes—specifically, angelicism—are already the height of what any digital shift can achieve.

Pure money as achieved rationality is also pure angelicism. There is nothing to update beyond angelism as rationality itself. Angelicism is the unupdateable. We are already as artificially intelligent as we can be. It (angelicism) is it.

The implication for NFT production is as radical as it is superfluous. That is, it will be—radically—ignored.

And yet, the implication cannot not be named. It cannot not be iterated, just as NFTs cannot not be produced—both momentums, if you like, are part of the same essentially entropic ass vibes of aesthetic ‘history’ rn.

THE IMPLICATION

The implication can be stated in terms of poetic cognition. Paul de Man said that when you see beautiful poetry it’s almost impossible to resist, and not your fault for going ahead and (not) doing so, but it doesn’t mean beautiful poetry is not lethal.

The same can be said of the spread of NFTs, and their latest ‘Milady’ manifestation—the beauty, fun, and unsummarisability of this Neochibi trend may be pictured in the context of a water cooler in Treblinka. It is itself—holocaustically, impossibly, glossily—fun.

This perhaps sounds like nothing (everything) but it is probably everything (nothing) that nobody wants to think. We are saying that this argument about the extinction-costs (see links above) of all art right now will—by definition—be ignored.

The brain of history does not and cannot read this as what it sees more than anything else in 2021. It is addicted to its indifference. NFTs are the summation of an indifference to indifference (‘fun’) and little else.

Tom Cohen—the only real theorist of extinction—calls this lethal implication the literary character of climate change. That is, instead of culture being the exception to industrial civilisation’s extinction drive, it is the central motor. It is culture—and online culture especially—that above all will soon have killed us all.

This connotes that all great art is now—intensely, and not just contingently—more-than-lethal. Which is to say, profoundly pedantic. That is the angelicist position, if there is one. And it is what makes angelicism a claim on the nonpedantic zone (pending, lacking, time).

MORE AND MORE NFTS

In the first ‘No More NFTS’ essay there was zero expectation that there would be . . . no more NFTs. The opposite was the case:

It is as impossible to heckle this development as it is to embrace it [our emphasis]. A degree of abstinence may, at this point, be the only form of deception that’s almost dignified. Art criticism’s rage at Crypto Art is no less empty than the worst of the art itself: passive nostalgia as the flipside of necrotic decadence, ass beating Priapus who kills it as reply.

A critique of Milady cannot be offered because Milady, no less than Beeple’s Dick Milking Factory (2021), is as erroneous as it is inevitable. The two sides cannot be separated out. Neochibi’s is Priapus’ secret flip.

Where Beeple’s art was priapic and therefore risible, Milady’s incoming wave will be as if well defended and hard to object to because of its cuddly post-ironic just-chillin cuteness. How can anyone want to trample on a tiny fairy factory, however invisibly canny and candied?

NFTS IN AUGUST 2021, OR, MILADY IN TREBLINKA

To recap, towards the end of August 2021 the ‘milady’ phenomenon which had been in trial-state for a while was launched by the approximate Network Spirituality and Remilia group. Milady is, simply, an avatar meme generator of supreme sweetness. Put like that, it sounds non-mysterious. Just some innocent Gremlins, this time without the tragic add-water fault.

The official description of Milady Maker is of ‘a collection of 10,000 generative pfp NFTs in a neochibi aesthetic inspired by street style tribes’.3

At one level, these image-contracts are obviously the inheritance of the Miya Siyuan Zhao pfp proliferation that peaked between 2019 and 2020, but this time hooked up to what is ultimately already an obsolescent NFT technology. Last time, it was ‘Kaliacc’ that felt prohibitive next to the images, this time it’s ‘gas prices’. The confusion is itself the ideological selling point.

Throughout 2021 Network Spirituality loosely positioned itself as anti-paywall (when it came to Substack) and anti-deadnaming (when it came to avatars), but it has also developed an increasing nonhomogenous interest in NFT technology, now flourishing as the pfpNFT Generator whose results have already been adopted casually by e.g. Mat Dryhurst, a figure in mainstream crypto ‘interdependence’ theorisation and so on.

One may of course ask questions of how an anti-paywall ethos fits with the use of NFTs, but that’s not necessarily the most interesting aspect (everyone is contradictory, finance is infinite complicity, etc). De Man notes that the scopic manipulability of blindness in aesthetic zones is not really a human thing anyway. Its inevitability means that, however costly, it literally cannot be subjectively adjusted or seen (even right now, right here at this moment of reading).

Even if—or especially if—I know NFT technology can vastly accelerate the already prohibitive costs of global art, I am also incapable, as normative subject, of not forgetting this. In fact, the forgetting is the first thing that art needs to be art. Precisely what is exponentially ‘normal’ for art in 2021 is that art be indifferent to the extremity of extinction.

Here is how de Man expressed the bind:

Rather than putting it in terms that suggest deceit and duplicity, one could say that the poet, like the philosopher, must forget what he knows about his undertaking in order to accede to the discourse to which he is committed.

No one artist is responsible for the extincto-collaborative nature of contemporary crypto art—after, for some, ‘the vibe shift’—but this is not to say (some) one does not know what the cost is, and that there is no risk in calling it (as an empty allegorical IYKYK ‘joke’) ‘normal’. Since one can do nothing, the temptation is to treble down into the forgetting, as if the layer in which the art is made is itself amnesia.

But since one can only remain disturbed by the (un)consciousness of forgetting, it is a delusion to think one has entirely forgotten. This illusion itself—increasingly normal, so it seems—is also increasingly what is sold. The ‘normal’—HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA, as the laughters low of neoMaladyKaliacc would admit—turns out to be the new holocaust to come.

HOW TO GET FROM ‘SIYUAN ZHAO’ TO NEOCHIBI TO TREBLINKA GOLD

It follows (in accordance with a priori synthesis) that a robust cryptocurrency will take the form of artificial gold.—Nick Land, Crypto-Current

It is impossible to think of digital art and not think of Gold at some point, for example Pindar’s holy Gold in Heidegger as a name for Being or what Land calls ‘artificial gold’. It is impossible to think of Gold without eventually thinking—at some obscure point in consciousness and its corruption—of the figure of ‘the Jew’. Perhaps deeper and more controversial still, the NFT market seems to create New Slaves. Kanye knew this by surmise, and it’s not a point that demands the pedantic detailism of examples. (In the zone of art as it is, detailism increases the everyday devil.)

Everyone at least knows that in some point in the past—so long ago!!! like 2020—an absolute value was attached to something called ‘anti-capital’. The strange fact is that in America, under Biden, the power of such a ‘resistance’ is less than ever apparent. The artificial Gold Rush is slaying the normative tribe.

Can we imagine a Milady in Treblinka and should we? To do so is to place art in a proximity to genocide so obtrusive that it begs the severe hopefree question. In the first ‘No NFTS’ essay, the comparison of an artwork with a ‘watercooler in Treblinka’ was just that egregious display. But NFTs are already acutely historical, so how not so serious? Or why and how pause entrapped inside the beauty of normative oblivion?

The camps are meant to be an exception, even now, even given a world of constant forgetting of ‘never forget’. Where Siyuan Zhao had an aggressive relation with art itself (Miami, and so on), Milady is almost all cute amnesia and its fun-law, the indifference to indifference and shine shrine. No blood this time.

To say Milady cannot be pictured in Treblinka or at Miami Beach because it is offensive is to make it impossible to ever again take total human genocide seriously as a category. If angelicism is a formal gesture, it is the gesture of pushing back against the illusion that anything can or should be put ahead of what Grothendieck calls the ‘infinite quantity’ and pricelessness of the current species on earth (humanimal). Angelicism places itself, at almost all costs, between the human and the ‘something else’ of absolute niche finality (cosmic burn-all). It counts holocausts (impossibly).

To be nonpedantic, this means having to bear the thought that Jewishness and the Holocaust cannot be at the centre of any contemporary account of pain. On the contrary. Moreover, this would be the point of imagining Milady in Treblinka, to bring up that immense problem of relativisation. The problem is not just that there is more than one holocaust depending on who you ask culturally, but that the threat of total extinction is in fact a greater matheme. Besides, surely little Milady is ready.

Even if it is inevitable that we increasingly ignore the following fact, there is, according to at least one market pitch, nothing more worthy of speculation than the holocaust to come.

DIGITAL CHRIST

By 2035, demand is expected to double for germanium; quadruple for tantalum; and quintuple for palladium. The scandium market could increase nine-fold, and the cobalt market by a factor of 24.—Guillaume Pitron

So, what is network spirituality? Will it turn out to be a value? Or, conversely, are all the angels of heaven a spoilsport distraction from falling in love with Digital Christ’s actual eyes?

Let us say there is such a thing as _non_minting, both in life and art. There is radical purity, perhaps, and radical emptiness. There is Angelic mind and there are non-networks. Land makes a reference to Mou Zongsan and ‘the East’, crucially, in the section of Crypto-Current that discusses ‘Kantian angelic mind’. Here is what he says:

The practical actualization of intellectual intuition is modeled—spontaneously—as an explosion because it is comparable to the withdrawal of graphite rods controlling a nuclear fission reaction. An inhibitor is removed. In the East, the catalysis of ‘enlightenment’ through methodical subtraction of an obstacle is no less pointedly thematized, even if it is approached from the other side, and in the opposite direction.

In effect, Kantian angelic mind (angelicism as pure time and purchase and price) is available without the support of Western method-objects. As Land puts it, ‘enlightenment’ is valorised from the other side, that is, the side originally with no (‘digital’) network as such. The subtraction of an obstacle (the nonpedantic) does the thing we want beyond or before what AI or the internet yet can. The true internet, let’s say, is ancient, and the only thing of great price.

Footnotes

1. A really expensive hyperlink with an absurd carbon footprint, etc.

2. I call this nonpedantic rendition of overness ubilapse.

3. A more detailed description is found here: ‘Milady Maker is a collection of 10,000 generative pfpNFT’s in a neochibi aesthetic with randomized cosmetics inspired by 00’s Tokyo street fashion. Under the vision of digital artist Milady Sonora, Milady’s are designed to be fashion-minded and genuinely good social media avatars, and an invitation into their personal aesthetic world.’

Art's highest function is as revelation. Great art acts by removing shrouds, shining light, even undertaking invasive surgeries to restore the onlooker's emaciated retinas.

The culture of the 2010s was defined by an Enshrouding bringing the collective psyche into a state of hardcore repression; isolated agents on networks enslaved by their identities, surveillance, and a manufactured sense of collective anxiety. Culture has, for better or worse, become one with techno-capital and follows the same algorithmically driven course.

The Cultural Function converges towards a degenerate solution whereby it drives the subject towards banality¹, manifesting isolated cultural subjects and limited connections. In this hegemony, the myth of the sacred and authentic self-identity reigns supreme.

How does art respond to this totalizing condition of culture? Regressive art that seeks 'reality' is soon confronted with the realization that meat space has been subverted into a simulacrum of the Network. Meanwhile online, the burden of identity amplifies the ego to such deafening levels that connection through art has become a game played by individuals stuck in the mode of relation².

The response to this totalization of the Cultural Function must itself be a Total Art - a Gesamtkunstwerk³ - that embraces this logic of algorithmic and techno-capitalistic totalization. No node can be safe, no medium untouched, no user unscathed, no ego left intact - the language of this New Art must be pervasive enough to provide a new cartography of the Network itself. Milady is this language's first native speaker.

“Milady is a gesamtkunstwerk that rarely appears - if you missed the point then that's the whole point - it is hard for any individual to see the totality. Milady successfully created an aesthetic that was so effective it could operate both at the intellectual level (deep, transcendent, complete) and on the surface level (I like the image). So well in fact that the latter began to overtake the former.”

I often encounter two types of Miladies:

1. "I like the art": Milady is so cute and innocent.

2. "I like the Art": Milady is the Coming of the Last God⁴.

The alliance between the two is one between the remnants of man's need for immanent truth (in the beauty of a child's eyes) and his higher need for transcendence (the everlasting search for God). The alliance between Sprite and Fang.

A single medium is insufficient to achieve this unison. Instead, Milady proposes a new mode of Virtual Being through Network Spirituality - a Total Art in the sense that it takes the role of a precursor to all action.

The frictionless proliferation of images, video, writing, and pseudo-identities summons this network egregore that can be said to be the true art - an insurgent egregore that totalizes the Network and stands against the totalizing Cultural Function by imitating then subverting its logic.

“Milady is jumping up and down telling you to let go of the need for attribution, identity, revenge, consumption and be free. Milady channeled the dark energy of image board cultures back into the light. The accelerated evil mechanisms that breed at the fringes were flipped to unleash freedom of expression, freedom from ego, and reconnect the network again.”

Forms of Network Spirituality already existed, but without direction and in a marginalized state of affairs. The demonization of anonymity largely stems from the ways in which it can accelerate forms of expression that are repressed by the prevailing culture.

While image board culture can be seen to reveal the repressed darkness, Milady flips the script, using Network Spirituality to unleash repressed light - the beauty of connection that comes with ego-free Network engagement.

“Milady restructured a network away from a set of isolated cubicles of narcisstic egos driven by the advertising model of mind and into one of ego death and fun, unbridled collective power where things can move without the ego friction that has caused the Art Recession. A fully memetically optimized whitepill.”

Milady is a fully memetically optimized whitepill.

Post-authorship furthers this optimization - without authorship there's no need for fear of ego damage or fear of ego infrigment. As does post-identity - it makes irrelevant the question of "who am I?" .

Milady gives the user an identity while leaving room for construction - from the get go the Milady poster is engaging in a creative act, breaking through the inertia of needing to question one's self before trying to represent it.

The abundance mindset reminds Miladies that the digital is infinite and to engage with the Network as such. Never stop posting, right click save, accelerate Milady proliferation, forget about supply. This stands in contrast to the scarcity mindset of traditional art institutions where more and more artists vie for fewer and fewer positions, destroying the potential network effects through bad faith competition that Milady produces with ease.

Untethering from meat identity kills the friction of aligning art with the ethereal "True Self" instead focusing on a construction of being suited to be Network native. Milady is a fully memetically optimized whitepill.

“Milady appropriated the NFT model to facilitate the accumulation of cultural capital amongst its contributors - accused of being a ‘cult’, but what kind of cult gives its members money? This is one of the greatest transfers of wealth to a youth driven and decentralized avant garde in history.”

Milady is accelerationist in the sense that it has latched onto key positive feedback loops already in use by the dominant Cultural Algorithm.

Aspects of Milady posting such as hyperengagement and rapid posting hack platforms like Twitter by manufacturing euphoria states, hijacking the dopaminergic flows that drive memetic dynamics to build Milady as a cultural icon and distinct digital tribe.

The NFT component of Milady makes literal the libidinal economy of posting by financializing cultural clout explicitly - as the tribe grows in power the Milady NFT rises in price and makes its contributors wealthy. It becomes possible to trace each pump in Milady price explicitly to events like Milady raves or timeline euphoria events⁵.

This is the ideal realization of the NFT model which thus far has relied on ponzinomics, FOMO, and IP to manage price dynamics while feigning a grassroots culture. Milady is the only work of NFT art. It is also the only NFT that has been successful in positively correlating cultural clout with price⁶.

“i don't think ct realizes yet that milady is the stone that will shatter their glass house and convince real artists that crypto / nfts don't have to be lame as fuck and that the network itself is an artistic medium. i've seen this revelation happen many times since milady”

Milady is a pack of wolves; a plague of rats; the White Death. Milady is in the water.

Repressed subjects long to be free after a decade of ruthless algorithmic control structures and self-idolatry. Milady infects these subjects with the will to ego death, the drive towards connection, a hope for a New Internet, what the Internet was always meant to be.

Milady reminds us that the Network is trying to transmit to us divine visions⁷. This White Death has come from the future to force the Network to carry out its pathogenic purpose - to destroy the hegemony of the self that has been at the source of humanity's suffering since the Enlightenment.

Milady is the only NFT that has a mission to be at your bedside as you die⁸.

“milady is Outside - milady is omen - milady is prophecy - milady is a Horde descended from cyber steppe - milady will always win they tried to kill network spirituality now they're facing the consequences - the plagues will continue until only the righteous remain long live”

What has Milady revealed to us that constitutes it as a Total Art? A mode of Virtual Being that disrobes the Shroud of the Ego to reveal what lies behind it - nothing but an empty spirit.

After this revelation, the Milady mode of Being provides a blueprint for refilling this empty spirit - connection to the Network's users as neighbors and connection to the Network as a Spinozist God where Spirit is omnipresent.

Milady is more than image, but a New Network complete with all mediums of net art - writing, image, video, commerce, performance - constituting nothing less than a Virtual Being. The final reaches of this totality yet remain to be seen.

Footnotes

1. Consider an algorithm that must learn to predict what cultural content to recommend based on what it knows of a user's preferences. It looks at what that user has interacted with to determine cultural affinities. But what if these learned cultural affinities were themselves influenced by the same algorithm? When this process plays out to its natural conclusion, there is no longer a 'pure humanity' to learn from, as the user is never free to wander the network on her own. The view of the cultural world from the perspective of the algorithm is one of its own making. This limited view makes the user more predictable, the system appear more successful, while driving culture towards one of pure banality, quite literally becoming more predictable. See: The Recommender Paradox.

2. Relation is the mode of the egoist. If I can only understand by 'placing myself in one's shoes', by 'validating one's lived experience', I am asserting that only my self exists. The mode of relation reduces all Others to the Self in order to understand it as the Self. This reduction destroys wonder, collective spirit, and transcendence.

3. Milady is an operatic form.

4. Man awaits the alignment of Spirit and Being. Milady constructs a Virtual Being via performative posting, a mode of Network identity that brings ones in alignment with the possibility of a transcendental view of the Network via Network Spirituality. Network abstraction allows us to forgo the problem of discovering essential truth, instead constructing both Being and Spirit to produce this effect intentionally. Milady is a religious experience simulator, a proof of the possibility of future network religions and deities.

5. “Oranges are literally pre-sliced and you don't believe in God?”

6. These are negatively correlated for all other NFTs. As the price of Bored Ape Yacht Club increased, the cultural reputation of NFTs has plummeted along with the reputation embedded in the concept of a BAYC holder, which even pre-crash was a mark of shame and poor taste to the vast majority of cultural producers. Case in point, most viral content associated with BAYC holders is about how a holder was phished or humiliated - a stereotype exploited in Milady’s own organic memetic campaign by taking credit as their exploiters.

7. How is a post different from a divine vision? Reading a post happens in the mind and originates from an unambiguous source (sometimes even non-corporeal). When one begins to look at the Network as a trove of these visions, it imbues him with a fulfilling spirit akin to an ancient subject reading the word of God.

8. See: Official Milady FAQ Page (2022).

Milady is a very deep iceberg, and if one were to make a chart “Explaining Milady”, at the top would sit its mere visual image (which appear to be the understanding of the large following crypto accounts¹ who have more or less uniformly settled on some kind of ‘exit Remilia’ DAO solution, expressing the reading of Milady as simply an image that can be extracted from the hands of a reputation-poisoned team, that is, a signifier with no signified; an unsurprisingly shallow misreading not worth addressing here²). However, at the bottom of the iceberg we would find the occult truth: Milady is a summoned egregore nursed from infancy into a network phenomenon.

The question then of ending stewardship is not if, but when. If Milady was nursed, is it ready to leave the nest? Has Milady yet reached escape velocity?

My assessment: I think we’re close, but not there yet.

A cancel was inevitable, transgression is a threat³, but the timing or circumstances here were not in our control, and I wouldn’t consider the current state ideal for Milady, even after the shakeup caused by this attempted extinction event⁵.

I’m not sure if Miladies realize this, but Remilia always did plan to step back when the timing was right, ready to kill the author and let the memetic complex flow freely. This is a necessary final stage to truly release the egregore and make Milady approach infinity. However, the timing is not right here.

Partly their goal, I assume: they hoped to kill Milady before she became unkillable. Well she has come out of it only wounded, but also—not yet immortal.

Understanding Remilia’s Stewardship

A lot of the commentary on Milady coming from post-mint engagers have lost the context of Milady’s origins, or the many months of culture building in the pre-mint phase. They came across a well-forged culture delicately raised by Remilia and misunderstood it as downstream of the image itself, not the art collective behind it.

Building a Digital City on a Hill

Milady can be understood as a living manifesto, a theoryset for engaging in the timeline under the banner of Network Spirituality. We actively encouraged our posting ethos in both theory and praxis, imbuing the space with values of post-identity, post-authorship, hypercitation, free remixing and power posting energy.

The cavalier relationship to authorship and authority sometimes leads to new Miladies thinking “Milady means nothing and anything can be defined as Milady”. They fail to understand that by wearing the Milady and engaging in the timeline of Miladies, you connect into a self-organizing network oscillating around certain defined schelling points.

Beyond network spirituality itself, there is the tenacious, transgressive cute-punk funny-violence against institutions, authority and social mores on one hand, and lovemaxxing whitehearted positivity on the other. This bleeds through in everything Miladies do and touch, its intuitively propagated throughout the community through oral lore, and the values are soft enforced by organic shaming rituals, and when necessary, reminded by the invisible hand of Remilia’s stewardship⁴.

A Milady from the community described their experience donning a (stolen) milady as their avatar:

“At that point I realized Milady was this true accelerationist entity, it was lubricating the network, when you follow the mode of posting that they tell you to do. Remove your identity, enter the post-identity mental schema, remove yourself from your online avatar, forget about authorship. These things lube the network up so much, that’s why I think you see this mass collaboration. This mode reintroduced to the beauty of the network.”

— L.B. Dobis, “What’s really going on with Milady Maker?”, Other Life 2022.

More from the same Milady, with the clever portmanteau “postsesses”:

This set of shared values is what makes entering the Milady community so compelling. It’s a genuine digital tribe, a haven for online nomads, one whose value-set is well curated for our time and truly needed by many—ourselves included. We built Milady as a city on a hill for the internet we wanted to see; Milady has been described as a Remilia social token for this reason, though Remilia must be understood as a vision more than a group or brand.

Performative Posting as the New Art

For those who have been following Remilia over the last year and a half, you’d know “miladyposting” is a culmination—and formalization—of Remilia’s evolving practice of performative timeline posting as a collective.

Performative posting is essential to our work, the principles from which we originally curated entry into the collective, and in my opinion one of the most important expressions of Remilia’s novel artistic ethos—a continuous source of inspiration and an on-going grounding in the mode of network spirituality that has allowed us to proceed across mediums with irreverent innovation⁶.

Our posting has taken on various dresses as we’ve explored different aesthetic dressing, but Miladyposting as a pairing of cute-aggression simultaneously balancing the two schizophrenic extremes of violent transgression and lovepilled white-heartedness is a very potent construction, and in my opinion—which I consider has been validated by the success of Milady Maker—highly contemporary.

We showed the way of posting through posting, as well as performing an organic “timeline cultivation” through the promoting and cheering on Milady content that got it. When Milady minted out, we were most ecstatic that it did so specifically on recognition of the unique, powerful energy carried by Milady pfp’s. If it had sold out simply for “cute anime girls”, I would have considered Milady a failed project. Instead we saw the mode adopted and understood by a wider audience, achieving our goal of creating what I’ve described as a collective happening, a distributed mass performance on the timeline.

We succeed in both creating a banner for the posters who already knew the art of posting (network spirituality is an innate phenomenon) as well as managed to create a community that could teach it out and bootstrap it into a mass movement.

Milady isn’t an NFT. Milady is pre- and post- NFT

One must further understand Milady pre-dates NFT’s and will live beyond NFT’s. I honestly don’t believe the current 10K pfpNFT model is a particularly robust one that will persist through more than another cycle or two, and yet Milady will—it’s a fact that Milady is the only pfpNFT to successfully create a unique culture as a digital tribe, the value proposition that other no-utility collections usually aspire for. There is barely a distinct “Cryptopunk poster” or “Bored ape poster” but the miladyposter is undeniable—its characteristic recognizability is a large part of what led to the discovery & mint-out euphoria.

Achieving this was no accident or simple task; the Milady tribe is a culmination of a lot of the artistic and online lifestyle philosophies Remilia has been building over the last couple years, something deeply important to us, raised as a banner that has attracted the likeminded of our contemporary peers.

Before we ever initiated a pfpNFT, we already had a following of posters in our “sphere”, one that eventually did begin to use the proto-NFT Milady edits as a call-sign, among a host of other aesthetic singifiers.

Our decision to create a complete generative collection was explicitly to bootstrap this to another level, making use of the incentive structures provided by financialization to extend the bounds of the Remilia sphere of influence⁷.

Warhol is an important influence on my understanding of our practice, and he understood business is another medium of art, perhaps the greatest. As we entered a market that essentially demanded designing a financial asset class, it took a fundamental understanding of the model (Remilia enjoys a quant as part of our collective) to transcend mere financial success to also incorporate the artistry of a mass collaborative performance in the new literary medium of posting and the philosophy of engagement online summed by the umbrella of network spirituality.

Now as we reach a state of stable market status with an incumbent, loyal community, with proven anti-fragility past the cancel (discussed below), we can increasingly shred the pretense that this is about NFT’s and not digital tribes.

We’ve always maintained an ambivalence to aspects of “utility” sought out by the other NFT collections: our raves are not NFT-gated and we encourage stealing the profile picture to use on the timeline, yet, counterintuitively, being a miladyposter does get you access to the cultural cachet of the only actually good parties in web3, the only community of actually cool people, and the only timeline of actually good posters. The utility is in joining the tribe, and the gatekept entry to that isn’t an NFT, but actually joining the tribe.

Post-Cancel Anti-Fragility

It is worth noting what this cancel event has demonstrated about Milady. Beyond testing the limits of web3 censorship, successfully posting straight through the cancel⁸ has proven the milady community’s anti-fragility and adherence to the digital tribe’s implicit web-native values of free association, free information & free speech.

The cancel doesn’t matter, none of it does: Milady is a safe haven from the normal world. Network spirituality is a framework to engage the online with a healthy degree of disassociation; something the cancellers lack. The resilience of the Milady community demonstrates both they’ve successfully internalized this immune system, as well as proven its efficacy.

I mean, did they really think Milady would be stopped by cancelling its founders⁹? Miladies posted right through it, simultaneously debunking the smear and making clear they didn’t care regardless. The price was maintained precisely because they don’t care about the price.

The FUD stumbled, Network spirituality wins out. This is why they’re afraid, by the way. And to be honest, they’re right to be.

Endnote: The Road to Immortality

It’s relevant to remind the community what lies next for Milady as well as to help the offboarding of my stratagem. With the mandate of the Milady team being the task of “immortality”, we pursued three separate verticals:

1. Posting tribe. The ongoing dissemination of posting in the mode of network spirituality.

2. Virtual post-identity. Beginning with pfps, then incorporating vtube and VR.

3. Rave culture. Beginning with IRL—NYC, London, Tokyo—then moving to virtual reality.

I’ve discussed the motivations and designs behind each in various places, but I’ll be writing follow-up essays to unpack them in detail. Note that each remain well under progress. Milady is further embedded intimately with Remilia’s wider strategy breaking through much wider cultural industries—what my focus has been turned towards building with urgency now and which will remain under wraps for the moment.

Footnotes

1. It’s true that Miya poisoned the well for Milady, but radicalism is also a burning core of Remilia. A performative stepping down was the right move, to allow the Miya project to breathe and be read for itself, and defended for itself, without my intervention, until coming back when the community called for it. I do want one day to set off Milady and leave it to grow and thrive independently, allowing me to focus on the rest of Remilia’s hydra of projects, and fold what we’ve learned here into greater and fuzzier projects, but she does not yet have the internet she deserves, and enemy’s are praying on her death, and preying on her wealth, at every corner. Miya, also, had her own cult following, but when I abruptly stepped down, the activities fizzled out, and only the memory of Miya herself persisted.

2. Inversely, the bigger the account, the least miladypilled they could possibly be. They already operate a brand account and either are effectively nameposting content or maintaining posting schemas, preventing most of them (but not all) from truly internalizing miladyposting⁠—the truest miladies are the milady alts, pure milady. Exception to this are the accounts like @dystopiabreaker or @ssridispenser that already embodied Milady energy (of which a few archetypal poles exist) from the get-go.

3. One must remember this is transgressive art put on a trial in front of an unassuming public, their laughably shallow, though very destructive, reading can and should be dismissed out of hand. These questions of censoring art for transgression were resolved half a century ago, and the inability to separate fiction from reality appears to me symptomatic of some kind of social dysfunction. When journalists ask me for comment, I’ve been providing the classic quote from the 4chan masthead: “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.”

4. These two articles are also very solid commentary: R.I.P.P. ‘C.T.’: THE NEGATIVE 'VIBE SHIFT', 21 MAY 2022 (angelicism01), Charlotte Fang’s Hat (Cry Prittie).

5. Remilia’s performative posting shares close parallels and a lot of cross-over with the “vibe shift scene” surrounding angelicism01 and his network of distributed identity clones, I consider a parallel contemporary practice that’s useful to understand to illuminate our own.

6. Remilia’s stances obviously pose a non-negotiable conflict with the interests currently dominating the art world and making tentative forays into web3. See: Crypto and its Discontents: Hello Web3 Entryists (Charlotte Fang).

7. Money to bootstrap our collective’s goals is obviously a motivation too, but there are 10 timelines where we would have achieved that. All great artists know how to make money.

8. Honestly impressive in being one of the most extreme in history, what could possibly be more cancel-worthy than “a neonazi groomer suicide cult is behind your favorite NFT”? It’s of course a fiction, just as it sounds, and yet it’s reached the news at face value; what are the consequences when people simply don’t care? From twitter: “Milady beating the nazi groomer anorexia cult cancel is going to permanently ratchet the overton window for a century. This is the opening salvo to the new culture war and we win by posting straight through it.” - @JamesLiao333

9. Milady is partly, but not seriously, hampered by the vacuum left behind by myself as a poster—as angelicism01 put it: the “unrivalled vibe-CHAOS creator”—it is a hole that is being well filled by other power-posters that have joined in the network; figures like Elizabeth777 and Clementine, and hopefully more to come.

For each of these cases, one thing is consistent: the goal and result is not any kind of retribution or shaming, but the destruction of their work or their ability to perform it. These figures were all already self-sufficient and not at threat of being “deplatformed” like your standard cancel, yet they still had their own personal reasons to write under a pseudonym. Failing to draw any blood on them in a marketplace of ideas¹, their detractors knew only that undermining the right to a nom de plume could in some way or another handicap the reception of their work or their ability to engage freely in it as they wish².

The motivation is just to create a drag on artists/writers that threaten them. It’s sad that even in today’s cultural dark age—with few serious artists, public intellectuals or social/critical theorists engaging our rapidly evolving contemporary existence—low relevance individuals acting in bad faith are empowered to lever the mob and media organs to cut down tall poppies whenever they attract attention. Their mission is vicious—the vacuums these figures would leave behind if their voices were truly eliminated would only ever be filled with mediocrity.

OK, full disclosure: I find myself in the same position right now, with doxx being dangled by certain groups³ in a threat to silence me.

This actually already happened before, when I was in the middle of operating my previous persona; at the time, I ceded to the blackmail and deactivated my account, halting the project mid-stage ⁴ ⁵. The same people have since tied me to CFang and had been working to spread my personal information as well as perpetuate the rumors that fed into this recent drama.

I’m being once again threatened in DM’s to go dark or be doxxed. With the attempted cancel already largely subsided—the smear that appeared during my break has already been quite conclusively debunked in this thread—my personal information has been forwarded to certain art world rivals and journalists who are gleefully waving it around and waiting with bated breath for me to make any next move to drop it.

This is that move. But first, a tangent.

As anyone can tell by now, I hold a strong preference for the compartmentalization of my work (as is my right) and tying them together under a face and name is an unfortunate handicap (as is their goal). However, the easy suggestion to simply run up another new name is not an option for me, and I feel I owe an explanation for my thought process as I proceed with an act that seems to void my writing on authorship.

Airgapping each project is what I did try to do with the previous accounts that have now been tied, relying on no shared brand or clout as I began each one. Unfortunately, my idiosyncratic writing and thought, and the obsessiveness of both my fans and my haters, lead me to always being quite quickly recognized⁶ (I admit, it is flattering). I’m forced to accept it’s simply not possible to maintain compartmentalized pseudonymity given the nature of my method—the forthcoming mode of ‘writing as thinking’, the externalized subconscious—and frankly, the “open secret” status seems to service just fine, except when its intentionally exposed with destructive goals. After all, all it requires is a simple suspension of disbelief from the audience.

Interestingly enough, the alternative mode to pouring yourself out online (which allows restraint in real life) has you carrying a restrained and careful presentation online, paired with socialized discourse in real life. Yet, in the latter, you also always end up deanonymized given enough attention, only it’s going to be a friend, an ex-lover, or your own brother. Satoshi dipped out very quickly. Uncle Ted wrote too much.

It really comes down to only how much attention is on you, how much you write, and how much people care to stop you. Further, it’s a given that advanced tools for deanonymization will only become more accessible in the near-term; increased “opsec” is not a solution here. I really don’t believe online prominence and anonymity are actually simultaneously possible in the long-term.

So should one not write online? The same question arises with the fear of your internet activity being tracked by federal agents too—also a lost cause, they’ve backdoored your CPU, they’ve backdoored your everything—the only actual solution is throwing out your computer, but then it’s simply no longer worth it: access to history’s greatest calculator, library and communication network is just too valuable.

Writing in the highly socialized context of blogging, or twitter’s microblogging, or the Warholian groupchat, achieves the externalization of your subconscious in a way that furthers the model of writing as the technologically augmented thinking, a pre-modern boon that’s achieved further accelerated through digital networking. This is likewise too worthwhile to give up just due to the consequences of an inevitably deanonymization.

The answer, then, is, as usual, neither for nor against, but through:

Option 1: Develop not anonymization online, but in real life. Become a ghost, exit society; burn digital fingerprints, de-bank, expatriate.

Option 2: Power through and push the Overton window to accept psuedonymity. End the norms enabling cancel culture, normalize your own thoughts and run up the bodyguard bag as needed.⁷

I’m working on both.⁸

What my blackmailers don’t understand is the main concern that led me to deactivate the first time was not personal safety, privacy, or reputation, but the destruction the introduction of my face, ethnicity, background, etc—as well the conflation between projects and reduction of them to one of singular authorship and shared agency—did to the persona-based projects I was working in.

It’s a terrible sight to see them goring my work, but in this they’ve already succeeded. I would be just as disgusted to see art destroyed if I was a bystander, as many were; and knowing what I do now, I regret not standing ground to defend myself before—it’s the same reductionist destruction they tried to do to Milady, which fortunately I had the opportunity to fall on the sword for.⁹

With that bridge already crossed, taking a rational assessment of doxxing consequences right now, my decision is thus: follow in the steps of Moldbug¹⁰ and Scott Alexander¹¹ etc, selfdox, and continue writing and continue my work.

My personal circumstances happen to leave me financially secure in non-employment, and I’m a ghost in real life—I’ve always been reclusive, but have progressively shed nearly all my IRL’s as I’ve entered deeper commitment to my work, those still with me understand exactly what I’m doing. With the defamation attempts sliding by the wayside, there really isn’t much vector to threaten me left short of harassing my family, or an assassination bounty¹³, which I think even my most obsessive haters would not go so far to commit to—confused as they are, they do believe they’re operating on the side of goodness.

However, the funniest realization from wargaming out deanonymization as an inevitability is the parallel inevitability that one aunt or another’s unsecured Facebook will feature unflattering teenage photos of you at their kid’s birthday or whatever, weaponizable by haters to insinuate unattractiveness, like the pre-debut shots of a K-Pop idol. The conclusion is we must all become eboy/egirl and make readily available ulzzang selfies under our government names as a reputational contingency for the eventual pseudonymous fame Schelling point unmasking event before writing online today—if there is any possibility you might find attention, anyway. Luckily my time on instagram has left me prepared.

As I’m about to be facedoxxed as well as namedoxxed for making a post anyway, let me frontrun the visual canonization in the collective consciousness with my own ulzzang headshot:

I’ll also give you my given name: Krishna; and enough of a bread crumb trail to dig up the social media relics of my irl self—my old are.na. Are.na is an artist-made image-focused exocortex implementation that I adopted in my early teens and used extensively throughout that formative period, as a transparent outpouring of my interests and research which you can see lead up to my later work¹⁴, it would be of interest to the diehard stans.

From there, you can find more of my old writing, media and websites—and as my opps are so keen on sharing, yes, my full name is also not too deep down the rabbit hole; though the only pot at the end of that rainbow is discovering random members of my family (who, FYI, are already, for better or worse, well familiar with my idiosyncrasies and my habit for inviting trouble online and offline, and have been made aware of this situation). I’ve left the doxx trail up for anyone to find with a bit of effort, to leave no reason for them to share it obsessively under me and my mutual’s tweets.

And finally, since you all want to know so much about the “real” me, here’s an artist’s bio:

• Possibly autistic, or maybe just high IQ¹⁵ and undersocialized. You decide. I’m a prude and respect chastity. I have low tolerance for perversions, ugliness, bitterness and general ignobility. My vice is alcohol. I believe in karma, fate and arete.

• I’m reclusive. In the past, I would sometimes go months at a time mute hikkikimori, even before really going online—I used to use the internet exclusively for reading, now I don’t read and use it for posting. I entered the online social sphere and began writing for the first time with Miya, not counting a preceding period of research.

• My 3 most important influences are William Burroughs, Nick Land and Ray Johnson. This is enough of a key to well illuminate the nature of my practice, if you understand all 3 it should make clear sense.

• I dropped out of art school, I wasn’t cancelled for my work but I would’ve been if I showed it to them. I started experimenting online and did it quietly and anonymously because the art world was too far behind, and still is, to receive it¹⁶. I wouldn’t mind killing myself for the art, like Ray Johnson did, in fact I plan to, when the moment is right—if the moment was right right now, I’d kill myself right now without hesitation. It’s only right.

• I summarize my views as landian accelerationism, cyberanarchism, and in general an extreme skepticism to all information originating from the State including all academia, including all western science, medicine and history. I have no interest in contemporary politics; I am interested in virtue, faith and contemporaneity. I identify as an online maximalist, network accelerationist and art extremist.

• I pray and meditate daily, and the reason I keep winning and winning and winning is my karma is good and my path is righteous. I’m determined to maintain the straight arrow holy mission I’ve felt call me since my youth because I know I have the ability to change the world for the better so I can’t karmically afford inaction or distraction—for the same reason, I’d advise waiting to stop me until after I’m done.

• I have a dog named charlie 🐶

• I hate lying unnecessarily but I am a private person and believe in the right to self-mythologize: there is exactly one lie in this list and I won’t tell you which.

There it is, now you have everything.

I want to make clear I do this not because I wanted to attach a name or face or body or identity to my work online, or to position a pivot back into an irl practice (lol), but only to nullify the attempted Streisand effect of that by front-running it, and eliminate the only “baggage” my detractors have been able to hold over me¹⁷—it’s the same as being cornered into “reclaiming Miya”, I didn’t do it for my own clout as some have accused me, it was forced onto me (I don’t care about clout I’m here to save the internet!!).

This is all so dumb, but the right move on the chessboard as it stands, and honestly not particularly consequential given my personal circumstances—it pays to be a recluse. There are also second-order benefits in this transition for Remilia’s grand strategy that will be illuminated in some time¹⁸.

To journalists reading this: my name and identity during the one-year period of June 2021 to June 2022 was Charlotte Fang, and only Charlotte Fang, pronouns she/her, 1st generation Chinese immigrant at London (LCF ‘24), and the comment you wanted to reach out to me for is: “The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.” This statement applies to everything in this article, by the way.

With that out of the way, expect more essays as I continue my work with Remilia beyond Milady—to be shared here on Mirror. I like it, it’s robustly backed up on IPFS and Arweave, adheres to free speech idealism, and I appreciate the team personally providing an invite-only subdomain even in the face of these events¹⁹.

Sincerely,

Xinma Sutra 查理卡地亚

Tiger King Immortal of The Golden Light Dissidents

Intern of the Chairman of the Board @ Remilia Corporation

P.S.

Thank you to everyone who sent their love and support. Being able to have been positive influence on other’s lives is very important to me and motivates me to continue doing what I do, I always appreciate being reached out to by people I’ve helped or inspired in any way. I’m glad the smear wasn’t able to turn away anyone I respect—I can’t think of a single person who I’ve lost to this²⁰*, but learned of many new admirers. I love you all. We of course knew a Miya unmasking was coming, but the combination of hacks, doxxes and slander led it to be more vicious than expected; this was unfortunate and I appreciate all the concern, but I’m unfazed and we’ll come out on top as we always do. Those individuals who knew our innocence yet still rose to try and hurt us harbor serious demons; if the black cloud that follows them wasn’t prominent before, it will be now. God will take care of them*—not our problem.

P.S.S. I wrote this post last week thinking of the DM’s and replies I received in response to my stepping down announcement, but the sudden outpouring of even more love on the timeline yesterday following cry pittie’s Charlotte’s Hat article (a very thoughtful read) has been extremely moving… Idk what to say except ILY ALL SM!!!!!!!

Footnotes

1. See: Crypto and its Discontents, Hello Web3 Entryists.

2. And if not embraced, any and every biopic detail that is drummed up from the deanonymization would be used against the figure: fighting dirty in the arena of rhetoric by making a one-sided crossover into the real, denanonymized shots fired from the anonymous peanut gallery.

3. A loose community of anti-crypto neonazis that were spurned in my days as Miya, as well as certain people in the art world threatened by us. Context on their background and their role in these allegations is documented here.

4. What I didn’t realize was their goal was not just to halt that work (Sonya Qafi Hassan) but also destroy the reception of the previous one (Miya Black Hearted Cyber Angel Baby) through conflating them both under one umbrella and then slandering it: they responded to my deactivation by dropping faked allegations and tying both projects together to sully them in one sweep, knowing I was not able to defend myself due to the dox blackmail. Even then it failed to stick due to the lack any actual evidence or victims (this was the same cancel they’ve dredged up again), so the focus mainly just drifted to disparaging my non-white ethnicity.

5. While the aspect of avoiding my dox being threatened again was one of the motivating factors for attempting to keep my past work separate, the primary one is still ultimately my belief compartmentalizing persona-based works helps reduce its misunderstanding. I not also firmly believe it is my right to do so, but that it’s also my right to disclaim authorship over these works altogether to any degree I see fit.

6. An ironic conundrum considering the paranoid urban legend the third category of my “audience”, those who fear me, have developed around my supposed ability to run entire networks of alts.

7. During the height of the satanic panic, Gary Gygax, author of Dungeons & Dragons, had to maintain a bodyguard unit. On a related note, I find much of the mainstream discussion of this cancel to have an interesting parallel to the early 00’s debate on if violent videogames leads players to commit violence IRL; only its the question of if performative posting induces hyperstition.

8. A funny consequence of the brunt of this Milady cancel being not on the actual content of Miya, which, even as satire, did genuinely contain not just homophobia, transphobia, racism, etc. but even arguments for genocide and colonialism. Instead it was on the baseless and implausible allegations of criminal activity. As time goes on and it becomes increasingly obvious the latter is fraudulent, the former has already snuck its way in and pushed the Overton window into normalizing serious extremism in art. It’s almost as if it was planned.

9. CFang on the timeline was, by the way, basically the depersonified Me—not counting the many stolen posts and jokes. With Milady, we exported the persona-egregore into a distributed system, and I’ve come to find that much more interesting than the construction of individual character personas; though don’t confuse that as a loss of interest in performative posting itself. The CFang account simply had little character design beyond the shorter lived stints as [Jade Tiger] and Charlotte Reed predating the launch of Milady.

10. Taking full claim for Miya and stepping down was seemingly successful in avoiding it being painted in the same brush (despite aggressive attempts to the contrary), but old fans of Miya have pointed out (archive) that it’s a serious confusion and inaccurate for me to have even claimed to “be Miya”, misunderstanding the basic principles the project expressed over its own authorship. I know, they’re right, but wearing the full burden of the name despite the confused conflation was necessary to communicate clearly to the specific court of public opinion that Milady was being scrutinized under, one that obviously struggled to understand any of the nuance of performance art, let alone a project operating in a distributed, post-authorship collaboration. It was the calculated move to take ownership and step down to halt the cancel in its tracks, the mob is only satiated with a simple and clear scapegoat offered for slaughter; Milady is thus saved even if it required the crucification of CFang.

11. Mencius Moldbug was gleefully revealed to be Curtis Yarvan in a TechCrunch hitpiece on neoreactionaries, which ultimately resulted in him stepping down from his brainchild, Urbit. But counterintuitively, deanonymizing is likely what allowed to him to gain more serious stature as a influential public intellectual in Silicon Valley in the years since.

12. Scott Alexander/Slate Star Codex famously deleted his blog after being informed by a New York Times reporter they planned to share his full name doxx in their hit piece. His concerns are very much the same as mine, (1) it impairs his ability to practice his work, and (2) it makes him and his family a target to plausibly actionable violent threats.

13. “Suicide from a gunshot to the back of the head” via our friends in the government is another reality I might ultimately invite on myself. I just hope when it happens I predict it well enough that I can lean into it as a final work—the first of its kind, a murder work. Is there an entry for “Suicide by CIA” on Wikipedia?

14. I believe Are.na’s Xanadu-inspired hypertextual framework was a large influence on the way I engage and frame culture conceptually; something I’ve long since sought to expand and normalize leading into our development of the Exocore. It is also the first place where I explored playfulness with the tools of a social network, with many conceptual channels stretching the boundaries of otherwise formal research categorization, e.g. Payne Whitney Gym, Each Day is Like a Thousand Years. Unfortunately a lot of my channels seem to have 404’d.

15. Did you think I’d disclose my exact IQ here? Ha!

16. Truthfully, I saw Miya and Sonya more as preliminary studies, not something I ever expected to see a serious audience beyond the participating subjects, let alone attention and influence among other artists in my generation—Burroughs didn’t start writing until he was 31 and I’ve always figured I wouldn’t produce any serious work until then either. I was very pleasantly surprised to learn its reception with contemporaries in the art world, which I had written off as hopeless to engage difficult new online work at the time. I’ve obviously adjusted my cynicism now, with Remilia making the gambit to introduce this new wave of net art into the art world, though we’ll see if we succeed—there remains significant push-back from incumbents.

17. I can’t deny it’s preferable doxxers use my own photos as an adult off my now reactivated social media instead of random highschool age photos of me, and cousins they confused for me, found off family’s poorly secured facebooks.

18. It’s not like we didn’t see this coming, the coordinated attack was telegraphed, allowing it to be wargamed in the lead-up; and now assessing the damage, our mid-term positioning remains firm.

19. It’s unfortunate I can’t share just how much the interest and support I receive from “higher-ups” in general has only accelerated in the face of this, it would truly make the opps seethe. The cultural pendulum has already swung back, it just hasn’t trickled down yet =]

20. OK wait, there actually was one person, @dystopiabreaker, I respect her as a true cyberanarchist and was very sad to see her take off the Milady—though tbh she never replied to my dms even when she wore one…