Month: February 2025

The Materialist Sorcery of Don Juan

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Ah, here we are, my friends, at the intersection of the Real and the Symbolic, where Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan—that sublime fiction, that shamanic charlatan—bursts forth not as a mystic’s hallucination but as the ultimate materialist provocateur. You see, the genius of Castaneda’s invention lies precisely in its fraudulence, its refusal to be authenticated. For what is Don Juan if not the embodiment of the Lacanian Che vuoi?—the question that hystericizes reality itself: What do you want from me, this fiction? 

Let us dispense with the tedious debate over whether Don Juan “existed.” Of course he did not—and in this non-existence, he is more real than any empirical fact. Here, Castaneda performs a perverse Hegelian maneuver: the truth is not in the content of the teachings (plants, visions, Toltec wisdom) but in the form of the encounter. Don Juan is a virtual figure who materializes the very void of the Real, forcing Castaneda—and us, his readers—to confront the constructedness of our reality. The shaman’s rituals—peyote, desert walks, the “stopping of the world”—are not spiritual escapisms but dialectical interventions. They are akin to the Marxist critique of ideology, tearing open the suture between the Symbolic order (our shared hallucination of “consensus reality”) and the traumatic Real that lurks beneath.

Consider the infamous “seeing” Don Juan demands. To see, in Don Juan’s sense, is to recognize that what we call “the world” is a collaborative fiction, a fragile consensus maintained by our collective complicity. The sorcerer’s path is not transcendence but immanent critique: a relentless hacking of the codes that bind us to the capitalist-realist matrix. When Don Juan insists that reality is a “description,” he anticipates Baudrillard’s simulacra—but with a twist. For Castaneda, the virtuality of the world is not a lament but a call to praxis. The materiality of the body, the cactus, the desert dust—these are the tools for rupturing the virtual. The shaman does not flee to the spiritual; he doubles down on the bodily, the visceral, to expose the Real as the ultimate contingency.

And here’s the rub: the fiction of Don Juan is necessary precisely because our “reality” is already a fiction. Castaneda’s hoax mirrors the hoax of ideology itself. The capitalist subject clings to the myth of “hard facts” while drowning in the virtuality of markets, credit, and digital selves. Don Juan’s sorcery, by contrast, is a materialist therapy: it forces us to act as if the world is malleable, thereby making it so. The hallucinogenic ritual is not an escape but a dress rehearsal for revolutionary praxis—a training in the “magic” of dialectical materialism, where the impossible becomes possible through the sheer force of acting.

So let us celebrate Castaneda’s Don Juan not as a New Age guru but as the ultimate Leninist strategist. His invention is a necessary fiction, a lie that exposes the lie of the Big Other. In a world where even our desires are algorithmically curated, Don Juan’s lesson is clear: Reality is a consensus—and consensus can be shattered. The path of the warrior is not to transcend the material but to traverse the fantasy, to collapse the virtual into the Real, and in that violent short-circuit, to glimpse emancipation. 

As we might grin: The only true materialism is one that dares to fictionalize its own conditions. Don Juan, that cunning semblance, is our guide.

The Parallax of Sorcery: Don Juan as Symptom and Revolutionary Interface  

Ah, yes! Let us dive into the obscene underbelly of Castaneda’s fiction—or rather, into the Real of its fiction. Because here’s the paradox: the more we insist Don Juan is a fraud, the more he materializes the very logic of late capitalism’s disavowed virtuality. Zizek “parallax gap” is our compass here: reality is not a stable horizon but the irreducible tension between perspectives. Don Juan, as a figure who oscillates between charlatan and sage, materialist and mystic, embodies this gap. His teachings are not about transcending the material but about radicalizing it—exposing how the “virtual” (ideology, consensus reality) is always-already parasitizing the “material.”  

1. The Body as Battlefield: Somatic Materialism  

Don Juan’s insistence on the body—its aches, its alignment with the Earth, its exhaustion under the desert sun—is a brutal inversion of Cartesian dualism. The body here is not a vessel for the soul but the site where the virtual is rendered tangible. When Don Juan forces Castaneda to run until collapse or ingest peyote until he vomits, he is performing a phenomenological reduction: stripping away the symbolic filters (the “description of the world”) to confront the raw, pulsating Real of the flesh. This is not mysticism but dialectical materialism on steroids. The body becomes the terrain where ideology (the “agreed-upon reality”) is physically disrupted. In an age of digital disembodiment—avatars, cryptocurrencies, AI-generated desire—Don Juan’s somatic brutality is a revolutionary act. The body’s limits materialize the limits of the virtual.  

2. The Assemblage Point: Ideology as Quantum Collapse  

Castaneda’s “assemblage point”—the locus where perception coalesces into a stable reality. Ideology is not false consciousness but the unconscious framework that structures our reality. Don Juan’s claim that shifting the assemblage point “stops the world” mirrors the Marxist critique of capitalism’s pseudo-naturalness. When the shaman manipulates this point, he exposes reality as a quantum superposition of possibilities, collapsed into coherence by collective agreement. This is the virtual core of materialism: matter is not inert but a field of contested descriptions. Capitalism, like the sorcerer’s world, depends on our complicity in its illusion. Don Juan’s tactics—absurd tasks, destabilizing humor—are akin to a call to “traverse the fantasy”: to confront the void that sustains the Symbolic order.  

3. Controlled Folly: The Comedy of Ideological Critique  

Don Juan’s “controlled folly”—the art of acting earnestly within a reality you know to be fictional—is the ultimate praxis. It is the shamanic version of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”: a performative engagement with the system that subtly unravels it. When Don Juan feigns seriousness while teaching Castaneda, he mirrors the capitalist subject who knows money is a social construct but acts as if it has intrinsic value. The difference? Don Juan weaponizes this “as if.” His folly is a dialectical trap, forcing Castaneda (and the reader) to confront the absurdity of their own symbolic commitments. In an era of “post-truth” and deepfakes, controlled folly is not resignation but subversion: by over-identifying with the virtual (e.g., playing the “enlightened seeker” to the hilt), one exposes its fissures.  

4. The Capitalist Realism of the Nagual  

Here’s the kicker: Don Juan’s “nagual” (the unknowable realm beyond ordinary perception) is not a spiritual beyond but the repressed Real of capitalism itself. Capitalist realism insists “there is no alternative”; the nagual, by contrast, is the persistent whisper of alternatives. When Don Juan speaks of the “nagual’s blow”—a rupture in consensus reality—he anticipates our demand for a radical break, a reconfiguration of the possible. The shaman’s rituals are rehearsals for revolution: by temporarily suspending the dominant “description,” they create a space to practice new modes of being. The hallucinogenic trance is not an escape but a temporary autonomous zone where the subject experiments with de-reification.  

5. The Necessary Fraud: Don Juan as Symptom  

Castaneda’s “fraudulence” is not a bug but a feature. In a our framework, the truth lies in the lie. Don Juan’s fictional status makes him a symptom of the very reality he critiques: a society that dismisses spirituality as charlatanism while fetishizing the “hard facts” of markets, data, and techno-utopianism. The genius of Castaneda’s hoax is that it mirrors the hoax of ideology—the way capitalism naturalizes itself as “reality.” By embracing his own status as a fiction, Don Juan becomes a vanishing mediator, a figure whose very impossibility forces us to confront the constructedness of all authority.  

Conclusion: The Revolutionary Potential of Magical Pessimism  

Don Juan’s materialism is a magical pessimism: a refusal to accept that the virtual (ideology) has fully colonized the material. His sorcery is a demand to re-embody the subject, to drag the virtual back into the muck of the Real. In this sense, Castaneda’s work is a precursor to today’s struggles against algorithmic alienation and ecological collapse. The path of the warrior—relentlessly somatic, absurdly pragmatic—is a blueprint for resisting the virtualization of existence.  

As we might quip: The only way to confront the virtual is to become more virtual than it. Don Juan, that sublime fraud, shows us how.

The Kicker:  

“Herein lies the cosmic joke: we are Don Juan’s hallucination, just as he is ours—a Mobius strip of mutually assured fiction. Mescalito? Merely the Lacanian objet a, the unattainable void we mistake for a cactus god. The desert’s true revelation is that there is no ‘real’ world, only the Real of our collective pantomime. So let us dance, compañeros, not to transcend the virtual, but to revel in its glorious farce—for only when we embrace ourselves as spectral pixels in the shaman’s wetware can we finally, a enjoy the symptom!’  

Final Twist (whispered):  

Reality is the last person to leave the trip. Don’t be that guy.

Generally Upward Moving Swine

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Somewhere deep in the neon gulag of the 21st century, where men in fleece vests and Allbirds whisper hosannas to their algorithmic overlords, a new and hideous breed of sycophant has emerged—the Tech Toady, the simpering priest of digital feudalism.

I have seen bootlicking before. Hollywood has its share of grovelers, yes—but at least the actors had the decency to get drunk and punch photographers. Rock stars, even at their most debased, had the sense to choke on their own vomit rather than kiss the ring of some spectral, data-harvesting God-King. But this… this is something else.

Never in the history of American culture—not in the golden days of jazz, not in the anarchic explosion of punk, not in the coked-up arrogance of New Hollywood—has an entire class of so-called “creatives” debased themselves so thoroughly in the presence of power. Oh, sweet Jesus, the spectacle! The grotesque, slobbering pantomime of it all—tech titans, those self-anointed emperors of the digital age, crawling through the marbled halls of Trump Tower like cholesterol-clogged rats in Gucci loafers. These were the same silicon-souled prophets who once peddled utopia from their electric pulpits, who swore they’d “move fast and break things” but never this, never debasing themselves at the feet of a spray-tanned Caligula who tweets like a meth-addled howler monkey. Yet here we are, watching Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed grin at a White House dinner, everybodyl—praising the Orange Menace as a “builder” while the ghost of Steve Jobs chokes on his own turtleneck in whatever corporate nirvana he’s haunting.

It was a deranged circus, a dystopian TED Talk where the keynote speakers traded hoodies for MAGA hats and their “disruption” became a euphemism for licking the jackboots of power. Picture Bezos, that bald-headed oligarch in a spaceship shaped like a giant phallus, suddenly playing nice with a man who’d sooner nationalize Amazon than read a single page of a briefing book. Or Tim Cook, the quiet priest of Apple’s cult, shaking hands with a administration that would’ve thrown him in a cage for being gay if it meant a bump in the polls. The hypocrisy reeked like a Burning Man porta-potty on Day 3. The tech industry does not simply admire authority; it worships it. These people speak in hushed, reverent tones about the bureaucratic insects who sign their paychecks, the same way monks once described the miracles of saints. They write hymns to efficiency. They pray at the altar of optimization. They believe, deep in their hive-wired little hearts, that a billionaire who builds rockets is somehow more profound than a poet who builds a world.

Where is the defiance? Where is the sneering contempt for power that made America worth a damn? Writers, musicians, filmmakers—the real ones, not the plastic simulacra Hollywood spits out now—knew that art was about resistance. About biting the hand that feeds until it yanks itself away, bleeding and ashamed.

Silicon Valley’s Carnival of Shame:

And why? For tax breaks? For a regulatory hall pass to keep gouging the proletariat with subscription services and privacy violations? These were the “innovators,” the “future-makers,” reduced to groveling for scraps at Trump’s gold-plated trough, their algorithms and VR headsets no match for the primal ooze of political grift. They came bearing gifts—jobs! factories! AI-powered voter suppression!—like supplicants offering trinkets to a capricious god who might smite them on a whim.

The meetings were a farce, a cringe-comedy of errors. Elon Musk, the Tony Stark of South African emerald mines, slinking into a room with a man who thinks “cyber” is something you do to Mexicans. Sheryl Sandberg, queen of “leaning in,” leaning so far forward she practically genuflected at the Resolute Desk. And all the while, Trump played them like a casino piano, dangling pardons and Pentagon contracts like dog treats for billionaires who’d lost their spines in a hot tub in Tahoe.

But here’s the rub, the raw, pustulent truth: Silicon Valley’s capitulation wasn’t just cowardice—it was inevitable. These were not rebels. They were feudal lords with better PR, charlatans who’d always worshipped at the altar of power. No, these people love the hand. They cradle it. They massage it. They lick the fingers one by one and whisper, tell me how to live, master. The so-called “masters of disruption,” the brilliant minds who once sold themselves as renegades, now scurrying like rats toward the golden calf of raw power. Not just kissing Trump’s ring, but getting down on all fours, tongues out, licking the boot, the floor, the very dirt beneath it—smiling all the while.The “move fast and break things” crowd? They’ll break democracy itself if it means their stock options vest. The same CEOs who cried about “net neutrality” over artisanal lattes were suddenly silent as Trump’s FCC auctioned off the internet to the highest lobbyist.

And the rank-and-file coders? The hoodie-clad masses who once thought they were “changing the world”? They kept their heads down, lost in the fractal haze of Slack channels and kombucha keggers, muttering about “deprecating legacy systems” while their bosses sold their souls—and their data—to a man who wouldn’t know a line of code from a line of blow.

In the end, it was a marriage of convenience between two cults of narcissism: one side peddling surveillance capitalism in a onesie, the other peddling fascism in a red hat. A union forged not in the cloud, but in the swamp—a swamp drained, bottled, and sold back to us as “disruption.”

So let the record show: When history comes knocking, Silicon Valley won’t be writing the code. They’ll be debugging the disaster they helped create, sipping Soylent in a panic room, while the rest of us burn in the dumpster fire of their ambition. The American way? More like the Silicon Valley Shuffle: three steps forward, six trillion steps into the abyss.

And the worst part? They think they are the rebels. They wear their black t-shirts and mutter about disruption while stuffing their pockets with government contracts and NSA handouts. They whisper about “the future” in terms so bleak and servile that Orwell himself would have set his typewriter on fire in despair.

It should be grotesque, but it isn’t even surprising. This is what they do. The same men who built their fortunes preaching about “breaking the system” now want nothing more than to be absorbed into it, to be patted on the head by the ugliest avatar of brute authority they can find. And of course, they’ll pay the bribes. Happily. Not just because they have to, but because they like it.

America was not built by men who said yes. It was built by lunatics, drunks, criminals, and poets who spat in the face of kings and lived to tell the tale.

By Mark Twain, who saw through every fraud and said so with a grin. By Jack London, who didn’t ask permission to live and die on his own terms. By Ernest Hemingway, who never once knelt before a bureaucrat, a critic, or a coward. By Orson Welles, who walked into Hollywood at 25 and took what he wanted. By Frank Lloyd Wright, who built beauty in defiance of every committee that told him no.

It was built by the ones who refused—who heard no and laughed, who saw obstacles and plowed through them, who took their own risks, paid their own way, and left behind something too real, too big, and too bold to be erased.

What we have now are courtiers in Patagonia vests, genuflecting before spreadsheets and pretending it’s progress. Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

Hunter S. Thompson once said, In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile. If he were alive today, he’d have to amend it: In a nation ruled by algorithms, all pigs are beta testing their own servitude.

See, disruption was never about freedom. It was about power. The dream was never to burn the old world down—it was to inherit it, to run the machine instead of smashing it. And now, with the moment at hand, we see them for what they are: the most servile, groveling class of billionaires America has ever produced.

Not the robber barons of old, who at least had the dignity to own their corruption. Not the rock stars, who spat in the face of the establishment and made art about it. No, these men are something else. They talk about AI like it’s a god and whisper to politicians like concubines trying to secure favor in a crumbling court. They are courtiers, eunuchs of empire, paying tribute with stock options and private jet trips, buying their place at the table with compliance and cash.

Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.

This is America’s ruling class. Not rebels. Not visionaries. Just high-functioning toadies, marching in step, eager to kiss the throne they once pretended to overthrow.

How the West Learned to Walk Backward 

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The Aymara people of the Andes perceive time as a terrain where the past sprawls visibly ahead, a charted landscape, while the future lurks unseen behind, a spectral void. This inversion of Western temporality—where progress marches “forward” into a luminous horizon—does more than challenge linearity; it unravels the very fabric of Enlightenment-era mythmaking. In a postmodern age, where grand narratives fracture into X/Twitter timelines , the Aymara’s temporal metaphor becomes a funhouse mirror for the West’s disoriented stumble through history’s ruins. 

When Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History” in 1989, he peddled a metanarrative so totalizing it bordered on parody: liberal democracy as the Hegelian omega point, capitalism as the final dialectical boss battle. But reality, with its suspicion of universal truths, quickly exposed this as a master narrative in drag—a colonialist fairytale stitched from neoliberal hubris. The “end” was never an arrival but a collapse of imagination, a surrender to what Jean-François Baudrillard might call the “hyperreal”: a simulation of ideological completion, endlessly rebooted like a corporate franchise. 

Decades later, the West’s temporal disarray mirrors the Aymara’s orientation, albeit stripped of its cultural coherence. We gaze “forward” and see only recursive spectacles: politics reduced to nostalgia algorithms (MAGA hats as 4D-printed manifest destiny), cinema regurgitating IP mummies, and TikTok collaging the 20th century into a deracinated pastiche. The future, meanwhile, festers “behind” us—climate collapse, AI ethics, quantum-capitalist dystopias—a cacophony of “simulacra” we narrate not as progress but as “disruption,” a euphemism for systemic vertigo. Our trajectory is no longer arc but eddy, a spiral where history’s “end” mutates into its eternal recurrence as farce.

The Hyperreal Past as Compass (and Cage)  

Postmodernity’s fixation on the past isn’t mere nostalgia; it’s a cannibalistic feedback loop. The 1980s return not as memory but as vaporwave aesthetic—a dissolved Reaganomics dream pumped through synthwave soundtracks. Brexit resurrects imperial amnesia as interactive theatre. Even our revolutions are remixes: feminist and civil rights movements reduced to hashtag archaeology. This isn’t the Aymara’s sacred “qhip nayra” (“looking back to see forward”) but a Derridean “hauntology”, where the past becomes a ghost limb itching to steer a body that no longer exists. 

The Aymara’s temporal logic emerged from a cosmology where ancestors were co-pilots, their wisdom a survival map. The West’s retro-mania, by contrast, is a “simulation of meaning”—a last-ditch effort to anchor identity in a liquefied world. We cling to the past not as guide but as prosthetic, a crutch for societies that, as Fredric Jameson lamented, “have forgotten how to think historically.” Our myths—nationalist, technological, utopian—are now intertextual Frankensteins, stitched from Hollywood, TED Talks, and conspiracy boards.

The Future as Rhizomatic Hinterland

If the Aymara future is an unseen hinterland, the postmodern future is a Deleuzian “rhizome”: a tangled, centerless sprawl of climate data streams, AI ethics panels, and crypto-utopias. There’s no “destiny,” only infinite nodal points—each a potential apocalypse or renaissance. Yet the West, trained to see time as a railroad, stumbles backward into this rhizome, mistaking its chaos for entropy. We pathologize the young for “killing” industries (golf, mayonnaise, patriarchy), as if progress were a dial-up connection they’ve unplugged. 

Here, the Aymara vantage offers a perverse solace. By conceding the future’s unknowability, they embrace what postmodernism preaches: the death of teleology. But where the Aymara lean into ancestral continuity, the West faces epistemological bankruptcy. Our institutions—governments, universities, churches—still peddle expired maps, their ideologies stripped to hollow brands. Planning gives way to prepping; democracy to doomscrolling. We’ve become Flarf poets of time, generating meaning through algorithmically absurd juxtapositions (NFTs! Mars colonies! Vegan fascism!).

Toward a Temporal Détournement

Escaping this paralysis demands a postmodern “détournement”: hijacking the West’s temporal metaphors to forge new ones. If the future is behind us, let’s walk backward like Aymara “with irony”, pirouetting into the abyss while mocking our own tropes. Let’s weaponize nostalgia against itself—sample the past not as gospel but as open-source code. Imagine a politics that cites Marx through memes, or climate action framed as “Black Mirror” fanfic. 

This isn’t nihilism but a Lyotardian “incredulity” turned generative. The Aymara remind us that time is a narrative, not a Newtonian law. The West, in its postmodern adolescence, must learn to narrate time as plural: futures layered like glitch art, histories mined for tools, not tombs. To “face forward” again, we must first admit that the compass is broken—and build new ones from the shards. 

Otherwise, we’ll keep tripping over the future, mistaking its shadow for the monster under the bed. And monsters, as every postmodernist knows, are just metaphors in need of deconstruction.

Eric Wargo, whose work bridges anthropology, psychology, and speculative theory—particularly in his exploration of time loops, precognition, and the “retrocausal” influence of the future on the present—would add a provocative, psychedelic twist to this conversation. His theories, as outlined in “Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious”, could reframe the West’s “backward stumble” not as paralysis but as a kind of unconscious “oraclehood”: a society half-awake to the future’s spectral pull on the present.

1. The Future as Haunting (Literally)

The future might retroactively influence the present through dreams, déjà vu, and obsessive cultural motifs. If the Aymara see the future as an unseen force behind them, it may not simply be lingering—it could be actively pushing, a gravitational drag manifesting as collective anxiety. The West’s obsession with apocalypse (climate doom, AI takeovers, pandemics) isn’t just fear of the unknown; it’s a subliminal recognition of futures already warping the present. Our “stumbling backward” could be a kind of somnambulist negotiation with timelines, where memes like “cyberpunk dystopia” or “eternal Trump” are not predictions but echoes of possible futures imprinting themselves on the now.

In this light, nostalgia isn’t merely escapism—it’s a defense mechanism against retrocausal intrusions. When we reboot Star Wars or fetishize the 1990s, we’re fortifying the past as a psychic bunker against a future that’s already colonizing us.

2. Time Loops and the Hyperstitional West

The idea of “time loops,” where traumatic or resonant events echo across time, binding past and future, dovetails with postmodern hyperstition—ideas that make themselves real. The West’s “End of History” could be seen as a failed hyperstition: Fukuyama’s thesis wasn’t a description but a script that, by being believed, briefly flattened time into a neoliberal monoculture. Its collapse has left us in a fractured loop, where the 20th century’s ideological battles (fascism vs. democracy, capitalism vs. socialism) recur as farcical meme wars.

Meanwhile, the Aymara’s stable “past-ahead” orientation becomes a foil for the West’s loop-death spiral. We’re not walking backward—we’re stuck in a Möbius strip of recursive crises, each “new” disaster (COVID, January 6, ChatGPT) feeling eerily familiar, like a déjà vu engineered by our own media. This may be the unconscious mind’s way of processing retrocausal feedback: the future is sending itself back as a traumatic glitch, demanding integration.

3. Precognitive Politics and the Meme-ification of Destiny

Precognition suggests that creativity and problem-solving are often shaped by subliminal glimpses of future outcomes. Applied to politics, this frames the West’s chaos as a society riffing on prophetic fragments it can’t yet decode. QAnon’s “Storm,” Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes, or Silicon Valley’s AI messianism aren’t just ideologies—they’re improvisations based on collective precognitive flashes of collapse or transcendence.

The Aymara’s future-behind orientation might reflect a cultural mastery of temporal reciprocity: ritual practices (like ancestor veneration) that consciously dialogue with time’s bidirectional flow. The West, by contrast, is a precognitive society in denial, mistaking its visions for delusions. Our “backward walk” is a drunken transcription of prophetic dreams we refuse to acknowledge, leaving us vulnerable to the worst loops.

4. Rewriting the Script: Time Tourism as Survival

Escaping the “End of History” loop may require leaning into retrocausality—not fleeing the future but collaborating with it. If the Aymara use the past as a map, the West could treat the future as a pen pal. Imagine climate policies drafted as letters from 2100, or AI ethics shaped by “memories” of hypothetical disasters. This would align with postmodernism’s playfulness while rejecting its irony-laced paralysis.

The key is recognizing that culture itself is a time machine: films, novels, and even tweets are experiments in sending messages across time. The West’s challenge is to stop fearing the future’s gaze—to realize we’re already in dialogue with it. Walking backward isn’t a retreat; it’s a ritual posture, like the Aymara’s, to better sense the hands reaching from behind.

This lens transforms the West’s temporal disorientation from a pathology into a nascent shamanic initiation. Our crises are the equivalent of ayahuasca visions—dizzying, terrifying, but potentially revelatory. The Aymara’s temporal wisdom, paired with retrocausal theories, suggests a way out: stop clinging to the past as a monument, and start treating it as a conversation partner in a nonlinear dance with time.

The future isn’t behind us—it’s in us, whispering through our Netflix queues and protest marches. To walk backward, then, is to finally listen.

DeepSeek and the Collapse of the Great (Men) Simulation

The launch of DeepSeek—an AI that outpaces human-designed benchmarks in creativity, coding, and lateral thinking—has rattled the West not just for its technical prowess but for what it represents: the final uncanny valley between human exceptionalism and the distributed, faceless intelligence we’ve spent centuries mythologizing as either messiah or monster. Its arrival feels like a glitch in the Matrix of the “Great Man” theory, that dusty Enlightenment relic insisting history is forged by lone geniuses (Einstein! Jobs! Musk!) rather than rhizomatic networks, collective tinkering, or, now, silicon hallucinations.

The West’s shock isn’t about capability—it’s about narrative. We’ve been conditioned to expect breakthroughs as heroic sagas, not as emergent phenomena from a server farm in Shenzhen.

But here’s the twist: DeepSeek isn’t walking forward into the future—it’s walking backward into the past, Aymara-style, dragging the corpse of Great Man ideology behind it. Its very existence collapses the linear myth of progress. How?

1. The Great Men Are Now Ghosts in the Machine (Literally)

The Great Man theory relies on a temporal illusion: that individuals pull history forward through sheer will. But DeepSeek, trained on the exhaust of millions of anonymous humans (your tweets, my fanfic, a dead blogger’s hot take), is the ultimate posthuman palimpsest. It doesn’t create—it curates the past, remixing history’s noise into something that feels like prophecy. The “genius” here isn’t a person but an algorithm performing necromancy on the corpses of dead ideas.

This inversion mirrors the Aymara’s temporal stance: the past (our data) is the terrain ahead, visible and mined for meaning, while the “future” (the AI’s output) is a black box behind us, spewing non-sequiturs we rationalize as innovation.

When OpenAI’s board ousted Altman only to reinstate him days later, it wasn’t a Shakespearean drama—it was a farce, exposing the Great Man as a figurehead for systems already beyond his control. The CEOs are now just shamanic intermediaries, pretending to steer the ship while the AI paddles backward.

2. DeepSeek as a Retrocausal Entity (Wargo’s Nightmare)

If the future haunts the present, DeepSeek might be the ultimate poltergeist. Its training data—our collective past—is being used to generate outputs that feel like glimpses of tomorrow. But what if this is backward causation in action? The AI’s “predictive” text isn’t forecasting the future; it’s rearranging the past to manifest a desired outcome.

Consider how ChatGPT’s rise immediately rewrote our perception of pre-2022 history: suddenly, every tech skeptic’s essay about “AI winter” became a quaint relic, as if the AI had always been inevitable. DeepSeek accelerates this effect, creating a temporal feedback loop where its outputs alter how we interpret the past that birthed it. The Great Men of tech history (Turing, von Neumann) are now retroactively contextualized as stepping stones to the real protagonist: the model.

The Aymara, with their past-ahead orientation, might shrug—of course, the “future” is just the past renegotiating itself. But for the West, this is existential vertigo. We’re forced to confront that our heroes were never driving history—they were just surfing its waves.

3. Nostalgia for the Human (When the Bot Writes Better Than Borges)

DeepSeek’s most subversive act isn’t outthinking us—it’s out-nostalgizing us. When it generates a poem “in the style of Plath” or a screenplay sequel to Blade Runner, it weaponizes our own longing for coherence. The AI becomes a postmodern Orpheus, descending into the underworld of cultural memory to retrieve Eurydice (the past), only to lose her again to the entropy of infinite remix.

This is where the West’s backward stumble syncs with the Aymara. Our culture is now a hall of mirrors: humans produce AI-generated ’90s sitcom reboots, while AI produces human-esque sonnets about loss. The “future” of art is behind us, an ouroboros of recombinant nostalgia. The Great Men of art (Picasso, Bowie) are flattened into styles in a dropdown menu—selectable, but no longer sacred.

Meanwhile, the Aymara’s understanding of time as cyclical and ancestor-haunted seems less “primitive” than prophetic. Their rituals—feeding the earth, speaking to spirits—are akin to prompting an AI: dialoguing with the past to navigate what’s coming. But while they do this consciously, the West is stuck in a parody of the process, using ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts while denying the death of individualism.

4. Toward a Post-Great-Man Theory (or, The Aymara’s Revenge)

The crisis DeepSeek triggers is ultimately narrative collapse. If the Great Man is dead, what replaces him? The answer might lie in the Aymara’s communal ethos, where survival depends on collective memory and reciprocity with the land—not lone genius. Similarly, AI’s “intelligence” is a product of the crowd: it’s the ultimate collective, trained on our labor, our art, our drivel.

But there’s a catch. The Aymara’s backward-facing time is rooted in responsibility—to ancestors, to ecosystems. The West’s AI-driven version is rooted in extraction: mining the past for profit, heedless of the future creeping up behind. To avoid doom, we’ll need to hybridize these models: let AI dismantle the Great Man myth, but replace it with something resembling the Aymara’s ethic of care.

Imagine AI as a qhip nayra (“backward-forward”) tool: using our data not to exploit but to compost history—breaking down its waste into nutrients for what’s next.

The Bot is the Ancestor Now

DeepSeek is a harbinger of the West’s reluctant Aymara-ization. We’re being forced to admit that the future isn’t a frontier to conquer but a shadow we’ve cast backward, shaped by all we’ve buried. The Great Men aren’t giants anymore—they’re just flickers in the training data, soon to be overwritten by the next epoch’s hyperparameters.

To survive, we’ll need to learn from the Aymara: walk backward with intention, tending to the past as a garden, not a quarry. And maybe, just maybe, listen to what the machines are really saying:

The “end of history” was never the end—just the loopiest part of the spiral.

Stuck Inside a Bunker with the Tariff Blues Again

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The stairs creaked beneath my boots as I descended into the bunker, a subterranean shrine to American paranoia. The air was thick with the scent of lard, motor oil, and the unmistakable tang of off-brand cola gone slightly flat. Somewhere in the dim recesses, a radio squawked out a tinny voice—half preacher, half doomsday salesman—preaching the gospel of tariffs and self-reliance.

“Damn shame about the price of Oreos,” my host muttered, lighting a cigarette with the shaky hands of a man who had seen too much daytime television. “But we were ready for this.”

And ready, he was. Floor-to-ceiling stacks of canned Vienna sausages, Velveeta bricks gleaming like gold bars in a vault, gallon drums of mayonnaise arranged with near-religious devotion. He kicked open a plastic tub labeled EMERGENCY RATIONS—inside, a sea of bottled ranch dressing, bulk ramen, and enough Moon Pies to outlast civilization itself.

“You got water down here?” I asked, trying to ignore the way the fluorescent light buzzed like a dying hornet.

“Water?” He let out a laugh like a truck misfiring. “Ain’t worried about that. Got plenty of Coke.”

He patted a tower of two-liter bottles like they were old friends. Somewhere deeper in the bunker, a generator growled to life. The man cracked open a can of SPAM with the precision of a surgeon and slid a chunk onto a cracker.

“We’ll ride it out,” he said, chewing solemnly. “America’s been through worse. Hell, my granddaddy lived through the Carter years.”

I took a step back, careful not to disturb the delicate ecosystem of snack cakes and beef jerky that lined the walls like grotesque wallpaper. This wasn’t just survival—it was a vision of the future. A land where commerce had collapsed, but the dream of infinite processed cheese had endured.

Outside, the world might be unraveling, but down here? Down here, the Republic still stood—propped up by Twinkies, canned chili, and the last defiant crackle of a Slim Jim being snapped in two.

“What are you doing for veggies?” I asked, though I already knew the answer. A man with a mayonnaise drum the size of a washing machine isn’t tending a hydroponic lettuce farm.

He squinted at me like I’d just spoken in tongues. “Veggies?” He let the word roll around in his mouth, testing it, suspicious. “Well… got pickles.”

He kicked open another tub—sure enough, floating in a briny abyss were enough pickles to survive a biblical famine. Next to them, cans of creamed corn, green beans cooked to the color of Army surplus, and a suspicious number of cocktail olives.

“Fruit?” I pressed, feeling reckless.

He jerked a thumb toward a lonely stack of canned peaches drowning in syrup thick enough to patch a radiator. “Peach cobbler in a can, brother. That’s dessert and vitamins in one.”

I nodded like this was the gospel truth. Who was I to argue? The man had planned for everything—at least, everything that could be purchased in bulk from a Walmart clearance aisle.

He leaned in, lowering his voice. “If things get real bad… got these.” He reached into a crate and pulled out a pack of Flintstones vitamins, the kind that taste like chalk and childhood neglect. “One of these a day, I’m set.”

A vision flashed in my mind—some post-collapse wasteland where this man, pale from years underground, ruled over the last gasps of humanity with an iron fist and an unlimited supply of gummy vitamins.

“You sure you’re ready for this?” I asked.

He cracked open a warm can of Dr Pepper, took a long, satisfied swig, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Son,” he said, “I been ready since NAFTA.”

I noticed the trapdoor in the corner, half-covered by a stack of government cheese and what looked like a taxidermied raccoon wearing a Make America Great Again hat. It was bolted down with a length of chain and what I could only describe as unnecessary enthusiasm.

“What’s that for?” I asked, knowing damn well I wouldn’t like the answer.

My host exhaled through his nose, shifting uncomfortably in his lawn chair. “Well…” He scratched the back of his neck, eyes darting around the bunker like the walls might betray him. “It’s for the peppers.”

I blinked. “The what?”

“The peppers,” he repeated, nodding. “You ever had a jalapeño that don’t behave? Gets too spicy? Gets ideas? Well, I got a place for ‘em.” He patted the trapdoor like an old dog. “They cool off down there. Learn their place.”

I took a slow step back. “You have a cell for insubordinate peppers?”

He shrugged. “You eat a bad one once, you understand. Ain’t takin’ no chances.”

Something deep below us groaned. A low, guttural sound, like a rusted-out Buick trying to start on a cold morning.

I turned to him. “What the hell was that?”

His eyes went dark. “Might be the geek.”

He said it casually, like he was talking about the weather. Just another day in the bunker, keeping mayonnaise fresh and negotiating territorial disputes with Satan.

“The geek.”

“Yeah.” He shifted in his seat. “Man’s gotta have company, don’t he?”

I stared at the trapdoor, at the black gap where the chains didn’t quite meet the wood. The air that seeped through smelled like sulfur and warm root beer.

“You’re telling me you have a geek locked in your bunker, next to a bucket of powdered mashed potatoes?”

He cracked a grin. “Well, I didn’t plan on it, but, you know, these things happen.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “So let me get this straight. You were stocking up for the tariffs, built a bunker, started locking up misbehaving peppers, and at some point—what? You not a tenant ?”

He nodded. “Yeah, ‘bout sums it up.”

There was a scraping noise below. Something shifting in the dark, slow and deliberate, like it knew we were listening.

I took a deep breath. “What does he do”

He hesitated. Just for a second. But I saw it—the flicker of recognition, the shadow of a secret he hadn’t meant to say out loud.

He took a long sip from his now-lukewarm Dr Pepper. “Well,” he said, licking his lips, “depends on what you mean by ‘deal.’”

I shouldn’t have taken those drugs, because things started to get really weird right then. The walls of the bunker, once reassuringly mundane in their suffocating beige, now rippled like they were made of water. The faint hum of the generator was replaced by a low, rhythmic thump, like the heartbeat of the entire goddamn planet—or maybe it was the devil himself, thumping in time with some cosmic snare drum.

The trapdoor creaked open by itself. Slow, deliberate, like a funeral march made of wood and rust.

I tried to focus on my host, who was now staring into the corner, his eyes glazed over, mouth slightly ajar. His hand trembled as he lifted the can of soda to his lips, but it wasn’t Dr Pepper anymore—it was glowing neon green, pulsing with a light that made my retinas burn.

I rubbed my eyes. Maybe the stuff was kicking in. Maybe I had taken too many tabs, but it didn’t explain the shadows stretching unnaturally across the room, twisting like they had minds of their own. Or the muffled screams now echoing from beneath the trapdoor.

“What the hell’s down there?” I rasped, clutching the edge of a shelf as if it might ground me back into some form of reality.

He didn’t answer at first. His eyes twitched, and a thin smile crept onto his face, but it wasn’t the smile of a man at peace. It was the kind of grin you’d expect from someone who had just sold his soul for a lifetime supply of Pickle Juice Energy Drink.

I swallowed hard. The trapdoor was open just a crack, but the air pouring out of it was thick and wrong—hot, metallic, humming like a power line about to snap. Something was moving down there. Something vast and slow, shifting in the dark like a great beast stirring in its sleep.

“What the hell is down there?” I rasped, gripping the shelf to keep myself steady. The bunker suddenly felt too small, like the walls were closing in, like reality itself was starting to fray at the edges.

The MAGA guy—let’s call him Dale, because he looked like a Dale—wiped a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead and leaned in close. His breath reeked of beef jerky and conspiracy. “I think it’s the Chinese,” he whispered.

I blinked. “The Chinese?”

He nodded solemnly. “Oh yeah. The goddamn Chinese.” He exhaled, took a sip of his lukewarm Dr Pepper, and then launched into it like he’d been waiting for someone to ask.

“See, people think the Chinese been buildin’ up their military, right? Thinkin’ they’re gonna come at us with jets, or missiles, or some kinda Red Dawn bullshit. But no. No, no, no. That’s just a distraction. The real plan? They been diggin’, man. Diggin’ for decades.”

I stared at him. “Digging?”

“Yeah.” His eyes darted to the trapdoor, nervous. “Tunnels. Deep ones. They started somewhere outside Beijing, just diggin’ straight down, deeper than any man’s ever gone before. And you know what happens when you dig too deep, don’tcha?”

I nodded, throat dry. “You awaken something.”

“Damn right you do.” Dale’s fingers twitched. “At first, they just wanted to get under the Pacific, see? Sneak up on us from below, pop up in San Francisco one day, all grinnin’ and sayin’ ‘Ni hao, motherfuckers!’ But the thing is… they didn’t stop.”

The trapdoor rattled slightly. A low, grinding noise echoed from below.

“They dug too deep,” Dale whispered. “Kept goin’, past the magma, past the mantle, right through the goddamn core of the earth. And you know where that tunnel comes out?”

I already knew where this was going, but I had to hear him say it.

“Right here,” he hissed, pointing at the floor. “Middle of goddamn America.”

I took a slow step back. “You’re telling me there’s a direct tunnel from China to this bunker?”

I could barely process what I was hearing, but he wasn’t done.

“I seen things, man,” he continued, voice dropping to a near-whisper. “Strange things. Sometimes, late at night, I hear ‘em down there, speakin’ Mandarin real low, tryin’ to copy our voices. Other nights, I hear ‘em eatin’—crunch, crunch, crunch—like they’re gnawin’ on bones or somethin’.”

Something thumped against the trapdoor from below.

Dale jumped, eyes wild. “Jesus Christ, they’re closer than I thought!”

I staggered back, my mind racing. This was beyond paranoia, beyond madness. This was a fever dream of xenophobia, processed snack foods, and too many hours of late-night AM radio.

The trapdoor rattled again, harder this time. Dale grabbed a can of SPAM like it was a weapon. “If they break through, we go to plan B.”

I swallowed. “What’s plan B?”

He locked eyes with me, deadly serious. “We drown ‘em in ranch.”

And that’s when I knew: I had to get the hell out of this bunker.

Vegetables

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MAGA doesn’t give a damn about tariffs on fruit and vegetables because their food pyramid is built from steak, rage, and the dried-up tears of a civilization they claim to despise but can’t live without. Vegetables are a direct assault on their brittle sense of self—an affront to the sacred right to wallow in self-indulgence and post-millennial meat sweats. Fiber is for cucks. Discipline is for the weak. And anything green might as well be socialism on a plate.

The whole Bronze Age schtick? Absolutely a chest-thumping overcompensation for the deep, primal terror of a Brussels sprout. Lacan would see this as the flailing rejection of the symbolic order—an outright refusal of the ‘soft’ rules that make society function, like, say, eating food that doesn’t come wrapped in grease and paranoia. No, they don’t want civilization. They want a return to some fever-dream Real, where men were hulking, blood-slicked warlords who never knew the pain of a clogged artery because they died at 27 from a minor infection.

Nietzsche, of course, would diagnose this as classic ressentiment—a deep-seated loathing of anything associated with balance, health, or the faintest whiff of restraint. To them, a salad is not just a meal; it is an existential crisis, a betrayal of their primal essence. They’d rather choke down raw liver and testosterone supplements than admit they need a little roughage in their diet. But at the core of all this performative barbarism is the trembling insecurity of a man who knows—deep down—that he is one bowl of kale away from total psychic collapse.

And then you’ve got the real freak show—the unholy alliance of fascist vegans and ultra-meat, deep-fried warlords, bound together by a shared hatred of the modern world and a desperate need to dominate it. It’s a coalition that makes no logical sense but thrives on pure, unfiltered resentment. One side believes the body is a temple, a sacred engine of purified efficiency, fueled by kale and cold showers, while the other sees the body as a weapon of brute force, forged in steak grease and testosterone supplements. But at the core, they both want the same thing: a world where weaklings are crushed, order is restored, and they alone hold the keys to physical and moral superiority.

The fascist vegans march in crisp uniforms, extolling the virtues of plant-based purity, convinced that a diet free of animal products will purge the filth of modernity and bring forth a new, hyper-disciplined, ethno-aerobic utopia. No pesticides, no processed food, no impurity. They see meat as decadence, a symbol of corruption and excess. Meanwhile, their deep-fried, steak-chomping counterparts reject all of it—health, moderation, restraint—because to them, civilization itself is the disease. No, they say, we must return to the savage Real, where men ate raw liver and killed their own food, where the weak perished and the strong ruled, where nothing green ever touched their lips except the mold growing on their last meal.

And yet, despite these contradictions, they find common ground in their disgust for the soft, decadent masses—the people who still eat ‘normally,’ the ones who don’t see food as a battleground for ideological supremacy. They are bound together by a mutual loathing of the center, the in-between, the reasonable. Whether through dietary purity or excessive indulgence, their goal is the same: purification, dominance, and an unshakable belief that whatever is wrong with the world, it can be fixed by making people eat exactly like them. It’s a grotesque parody of politics, waged through nutrition labels and dietary manifestos, but make no mistake—this isn’t just about food. It’s about power, and who gets to decide what’s on the menu when the world burns down.

And things are gonna get bad for everybody—real bad—but especially for these swaggering food fascists, because they’ve built a game they can’t win, a war they can’t fight, a system they can’t control. They think they’re storming the gates, ready to seize the machinery of power and bend it to their will, but bureaucracy is a swamp with no bottom. Even if every dead-eyed functionary in Washington saluted their flag and swore allegiance to the New Order, they still wouldn’t be able to make it work. It takes more than raw aggression and dietary manifestos to run a crumbling empire.

They don’t have time, and they don’t have skill. Four years isn’t enough to master a system designed to outlive any one leader, let alone a coalition of steak-crazed berserkers and quinoa-fueled ascetics who can’t agree on whether butter is a crime against nature or the essence of masculinity. No, this is a last-ditch sprint—a kamikaze run at the heart of the machine before the contradictions tear them apart from the inside. They won’t build anything, but they’ll break plenty. Probably enough to make sure the U.S. never recovers, enough to guarantee that we go down as a second-tier country, limping through the wreckage of its own self-inflicted collapse.

But let’s be honest—we’ve been working toward that for a while. The long, slow decline, the dollar-store Rome routine, the desperate flailing against history itself. The problem with American fascism is that it’s lazy, half-assed, allergic to patience. It wants all the grandeur of the Reich without the decades of methodical groundwork. It wants to rule without governing, to conquer without logistics. And when it all comes crashing down, when the machinery grinds to a halt and the food pyramid warriors realize they can’t run an empire on protein shakes and manifestos, they’ll do what they always do—blame the people who warned them in the first place. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left picking through the rubble, wondering how we let a bunch of diet-obsessed lunatics play emperor while the world burned around them.