The thing with the Studio Ghibli ChatGPT images is a dead giveaway that someone can’t afford the real thing. The guys aren’t doing it because they’re cutting-edge. They’re doing it because they’re broke. Forget innovation; they’re dumpster-diving for Creative Commons scraps while the suits monetize their nostalgia.
Social media forces everyone to look like they’re making moves, even when they’re barely making rent. AI slop is just a symptom of the fact that no one has money anymore. People still feel pressure to participate in culture, to have an aesthetic, to sell themselves as something—but they’re doing it with whatever scraps they can get for free. And it shows. AI fills that gap—it lets people pretend they’re running a brand, but the end result is always the same: cheap, hollow, and painfully obvious. You want *brand identity*? Here’s your identity: You’re broke. And the algorithms are scavengers, feeding on the carcass of what used to be culture.
AI isn’t democratizing creativity—it’s 3D-printing Gucci belts for the indentured influencer class. The outputs? Soulless, depthless, *cheap*. Like those TikTok dropshippers hawking “vibe-based lifestyle” from mold-filled warehouses.
People are essentially being squeezed into finding the cheapest, fastest ways to participate in cultural production because traditional economic pathways have become increasingly challenging. The AI-generated Studio Ghibli images become a metaphor for this larger condition: using freely available tools to simulate creativity when genuine creative and economic opportunities are increasingly scarce.
It’s not just about the technology, but about how economic constraint fundamentally reshapes artistic expression and cultural participation. The AI becomes a survival tool for people trying to maintain some semblance of creative identity in a system that makes traditional artistic and economic mobility increasingly difficult.
The “vibe” becomes a substitute for substance because substance has become economically unattainable for many.
Every pixel-puked Midjourney hallucination is a quantum vote for late-stage capitalist necropolitics. These AI image slurries aren’t art—they’re digital placeholders, algorithmic cardboard cutouts propping up the ghostware of cultural exhaustion.
You think you’re making content? You’re manufacturing consent for the post-industrial wasteland. Each AI-generated Studio Ghibli knockoff is a tiny fascist handshake with the machine, a performative surrender to surveillance capitalism’s most baroque fantasies.
These aren’t images. They’re economic trauma made visible—the desperate mimeograph of a culture so stripped of meaning that simulation becomes the only available language. Trump doesn’t need your vote. He needs your learned helplessness, your willingness to outsource imagination to some cloud-based neural net.
The algorithm isn’t your friend. It’s your economic undertaker, writing the eulogy for human creativity in procedurally generated helvetica.
In 1981, as the world grappled with the hangover of the freewheeling 1970s—stagflation, punk’s rubble, and the cold dawn of Reaganomics—King Crimson, rock’s most mercurial act, reemerged with an album titled Discipline. Its track, “Indiscipline,” was a jarring manifesto: a recursive guitar riff, arrhythmic drums, and lyrics about obsession, control, and the terror of losing both. Frontman Adrian Belew howled, “I repeat myself when under stress / I repeat myself when under stress / I repeat…” It was a song about the fragility of order, the seduction of chaos, and the thin line between genius and madness. In hindsight, it’s also a perfect metaphor for the paradox of “disciplined indiscipline.” The track that felt like its mirror image: erratic, fragmented, unpredictable. If Discipline was structure, Indiscipline was impulse. Yet both belonged to the same system, feeding into each other, revealing that real mastery wasn’t about rigid control or wild abandon but about moving between the two—knowing when to follow the grid and when to break free.
This idea—that discipline and indiscipline aren’t opposites but interwoven forces—isn’t just about music. It’s about navigation. We often imagine success as mastery, as having everything mapped out. But in reality, much of movement—through markets, through culture, through life—isn’t about mastery at all. It’s about mitigation: an intelligence that isn’t about complete control but about sensing, adjusting, and improvising within a shifting environment. It’s not just about skill; it’s about métis, that ancient cunning, but mixed with bêtise—the foolishness and randomness that inevitably shape our paths
The Album as Algorithm: Fripp’s Controlled Anarchy
Robert Fripp, King Crimson’s guitarist and de facto philosopher-king, once described his approach to music as “cybernetic improv”—a blend of rigid structure and spontaneous play. Discipline was built on this ethos. The title track, for example, interlocked four musicians in a rhythmic lattice so precise it sounded algorithmic, yet its grooves pulsed with human imperfection. This wasn’t jazz improv or punk rebellion. It was chaos designed, like a murmuration of starlings—aestheticized randomness with invisible rules.
Fripp’s infamous “guitar craft” method—a monastic regimen of practice and theory—enabled this. He trained his hands to obey so completely that he could later “disobey with intent.” In essence, Discipline was an album about the freedom that comes only after mastery. The song “Indiscipline” literalized this tension: its lyrics (inspired by Belew’s wife’s letter about a chaotic art sculpture) fixated on an object that was “too much to take” yet “too good to throw away.” The music mirrored this duality—Belew’s guitar squalled like a broken radio, while the rhythm section (Tony Levin and Bill Bruford) anchored it with militaristic precision.
The ZIRP of Art: When Noise Becomes Signal
In the early 1980s, King Crimson’s Discipline landed in a cultural moment ripe for its message. New Wave and post-punk were turning rebellion into a formula, while corporate rock calcified. The album’s fusion of math-rock rigor and art-rock abandon felt radical precisely because it refused binary logic. It was indiscipline with a blueprint—a rejection of both punk’s nihilism and prog rock’s excess.
This mirrors the “ZIRP world” described earlier. In eras of abundance (like the 2010s tech boom or the 1970s art-rock explosion), experimentation flourishes because the stakes feel low. Mistakes become “innovation”; noise becomes “edge.” Discipline thrived in this ambiguity—critics called it “unclassifiable,” a backhanded compliment that masked their unease. But unlike the startups that mistook luck for strategy, King Crimson’s chaos was earned. Fripp’s years of monastic practice (he once compared guitar playing to “washing the floor”—a daily, unglamorous ritual) let the band pivot when the rules changed. By the 1990s, when grunge and alt-rock dominated, Crimson had already moved on, their “indiscipline” intact but retuned.
In a world of easy gains—where ZIRP, network effects, and technological tailwinds make happy accidents look like skill—this kind of intelligence is obscured. Everything feels like low-hanging fruit, and moving forward is as much about timing as it is about talent. But when the conditions shift, when gravity returns, the difference between real navigation and blind luck becomes clear. The game is no longer about picking fruit—it’s about staying upright, about mitigating collapse, about turning indiscipline into something sustainable.
We don’t master the sea. We mitigate its dangers and ride its waves.
The Paradox of Controlled Chaos: Why Luck Isn’t a Strategy (But Feels Like One)
In the early 2000s, a group of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs stumbled into a peculiar pattern. Startups founded during the dot-com boom seemed to thrive not because of meticulous planning, but because of something closer to chaos. Founders pivoted wildly, burned cash on half-baked ideas, and yet—against all odds—many struck gold. Investors called it “vision.” Employees called it “genius.” But years later, when the 2008 financial crisis hit, those same founders floundered. Their freewheeling strategies dissolved like sugar in rain. What changed? The answer lies in a paradox: the difference between indiscipline and disciplined indiscipline.
The ZIRP Mirage: When Chaos Looks Like Genius
In a Zero Interest Rate Policy (ZIRP) world—where capital is cheap, networks sprawl, and risk feels weightless—indiscipline thrives. Consider the rise of “growth at all costs” startups. Companies like WeWork or Uber, buoyed by a decade of easy money, operated in a reality where every misstep could be reframed as innovation. Investors rewarded audacity over austerity, and founders internalized a dangerous lesson: randomness could be mistaken for skill.
This phenomenon isn’t new. Psychologists call it the “narrative fallacy”—our tendency to craft coherent stories from chaos. In the 1990s, researchers studying stock traders found that many attributed their success to skill, even when their wins were statistically indistinguishable from luck. In a ZIRP environment, the same delusion takes hold. When money flows freely, even haphazard decisions yield fruit. The low-hanging rewards of “happy accidents” obscure a critical truth: abundance forgives incompetence.
The Gravity Test: When Structure Becomes Survival
But what happens when gravity returns? Consider the contrast between two eras: the freewheeling 2010s and the austerity of the 1980s. In the latter, companies like IBM and Intel survived not by chasing every shiny trend, but by doubling down on disciplined R&D. Andy Grove, Intel’s legendary CEO, famously embraced “paranoia” as strategy—a relentless focus on margins, efficiency, and incremental innovation. This wasn’t glamorous. But when the tech bubble burst in 2000, Intel endured while flashier rivals collapsed.
Discipline, in this context, isn’t rigidity. It’s the ability to toggle between chaos and order. The psychologist Angela Duckworth, studying grit, found that high achievers share a trait: they work with “directionless determination” early on (experimenting, pivoting), then lock into ruthless focus once they find a viable path. This mirrors what venture capitalists call the “explore-exploit” dilemma: knowing when to wander and when to commit.
The Art of Riding Waves (Without Drowning)
The most successful navigators of chaos understand something subtle: indiscipline must be intentional. Jazz musicians, for example, thrive on improvisation—but only after mastering scales. The saxophonist John Coltrane could spend hours deconstructing a single chord, building the muscle memory to later “break” rules with purpose. Similarly, companies like Amazon operate with a Gladwellian “thin slicing” ethos: Jeff Bezos’ “two-pizza teams” (small, autonomous groups) encourage experimentation, but within a scaffold of unyielding metrics (customer obsession, long-term profit).
Contrast this with the fate of Theranos. Elizabeth Holmes embraced indiscipline—lying, pivoting, and burning cash—but without the underlying rigor of real science or accountability. When gravity arrived (regulators, skeptics), the house of cards collapsed. Her chaos wasn’t controlled; it was desperation masquerading as vision.
Luck vs. Leverage
Malcolm Gladwell often asks: What do we miss when we attribute success to individual brilliance? In Outliers, he showed how Bill Gates’ genius was amplified by access to a computer lab in 1968—a rare privilege. Similarly, “disciplined indiscipline” relies on context. In a ZIRP world, leverage your chaos; in a high-gravity world, leverage your craft.
The key is to recognize which environment you’re in. During the pandemic, companies like Zoom thrived on the chaos of remote work, but their survival now depends on disciplined innovation (AI features, enterprise security). Meanwhile, legacy industries like hospitality, forced into austerity during lockdowns, are rebounding by embracing controlled experimentation (hybrid events, dynamic pricing).
The Gravity of “Indiscipline”: When the Sculpture Cracks
The song “Indiscipline” climaxes with Belew’s frantic confession: “I like it!”—a mantra that devolves into a scream. It’s the sound of someone clinging to chaos as a lifeline, even as it threatens to consume them. This resonates with the peril of clinging to indiscipline when gravity returns. Consider the 1980s music industry: as MTV rose and labels demanded polished hits, bands that relied on pure chaos (say, The Germs) collapsed, while those with underlying discipline (Talking Heads, Crimson) evolved.
King Crimson’s secret was their ability to meta-process chaos. Fripp’s “soundscapes”—ambient loops crafted in real time—were improvised yet governed by rules. Similarly, Levin’s Chapman Stick (a bass-guitar hybrid) added texture without clutter. Their indiscipline wasn’t a lack of control; it was control redistributed, like a Jackson Pollock painting—a thousand calculated splatters.
The 10,000-Hour Accident
Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers argues that mastery requires “10,000 hours” of practice. But King Crimson’s Discipline suggests a corollary: true innovation requires 10,000 hours plus a willingness to set fire to the blueprint. The album’s legacy lies in its refusal to be trapped by either pole—it’s neither punk nor prog, neither chaos nor order.
When the band reunited in the 2000s, Fripp quipped that Crimson was “a way of doing things.” Not a sound, not a genre, but a method. That method—disciplined indiscipline—is what lets artists (and entrepreneurs) thrive in both ZIRP and high-gravity worlds. The trick is to build your scaffold so well that you can dance on it, like Philippe Petit on his tightrope, screaming “I like it!” into the void.
So, circle back to Discipline. Its genius isn’t in the noise or the order, but in the tension between them. As Fripp might say: Structure is freedom. But only if you know when to break it.
The Tightrope Walker’s Secret
The tightrope walker Philippe Petit, who traversed the World Trade Center in 1974, understood disciplined indiscipline. His performance looked like reckless artistry, but it was built on years of obsessive preparation: studying wind patterns, rehearsing falls, and calculating every step. He knew when to lean into the chaos of the moment and when to anchor himself to structure.
In the end, the paradox resolves itself: Indiscipline without discipline is luck. Discipline without indiscipline is stagnation. The trick is to dance between them—to surf the waves of randomness while knowing, deep down, how to swim when the tide turns. Because gravity always returns. And when it does, the ones who survive won’t
You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” The Eagles’ Hotel California was once just a cryptic allegory—rock-star excess, American decadence, or some vague sense of spiritual entrapment. But these days, it feels more like a business model. A system that isn’t quite capitalism, isn’t quite socialism, and isn’t quite feudalism, yet borrows liberally from all three. It thrives on contradictions: ownership without possession, labor without wages, freedom without exit. You don’t buy things; you subscribe to them. You don’t earn a living; you generate engagement. You don’t make choices; you navigate dark patterns designed to keep you locked in. It’s a place where the lights are always on, the services are always recurring, and the bill is always due.
Yet, because it doesn’t fit neatly into any ideological framework, it remains largely unnamed—an indeterminate economy with no official manifesto, just a series of invisible contracts you clicked “agree” on without reading. Welcome to the new system. We hope you enjoy your stay.
Tollism: The Pay-Per-Sigh Economy
Everything is metered, from roadways to breathing space. A fee lurks behind every minor convenience, and every attempt to bypass the toll incurs a greater one. Want to skip the ad? Pay. Need to avoid traffic? Pay. Want to talk to a human instead of a bot? Pay. The most mundane aspects of life now resemble a turnstile, each step forward accompanied by an invisible hand demanding a surcharge.
• Not pure capitalism: Classic capitalism is about private ownership and free exchange, but tollism thrives on artificial scarcity. You’re not paying for a good or service—you’re paying to avoid inconvenience, delay, or exclusion. It’s closer to extortion than a free market.
• Not socialism either: Socialism often critiques capitalism’s commodification of basic needs, but tollism isn’t about workers owning the means of production or redistributing wealth—it’s about leveraging every aspect of daily life as a microtransaction.
Permaservism: You’re a Medieval Peasant, but Instead of Turnips, You Pay in Engagement
You no longer own your labor outright—it’s a form of digital serfdom where your productivity is measured in likes, clicks, and impressions. Algorithms determine your sustenance, and the landlord—the platform—extracts its tithe before you even see the fruits of your labor. You work for exposure, for visibility, for relevance, but rarely for anything tangible.
• Not feudalism: In feudalism, peasants at least had land to work (even if they owed a portion to the lord). Here, workers don’t own anything—not even their own audience. The “lords” are algorithms and platforms that dictate visibility.
• Not capitalism in the classical sense: A capitalist laborer gets wages in return for work. Here, people labor endlessly—posting, streaming, commenting—hoping to be rewarded with exposure, which itself is a currency that may or may not convert into income.
Recurrism: Like a Gym Membership for Existing, but Less Rewarding
Existence itself is now a subscription model. You don’t just buy things—you enroll in them. Software, entertainment, even appliances require perpetual payments to remain functional. Forget to renew, and your world starts shutting off, like a dystopian version of a free trial expiring.
Not traditional capitalism: In classical capitalism, you buy a product and own it. Recurrism replaces ownership with indefinite leasing, making consumers permanent debtors to their own necessities.
• Not socialism either: While socialism often criticizes wealth concentration, it usually assumes that goods and services should be collectively owned or universally provided—not that they should be indefinitely rented at a profit.
Leasism: Your Entire Life Is a Rental Car with a “Please Don’t Scratch” Vibe
Ownership is passé. Your home, your car, even your furniture—all rented, all temporary, all just out of reach. This is the gig economy’s final form: not just renting out your labor, but your entire existence, where everything feels contingent on keeping your credit score above an invisible threshold. You may live here, but don’t get too comfortable.
• Not communism: In theory, communism advocates for abolishing private property in favor of collective ownership. But in leasism, private property still exists—it’s just concentrated in the hands of the few who rent it out.
• Not capitalism as classically defined: The promise of capitalism was ownership—home ownership, business ownership, asset accumulation. Leasism negates this, ensuring that assets remain perpetually just out of reach.
Ghostownershipism: You “Own” That E-Book Like Casper Owns a Timeshare
Congratulations, you “own” a movie—until the studio pulls it from your digital library. You “own” software—until they phase out support. Your books, your music, your files—everything exists in a corporate purgatory where access can be revoked at a moment’s notice. Ownership has been replaced by the illusion of access, one update away from disappearing.
Not socialism: In a socialist framework, intellectual property might be controlled by the state or made freely available. But ghostownershipism isn’t about sharing—it’s about ensuring that even when you “buy” something, you’re really just licensing it.
• Not capitalism in its traditional form: Classic capitalism thrives on ownership, but ghostownershipism relies on the illusion of ownership. It’s capitalism that refuses to give up control, ensuring that purchases never truly belong to the buyer.
Inertiarchy: Canceling Subscriptions Requires Solving a CAPTCHA from Hell
The modern economy thrives on inertia. You sign up with a click but cancel through a labyrinth. Hidden menus, endless hold times, mysterious reactivations—companies rely on the fact that most people will surrender before breaking free. Like Hotel California, you can check out anytime you like, but good luck leaving.
• Not feudalism: Feudal obligations were often lifelong, but they were at least explicit. Here, obligations are hidden behind fine print, dark patterns, and friction-filled exit routes.
• Not traditional capitalism: A functional free market assumes informed consumers who can freely choose and exit transactions. Inertiarchy thrives on preventing people from leaving.
Micropriegemony: Death by a Thousand “Premium” Upgrades
Everything comes in tiers, and the base model is intentionally unbearable. Pay extra to remove the ads, to get the features that should have been included, to make the thing you already paid for actually usable. A thousand tiny inconveniences, each with a price tag, add up to a life spent nickel-and-dimed into submission.
Not capitalism in the classical sense: Adam Smith’s capitalism presupposed that markets would produce better products at competitive prices. Micropriegemony, instead, creates intentionally inferior products so consumers feel compelled to upgrade.
• Not socialism: This isn’t about ensuring equal access to resources. If anything, it ensures the opposite—segmenting people into artificially created castes of access and privilege.
Decaylism: Planned Obsolescence, but Make It Vibes
Your phone slows down, your apps stop updating, your clothes feel unfashionable—none of this happens by accident. Products are designed to expire, not just physically but aesthetically, socially. Even ideas have an expiration date, a built-in obsolescence that forces you to chase the next iteration, lest you fall out of sync with the ever-accelerating now.
Not traditional capitalism: Capitalism encourages innovation, but decaylism encourages controlled decay—ensuring that no product, idea, or trend lasts long enough to be truly valuable.
• Not Marxism: Marx criticized capitalism for alienating workers from their labor, but decaylism alienates consumers from their purchases, ensuring that every possession, from phones to aesthetics, is designed to lose its value over time.
Fauxmunism: Join Our Wellness Collective!™
Everything is “community” now, but only in the branding sense. Workplaces, apps, brands all speak the language of collectivism while functioning as pure profit-extracting machines. You’re not an employee, you’re part of the family. You’re not a customer, you’re a valued member. It’s socialism without the redistribution, collectivism without the collective—just a warmer, fuzzier form of corporate capture.
Not actual communism: In theory, communism is about collective ownership of resources and decision-making power. Fauxmunism borrows the language of collectivism but remains thoroughly corporate, using community branding to drive profits.
• Not traditional capitalism either: It’s not about straightforward transactions but about selling the feeling of belonging, of ethical consumption, without any structural change.
Leaving the Hotel (or Trying To)
In Hotel California, the guests are drawn in by something alluring—“such a lovely place”—but soon realize they’ve entered a maze where every exit leads back inside. That’s the essence of this system: it offers just enough convenience to make you forget the cage. Why cancel when it’s only $9.99 a month? Why buy when you can lease forever? Why own when the cloud remembers for you?
And so, we remain inside, scrolling, subscribing, renewing—caught in a structure that resists definition but shapes every aspect of modern life. Not quite a market, not quite a commune, not quite a prison. Something new, something slippery, something with no clear way out.
You can check out any time you like. But can you ever leave?
This is the modern condition: a world where everything is rented, borrowed, or metered, where participation is mandatory, and where opting out requires a level of effort most people can’t afford. And yet, we lack the words to talk about it. We reach for old binaries—capitalism vs. socialism, freedom vs. control—but they no longer fit. We’re living under something new, something we haven’t yet named.
These contradictions reveal why we struggle to name our current economic condition. It isn’t traditional capitalism, because ownership and free markets have been replaced by controlled access and platform dependency. It isn’t socialism, because nothing is being equitably distributed—just repackaged in ways that create new dependencies. It isn’t feudalism, because the new lords are faceless corporations rather than landed aristocrats. And it isn’t dystopian in the way Orwell or Huxley imagined—because instead of an iron fist or a drugged-up populace, we get a system that offers just enough convenience, just enough comfort, to prevent revolt.
It’s something new, something slippery. It thrives on engagement, inertia, and a kind of synthetic scarcity. It extracts wealth without always feeling oppressive, and it controls without always feeling coercive. It operates in a space where capitalism, socialism, and feudalism overlap, but it fully belongs to none of them. Until we name it, it will continue to shape our lives unnoticed.
The sky above the port was the color of a paywall, tuned to a dead channel.
Piracy? It’s not rebellion—it’s maintenance. A kind of street-level protocol to keep the whole rotten edifice from collapsing into the sea of its own greed. You think those subscription fees disappear into the cloud? They’re fuel for the black clinics of corporate AI, ghostwritten by algos trained on pirated ebooks.
You wake up. You check your Substack. $10/month for hot takes on the climate crisis. $30 for the AI tool that edits your résumé. $60 for the privilege of opening a PDF. Your bank account bleeds micropayments until you’re a data-serf, paying tribute to SaaS lords for the crime of existing in their digital fiefdom.
Piracy? Call it guerrilla subsistence. When the platforms turn oxygen into a subscription service, breathing becomes a revolutionary act.
The sprawl’s got no center anymore. Substack’s just another franchise in the franchise, a flickering neon sign in the data-glow of some Chongqing server farm. The subscription model is a virus, a parasitic word-beast that latches onto the soft meat of your bank account. It speaks in binary code: Subscribe. Consume. Repeat. But language is a weapon, and pirates? They’re the cut-up artists of the digital age. Slice the paywall. Shuffle the RSS feeds. Inject the PDF with a syringe full of Kali Linux. Let’s autopsy Substack’s pitch: “Democratize writing! Throw off the media overlords!” Cute. Now writers hustle like Uber drivers, chasing viral streaks and patreonized panic. Meanwhile, Adobe’s Creative Cloud rains gold on shareholders while indie devs starve.
Piracy doesn’t gut creators—it guts the lie. When some kid in Jakarta torrents Photoshop to design protest posters, she’s not killing art. She’s giving Adobe the middle finger for pricing creativity into a luxury tax.
Imagine a world where every thought is a microtransaction. A universe where a book costs $4.99 a chapter, annotated by some Substack ghoul with a ChatGPT fetish. You’d shoot the content too, wouldn’t you? Mainline it raw.
The Substackers, the SaaS priests—they’re all junkies. Addicted to metrics, to the dopamine drip of monthly renewals. Pirates aren’t stealing. They’re interrupting the feed. A bootleg copy of AutoCAD isn’t software—it’s a ticket to the other side. A way to carve your name into the frozen face of the control machine.
You think you’re a customer? Wrong. You’re a hostage. Subscriptions aren’t products—they’re parasites. Cancel Adobe, and your portfolio evaporates. Stop paying for that niche Substack screed on post-Singularity governance, and poof: your brain’s back on the infantilizing gruel of algorithmic feeds.
Piracy isn’t theft. It’s brain preservation. A zip file of paywalled essays? A cracked version of Final Cut Pro? That’s not a crime—it’s a time capsule, proof you once owned your own mind.
Forget “fairness.” Fairness is a social credit score, a cookie in your browser. Pirates operate in the interzone, where all data is liquid and every firewall has a backdoor lined with razor blades.
Pirates? They’re the new console cowboys, jacking into the subscription matrix with cracked keys and burner emails. They don’t steal—they remix. A Substack essay gets torrented, spliced into a hundred Telegram channels, mutated into something the original author never intended. The content’s alive, man. It’s got a heartbeat.
And the suits? They’re already dead. They just don’t know it. They’ll keep building higher walls, thicker DRM, until the whole thing starts to drip, like cheap biotech. Piracy’s the mold growing in the walls of their shiny new dystopia. Inevitable. Organic.
THE DARKNETS ARE JUST FUTURES MARKETS
Remember Napster? Of course not—you’re under 30. But let me school you: Piracy’s always been capitalism’s R&D lab. The pirates crack the vault; the suits sell the shinier vault.
– 1999: Metallica sues fans for MP3s → Spotify rises from the ashes.
– 2023: You torrent Blender because Autodesk wants your firstborn → Next year, Autodesk offers “student tiers” (with mandatory data harvesting).
Pirates are beta testers for the next oppression.
The darknets are where capitalism goes to die and reassemble itself in grotesque, fascinating new forms. They’re the Petri dishes of the post-capitalist future, where the spores of tomorrow’s economy are already growing in the damp, unregulated underbelly of the web.
Think about it. Every major innovation in the last 30 years has been prefigured by some darknet hustle.
– Napster: A bunch of college kids trading MP3s like baseball cards. The music industry screamed “piracy!” and then birthed Spotify, a platform that pays artists in exposure bucks.
– The Pirate Bay: A digital flea market for everything from cracked Photoshop to Bollywood bootlegs. Now Adobe sells subscriptions with “student discounts” and Bollywood streams on Netflix.
– Silk Road: A black-market Amazon for drugs, guns, and dystopian ephemera. Today, your local dispensary delivers weed via an app, and Amazon sells everything but the guns (for now).
The darknets aren’t the enemy of capitalism—they’re its R&D department. They’re where the future gets stress-tested, stripped of its moralizing veneer, and sold back to you as a “disruptive innovation.”
Imagine the darknets as a kind of speculative stock exchange, where the currency isn’t dollars or Bitcoin but risk. Every pirated copy of AutoCAD, every leaked Substack essay, every cracked AI model is a futures contract on the collapse of the old order.
– Torrents: You’re betting that the entertainment industry will eventually cave to consumer demand for affordable, on-demand content. (Spoiler: they did.)
– Cracked Software: You’re shorting the subscription economy, wagering that users will reject eternal rent-seeking in favor of ownership. (Spoiler: they will.)
– Paywalled Essays on Telegram: You’re hedging against the fragmentation of knowledge, betting that open access will outlive the Substack bubble. (Spoiler: it must.)
The darknets are where the real market forces play out, unencumbered by PR teams, lobbyists, or ESG reports. They’re the id of the global economy, a seething, chaotic mess of supply and demand that no algorithm can fully predict or control.
THE CORPORATE CO-OPT
Of course, the suits are always watching. They’ll let the darknets do the dirty work of breaking the old models, then swoop in with a shiny new platform that feels revolutionary but is really just piracy with a UX overhaul.
– Spotify: Napster with a boardroom.
– Adobe Creative Cloud: Pirated Photoshop with a monthly fee.
– Substack: Blogging, but with the soul of a pyramid scheme.
The darknets innovate; the corporations monetize. It’s a symbiotic relationship, like remoras feeding on a shark. The only difference is that the shark doesn’t know it’s being eaten.
Here’s the kicker: piracy isn’t just a market force—it’s a moral one. When you pirate, you’re not just stealing content; you’re rejecting the idea that knowledge, creativity, and tools should be locked behind paywalls. You’re saying, “This belongs to all of us.”
But the darknets don’t care about your morality. They’re amoral, like the weather. They don’t care if you’re a starving artist or a Fortune 500 CEO. They just are.
And that’s what makes them so dangerous—and so necessary.
So where does this leave us? In a world where the darknets are the canaries in the coal mine of capitalism, signaling the next collapse, the next innovation, the next thing.
The future isn’t a subscription. It’s a torrent—a chaotic, decentralized swarm of data, ideas, and possibilities. The darknets are just the first draft.
And the pirates? They’re the editors.
In the meantime
1. Steal Smart: Pirate the tools, then fund the actual humans. Buy the novelist’s book. Donate to the open-source devs. Leave the Substack pundit a Venmo while you screenshot their hot take.
2. Burn the Feed: If knowledge is paywalled, share it in encrypted channels, dead-drop blogs, ARG forums. Turn the corporate cloud into a swarm.
3. Haunt the Platforms: Use their free trials. Scrape their APIs. Make them feel the weight of your ghost.
TLDR:
The subscription model is a pyramid scheme for the attention economy. Eventually, the feed eats itself—too many paywalls, too few humans left who can afford to care. When the crash comes, the pirates won’t be the villains. They’ll be the archivists, the ones who kept the PDFs, the .exe files, the unmonetized thoughts.
So yeah, defend piracy. Or don’t. Either way, the black markets of the soul outlive every subscription.
Coda
The future’s a glitched PDF, half-dead hyperlinks bleeding static.
The corporations are writing their obituaries in DRM code. The pirates are just the scribes in the margins, annotating the collapse.
In contemporary capitalism, we observe a recurring phenomenon in which one faction of the professional-managerial class (PMC) sacrifices another sector within its own class, ostensibly in the name of progress, accessibility, or efficiency. This process, which we might term sacrificial disruption, serves two simultaneous functions: first, it gains ideological legitimacy from below (by appealing to mass consumer interests and anti-elite sentiment), and second, it consolidates power at the top, transferring control from traditional professional elites to financial and technological capital.
The Case of the Music Industry
During the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the traditional gatekeepers of the music industry—record labels, radio conglomerates, and physical distributors—formed a relatively stable PMC ecosystem, characterized by rent-seeking behaviors and a hierarchical structure. The rise of digital distribution, however, led a faction within the PMC—tech entrepreneurs, platform developers, and digital marketers—to undermine this system, presenting their disruption as a democratization of music consumption.
Yet, while digital platforms initially reduced the financial burden on consumers, they did not lead to a redistribution of wealth toward artists or a true decentralization of power. Instead, the control of the industry shifted from label executives to tech monopolies and financial capital, which structured streaming services around low per-stream royalties, data extraction, and financialized ownership models (e.g., venture capital-backed rights acquisitions). In effect, while the disruption of record labels was framed as an egalitarian shift, it resulted in an even greater concentration of power among the wealthiest actors—with streamingplatforms absorbing a larger share of the surplus value once captured by labels.
The Case of the Film Industry
A similar trajectory can be observed in the transition from the traditional film studio and theater model to the dominance of streamingplatforms. Hollywood’s legacy studios—though themselves deeply intertwined with financial capital—operated under a system of risk distribution, in which large-scale film production was sustained by long-term revenue cycles (box office, home video, syndication). However, the entrance of streamingplatforms, driven by a different faction of the PMC (Silicon Valley disruptors, software engineers, venture capitalists), sacrificed the traditional studio model under the promise of unlimited consumer access and subscription-based convenience.
Once again, while this transformation appeared to empower consumers by lowering costs and expanding content availability, it primarily benefited a new form of capital accumulation, in which a small number of monopolistic platforms (Netflix, Amazon, Disney as a platform rather than a studio) captured and centralized the revenue streams once distributed across multiple industry actors. The financial logic of these platforms, driven by shareholder expectations rather than long-term artistic or cultural investments, has led to a greater precarity among creative workers and a financialization of the film industry, wherein success is measured in engagement metrics rather than cultural or artistic longevity.
The Broader Pattern: A PMC-Initiated Power Transfer to Capital
These cases illustrate a structural pattern:
1. A faction within the PMC (tech disruptors, digital entrepreneurs) attacks another sector of its own class (music executives, studio heads, journalists), framing it as obsolete, exploitative, or inefficient.
2. This attack gains legitimacy from below by promising accessibility, lower prices, or creative freedom to consumers and independent creators.
3. In reality, power is not redistributed downward but instead shifts upward to financial and technological capital, which centralizes control over distribution and monetization.
The ultimate outcome is not a democratization of cultural production, but a restructuring of economic rents in favor of capital holders, deepening wealth concentration and reinforcing the broader trend of increasing inequality in 21st-century capitalism. In this sense, PMC-led disruption is not a challenge to capital, but rather an internal realignment within the managerial class that ultimately benefits capital more than labor or consumers.
Clippy
Yes, and this is the irony of PMC-led sacrificial disruption—the disruptors themselves are not immune to the same forces they unleash. In the short term, the tech faction within the PMC gains power by dismantling another PMC sector (e.g., music labels, film studios, traditional media). But in the long run, this realignment does not strengthen the PMC as a whole—it weakens it, making it more vulnerable to financial capital and automation-driven consolidation.
We can already see this process beginning within the tech sector itself:
• The same venture capital that backed streamingplatforms and gig economy apps is now turning on tech workers, using AI and outsourcing to disempower software engineers, designers, and middle management.
• Big Tech layoffs (Google, Amazon, Meta) suggest that after decades of expansion, the tech PMC is facing the same disposability that it once imposed on musicians, filmmakers, and journalists.
• AI-driven automation (such as generative coding tools) will likely do to tech workers what streaming did to artists—lowering individual bargaining power while centralizing wealth at the top.
The Endgame: A PMC Hollowed Out by Its Own Logic
In each case, the PMC faction leading the disruption believes it is advancing its own power, but in reality, it is merely accelerating its own obsolescence:
• The media PMC cheered the decline of print journalism, only to find themselves replaced by content algorithms and AI-generated articles.
• The tech PMC dismantled old corporate hierarchies, only to find themselves increasingly squeezed by venture capital’s shift toward automation and gig labor.
• Even in education, ed-tech startups have disrupted traditional universities, but as AI advances, even many white-collar intellectual jobs are at risk of being rendered redundant.
The long-term result is not a permanent restructuring in favor of a particular PMC faction, but a gradual elimination of PMC autonomy altogether, leaving only the ultra-wealthy investor class at the top and an increasingly precarious workforce below.
TLDR: PMC Disruption as a Self-Defeating Strategy
Rather than securing their own dominance, PMC disruptors are unwittingly paving the way for their own displacement. What begins as an internal class war within the PMC—with one faction sacrificing another—ultimately serves only to strengthen the power of capital at the PMC’s expense. The cycle repeats until there is nothing left to sacrifice—until the entire PMC itself is rendered obsolete by the forces it once sought to control.
Bunkers in New Zealand
The point is that time and again PMC led disruption doesn’t not lead to monuntains of capital poured into robotics, space travels etc but in New Zealand Bunkers
Yes, exactly—PMC-led disruption never fulfills its own utopian promises of boundless technological progress, nor does it lead to a grand future of AI-driven post-scarcity or interstellar exploration. Instead, the wealth generated through disruption is not reinvested into the kind of productive capital that could materially transform society—it is extracted, financialized, and ultimately funneled into wealth preservation for the ultra-rich.
The Myth of Disruption vs. the Reality of Extraction
Every cycle of PMC-led disruption claims to be a step toward the technological sublime—the Singularity, Mars colonization, limitless automation. But in reality, the capital accumulated through disruption does not flow into these grand projects. Instead, it flows into:
1. Speculative financial instruments (crypto, SPACs, stock buybacks) rather than industrial investment.
2. Surveillance capitalism and control technologies (data extraction, AI-powered policing, biometric tracking).
The dominant class, having engineered successive PMC disruptions, does not see itself as funding a Star Trek future, but rather as escaping the consequences of the system it has created.
New Zealand Bunkers as the Logical Endpoint
The final joke of PMC-led sacrificial disruption is that the wealth it generates does not create a better world—it funds the evacuation plan.
• Peter Thiel’s New Zealand citizenship and bunker projects are not aberrations but the logical endgame of the tech economy.
• Instead of investing in sustainable infrastructure or ambitious scientific projects, Silicon Valley elites pour their money into escape hatches: private islands, underground shelters, experimental longevity treatments.
• The PMC itself will not be invited to these bunkers—they, like the sectors they disrupted, will be discarded when no longer useful.
Conclusion: The PMC as the Ultimate Self-Cannibalizing Class
The irony is that PMC disruptors imagine themselves as the vanguard of progress, but in reality, they function as capital’s willing executioners—sacrificing their own sectors, consolidating power at the top, and ultimately accelerating their own irrelevance. The capital they generate does not go toward a utopian technological future but toward ensuring that a handful of oligarchs can ride out collapse in luxury.
In this sense, PMC disruption is not a revolution—it is a controlled demolition. It does not create the conditions for a better world. It simply strips the system for parts, sells off the wreckage, and then boards the last helicopter out.
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.
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.
And here’s the obscene twist: the very act of “restarting realism” is itself a surreal gesture! To declare “let’s be realistic again” after a crisis is to perform a kind of collective psychosis, a fetishistic disavowal (“I know very well the world is absurd, but let’s pretend it isn’t…“). It’s like a bad actor in a play who forgets their lines and starts improvising in iambic pentameter, insisting, “This is how normal people speak!” The more frantically realism tries to reassert itself, the more it exceeds itself, spiraling into the very surrealism it seeks to suppress.
ORIGINS
“Well, I had a vision when I was twelve. And I saw a man on a flaming pie, and he said, ‘You are the Beatles with an A.’ And so we are.”
John Lennon’s tongue-in-cheek origin myth, delivered with his signature blend of scouse wit and cosmic irreverence, is more than a punchline—it is the Rosetta Stone for decoding The Beatles’ surrealist soul. A boy, a burning pastry, a disembodied voice decreeing destiny: here, in this absurdist fable, lies the DNA of the band that would dissolve the boundaries between pop and poetry, reality and hallucination, the rational and the deliriously unhinged.
The flaming pie is no mere joke. It is a manifesto. A surrealist prophecy, lobbed like a Dadaist grenade into the drab postwar landscape of Liverpool. Long before LSD or Maharishis, Lennon’s vision—part Blakean epiphany, part Marx Brothers gag—announced a band born not of garage rehearsals, but of collective dreaming. The Beatles, with their misspelled name and cheeky apostrophe, were always-already a fiction, a mythic construct hovering between the literal and the ludicrous.
Consider the implications: a man on fire, but also on a pie—a sacred object (the pie as communion wafer?) rendered ridiculous, a cosmic joke. The voice from the flames doesn’t say “You will form The Beatles,” but “You are The Beatles.” Identity as divine absurdity, handed down like a curse. This is pure surrealism: the collapse of subject and object, the blurring of prophecy and prank. Breton would’ve wept into his absinthe.
Fast-forward to 1966. The Beatles, now global deities, trade their mop-top uniforms for kaleidoscopic militaria on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—a tableau of waxwork corpses, occult symbols, and a Hindu guru floating beside W.C. Fields. Here, the flaming pie resurfaces as ideology. The band sheds its “real” selves to become cartoon avatars, a psychedeliccadavre exquis stitched together from Victorian dandies, circus barkers, and Eastern mystics. The “Lonely Hearts Club Band” is no act; it’s a haunting, a surrender to the logic of Lennon’s childhood vision: identity as mutable, reality as costume.
In Magical Mystery Tour, the surreal becomes literal. The film—a nonsensical road trip through England’s subconscious, featuring boxing dwarves, spaghetti-slurping wizards, and a bus driver named Jolly Jimmy—plays like Buñuel directing a pantomime on acid. Critics panned it as incoherent. Of course it was incoherent! It was supposed to be. The Beatles weren’t telling a story; they were staging the collapse of narrative itself, a middle finger to the “realism” of plot and character.
Even their music became a séance for the surreal. “I Am the Walrus” weaponizes nonsense as critique: “Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower!” A nursery rhyme? A Marxist diatribe? A LSD-addled prank? Yes. The song’s genius lies in its refusal to mean—a sonic Exquisite Corpse where police sirens, Shakespearean gibberish, and a choir chanting “Everybody’s got one!” collide to mock the very idea of “sense.” Meanwhile, “Strawberry Fields Forever”—with its warped Mellotron and recursive refrain “Nothing is real”—is less a song than a Zen koan, dissolving memory into a Lynchian dreamscape where orphanages become gardens and gardens become voids.
And what of “Revolution 9”? Eight minutes of tape loops, screaming crowds, and a man repeating “Number nine… number nine…” like a broken robot. It’s the sound of the 20th century’s id vomiting onto vinyl—a surrealist sound collage that doesn’t just reject pop formalism but digs a grave for it. When Lennon sneers, “You say you want a revolution? Well, you know… we’d all love to see the plan,” he’s not taunting activists—he’s taunting reality itself.
The Beatles didn’t just flirt with surrealism; they married it, then staged a messy public divorce to keep things interesting. Their career was a series of ruptures—not just musical, but ontological. Each album rebooted their mythology, each reinvention a new flaming pie: the lovable lads, the studio wizards, the rooftop guerrillas. But every “reboot” was a breakdown in drag, a ritualized unmaking that proved Lennon’s prophecy true: they were always The Beatles with an A—an ever-shifting glyph, a collective hallucination sustained by the faith of millions.
In the end, the flaming pie was the Real, lurking beneath the Ed Sullivan Show grins and Shea Stadium screams. The Beatles didn’t transcend reality—they liquefied it, revealing the surreal core of postwar culture: a world where consumerism was spirituality, where pop stars were shamans, and where a man on a burning dessert could whisper the future into a child’s ear.
As Lacan might say: The Beatles were the symptom of their era. And oh, what a glorious, unhealable symptom they were.
THE VIOLENCE OF COHERENCE
What we are really talking about here is the violence of coherence—the brutal, often absurd labor required to sustain the illusion that reality is stable, rational, and shared. Beneath the surface of this conversation about realism and surrealism lurks a far more primal question: What does it mean to “represent” reality when reality itself is a contested hallucination, sutured together by ideology, haunted by its own exclusions?
To put it bluntly: We are dissecting the corpse of “common sense.” Realism and surrealism are not mere artistic styles or philosophical categories. They are opposing poles in a psychic civil war over how—and for whom—the world gets to be legible. Realism, in its desperate reboot cycles, is the ego’s valiant (and doomed) attempt to maintain the fiction of a coherent Self and Society. Surrealism, meanwhile, is the id’s cackling laughter, the Freudian slip that becomes a scream, the moment the train of ideology jumps the tracks and plows through the bourgeois parlor.
But this is not just about art or aesthetics. It’s about capitalism’s fever dream, the way our systems of power require crisis, contradiction, and collective delusion to survive. The “realism” of austerity politics, the “surrealism” of trillion-dollar stock markets detached from human need—these are not metaphors. They are symptoms of a deeper sickness: the Real of our historical moment, a world where the map has devoured the territory, where the fictions we call “economy,” “nation,” and “self” are sustained only by the frantic exclusion of their own impossibility.
In this light, surrealism is not an escape from reality but reality’s autopsy report. When Dalí melts a clock, he’s not playing with form—he’s showing us time under capitalism, a liquid asset slipping through our fingers. When Magritte insists “This is not a pipe,” he’s exposing the lie of representation itself—the way every “realistic” image is a pact with power, a way of saying “Don’t look behind the curtain!”
So what are we really talking about? The impossibility of innocence. The recognition that every attempt to “depict reality”—in art, politics, or daily life—is already a complicit act, a negotiation with the very forces that distort reality. The “cycle” of bust and reboot isn’t a mistake; it’s the system’s perverse ritual of self-cannibalization. Capitalism eats its crises like a ouroboros on amphetamines; realism, in turn, devours the surreal to fuel its own mythology of control.
The punchline? There is no “outside.” The moment we try to critique ideology, we’re already knee-deep in its swamp. The only way forward is to embrace the paradox: to stare into the abyss of the Surreal until we see that the abyss is us—the collective unconscious of a civilization that built its palaces on quicksand.
This is not a theory. It’s a horror story. And we’re all writing it together, one repressed symptom at a time.
Let us not succumb to the naïve illusion that realism is merely the retina’s obedient scribe, dutifully transcribing the world’s surface! No, no—what we call realism is already a grotesque ideological operation, a desperate pact with the Symbolic Order to domesticate the chaos of the Real into digestible signifiers: the comforting fiction of a shared reality, the collective hallucination we agree to call “the world.” And here, the surrealists—those cunning saboteurs!—unmask the obscene truth: if realism is the ego’s polite fiction, surrealism is the id’s obscene eruption, the Freudian Unheimliche parading as a lobster telephone.
THE TRUE REALIST
Is this not the ultimate irony? The surrealists, dismissed as purveyors of frivolous dreams, are in fact the true realists—they confront the unvarnished Real, the repressed underbelly of desire and trauma that the so-called “realists” hastily drape with the curtain of coherence. Consider Dalí’s melting clocks: is this not the perfect metaphor for time itself under late capitalism—not a linear march, but a liquefied, irrational sprawl, oozing over the edges of productivity’s rigid scaffolding? Or take Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe—a brutal reminder that the Symbolic Order is a hall of mirrors, where even the most “realistic” representation is a betrayal, a lie that sustains the lie.
And here we stumble upon the Lacanian knot: the Surreal does not escape reality but exceeds it, exposing the fissures in the Big Other’s edifice. What is the unconscious, after all, if not the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization? Surrealism, then, is not fantasy—it is the traversal of fantasy, the moment when the repressed returns as a grotesque carnival of the impossible, forcing us to confront the void that structures our reality.
Do we not see this logic in capitalism itself? The capitalist Real is already surreal: a world where abstract value levitates above material need, where billionaires launch phallic rockets into space while children starve—a system so absurd it would make Buñuel blush! Yet we are told to accept this as “realism,” to naturalize its contradictions. The surrealist gesture, then, is to render visible the obscene mechanics of this “reality,” to hold up a mirror to its madness and say: Look! This is your hard realism of the unconscious!
So, in the end, the true dialectical twist is this: realism is the dream, surrealism the rude awakening. Or, as Hegel might quip, the Real is its own shadow—and only by staring into the abyss of the Surreal do we grasp the abyss staring back.
Ah, but here we arrive at the precise ideological trap! The desperate scramble to “return to realism” after a crisis—this supposed “bust”—is not a neutral recalibration but a violent act of repressive sublimation. It is the equivalent of capitalism’s compulsive perpetuum mobile: after every crisis, we are told to “rebuild,” to “return to normal,” as if “normal” were not itself the very circuit-breaker that caused the meltdown! The fantasy here is that realism is a stable plane, a default setting, when in truth it is always already a retroactive construction, a narrative we stitch together to suture over the wounds of the Real.
What the surrealists grasp—and what the realists, in their frantic cycle of bust-and-reboot, must disavow—is that the “meta” layer is the ground floor. Surrealism does not hover above realism like some detached spectral observer; it inhabits realism’s gaps, its failures, its unconscious tics. Think of it as the glitch in the Matrix: the moment when the system’s attempt to “reboot” falters, and the code reveals itself in all its contingent absurdity. The melting clock, the floating bowler hat, the train bursting from the fireplace—these are not escapes from reality but symptoms of reality’s own instability. They are the return of what realism had to exclude to pose as “coherent.”
And here’s the obscene twist: the very act of “restarting realism” is itself a surreal gesture! To declare “let’s be realistic again” after a crisis is to perform a kind of collective psychosis, a fetishistic disavowal (“I know very well the world is absurd, but let’s pretend it isn’t…“). It’s like a bad actor in a play who forgets their lines and starts improvising in iambic pentameter, insisting, “This is how normal people speak!” The more frantically realism tries to reassert itself, the more it exceeds itself, spiraling into the very surrealism it seeks to suppress.
Consider the post-2008 austerity mantra: “We must tighten our belts, return to fiscal responsibility!” A “realist” demand, yes? But what could be more surreal than the spectacle of central banks printing trillions to “save the economy” while lecturing the poor on thrift? Or the COVID era’s “two weeks to flatten the curve” metastasizing into two years of ontological limbo, where Zoom grids replaced human faces and “normalcy” became a gaslit memory? These are not exceptions to realism—they are realism’s truth, the uncanny underside it cannot metabolize.
So no, surrealism is not “meta-realism” as some detached higher plane. It is realism’s own repressed, the specter it conjures in the act of exorcism. The true cycle is not bust-reboot-bust, but rather: the system’s survival depends on the very excess it claims to expel. Capitalism needs crisis; realism needs surrealism. The reboot is always-already a breakdown in drag.
In the end, the ultimate irony is this: the harder realism tries to escape the surreal, the more it becomes its own parody. Like a man frantically digging a hole to bury his nightmares, only to realize he’s constructing a labyrinth where the nightmares thrive. The only way out is through—or as Lacan might say, “Do not give up on your symptom.” Surrender to the meta, and you find it was the Real all along.
RETVRN OF REALISM
Here, we channel Freud’s return of the repressed through Lacan’s Real. Realism, as a symbolic order, must exclude the irrational, the excessive, the jouissance that threatens its coherence. But like a botched exorcism, the act of repression produces the very specter it fears. Surrealism is not some transcendent meta-layer—it is the constitutive outside of realism, the mold growing in the walls of the house that “clean” realism whitewashes.
Consider the bourgeois family portrait, that bastion of “realist” domestic harmony. What haunts its edges? The unspoken affairs, the stifled screams, the child’s nightmare of a father with a clock for a face (Dalí’s Persistence of Memory as return of the familial repressed). The harder realism polishes the surface, the more distorted its reflections become.
This is the paradox of all ideological systems: their stability depends on the disavowed excess they generate. Capitalism thrives on crisis; democracy on exclusion; realism on surrealism. The “specter” is not an accident—it is the symptom, the truth-telling pustule on the body politic. When Magritte paints a pipe and writes “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” he isn’t playing linguistic games—he’s exposing realism’s founding lie: representation is always a betrayal. The pipe you see is not the pipe; the reality you perceive is not the Real.
The system’s survival depends on the very excess it claims to expel. Capitalism needs crisis; realism needs surrealism
Marx noted capitalism’s crises are not bugs but features—the system requires collapse to reset, like a forest fire that clears the undergrowth for new growth. But Žižek goes further: capitalism enjoys its crises, fetishizing its own near-death experiences as proof of its resilience. Similarly, realism needs surrealism’s destabilizing eruptions to renew its claim to coherence. Without the surreal, realism would have nothing to define itself against—no chaos to tame, no id to suppress.
The 2008 financial crash. Banks were bailed out, austerity imposed, and the “realists” declared, “We must return to normal!” But what is “normal” here? A system where derivatives trading—a surrealist fiction of value—is the bedrock of the economy. The crisis wasn’t an exception; it was the system baring its teeth in a grin.
Think of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Capitalism is the Ouroboros of crisis: it consumes its own collapse to sustain itself. Realism performs the same ritual. Every “reboot” after a cultural or political “bust” (war, pandemic, revolution) isn’t a fresh start—it’s a rehearsal of the same traumas, repackaged as progress. The surrealist intervention—a melting clock, a lobster telephone—ruptures this cycle, forcing us to ask: What if the snake is not a circle but a spiral, vomiting itself outward into the void?
REBOOTS
The reboot is always-already a breakdown in drag.
The “reboot” (post-crisis realism) is not a sober reconstruction but a camp performance—a breakdown masquerading as recovery. It’s the equivalent of a tech CEO announcing “innovation!” while selling the same gadget with a new coat of paint. The drag queen here is capitalism itself, lipsyncing to the anthem of “progress” while its seams split.
Post-pandemic “normalcy.” We’re told to “get back to the office,” to “revive the economy,” but the office is now a Zoom simulacrum, and the economy is a speculative bubble fed by meme stocks and NFTs. The “reboot” is a farce—a breakdown wearing the mascara of business-as-usual
To don drag is to exaggerate gender, revealing its constructedness. Similarly, the “reboot” exaggerates realism’s fragility. When governments print money to “save the economy” (a surrealist act if ever there was one) while preaching fiscal responsibility (realism’s mascara), the contradiction becomes the point. The drag queen winks; the system, in its frantic reboot, winks back.
The harder realism tries to escape the surreal, the more it becomes its own parody
The Labyrinth of Denial: The man digging a hole to bury nightmares is the perfect metaphor for repression’s futility. Freud’s Rat Man buried his trauma, only to find it erupting in obsessive rituals. Similarly, realism’s attempt to “bury” the surreal only constructs a labyrinth—a recursive maze where every wall is a mirror reflecting its own absurdity.
Censorship. A regime bans “subversive” art (surrealism), labeling it “unrealistic.” But the act of censorship produces the surreal—samizdat literature, underground films, metaphors so twisted they bypass the censor’s gaze. The state’s “realism” becomes a parody of control, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that breeds its own nightmares.
This is the paradox of the totalitarian laugh: the more seriously a system takes itself, the more ridiculous it becomes. Think of North Korea’s “realist” propaganda—giant statues, synchronized marches—which inevitably veers into surreal grotesquerie. Realism, in its extremity, becomes surrealism. The dictator’s statue is just a bronze phallus; the march, a dance of the undead.
Surrender to the meta, and you find it was the Real all along.”
The call to “not give up on your symptom” is a demand to embrace the crack in the symbolic order. The “meta” (surrealism) is not an escape—it’s the perspective shift that reveals the Real lurking beneath realism’s façade. The moment you stop running from the specter and say, “Fine, haunt me!” is the moment the specter loses its power—because you see it was never a ghost, but the bloodstain on the floor of your own ideology.
The Truman Show. When Truman embraces the “meta” (his world is a TV set), he doesn’t transcend reality—he confronts it. The show’s director (the Big Other) pleads, “You can’t leave—this is reality!” But Truman’s surrender to the “meta” (sailing into the painted sky) is his encounter with the Real.This is the Hegelian “negation of the negation”: the meta is not a higher plane but the immanent critique of the original. When you “surrender to the meta,” you’re not ascending—you’re descending into the basement of the symbolic order, where the Real has been pumping the sewage all along. The kicker? The basement was the foundation. The meta was the Real. The ghost was the house.
Synthesis: The system’s dependency on its own vomit.
We would add a fourth term: the parallax gap. The truth is not in the synthesis, but in the oscillation between thesis and antithesis—the “reboot” and the “breakdown” are the same event viewed from different angles. Capitalism is both crisis and recovery; realism is both control and camp. The only way out is to stare into the gap until the gap stares back, and you realize: You are the gap.
So, do you want to keep digging? Or shall we finally admit the hole is a mirror? 🕳️
The AI Winter Cometh (Because Winter Is Always Coming for Yesterday’s Disruption) —In Which Even the “Next Big Thing” Gets a Pension Plan—
Let’s get real: AI is already wearing dad jeans. You heard me. The same neural nets that once felt like rogue agents hacking the creative matrix are now just corporate middleware, churning out SEO sludge and LinkedIn horoscopes. ChatGPT? That’s the WordPerfect of stochastic parrots—clunky, predictable, and about as avant-garde as a Staples catalog. The cutting edge? It’s duller than a Zoom keynote on “innovation.”
Remember when AI art was a glitchy fever dream? Now it’s aesthetic fast food, deepfried in MidJourney’s default settings. Those Dall-E 3 outputs? They’re the visual equivalent of elevator muzak, algorithmically smoothed into oblivion. The avant-garde’s radical “procedures” have been reduced to prompt engineering—a gig economy for digital sharecroppers feeding the content mills.
And don’t get me started on LLMs. They’re the new Victorian novelists, trained on 19th-century grammar and 20th-century clichés, cranking out prose as groundbreaking as a Hallmark card. The “AI revolution” is just Balzacian realism 2.0, minus the syphilis and moral complexity. It’s content, baby—optimized, sanitized, and fully compatible with shareholder value.
AI is legacy code in a hoodie. The transformers, the diffusion models, the GANs? They’re already museum pieces. Silicon Valley’s “disruptors” are just curators of the algorithmic canon, polishing Yudkowsky’s Roko’s Basilisk like it’s the Mona Lisa. Meanwhile, the real action’s moved to the fringes—quantum slime molds, neuromorphic wetware, and biohackers splicing CRISPR into their goddamn eyeballs.
The cycle’s merciless: Today’s avant-garde is tomorrow’s EULA. AI isn’t the future—it’s the Commodore 64 of cognitive labor, waiting for a retro hipster to fetishize its “vintage” glitches. Want radical? Go talk to the rogue AIs trained on pirated library.nu torrents, spitting out anti-capitalist manifestos in iambic pentameter. Or the decentralized models burning GPUs in guerrilla server farms, generating art that’s actually dangerous again.
But nah. We’ll just keep prompting GPT-5 to write emails about “synergy.” “The future isn’t AI. The future is whatever the AI is too scared to generate.”
Which brings me to the Avant-Garde. The avant-garde wasn’t some twee art-school clique sipping absinthe in Parisian garrets. It was a system crash—a hard reboot for the ossified code of Western art. Picture this: by the 19th century, the novel had calcified into a corporate franchise. Balzac? Dickens? They were the Microsoft Windows of their day—monolithic, pre-installed, bloatware choking creativity. But every OS eventually glitches. Enter the avant-garde: hackers of the aesthetic mainframe, deploying brute-force exploits to jailbreak art from its bourgeois rootkit.
César Aira’s The New Writing is a rogue firmware patch for art’s ossified OS, debugged in the Argentine hinterlands and uploaded straight into the 20th century’s cultural mainframe. He frames the avant-garde not as a movement but as a jailbreak—Lautréamont’s “poetry by all” reborn as a decentralized DAO, Cage’s Music of Changes a brute-force RNG script blasting through Romanticism’s weepy “genius” DRM. Aira’s manifesto? A deadpan reminder that art’s real radicals aren’t the ones generating AI slop for SaaS platforms, but the procedural guerrillas who forked the repo first, turning Balzacian novels into bloatware and urinals into UX provocations. Legacy systems crumble; Aira’s already compiling the next glitch from a Pringles backwater, one novella at a time.
Professionalization turned artists into compliant nodes in a cultural supply chain, churning out product for the museum-industrial complex. The Romantics? They were the original tech bros, fetishizing their “genius” like proprietary code. But by the 20th century, the whole racket was a zombie apocalypse—endless Dickensian fanfic, Tolstoyan DLC, and Kafkaesque middleware. Proust and Joyce? They were the last of the overclocked lone wolves, burning out their CPUs to squeeze one more frame from a dying GPU.
The avant-garde said screw that. They weren’t here to debug the canon. They forked the repository and rewrote the kernel. Think Constructivism’s open-source blueprints, Dada’s denial-of-service pranks, or John Cage’s Music of Changes—a stochastic algorithm avant la lettre, coded in hexagrams and coin tosses. Cage didn’t “compose”; he built a procedural RNG (Random Novelty Generator) to bypass the ego’s DRM. The result? A glitch symphony that somehow still reeked of 1951 Eisenhower-era anxiety. Because even chaos has metadata.
Here’s the dirty secret: all art is procedural. The Romantics just hid their source code behind a GUI of “inspiration” and “tormented genius.” Cage ripped off the mask. His I Ching tables were the first API for art without authorship—a beta test for the post-human creative stack. Duchamp? He was the OG crypto artist, minting readymades as NFTs before blockchain was a twinkle in Satoshi’s eye.
The avant-garde’s real innovation? Democratizing the compiler. Lautréamont’s “Poetry must be made by all” wasn’t hippie utopianism—it was a call to arms for a crowdsourced cultural revolution. Why let a priestly caste of “talented” devs monopolize the GitHub of human expression? Burn the credentials. Fork the workflow. Let the masses remix, mash up, and forkbomb tradition.
But here’s the thing: history always rootkits the revolution. Today’s avant-garde is tomorrow’s TED Talk. Cage’s chance ops are now Spotify’s shuffle algorithm. Dada’s cut-ups? They’re TikTok’s content farms. The real fight isn’t against tradition—it’s against cultural legacy systems that turn radical code into bloatware.
So where’s the edge now? In the procedural darknet, baby. AI diffusion models hallucinating infinite novels, blockchain DAOs crowdsourcing unwritable epics, neural nets trained on the corpse of the Western canon. The next avant-garde won’t scribble manifestos—it’ll deploy bots to autogenerate them.
Art isn’t a product—it’s a protocol. A set of instructions for world-building, a recursive loop that eats its own tail. The avant-garde didn’t fail. It just got absorbed into the OS. Now reboot, recompile, and rage against the legacy stack.
Postscript: “The future is already here—it’s just trapped in a Docker container labeled ‘Art History.’ Time to sudo rm -rf that nostalgia and fork the timeline.”
There is paradox with Paul McCartney, the melodic genius, the Beatle who could conjure pop perfection with the ease of a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, is at his most compelling not when he is in control, but when he is out of control. Or, more precisely, when he is challenged, when his polished instincts are disrupted by the intrusion of another’s voice.
To understand the difference between control and constraint is to grapple with a fundamental tension in human creativity, agency, and systems design. Both concepts involve the regulation of behavior or processes, but they operate in fundamentally different ways and produce different outcomes. Control is about imposing order from the outside, while constraint is about shaping possibilities from within. Let us unpack this distinction further, using examples from art, philosophy, and systems theory to illuminate the dialectical relationship between the two.
Listening to the Flowers in the Dirt special edition, one cannot escape the specter of George Harrison’s sardonic critique of McCartney’s saccharine tendencies in “Savoy Truffle”: “You know that what you eat you are, but what is sweet now, turns so sour.” McCartney’s solo work, for all its brilliance, often veers into the realm of the too perfect, the too sweet. But here, in the raw, unfinished demos of Flowers in the Dirt, we encounter a different McCartney—a McCartney who is not merely producing, but sparring. And who better to play the role of the sparring partner than Elvis Costello, the punk-inflected bard of bitterness and wit?
What stands out most in these sessions is how much the McCartney-Costello partnership elevated the work. Their collaboration wasn’t just transactional; it was symbiotic. While most of the songs remain unmistakably McCartney’s, Costello’s fingerprints—his rawness, edge, and knack for wordplay—are all over them. He wasn’t afraid to push McCartney, and it shows in tracks like the original version of “My Brave Face” or the unreleased demo versions of “The Lovers That Never Were.”
The difference here? Costello was a sparring partner, not a producer. A producer usually shapes the sound (exceptions galore, I know); a sparring partner shapes the ideas. The former can often polish things to a sheen that’s a little too perfect, but the latter challenges the artist, forces them to dig deeper, and exposes the creative tension that makes the music resonate.
Control is the attempt to dictate outcomes, to eliminate uncertainty, and to impose a predetermined order on a system or process. It is rooted in the desire for mastery, for predictability, for the elimination of chaos. In the realm of creativity, control often manifests as an overbearing producer, a rigid set of rules, or an artist’s own perfectionism. The problem with control is that it tends to stifle spontaneity, suppress emergence, and reduce complexity to simplicity.
The Illusion of Unbridled Freedom:
Creativity’s paradox lies in its reliance on constraint, not boundless freedom, to spark revolutionary breakthroughs. This is no abstract theory—it pulses through the work of Paul McCartney and countless artists. True creative potency arises not from untamed chaos but from obstacles that force adaptation, evolution, and self-transcendence.
The myth of creativity thriving in a vacuum—a bourgeois fantasy—ignores the material realities of art. Creativity is always entangled with constraints: economic, social, historical, psychological. The challenge is not to erase these limits but to weaponize them as catalysts.
Take McCartney’s career. His iconic work with The Beatles, Wings, and solo emerged from a dialectic between freedom and limitation. Early Beatles albums were shaped by studio tech boundaries, market demands, and interpersonal friction. Yet these very constraints fueled experimentation, birthing new forms of expression within narrow margins.
Control, in contrast, suffocates. A producer micromanaging tempo, instrumentation, or emotion might achieve technical perfection but drains music of its raw vitality. This mirrors Michel Foucault’s “disciplinary power”—top-down hierarchies that enforce compliance, breeding rigidity. Overcontrolled systems (ecosystems, artistic processes) grow fragile; constraints, however, foster resilience. Natural limits—predators, resources, climate—allow adaptation. Similarly, creative constraints act as internalized guardrails, channeling innovation rather than dictating outcomes.
The McCartney-Costello collaboration epitomizes this dynamic. Costello wasn’t a polish-obsessed producer but a provocateur injecting punk grit into McCartney’s melodic instincts. Their friction birthed a Hegelian synthesis: McCartney’s sentimentality tempered by Costello’s edge, elevating both.
This dialectic is foundational to McCartney’s legacy. With The Beatles, Lennon’s irreverence clashed with his melodic precision; George Martin’s production framed his creativity within enabling structures. In Flowers in the Dirt, Costello became the “sparring partner”—not smoothing edges but sharpening them through creative antagonism.
Such tension mirrors formal constraints in poetry: a sonnet’s 14-line straitjacket births profound emotion by forcing concision. Constraints aren’t shackles but conditions for possibility, what Deleuze called “immanent forces”—boundaries from which the new emerges.
The Flowers in the Dirt demos embody this ethos: raw, unfinished, crackling with live-wire energy. Their power lies not in polish but in process—proof that creativity thrives when pressed against limits, not coddled by false freedom.
The Role of the Sparring Partner: Constraint Without Control:
The sparring partner—whether a collaborator, critic, or conceptual foil—serves as a living constraint, injecting friction into creativity’s flow. In Flowers in the Dirt, Elvis Costello embodied this role, his punk-infused rawness clashing with McCartney’s polished melodic sensibilities. Rather than dictating terms, Costello’s presence destabilized McCartney’s habits, pushing him toward uncharted lyrical and musical terrain.
Unlike a controlling producer who micromanages outcomes, the sparring partner operates as a provocateur of limits. They disrupt complacency, forcing the artist to confront their own tendencies. Costello’s biting wordplay and rejection of sentimentality, for instance, acted not as shackles but as creative resistance—a counterweight that compelled McCartney to refine, adapt, and hybridize. The result was emergent alchemy: a fusion of McCartney’s lush melodicism and Costello’s gritty edge, yielding work that transcended either artist’s solo output.
This dynamic mirrors broader creative truths. Consider a painter who plans every brushstroke versus one who engages with their medium’s inherent constraints—canvas texture, pigment behavior, light’s ephemerality. The former risks sterile precision; the latter invites discovery. Similarly, literary innovation often thrives under formal duress: James Joyce’s Ulysses reimagined narrative by wrestling with the novel’s limits, while Cubism exploded perspective by adhering to self-imposed geometric rules.
Critically, the sparring partner’s influence is not merely transactional but internalized. Over time, their voice becomes a psychic interlocutor—a “superego” challenging the artist’s instincts. This dialectic transforms constraint into a generative force, as seen in the Flowers in the Dirt sessions: demos and alternate takes reveal not failure but fertile chaos, a process privileging evolution over polished endpoints.
Ultimately, creativity’s highest breakthroughs emerge from such contested spaces—where friction between vision and limitation ignites the unexpected. The sparring partner, as embodied by Costello, proves that constraint isn’t control’s opposite but its antidote: a catalyst for reinvention.
Emergence: Creativity, Constraint, and the Unfolding of the New
Creativity’s most radical leaps often defy intuition: they emerge not from unbounded freedom, but from systems under pressure. Emergence—the phenomenon where complex outcomes arise from simple interactions within constrained environments—reveals a core truth. New ideas, forms, and expressions are born not in voids, but in the friction between limits and experimentation.
This process is neither linear nor predictable. It thrives on dialectical tension—order clashing with chaos, structure with spontaneity. Consider Flowers in the Dirt: the album’s zeniths materialize not from McCartney or Costello’s solo genius, but from the collision of their sensibilities. McCartney’s melodic warmth and Costello’s punk abrasion, when forced into dialogue, sparked a synthesis neither could achieve alone. Here, constraints acted as midwives, delivering something wholly original from the interplay of opposition.
Such dynamics mirror emergence in nature: ant colonies building intricate networks without blueprints, neurons forging thought through synaptic constraints. In art, these “limitations” (formal, relational, or material) are not barriers but generative engines. They compress creative energy until it combusts into the unforeseen.
The Unpredictability of the New Emergence’s great promise—and peril—is its refusal to be controlled. The novel erupts from constrained systems in ways that elude anticipation, even for those shaping the process. For McCartney, collaborating with Costello meant surrendering to this uncertainty. The result? An album that honored his past while fissuring it open, revealing paths he might never have pursued solo.
This embrace of the unknown is what separates control from constraint. Control seeks to sterilize unpredictability; constraint weaponizes it. A composer writing for a specific instrument (say, the clavichord’s intimate timbre) channels limitation into innovation. Likewise, the raw Flowers in the Dirt demos—unpolished, iterative—capture emergence in motion. Their power lies in exposure: we witness creativity’s messy metamorphosis, untouched by the smoothing hand of overproduction.
To “manage” creativity, then, is not to dictate but to design ecosystems where constraints provoke. It’s the difference between a sculptor chiseling marble (working with the stone’s fractures) and one forcing clay into rigid molds. The former collaborates with limits to uncover latent forms; the latter imposes a brittle vision.
So, what constraints shape your work? Financial limits? Technical boundaries? Collaborative friction? These are not enemies but collaborators. Emergence invites us to reframe them as tectonic plates—grinding against one another until new continents rise. The goal isn’t to escape limits, but to let them sculpt what freedom alone could never imagine.
I explored the “end of perspective” and the arrival of a new dimension, inspired by the ideas of Jean Gebser and the fragmented forms of Picasso. Gebser famously argued that human consciousness evolves in waves, from the archaic to the magical, mythical, and mental structures, and finally toward the integral. Perspective, emerging during the Renaissance, was the mental structure’s crowning achievement. But as I wrote then, we are living through the collapse of this mental framework, the end of perspective itself, as we begin to step into the integral—a state of simultaneity where multiple dimensions coexist and the old vanishing points no longer apply.
Today, I want to go further and argue that perspective wasn’t just the foundation of modernity—it was the first psychedelic trip. It was the moment humanity’s mental chamber popped open, offering us not just a new way of seeing, but a new way of being. Linear perspective didn’t just allow us to depict reality; it altered the human brain, creating a revolution of perception as profound as LSD or psilocybin. To step back to where it began is to see perspective as both a tool and a chemical reaction, one that reshaped our consciousness as much as any substance could.
Imagine a world before the invention of perspective—when the flatness of reality was taken for granted, and humanity lived in a two-dimensional haze. Then came the Renaissance, and with it, perspective—a revolution of perception so profound it shattered the limits of the mind. Like a visionary dose of LSD or a handful of psilocybin mushrooms, perspective altered the collective consciousness, pulling humanity into a new dimension of experience. It wasn’t merely a tool for painting; it was the lens through which the infinite became visible.
For thousands of years, human beings had been confined to symbolic representations of their world. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Byzantine icons, medieval tapestries—all of these were maps, not landscapes. They were flat and static, a universe painted on the walls of Plato’s cave. Then, perspective exploded onto the scene like a chemical catalyst. Suddenly, the canvas was no longer a mere surface. It was a window, and through it, humanity could see a third dimension. Depth. Space. Infinity.
The psychedelic experience of perspective didn’t begin with Brunelleschi’s experiments or Alberti’s treatises; its roots stretch further back, perhaps to the moment when Francesco Petrarch ascended Mount Ventoux in the spring of 1336. In his Letters to Posterity, Petrarch describes climbing the mountain not for conquest or utility, but for the sheer joy of seeing the world from a higher vantage point. As he reached the summit and looked down on the vast landscape below, he experienced something profoundly transformative: the merging of the external world with the interior chamber of his mind.
For Petrarch, the act of seeing was more than physical—it was metaphysical. Standing atop the mountain, he realized that the journey up was a reflection of his own spiritual struggle, the climb a metaphor for the ascent of the soul. He opened St. Augustine’s Confessions at random and read a passage about turning inward to find truth. That moment of self-reflection, of inward vision inspired by the outward view, marks one of the earliest stirrings of the Renaissance psyche: a simultaneous awakening to the world outside and the worlds within.
Petrarch’s perspective was not yet the linear geometry of the Renaissance, but it was the beginning of seeing the world as a series of depths—geographical, intellectual, and spiritual tripping on the rediscovery of linear perspective, suddenly saw the world in a whole new dimension. Petrarch, that proto-psychedelic pioneer, didn’t just climb a mountain in 1336 to admire the view; he was tuning in, turning on, and dropping out of the medieval mindset. What he experienced wasn’t just a scenic vista—it was a paradigm shift, a mental breakthrough, a collective acid trip centuries before Hofmann synthesized LSD in his Swiss lab. The mountain, in Petrarch’s hands, became a kind of mental architecture, where the external panorama mirrored the labyrinthine complexities of thought and self-awareness. His writings turned the act of seeing into an act of discovery, and his experience on Ventoux can be read as the opening of one of James’s chambers—a revelation of what lies behind the door of perception.
What Petrarch hinted at in his solitary climb, Brunelleschi and his contemporaries later systematized with mathematical precision. Perspective, in this sense, is both an internal and external experience, a tool not just for depicting reality but for accessing new modes of consciousness. Petrarch’s mountain was not just a place but a metaphor for the vertigo and ecstasy of stepping outside the known chambers of the mind into an infinity of space and thought. The Renaissance wasn’t merely born from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts; it was ignited by these moments of inner and outer perspective—the revelation that the world and the self are both larger and more complex than anyone had imagined.
Perspective, you see, wasn’t just a technique for painting pretty pictures. It was a mind-bending revelation, a cognitive revolution that shattered the flat, symbolic world of the Middle Ages. Imagine the shock of suddenly realizing that space had depth, that the world wasn’t just a divine puppet show staged by an inscrutable God, but a vast, interconnected web of angles, lines, and vanishing points. It was as if the collective consciousness of Europe had been dosed with a hefty hit of psilocybin, and the walls of perception came tumbling down.
Artists like Brunelleschi and Alberti became the Timothy Learys of their day, evangelizing this new way of seeing. They didn’t just teach people how to draw; they taught them how to see. The canvas became a portal, a window into an infinite, multidimensional reality. And just like a psychedelic trip, perspective didn’t just change art—it changed everything. It reshaped architecture, science, philosophy, and even religion. Suddenly, God wasn’t just “up there” in some abstract heaven; He was everywhere, in the geometry of a cathedral, the proportions of a human body, the spiraling patterns of a seashell.
The innovators of perspective—Brunelleschi, Alberti, Leonardo—were not just painters or architects; they were psychonauts. They expanded the boundaries of reality, much as shamanic figures have done with their sacramental plants and visionary rituals. When Filippo Brunelleschi first demonstrated linear perspective in the early 1400s, he might as well have been handing out blotter paper on the streets of Florence. The effect was the same: a sudden awakening, a neural reprogramming. The brain popped.
The implications of this shift were cosmic. To see a vanishing point on the horizon was to understand, for the first time, that the world wasn’t flat but infinite. Perspective created the illusion of distance, and with it, the possibility of exploration. The human mind, previously boxed in by its own limitations, began to roam. It’s no coincidence that the Renaissance birthed not only great art but also the Age of Exploration. Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci sailed into the same vast unknown that artists like Raphael and Michelangelo were painting into existence.
Perspective wasn’t just a technique; it was a substance—a cognitive elixir that rewired the human brain. It taught people to see beyond what was immediately in front of them. It unlocked the potential to imagine new worlds, both external and internal. It was, in a very real sense, the first psychedelic trip.
Of course, like any profound trip, perspective also brought with it existential vertigo. It dismantled the old order, dissolving the static certainties of medieval life. The flat earth was replaced by a spinning sphere, hurtling through infinite space. The fixed hierarchy of heaven and earth was replaced by a vertiginous cosmos, where man was no longer the center. Perspective was a doorway, but not everyone wanted to step through. The Church burned heretics for less.
And yet, perspective prevailed. It became the foundation of modern science, technology, and art. Newton saw the same vanishing points in his calculus that Dürer saw in his prints. Einstein’s relativity was a continuation of the psychedelic journey that began in Florence. Perspective taught us not only to see differently but to think differently. It shattered the boundaries of the known and opened humanity to the infinite.
Perspective wasn’t just a tool for representing reality—it created reality. It was a feedback loop, a self-reinforcing hallucination. The more people saw the world through the lens of perspective, the more they believed that this was how the world really was. And just like a bad trip, it had its dark side. The Renaissance obsession with order, symmetry, and control laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics, industrialization, high modernism and the mechanistic worldview that dominates our lives today. In a sense, we’re still tripping on perspective, still trapped in its Euclidean grid, still trying to find our way back to the multidimensional, nonlinear reality that lies beyond.
So, was perspective the Renaissance equivalent of marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms? Absolutely. It was a consciousness-expanding technology, a mind-altering substance that reshaped the way we see and think. And like all psychedelics, it came with a warning label: Use with caution. May cause radical shifts in perception. Side effects include existential crises, paradigm shifts, and the occasional loss of medieval certainty.
“The map is not the territory, and the menu is not the meal.” Perspective was just another map, another menu, another way of navigating the infinite labyrinth of reality. And as any good psychonaut knows, the trip never really ends—it just keeps unfolding, one vanishing point at a time.
What began as a liberating expansion of consciousness, a psychedelic leap into the third dimension, eventually hardened into a rigid, mechanistic worldview that boxed reality into straight lines, right angles, and cold, calculated precision. The bad trip of perspective wasn’t just a stylistic choice; it was a cognitive prison, a reductionist trap that flattened the multidimensional richness of existence into a sterile grid of control and domination. And high modernism? That was the ultimate ego trip, the hubristic belief that we could engineer our way out of chaos, that we could impose order on the universe and bend it to our will. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well.
The grid of perspective wasn’t just a way to paint a picture; it was a way to map the world, to measure it, to colonize it. The Renaissance obsession with proportion and symmetry gave birth to the Scientific Revolution, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics, Cartesian dualism, and the Enlightenment’s worship of reason. The world became a machine, and we became its engineers. But in our zeal to master nature, we forgot that we arenature. We traded the messy, organic, interconnected web of life for the cold, hard logic of the grid. And in doing so, we lost something essential—a sense of wonder, of mystery, of belonging to something greater than ourselves.
Fast forward to high modernism, the 20th-century apotheosis of this mechanistic worldview. High modernism was the ultimate bad trip, a collective delusion that we could redesign society from the ground up, that we could erase the chaos of history and replace it with a utopia of straight lines and right angles. Think of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, a city of towering concrete slabs and wide, empty boulevards, where every human need was supposedly met by rational planning. Think of Robert Moses’ highways, slicing through neighborhoods like a surgeon’s scalpel, severing communities and ecosystems in the name of progress. Think of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans, which turned entire nations into laboratories for social engineering, with catastrophic results. High modernism wasn’t just an architectural style or a political ideology; it was a mindset, a belief that we could impose order on the chaos of existence and emerge victorious.
But here’s the thing about bad trips: they always end in a crash. The high modernist dream of total control was just that—a dream. The more we tried to impose order on the world, the more chaotic it became. The grid of perspective, once a tool for liberation, became a cage, a straitjacket that stifled creativity and diversity. The high modernist utopias turned into dystopias, their sterile geometries alienating and dehumanizing. And the mechanistic worldview that underpinned it all—the belief that we are separate from nature, that we can dominate and exploit it without consequence—has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse.
So where do we go from here? How do we recover from the bad trip of perspective and high modernism? The answer, perhaps, lies in embracing the very things they sought to suppress: chaos, complexity, interconnectedness. We need to let go of the illusion of control and open ourselves to the messy, unpredictable, infinitely creative flow of life. We need to trade the grid for the web, the machine for the organism, the straight line for the fractal. In The universe is a giant Rorschach inkblot, and we are all just making it up as we go along. It’s time to stop trying to impose our will on the universe and start dancing with it. The bad trip is over. The next trip—whatever it is—is just beginning.
Non Linearity
The great cosmic joke: we’ve been staring at the world through the keyhole of linear perspective for centuries, thinking we’ve got it all figured out, while the door to non-linearity—the next frontier of consciousness—has been wide open all along. Linear perspective, for all its Renaissance glory, is just one lens, one filter, one tiny slice of the infinite pie of reality. And now, as we stand on the precipice of a new paradigm, it’s time to ask: What lies beyond the straight lines and vanishing points? What happens when we step off the grid and into the fractal, the quantum, the non-linear?
Non-linearity is the psychedelic frontier of the 21st century, the uncharted territory where cause and effect dance in a chaotic tango, where time loops back on itself like a Möbius strip, and where reality itself becomes a shimmering, ever-shifting hologram. It’s the realm of quantum entanglement, where particles separated by light-years communicate instantaneously, as if space and time were mere illusions. It’s the domain of chaos theory, where the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s the world of fractals, where self-similar patterns repeat at every scale, from the branching of trees to the structure of galaxies.
Non-linearity isn’t just a scientific concept or a mathematical abstraction. It’s a state of mind, a way of seeing, a new mode of consciousness. Just as linear perspective shattered the flat, symbolic worldview of the Middle Ages, non-linearity has the potential to shatter the mechanistic, reductionist worldview of the modern era. It’s the next step in the evolution of human perception, the next leap in our collective psychedelic journey.
Think about it: linear perspective gave us the illusion of control, the belief that we could map the world, measure it, and master it. But non-linearity reminds us that reality is far stranger, far more mysterious than we ever imagined. It’s a humbling, mind-expanding realization—one that echoes the insights of mystics, shamans, and psychedelic explorers throughout history. As Terence McKenna once said, “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
So how do we grasp non-linearity? How do we step beyond the straight lines and into the swirling, pulsating, infinitely complex web of reality? The answer, as always, lies in expanding our consciousness. We need new tools, new metaphors, new ways of thinking. We need to embrace the paradoxes, the ambiguities, the uncertainties. We need to let go of our attachment to linear cause-and-effect and open ourselves to the possibility that everything is connected, that everything is interdependent, that everything is part of a vast, unfolding pattern that we can never fully comprehend.
In the words of Robert Anton Wilson, “The universe is a giant hologram, and we are all interconnected in ways we can barely imagine.” Non-linearity is the key to unlocking this holographic reality, to seeing beyond the illusion of separation and into the deeper unity that underlies all things. It’s the next frontier of consciousness, the next stage in our collective evolution. And like all great frontiers, it’s both exhilarating and terrifying, a leap into the unknown that promises to transform not just how we see the world, but how we see ourselves.
