The Materialist Sorcery of Don Juan

February 4, 2025February 4, 2025Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. The Body as Battlefield: Somatic Materialism

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

2. The Assemblage Point: Ideology as Quantum Collapse

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

3. Controlled Folly: The Comedy of Ideological Critique

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

4. The Capitalist Realism of the Nagual

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

5. The Necessary Fraud: Don Juan as Symptom

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

Conclusion: The Revolutionary Potential of Magical Pessimism

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

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

The Kicker:

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

Final Twist (whispered):

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

Generally Upward Moving Swine

February 4, 2025February 4, 2025Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

Silicon Valley’s Carnival of Shame:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How the West Learned to Walk Backward

February 2, 2025February 3, 2025Leave a comment

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

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

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

The Hyperreal Past as Compass (and Cage)

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

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

The Future as Rhizomatic Hinterland

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

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

Toward a Temporal Détournement

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

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

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

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

1. The Future as Haunting (Literally)

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

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

2. Time Loops and the Hyperstitional West

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

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

3. Precognitive Politics and the Meme-ification of Destiny

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

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

4. Rewriting the Script: Time Tourism as Survival

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

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

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

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

DeepSeek and the Collapse of the Great (Men) Simulation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bot is the Ancestor Now

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

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

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

Vegetables

February 1, 2025Leave a comment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Flaming Pie

January 30, 2025January 30, 2025Leave a comment

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 psychedelic cadavre 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.

Dialectical Punchline

This post is itself a Hegelian triad:

Thesis: Realism as reboot.
Antithesis: Surrealism as repressed excess.
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? 🕳️

Perspective: Psychedelics for the Modern Man

January 26, 2025January 26, 2025Leave a comment

Modernity, as we know it, began when humanity first embraced the idea of depth and dimension. In a Medium post I wrote back in 2020,

https://ramurrio.medium.com/the-end-of-perspective-and-the-new-amension-gebser-picasso-36a55f429f48

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 are nature. 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.

Stargate

January 23, 2025Leave a comment

Ah, yes, the Stargate project—an allegory for the present moment, a monument to the madness of techno-optimism, with its endless stream of corporate behemoths like SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others all rubbing their hands together in glee. It’s as if we’ve entered a dystopian remake of the 1994 Stargate film, this time with some kind of unholy alliance between almond-laden neural networks and the unchecked power of Silicon Valley. We have here a project that is, let’s say, a vast and complicated ritualistic venture into the unknown, but only by piling up clichés and buzzwords into an enormous heap, like a digital ziggurat that promises to launch us into new realms of possibility—only to leave us disappointed, as we begin to realize that the realm we are entering is just a digital version of the same old world.

What do I mean by this? Well, just look at the Stargate film, directed by Roland Emmerich, which used a hopscotch of sci-fi tropes: ancient alien civilizations, time travel, mystical portals—sound familiar? You had Kurt Russell in fatigues and James Spader, well, being Spader. The movie dabbled in some fascinating ideas about transcendence, humanity’s quest for meaning, and the unknown, but it ultimately faltered in its execution. There was no real philosophical resolution, no deep understanding of what this interdimensional journey was supposed to signify. Instead, it ended with explosions and a vague sense of wonder, but not true insight. It was a metaphor for the modern project itself—big promises, very little deliverance.

Now we have Stargate reimagined, not in terms of interstellar adventure, but as a platform for the so-called “next frontier” of technology. With OpenAI and a collection of corporate giants, we are told we are on the precipice of something that will change the world—an artificial intelligence that will open portals to a new dimension of human experience. But, as always, there’s the classic ideological sleight of hand. We are led to believe that these technological advances will liberate us, but the truth is far more banal. It’s about control, domination, the smoothing over of contradictions. These tech companies, under the guise of innovation, are crafting the new digital Stargate, but it’s a gate that leads to the same old issues, masked in the sheen of progress.

We are back in the same place, aren’t we? We can cross over into other dimensions—whether it’s in terms of data processing, artificial intelligence, or virtual worlds—but these are mere extensions of our existing order. The stargate itself, which might have been a symbol of exploration, is now a tool for increasing profit margins, cementing the power of those who already control the means of technological production.

The logic behind these tech giants’ involvement? The same logic that governed Emmerich’s film—using a few cool ideas (yes, AI, metaverses, quantum computing) but leaving us with more spectacle than substance. It’s a modern Stargate—offering the promise of transcending limitations, but in reality, merely reinforcing them. The more we chase after these “portals,” the more we get sucked into the very system we thought we were escaping.

The discomfort at the heart of Stargate—it is indeed, a grotesque Frankenstein, stitched together from the decayed parts of trickle-down economics and the logic of a perpetual motion machine. It is the quintessential product of neoliberal ideology: the promise of infinite returns, endlessly repeated, as long as the last investor keeps buying into the myth. In this sense, the Stargate project, like its cinematic precursor, is less about exploring new frontiers and more about maintaining the illusion of progress while profiting off its perpetuity.

We must ask ourselves: what exactly is being “unlocked” in these grand ventures of AI and quantum computing, if not the very mechanisms that perpetuate the existing system of exploitation? The endless rhetoric around infinite returns—whether it’s in terms of data, profits, or opportunities—betrays the fundamental deceit at the heart of this whole venture. The “Stargate” is not a portal to liberation, not a gateway to a new dimension of human understanding, but a cunningly constructed mechanism that extracts value from the very people it purports to serve. It is the trickle-down logic, the same one that has failed us for decades: as long as you keep the machine running, as long as there’s a constant flow of fresh capital to fuel it, the promise of limitless growth can continue.

But of course, this is the lie we’ve all been sold. The reality is that the trickle-down never reaches the bottom. Like the revolving door of investment in the Stargate project, the wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few. These grand promises of technological transcendence are, in the end, just a sophisticated form of financial alchemy. The constant promises of infinite returns are like the perpetual motion machine—beautiful in their conception, but ultimately doomed by their own impossibility. What’s so tragically ironic is that the true “Stargate” these tech giants are building is a portal not to an exciting future, but to an even more elaborate prison of illusion.

The capitalist system today operates much like this: under the guise of new technological horizons, it insists that each new frontier will solve our problems, give us endless possibilities, when in reality it is only expanding the reach of its own machinery of control. The investors—those lucky enough to enter the game early—are promised the stargate of boundless wealth, while the rest of us are left to follow the thread of this speculative spiral, only to discover that the gateway is a dead end, a vast cul-de-sac of endless, pointless motion.

This, then, is the fundamental contradiction embedded in these projects. We are told that we will transcend our current limitations, that we will discover new dimensions of possibility. But in truth, we are only being pushed deeper into the very system that shackles us. The more we invest, the more we become entangled in this matrix of infinite returns. The project’s success is predicated not on any tangible breakthrough, but on the ability to convince the next wave of investors to buy in, to keep the charade going just a little longer. But ultimately, we are trapped in the same economic system, only with shinier technology and more abstract concepts.

And let us not forget the prophetic tropes that play a pivotal role in this charade, tropes that have been mediocrally executed in both the cinematic Stargate and these grand tech ventures. In the film, we encounter the idea of ancient civilizations—gods, in fact—who possess extraordinary knowledge and power, locked away in a distant past, waiting to be rediscovered. This resonates strongly with the way Silicon Valley talks about “unlocking” hidden potential, as though the answers to humanity’s most pressing problems lie buried just beyond our reach, waiting to be unearthed by the next technological breakthrough. The idea of “unlocking” ancient knowledge is a classic prophetic trope, one that promises to reveal profound truths and usher in a new era. But as Stargate itself demonstrates, this knowledge is never quite as transcendent as promised, and in the end, it’s just another tool of control.

Then, of course, there is the prophecy of the chosen one—the idea that a single individual, in this case, Daniel Jackson (James Spader), will decipher the ancient language and unlock the power of the Stargate. This individual, like a modern-day messiah, is set apart as the one who will lead the way, revealing the path to salvation. In the context of the tech world, this is mirrored in the cult of the CEO, the notion that a singular visionary, be it a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk, will guide us through the technological singularity into a utopian future. But once again, this is just a recycled cliché, an empty promise, as these “prophecies” consistently fail to deliver anything substantial.

Finally, there’s the constant appeal to destiny—the idea that our heroes are fated to discover the Stargate, just as our tech moguls are “destined” to shape the future. This notion of destiny, of history unfolding according to some grand, hidden plan, underpins the entire narrative of Silicon Valley’s most hyped ventures. But like the movie, where the supposed “destiny” of the characters ultimately leads them to yet another battle with an ancient power, we’re left with the same tired tropes—promises of an extraordinary future, only to find that the destination is much less than we had imagined.

The very nature of these prophetic tropes is what keeps us hooked. They appeal to our deepest desires for meaning, for escape from our mundane reality, and yet they always disappoint. The tech industry, much like Emmerich’s film, dresses up its promises in extravagant imagery of otherworldly achievements, only to reveal that the truth behind the curtain is far less impressive. The promise of a digital “Stargate” is just another metaphor for the perennial human desire for transcendence, for breakthrough, but as we’ve seen time and again, such promises are rarely fulfilled. Instead, we are left with a shiny new version of the same old system, which ultimately serves the interests of the few, while the rest of us watch as our hopes dissolve into the ether.

Nazi Salute

January 21, 2025January 21, 2025Leave a comment

Ah, the Elon stans—how delightful their contradictions are! First, they deny: “It wasn’t a Nazi salute!” And yet, in the same breath, they invoke the shadow of Wernher von Braun, the man who quite literally rocketed from the swastika to the stars. Here lies the paradox of modern techno-fetishism: the absolute refusal to reconcile the roots of innovation with the ideology from which it sprouted.

This is ideology at its purest, my friends. The Elon stan does not see a salute, does not see history, only the myth of progress embodied in their techno-Messiah. Von Braun? Oh, he was just a man of his time, they say, as though the V-2 rockets were merely innocent sparks of genius, detached from the rubble of London and the forced labor camps. Likewise, the Nazi salute? Just a misunderstood gesture, like one of Musk’s awkward memes, surely nothing to overanalyze!

What is at play here is the disavowal of history: “Yes, yes, von Braun worked for the Nazis, but let’s not dwell on the unpleasant details—look at the stars!” The genius of capitalism, of course, lies in its ability to sanitize such contradictions, to commodify even the remnants of fascism. Von Braun’s rockets, once symbols of Nazi terror, become the foundation of NASA’s triumphant quest for the moon, and now, in Musk’s hands, the rockets become the ultimate fetish object: the means by which humanity will escape itself.

This is not to accuse Musk or his fans of fascism outright—no, no! The genius of ideology is subtler than that. It is to point out how the sanitized past feeds the fantasies of the future. To worship the rocket while ignoring the Reich is to embrace progress as though it were pure, apolitical, untainted by the horrors of its own genesis.

So, when the Elon stan says, “It wasn’t a Nazi salute,” they are not simply denying—it is not that they don’t know, but that they know very well, and yet they continue to act as though they don’t. This is the essence of ideology: to know and disavow simultaneously, to erase the contradictions of the past in order to dream of an unbroken, immaculate future.

In this way, the Elon stan becomes the ultimate subject of late capitalism: one who sees the cracks in the myth but chooses to believe nonetheless. Progress, rockets, Mars—these are no longer the means to an end but ends in themselves, the ultimate commodities, sold with the promise that they will liberate us from the very world we have ruined. And yet, as von Braun himself might have said, we aim for the stars, but our gaze is still firmly fixed on the ground—on the ruins we refuse to acknowledge.

It is fascinating, no? Everyone who has seriously thought about space travel knows that rockets are an antiquated concept, a primitive phallic obsession from the mid-20th century. We are not getting to Mars with these oversized fireworks, these glorified Nazi-era technologies refined only to look sleeker in a Silicon Valley PowerPoint presentation. And yet, Elon—and let us not forget his stans!—they proceed as if the memo never arrived. Or perhaps they received it but, in true ideological fashion, simply chose to ignore it.

This is ideology at work! Rockets are not a solution—they are a spectacle, a fetish object designed to obscure the fundamental impotence of the project itself. SpaceX does not represent the future of interstellar travel; it is a reenactment of the past, a repetition of the Cold War space race, but with private corporations standing in for nations. We know rockets are insufficient; we know that without new propulsion systems—nuclear, electromagnetic, or something we cannot yet imagine—we are not going anywhere beyond our celestial backyard. Yet Elon clings to the rocket, just as his fans cling to their Teslas, precisely because it allows them to dream without truly thinking.

What is important here is the narrative function of the rocket. It is not a tool; it is a symbol of progress, an object that tells us, “Yes, humanity is still capable of transcending its limits.” The question of whether it works, of whether it is the right tool for the job, is irrelevant. Like von Braun’s V-2 rockets, it serves a purpose beyond its immediate utility. For von Braun, the purpose was military domination; for Musk, it is the domination of imagination itself.

But here is the twist: the obsession with rockets is not just about Mars; it is about Earth. Musk’s promise of Mars colonization is not a genuine proposal for human survival—it is a marketing campaign for his earthly empire. The rocket is not a vehicle for exploration; it is a justification for endless extraction, for the continued destruction of this planet in the name of a hypothetical escape plan.

The Elon stan does not care if we reach Mars. The Mars colony is irrelevant. What matters is the fantasy that it represents: the fantasy of escape, of a second chance, of a new frontier where the sins of Earth can be left behind. This is why the Elon stan clings to the rocket despite its obsolescence—it is not about transportation; it is about absolution.

And so, they look at the rocket, and they see not the limitations of 20th-century technology but the limitless possibilities of the future. They do not ask, “How do we get to Mars?” but rather, “What does the rocket allow us to believe?” In this way, the rocket becomes a totem of denial, a monument to humanity’s refusal to confront its own failures. We aim for the stars, but only to avoid looking at the ground beneath our feet.

A Mythology for the Distracted Age

January 13, 2025January 13, 2025

Netflix and Amazon walk into a bar. Netflix orders a cocktail called The Cliffhanger, garnished with a hastily-scribbled napkin that says “Season 2 Coming Soon.” Amazon, meanwhile, demands the bartender blend every book on the shelf into a smoothie, then pours it over their own head while shouting, “This is what the people want!”

Netflix’s algorithm seems to operate on the principle of “quantity over coherence.” They’ll greenlight an 8-part series based on a tweet they misread, insist the protagonist must overcome trauma via quirky dance montages, and wrap it all up with a finale so ambiguous it could double as an AI hallucination. “Don’t worry,” they whisper, “we’ll fix it with spinoffs no one asked for.”

Amazon, on the other hand, approaches storytelling like a toddler with a new set of crayons. They take beloved books—your Lord of the Rings, Her Dark Materials —and cram them into a “one-size-fits-all” corporate PowerPoint presentation. Entire character arcs vanish, plots are replaced with slow-motion fight scenes, and they stretch out the runtime just long enough to sell you a subscription to Audible. It’s like they think the soul of literature lies in its prime shipping potential.

Both platforms, in their way, prove the same point: If you give an algorithm a paintbrush, you’ll get a Picasso drawn by a toaster.

The modern hero’s journey no longer revolves around the hero’s choices—it bends to the rhythms of an audience whose greatest trial is staying engaged for longer than 30 minutes. Algorithms don’t care about Campbell’s archetypes; they only care about “engagement metrics.” The Ordinary World isn’t a village to leave behind; it’s your sofa. The Final Reward isn’t wisdom—it’s the vague satisfaction of seeing “You Might Also Like” recommendations you’ll never click. In this new mythology, the hero doesn’t just fight monsters. They fight the greatest enemy of all: the viewer’s attention span.

The modern hero’s journey, in its current iteration, is no longer a tale of self-discovery, transcendence, or triumph over external forces. Instead, it is an algorithmic feedback loop designed to accommodate the fragmented rhythms of a distracted audience. The narrative no longer revolves around the hero’s choices or challenges but around the neurotic pacing dictated by a viewer’s capacity to withstand their own boredom. In this way, the mythological structure becomes something far darker: a calculated negotiation between storytelling and the fractured temporality of attention economy.

What we observe is a profound disintegration of the hero’s agency. The algorithm, that silent demiurge of the distracted age, has replaced the divine intervention of myth. Where gods once tested heroes with fire and prophecy, the algorithm now tweaks pacing, edits cliffhangers, and inserts redundant flashbacks—its primary concern not the coherence of the narrative, but the statistical retention of the viewer. The sofa, not the call to adventure, is now the “Ordinary World,” a space of stasis masquerading as comfort. The hero, instead of leaving this stasis, is forced to contend with an audience that refuses to leave theirs.

The journey itself becomes warped by the rituals of the couch-bound viewer. The traditional arc—departure, trials, revelation, return—splinters into a series of disjointed scenes engineered to survive bathroom breaks, snack-fetching interludes, and the ever-present distraction of the smartphone. Every line of dialogue must be exposition-heavy, every event must reorient the viewer to the stakes, lest they lose the thread entirely while doomscrolling Twitter. Thus, the journey is not the hero’s alone—it is yoked to the banal domestic interruptions of the audience, rendering the story a kind of co-dependent limbo.

This new paradigm reveals a deeper counterfeit at play: the hero’s journey is no longer a communal myth meant to connect us to universal truths or shared humanity. Instead, it has devolved into a solipsistic performance, designed to pander to the solitary, fragmented viewer. The hero is no longer a stand-in for the collective psyche; they are a desperate, algorithmically optimized reflection of the individual viewer’s habits, anxieties, and fleeting whims. The streaming platforms, in their cynical genius, have realized that the hero doesn’t need to transcend—it canyon be counterfeit to keep the viewer watching.

This solipsism is not an accident; it is a design feature. The viewer, sitting at home with their snacks and their phone, is no longer a passive recipient of the story but its gravitational center. Netflix and Amazon exploit this dynamic by tailoring the journey to flatter the viewer’s every interruption and indulgence. The pacing of the narrative bends to their attention span; the emotional beats sync with their scrolling habits. The hero’s struggles are less about confronting universal archetypes and more about mirroring the viewer’s petty frustrations: boredom, distraction, and the need for instant gratification. The hero, in essence, has become a tool for the viewer’s self-soothing, a vessel for their fragmented, solipsistic engagement with the world.

Take, for example, the way plot arcs are now structured to cater to this dynamic. The classic “belly of the whale” moment, where the hero confronts the abyss and their own existential fears, has been replaced by strategically timed cliffhangers and reveals. These moments aren’t designed to challenge the viewer or provoke introspection—they exist solely to prevent them from clicking away. Emotional depth is sacrificed for continuity, tension flattened into easily digestible morsels of plot that can be consumed between bites of takeout or during bathroom breaks. The hero doesn’t descend into the underworld to emerge transformed—they descend because the viewer demands constant stimulation, and the algorithm mandates it.

What we are witnessing is the collapse of narrative as a loosely structured, rule-bound system into a kind of chaotic more or to put evening clocks, where the very principles that once gave stories their coherence are pulled out from under us—like a chair disappearing as we sit. The hero’s journey, once the backbone of mythic storytelling, no longer stands as a map for transformation but as a casualty of its own commodification. It is not that the rules have evolved; it is that they have dissolved, replaced by the infinite pliability of algorithmic tailoring, which bends the story into whatever shape is necessary to hold a viewer’s fractured attention.

This anomie—the disintegration of any external logic governing narratives—reveals a deeper malaise. Stories used to promise a kind of loop, a structure that reflected the rhythms of life and the resolution of chaos into meaning or sometimes absurdity. But now, in the age of streaming platforms, this promise has been reduced to a cynical bait-and-switch: instead of meaning or absurdity, we are offered endless circadian mirroring; instead of catharsis, a dopamine drip of cliffhangers and cheap resolutions. The narrative doesn’t guide us to confront life’s mysteries or complexities; it merely keeps us sitting, scrolling, consuming, suspended in a state of perpetual distraction.

What replaces the old rules is not liberation, but a hollow parody of freedom. The narrative no longer obeys the rules of myth or structure because it has a new master: the viewer’s whims, as interpreted by the cold calculus of the algorithm. In the absence of shared archetypes or universal truths, stories become untethered from any external purpose. They exist only to serve an immediate function—to keep the viewer watching, to ensure the metrics stay green. This is why narratives today feel both bloated and empty: they stretch endlessly, packed with filler and redundant twists, because they no longer end when the story demands it—they end when the viewer’s attention gives out.

It is a parody of freedom because what appears to be boundless choice and liberation is, in fact, a carefully engineered illusion. Streaming platforms offer an endless array of options and narratives, claiming to liberate us from the supposed tyranny of traditional storytelling structures. Yet this abundance does not empower us; it overwhelms and pacifies us. The more choices we are given, the less meaningful those choices become, and the more we find ourselves locked into an experience that feels curated not for us, but against us.

True freedom involves the ability to engage with something larger than ourselves—a story, a world, or a meaning that challenges us, changes us, or connects us to others. But in this parody, the hero’s journey is stripped of its capacity to provoke or transform. Instead, it reflects back the viewer’s own trivial habits and fleeting whims, flattering them into complacency. The platforms don’t ask us to rise to meet the story; they lower the story to meet us where we are, in our inertia, our distraction, our solipsism.

Consider the constant nudges embedded in the interface: autoplay features, personalized recommendations, the endless scroll. These mechanisms masquerade as tools of empowerment—“You choose what you watch, when you watch it!”—but in reality, they close the loop, ensuring we never escape the gravitational pull of the algorithm. We are free, but only to pick from a menu designed to keep us trapped in a state of perpetual consumption.

This is why it is a parody. It mimics the outward appearance of freedom—choice, abundance, control—while hollowing out its substance. We do not shape the narrative; the narrative is shaped around us, our decisions anticipated and exploited before we even make them. The freedom we are offered is not to transcend or grow, but merely to linger, to scroll, to consume. It is freedom as an anesthetic, freedom as a form of control.

The true irony lies in how this parody undermines itself. The more the platforms bend the hero’s journey to our whims, the less satisfying it becomes. We sense, deep down, that this endless customization diminishes the story’s power. By removing friction, challenge, or contradiction, the narrative becomes lifeless, a bland echo of our own shallow impulses. This is not freedom; it is an elaborate cage, decorated to look like a limitless horizon.

And this is the true horror: the disappearance of rules does not liberate us in a modernist Virginia Woolf or post modernist Thomas Pynchon but folds the narrative back onto itself, under its own weight, into a self-referential void. Without structure, the hero’s journey becomes a meaningless procession of events designed to accommodate snack breaks and bathroom trips, where every story is both too much and not enough, where we are endlessly teased with the promise of meaning but never allowed to grasp it.

This is an anomie not of absence, but of excess: too much content, too much pandering, too many “choices,” all leading to a paralyzed, anesthetized audience incapable of demanding more. The rules don’t disappear into freedom; they disappear under the weight of their own exploitation, leaving us with stories that serve no higher purpose than to fill the void in our own overstimulated, underfulfilled lives. The narrative, like the viewer, collapses into itself, a hollow echo of what it once promised to be.

This is the ultimate exploitation: the platforms present themselves as delivering a grand narrative, while in reality, they deliver a mirror. The viewer, in their isolation, becomes the sole arbiter of the hero’s relevance, the sole judge of their journey. But this illusion of control only deepens the solipsism. The hero exists not to confront universal truths or transcend their world, but to validate the viewer’s immediate emotional state. Their struggles must be relatable but not too challenging, their triumphs satisfying but not too complex—always calibrated to the viewer’s fragmented attention and shallow engagement.

And so, the hero becomes a hollow figure, trapped in a loop of pandering and performance. Their journey, once a testament to human resilience and transformation, is now a product designed to sustain the viewer’s solipsism. The streaming platforms exploit this relationship with surgical precision, feeding the viewer endless variations of the same solipsistic fantasy. The hero doesn’t change the world—they simply reflect the viewer’s fleeting, distracted gaze back at them. In this way, the platforms don’t just monetize the hero’s journey; they hollow it out, leaving behind a simulacrum that exists solely to keep the viewer trapped in their own comfortable, isolating orbit.

And what of the reward? Here lies the most tragic inversion. The promise of wisdom, transformation, or catharsis has been reduced to the fleeting satisfaction of an ending that queues up the next binge-worthy offering. The “Return with the Elixir” is not a moment of revelation—it’s an autoplay feature. The algorithm whispers: “You might also like this,” not to broaden your horizons, but to keep you ensnared. The viewer, like Sisyphus, is condemned to an eternal cycle of scrolling and selecting, their engagement driven not by genuine desire, but by the dread of facing an empty screen.

The hero’s ultimate battle, then, is no longer with monsters, villains, or the self, but with the fragmented attention span of the audience. This is the counterfeit logic of our age: the heroic journey subsumed by the banality of distraction, where epic trials are subordinated to snack breaks and bathroom trips, and the great elixir of wisdom is traded for the anesthetic of endless content. The question is no longer whether the hero will succeed, but whether the viewer will still be watching when they do.

Ashes in the Ledger

January 8, 2025January 8, 2025

Sometimes I wonder how many social democrats and Jews of all extractions—bankers, pharmacists, tailors, teachers—found their hands brushing against the paper edges of stock certificates for Audi, Bayer, Hugo Boss, Thyssen, IG Farben, Krupp. How many of them sat in cramped apartments in Berlin or Vienna, trying to reconcile their progressive ideals or ancestral guilt with the dividend checks that arrived on time? Could they have known, or did they simply not look? And if they didn’t look, was it because they couldn’t bear to, or because the alternative—a life without that income—was unthinkable?

Maybe there was a Jewish chemist in Frankfurt who believed in the socialist cause, the kind who lectured his son on solidarity and the workers’ struggle, but who also rationalized his holdings in IG Farben. “What can I do?” he might have said, folding his hands. “It’s not my factory. It’s not my Zyklon B.” Did he know? Or a Social Democratic alderman in Hamburg who wore Hugo Boss suits—tailored perfectly to his reformist speeches, perfectly stitched to stand up to the bourgeois opposition—and who privately thanked himself for his wise investment in the firm.

It’s not hypocrisy exactly, though hypocrisy plays its part. It’s survival, wrapped in capitalism’s suffocating embrace. It’s the damned problem of complicity in a world where even the innocent are investors, where justice and profit are rarely bedfellows. And I think about that, about them, because isn’t that the Jewish question, after all? Not the one history asks, but the one we ask ourselves: “What am I supposed to do when my hands are tied to the same wheels that crush me?”

And, of course, it’s never just Jews. The Germans, the Americans, the French. Everyone has a stake in the machinery. Everyone owns a little piece of the war, even the peace-loving ones, even the idealists. Maybe especially the idealists, because they need that stake to keep on dreaming their dreams.

And me? What would I have done if someone handed me a share of Bayer in 1925, a tidy inheritance from an uncle with no children, just chemicals in his veins and ambition on his mind? Would I have burned it in defiance or tucked it into a portfolio, knowing it might pay for my children’s education, my wife’s medical bills, my own peace of mind in an increasingly unpeaceful time?

I’d like to think I know the answer. But that’s a lie, isn’t it? We never really know what we’d do—not until the papers are in front of us, not until the money is in our hands, not until we feel the weight of history bearing down on us like a shareholder’s meeting we can’t refuse to attend.

Did the Captains of Industry know? Did the men who sat behind the polished mahogany desks of Audi, Bayer, Hugo Boss, Thyssen, IG Farben, and Krupp, men who dressed in finely tailored suits and polished their egos with the same attention they gave their portfolios, know that the great, shining machine of industry they were feeding would, in time, begin to chew on its own? Perhaps not in so many words. Perhaps it was a matter of not knowing as much as it was not asking. The slow, almost imperceptible gnaw of complicity that runs like a thread through the fabric of a company’s rise and fall, through the lies we tell ourselves while others take the brunt of it. But in the quiet corners of their minds, buried beneath layers of ambition and arrogance, could they have known that the very system they were financing—the grand spectacle of global capitalism, of shareholder value, of industrial might—was a beast that would eventually devour even the hands that fed it?

Perhaps they did. Perhaps some of them saw it coming, the great collapse, the inevitable breaking point. But what choice did they have? Could you be a player in a system so vast and powerful and still hold on to your purity? Could you climb to the top of a mountain of capital built from the ashes of others’ suffering and still look down without a touch of pride? Could you gaze at your dividends, the returns on your investments, and not see the hand of history drawing ever closer, a hand that might one day slap away your carefully constructed facade?

No, they didn’t know, not in the way one knows the end of a novel, the way you know that the last chapter will arrive before too long. It was a slower process—an accumulation of small decisions, of overlooking the darker corners, of pretending the rot was someone else’s problem. IG Farben’s contracts with the Nazis, Krupp’s steel feeding the war machine, Bayer’s patenting of chemicals—these were just facts of doing business, weren’t they? They were the necessary costs of progress. A price paid for the bright future. In the margins, somewhere between board meetings and champagne toasts, they told themselves that the world was a place where winners win and losers lose. They were simply winners.

There’s a cruel irony in it, of course. Because even as the foundations of their empires began to crack, they clung to their faith in the system, even as the system turned on them. They thought, as all men in positions of power think, that they could control it. That with enough maneuvering, enough strategy, enough money, they could ride out the storm. They were wrong. But of course, by the time they realized it—when the cracks were too deep and the storm had already broken—their wealth had become as fragile as the paper it was printed on.

And so it goes.

The Jew owns shares in IG Farben. The teacher owns shares in Bayer. The Social Democrat owns shares in Audi. They own them reluctantly, sure. They own them because a cousin said it was a sound investment, because a neighbor swore the yield was better than war bonds, because some analyst with a reassuring face on the radio promised dividends as sturdy as the Reichsmark. They own them not because they love what the companies produce, but because everyone owns something, and better to own a piece of progress than to be left out entirely.

But what are they really buying? IG Farben isn’t just a chemical company. Bayer isn’t just pharmaceuticals. Audi isn’t just cars. They are machines on sliding scales of entropy, machines dressed up in the finery of industry, their factories humming with the energy of collapse. These companies don’t just produce goods—they go from raw materials to heat death. They extract, they exploit, they expand, and in the process, they wear down everything: workers, resources, the very society that props them up. Every share is a vote of confidence in the machine of entropy. Every dividend a reward for feeding the beast that devours us all.

The system is designed for heat death. It’s not an accident, not some tragic malfunction. It’s the design. Progress doesn’t run on innovation or ingenuity; it runs on entropy.

The concept of heat death is simple, almost banal, but its implications are vast and unyielding. It begins with a law, one of the few laws that govern the universe without exception: entropy always increases. This is not a law of man, to be bent or debated. It is a law of nature, universal and absolute, indifferent to our desires or fears.

Imagine a system—a room, a planet, a galaxy. In it, energy moves like water spilling from a higher to a lower place. Heat flows from the hot to the cold until there is no difference, no gradient. At first, this is productive, even vital: the flow of energy fuels stars, sustains life, and drives machines. But the same process that creates order—by burning fuel or building structures—inevitably creates disorder elsewhere. The ashes, the waste, the broken pieces—these are entropy. Slowly, inexorably, the system approaches equilibrium, where no more energy flows, and nothing changes.

On the scale of the universe, this means that the stars will burn out, one by one. The galaxies, which now swirl in splendid motion, will become cold, diffuse clouds of gas. In time—unimaginable spans of time—there will be no more movement, no more light. The universe will become a uniform, silent void. This is heat death: not fire and fury, but the absence of both.

What is unbearable about this idea is not its inevitability but its finality. The universe, in its birth, promised so much: complexity, beauty, possibility. And yet, written into its very fabric is the promise of its own dissolution. Entropy is not merely a force of nature; it is a force of betrayal. What builds also destroys, and the greater the structure, the greater the collapse.

Even we, in our small lives, see this mirrored everywhere. The machines we build to sustain us wear out. The systems we create to organize ourselves decay into corruption. The fire of human ambition burns, yes—but it also leaves ashes. We dream of progress, of permanence, but in the end, everything succumbs to entropy.

What then can be done? Nothing. The laws are immutable. And yet, perhaps there is some consolation in understanding. To know the law of entropy is to know the truth of existence: that all things are temporary, and that within this temporary nature lies their meaning. We do not fight entropy to win; we fight it to live, for as long as we can, with as much grace as we can muster.

What they did not understand, or perhaps did not wish to understand, was that the heat—the very heat that powered the engines of production, the machinery of life itself—was not a promise of life, but a prelude to death. The machine he had helped to build, like all machines, was an agent of entropy. Not the sudden, violent collapse of a great empire, not the crash of a factory, but the quiet, slow death of all systems, the unrelenting expansion of disorder. This was not the collapse of one man’s dream, or the failure of one system—it was the universal condition of things. Heat death was in the machine long before he ever invested his faith—or his shares—in it.

The machine knew this, of course, in ways that its creators never could. The gradual acceleration of decay, the increasingly complex forms of its demise—the system that promised life did not know how to give it, and thus, it only ever devoured. But there is no steering entropy. Entropy does not heed the will of men. Entropy is not a force to be bought or sold. It is the price of the universe itself—the price of every system, every plan, every certainty. No matter how fine the mechanism, no matter how polished the machine, it is bound to the same finality: the dissolution of all things into an unstructured, featureless state. The machine that had promised him a future would deliver none. In the end, he was not an owner of shares, but a shareholder in oblivion.

And so he sat, at his desk perhaps, or at the table of some meeting, eyes fixed on the horizon of history, unaware that the very thing he had pledged his loyalty to—the thing that had promised him security, comfort, continuity—was the very thing that would, inevitably, turn its machinery inward and consume him, and all those like him.

The Social Democrat with their earnest morality, the Jew with their scruples, the teacher with their quietly ethical heart—all of them believe they’re different. That their investment is reluctant, that their participation is marginal, that they are outsiders in the system they profit from. But there are no outsiders. Once you own shares, you’re inside the machine, and the machine is entropy.

The collapse isn’t a bug; it’s the system’s final, perfect feature. The same industry that builds wealth also builds collapse. The shareholders think they can stand apart, that when the system devours itself, they’ll be spared, standing tall on a mountain of profits. But they’re wrong. Entropy eats everyone in the end. And it saves the shareholders for last, savoring their illusions of immunity, their desperate belief that they’ll somehow escape the inevitable.

DRESSING ENTROPY IN HUGO BOSS

Entropy is the ultimate shapeshifter. Today, it wears the sharp tailoring of Hugo Boss uniforms, medals gleaming like a carnival trick, its shoulders broad and its authority unquestioned. But this is just the latest costume. Entropy has been in disguise before: sometimes it drapes itself in the gilded robes of monarchy, at other times in the starched collars of Enlightenment rationalism, or the red banners of revolution. The costume changes, the slogans change, but the fundamental fact remains—Entropy is still Entropy. No matter how shiny the veneer, no matter how polished the facade, the cracks are already there, running invisibly beneath the surface.

Humans have a knack for dressing up their decay, for putting lipstick on the inevitable. We build systems, we erect ideologies, we manufacture empires, and then we place Entropy at the center of it all, decorating it with ceremony and pomp as if to ward off the truth of its nature. The uniforms are meant to inspire confidence, to convey permanence, but they do nothing to stave off the collapse. Entropy doesn’t care about uniforms. Entropy eats uniforms for breakfast.

It’s a sick sort of comedy, isn’t it? We design systems to fight the forces of chaos, but we build into them the very seeds of their undoing. We invent new costumes to dress up the old monster, thinking maybe this time we’ve outsmarted it, maybe this time Entropy will play by our rules. But Entropy doesn’t play. It just waits.

In the end, the uniform is meaningless. Whether it’s the imperial purple of Rome or the mechanized efficiency of modern industry, Entropy always wins. It is the true constant, the quiet devourer behind every proclamation of progress and power. And yet we keep decorating it, as if a bit of gold trim might turn the tide. As if a new name, a new flag, a new uniform might trick the untrickable.

And so, as the once-great men in their now-wrinkled suits and ties watched the world burn, they discovered something else that nobody likes to talk about—when it all goes up in flames, nobody’s standing on top anymore. Nobody gets to win. They were just cogs in a wheel.

The Social Democrat owns shares in Volkswagen. The Jew owns shares in Audi. The teacher—mild-mannered, bespectacled, grading essays about the moral arc of the universe bending toward justice—owns shares in IG Farben. This is not hyperbole; this is history. These are facts. They didn’t buy into Nazi uniforms or Zyklon B. No, they bought into progress. Into a system that promised efficiency, productivity, order. What could be more innocent, more ordinary, than owning a piece of a well-run machine?

The machine wasn’t broken. That was the worst part. It was humming along perfectly, like a well-fed beast, doing exactly what it was designed to do: chew up the world and spit out ash. People kept talking about fixing it, but no one had the guts to admit it wasn’t broken at all. It just didn’t care about them. It never had.

The funny thing about machines is that they’re supposed to make life easier. And they did, for a while—until everyone realized the machine wasn’t running on oil or electricity. It ran on people. You could grease its gears with sweat and hope and maybe even a little love, but sooner or later, it wanted bones. And it always got them.

People at the top didn’t see the problem. Why would they? The machine worked for them. It gave them everything they could possibly want—money, power, bigger yachts, smaller waistlines. Every time the beast coughed up a new disaster, they just threw another party. “It’s just business,” they said, sipping cocktails made from the tears of the damned.

Meanwhile, the rest of us kept turning the crank, pretending we weren’t the fuel. We told ourselves we had no choice. The machine needed us, and we needed the machine. Sure, it ate a few of us now and then, but that was just how it worked. Progress always comes at a price, right?

Here’s the kicker, though: we knew better. Deep down, we all knew. The machine didn’t need to run. It never did. But stopping it would mean admitting we’d been suckers all along. And nobody likes being a sucker.

So we made excuses. We called it entropy, the natural order of things. The universe is falling apart anyway, right? Might as well enjoy the ride. But entropy doesn’t need our help, does it? It’s perfectly capable of wrecking everything on its own. We just speed things up because we’re impatient. Or maybe because we’re scared.

The thing about jumping off the machine is that it always feels like the wrong time. The gears are grinding, pistons pumping, the whole thing vibrating like it’s alive, and there you are, clutching the edge, staring at the mess of parts below. The other operators look at you like you’ve lost your mind. “You can’t jump,” they say. “You’ll get chewed up in the gears. Or worse, you’ll end up in the scrap heap.” Nobody seems to notice the machine is falling apart—or that it’s always been falling apart.

But the truth is, jumping off is easier than they make it sound. The hard part isn’t the jump. The hard part is convincing yourself that you don’t need the machine. It’s realizing that every promise it made—of progress, of purpose, of some great outcome—was just noise. It was all designed to keep you cranking levers, pulling switches, and feeding it more fuel. Once you see that, really see it, the grinding metal below stops looking so terrifying. Sure, you might take a few bruises on the way down, but at least you’ll be free of the endless clanking that’s deafened you for years.

Of course, the machine doesn’t stop for deserters. Once you’re off, it keeps roaring forward, its gears turning without pause. And that’s the punchline, isn’t it? The machine doesn’t care that you’re gone. It never cared. You were just one more cog, easy to replace. And while that truth stings, it’s also the best feeling in the world: knowing you’re free to walk away, to start building something of your own—something that doesn’t grind people into dust.

But the machine was entropy. Always entropy. System-entropy, wave-entropy, market-entropy. Whatever you called it, it wasn’t designed to spare its own architects, let alone its investors. Yet they believed. They believed in their special exemption, their clever foresight. The collapse was for someone else—those other investors, those other shareholders, the poor fools who didn’t know how to hedge, who weren’t smart enough to see where the world was going.

So you jump. The air rushes past, the noise fades, and then—wham. You hit the ground. Your knees buckle, your hands scrape the dirt, but you’re alive. For the first time in what feels like forever, the noise is gone. The world is still. You look back at the machine, its smoke trailing into the distance, and realize it wasn’t the gears you were afraid of—it was the silence that came after.

What makes it worse, what makes it unforgivable, is that you knew. You knew what Volkswagen built, what Farben manufactured, what Krupp supplied. You knew, and you told yourself it didn’t matter, because what mattered was the system itself—the unstoppable force of progress, the indomitable march of capital. Entropy wrapped itself in precision engineering and quarterly reports, and you convinced yourself that it was something else entirely. Something clean. Something you could benefit from without ever being touched by the blood it spilled.

And when the system collapses, it collapses for you too. It devours you last, not out of mercy but because you taste the sweetest. You, the self-aware shareholder, the reluctant participant, the one who held your nose while collecting dividends. The machine feeds on your denial, your smugness, your belief that you stood apart.

The world is still, as if you’ve stepped into a void where sound was never born. You look back at the machine, its smoke thinning against the horizon, and realize it wasn’t the grinding gears that filled you with dread—it was the immensity of what lay beyond them. The silence stretches, vast and infinite, a space too big to hold onto and too deep to escape. And yet, that vastness is yours now. It wasn’t the gears you feared, but the quiet that comes after. That quiet isn’t emptiness; it’s potential—the first step toward something unbound and true.