“No amount of fill, you can create....”
-Ricardo Dominguez
“The tenacity of the soul – as an act of the intellect upon the body – in conserving its
inner parts brings life to the universe as an intelligible principle. Yet this insistence on
survival or remaining introduces decay and negrido into both intelligibility and vitality.”
The Corpse Bride: Thinking with Negrido, Reza Negarestani
Palaces
Dominic Paul Miller
These fucks NEVER shut THE fuck up!! One time they can’t stop stammering about quanta, quanta, quanta. All day. Monitoring, electrodes up the anus, shaved scalps, quilts lined with oscillators, quilted oscillators, feedback dampeners stitched on to the cuffs of their greasy pajamas. The selfers dream of numbers and the feedback is harsh. Once they picked up on it they started weaving away with their neurotic hands, tearing at strands of thread, bits of code, “uh,uh,uh that algorithm, it, uh...yeah that one, once we splice that one in, oh yeah, smooth sleep, erotic dreams, again.” Screens, these fucks want one screen after another. But its all mirror and they know it! No scream-breath, they want screen-breath, fog up the glass and drift into sleep, terrabytes of wolves attacking a small boy, your neighbor saw a coyote once when you were five, you wanted to find its hole by the creosote stands just past the fence. I saw one at the end of my driveway in the moonlight, staring into the window through the blinds, I swear it looked into me. Opened up the sleepy eyes. Anyways, no more of that, just numbers moving higher. Once cache coherence, Gordon Bell, back in the eighties crystallized, the quantified selfers started clawing their way up from their multicores. And when the snooping traffic started to die down, people started noticing ONE thing...Gaps. Gnawing gaps that you suck at, suck the marrow straight from top, make a small incision at the top, and then do just the opposite of scream, suck, harder than ever before. So its constant noise out there, either the high pitched slurping, or the hu,hu, hu, hundreds and thousands, gflops, terraflops, cut the sides of the face back and scream down the tube. Never look at a tube the same way again. Never look, just glance over the shoulder, then the other, suck, repeat, scream.
This bottom up aggregation, one selfer fucking another in the mouth, is everywhere. One word between them, hyperbolically imploding, slowly, slower, slower, just, like that. Once they started the infowars for the kids it was over, not stitching up the children, you cannot “self” a kid, its not in the program, I mean it is and isn’t. A parent can’t self their own kid, or else they wouldn’t have one in the first place. BIOS(lite), though, the kids got swept up right away so it didn’t matter. The kid came to visit the parents not the other way around. And again, NOT everyone is THERE. Outside the gap, because its not a horde, the mass is defined by an extruded body; we’re way past that, no working class! Infoworkers don’t gather around each other, unless it’s to compare numbers, then they shout about numbers and someone’s always right, nearest to the data, surfing the sine tightest and taking a picture of themselves with the front mounted board cam, it’s about yay big and feeds to GIS sensors. Even the waves aren’t outside the gap, you have to go to the desert. All sun, no talking, with lots of beaders there, you can “buy” necklaces cheap, they don’t care really though, all they do is buy more beads, or crush more sand, old microchips and processors. The beaders took me in when I was eleven. We ate mushrooms and peanut butter and talked about sheep. Wool is an aggregate of loose ends, not a rhizome, nor is it funicular, it doesn’t spread, or span, or traverse, it clings and saturates and knots. BIOS(lite) was new on the market then, the old gen were there already but those that got it, REALLY got it. JOBS. lots of them. STEVES, CARLs, NGUYENsss, whatever. What did they get? What the selfers wanted, and that’s to make a lot of noise carry. Cables, you get that end over there, hurry, okay now pull, tighter, alright now plug it into the wall, and, good, now, go into the other room. Which one? The one marked with the higher number, yes higher, to the right, somehow they figured out how the next one is always on the right. So when you leave, close the door, and open the one on the right, and close that one.
Next you wake up five years later strung out on Diet Coke, inhaled aluminum.
But the point is Gordon Bell, his various corps, bits extended across the divide (don’t use that fucking word “liminal” goddamnit!) Done for, the only thing liminal is your bank account, it’s in the alloalgo realm, hypochondriac’s nightmare. You bought twelve hours of sweatshop plabor this morning:
Just in case you didn’t see Arnold Schwarzenegger’s eyes bugged out of his face when you were nine, Bell co-authored a book with the same title, Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything, including how you remember Philip K. Dick’s We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. Holes for sale. I won’t bore you with the details, your parents die, come back from the dead, and then cannibalize your forearm. In the sequel, however, we get this: "(My concern then and still is on maintaining high signal to noise ratio - quieting the mind to achieve the zen of pure signal.)" - Robert L. Blum, PhD, MD. At this point we've got to follow the tetrahedron to the pentachoron, a "5-cell", don't think I'm making this up. First think of the tetrahedron, Bucky Fuller, then plug in a shit-ton of alloalgo realm, and you've got a fourth dimensional object. Which, again, don't take my word for it, but really what you're looking at is the fourth dimension which is the UI. It's infinitely expandable because one facet is the connecting/cannibalizing interface, bone sucker.
I’m gonna punch you in the mouth if you don’t listen. How can you listen to a fist, put it in the mouth as close possible to the ear channel, just below the sinus. Now talk. Real feedback loop. Noise happens when you boost something, amplify it, noise is the detached, uncanny message. Claude Shannon was the signal to noise ratio essendi or perhaps the war was, or if we don’t want to cast petty blame on a man serving his country (nation-self) we might say the code was there all along, and what becomes the most terrifying result of WWII is not the atomic bomb, but algorithmic communication. A leviathan of roving code. David McNally talks about the “superintended inscription” through the mechanism of the anatomy-stage. What about a homeless person drinking Monster energy in the parking lot above the freeway. Is there really any difference? I don’t want to perform some high/low gymnastics, I want you to look the homeless person in the eyes and tell them they’re wrong. Not for being homeless, not for defiling their body. But for owing themselves to a self state. You’re going to balk of course, the pauper was innocent! crushed under by the weight of the gears, years of schizophrenic transgression was too much for society to bear, let alone that pore, singular soul. The neoliberal state is a woolen cloak for the porous body exiled to the manicured eucalyptus stand cupping the shopping mall. In the night when the fog rolls in and the air is purely damp the cloak becomes a sponge, sopping wetting to the bone. You want to scream but it suffocates you and pours into your throat, so naturally you start swallowing.
That’s a type of inscription. Self-inscription. We are all transmitting outward and inward, grasping the hole emphatically. Rimming it, so that as we draw nearer to the center it becomes pushed away just a bit further, squeezing the corpse for one last drop#. One more pulse rattle before bed. Towards what are we extending our neuroplasticity, however? Imagine a field of ravens with two young children playing in the center. Beyond them is a dry lake bed, alkali-rich mud, flowing lobes of black mud bed, or, they are in it but it also stretches beyond them. As each child dies proceeding the other, the ravens are stitching up the one beside. It’s happening so rapidly that a jittery song starts to palpitate. That’s the space above them: a woolen tapestry of migrant corridos. So what you’re really seeing is the movement of the ravens casting about beneath the blanket, hopping and swooping their beaks low to the ground, then higher up, nice and snug, taut lines, tautological sutures. Because the song follows the dance there is complete believability to the narrative and when you’ve thought one line to be something persistent it’s already dissolved into the body, ingested plasticity.
What then of Metcalfe’s Law, as the number of users increases so does the value of the interface. Lines become circulatory, information aspirated. Screen breath redoubled in the informatics telecom strata, zombie planet encrusted with a stratum of algorithmic telemech, a smoldering infection of retro leather bike seats, concrete palaces, concrete ramps, concrete speeds, war speeds invisible flexibility. The zen of war empties the self in favor of the state: “ [if ordered to march]: tramp, tramp and shoot: bang, bang.#” Act as a vehicle: drive. In this moment of crystalline growth what does the ethernet amplify? The signal to noise cancellation costs are high; every spam email generates .3 grams of CO2. Of course you might say that’s merely a micro-industry tagging along for the ride, parasites are a natural organism in any system, more anti-bug ointments over the counter, respirators for your computer(s), “Oh, I just have Mac, I don’t worry about viruses, my partner and I don’t have problems like that.” Foxconn riot two months ago, see what kind of plabor that gets you.# 
The signal to noise ratio becomes a matter of consumption and proliferation, decay and lustful procreation. As the propagation of informatics surges and Moore’s hyperbolic doubling enacts the humanization of the planet, the anthropocene aestheticizes a notion of the living corpse bound to itself and not, in fact, the rules of “nature”. We see then not a living corpse, however, but a living grave, the space of death and decay wholly annexed within culture. Death may only be seen as erasure without return. While the anthropocene does not exist as a radical motif outside a natural temporality, homo sapien’s fear of the night/void becomes transmuted into a frozen iterative articulation of the sign under which being consistently enfolds. There is only the synthetic glow of the present remaining.
