exercise (2025) skopje: countertext to simulation, exercise, operations by urbanomic

andrej synkar's counter-text to mackay - simulation, exercise, operations titled: exercise (skopje) 2025 [now with an accompanied video!]

antonie bousquet - wargames:

bousquet appears first because he appears to be the one with the most refined and concentrated point in this compilation, which allows me to actually produce an interesting and not overdrawn comeback to his own point - the idea that simulation overproduces and intensifies lived realities rather than representing or merely capturing them, and the particular ways in which fields of views and their assorted maps allow for a re-normalization of ontic focus-points.

it is abundantly clear, and a good point, that simulation doesnt merely represent reality, nor that it produces hyperreality by losing all similarities with the original representational field, but that it is its intense site of production, and it is true that it can be said to be 'realer' or a contigent fold within said reality, and, challenging the relationship between the virtual and real without comprehending their mutual interaction is indeed contextually antiquated for us without newer anthropological basing, however, it is a case of finding the cruical point where the systems of value that allow the outcomes to be generated in the first place, not the case where we prioritize which intense field can generate the most efficiently navigatable landscape, but which one creates occurances that can at any point distort our field of vision.

it is still true, no matter the unreliability of external reality, that it largely produces the consequences to which virutal reality is supposed to be a solution of. however, in the moment where virtual reality creates external problems through the use of its own internal framework, partially divorced from direct causality to the real landscape, we may in fact find ourselves required to return to the value systems and casual relations of the real (to virtualize the real) in order to figure out where exactly the virtual (now real) site of production messed up.

in that sense also though, maximally productive value is generated not by the current most reliable site of production, nor by the most consistent one or efficient one, but by the most recurring one. the most recurring site shows us that it has the most potential for messing up the conditions that make navigations possible, which is far more important than what or how something is presented. if i wanted to create false information, and the primary navigation was a virtual map, i would naturally create a physical obstacle. if the priorities are rearranged with maximal efficiency aimed towards navigating the real world, i would however not attempt to engineer a false mark in the virtual map, since the navigator would have already presumed its unreliable.

this shows that the real world is simply more occuring, therefore more valuable. however, if in any case, the virtual map started to prioritize different targets, and our value metrics were adjusted to it, or it somehow began to matter to us what happens in the map more than it actually does in the real world, then suddenly the virtual map would be more valuable, and it wouldn't matter as much what's happening in the real world. this shows how, in the epistemic dimension of navigation, what matters more is the normative dimension, not exactly the actual description of the world.

der derian - virtuous war:

derian speaks cleanly, but simply contextualizes how the political effects of technology today not only confirm plato's shipwreck dilemma but extend it into dilemmas. cool, i guess - but the issue of stricom's total banality and complicity is unfortunately undercut and underexplored, amounting to the motive ultimately being underdelivered.

its especially interesting to consider what der derian wrote about the seargants and generals that work in stricom in regards to their belief in the primacy of simulated war over any other form of social play, when compared to the question of what do they actually think like, and what have they actually done or been doing? and what do they get out of doing this? the same comparison to banal evil as arendts eichmann, may be the first impression, but then later, also theres a considerable difference here too, one underscored by a new type of virtual conflict. also this is largely how they prevent sabotage im guessing, they cause a depletion of character on account of the interior human "resources" or their internal rhetoric/narrative.

as crozier points out, they trade the functional benefit of escaping superior authorities and peer pressure dynamics, but also fail to communicate their intricate character, trading it for career gains. technically then, it is more rewarding, but far less efficient to climb those latters strategically, because the chance of successfully balancing between losing yourself or losing interest in the mission in order to prevent that is just too high, when already anyone who wants to sabotage is an eccentric. so the real goal of radicals should, instead of outdated criminal terror or sabotage plans, is to attempt to somehow, in any way possible, influence anyone they can get their hands on thats already inside the system. dont forget that the gating for being able to do this is also influenced by unrelated factors like social and resource positioning.

there arent enough people in the inside of the bubble who even have this as a goal for this ever to produce substantial effects, which is why only systems logics or global overturns of whole philosophies will ever truly crash the system from the outside. not enough people are interested enough in figuring this stuff out, so even with all the information on how to cause these problems, the intellectuals/radicals might be outnumbered outright by stacked pragmatic opposition on the other side. but still, a conversion of logic is still necessary, there should be a book, something along the lines of "for all radicals" that tries to create future predictive logics of actually impactful resistance. meanwhile, it shows how axiomatic this process is, cause if that book had strategies of influence, it also shows that the deep state has access to the same forms, meaning they can try to do it back to the radicals, on top of the radicals having to be able to hold an ultimatum over their heads to even be allowed to exist in a way thats externally impactful to the enviornment theyre resisting. the directions of the world are random and stack.

these next ten to twenty thousand years since the beginning of the dutch colonail invasions all the way to today, and up to the next two or so thousnad years, will be in this fashion, where civilization feeds its own weapons, then the internal logic will maybe shift to something less horrible for everyone. but meanwhile, we rely on the inside actors to fuck themselves over, even though this will happen less and less as the system draws on even more efficient models. the resistance will have to run its own simulation models, ones that simulate the inner beurocracies procedures in very much the same structure, so they can develop the informational games to even pose a threat. also, even third party sabotage will be harder to do as ever greater degrees of npcs populate those roles, the actual ethical convincing will have to be ever more absurd, as theyre convinced by ever less actually ethically interesting propositions.

there will be a science of pragmatic-manipulation, several degrees abstracted both in its own epistemic consistency and in the actual advice for how to train models to convince npcs. we should feel comfortable exercising these speculations openly, even though they're worth a ton to a data harvesting malevolent app, because we're connected either way, you feed me ways to counter you, im inspired and draw them back, we meet in the middle one way or another. i dont believe the information war is real on an actual ideas plane. its only empirical specifities, training and political plans, abstracted from all sense, and that pushes us right back to the economic mode of who is in the position to influence these things to begin with. this is what crozier calls the science of organizational games.

virtuous war, when it becomes a live rendition of clash of clans, loses its cool so much, that we have to wonder whether its even worth talking about it in the way we have to a certain degree.

stepan kment - programming worlds:

kment shows us how mental decoupling can serve as cognitive dissonance in this speech, as he ends up rightfully worrying over the new technologies he himself oversees and foresees, more specifically that they may destabilize governments or allow for so much libidinal investment that they have latent consequences on interactions in the outside world, or alternatively, that they may even be a cynical rewrite of the world, removed of all its details, only upkeeping the most banal, replicated sounds and worldscapes, which, unfortunately, has you focusing more on kment half the time than the text itself.

so this actually shows us an example of his practice of a safe decoupling, precisely stepan's attempt at cognitive dissonance, due to his professed job and the signals of light but decoupled and renunciated stress or speculation at the dangers that his profession causes in the world. if hes already handing this for free, but still not being impacted to sort of, sabotage the programming/engineering hes working on, then its presumably either a non impactful role, trivially influenced by ethics given the prerogative to impact soldiers less and less that he himself underlines, or something other.

and if he did show signs of inner struggle beyong "this worries me" then he'd have to at least say "i used to be an engineer before i whistleblew" or at the very least "theres something troubling about this so in my own work ive been trying to find ways to bypass it. also the idea that video games are mini cognitive overloaded networks serving the goal of light sensitization towards "mission task" rhetoricization or re-cognation/normalization of war, or even a light training imperative itself when it begins to closely mirror real war surroundings, or itself a part of an apparatus, or the simulations beginning to influence not just future war stakes and unintended consequences, but also the mapping of the terrain itself sort of indicates a recalibration of values.

but also it shows how all war is already fought beforehand, so the simulation is the actual emergent sequencing of the real thing, or in other worlds, its the multiverse that has already affected reality, its its own version of "capitalism emerges as an alien virus of the future" or terminator, the war event is terminated beforehand, but it also concludes in all possible initializations, its initilalized and therefore avoided, its also the only real conflict in the world, but its also just a command prompt and executable, so in its transgression it flattens the world - even admittedly to the pilots themselves, they say they need the flattening as kment mentions or else the speed overloads their cognitive processing power.

also, reminds me of derrick jensen when he says war is an imitiation of indigenous play. like you've really turned the warmest to the coldest (in the baudrillardian sense of those terms irt. play). this is exactly why war, more terrifying than ever, can feel underwhelming. not just the victims, but those supposed to be enjoying it are too busy worrying about making sure to win it, so they don't really get to play ever. nobody gets to play... kment's worries never really get to exist in his engineering position, even his potential rebellion is pre-simulated and removed. maybe all he has left is to worry about it?

mckenzie wark - players:

wark also gets to boast her early inspirations that would later draw on her more mature work much like almost everyone else in this cohort, but her text appears more schizophrenic than her peers, for better or worse, as she ends up fighting herself on top of the text in an inability to decide whether its supposed to be a critique of the ideology of play masked by capitalism or the question of the real and how the gamespace and its limits defines the inner structural tendencies, leading to a directionless - albeit refreshing read.

sorry for this. john girrard's work would have been more impressive if he created the digital screen and digital animation in real time, entirely all by himself. now, it's contigent on spaces existing in these ways, i mean, when he places the screens down next to locations, seemingly as if the path is continuing there, but it's simply an illusion, because it doesnt. and even if it didnt, it wouldnt be the same path. we need girrard to open a portal for us, but he's not there yet, he's also by the far the closest we've gotten to that point.

but i say we, as if he's doing it for some wider human public - of course not - this is all simply existing because it can. that's the weird thing about all of this. now all of this seems like a huge ramble, and yeah, i don't know. but why not? this is how i can find myself to interact with what i've seen. yes, it's fascinating. i guess the point is that he's still caught in the representational trap (screen as surface) rather than an ontological break (screen as fold in the real). and now, moving on, games since the point wark wrote what she did no longer are economically-fantastically neoliberal, they in fact have largely moved to showing hierarchical differences. lil yachty, elon musk and drake pay subscriptions to online services that allow them to cheat in games they've already bought, or for someone else to play on their accounts, or to enter higher meta-games (of gambling) and so on. in-game payments help progress you forward, your initial standings just don't matter anymore.

why? because it's all just your game now, your game towards reaching (and never being able to) god. it's all just theological, eclectic, cosmologically vain, its a simulation of infinite accumulation, it's like you're plugged into capital's backside, but even worse since there's no reason now to be. it's not like it comes with the status of having been the one to topple and dominate and opress the world, since you're in a basement playing an rpg and not getting 5% boosts on ways to execute invisible minorities like actual stemlords. meanwhile, they play the games so that they can learn how to think like capital better, they simulate their ontic phenomenology, you're simulating the slavery of non-participation, and we're all paying for it (literally and figuratively).

on the other hand, the world being a large gameboard with no external world is like, zizek's problem of the real mixed with godels incompleteness problem taken to a broader philosophical point, but it sort of ends before she says anything about that. very mixed passage, schizophrenic. also, games are simply places where designers get to enjoy being allowed to break rules they know they've always wanted to see what was behind them in the real world. but suddenly, they were the ones that had to put the objet petit a behind the wall thats supposed to be held down by the laws of physics but isnt, only to realize its just their own doomed reflection, and in that sense.

so instead of trying to figure out ways that motion doesn't work for us in new and inventive ways that end up just feeling like puzzles instead of revelations after like the third time you do the same thing (which wants to be different but isnt) they decided instead to just rely on cultural hauntology to feed actual cultural-evolutionary assemblages and their relevant processes back to autistic kids in a never ending but constantly downgressing loop, that at some point in the future will mimic the original template of traditional reductive but sensical cognitive testing games, because ultimately, it's between that and simply recreating the social economy all over again, but there's obviously no love in the abstraction of social economy if not for the prospects of the continental definition of aesthetics (sense + experience) so they mostly just turned that into gambling instead.

well i tried to have a nice convo but i guess im kind of rude. not saying this in the sense of as if i'm somehow backstabbing wark, we're kind of both saying the same thing in different ways. to finalize my point though, the aesthetic and political form that corresponds to being trapped in an endless, theological simulation of progress is the surface of the credit card, or in other words, the payment processing idea itself, the idea of sending value virtually. money itself becomes corrupted, it's like it's value slides off of it when some guy turns a cheap nothing-game of an infinite accumulator rpg into his own liquid wealth or stock bonds or like bitcoin or idk, even directly receives the money stashed into a briefcase, because the point is that that's still monopoly money, it's still lego-valued money. because here's the point, the way he interacts with the world, he's discredited from certain libidinal services. sure, he can buy a house, but it's not the same way warren buffet buys one, even if they have the same amount of money.

he just didn't opress and slaughter enough third world invisibles to really earn his place to be in that position, he just didn't do it, so he gets to buy a virtual house, a reflection of the simulated service of payment-processing. what's the point here? when you play that type of game, you are paying, forever, to him, money of a decoupled, ruptured, no-longer-universal quality. it no longer is the sole proprieter and capturer of capital's deterritorialization, constantly fixing and rebinding the stakes of values. it instead actually goes down. you are stuck in the hotel of infinite processing, you are processing your arrival to the game itself. even if you're not constantly paying, you're playing as if you're constantly paying, until you feel you are, and then the game itself never arrives, and so on.

thats where money itself becomes postponed, it can arrive, but it no longer holds. it can be with you, but you can't do anything with it, even if you can still do everything with it that everyone else can. its not that you just would never think to, or somehow symbolically you're prevented on the level of the social assemblage, but you're just kind of, well, the origin of the money hasnt been reified properly enough, it's half-baked, it needs to boil more to truly show the whole process of alienation. it's like you just wasted someones time, thats all you did. you never managed to truly isolate them from anything, they're still trying to pay you the money you already got from them. is that really the condition where you have the money?

the recursive form of play ("shooting some otha muthafucka") is now, trying to send some money to some otha muthafucka, but the money just never arrives, like in waiting for godot, it's the god of the game, you're not supposed to send or receive, you're on the zero-sum, and in that sense. the transaction is infinite, but the transformation (the social inscription of value) is absent. this is kind of how you get a payment with no settlement (gamespace with no outside) it's not that the world is too full and needs something to connect it to everything on the outside, it's actually kind of very empty, desperately waiting for that outside thing to come in and confirm that the checkout matters, not that the check out has happened. that's what simulating transfers for so long does to you, it destabilizes the matrix of value's value, not of value, the value stays exactly where it needs to be to keep being value.

it is possible, and i unfortunately sympathize with wark here, that the world we accompany, once it crosses the hyperreality threshold, simply doesn't have the sustained architecture to correctly identify what is and isn't a game, which reminds me of nick land's otherwise quite tame definition of intelligence as something along the lines of the ability to gameplay appropriately - viewing the naturalization of a condition of rulesets and their aesthetic composition as fundamental to the constitutive meaning of embodying the lived experience of the world itself - a kind of backwards theological direction that you see wark travelling towards.

eyal weizman - forensic temporality:

weizman sets out to examine how forensic studies create room for resurrection and ontological-level reversibility due to the way they shift space, temporality and perspective. in his more mature work, he successfully and militantly defends this clause from an anthropological perspective, however you'll notice that it's far more mature and far less philosophical in nature - and this speech shows precisely why he wasn't able to get anything out of his original inspiration, forcing it to mutate into a genealogy rather than the impressive metaphysical philosophy he was aiming for.

“good thing ekko had triggered his z-drive. eighteen times he heard the blood-curdling scream of the boy falling to his death before he figured out how and where to arrest the fall and save his life.”

ekko's z-drive, the device behind his famous chronobreak, allows him to escape certain encounters by rewinding time over and over again. in league it’s described as ekko shattering his timeline, becoming untargetable and rewinding to a position from a few seconds earlier, healing himself and damaging enemies around where he reappears. other video games also feature this same concept in similar ways, such as the prince of persia, braid, life is strange and majora's mask from the zelda series, mostly allowing for the preservation of certain resources at the cost of certain skill acquisitions, whilst preventing dialogue mistakes and so on, a classic game cliche.

in multiplayer competitives like league, it doesnt lead to literal time reversal, it can be thought of as a purely positive manifestation (ekko teleports and heals in-game, he doesnt really reverse everything that just happened, although they have that in the practice tool, so maybe they should allow his kit to do that, albeit, it would probably be frustrating and undeniably unfair). in the price of persia, a dagger, similarly to ekko, allows for a short rewind, unlike in madoka magica where large scale loops reset the entire worldline.

and on that topic, heres the second conceptual trigger for time-reversal shenanigans, the macro rather than micro field. we can see it in stephen strange from the mcu, who uses the eye of agamotto to create localized time loops, rewinding events until he achieves certain outcomes that he prefers. hes also seemingly able to calculate every outcome according to certain probabilities. the difference is that stephen's ability allows external world repeats on top of the longer duration. in the edge of tomorrow, a full death reset to a fixed point occurs. this is very similar to groundhogs day, also hinging on a certain criteria being met that snaps you out of that situation. harry august, on the other hand, is that same concept taken to the extreme, except in this case the protagonist reincarnates into the same life repeatedly, remembering each cycle.

in jojo, pucci's ability, made in heaven, allows for a delay between people’s perceptions and the actual flow of time, which causes all non-biological events to appear sped up, making vehicles and moving objects uncontrollable and lethal. eventually, objects move so fast they leave afterimages, like the sun becoming a strip of light as it rotates. natural processes accelerate beyond human reaction over time, leading to erosion and decay.

all this to say, what? well, obviously, weizman obviously isnt describing actual time travelling, but its funny how our worlds version of it does feature what we could possibly count as nearest to it, and that is precisely hauntological politics and abominable cruelty, beurocratic machines simulating violent endeavours, enacting, and then retracing them, living in their spirit. ekko preserves his time and actions away from the machine of capture, whereas in our world, small worlds are shattered to preserve the status quo of the state. the state takes all varied experiences, and systemizes and analyzes them, puts them in archives, and then retraces them for their validity. this is both its biggest strenght, because it becomes the governor of time, but also its biggest weakness.

the state can't speed up the entire movement of the universe, unlike in jojo, but it is in fact studying it so that one day it can perform that type of violence, shown but never truly fully shown in movies such as interstellar, where time and intimate affectivity is ruptured by distances in between worlds moving at different times. if the state could use this power, it would, so that it can "enact spirit" (shatter subjectivity as commanded by capital). the state can't make weapons kill you whilst still returning time to their holder, but they can make weapons kill you before the carrier even knows they have, and they can accidentally locate your murder in an inventory of shadowy states later, they can call back the memory of your death like a shadow-wielder.

now, the irreversible arrow of time is only reversed in its dead-form, and thats cruical. but if they could use ekko's ult to make it reversible in the positive form too, they would. ekko’s time is embodied, personal, anti-archival; the state’s time is systemic, archival, algorithmic. their only conflict would be between reversing two contradictions at once, since the state apparatus is primarily a machine of consistency, it wants to keep up certain alternatives over others. thats what we mean by it editing history, it isnt removing it, it gets the say on what counts to get removed, not what counts for the removing. they already act on history, and auto-remove elements, and then they act on this removal itself, deciding what even counts as being removed. this is the abstracted aspect of vaporization that everyone misses. this is why garlasco returns later to examine the atrocities he himself has committed as a "researcher".

he's a researcher, which is a modern day philosopher. why? because you can't study or teach what is above you in quality and weight (capital), you can only ever really be something in between an admirerer and impacted, you are searching for its points over and over. he is there, searching for his own actions, because he is committed to capital, he's there to enact capital, not his own actions ultimately. he's researching capital, the rest is secondary. he goes to re-enact and resurrect his failures in their dead form, so they can serve as museismic and archival artifacts of capital, they're auto-artifacted, but also, he's there to optimize and archive the process itself, and this ultimately is why you can't be a devotional admirer of capital in the old sense of devotion. you can only ever be inspired, but optimization, as an ethico-ontic process, disallows literal praying, he's simply there to be devoted to the system under which he acts.

he killed himself in a certain sense, capital doesn't allow refugees or victims. they don't count, in their social roles, as really ethically impacted beings to capital. marc, in a certain sense, is the victims he blew up, he's there to witness the destruction of his own building complex, in the name of the sacrifice to the gods of capital, of the symbolic vip, the symbolic us-manufactured terrorist. terror is exported, brought back - imported - terror arrives as an alien from the future (dialectical, not literal) but then it takes itself back, terror re-appears to examine itself, not allowing the conditions of that world to be terrifying on their own.

weizman could have looked at every universe to find the clearest possible solution like the marvel wonderman, but it wouldnt have stopped the threat from existing. this is why the dead are dead for stephen to perform them in their own rupture, because obviously they didn't die to prevent a threat if the threat is always a by-product of these systems existing in the first place. you could empirically and materialistically link all the sources and networks together, but at some point, they grow so powerful that the concept of probabilities and temporalities does in fact get breached. its difficult to comprehend weizman's philosophical and forensic arrogance in these passages, but it ends up making sense, when you have to find the religious purpose behind it.

obviously, as he says, when something like the difference between twenty nine and thirty lives is in question, there has to be something more behind that abstraction, it can't literally just be a formalism that actually expects reciprocal ethical engagement to its demands, the cynicism is too intense for that. this is why this is in fact about time travel, no matter how hard to comprehend. the state could never create real time travel. if you gave the inidgenous, following derrick jensen's orders, they quite literally could really have done that. this is because magic is turned down by the state's logic, and magic does exist. time travel is one of those things that was withdrawn backwards from existing concepts - like war simulation - largely in a bit to make sense of these processes.

this is why time travel, both the micro version in ekko and the macro groundhogs day version, are abstractions of different things (one is a simulation of running from the state - because the time for lethal decision making is really limited to a few seconds, thats exactly why its a few seconds, because it needs to make sense of impact under war. do you really think impact was calculated in a few seconds before capital accelerated it? of course not) this is the only way to make sense of it. same with the macro events, theyre a critique of everyday life, like in lefebvre, when the days all blend together.

so indigenous, magical time travel would actually be a third thing we can't exactly make sense of yet (but can speculate on, as i'm about to), since it had no time to exist - or it did but we dont and cant know about it due to its anti-archival logic. this shows that beyond the beurocratic machine or the micro world of affects (which, indigenous time itself likely inspired ekko's concept), anti archivality could also be a form of time-dilation. time reversals can be thought of as grasping onto a sort of consistency that relates to the way the state perceives of time, something the speculative inidgenous could have or would deny. the difference between tactical rewinds and cosmic rewinds is clear.

the difference between indigenous rewinds and destined ones is that the concept of consistency and archivable density is found in movies like groundhogs day, and toyed with in memento, but its exactly the way that modernity plays with cosmic destiny, vs the way ancient ritual logics would have (against consistency, towards plurality). but the difference between something like madoka magica and weizman's garlasco, beyond the point of a continuation of days vs. a single day, also hides a darker function:

the state doesn't hold onto the concept of destiny unlike in fantastical rewinds. destiny for the state is simply an act, its a destination, not a result. the state cannot proceed with results, its rewinds are vaporizations, it can only crumble what it can't hold together, it falls apart. this is why the gaza-israeli beachsites feel uncanny, not just because like in the movie "zone of interest" they show how the mundane is the cruelst regardless of if its a banal aristocracy or a repressed dominated society (two faces in one), but also because those beachsites are taped together, not literally in that they show cracks the way athens shows glass panels to past civilizations buried under, but in a much more mundane way, it deletes its forensic character, the investigators and researchers remove its spatial connection to the past in an attempt to correct it and hold it together into consistency, causing it to decay and create some type of plastic territory, something that resists detail and complexity the way we understand them. the mistake is thinking that the genocide isnt successful in memory - it very much is - but it is fundamentally useless nontheless.

reversibility cannot be real in algorithmic systems, reversal of existing reversals doesnt leave room for comparisons, the state can't time travel the way representations can, or the way non-forensic magicians do. sorry weizman, i dont see how mark is able to truly reverse anything., hes reversing the catastrophy in his mind, hes not reversing the necropolitics, nor the order of time into new constitutions, he's literally realizing things for the first time instead of "acting back on them" the way it happens in representations

shane brighton - tragic witnessing:

brighton sets out to ask who gets to say what war even is, or means, as a fight for epistemic sovereignity, but ends up with a half drawn genealogy by the end, that says almost nothing about war, truth or democracy. fortunately, all the questions he does ask have an underlying, extremely powerful current to them, that question a variety of abstractions outside their seemingly one-sided literary studies foregrounding.

its true, in the same way that marines prior to the gulf war really did watch oliver stone's platoon in a way contrary to its authentic intentions, precisely assimilating the very parody mocking them and their way of (war) life into an assimilable lifestyle, the same can be said about, say, conservative americans trying to make sense of something like verhoeven's starship troopers.

the movie can criticize the fascist tendencies behind military conquest in a way that say, klaus theleweit analyzes male fantasy as cold and emotionally unattuned, or objectifying, or totally disregarding of the subjectivity of the other (female, sexual desire), even expendable to an ecological degree, and even tying themes of imperial or colonial expansion as insufferably disregarding of other modes of life, and the way this feeds back into the soldiers psyche, but again, the parody can precisely also serve as the best material or fodder.

it warns of the dangers of attempting to school the cynically unschoolable, those who do not feel any pride in actually holding their position, but only feel justified in the position itself, those who simply have no meta awareness. so how does someone become this way? the answer can only lead to a traumatic removal of subjectivity, branded as a ritual de-egoification. all forms of narcassism other than opinions that agree with the urban status quo are forcibly removed or made dangers for the holder of those views.

the power of banality can only spread beurocratically once its seen as not worth it to even hold the other opinion or form of logic in juxtaposition to it, and then its scaled upwards, holding the alterior perspective comes with the threat of increasing and crumbling pressure. the latent removal of possible re-considerations of ones lifestyle is especially potent in places where its most dangerous to reconsider your standings, and these places, contrary to the first belief of being actively hostile, are more usually the type of urban enviornments that are at best only passively mundane.

as for brightons own concern, the way love assimilates and promotes the tragedy as an existential context rather than a particular ontological logic that pervades and attacks all possible domains of living truth, and attaches all forms of meaning only in harmonial retrospection to the general form of life, it seems obvious that only a severe, deathly evil call, the most boring of criticisms, can ever truly negatively impact system-logics. so boring that it is not even normative, simply detecting possible variations. the detection of possible variations is not only axiomatic.

the axiomat relies on a fixed ontology, thats what makes it beurocratically deadly in towards network-rich world of the powerful. but they ignore how, backwards axioms can threat epistemic ontology by raising curiosities regarding logics in a fully definable way. the problem with irony to brighton is that it passifies by reducing something too much to the very elements it promotes in its appearance, allowing for anyone who's already dumb enough to not care about which ontology they exist in, to continue existing in that very one

i speculate, with total disregard for something like homer, which, to me, is as irrelevant as any manga today, because fine art itself is kitsch from todays perspective - infinitely subversive and scalable (with no care for the status or earliness of the thing, of course), may i even suggest it would be boring to read or open it up to even make any more relevant remarks towards it. whats more important is my speculation, and this is the following - homer trivializes all existential (meaning-producing) problems between the order of war and its potential for coextensivity with the order of life, in agamemon vs. odysseus in regards to whether zeus abandoned them for the other side (who does he favor?) precisely because he needs the medium to trivialize these connections in order to make them appear complex.

to truly universalize a specific logic, you require the medium to carry the weight. this is why every great work - every work considered a great work - usually carries the status of something iconic (a badiouian event) not because of its total rupturing non conformity to pre-existing sets as he may suggest, but on the contrary, they perfectly contain the logic they want to replicate, with very little of anything else. this is why homer succeeds, his story is blind to everything, and i know it is because it carries with it a type of mythos that suggests this be the case, no matter what is written. these great questions of war and love, they are not existential questions at all, they're just carriers of social memetics.

there is nothing profound in them, they preicsely obfuscate because they're too busy wondering how to ever want to wonder whether to. they're craftsmen, they are enamoured, obsessed by the craft. and this is a great piece of artistry, precisely because we're all preconditioned to something. brighton, through weil, is preconditioned to wondering if life is coextensive with war, when surrounded by stories of war in his very career placement. homer on the other hand, he simply enjoys writing about it. he would never ask such a question, that doesn't somehow serve continuing that medium. this is at least where, plato's ion does the considerable work of comprehending the blindness of the illustrative worker.

so to say, my answer to your worry (well, your worry from a long time ago that you already probably fixed on your own) generally brighton is that, as the genericality of the world ends up dominating the complex of subjectivities, it ends up creating ways to process them rather than ways to think about them. homer, plato, weil, they serve this end as well, even weil's wisdom, if assuming it greater than homer, ends up creating a pseudo-weilian that replicates that logic. the way to escape war is to never find yourself in one. the way you escape love is actually the same thing. the way you escape them connecting is never being exposed to that connection long enough to start believing in it.

and a plurality is not meant to be discovered, in a spinozian manner the world already contains its plurality, and a virtuality on top of it that can endlessly expand us outward, but the problem is that the generic ends up dominating and constraining everything to its tight narrow margin. the intellect is limited, and it ends up knotting and thinning out. as it thins, cruelty becomes porn becomes sex becomes love becomes war becomes medium becomes an audience becomes criticism becomes fear and pain and death and irrationality and so on. and this world in its hypocrisy can hold all of that in one place, whilst also holding a bunch of things that are way more similar in largely isolated and distant fragments, much to our confusion. yes, ideally, everything that is seperated is novel. thats the only world that makes sense. if theres a boundary, theres a fundamentally different law. but this isnt the type of logic we find ourselves in.

mark fisher - the labour of simulation:

it really seems like fisher is building up to something amazing once you get to the second half of his speech, only for it to fall on the last page when you realize it's not leading to a grand conclusion about subjectivity and performance or about superficiality and automation, but rather a poorly-phrased... market recommendation?

near the beginning theres an insertion about baudrillards reading of the copy in its relation with the simulacrum, then the question of its simulation and proximity, then the part about subjectivity which leads him to think of personalization, then into mundaneness of everyday life extending into abstracted automated communicative relations, humorously referencing the way video game characters exist in a certain space where only specific conversational triggers contextualize their existing - which is a great example precisely because you slowly begin to see these types of dialogues trees emerging in real life too, where the space for correct conversational moves draws thinner the more niche, specialized and contextually fatigued everyone becomes.

you hope he'll tie them all together to end it off and have some final great remark to add but instead of that he ends with an impromptu suggestion on how to improve the hyperreal? the hyperreal doesnt need you to improve it from the front, or making it "more realistic" only from the back, its about allowing these store workers and call centers to enter even more uncanny forms of communication, to be even more locked into their tight performances whilst somehow appearing more and more perfect in the robotic sense, whilst still allowing the mitigation and removal of moments of political rupture.

almost as if fisher wants to polish their annihilation rather than their attunement, but hes phrasing it from the other end as if the goal is flipped. the point should have ended with not the way subjectivity reflects personalized entries on automated entities but the way non automated entities try to factor out subjectivity whilst retaining personalization through the play of analogies surrounding copies and fugues/expanded trigger points. or how theres a convergence where to eliminate conversational radicals (the way its increasingly happening in urbanized spaces) is a control method, you vaporize both the overly normalizable and the overly radical, maintaining this uncanny space, where the goal is to juggle the way in which the dialogue tree both expands the contextually limited and alienated circumstance, whilst drowning out the entrance points of the external world, to the point nothing is expected but everything is still novel.

all of fisher's examples are fascinating, from the simulation of illness to the simulation of war being safer than the war of travelling to your job at your very localized domestic territory, from the way this technically leads to an emerging parallel between isolated and dangerous travelling journeys to conversations requiring strictly locked points of emergence and social gain, the way conversation and travel becomes weaponized also of course suits this trajectory perfectly.

i'd even argue its not even worth it to speak to anyone in localized urban contexts whatsoever, it only serves to drown you and the realness of the situation further the more you try to signal that theres something that doesnt fit the criteria of performative lockdown being employed by the automated simulation emerging under the fully abstracted realm of wage labour. this itself only serves to obfuscate the spirit of the real is already floating around, animating everything around us.

the real is very much around, swimming through objects, lighting up relations, illuminating estrangement. its so active, so powerful, so fed, that even dialogical insertions, attempts at dialectical tension, attempts at posessing a character all fall flat to it. when accelerationalists point to a hum, a type of static low level noise in the city of capital, they dont realize that this humming ghost is exactly what's producing that sound. it helps hold things together in the city (and by things i mean poisoned cats, poisoned trashcans, ugly birds, halfmad drunk zombie walkers, the unique products of the urban city that you wouldnt find anywhere else). when fake horrible alienated non-conversations and expansive but suffocated dialogue "options"

the last thing this should've focused on is empathy, there's hardly a question of empathy in represetnational dilemmas. this is the one situation where i was fisher was more hegelian, he was neither done exposing the contradictions nor explaining how they bounce into something more refined, or in capitalism, refuse to bounce off eachother to produce something better but just keep drifting in the grey zone endlessly and ever-more efficiently.

however, i have to do one more thing, and that's climb above this territory in any way i can, because i'm still technically speaking from fisher's own achievements that don't fully emerge in this speech but do throughout his work. and i'll do that in the form of a suggestion: there are three throughlines that the call center allows: in disco elysium, you get the haunting radio siren slowly mutating - even though its automated and dead, it constantly transforms from the past, it remains in the past, however, echoing dead philosophies but doing so in ever-present ways.

this however, doesn't stop them from continuing to feel dead and impotent of the present moment, which is why the sustained contradiction allows for capitalism to subsume it into its codex, this is the dead flag blues moment of godspeed you black emperor as well, the call of the dystopia is harkened back, its like that contained beast that wants to spark back up.

the second line is that the frustrations of the call-center agent constantly appears in deleuzian micro-lines as they speak and behave. even if the rupturing moments are valorized and held together tightly, romance still fails if you dont know what the other side is thinking, and you never do. the third line is the abstraction of war itself which fisher notes through baudrillard. where is the war? its a moving object. the war is paranoia, it surpasses capital itself.

you want to see past capital? try staring really hard into one of its constructions, you will never find it in the impasse, you need to ever more clearly try to enter the zones it thinks it wants you to go into. the conspiracist is the messenger, the prophet of capital, they are the furthest from the vector point of rebellion. i think i've said enough for now to not appear like someone merely walking behind fisher trying to find where the road ends whilst trying not to find myself stuck in his head halfway through that experience instead

one last thing i will say is that fisher does kind of hint at an early speculative understanding of the future problems of an at the time yet undeveloped schema of what are now the current developments in artificial intelligence in the last five years, about seven years earlier than they took the form which fisher actually discovers somewhat here. i will leave that up for the reader to think about or even find, though, given it isnt a very large or meaningful coincidence.

eivind rossaak - more than an image

rossaak wants to see the truth in sensibility, subjectivity and the present moment in technology, and is hopeful to work on these projects in an attempt to get us one step closer to the newly introduced phenomenological economy brought on by the technodigital. without going into or even knowing what he's up to nearly fifteen years later, he raises way more anxities and questions than he was originally trying to answer or serve as the mediator for, which isn't bad at all for such a short and promotional speech

rossaak resurfaces the claim that we're giving away our data in return for the ability to communicate or share our information in a way that gives us advantages, akin to the concept of derrida's now half-beaten-to-death concept of the pharmakon, which will not be referenced here again so don't click away - or otherwise that technologies artificially replace what they take away with new capacities. rather, it can be thought of as more like, they diminish a certain aspect of our being semi-permanently by putting us into a newly constructed subjective enviornment, and that's final, and there's no payoff for that. whatever happens as a conceptual gain from technology only works to be compared with what was lost in retrospect but never directly or back to back.

rossaak uses the example of being able to read the haptic data of your body and its attunment to have a biometric read on your enjoyment of reading agamben, or to understand how bodily comportment harms or aids in business negotiations. but what is lost with reading data and repositioning yourself to act in a different way prior to how you would beforehand is not just the way you would have organically moved previously - so in a certain way, schiller's concept of grace is impossible with the contemporary bio-feedback-hacked mover, but also the idea of cheating the inside world over the outside world is a fundamentally false compartmentalization, so to say, when you start messing with the builld of the inside world and its habits, you're tempering with very sensitive arrangements you may not be able to replace later.

this reminds of me u/caffeinehell, one of the few real clinical zombies, who has permamently tempered with the inner aspect of their bodies metabolism, leading them to desperately announce that they have realized how superficial emotions are, when they depend entirely on physical processes like hormones, essentially that they are not as essential nor as organically meaningful as they appear to someone who has not felt the inside of their metabolic activity. the inside of the biometric activity, the world of how you react to things - the moment you start to fiddle with this aspect, you are losing things you don't understand or yet know about, unable to replace, and essentially unable to even replicate, meaning they are both instrumental mysteries (helpful, unreplacable) but also functional mysteries (the moment you do try to fuck with them, they show how you how useless they were - but then you are left without a root).

as a result, often times technology doesn't give you a replacement, nor does it give you something of a parody or whatnot, instead it gives you dissapointments. they are originary - their functional novelty and "differential yet replicating" nature is their most proud aspect, but thats unfortunately about where it ends for them.

there is no need to go all the way to byung chul han's walterianism when considering how technology warps our viewpoints, nor something along the lines of considering artifacts the way winner does as potentially colliding with different forms of ontological logic - different unexpected ways of interacting with the world - it is simply a matter of noticing that sensibility of the kind that rossaak describes, such as using the data of browsing habits on platforms to create singular and unique sculptural objects, although it is immensly valuable both as a piece of phenomenological reality turned empirical deity, and as a floating artifact on its own, is only harkened back to the anxious space within which browsing habits and algorithmic predispondency lay - in the sense that - the algorithmic and browsing experience, and habits of thinking patterns are themselves unnatural products of a machine that deterritorializes and alienates desires, away from the subject posessing the psychoanalytic unconscious drive or to the earlier one which posessed a divine connection to the greater spirit above, communicating through subtle nazianzusian energies, but back to the logic of some type of primal search (but with an infinite field) that is no longer a question of the origin of desire

desire was lost all the way back at the moment in modernity where there was an instrumentalization not of desire (which resulted in "propaganda", the idea that specific messaging could influence thinking patterns that could influence voting logics and economic policies such as francissco valla's situation) but rather lost at the moment where sensibility itself became anxious, in the sense that there is no longer any single messanger with a propagandistic mindset, neither is there any goal to be achieved, which puts the human agent back in the position of the pre-civilizational subject enamoured with the world around him - the digital world is kind of like bogna's dark forest, but more-so in the sense that its a desubjectified plane.

this is where rossaak is right to mention depresencing, digital spheres create their own version of a parasympathetic drive where essentially the drive to search and the will to seek (kind of proto schopenhauer mixed with proto nietzsche) are found colliding in this space where depresenting is used to an otherwise equally anxious and intensified subject to create artifical zones of peace and mindfulness, not literal mindfulness (where its functional qualities would be missing) but only a defunctionalized equivalent - such as doomscrolling - which fits the prorogative of a de-initialized or temporary unconscious experiential replacement for the seeking-willing complex, which puts it outside of the dilemma of desire - and in this sense, the entire internet is a giant sort of post-driving phenomenon, and in a sense post-messaging as well, as it communicates nothing, since it is unable to will an intensive nor intentional predispossesion towards conscious, husserlian acting-in-the-world.

anne-francoise schmid - on contemporary objects

in the final speech-text morph, anne is cutting both through a boring interpretation of interdisciplinarity as an open holistic process - into a much more fun closed dilemma of losing the priority of interpretation over wild objects as the mystery of the complexified entity (morton's hyperobject, which in anne's case is rather her collaborator - legay's work), whilst also cutting through the previous technological saturation present throughout the simulation-orgy of the roundtable itself. however, it still feels like a spiral, unlike the first few texts, much less rounded-out - whilst still nonetheless successfully enough returning to and slightly expanding her point.

anne's detourement into integrative processes feel more positivist and balanced on top of fisher's consistent cultural nihilism (even if in this very text it fails for him). aside from the fact she's too worried about what science has to say about the situation, given they are frenchies and maybe feel they must worry about anthropology as world-leaders, she does offer an interesting phenomenon in integrativity by itself, which would feel still underwhelming, if it wasnt for the fact that she tackles an interesting aesthetic dilemma which is worth spending the remainder of the counter on.

if the aesthetic object is imperceptible, in the sense that it's impossible to tell which aspects of which disciplines integrate into it, intersect it, or what types of varieties or nuances go into viewing it, this isn't just the type of contemporary art that's a heated cultural topic but also means that the aesthetic object itself has no foundational platform, or in other terms no criteria that require it to be any one certain way, which is another way to explain how anything can be an art object, but in this case not in regards to its constitutions but its references and standpoints. this creates a type of standpoint theory of art that only further causes holistic confusion. anne's initial attempt to create controversy around scientific objects as both infinite multiplication, infinite aims (quest for lowest denominators) and the death of specialized knowledge as a subject-capacity, in an attmept for a non-standard epistemic account, kind of only further muddies the water. and why the impulse for demanding that holism demonstrates itself? if holistics can only create problems and not solve any, then its programmatic-practical advantage can't be recognized beyond it being a type of mutating cancer of badiouian oversaturation.

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