Dear stakeholders!
The time is out of joint. End of Trend, Narrative Collapse, Death of Melody, a decentralised and asynchronous non-trend emerges. Peli Grietzer’s[1] rigorous computational formalization of vibe compiles just-in-time as TikTok teens autoencode aesthetics with unprecedented efficiency, aesthetics which remain fully backwards compatible with Tumblr moodboards and Pinterest *core collages in anticipation of the Universal Aesthetic Turing Machine. Grand or petit narratives, terminally obsolesced by their timeline lock-in, may process in parallel, but it is vibes that resonate across chronologies, quantum tunnel through timelines, diagonalizing them and computing non-linear novelty.
At the dawn of the millenium, Hiroki Azuma[2] abandons established world-images of the tree and the rhizome in favour of the depth-preserving database, and it is precisely philosophical, technological and corporate chronologies as databases that enable “a reading not of this history but through this history”.[3] Now is not the time for any (Yugo)nostalgic longing after lost pasts or, arguably worse, futures—“Never in human history has nostalgia been as useless or uncomforting as it is now.”[4] All the texts collected here are, in some way or another, firmly of the moment, propagating the present backward and forward through more or less hidden layers. In Stomach Acid, the dissolution of Iskra Delta is reimagined as a violent liquidation of a rogue signal, but an odd optimism of a revolutionary spark perseveres despite the overwhelming deluge of hegemonic overcoding: “The future is a vast ocean, out to which the past can’t help but flow. […] Flows may twist, abort, divert, but some part must always escape and reach the sea.”[5] This temporal flow, and the remarkable ability of reason to regulate its regime—to transcend time, to tap into the datasets of both past and future—is tackled in both Humanity’s Time-punk challenge and A Peculiar Transformation as they gloss the inhuman intelligence that awaits us at (a) world’s end: “I can now change but cannot die.”[6] Whitehead posits that “reason is […] the disciplined counter-agency which saves the world”,[7] but then again, each tooth on the ratchet of reason implies an instance of reworlding and every one of them is a “destruction of one firmament after another”.[8] One such click of the ratchet constitutes the background noise of The Spark of a Future Anterior as it traces Iskra Delta’s foreseeing of “the paradigm shift from an optic to an entoptic media regime”,[9] the logical endpoint of “the dwindling ‘reality-contact’ […] of our species in its ratcheting pursuit of supernormal replacements for the strife of the real”.[10] If, as Laruelle claims, “Philosophy remains an optics”,[11] comprehending the coming entoptic regime might require something different, not unlike that which Spectres of Non-brand explicates in terms of the autonomous aesthetic, but applies all the same to any inhuman agency looming ahead: “This history is an uncanny valley before an indeterminate future.”[12] In the end, The Iskra Delta (ID) Building Event Timeline sweeps everything back behind the sterile surface, but a puddle of futurity nonetheless leaks out: “Bizarre incidents”.[13]
Normies will never understand what it’s like to be a non-based hyperpop-listening schizocore Tarkovsky time-punk. An omnicringe Outsideness oomfie and a Kanzi-kinning Reza reply girl. To be a Bratton bloomer, a Laruelle/Löffler/Land crossfic-writing institutional accelerationist. An x-risk aware xenofeminist inhumanpilled neoratcel and a true agent of reason.
To paraphrase Nick Land: “Read Xenoslavia, and vibe…”