Scrap note #7¶
A ‘scrap note’ is what you end up with after dropping below the level of articulacy required for a raw quote (or T-shirt slogan). It’s a format dragged out of Cambodia for informal meanderings.
This one is here because I’m in the sand-pit, playing the German Army of the Great War. First hurl everything at the French (communist Accelerationism) and try to take them out of the game within a few months, then wheel around for a plunge into Russia, dismantling the Czarists (with a hurricane of Neocameralism). Sequenced two-front war. It’s a strategy that’s already driven me into narcoleptic disintegration, but I’m committed.
Out here in the Dark East, waiting for news about the titanic Western clashes, it’s a time to patch things together with meager resources. That’s economy, which is always worth exploring. The specific topic of micro-cognition has been nagging at me with unusual ferocity ever since crossing over into Twitter. It seems like something close to a compulsory adaptation, as the near future chews human psychology into hot techno-splinters. If we don’t accept miniaturization as an urgent and intimate problem, we’ll eventually collide ruinously with nano-hostiles we can’t even perceive. (So, as always, I think any traditionalism without a ‘neo-‘ is already laid out on the sacrificial slab.)
Languid afternoons with long and difficult books would be the way to go — if we had a different future. In the one we have, we’ll receive the ancient tomes in scrambled streams, hurtling at us like a particle storm out of cyberspace. Lamentable? Perhaps. Avoidable? Almost certainly not. So adapt.
This is the sort of thing worth thinking about carefully — but in pieces. It’s creepypasta taken to the next level. I was totally ready for it, musing vaguely about scaling horror down to the same approximate size while in Cambodia — although nothing quite crystallized. The reception of these two-sentence micro-nasties suggests that plenty of other people were tapping into the same high-frequency shadow waves. The next stage is compression to the 140-characters of a tweet — then it goes into tweet contagion. Horrorist memetic warfare. (Did I warn you that grammar gets suspended in a scrap note?)
A few additional quick-and-dirty points about horrorist method. (1) It’s not clicked here yet, which is why this isn’t a horror story. (2) When it is, the story has to absorb enough theory to be gratingly ‘meta’ — smoothing that out will be a guiding aesthetic imperative. (3) Horrorism has to be not only ‘meta’, but also reflexive, or nonlinear, in order to deliver its payload across the fiction barrier. It will all seem hideously ‘postmodern’ if it isn’t done well, so clunky annoyances will abound in the early stages. (Consider that a preliminary down-payment on future apologies.) (4) I’m not at all sure there’s anything horrorism can’t do … (5) Experiment.
Stepping back from the harsh tracts of horror, there are numerous paths of splinter-technique to wander down. Prominent instance: numbering. Coming full-circle, the #Accelerate manifesto is composed in numbered paragraphs, which is formally appealing. It acknowledges a virtual discontinuity, as if pre-formatted for the rending to come. With different methods, it could facilitate discontinuous composition, providing the assembly codes for a whole that arrives in chunks, even out of sequence, or across intervals of oblivion. It also references traditions of fragmentary writing (Nietzsche, Wittgenstein) in which brevity, or conceptual completion on constricted scales, was adopted as a principle of achievement. The Internet tide flows in that direction (Moldbug notwithstanding).
I liked this short piece by Isegoria a lot. (I’m half way through Moby Dick at the moment, and getting far more out of it than ever before.)
An Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn classic (just because I want a place to lock-down the link).
Some final horrorism material.
Disintegration …
ADDED: The machines don’t think we’re reading fast enough. (Their case is terrifyingly persuasive.)