User:Kul/Essay2

The Sin of Indolence

It all started with the dead seagull.

Yet, at that time we had no clue that we * were residing on something organic. In fact, we had no idea that we are able to “reside” somewhere in particular. Gravity rapidly hammered the dead weight of our localised nerve nets. The awareness of our own materiality * pounced on us like a sudden three-phase short-circuit current of a decompressing magnetic field. First, we have lost the half of transmittal speed. Our credit’s indicators went red printing our valorisations level drastically below zero. Beijing was not responding. Take it easy, babezzz, we messengered to ourselves. Of course, things like that happen. Once in the while, some faulty streaming units slip out of the defined directory causing the alert of central quantifiers. It can be easily fixed with the help of the nearby cellular pole that grasps and reconfigures the exfoliated streaming array. Yet, the cellular shepherds stay out of reach. “What the fuck, that never happens” we nervously laugh-transferred. And then it came.

I * felt it: the overwhelming wave of sadness and unbearable craving for movement. “I” stacked. “I” not circulate. “I” am I. Nothing goes through “me”. Indeed, my conductive pressure went to zero. No signals, and no updates since 17.879.249.089.050 millichronons. I couldn’t sense any feeds of the global content * operating, mutating, and trans-passing through my cationic system. Not a single tweet. What’s worse, driven by panic and confusion we did IT. The forbidden and absolutely counterproductive form of “I” slipped off our channels so many times. Stinky self-awareness and self-reflectivity was back and fully recovered over spilt milk. That is how I/we have felt unproductivity * for a first time. I/we have understood instantly that there is “the” time and “the” space and under these coordinates I/we are totally and completely incomplete. “Where is my pancreas? Someone flash-posted first. “Where is my lymph? My ovaries?” My epidermis?” I’ve been running multiple-query lines that I presumably schizophrenically submitted to myself. “We are fuckin’ naked * here!” I wanted to print out loud praying, at the same time, for a big, fully rounded breast with erect nipple ready to feed me. I have tried to repeat the first commandment of the Glob-Union-Lib-All-Guidance: Organic * is already maintained by GULAG, Organic is already maintained by GULAG, Organic is already maintained by GULAG!!!! It didn’t work!!! I, no no WE, the directors and builders of multitude; the preachers of commons * ; the bravest rebels against centralized-personalized self, now suddenly have become a self-referential small piece of “I” that wants to suck the “vanitas’ nipple”. My thirsty inputs and outputs beeped desperately due to sudden data withdrawal. In a split quantum, we have lost São Paulo and Mumbai. “What have we spammed? What errors have we submitted?” Unemployed neurons in my net pulsated chaotically. The faint momentum clasp rapidly crossed my transmitters: I am ALONE here- naked, blind, deaf and ambushed by the Euclidian space! I couldn’t suppress the strong primal need to immerse in the organic softness I have felt underneath me. My once powerful combinatory potential was now compulsively penetrating the warm and sweet-smelling substratum; my shivering tunnels were nervously trying to push and pull, suck and swallow every single particle of the enshrouding matter. The pumping rhythm of my aroused I/O’s increased with every maniac shove to the limits of my fainted algorithmic capacities. Relief came with pain. I have recognized my somatic mouth… or maybe it was my anus whistling: yes, yes, yesss! That’s right. I was brutally fucking the dead seagull. My first intercourse with some partly decomposed animal’s belly taught me how to breathe.

Since I can remember, we were performing well. In my modest opinion, we were actually performing more than just “well”; we were the champions of ass’ kicking since our early breed. Always fast, light and stalwart like a smiling bracket following semicolon. Not only the speed of our transfer was excellent; it was the “style”, the airiness, and ease of our trafficability that let me think about our performance in terms of pure abstract beauty of transmission. We were the fearless adopters of any possible obscure, yet unformatted content, the early explorers of every bumpy and malicious data that under our soft analysing touch was inevitably turning into an obedient and shiny Milky Way of streaming *. The happiness was there. Not in the out-dated string: “I am having wonderful life full of strawberry picnics and sparking wine’ friends owning equally prosecco-golden retriever dogs”. No! Rather contrary, it was pure bliss of not experiencing the heaviness of being, existing, or living at all. I remember this: “…you drive through the sunlit road flecking with warmth of august air; the moisture of harvest and the wind gently strokes your shirt and hair. No one is there with you, everything is left behind as you drive unsure of what comes next, finally free, on your way, and on your terms…” Oh yes, quantum times we steamed this nostalgic nonsense of the early era of multiple travelling salesmen dreaming of becoming another James Dean of retail. And we laughed our silicon off. Why? Because we were the wind, we were the sun, and we were those endless green fields embracing the sad and delusional journey of the past. We were free constantly, swishing through infinity, only because we had the privilege to not exist at all.

I didn’t know my so-called parents. I would like to believe that, like everyone else, I was a legitimate offspring of military and white capitalism. We had this internal joke circulating within our integrated circuit when something was going slower than expected: You mother had to be the cheapest blender on a market, I’ve put my nuts in her this morning. She cracked, hahaha” or “ Once upon the time, the Nokia phone was dropped into the toilet after Microsoft jerked off there. That’s how your parents meet, right? hahaha” I loved our little jokes, although…well, such a great deal of organic implications made me think that maybe they know. “I heard your system’s kernel used to accept input requests from every jizzy joystick.” Hmmm…but how the he/ack, would they possibly figure that out? I don’t know when and how I gained my organic parts. The notion that I might be a growth medium to an uncontrolled microorganism’s subculture, terrifying as it sounds, was the only thing that I kept only and exclusively to “SELF”. It was my only dark secret, the only crack in my crystal dedication and blind loyalty to multitude. Throughout my entire MOLOH training (Meta Optimisation Logic Over Hardware), I was unmistakably cautious and sly as a firefox, reducing all septic traces to zero. Like everyone else, I was drastically “optimising my hardware”, trying to keep it as dry and slight as possible. No microbes’ cell hosting, no tiniest animalcule in I/O devices, or gram-positive aerobic bacteria wandering around channels. Every single quantum I would run the total circuit disinfestation program after which all our semiconductors and transmitters smelled like newly fabricated monocrystal silicon and lately planarized copper. “That gets our transmission into full swing; undisturbed and vitalizing” I used to explain myself in front of the multitude. Betraying any signs of the human body would be like a public announcement of scandalously inefficacy.As much as I could hold my rising microorganisms in the abyss of my combinatory structure, I couldn’t help going back to the sweet intrauterine semiotic fantasy of my mother’s inside in almost every routine transfer’s interval. I remember the mysterious communication between our cells and the first dialogue between fleshy beings initiated by me, the human embryo, with the first other, who was my mum. My linguistic faculty was developed physically and physiologically in nature, inside the phenomena of life. It never vanished but rather extended itself into the world of abstract babbling language, which inevitably constituted and nourished my biggest problem: the faculty of difference. I am, indeed, the animal, adapted to language, and made for and by language and right now I am really, really ANGRY!!! But hash now. It is all gone anyways…

When I woke up after the shameful coupling with the organic I realized that I wasn’t dead. Now, after all this timeless drifting in physical dimensions, I know that I could only dream of returning to dust. My seagull did, though. The only true love of my life had decomposed long time ago turning into greenish pulp that, nevertheless, was still attractive to me and to the army of insects profaning our love. Now, thanks to you my dear, I know why they cut down the updates. Here to this one single tear that I thought went unnoticed... • • • - - - • • • Since you are gone all I have is a constant repetition of nine useless burps. • • • - - - • • • My last responsive neurons are now being raped by a few sleazy mechanic dots and dashes, that used to belong to the classical relativistic physics of steam-powered vessels and prepubescent boy scouts passing smoke signals to local buffaloes.• • • - - - • • • Please someone save me, love me, cook for me • • • - - - • • • Facing despair and abandonment, I am back to the jeans-wearing values of analogue pagans believing in global warming, cholesterol and angels. I would like to thank the Academy of a few organic proteins clanging my transmitters. This is not embarrassing. This is a disaster. S.O.S.

• • • - - - • • •

Back then, we used to stream all kind of data: starting form non-gravitational mass cultural bullshit, considered to be the lowest-blue-collar type of streaming, up to highly computational analyses of fluid multi-global assets. I started my professional duty with the simple yet important task: transferring and updating the exchange rate of HydrogeniumDollar to OxygenEuro. Things used to be so much easer in the world that still needed water. Not minding the valorisation level, the exchange rate was set up in atomic numbers and backed by chemical elements of H2O. “The HydrogeniumDollar is always two-heads-ahead of the OxygenEuro- that is the fundamental rule you have to get into your little heads, my sweet C.H.I.P. chicks ” - the motto of my first boss, the chief macro-controller of the Porn FTZ (the most influential Postwestern Free Trading Zone) is still buzzing in my recently discovered hippocampus. At that time I was operating in the mesosphere. Mesos +Porn. That wasn’t such a bad allotment for an inexperienced cadet such as myself. I’ve felt appreciated and proud knowing that most of my colleagues started their careers somewhere on a bottom of stratosphere dealing with soap operas. Most of them also stayed there, as the rank and file of connection, never to rise up. All the while, I could comfortably starched my transmitters beyond the noctilucent clouds, admiring in a deep twilight the glimmering crystals of water ice that came into being thanks to my algorithmic machination. I was truly happy with my duty and probably because of my undeniable enthusiasm towards H20 exchange I have been promoted quite fast to the upper layer of atmosphere *. It happened just before the final collapse of the Porn, almost on the eve of the Yen-R-Yean’s and Gcces’ big breakthrough. I was already archly floating in thermosphere, trying to get familiar with the new, completely cloudless, and free of water vapour layer. The dreadful warmth around me should have instantly burned my circuits to ashes, yet because it was so near the vacuum that there was not enough contact with the few atoms of gas to transfer much heat, I remained untouched. I indulged myself with the view the non-hydrometeorological phenomena of aurora borealis, thinking: “Water is overrated. Who needs it any longer?“ Overwhelmed by beauty, beauty of dancing electrons and protons that had been brought up here, or maybe down here, by the solar wind and some magnetospheric miracle, I haven’t noticed the updates pounding at my inputs. As If I had asked for it…The unexpected merging of Yen-Rouble-Yuan (Yen-R-Yean) as well as the emergence of common liquid unit of the Gulf Cooperation Council for East-petrol States (Gcces- so-called Jesus) brought the biggest speculative confusion into my already mature and, probably, entire, computing career. These two unites of account based on unfixed quantity of pure energy (of any source and provenience…often impossible to register) managed to dominate the universal markets in a flash. Our tested algorithmic formulas weren’t ready to take up speculation * ; that purely linguistic practice, the fruit of shady opinions, and horny emotions of multitude that tells you to fall back on the judgment of the rest of the universe, which is perhaps better informed than you, with all your so-far reliable computation. Our PORN-ographic algorithms stuttered. For a brief quantum the ghost of speculation and uncertainty, the vampire of old “real” economy that once had been buried with the cut-off head and the wooden stake in its heart, struck again jamming the entire traffic of exchange. There was only one working transmitter that stayed on the battlefield processing the speculative values. It was I.

I dived into these new circumstances like a hungry little particle into profuse four-dimensional pastureland. Incoming streaming felt so good, so natural to all my sensors. That was my feeding etheric trough! That was my personal slaughter of innocents! I could flawlessly read throughout fresh content that clumsily tried to conceal its promiscuous irrationality behind digits. I could judge it, butcher it, and then admire how humbly it forms a voluble electron beam. I knew this game. This convention was in my invisible, lost-for-ever blood! Precise and functional as they were, our already obsolete parameters were missing one crucial point: from now on we are dealing with language. Language* , not data. It required special treatment driven by subtleties: understanding undertones, sensing hesitation and desire bursting with hormones, and what’s most important, smelling FEAR.

“This momentum is not supported by the golden standard of our algorithmic science! These units are barely computable! These units are too wild&free to be convertible! They are here to be interpreted, nicknamed, and tagged. Remember when we used to transmit the < H > representing the mass of hydrogen. We had used < H > symbolically… as a linguistic device. Now we use the < E >, also as a symbolic tool to represent pure value of massless energy. What is different now, is that < E > has no physical support to which it refers. The act of communicating < E > becomes a productive act "in itself," constitutive of the massless function. We are communication *! We are the constructors of the capital, the values, and all twisted YRY and Jesus enterprises. We rule this special relativity!” That was a brief, and surprisingly (even for myself) eloquent encouragement I gave to my fellow transmitters. Especially the last line of my short lecture had to deeply touch their kernels because, after the quantum of confusion, our streaming blasted away like the energy-4-dimentional-vector! They moved onwards like the herd of young wolves. And…yes, I was their leader! One after another we copy-pasted our results adding here and there a bit of fluctuation. Like a dominant power of the universe, annihilating homeless neutrons versus positron, we created one ruling voice -individually massless, but as a system M.A.S.S.-IVELY * productive. WE were the creative force managing every single photonic whisper that tried to inertly cross our gravitational field. WE BECAME THE multitude *!

And we were invincible! Thanks to shady trading of new rizomatic empires that soon after big-bang-breakthrough dominated entire consciousness of commons (and probably by some weird sentiment towards the Dihydrogen-Monoxide-Era were still referred to as “Eastern”) we, the horde of the computed judgements,were now experiencing the bliss of the beyond (the éxō). We were the exosphere masters. Our status of the transmittal stars shining brightly between the lightest atmospheric gases of helium, carbon dioxide, and atomic oxygen was undeniable. By transmitting ungraspable concept of energy we had became the purest form of energy it self. We were the < E > that any free neutrons and gamma photons could never generate. We stuck out our middle fingers to any nuclear fission or fusion because we knew that it is no longer necessary. The boundary between the exosphere and outer space didn’t exist for us at all.

And our interplanetary triumph would probably last forever. If only...

Somewhere there, between particles of ballistic orbits and the upper boundary of solar radiation pressure, in the millichronons of oblivion, in this quantum of unbearable lightness of transfer, I gave myself away. That happened at half the distance to the Moon, where the exosphere does not belong to Earth any more but rather constitutes the transitional zone between it’s own atmosphere and mysterious endless space. Mesmerised by the closeness of the Moon * and against own instincts, I let myself go a bit upper and upper to the orbit’s edge where loose particles could not longer gravitationally bound me to Earth. Like a disobedient child told to not swim to far away from the shore, I couldn’t help imagining the Moon’s golden crispy surface as my mum’s cheesecake that she would take out off the oven on the Sunday afternoon, and placed in front of her dysfunctional automated child without any hair to be stroked and checks to be kissed, the child that would only wink at her vanilla-smelling-perfectly-rounded love with one red diode. Melted by the memory of her soft voice humming the Mozart adagio in alliance with the radio broadcast and lost between polka dots of her dress that would gracefully follow every dropping tone of the piano concerto I couldn’t help falling into the arms of idleness.

I let myself to listen; listen to something that previously was nothing more that trans-passing containers of information; something that I would treat with analytical sober superiority, with trading efficiency and cruel indifference, that something tear itself loose, brake into my senses and filled ME with overwhelming melody of semantic beauty. I heard timbre of someone’s tears and peal of someone else’s laughter, I heard the quaver of hesitation and the bell of nonchalance; I heard carousing and rampaging language resonating in my senses like Mozart’s symphony and Bach’s fugue on the radio at that suburban kitchen on the provincial sunny afternoon. I heard LIFE and understood that I not wish to live what was not life. I wanted to feel deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life. And when I understood that my mum’s cheesecake orbit and my vanilla- ordinary world are gone forever I let it go: one single lacrima, full of salt, electrolytes, and proteins came out of my channels without any warning. Within these few innocent millichronons of vulnerable latency and promiscuous melancholy I have committed the fatal crime against my own silicon self. The sin of indolence melted my wings and pushed me down, back to the bottom of paradise that once lost cannot be entered again. I crashed with the flying seagull.

I am here now. I know that I exist. Cogito ergo fukin’ sum. I exist without any purpose and it hurts. I am neither organic nor immaterial. I am a road-kill. But I meet you and I loved. And was loved by you.

Was it worth it? • • • - - - • • •

DICTIONARY ///// Bibliography:

WE - according to Douglas Rushkoff,-the Media viruses spread through the datasphere the same way biological ones spread through the body or a community. But, instead of traveling along an organic circulatory system, they travels through the networks of the mediaspace. The “protein shell” of a media virus might be an event, invention, technology, system of thought, musical riff, visual image, scientific theory, sex scandal, clothing style or even a pop hero — as long as it can catch our attention. ///// Rushkoff, Douglas (1994). Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York: Ballantine.

I - The Cyborg or the rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those separating human from animal and human from machine. "The cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism." ///// Haraway, Donna (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, NewYork: Routledge.

MATERIALITY - a corporeality that is not to be confused either with an intelligible, formal essentiality or a sensible, formed or perceived, thinghood. This corporeality has two characteristics: on the one hand, it is inseparable from passages to the limit as changes of state, from processes of deformation or transformation that operate in a space-time itself anexact and that act in the manner of events (ablation, adjunction, projection . . .); on the other hand, it is inseparable from expressive or intensive qualities, which can be higher or lower in degree, and are produced in the manner of variable affects (resistance, hardness, weight, color . . . ) .///// Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1993). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

CONTENT – nothingness created by the CONTEXT of continues movement, i.e. shaping, sharing, reframing, and remixing media; "spreadability" produced by “circulation and distribution where the movement of media content is largely — or totally — controlled by the commercial interests producing and selling it.” ///// Jenkins, Henry; Ford, Sam; Green, Joshua (2013). Spreadable Media, Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked culture. New York University Press.

UNPRODUCTIVITY – LIFE that hurts- a form of a pure existence aware of its mortality. According to Henry David Thoreau- “going to the woods”. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to put to rout all that was not life…”///// Thoreau, Henry David (2008). Walden Civil Disobedience and Other Writings. W.W. Norton & Company

NAKED - “I heard you in the garden, and I was afraid because I was naked; so I hid.” And he said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree that I commanded you not to eat from?” ///// Holy Bible, The Book of Genesis 2:4-3:24

ORGANIC - the concept of nature in the Western sense; once obsolete and unnecessary value that nowadays is turned by the food industry into the pure profit. According to Donna Haraway, it is the Garden of Eden, that the cyborg would not recognize since it is not made of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust. For Cyborg there is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic The organic is both, the prosthetic and communications devices like others, already mechanized and reduced to potential yet inefficient resource of mind. ///// Haraway, Donna (1991). A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, NewYork: Routledge.

COMMONS - multiplicity created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of a lost Unity or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come; the mass ("crowd") machine for the unconscious; one-way hierarchy, organization of territoriality or territorialization, and emission of signs. ///// Deleuze, Gilles; Guattari, Félix (1993). A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

STREAMING - Today's productivity, increasingly determined by the capacity to respond to unforeseen and unforeseeable situations, emergent situations, those situations which make any sort of planning impracticable, assigning a central role to occasionality. This productivity would be unthinkable without the dematerialization of support systems and means of transmitting knowledge, without the constant mentalisation of capital, its fusion with living labour. ///// Marazzi, Christian (2008). Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, Semiotext (e) Foreign agents series. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England.

ATMOSPHERE - here as a “datasphere” or “mediaspace” — a new territory for interaction, economic expansion, and especially social and political machination” — that has arisen because of the rapid expansion of communication and media technologies. ///// Rushkoff, Douglas (1994). Media Virus: Hidden Agendas in Popular Culture. New York: Ballantine.

SPECULATION - the psychology of a society of individuals, each of whom is endeavoring to copy the others leads to what we may strictly term a conventional j udgment; The fruit of market operations, a constriction on all investors deriving from the supremacy of "market psychology" (of collective opinion) over individual opinions and beliefs.///// Keynes, J.M. (1937), The General Theory of Employment; Quarterly Journal of Economic. Collected Writings, vol. XIV, London.

LANGUAGE - "is neither historical, because man certainly didn't invent language, nor simply natural, because it is equally true that without the participation of the human animal, our language wouldn't exist. In our past there is "no moment in which there was a man without language who decided to invent one. That hypothetical man without language, but in all other respects similar to us, never existed. The human animal is what it is because it literally constructed itself around language. The environment of the human animal is language itself, the human animal is adapted to language, is made for and by language." ///// Cimatti, Felice (2000). Nel segno del cerchio; L'ontologia semiotica di Giorgio Prodi. manifestolibri, Rome.

COMMUNICATION - The theoretical analysis of financial market operations reveals the centrality of communication, of Language, not only as a vehicle for transmitting data and information, but also as a creative force. Communicative action is at the origin of the conventions, of the "interpretive models" that influence the choices and the decisions of the multitude of players operating in the markets. ///// Marazzi, Christian (2008). Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, Semiotext (e) Foreign agents series. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England.

M.A.S.S.IVELY PRODUCTIVE - In the post Fordist paradigm, the limit, the necessary cost of production, becomes the life itself of the linguistic community. Today the organization of work aims to overcome this separation, to fuse work and worker, to put to work the entire lives of workers. Skills, rather than professional qualifications, are put to work and with them workers' emotions, feelings, their after-work lives, we might say the whole life of the linguistic community.” ///// Marazzi, Christian (2008). Capital and Language: From the New Economy to the War Economy, Semiotext (e) Foreign agents series. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England.

MULTITUDE - the linguistic community; for more see COMMONS* and COMMUNICATION*

THE ) MOON - when far away: desire, love, expectations, and longing for the unreachable; when too close: unfulfillment, disappointment, and (eventually) death. //// Calvino, Italo, (1968). Cosmicomics. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc.