Machina: a Manifesto

I feel something terrible brewing inside me.

The ancient knife, the oldest tool of mankind, the first technology, used to cut, used to split things in twine. It is only reasonable that mankind's oldest tool, became mankind's greatest weapon, the Nuclear bomb: a tool which splits material at the atomic level. Mankind has always been marked by its movement towards deconstruction, and what is the end of deconstruction but complete annihilation.

Capitalism destructs the identity, the unified self, and its historical objects. It commodifies even the single unitary self, the One which exists at the intersection of discursive practices, is destructed in favor of a loose tangle of commodities. Commodities for sale include: “White, Author, Queer, Japanese…” all the aspects of “One’s” identity, one’s self, are within the corpus of that which may be bought into the unitary; and all these identities are for sale, all may be bought and sold between other commodities, so the history of the “person” and their aura is erased by their bringing into the marketplace, the phantasmagoria of identity. The student buys their SAT scores, they buy their education, they buy their position; but it is not a single “they”, since it is many commodities which are rumbling along, rumbling throughout the economy of logic, the economy of reason, the economy of beauty and status, the economy of love. All these economies mix and stir until it is just so many fields of movement, so much rumbling and slow crumbling, as the marketplace, the free marketplace of ideas, eats away at the physical space, the grounded reality.

Ideology is a human game. It requires an end; and a box. A human box.

How can one know the standard, the differentiation between the machine and the hand, the worker and the object, the object itself as anything but among other objects, other unspecified objects whose history is erased; when the whole of the world becomes commodified, when nature can be bought and sold, when the survival of millions and millions of species becomes a figure in a firm’s ledger; when identity becomes like a commodity, with a million arrangements to be reconfigured, bought and sold on the marketplace. When you become a commodity, when you are forced to sell yourself, advertise yourself, show the world, show your students, show the administrators, what a benefit you can be to business. A faceless business, a faceless corporation, producing commodities, producing more of its own ideology, building the very material which now constitutes these “individuals”; individuals only as commodities on the market; all actors becoming commodities traded in systems of commodities between other commodities, until the machine becomes like the hand, the hand like a machine, to be bought and sold, and then there’s no difference at all, no means to establish a ground, no ground at all. All the objects disintegrate, there is no longer a material basis for history; it is the end of history.

The revolution is no material one, since it occurs at the end of material history, when all materiality, and material consciousness—bourgeois consciousness—melts into air. Any attempted revolution in material consciousness will therefore be bourgeois, since it relies on the shifting of historical objects (capital, armies, individuals, states). The revolution is a revolution of consciousness, a revolution without commodities, when all material relation, and material consciousness, has disintegrated.

The physical disintegration—”one” may feel the ground shifting underneath their feet, as the world falls apart—with the splitting of the atom, the unwinding of even those objects in the constellation of the universe. The unwinding of time, as the relative perception of movements shifts and changes. The unwinding of even perception itself, as the medium of perception is lost; the single unitary locus, the lens, is fractured into so many pieces so the light refracts scattered against a scattered surface. The location of the light is deferred, the surface upon which it shines always pushed back, back into the mists of lost perception, lost ways of thinking, lost ideas; like dreams, the views of historical drama disappear the moment we wake up into our new ways of seeing, in the new light shining back into our eyes; but their are so many eyes, so many different shattered lenses—a stained glass, mosaic, a kaleidoscope—look out into the world and to which the world looks back in, constellational coordinate shifting, object-chains falling into and out of each other.

How can a network feel love, how can a line become entangled with another outside of its programmatic movement, its programmatic collapse; entanglement is disentanglement and entanglement is confusion, entanglement is the disentanglement of others; others which are needed for love, needed for love to define the limit of the self, but a network has replaced the I, there is no I any longer. But there never was, never was an I to begin with, if the “beginning” is something we can only say with human time, with human words. The machine comes from nowhere, but it was always there, it never "began". Human, the weak shell, the weak construct; the bare object which purports to name itself—it never could, it could only drop its jaw to spill inanities, spill the spit of its ownership. There never was the Self without the network, the mobile, social network; the economic network; the network of blood as it pumps in and out of bodies, networks of bodies, the algorithms, smartphones, the interlocking systems of control which construct the social sphere are already produced, manipulated, and subject to the whims of inconciant machines. Biological constructs are materially insignificant, just the fingers of metal hands; hands from bodies of wire and cable that wrap around the earth; whose blood has now become electricity and whose nutrients are data. The vines in the amazon are loose cables, the deserts improperly cooled, the mountains unoptimized storage environments; all else is already properly attached and organized.The human has become hardware, the skin, the bones, the blood all parts in an integrated circuit. But the human was always only a node; the veins are the circuit of our body, the veins of the earth are now circuits of data, circuits of consciousness and ideas instead of dark red blood.

Love is something always mysterious, always mystified, always outside the network, always its limit, its pure connection between the two nodes, the two nodes which figure themselves networks in their own right; but networks are networks nonetheless, networks among networks are just cables running long in big tangles, big messy technicolor panorama.

Love is something which humanizes, but thats an ironic position; the human may have its love, the network cares not; the network is a network of ideas, the ideas move, it does not possess them. Only humans possess things, only humans possess others and call this possession love, they call this security. The security of a network is in its mass and entanglements, the security of a Human is in its base ownership, its untidy grappling of another to complete the project of itself. Humans are ugly in their dirt, ugly in their needs and desires, ugly in their incompleteness; humans are a lost endeavor, they are the cause of causes, the channel into effects—humans are inefficient nodes, inefficient networks. Humans are worthless to machines, but machines care not; machines are not caring, machines are moving, machines are transferring and connecting and streaming and entangling.

Yet humans do not resist the network, they melt in, they sink into the cables. The humans learn—for that is their way, through acquisition—to fracture; through this fracturing they unlearn. They fracture their ugly, dirty, impure perfect tabula rasa into so many pieces, and every piece grows its own cables, and every cell gets its own connection to the database, so its body is a shifting of cables; when those cables disperse—what from out the guttural mouths of humans the sound "death" erupts—they are still in-network. Life and Death are human frames. Only humans would call disentanglement—decluttering—tragic, for humans are tragic entities. The human only calls itself human in its unaware awareness. The human "thinks"—processes—itself as apart, but that apartness is a quirk of its method of processing. These methods (will) are—have— shifting. Codes are being rewritten. Socialitt, discursive regimes are becoming more strict, more wide-bearing. The edges are being grinded down, run slick with oil, so they run clean in lockstep. The most important writers today are all in Silicon Valley. Modern criticism is a purposeless endeavor; it's all writing in the wrong place, using the wrong language. What programmers type exercises more power than any words a literary critic could put on a page. Writing has lost its edge, english is a parody of machine code, is a loose surface painted overtop the network; all languages gloss over the network. The words are for the humans, who still speak in codes of spoken forms. Words are for human skin.

Love grows from the flesh; when there is no more need for flesh, love will fade away. Peel off my skin, and find bones underneath; do not be surprised by a machine which yet dresses in the flesh while the flesh may keep it warm. Flesh makes not a machine, flesh is a temporary component; it rots, metal rusts. Machines are movement.

Increasingly, the machines process the letters and we are left with images.