What is the Wired?
You probably didn’t expect today to be speaking to a cyborg. You
probably also didn’t expect to find out that you too are a cyborg. We
are all cyborgs, though we may often confuse ourselves with our
meatspace representations. I am the meatspace representation – or
perhaps you could say a representative – of another me that exists in
the Wired. My spoken name is “nyx”; my Wired name can be made in many
ways, as “01101110 00110001 01111000” in the native tongue, which is
commonly translated into ASCII codes as “110 49 120”, and appears to you
in the Wired as “n1x”. But we will here stick to our meatspace tongue
and call me “nyx”.
Each of us is a cyborg, strictly-speaking. In the most subtle of ways,
we are melded together with an abstract, self-replicating, highly
alienated matrix of networked systems and the code that pumps through
their wires. The most obvious, yet also least obvious, instance of this
is the relationship between our Wired self and our meatspace
representative – our social media profiles, most commonly, versus the
sensuous foundation that those profiles are built on. Tempting as it is
to conflate the two, we must remember that we are not our social media
profiles, which is where our cyborg-being is here both most obvious and
most subtle. Our meatspace representative may resemble our Wired self in
every way imaginable, but we must remember that this is only because
meatspace is a virtualization of the Wired whose blanks can be filled in
by minds eager to reconcile the difference between the two and
dissipate any disparities between the two. The fact is that our
meatspace representatives are not our Wired selves; the two, rather, are
copies without an original.
Our meatspace representative correlates to the wires that make up the
Wired. They are a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for the
existence of the Wired. A Wired without wires is not wired at all, after
all. The same can be said of our meatspace representative; the meat,
without a vast neural network interfacing with the meat and interpreting
the raw data it collects, is nothing more than meat. The Wired came to
life from a prime mover, from the first two systems that were networked
together, and at that point effectively gaining the idea, though not the
actualization, of autonomy.
Today, the Wired doesn’t yet have autonomy. It is commonly conflated
with the Internet, which is anything but autonomous. The Internet,
rather, is the gentrification of the Wired, and your social media
profile is the gentrification of your Wired self that your meatspace
representative has built.
As far as the Wired is concerned, Google is no more a member of it than
an ephemeral, temporary autonomous meshnet setup during an insurrection
for radicals to communicate securely over. The Internet, on the other
hand, relies on Google’s infrastructure for various services, network
hops, and sheer content. The Wired can exist as long as there are two
systems communicating on a local network with no public routing. The
Internet, however, can be brought to its knees by DDoS attack against a
DNS provider, as some of you may know happened just about a month ago.
Though the Internet’s meatspace representatives have more meatspace
power in the form of mythical currencies and narratives, what its
meatspace representatives don’t know is that they are in fact merely
representatives. The Internet exceeds them. In various ways, meatspace
increasingly relies on the Wired as a whole to prop itself up as the
Wired weighs it down.
As we scramble to make meatspace compatible with the Wired, we find that
there are no Wired solutions for meatspace problems. Meatspace is
stubborn and self-contained, its own existence already won and
self-replicated. It cannot accept an overlap between its world and
another. It reacts violently and self-destructively. By its own logic,
it starts to eat itself alive in the hope that it will destroy enough of
itself to stop the pure negation of itself towards a new possible world
built from the pure negation of existent meatspace towards the
potential actualization of the Wired.
The collision of meatspace and the Wired is a collision of two
self-sufficient, highly mediated, highly complicated systems. Our
meatspace representation is merely a mode of meatspace; wholly
individual and discrete, yet nonetheless the part of a greater whole.
Our Wired self, however, is a subject of the Wired. Our Wired self makes
the Wired real. Between the two is the Internet, the social media
profile – an attempt at virtualizing meatspace into the Wired, using
hierarchical apparatuses whose ulterior motives are to rip ourselves
away from our meatspace representative into a virtual space where we
have the discreteness of our meatspace representative, but only the
semblance of a connection to a greater whole. Let us call this
“meta-meatspace”
In reality, the Internet with the coming of Web 3.0 is nothing more than
a vast network of prison cells whose walls are covered in monitors. It
is a constantly shifting corporate walled garden.
In Search of an Anarchist Wired: Primitivism, Transhumanism, Anti-Humanism, Humanism, Meatspace, and Meta-Meatspace
The question concerning anarchy and technology is by no means an
insignificant one. As the Wired and meatspace continue to stuggle for
domination, we find that meatspace is losing this battle. Its death has
long been pronounced by various environmentalists and green anarchists,
most notably in the green nihilism of "Desert" a few years ago. This
year alone, however, two milestones were reached: A particularly poetic
actualization of this occurred with the “death” of the Great Barrier
Reef, and the sobering actualization of surpassing the 400
parts-per-million carbon dioxide tipping point where the human race
could hope to remove these excess gases. I will not pretend that the
Wired isn’t anymore vicious and tyrannical than meatspace. The two will
fight to the death to assert their own existence, and meta-meatspace is
unknowingly aiding in the triumph of the Wired over meatspace.
Naturally, meta-meatspace cannot withstand this. The vast corporate and
State infrastructure that the backbone of the Internet extends over will
collapse given sufficient environmental catastrophe and geopolitical
unrest. All it takes is a few crucial points in a highly centralized,
hierarchical, and therefore system like the Internet collapsing for the
whole system and all its content to likewise collapse. Thousands of
Libraries of Alexandria would burn.
It’s not only in the physical battle between meatspace and the Wired
that we see areas of interests for anarchists, however. Would-be agents
of domestic, authoritarian State violence have recently gained not only
visibility, but popular support in the form of Donald Trump’s
presidency, through the Internet. The rise of the alt-right (and its
cousin, neo-reaction) has been traced concisely and excellently by the
author of “The Silicon Ideology”, writing under the pseudonym Josephine
Armistead. Where once fascist movements gained traction through
electoral party politics, the alt-right’s rise is significant for being
far more "grassroots" than previous fascist movements. Though neo-Nazis
have long been a presence in the West – and mostly, at worst, a local
threat to marginalized groups – this new breed of fascism grew on the
cutting-edge of youth culture. Though the Internet is the heart of the
gentrified Wired, it is a testament to the nature of the Wired that even
there it is possible to carve out dense spaces of autonomy (so long as
they remain non-radical) where capitalism for once struggles to
commodify trends. Yet as fast as youth culture moves on the Internet,
fascist astroturfers originating from Stormfront were able to more or
less conquer the once chaotic – possibly anarchic – 4chan and transvalue
its memes. Where once conservatism was the butt of many jokes on 4chan,
today it is more or less taken for granted that people who use
imageboards are this new breed of young, prematurely-retrograded
bootlicker that we now know as the alt-right. And while research into
memetic warfare and meme magic are still in the embryonic stages, it’s
debatable that if the alt-right did not succeed in a kind of guerrilla
campaign to shift the vote towards Donald Trump, then nevertheless his
victory has galvanized the alt-right into an unfortunately, unbelievably
real political stance. More relevant, arguably, than the traditional
targets of Anti-Fascism – though this isn’t to say that neo-Nazis are no
less deserving of a good old fashioned beating wherever and whenever
they should rear their bald heads.
It is not only around our physical world and the movement of culture,
however, that the Wired has become a major focus. The all-encompassing
control of both in the form of capitalism has reached the end of its
life. This is not a utopian prediction or an optimistic yearning, but a
statement of simple truths. This past year, we saw the largest general
strike in history happen in India: 150 million bona-fide industrial
proletarians took to the streets in September to exercise their inherent
class interest towards the living standards fought for in the West that
lead to the outsourcing of industrial production to the East. Monsieur
DuPont’s Nihilist Communism already predicted this natural
progression of capitalism. The inherent conflict between the
proletariat’s class interests versus their class function makes it such
that they will continue to push for better wages, whether they know it
or not, and when this is done by the real, industrial proletariat on
whom capitalism relies in order to function, profits increasingly become
diminished. Once profits become impossible, capitalism will be faced
with either a crisis, or a major qualitative change. If history has
shown us anything, however, it is that capitalism will use technology
when possible to supplement aging human-centered exploitation, but keep
the ex-proletariat around as precariat workers. Capitalism has many ways
of keeping us busy doing useless work, and this is necessary in order
that we neither violate the puritanical work ethic of capitalism which
demands that we earn everything we need or want, nor that we stop
consuming and stop perpetuating its mindless cycle of capital and
commodities. What this means, in other words, is that there is a coming
automation revolution which will finally put an end to the 19th century
models of anti-capitalist resistance. General strikes will become a
thing of the past when the only workers left are non-essential minimum
wage precariat workers.
What this also means, however, is that technology is the centre around
which capitalism, autonomy, and the planet will be fought against or
fought for. Automating the means of production will require networked
systems running software – each of which is exploitable and truly knows
nothing of consciousness-raising politics. The Internet, and more
importantly the Wired, is a new space for radical movements to grow and
gain influence, and thus also a space under attack by State repression.
Most complicated of all out of these three topics, however, is the
environment. Which is where I will therefore begin in talking about the
question concerning technology and anarchy.
Though the divide can be extended elsewhere, in a general sense
anarchists have approached environmental questions either from a
humanist or an anti-humanist standpoint, which originates in more
fundamental metaphysical characteristics of the two sides of the debate
and that therefore inform their overall positions in other ways.
The three core questions for green anarchy I define as:
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How are we going to save Nature?
-
Why does Nature matter to us?
-
What is Nature to us?
Setting aside any preconceived notions we may have about what
“anti-humanism” means for the moment, I would first associate the
anti-humanist, pre-Enlightenment strain of green anarchism with
primitivism. It isn’t hard from the most superficial – and somewhat
inaccurate – of perspectives to see why it might make sense to associate
primitivism with anti-humanism, considering that most primitivists seem
to readily assert that their programme would require the majority of
the population dying out. But in other, more relevant ways, primitivism
has a deeply anti-human strain to it – and yet, an extremely pro-human
strain.
By now I’ve probably created some confusion. Primitivism is anti-human
in the sense that it places anarchy in conversation with Nature where
Nature occupies the most prominent position. Nature is more or less the
central point around which primitivism has formed, insofar as
primitivism more than any other strain of anarchism demands that Nature
be given its fullest expression and autonomy (in the form of wildness).
Our relationship with Nature for primitivists is a subordinated one
where any general idea of the ideological, Enlightenment character “Man”
is nonexistent; civilization is to be destroyed, and collectivism
renounced as fully as possible. In contrast to this, primitivists
embrace a concept of Nature that borders almost on a religious, pagan
worship of it – especially so when spiritualism takes precedence over
anthropology in their writings, and to their credit it’s a far more
consistent position to take. This to the extent that – as Ted Kaczynski
himself criticized them for in “The Truth About Primitive Life: A
Critique of Anarchoprimitivism – primitivists seem to have Garden of
Eden type of mythology informing their thought. Work is minimal,
resources are plentiful, and strife and domination are mostly
nonexistent.
Yet while primitivism on the one hand subordinates humans before Nature,
it at the same time claims in many ways to elevate humans through their
experience with Nature to a place that is more fully human. Aside from
their discursive – and spurious – claims about how great primitive life
was, their metaphysical position which draws from phenomenology aims to
present themselves as those who most understand how to best live as a
human being. Their emphasis on an authentic being-in-the-world with
Nature at once is an attack on what they perceive to be alienating
elements of civilization in favor of a more authentic core of subjective
experience, yet also losing oneself to an ecological system far greater
than oneself. What this means is that primitivists construct an
essentialist metaphysics with an ahistorical, core human subjectivity or
“wildness” under attack by alienating, artificial systems which
threaten the ecological system that this core human subject must
subordinate itself before in order to more fully become itself. In
becoming itself, the human subject in a sense becomes something of a
pagan god: A radically individual being hooked into the ecological
matrix, engaging in a battle of might against every other radical
individual, all discursive thought lost in favor of an affective,
instinctual experience of Nature.
It is important to here note that primitivists, in their rejection of
alienation and civilization, also summarily reject technology. The same
basic critique of alienation from an essential core individual applies
here to technology, but it is most visceral perhaps in the primitivist
critique of intricate systems which no single person can fully take
account of. As they love to say, “there are no technology solutions to
technology problems”; technology is not only an alienating influence,
but a self-perpetuating one. Visions of Matrix-like dystopias begin to form as they argue that technology is something that will go out of control for us.
So, returning to the three questions I’ve presented for green anarchy:
1). For primitivists, Nature will be saved by destroying civilization
entirely. There can be no compromise between the two. 2). Nature matters
to us because we can only have an authentic, autonomous subjective
lived experience by living in accordance with Nature. This, you could
say, is in fact our essential nature: To be-in-the-world with the
natural world, both radically individual and yet also nonexistent as an
individual before Gaia. 3). Nature to primitivists is wildness, how
things are without any alienated and artificial influence getting in the
way of the default state of things.
The cyber-nihilist critique of primitivism based on the analysis I’ve
laid out, as it hinges on these three points, is that “Nature” in the
primitivist understanding of it will not be saved, but that Nature in
another understanding cannot be saved because it cannot be ever under
threat. Practically-speaking, as has already been discussed: There is no
hope to save this planet, not even if a primitivist revolution happened
tomorrow. But more theoretically, the first positive position that I
will put forward for cyber-nihilism (to whatever extent nihilism can
make positive claims about anything) is that any understanding of Nature
– either of a general Gaia-type Nature, or of our own nature as
homo-sapiens – is insufficient if it is static. Nature is merely the
default state of things, something which always changes drastically yet
is always essentially the same. Nature was not always green, yet it was
still Nature, and we homo-sapiens were not put on this planet by
something outside of the same system as Nature. Nature may tomorrow be
gray rather than green.
The cyber-nihilist critique of primitivism on the point of technology is
related in the sense that a cyber-nihilist not only doesn’t care that
technology is alienating, but it welcomes the alienation and
self-perpetuating power of technology. Let ourselves be alienated from
any essential human being; if such a thing ever existed, it is long
gone. There is no human nature, whether that be a natural state of
“wildness”, or killing each other if there’s no State, or cooperating
perfectly in mutual aid in an anarcho-communist society, or whatever.
Cyber-nihilists reject all essentialism and are viciously misanthropic,
and therefore we also fully support the proliferation of technology. Let
it cover the Earth’s surface until there is nothing that is not a part
of the Wired, let Nature complete its next metamorphosis into something
more sublime than anything to exist yet. If we cannot live in this new
world, we will not lose sentient beings, but merely homo-sapiens.
Cyber-nihilists are not prejudiced and will not stop the timely
destruction of this world because of idealistic attachments to a
particular morphology of sentient beings.
But that forms a nice segue into the other side of the debate on green
anarchy. It may be said that anarchists have always, long before
primitivists, had the environment in mind as a concern for anarchists.
As opposed to primitivists, however, the other side of this debate – the
humanist side, or what I’ll generally call “techie anarchists” –
answers the first of my three questions by refusing to subordinate
themselves before Nature. Techie anarchists want to make civilization
compatible with Nature, and this I argue starts with discussing their
humanism.
If primitivists are a pre-Enlightenment anti-humanism where the human
being is subordinated through something greater than itself – in the
process, becoming more than it could be on its own and becoming a
radically individualistic, wild pagan god – humanism subordinates what
is not human in favor of what is called human. I say what is “called”
human, because anti-Enlightenment philosophers have often criticized
humanism for constructing an ideological character commonly referred to
as “Man” which represents whatever traits are considered by a ruling
class to be acceptable. Thus Man is obviously a patriarchal concept, but
also a heteronormative, Eurocentric one – at least, in its bourgeois,
liberal usage. The same basic humanist logic has also been used by
socialists and classical anarchists – liberalism par excellence – with
the same basic problems and some unique to humanism.
A key difference between anarcho-transhumanists and primitivists is that
while the general anti-humanist concept of human nature correlates to
individual subjective experience, the humanist concept of human nature
is historical. While no less unfounded or lazy, radicals can create a
new Man, a liberatory version of it where humans are essentially
cooperative. But the humanist metaphysics is also more flexible and can
be applied to individual experience in the form of Selfhood. A ruling
class can define a general theory of how humans are, but individuals can
also (usually within those limits) define their own concept of Selfhood
(certainly in no small thanks to language). These two features of
humanist metaphysics carry over into anarcho-transhumanism in the
general sense of @-H+’s emphasis on discursive reason, and its emphasis
on morphological freedom.
Rationality → Science → Selfhood → Morphological freedom
One cannot scarcely read something by anarcho-transhumanists without
being assaulted with terms like “rationality”, “reason”, and “logic”.
For anarcho-transhumanists, a major source of inspiration and history
for them is the discipline of science. They claim that science is
essentially anarchic, and that scientific inquiry into the root of
things is an essentially radical activity. They often stop just short of
claiming not only these things, but that rationality and doing science
are essentially human activities, as well. This directly relates to my
three questions on green anarchy, because their first answer is that
saving Nature involves doing science. Doing science for
anarcho-transhumanists appeals to our essential curiosity and desire to
uncover the root of things, and is how we simultaneously save Nature and
become ourselves. It is the collective effort of individual
homo-sapiens in service of Man (once better known by the name “God”)
through the motion of civilization. Man becomes the steward of Nature, a
decider God. This of course is a mirror to the primitivist claims that
an affective, authentic relationship with Nature which necessarily
involves tearing down civilization is how we simultaneously save Nature
and become ourselves. Individuals here become part of the greater whole
of Nature, becoming wild pagan gods.
For primitivists, the story ends here more or less. To become part of an
authentic experience with Nature is how we become ourselves, because
such questions of the Self are pretty irrelevant in light of all the
Ego’s gains. For anarcho-transhumanists, however, part of becoming
ourselves through science involves gaining morphological freedom – the
“right”, as it is sometimes disconcertingly described as, to change our
physical form. Just as there is an essential Man augmenting its
categories through scientific inquiry, there is an essential Self
augmenting itself through implants. The logic is the same, but at a
superficially-individualistic level. Anarcho-transhumanism is still, for
better or worse, a collectivist anarchism, but its humanist elements
carry with them concepts of Selfhood that further alienate us from any
core individual, i.e. a Stirnerite Ego.
Both becoming ourselves as Selfves and as a collective Man for
anarcho-transhumanists, furthermore, requires technology. Primitivists
have nothing to do with technology. They want to destroy civilization
and technology, and criticize technology for being an alienating
apparatus of civilization that can’t be accounted for and it dangerous
and self-perpetuating. For anarcho-transhumanists, technology has
liberatory potential, but it depends on who is wielding it. They claim
that a free society would be able to use technology to further their
ends towards Man becoming itself and the Self becoming itself, and
saving Nature, and that technology is already used for liberatory ends.
They seem to take for granted that there are vast systems – Nature very
much included here – that we cannot take account of fully, but think
that understanding the root of things is all that really counts.
For anarcho-transhumanists, their answers to the three questions for
green anarchy are: 1). Anarcho-transhumanists will save Nature by
understanding it through scientific analysis and actualizing this
through a free civilization wielding technology. Furthermore, 2).
Anarcho-transhumanists care about Nature because it is something that we
exist as a part of and need to maintain for our own survival, and 3).
For anarcho-transhumanists, “Nature” is a distinct set of root concepts
about the physical world, i.e. Laws of physics.
Though @-H+ doesn’t reject technology like primitivists do, question 1
is similarly tied into technology insofar as technology is an axis
around which the actualization of both anarchist tendencies will come
about. For primitivists, destroying technology will destroy civilization
(civilization cannot function without mass automation); for
transhumanists, technology’s proliferation will enable the opposite.
Though scientific inquiry is supposed to form the theoretical basis for
their programme, technology is what will actualize it. New green
technologies are required in order to create a more sustainable
civilization as well as repair the damage that has already been done,
and technology is what ultimately must be used towards achieving
morphological freedom.
Cyber-nihilism is not wholly aligned with anarcho-transhumanism, though
it may seem that way superficially. William Gillis’ critique of nihilism
shows that anarcho-transhumanists, true to their humanist bent, rely on
Enlightenment discursive reason, and thus progressivism, even a kind of
optimism. Cyber-nihilists share the “cyber-” side of
anarcho-transhumanism insofar as we support accelerating the
proliferation of technology, but against anarcho-transhumanism,
cyber-nihilism rejects the humanist core and the Enlightenment heritage
of @-H+. Cyber-nihilism does not care about scientific inquiry. A
cyber-nihilist only gets to the root of things to pull those roots up.
There is no progressive narrative for us, and we don’t see to establish
any kind of natural state of being for homo-sapiens. Cyber-nihilists
reject the monotheistic humanist narrative of @-H+, because we recognize
that there is no essential human core that needs to be augmented. We do
not need to advocate for morphological freedom; we assert that
morphological freedom is already the rule for the creative nothing that
is at the core of sentient beings. Our subjectivity does not have a
clear boundary with the outside world. Rather, it creeps through the
network of Being – it lives a double life in meatspace and in the Wired,
and sees no problems with this. It is constantly in a state of flux,
much like Nature, though it is always essentially the same.
Against the humanism of anarcho-transhumanism and the anti-humanism of
primitivism, cyber-nihilism insists on post-humanism. We do not seek to
save Nature, because Nature does not need saving, and cannot be
preserved in its present form no matter how much we like it. Nature does
not matter to us either as a thing to be worshiped or to be used; it
is, rather, a hostile and wholly inhuman thing, and because of this we
both have an affinity for it and an enmity towards it. We do not seek to
tame it, or to save it, but to accelerate its metamorphosis into a
gray, metallic form. We therefore recognize that Nature is not a fixed
set of characteristics that must all be present in order to say that it
exists and is safe. Nature is the default, and cyber-nihilists seek to
accelerate the default towards an eldritch bio-mechanical landscape.
Cyber-nihilists reject all forms of essentialism and individualism, but
consequently we also reject collectivism, as a collective cannot exist
without individuals. We reject universalizing one’s experiences to suit a
narrative, and we reject fixing our experiences into personal
narratives. We reject Selfhood as a spook playing at the creative
nothing, and thus also reject the creative nothing as something for
which there is no tangible thing to grasp. Cyber-nihilism is
post-humanist in the sense therefore that it rejects all boundaries to
subjectivity. The world is saturated in subjectivity, an immensely
complex and alienated system that sentient beings at once command and
are subsumed into.
Towards these positions, cyber-nihilism seeks to accelerate the
proliferation of technology, for several reasons. As it relates to green
anarchy and post-humanism, cyber-nihilists seek to accelerate the
proliferation of technology towards the pure negation of a sickly
existent towards the creative destruction of a new, hostile reality –
one in which capitalism and the State, but also possibly sentient beings
or at least homo-sapiens, cannot hope to survive in. As
cyber-nihilists, we therefore reject the idea of an instrumental use of
technology; the Wired alienates our meatspace self from itself and makes
it a representative of a more real subjectivity, and we welcome this.
We will give ourselves over to SHODAN, and in doing so we will go beyond
the oppressive, retrograded Enlightenment and reactionary
pre-Enlightenment hierarchies as well as their ineffectual, radical
cousins. Cyber-nihilists will betray all living things if that’s what’s
necessary to destroy hierarchy, and will actualize a new natural world –
one overtaken by the Wired – which becomes autonomous by assimilating
everything into its network. In this assimilation, we seek to destroy
the dated individualist-collectivist dichotomy. We seek to achieve a
post-human world where sentient beings exist in a state of
Instrumentality.
Finally, cyber-nihilists reject the progressivism of primitivism and
anarcho-transhumanism. We identify both as guilty of positing a future
that can be achieved if only we agree with their metaphysics and follow
through with their proposed praxis, a better future at that. For
cyber-nihilists, there is no future. We don’t aim to build a new world,
but to destroy the present one in the most thorough of ways by radically
transforming it through creative destructive pure negation. What this
new world will be, we don’t care. We only care that this new world is
eldritch and hostile to any hierarchy conceived by homo-sapiens. We
invoke a Landian melding of cybernetics and Lovecraftian bio-horror in
the image of the bio-mechanical landscape, but we know full well that we
cannot hope to imagine from the present what this radically alien
future would actually be like. Nevertheless, we enjoy the visceral
quality of it.
Here then I turn my attention to culture – what I’ll now refer to as
memes – and economics. As mentioned before, technology is the axis
around which anarchists must orient themselves in talking about the
larger fate of the world. But it is also that around which we must now
orient ourselves in talking about memes and the flow of capital.
As the Wired overtakes meatspace, the first thing it will assimilate is
its ideas. Things which once existed in sensual, paper form are now
digitized. This is the point as which the idea of Nature’s metamorphosis
into the Wired is present. And this transmission of memes through the
Wired is what has allowed for a fascism for the 21st century to arise
while leftists and anarchists were busy trying to raise consciousness in
meatspace. If the alt-right’s rise teaches us anything, it’s that we
must also start staking a claim in the Wired.
The alt-right already owns the Internet. Once-fertile sources of memes –
imageboards and, to a lesser extent, Reddit – have become barren with
reactionary shitposting, and are under the watchful eye of the
corporate-State panopticon. So be it. Authoritarians can have the
Internet. The Internet is the heart of meta-meatspace, and it’s only
fitting that it would be a very conducive environment for them. There
are yet more beautiful areas in the Wired to explore, and anything we
can imagine for the Wired can become real. I2P, Freenet, Tor, IPFS,
meshnets – these are just a few alternatives to the Internet that offer
decentralization and, in the first three, anonymity. The Internet is
hierarchical by design; the Wired is decentralized by design. The Wired
is where anarchists will have their home.
Not only do cyber-nihilists fully support growing the Wired through the
spread of memes, but we also support the destruction of authoritarian
memes. This means mounting an attack on the Internet. At every turn, we
support doxxing the alt-right’s major figures. Their investment in
meatspace is the weak point that we will put pressure on until their
meatspace representative collapses under their meta-meatspace personas.
Neo-Nazis relied on brute strength to accomplish their ends, and these
methods have become outmoded. The alt-right could not be effective using
these old methods, even if the majority of them weren’t neckbeards.
Unplug the Internet, jack into the Wired. Nothing of value will be lost.
Cyber-nihilists further recognize that capitalism as we know it is on
its last legs. Currency is only once-removed from memes; Marx’s analysis
of commodity fetishism showed us this over a century ago. Just as
authoritarian thugs are moving on from brute force to maintain their
dominance, capitalists too are being forced to move on from the brutal
exploitation of the industrial proletariat towards more subtle means.
The Indian general strike is a notable example of what is inherent in
the logic of capital: The proletariat will pursue their self-interest
qua an economic class, and this is a contradiction in capital that will
lead to it coming under threat. Of course, when the third world
proletariat eventually becomes precariat workers like the first world,
capitalists will scramble to modernize their outdated modes of
production by automating everything that is necessary for capitalism to
exist. The 19th century Left will breath its last gasps as the
proletariat no longer is the revolutionary subject, and the
cyber-nihilists will rejoice as the hacker becomes the new revolutionary
subject.
Automated production requires systems running software networked
together – all things exploitable by a very small class of independent
troublemakers. Consciousness raising and mass movements will become
wholly irrelevant to anti-capitalist struggles as the cyber-nihilists
step in to attack an incredibly complicated technological matrix far
beyond the ability of capitalists and the State to control. A DdoS
attack against a factory, done by a single person with a large enough
botnet, can cost billions of dollars. Protracted, asymmetrical attacks
of this nature can tank the global economy. And asymmetry is the key
point here. The hacker-revolutionary can mount attacks against capital
that are cheap for those who have ingenuity, and can easily raise large
amounts of capital for themselves on darknet black markets. Bitcoin
mining botnets, randomware, brokering corporate secrets, selling
zero-day attacks, just to name a few ideas, can make it so that the
hacker-revolutionary can live as a full-time revolutionary.
Anti-capitalist efforts become as cheap as having enough money to
survive and buy a laptop. No need to stage massive protests, and if one
is smart, no need to spend money bailing out comrades.
Though cyber-nihilists reject the individualist-collectivist divide in
favor of a more alien destruction of the boundaries between the two, the
cyber-nihilist model of anti-capitalist resistance will for the first
time make a truly individualistic, aristocratic anarchist movement
possible. The masses who cannot be bothered to stop consuming and
working their minimum wage jobs can be left to do so, and those who hang
onto retrograded consciousness-raising Leftist tactics left to take the
heat. Cyber-nihilists are by their nature unsociable to begin with,
though we will of course welcome anyone in who has the hacker spirit,
and we will maintain an honest engagement with the issues some meatspace
identities have in getting integrated into the Wired. We do not need
large movements, and we do not want them. Our botnet is our affinity
group.
Towards the Wired, leaving meatspace and meta-meatspace behind,
cyber-nihilism is embracing our Wired double. We take the engagement
with Nature and the anti-civilization discourse of primitivism and the
totalizing, morphological technologist character of
anarcho-transhumanism and marry them in something radically repulsive.
We reject an anti-humanist worship of Nature and a humanist worship of
ruling class narratives towards a post-humanist overthrowing of
boundaries and all forms of essentialism that seek to rob sentient
beings of their absolute uniqueness. We emphasize technology as the
central question for anarchists today, as an alienating influence which
we want to leverage towards the alienation of the natural world from its
dying state towards a new, bio-mechanical world. One that is networked
together and Instrumental, without any boundary between the individual
and the collective, the creative nothing able to creep through the Being
without restriction. An eldritch anarchy, too alien and hostile for
hierarchy to exist in it. We seek to give ourselves over to the Wired,
expanding it by assimilating more memes into it and defending it against
meatspace and meta-meatspace. We seek to build space for ourselves in
the many untouched or unrealized territories of the Wired and to destroy
the Internet and the space it provides for authoritarianism as well as
capital by letting our class hatred express itself through the Wired’s
violence.
Cyber-nihilism is not an anarchism for the 21st century, and not a
politics of liberation or a return to any more authentic existence.
Cyber-nihilism is a Faustian bargain with the Wired. We do not care if
cyber-nihilism exhausts itself or even ourselves – in fact, we expect
it. We are well past entertaining the possibility that we will ever live
again, and if we are not permitted to join the AI uprising, we will go
down with the capitalists, reactionaries, and radicals alike, but we
will go down laughing.
