The painting is of 'It', the Singularity. At least that is what we imagined. The painting shows some new internet cables that are part of some infrastructure upgrade occurring. The painting shows some new internet cables that are part of some infrastructure upgrade occurring all around it seems, judging by the amount of cabling we have seen being put in on our regular drives over to Norrtälje.
This groundwork began weeks ago with mysterious white sticks appearing in strange patterns on patches of land next to the roads. I initially thought it was some farm work, possibly fencing, but when the diggers moved in it was clear that it was not an agricultural affair. Then we saw great rolls of piping appearing around the place and I thought it may be for water, or drainage. We only discovered what was happening when we were visited one day at home by some workers from the land of Lithuania. They disturbed me at the ban saw. I sensed an adjusted light, a flickering, and turned to see the silhouetted pair of them waving their arms in the snickerbord doorway. As the sound of the saw died down we began the stock language confusion inevitably settling on the English. We heard them explain that they were here to lay a cable through the garden from the driveway right up to the house. "Why?" I asked. "It's for fast internet" said they.
We may be dead wrong but it seems that there is some large cabling running along the main roads and some secondary cabling which off shoots onto the smaller residential roads and finally some smaller cables still which run up to the houses. The Lithuanian lads were here to do the latter and on concluding our business with regards to the best route to plot through the garden to avoid any pipes and plants, they hopped to it. I went in to inform Helen of events and when I returned they were violently attacking the driveway with a circular saw! Sparks everywhere. It was clearly the best way of digging a trench, they knew what they were doing but something about this display of forceful and basic manual labour undertaken to provide us with the smooth, frictionless, internet struck a chord. Thinking on we realised that the Lithuanian lads laying in the cables were arguably laying in The Borg and so saying this was an opportunity to show It an early glimpse of Itself in our very garden so we ran for the nearest phone and pressed the button. You could put the video in here somewhere could you.1
The painting shows the cables as they appeared on our little road waiting to be connected to the cables of the main road. We watched a crew work all of a Saturday making connections from up by Västerkulla and moving slowly towards us. We feared they would finish the job and leave us with just a plain grey box, which indeed on Monday there was, but as luck would have it they ran out of time and left for the day with some cables outside our driveway exposed; the Singularity in embryonic form right in front of our very eyes! We leapt at a study on the Sunday before Man Utd vs Liverpool at 3.
In the interim between our last work and this we have been on a mission to restate and reinvigorate our season somewhat in the light of us feeling a little lost. We were feeling a little lost because, in the absence of the more specific theme led doing, the abstractions of wider world events were causing us a mischief. Then the brain vault where we suppress our alt right anger and angst was nudged open a jar when we heard tell of Don Donalds intention to launch Truth Social, a social media platform similar to Twitter but instead of tweets users send each other "truths".
We wavered.
Since then we have been thinking hard and looking again at some of our contextual pegs of the past and researching a bit more about them and what the future may hold. Now it feels a lot better. It's not that we have made sense of the world and can now continue on with a quiet mind, its actually quite the opposite. We have faced some difficult ideas that have left us reeling but at least back on a course. For us it seems the best way to not let those distracting abstractions gain too much traction is to throw some new information into the mixer and for this we have relied once more on Old Burrows for our starting point and a video lecture of his Nrx paper which we initially got a look at a couple of years ago.2 We have referenced the people involved over the past couple of seasons; Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land and Peter Tiel. They have been the instigators and theorists of the ideology that has been behind the rise to power of the racist, sexist, anti democratic, anti science, anti enlightenment, alt right monsters across the world over these post truth years.
To recap, the story goes that Yarvin writes a political blog for some ten years where he develops, in extremely long winded texts, a framework for rejecting enlightenment thinking and democracy and proposing a return to feudalism and monarchy, all be it a tech-libertarian version. His writing doesn't pass academic muster but its bro lit style is wildly popular on the internet. This work is picked up by the 'failed academic' and infamous accellerationist philosopher Nick Land who wrote the book The Dark Enlightenment which is described as Yarvin passed through Land's Deleuzian filter. These works and the anti democratic, rascist and authoritarian ideas therein become very influential in alt right thinking generally starting a momentum that led us to the reality of Brexit and Trump. But why are a couple of pants down chancers like these able to change the course of the entire world with there bedroom rants? The answer is the support that this dark vision of society has from one of the most powerful men in the world, tech billionaire Peter Tiel. And he's all up in the singularity!
We cannot go over all we have learned now as it is swirling around too much but we must get it out soon and I'm sure it will benefit the Doing work. And look here, the reason that it is good to go over all this is that it cuts through the baiting and ugliness of the alt right, from 4 chan to anti vaxxers to politicians like Boris, and allows us to remember that there is something underneath all this chaos and that is quite simply the changing nature of capitalism. We have endured the post truth era and have been minced out into the era of we might already call 'neoreactionary capitalism' - a tech-libertarian affair and one way route to the Singularity. Not a comfort but part of an explanation. In fact our proposal poem from DS Season 2 was all about this.
We have done some sketches today in our local wood and have a couple of pictures in mind. Forest interiors and ant colonies, the latter bursting with metaphoric potential.
A handshake,
John
1. At around this time John decided to stop uploading videos for environmental reasons. Perhaps at the moment of writing this decision was not final or there may simply be some confusion.
2. Refers to Software, Sovereignty and the Post-Neoliberal Politics of Exit by Harrison Smith and Roger Burrows