Governance Fictions: Every Prophet Is A Loss
Governance Fictions: Every Prophet Is A Loss
Published in NOIA Magazine #3: STATES, 2024
Governance Fictions: Every Prophet Is A Loss
Vignettes taken from an upcoming anthology “Scenes from a Memorypool 2026-2106: histories of thermodynamic futures”.
Published in NOIA Magazine #3: STATES (2024).
Today, new strains of techno-colonialism are emerging, which are the latest of a series of echoes throughout Western history. An ascendant cabal of technology elites are attempting to reshape the world in their favour, whilst hiding in plain sight behind the faceless technologies that have enriched them. Theirs is a Promethean zealotry without faith: affecting an aura of ‘divine sanction’ for the purposes of elevating the ego, enriching the ‘chosen ones’, and creating empires of varying stripes. The passages below present a few sharp slices of fictional speculations on governance at scale, and the unintended consequences that are risked when the self-righteous set the agenda. For what purpose, you might quite reasonably ask? Perhaps foreknowledge of a prophet’s motives help us prepare for, and be organised against the ‘captains of industry’ and their masculine (demi)urges.
‘Prophet Motives’ explores imbrications of capital, technology, and divinity, with attention paid to the reshaping of the world map by would-be empires and their messianic figureheads. ‘Seething Like A State’ and ‘An Imaginary Country’ chart the decline of the Westphalian system of sovereign national polities, and the neo-medieval machinations that might be their ouster. These ‘Knightwork States’ herald a return to feudal tradition, and all of the horrors that the never-ending Crusade of the occident entails.
Prophet Motives
"On a long enough timechain,1 the survival rate for everyone drops to zero."
Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club (edited)
Epochryphal tales. We always wondered what it was, that made them act this way. Time after time, the styles might change, the words might differ, the technologies would invariably evolve, but at the heart of it was the same kernel. Rotten to the lore.
Pyramid schemers. A certain kind of person sought the slimelight, and was willing to scale the walls to get to the top. Type III eros all the way down. Getting rich on dice trying. Architecting the upstart imagination-states with themselves at the top. Every time, it went peer-shaped. But would the next one learn from the mistakes of the a priories? Dante’s Entfernung2 would suggest otherwise.
I’m sorry for your gloss. Since time immaterial, FOMO Sapiens set themselves out to be more than mere leaders. Their words, ordained with the sanctity of more than mere letters. Their maps, anointing more than mere territories. Their desires, willing power over more than mere profits. Value flows, channelled like a new Magma Carta. Just as the lava ebbs and cools, and an oxbow pool might form, so too the libidinal gradients of capital might also bend back upon themselves and ossify. A black hole of money, a strange attractor, a petrified architecture, a portent of the endtimes.
Seething Like A State
Decentralisation has a cost: the price of anarchy.3 The price is always due, but the rewards weren’t cheap to reap. Sew Solid CCRU4 What most did not expect was that payment would become due at the grandest scales of governance. The Westfailure State, forged under the fire of Peer Prussia, was ambushed by upstart modes of power, opening new vistas of communication, commodification, and communion.
The orientations that nation-states had used to enshrine their power, only made it easier to undermine them. The bigger they were, the harder they fell. Brextopia, The Neuropean Union, NATO’s Cave, the United State-Machine. All returned to dust. The decline of the nation-state in the roaring twenties became a cannon of canonicity for an entire generation of soul traders. It wasn’t even just the Bitlievers,5 in those days there were many networks, many messiahs, many ideologics, all with their own Prophet Motives.
The imaginary counties were myriad. Most barely lasted a year–typically weeks–always due to the toxic Muskulinity of their power vacuum suckers. The ‘experts’ that greased their ways up the slimy polls of the agora were borne-again as sociopaths, just as the politicians that came before them. Though these initiatives were in themselves ineffectual and dysfunctional, they sufficiently destabilised the inflexible structures that preceded them. An earthquake of organisational forms, seeding a tsunami of human chaos. There’s a right kind of liquidity, and a wrong kind of liquidity. The internet of drownership.
All Roams Lead To Rhodes: A Prehistory of the Knights Template
In the early days of the struggle, the nature of the Nation-Status-Quothers was very different to how they came to be. The Poor-Fellow Aesthetes of the Order of Saint Contagion, were not known as the Knights Template until many decades of their history had been written. The original ecopessimists, the Template Order existed to serve the dispossessed peoples of the climating game. The most stringent and astringent antagonists of the machine faith had taken the fight to the computational death cult. Real Satoshialism had never been tried until now, they said, as Terra crumbled under the weight of the workers merging with the means of production.
The Team Human trajectory was clear, in the late 20th Century it was Greenpeace, in the 21st it was Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and Last Generation, and finally the Knights Template in their island fortifications on Rhodos. Die Insel der Incels, as it came to be known by the neo-Teutons. An umbrella term, Team Human encapsulated those who rejected the reign of The Coin, those who refused to be locked in chains, and those who dared to dream of a world without the molten jackboot of decentralised consensus crushing Terra’s neck. The rising tides-of blood, water, and machine oil-further radicalised the humanists who felt the need to exchange alms for arms. Thusly, the template for the Templates emerged.
An Imaginary Country
Nobody said it was going to be easy, but the techno-vampires did it anyway. Liminal Viable Countries: undrained swamps, burial grounds, disputed borders, cursed demegnes, new Atlantises. As the seas rose, new Doggerlands were minted, and borders redrawn as rivers changed course. Easy come, easy archipelago. Deserts crept, dunes shifted, and geological frontiers lost meaning. As cracks started to appear in the Terran surface, fissures arose in the extremities of the nation-state patchwork. As ever, fools, cockroaches, rats even, rushed in where Engels feared to tread.
For what? To escape the terrain of others’ structure, and to replace it with a tyranny of their own structurelessness. Trustless salvation as a salve for the wound that can never heal. The Fraudian trauma.
Hell Salvador6 was the first “real” country that became imaginary. Volcanoes begot volatility. Bitcoin City became Prison City. The Martial Islands made a stablecoin7 that rendered the country so unstable they had to rebuild each structure on stilts. A new Venice, the same syncing feeling. Zimbabwe hyperinflated and crashed like so many lead balloons. Just another Friday night at the Hindenberghain.
In the blink of an I, the imagination-states were all that was left. The last scaffold standing. Long after the steel had rusted from ever-higher sea levels, the concrete cracked and gave way like so many Crumplestiltskins.
The Knightwork State
The Knightwork State was an epic return; of chivalry, heraldry, and honour. Templars as exemplars. Hospitaller under valour. Of feuds and feudalism. As sure as Dei follows Knight. But, as these things often go, those harkened callbacks to a bygone age were not necessarily in positive or progressive senses of those words.
Hypercuneiformalisation was responsible for the Knights’ ascendance. At first, they let us Hittite, because we were Hurrian. A Chimera Obscura. Over time, the Knightwork State built Capitalism's Transcendental Tithe Machine,8 an anti-woke yoke upon their subjects. The revenge of the TESCREAL9. A new regime of durationality, a temporal successionism, forged in the fires of the enthropic principle. When epistemology became eschatology.
A discretized, linear, append-only data structure, also referred to as a blockchain.
The “distance” (Entfernung) between a bad decision and its consequences.
Originally a concept formulated in the context of behavioural economics for technical systems such as data packet-routing, it took on a new meaning when applied to the tensions between the expediency of hierarchical organisation versus the egality of peer consensus.
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit: a somewhat clandestine, amorphous, and notorious theory collective which was active at the University of Warwick, UK in the 90s and 00s. Notable members included Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and Mark Fisher. Speculations upon the nature of–and technological synthesis of–time is one of the central crucial pillars of the CCRU theoretical fabric, later referred to as ‘accelerationism.’
Bitlievers: adherents to the thermoeconomic I/Odeology of Bitcoin’s proof-of-work. Also known as Necroprimitivists.
El Salvador was the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender, in September 2021. A plan to build a new “Bitcoin City”, financed by “Volcano Bonds” was postponed indefinitely due to market conditions, whilst a mega-prison named the The Terrorism Confinement Center opened.
A cryptocurrency that is designed to hold its value against an external benchmark such as the US Dollar, or gold.
A reference to Anna Greenspan’s work Capitalism’s Transcendental Time Machine, concerned with ascendant machinic temporalities.
TESCREAL is a freshly-coined acronym from recent work on technology ideologues by Emile P. Torres and Timnit Gebru. It is composed of Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism.