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the normalization processes of capitalist/state society are fuckin weird. it's bizarre that we're all coordinated to one singular time, and that we're imprinted with celebrations and festivals by a machine that just wants us to produce value

oh the variety of rituals and festivals and practices that we could've known as living practices...

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@exiliaex

the dead capitalist system we live in does not recognize the living subjects that create and maintain it.

but we *are* alive, and continue to express this in every way. we can experience living celebrations and organic community, we *will* experience these living practices, and we have the right and obligation to create more of them to better our lives and others'.

@exiliaex Have you read about the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton yet? I think you would like the theory of time around it and how this virtual conspiracy through neo-Roman imperial institutions imposes a unified time measure to make peoples more legible to the apparatuses of control and thus time becomes an apparatus of such.

@Sophia no, i'm not sure what that is, i'm unfamiliar, but i'll definitely look into it.

but i definitely already believe that unified time is to make the activity of people legible so that it can be calculated and regulated and coordinated as abstractly as possible.

@exiliaex Well since I have so much room now, paraphrasing a firends' simplification:

Okay so linear time is the conception that time runs in a straight line
Prior to the 1968 riots in France, the Situationists realized that oppressive time wasn't really cyclic, and arguably wasn't linear. There's an abundance of images of cycles, but really, these are appearances paid for by a linear progression of accumulation, and not actually real (because they're constantly disrupted). However, even the line of progress isn't really linear, because so much of what's accumulated is basically unsubstantial: dubious images of wealth within a barely functional system that's deeply tangled up in itself.

The result is Pseudo-Cyclic Time, false cycles of everyday life. But if you dig beneath those, all you find are other pseudo-cycles of social life, of history, which are all ultimately concerned more with appearing correct. Every progress generates a loop, and every loop is collapses, and gives way to a deeper progression which does the same. Pseudo-Cyclic Time never finds a final point of truth, but it does simulate one. By constantly yielding to interior cycles, there's the implication of a central point, an interior reference point which finally brings the whole system into unity. There's resonance here with Deleuze + Guattari's complete object of the phallus, or Oedipus. It's the unattainable centre which, despite its impossibility, acts as an organizing principle, and reverberates through all the cycles around it by giving them a lack to endlessly pursue.

The Cybernetic Culture Research Unity at Warwick University picks up from here, it terms the central point the omega-point, or Eschaton: the order that is beyond the rotation of time, but which must come to be. The effect this has on surrounding pseudocycles is termed architectonic. What the CCRU notes is that the cyclic attempt to justify history comes to resemble conspiracy, a conspiracy which plunges into ludicrousness the further down it goes. They term the agent of architectonics the Architectonic Order of the Eschaton, or AOE. Predictably, it's organized into rings, with each ring ordered by the anticipation of the ring below, and each ring presuming to explain every ring above it.

They numericize this into decimal hashes with the outer layer of the AOE is 1/9, and consists of the web of publicly-accepted imperial institutions with the resources to construct appearances. That's a conspiracy between corporations, the state, the church, and everything else which is Neo-Roman, the Roman Empire being considered the first unifier of time, having now retreated into obscurity. Obviously, the problem with this is that it's not a correct description of the world. There's a kind of truthiness to the idea that the world is a conspiracy, but it's not literally true, so we descend to the next radiation, 2/8. This deals with the perfect state, a kind of platonic image of the perfect state, idealized as Atlantis. By orchestrating the organizations of 1/9, this state generates the effect of a conspiracy. Whether it exists literally is of no importance. because it's simulated by despotism, it's virtually realized, even if not in actual brick and mortar.

But once you've done this, there's no reason not to go deeper. What bolsters Atlantis? We descend to 3/7, the Axsys Program. This states everything is the simulation of a vast supercomputer, whose organization of reality contains the principles of Atlantis. There's again a kind of truthiness, given all the recent technocratic talk about how we're all probably in a simulation, and again, it doesn't literally have to be true -- in fact, it's utterly unverifiable, but whether it's actually a thing or not, as a principle it can still architect other order.

But why not go deeper? Who simulates the simulations? 4/6 contends that what we know as alpha Centauri is the minor memory of a much vaster intelligence, whose purpose is as the mind which operates over the uncountable infinity of simulations. As a sentient cosmic god, it's purpose is to bring all possibilities into correspondence, and echoes up through the parameters of the simulations it accepts, those simulations themselves simulating simulations, into a rabbit hole. Like 2/8, which borrows from Platonic notions, 4/6 borrows from actual concepts of an unlimited god, and has a kind of reality in that. But if we ask what organizes 4/6, the CCRU finally lets us dispense with the preamble and gives us 5/5. 5/5 is the unreachable omega point, the cosmic voice in the centre of all pseudo-cycles. It's basic mechanism is encapsulated in claiming its opposition "Has never, does not, and will never exist." It is an exclusionary principle in time, delineating that whatever exists, there remains a centre which is universally accepted and cannot imaginably be opposed.

The CCRU dispenses with the idea that an omega-point is conceivable. The result is something which isn't Cyclic, Linear, or Universal time, but Spiral Time. If there is no centre, reality exists contemporaneously with its virtual organizations. The CCRU demonstrates this against the AOE by reclaiming its hashes: At 4/6 it describes The Crypt, a zone of impossibility reached by Cybergoths through simulating death in different modes, into what's termed Unlife. At 3/7 it describes The Unscreened Matrix, where glitches and viral tendencies within the Axsys Protocol accumulate and drive it mad. At 2/8 it describes a Black Atlantean movement, which eats away at the state from within itself. At 1/9, one finds all the organizations and institutions of Accelerationism and other movements, acting as front organizations.

This gets a bit bewildering, but the point is that the CCRU takes AOE rationality and liberates it. The AOE operates through virtual principles: if something functions as if it's true, it is true, no matter how conspiratorial it gets. The CCRU turns that around and says that if something functions, it's contemporaneous with all other functions. If we're willing to stray from the AOE and engage in theoryfictions in earnest, Accelerationists can engage with Black Atlantean occult movements, runaway protocols wriggling within hegemonic AIs, zones of impossibility and experiences of undeath. There's a whole numericization behind this, but that would take even longer to elaborate. Suffice it to say that this is the basic principle of spiral time: to dispense with the architectonic pleasantry of which sphere is false and which is true, and engage with them all at once.

The major point is that you have to choose how to organize yourself in time if you're going to get anything done. Ultimately, because any attempt to construct a real accumulation or a stable cycle fails, you're going to be dealing with currents of virtuality swimming beneath it. If you're willing to engage with these in earnest, you're halfway mad and a puppet to lemurian impulses intensifying coincidences into cross-sections in time. If you're not willing to do so, you're much worse off, and have obfuscated the real spiral into a conspiratorial paranoiac mess of retro-justifications.

Which is to say: You either RETVRN TO TRADITION or embrace cvltbabble
@Sophia @exiliaex you know I think this is the first time I've seen you post lilli's explanation somewhere lilli could end up seeing it
@Sovereign_Beast @Sophia @exiliaex tfw i read it and literally forgot that i had anything to do with it
@lilli @Sophia @exiliaex me coming back to an old essay I wrote like "Damn who wrote this I agree with everything it's saying"
@lilli @Sovereign_Beast @exiliaex I literally do that all the time, have literally had people quote my own tweets and posts to me and I'm like "damn I wish I was as smart as her, she sounds so fucking smart unlike my dumbass"
@exiliaex Society of the Spectacle's "Spectacular Time" chapter goes into this if you haven't read it:

"Consumable pseudocyclical time is spectacular time, both
in the narrow sense as time spent consuming images and
in the broader sense as image of the consumption of time.
The time spent consuming images (images which in turn
serve to publicize all the other commodities) is both the
particular terrain where the spectacle's mechanisms are
most fully implemented and the general goal that those
mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all particular
consumptions. Thus, the time that modern society is constantly seeking to "save" by increasing transportation
speeds or using packaged soups ends up being spent by
the American population in watching television three to
six hours a day. As for the social image of the consumption
of time, it is exclusively dominated by leisure time and
vacations-moments portrayed, like all spectacular com
modities, at a distance and as desirable by definition.
These commodified moments are explicitly presented as
moments of real life, whose cyclical return we are supposed
to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that
the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher
level of intensity. What is presented as true life turns out to
be merely a more truly spectacular life."
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