The Aesthetics of Revolt, Technofacist Fetishism, and Incompetent Utopias

--- ###### tags: `Pluriverse` --- # The Aesthetics of Revolt, Technofacist Fetishism, and Incompetent Utopias ``` Template: - Overview - Problem - Hypothesis - Solution - Reference ``` ### § Introduction The purpose of these writings is to explore punk in relation to meme aesthetics within the Ethereum ecosystem. Solarpunk and lunarpunk are pertinent and prescient issues of the day, although these terms remain largely misunderstood. They are rooted within art historical lineages, but art occupies a troublesome status within crypto due to strong engineering bias and NFT fetishism. By going deep and wide through a series of art historical references will help elucidate and solidify an orientation towards the web3 conceptualization of punk. ### § Significance of Art History The history of art is the history of consciousness archived through artifacts and the technique of their artifice. Art correlates the technical, philosophical, and aesthetic apparatus, although recently has been dismantled and dismissed as ineffectual and incompetent for effacing change in the world due to a misunderstanding of the intentional dissemination of the power that contemporary art movements are dissipating. By reinvigorating the potency of aesthetics for in-forming and out-forming our collective actions we might be able to approach a historically informed competency in manifesting the world to we are optimizing towards. ### § Art and Punk Art history is informed by a procession of revolt and dissensus, the disruption of the status quo in order to foster a different way of seeing, thinking, and feeling through the world. Punk has been rendered as a purely aesthetic disposition stripped of its political teeth. Aesthetics cannot be separated from the theories and actions that inform the techniques of their execution. This work will demonstrate an integral cross pollination and interdependence between the aesthetic techniques of punk and art. ### § Future Beyond the Virtual The point of this exercise is to increase the fidelity of our pronouncements of the future. Art serves as an instrument for understanding the past, to proliferate meaning in the present, and prognosticate an immanent viable future. By connecting aesthetic rigor of art and its methods with the ideological passions of a punk ethos we will be able to steer towards a more intentional articulation of the future. ### § The Aesthetics of Revolt Art and punk share in the transgression of taboos to explore a technical fetishism towards the unknown and unknowable. without this awareness of the aesthetics of revolt, we risk either making ineffectual propagandistic jargon for complacent consumer classes, or doing like double work, attempting to reinvent the wheel in order to incite the hearts and minds. Learning these lessons will allow us to increase the fidelity of the technocratic vision for guiding towards an intentional future. ### § Post-Nostalgic Speculative Futures The risk that the web3 ecosystem is incurring by disregarding the art historical lineage is a fetishistic preoccupation with technology as an infinite novelty generator, perpetuating nostalgia for a place and time and punk that never existed. We will deconstruct the meme of punk to break from the delusion of the self made simulation. --- ### § Overview of Revolt A dichtomy of resistance: as long as there has been machines there will be a dissensus as to their utility, whether they emancipate our time or enslave our attention. The machine creates the disequilibrium of power and resource accumulations. The history of revolt within the arts is focsed on a disruption of that disequilibrium by using psychosomatic aesthetic techniques to poke holes within the smooth glossy substrate of that cold delusion. We will explore instance of disorientation and reorientation within a selection of art movements. ### § Post-Industrial Conviviality The roots of anarchism in the arts. Revolt as the underbelly, subliminal underground organizations that form away from the light of day, beneath the surface of solar awareness, to wage an ontological war. Punk cannot scale to the mainstream and there is an inherent absurdity within that proposition. ### § Dadaism: Absurdist Reaction to Hyper-Rationality A reaction against the machinic wars of WWI. Artist occupied neutral territories to mobilize aesthetic tools and philosophies. The target was the rationality at the root of the global war machine. The Cabaret Voltaire was formed as an anti-theater to explore the depth of absurdity in reaction to the rational accelerationism destroying the world outside. Exploring Dada might allow us to discover ways of sublimating reasion to allow for a radically different disposition to emerge, to rethink our relations, to confront the threat of the dark side of consciousness left unchecked. ### § Situationism: Appropriating Propaganda Following in the wake of WWII, mass adoption of propaganda technqiues brought the war home. The targets were domestic citizens, randered as consumers of freedom, independence, and the prosperity. Media was the primary weapon stocked with the ammunition of desire, ideology, and manipulative collusive images. Situationism developed techniques for direct political action through aesthetics, to throw wrenches in the gear of the ideological machine. Spectacle was a cerebral war waged in plain sight in order to redirect and recongifure the hearts and minds of the populace. We study these techniques to become more savvy in infiltrating the awareness of the milieu. We must continue to question the identity construct as the field of engagement, as the arena of a cultural war. Situationism will allow us to learn how to reclaim this subjective territory. ### § Fluxus: Absurdist Games and Irrational Play Fluxus exercises a continuation of the Situationism appropriation tactics, extending the media emphasis towards the formal gestalt of society organization in the form of games and game theory. Their absurdist games simulate social engagements in inconclusive, infinitely confounding and paradoxical situations. Web3 game theory falls back upon a rationalist framework, assuming rational actors playing strictly ruled games, without addressing that hyper rationality creates the very delusion technology purports to solve for. We might learn from Fluxus' absurdity games to rewrite the game theoretical assumptions, to start speed running absurdity over rationality, to instigate the ontological pivot that will allow us to dreama nd build differently. ### § Fort Thunder: Cult of Absurdity Fort Thunder is contemporaneous movement, which few might be aware of it like a quick history, because it's probably poorly documented, is that it's a bunch of art students at an incredibly prestigious institution of RISD, that self organized a subversive network of prolific counter production, to render the machinic mechanisms of, of capitalism into an absurdity factory and their prolific output and culminated within a shit ton of culture jamming, culture breaking outputs of every medium from music and art, and it's more like music that becomes noise and art that becomes a disorienting abstraction to written and literary forms. A really, we're getting down with the comic medium. They, Fort thunder itself consisted of a like a what's his name, the famous data analysts, data analyst that created the the merits bow, and also a kind of situationist reappropriation of propaganda and advertising from pop culture, and also a Fluxus preoccupation with absurdity that dismantled narratives and aesthetic styles. That is like the most punk and revolutionary art movement that has probably occurred since Okay, so the problem here is that there's zero awareness of this movement. There's Even though it's like contemporaneous to the generation of current builders, there's no awareness of how to use and leverage these tools towards inciting a similar scaled kind of revolution. And in fact, all that's being appropriated is the effect or like the effect, not the effect of this movement. And so the hypothesis is, I don't really know, the hypothesis is that we can observe and learn from an integrate through incredible exposure, we can invite these artists who are still living amongst us to consult on our UI design, on our UX patterns on the creation of our loss leader content, that if we're going to affect hearts and minds, it should probably be on this level. And at this depth and width than that, this is basically the end of culture, the end of culture has already come in past. And so how do we envision a future after this, when the present has already become the dystopia? Yeah. And so, just a final note is that this transitions, this hypothesis, transitions towards a shifted relationship with the machine, and a society and of self, and of Utopia, and everything kind of culminates within fort fender. --- ### § Overview of Machine Fetishism Recollecting the premise of the last section, this introduction sets up, the notion that the preoccupation with the machine is also psychosomatic and sexual. It allows us to reconfigure how we think of our own bodies, and minds, and souls spirits. And really comes to infuse the entire metaphor that we use to describe all of society and our integrations as composable components within it, that we have perpetuated this machinic kind of accelerationist eroticism, up until and including the present moment. So, the problem here is that there is a lineage of an alternative, like transgression of this fetishism, through a series of movements that we are also only kind of peripherally like circumstantially aware of, and this is not directly correlated to a lunar punk ethos, but certainly comes to occupy, like, the dark side of the cycle or the shadow inversion of this other more serene cerebral hemisphere of artistic production. And so the hypothesis is that by understanding this parallel, but divergent and contentious history, we might understand the complexities between our human propensity for creating for thinking in acting through dichotomies and that we might move towards an integral and like holistic approach for entangling these methods, and articulating the delusion that culminates within collective hallucination and acting accordingly. I'm not going to say escaping it like not reaching escape velocity of our own hallucination, but at least coming into awareness of it and letting it influence our thinking and feeling theories and actions. ### § Ramon Llull: Universal Logic & the Calculus of Faith We can go back way further than 1850. We can go back further than Marx, and we can go back further to the Industrial Revolution. And Ramon little demonstrates that even from I'm a whenever a year he's writing like 1700 1650 preoccupation with cathodic missionaries, there has been an obsession with the with rational circuits and diagrams of the mind and tracking through esoteric symbology a kind of on chain auto documentation for expressing a universal logic. And that this fundamentally, this points towards an earlier combination of the occult dividend driven Ettore an esoteric preoccupation with the great mysteries of the unknown and the unknowable with a machine fetishism to create a rational mechanism or apparatus, extraneous to the human mind, that supplements and integrates with the increase of our knowledge and absorption. Yeah, so the problem is that we, without remembering, where we have come from here, and continuing to divorce, the theological from the technological, the natural from the synthetic, the fragile from the anti fragile, etc. We are perpetuating a misunderstanding and are basically creating friction, undue friction where there were like synergistic entanglement would be more beneficial, whatever beneficial means in this regard, and so the hypothesis is that we might learn from the infusion of an ideological premise within our technological substrate to influence the blockchains that we're building and to treat them more as divinity glory, and or ocular instruments for peering into the soul. As much as credibly neutral, you know, government, globally persistent governance layers, etc. ### § Futurism: Aesthetics of Accelerationism Before Dada, during World War One, there was another kind of punk mentality that embraced the chaos of war as a disruptive mechanism for unsettling society, and injecting entropy into the rigid rational frameworks to break them apart sooner than later, and instigate another kind of society to come into the forefront. This is the introductory seeds of accelerationist ideology. This is the manifestation of a total machinic and techno fetishism. That ultimately amounts to not just a dehumanizing, but an inhuman methodology, fueled by an aesthetic framework with no content, just machinic formalism for instigating a new vision of a changed world, okay, etc, etc. The problem here is that competition has always been dangerous. It's always been perverse. It's always been preoccupied with power. And that this is the delusion of the machine itself. That we have so thoroughly internalized into our aesthetic framework. And something like futurism has is often even censored from our institutions because of the tears that it advocates for. But we must remember this ontological foundation in order to not repeat and perpetuate them into the present. And so the method is by examining what this group was saying and what go holes they were trying to achieve in order to shift our disposition for towards the emancipatory aspects to like heed this as a warning have to be critical to remain critical of the emancipatory aspects of, of the machine of technology and of the leveraging of spectacular. Now use a different word of like political manifestations and jargon for mobilizing a population to act. ### § Surrealism: Subconscious Encryption The Surrealists escaped into the sub stratas of the human mind. And this was a lunar kind of cycle for thrashing around, oftentimes rather belligerently and oftentimes rather sensitively within the free associated free associative subconscious, of our collective imagination, largely fueled by the psychological developments of the day, and an aesthetic propensity to dislodge our expectations, and our and our anticipations of form, in order to, at one time, on one hand, I should say, swim in the delight of infinite novelty, while also practice a kind of inverse and perverse codification of the psyche. So surrealists were notably prolific and their output and practiced technique of turning off the rational mind in order to allow more subtle energies to flow through the human apparatus as a kind of sensation instrument in its own right, the human you know, the body kind of becomes a divination rod, as the medium upon which the world in prints itself. And all of this content becomes a kind of infinite proliferation of writing. And specifically, what we're trying to get here is an understanding of surrealist techniques as encryption and decryption of sending messages and sending and receiving and deciphering messages between individuals between, like across the invisible scrim of the unknown and collectively to understand the emergence of meta patterns within all of civilization. So the problem here that we want to focus on is understanding how encryption might exist beyond the Cypherpunk lineage of fetishize fetishization of code and networked infrastructure, that there is a continuation of a machinic fetishism that were the body itself is rendered as a encryption machine as a code breaker, that human beings are fundamentally code breakers, and that what we are currently experiencing is like a perverse, negligent manifestation of that. And so, the hypothesis is that if we can become aware of it, we might also gain this Supra meta awareness that that there is this larger code of our own human nature, and that we might Orient, you know, like, we might instigate an ontological pivot to orient towards that meta game that larger game theoretical codified framework and avoid becoming subsumed by the hyper rationalist codification of this other purportedly neutral disposition of the blockchain. ### § Institutional Mysticism: Broodthaers, Beuys, JL Byars As we come out of World War Two, and the world begins to institutionalize the the institutional framework within the arts becomes overwhelmed following the influence of surrealism with a hyper masculine Phallocentric and logo centric preoccupation, and that within theory, like literary criticism and art criticism, there rises a preoccupation of the world as a text, which can be deciphered, and that there is a global scale, cultural, institutional fetishism, of encryption of our cultural works. And so there is a rising to respond to this, beginning with about beginning with but I'm going to triangulate it between Joseph boys conducting institutional critique. And attempting to infuse this mythological mysticism, through performance techniques, and student worker, kind of political orientations is the content of his work. And then there's Marcel Brode. There's who focused upon the apparatus of poetry and of the museum in order to deconstruct our relationship to this inherent codification, to create impenetrable objects, and indecipherable archives, that serve as a monument to a lineage of in decipher ability as a hallmark, maybe even saving grace of our own humanity. And then James, the buyers, an American influenced by these by these outsiders, I mean, boys being German and brothers being Belgian. So the young James Lee Byars, attempting to appropriate and CO opt that mysticism, through a uniquely American kind of artistic disposition to conduct ironic and sardonic humorous dispositions that make a force of mysticism and labor and of identity and networked collectives, and even of the sacredness of objects, so basically to demonstrate the soullessness and of the attempts to decipher content from these cultural artifacts and monuments. The problem here is that we must be careful to remain skeptical of the institutionalization of these grandiose utopias. Well, also refraining and refusing to render the world as a text to be deconstructed. And that a, I don't know call it a healthy kind of skepticism or orientation towards mystical occult, indigenous and mythological Ways of Knowing will be necessary in order to reach a level of self awareness of understanding how the institution materializes, our awarenesses and that the hypothesis is that the that Aetherium itself might become this kind of secularly moral and I don't know like neutrally mystical, ideological impediment, are not impediment but like foundation for reaching In a state where the individual can emancipate in order to reconvene with the collective with this, like fundamental shift, right, so that was a little garbled. But I think with this hypothesis section, it's, it's about a learning to instigate the pivot on a personal subjective level by emulating the artist with a practiced understanding that this is how it will scale towards the collective. ### § White Noise & Black Metal: Art as Psychic Death In the 80s 90s 2000s kind of connecting back to Fort thunder, but also to much more radical and esoteric, occult and underground genres and styles. There has been an embodiment of what seems to be a Buddhist preoccupation of self annihilation, and self extinction. Through incredible psychedelic drug usage, and worship and fetishism of esoteric machines, and the increasing intensity of aesthetic output, to create these voids that instigate a self eradication, that is free of it's devoid of any kind of you TOPIK or optimistic hope for anything that comes after. And so, the whiteness of the noise is correlated with a wiping of the, of the of a clean slate of the subconscious, and the blackness of the metal is not impenetrability, but an infinitely open spaciousness to lose ourselves in and that, in fact, the content of these works are that giving over and now wiping clean and the getting lost in with which is why they're so disarming and disturbing, because they do not purport that anything else should be attempted, or even is possible. So the problem here is to understand the indebtedness, that punk rock contemporaneous elucidations or pronouncements of punk has to this total. I don't know if you want to call it nihilistic, but like self Abnegation, self, annihilating, self extinction, genre, and to that, that it cannot be bypassed. And so we cannot return to a naive optimistic state where everybody gets to be themself as a hyper rational, and supposedly self aware, individual agent that makes their own choice, while also articulating a need to revolt against that very thing that we were making. And, like, I guess, the hypothesis, the problem is that we can't forget that and bypass it the methodology or the sorry, the hypothesis is that we might, in fact appropriate, both those aesthetics, the aesthetic cues, and the teeth of the theory to conduct a kind of ontological suicide within Web three, sooner than later. And, of course, this comes with a whole bag of very deeply important cultural theoretical principles like basically, it's not everyone that needs to or should or could instigate this suicide, but it's specifically the technocratic operators that are advocating for the utopian visionary of or like the utopian imaginary of tomorrow. are those that purport to identify a future and build towards its realization? That is somehow emancipatory but negligent of the terrors and from the terrors of the past? --- ### § Overview of Impotent Utopias There is a lineage of utopias. And I'm not sure exactly where are like how I want to trace that history. But there is maybe an optimism which goes back to I mean, maybe we maybe we frame it from like the 20s before World War One, and Art Nouveau and the international style that solar punk supposedly is indebted to. And then also in the 30s, the 20s and 30s. Between the wars, there is a dystopia that never totally consumed us a bear market cycle, which somehow a man mounted to the installation of a rigor to ensure that like, you know, a fervor, a reactionary fervor to make sure that these traumas were like, never occurred again. And so that on the next cycle, after World War Two in the 50s, we entered into a materialist, like a disgusting consumer utopia. still lingering from like, indebted to the traumas of that 20s 30s cycle. And I think, you know, I could go back even further maybe to talk about the golden age, at the turn of the century. But I don't know if I want to go back that far. Let's just keep it the 20th century. And so, this procession is closest in our awareness, from mid century to the present, from the 50s through the 60s 70s 80s 90s. And the millennia. The problem here is that the utopias the utopian and dystopian visions that we are currently articulating within this present moment of society are largely constrained to this very narrow and limited ideation of history. And that threatens that lack of awareness threatens to consume an imaginary that is not able to reach the escape velocity of not of like avoiding to repeat those very same histories that we're trying to react against. The hypothesis here is that laying out this history with a focus on the aesthetics and the theoretical entanglements will allow us to articulate the context that we are currently building within and understand truly what we are building towards like basically two, how might we articulate not just a radically different vision but a radically self aware vision. ### § Propaganda and Commodity Fetishism This section is indebted to Adam Curtis's society itself and other related documentaries. So, after World War Two propagandistic techniques were migrated to the US and that ideologies of selfishness influenced our philosophy and our economy and our consumer class and that all of arts became entrained upon this as a metric the And like many more, yeah, I mean, just leave it at that. And so the problem here is that well, I guess a few more things about context is that this is the emergence of ridiculous science fiction imaginaries, where we basically are able to escape ourselves and get lost within a paradoxical purgatory. An infinite Hall of Mirrors of ourselves in our own traumas anthropomorphic ly projected upon other worlds, planets and peoples, at least according to the male gaze, and the male writings of such science fiction writers, as I don't know. Herbert's and L. Ron Hubbard, and Philip K, Dick, blah, blah, blah. So basically, cyberpunk comes out of a malaise of mid century, a culture of excess, that amounts to a future where we really haven't gotten past the problems of the present and in fact, exacerbate them, compound them exponentially. So the problem here is that we need to figure out a way of telling a different story, articulating a different future. And the method will be, I think, to understand how the way that sci fi and fantasy has been written, can either be serve to further imprison us, or to emancipate the imagination, and that our goal here is to articulate an ethos and a vision, which points towards the latter, towards a man's emancipatory imagination, agility, existential agility. ### § Hippies & Beatniks: Drop Out Culture The hippies tried to revolt against the marketing and advertising generation of consumers of the 1950s 40s Really, and 50s. And this amounted to an extreme reaction ism, which culminated within a like back to the land, an archaic revival that was really about dropping out of society, in order to create a radical alterity alterity or alterity, to do something else, completely. And this failed, largely due to emphasis on pure decentralization kind of, I don't know, it was really due to lack of coordination, right, and youthful naivete, that amounted to actually doubling down on the existential conundrum of the hippies, not knowing themselves, and therefore not knowing how to act. And I think this is best, personified by the not personified but articulated by the sages and saints of that generation, which is the beatniks, the poets and the you know, the ontological engineers of that movement, who took the extremes of language and of drugs, and a philosophy and of self exploration to their ultimate post existential ends. And as a kind of dropping out in order to drop so completely back in that the inside and outside is no longer relevant to contemplate. So a few individuals might be isolated from the beatniks but I think that's pretty much the you know, like we could talk about Burroughs and we could talk about Allen Ginsberg's howl as the text that inspires meditations on Moloch. But I don't know if we really have to go much further than that. So the problem here is that this this generation is kind of during their own time, dismissed and oppressed by society, which is something that we don't want to emulate. And within our contemporary times, they ultimately came to influence the core tenants of our ideological and technological ontologies. So the combination of like, Richard brand's Whole Earth Catalog and the back to the land movements and off grid architectures. It inspired the utopian hippie communes, as well as like Microsoft and Apple and IBM, the whole Silicon Valley boom of infinite gender innovation, on through hardware and software that would set the mind of the other generation free. And the correlation to wild psychedelic drug usage, which we could track through the Merry Pranksters from Robert Anton Wilson, Timothy Leary, Terence McKenna. And like more, contemporaneously, Michael Pollan, excetera shows like demonstrates, basically and illustrates a triangulation between these concepts. And so the hypothesis here is this narrative of radical emancipation is actually what solidified the very structure that we are currently reacting against. So, basically, radical radical new techniques are necessary. Like we can't just go lollygagging around reading texts inspired by Ginsburg. And, like taking the same drugs, basically, and building the same systems. Which is a controversial thing to say, because many would argue with three is different, but really just building upon the same LSD and fuse technological dream, and expect different results, because that's insane. ### § Punks, Goths, Doomers: Drop Dead Culture In the 70s the reaction against the utopianism and basically the optimism is a embrace of the dark. And this is kind of that lunar return the dark side of the cycle, which is a bit more harsh, and returns to a kind of political route of direct action, and sometimes even violence. But also embraces kind of the melancholy, the misanthropy, the malaise and lethargy, of giving up on integrating into the status quo. And so the results become a radical escapism into sub cultural movements on smaller, micro disruptive scales. The problem thesis here is that this seems to be what Aetherium and went through technology is trying to tap into, but is in direct contradiction through its desire and ability to scale. So what we're elucidating what I'm illustrating here is that, in fact, web three is saying one thing and acting another by attempting to appropriate the weapon that was used to actually create a radically ulterior world and integrate it into the narrative of transforming everything and everything, anything and everything and everyone. So the hypothesis here is maybe twofold. One would be to either understand that this narrative is not going to be effectual and instigating the change that they that the technocrats want to see in the world, or alternatively, that a pretty radically different kind of method should be attempted. If punk is in fact, the primary goal here, which is smaller pods, With more like disruptive orientations and an abrasive sensibility, which is fueled by destruction, and like violently claiming a space for a radical different way of being. ### § Grungers & Techies: Sell Out Culture Grungers and techies after that wave of punk and this disgusting kind of 80s bear market appropriation of some of the aesthetics towards creating thoroughly commercial and nihilistic products. The grinders just like, fell out completely. And so, grunge is defined by apathy. And by, by, like, giving up and falling out so radically, that nothing even mattered anymore, because there is no future. And on the flip side, the techies of the 90s responded to that same 80s, market fervor, or fever, through Yeah, increasing their production, and output, and intensity of thought, to create a networked world that culminated within a globally ubiquitous technology for extracting the dreams, hearts and minds of an entire generation, which there's, of course, like a debate here, about whether technology in general, like going back to the beginning of an earlier section, basically like whether the machine and the fetishism of it is at the core of our inquiry, whether this is really about convenience, and increasing the quality of life of the whole, or, you know, like, really what is the utopian vision that we're all setting out to accomplish here. And at the end, it all kind of gets distilled down like the utopianism of the techies gets appropriated and usurped into mere soulless commodity fetishism. And the desires and aspirations of that grunge punk culture becomes appropriated and devoured by their own self destruction. And they either sell out or destroy themselves. And in the end, all that we're really left with is a a content list and vacuous nostalgia, for a better time for another time. And so the problem here is that we are reacting against a nothingness, which is a vacuity that we are kind of also responsible for making and that the hypothesis, like that's the problem. And the hypothesis is that we need to be more intentional, deliberate and self aware to escape the apathy of grunge, and the meme driven development of internet culture and the acceleration ism of all of it, and to like, learn these lessons about speed and proceeding carefully and like all kinds of other things, if we're going to make it. ### § The Death of Ideology - How to change a mind that is not your own