The Oration on the Malignity of Man
Framed by Ligotti as a hunk of slowly spoiling flesh, I pass by a rosy-cheeked Australian wailing over acoustic guitar. Three chords. Almost a tear. Keep your emotions cowboy, I have enough of my own.
Good morning dear friends,
I know that quite a few of you landed here recently because of one of the AI and magick related articles. I promise there will be more of that in the future, but now you’re about to receive an unsolicited Saturday morning ramble.
Let’s open this with a statement. I was born and raised in Eastern Europe, with all its bittersweet implications. As one might expect, I experienced some culture shocks when I moved to Berlin almost a decade ago. Not only the order of the whole society seemed to hinge on the fact that pedestrians don’t cross at red lights, but people generally don’t complain the way we do in Slavic countries, where whinging is basically the fabric of jovial social interaction. In my early Berlin days, I used to storm into a club and my opening line to a friendly face would be something like “Wow the sound sucks and these drinks are really watered down” kept wondering why all the sun-kissed Australians took the fastest escape route.
Sharing the frustration of being is a bonding ritual that doesn’t build solar punk cities, but ey, it does usually yield at least a good comforting smirk. So buckle up, or run for life - in this episode I’m gonna marvel at Ligotti’s caustic sense of humour, our future robot overlords and include a list of books on US foreign policy I’ve binged recently.
Amidst the summer mirth, a kindred soul is blasting Rainforest Spiritual Enslavement in my hinterhaus. I won’t lie the drones got me in the mood, so I paged through Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race with my morning coffee. The book is well known in the gothy intellectual circles cause it’s dreary, nihilistic, misanthropic, anti-natalist and is generally considered one of the most depressing readings around. It’s smart and it’s incredibly entertaining in its own way, so give it a spin.
[…] the philosopher in question made much of human existence as a tragedy that need not have been were it not for the intervention in our lives of a single, calamitous event: the evolution of consciousness - parent of all horrors.
Thomas Ligotti: Conspiracy Against the Human Race
The introduction chapter is playing with ideas that stuck in my head for days. Just like Thacker in In the Dust of This Planet, Ligotti analyses the term “uncanny” underpinning the genre of supernatural horror. One of the greatest expressions of this term, he claims, is encountering a paradox in the flesh - something that should not be, and yet is. It is a powerful jolt that undermines our sense of security about reality as we know it. As an example, he drops into the centre stage a puppet, an inanimate object that breaks free of its strings and becomes self-mobilised.
Puppets are, in golem-like fashion made in our image, yet never in high enough resolution to be actually mistaken for humans. To fulfil their purpose of entertainment and education, we need to know that a puppet is a puppet. What dreads us so in the eye of the limp marionettes hanging from the theatre’s ceiling? Are we too just mindless mannikins that somehow broke free of their strings?
And as I mull over these ideas, I come across a few memes from the “first AI robot press conference” that took place last week in Geneva. I look at the assortment of these uncanny entities, pretending that the fact that almost all are young, thin female humanoids happens to be a funny accident. They promised not to take over the world just yet, but they are about to bring some significant societal changes. Fair enough, in the meantime tho, I can’t help but wonder - do they all really need those fake C-cups to steal my job?
I fight my way through the endless errands and urban squabble when I suddenly stop and change direction. A whim gets me into a scruffy little pawn shop and I spend half an hour browsing through old DDR postcards. Sloppy handwriting or flirty lipstick marks, addressed to Berlin in 1982. I think of Bowie and the Birthday Party. They really have it all, offputting hotel interiors, dreary black-and-white pictures of echt East German Christmas decorations and empty streets in some long-ago-renamed Russian towns. Each of the washed-out pictures tells a story, of alternate timelines and lives that could have, and maybe should have been. I pick a handful of unmarked ones, and as I’m leaving my head’s already reeling little stories and fake memories for this and that beloved friend.
It’s the small things that keep us sane.
And framed by Ligotti as a hunk of spoiling flesh hanging from slowly disintegrating bones, blinded by the sunset I pass by another rosy-cheeked dreamer wailing over his acoustic guitar on the Warschauer Strasse.
Three chords. Almost a tear.
Keep your emotions cowboy, I have enough of my own.
The Oration on the Malignity of Man Reading Group
Last week I binged half a dozen audiobooks on 3x speed, I think I might have caused permanent brain damage. Let me share an unordered list of some of the highlights with you, in case reading on the US foreign policy sounds like a fun way to spend your sunny afternoon.
1. The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy by David E. Hoffman (Pulitzer 2010) - the end of the Cold War, goes through the attempts to secure the nuclear and biological weapons left behind by the collapse of the Soviet Union (wonderful together with my Schlosser's fav 2013 Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety)
2. Putin's People: How the KGB Took Back Russia and Then Took on the West by Catherine Belton (2020) - a meticulously researched anatomy of the Putin regime, a bit tedious read with overwhelming detail tbh
3. Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army by Jeremy Scahill (2007) - just arrived so I haven't opened it yet, it's a bit outdated, but I really enjoyed Scahill's writing in 2016's The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program
4. The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock (A Washington Post Best Book 2021) - maps the US policy in Afghanistan from Bush to Trump. Pageturner. A perfect opening for Joby Warrick's Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS (2016 so obv not a full picture but that one is SO good I finished it in one go)
5. War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views (2015) - a collection of essays, where P. Fry brings together leading experts in such fields as evolutionary biology, archaeology, anthropology, and primatology to answer fundamental questions about peace, conflict, and human nature in an evolutionary context
6. Serhii Plokhy’s The Russo-Ukrainian War was released a month back, and I’m just chewing through the opening chapters, it’s pretty information-packed so far.
7. Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy, rest in peace. I promise if I ever release a harsh noise EP, it will be with Blood Meridian in my heart
And that my friends, is all. In the next essay, I hopefully deliver some more polished thoughts on Word Embeddings and Mystical Qabalah. I started thinking of the reduction of the dimensionality of the embedding space, and how that somehow feels like climbing up/ down the kabbalistic emanations - from the fully unfolded unprocessed data corpus of Malkuth through reduced space of embeddings up to a single point of Kether where all meanings collapsed onto each other. But that’s still just a raw shower thought, so stay tuned for more.
If you’re in Berlin, swing by Trust today for some snacks and talks and if you’re not, come to my talk on the Divine Embeddings next Tuesday 18.07.2023, which will be streamed through the Trust Discord. I’m super excited about that!
Aaaaaand also, don’t miss the online talk The Future of Occulture, Magic, and Underground Networking: A Conversation With Tom Banger and Carl Abrahamsson this Sunday!
Oh, and I really enjoyed this wholesome magick talk on This Podcast in a Ritual with River about her upcoming magick and art retreat in Sweden.
As always, stay kind 🖤
k
'do they all really need those fake C-cups to steal my job?' hahaha. But in all seriousness, you're right; a metal cube toaster doesn't have the same lusty appeal.
The rosy-cheeked Australians love it :)