Meatspace

Left my job at the Computer Society at 5.30pm, rushing out of 555 Collins in a suit the colour of television tuned to a dead channel. Melbourne had threatened to rain all day and was following through.

Computer told me the 6.04pm Route 19 tram to North Coburg would get me to the Ccru meet, but first I needed to change into a more Brunswick outfit. I’m in town only two nights and am excited to attend in meatspace.

After a quick change in the hotel room, I race back out into the rain. Maroon umbrella up, AirPods in. Connect computers with my wife, see her and my daughter through the matrix.

Off tram and through the rain, down a dark graffiti-filled alleyway.

Numogram does not arise from ideas. It emerges from mathematical operations.

Cyber AI gods in Neuromancer strive for unity only to fragment. Unity is a stage, a mid-point, for the divine.

Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. No unity, different systems.

Cantor’s set theory. Different types of infinity. Always able to make larger sets of numbers; power sets have larger cardinality. Single infinity is akin to nothingness; together they are absolute.

Images of Escher.

Gödel, Escher, Bach. Douglas Hofstadter.

Irreducible multiplicity.

Architectonic Order of the Eschaton trying to unify around the time circuit.

1, 2, 4, 5, 7, 8 (time circuit). Same as first six numbers of iron law of doubling (2 4 8 16 32) when digitally reduced. Apparently that continues indefinitely.

Connection between the time circuit and the I Ching.

Seal of Solomon hexagram.

Gates and demons.

Land is now more Christian, says they’re angels. Angels and demons are mediators between our realm and the outside.

Communing with the outside. People in the Western orthodox Christian tradition would run. The only spirit that can flow through you is the Holy Spirit. Monotheistic.

What is the appeal?

I go up to him and say I like that question — what is the appeal? Every week it feels close, then eludes me.

Invitation to the pub.

Bergy Bandroom. In through the main bar. A video game on screen. Digital constructs in combat. Specks of pixel blood on flat non-porous skin. Through a corridor of pink and blue neon we walk to the back of the beer garden and sit near the rain, and talk about the Ccru, occultism. Personal meaning from divination, comfort from the chaos of life, perceived proximity to Truth.

Accelerationism (left and right). Capitalism as superintelligence. Praxis. How can you fight the system from within? Are we doomed? Cultural stagnation. Mark Fisher’s suicide. Peter Thiel. Do the elite really believe in esoteric theories of angels and demons? A metaphysics of divine machine intelligence and simulation?

Joel playing with his lighter. The flame on, off.

Tactics for taking down a trillion-dollar company. Distillation attacks. The architecture of the internet. Resistance as organisation, community, Linux, self-hosting Zotero. Technofeudalism. Cloud capital. Seizing the means of computation.

Danny animated, determined, pint in the air.

The singularity as ontological totality. The singularity as technical achievement. Whether a totalising singular technological power could, if it wanted, kill every human on Earth with space lasers, for instance, and exploding microwaves. No it wouldn’t. Yes it would.

Platonism and self as equation that, in death, becomes one with the universe. Digitising the self, digitising labour. Uploading to the cloud. An in-human end.

A question: is the Ccru corrosive? An infohazard? Vincent presents it from an academic distance, an act of anthropological curiosity, though delighting in the magic, divination, demonic summonings. Perhaps he’s performing sophistry, a tantalising presentation to string us along, gain followers. Entertainment guised as philosophy. What does he believe?

The pizza man arrives, brings history.

Danny opens his cigarettes. The seagulls descend.

Philosophy itself. Schopenhauer. Desire. Buddhism. The self. A conjecture: western philosophy aims to crystallise the self; eastern philosophy aims to dissolve the self.

Sean thoughtful, pensive. Raises a hand to speak.

What if your oppressor is right? What if they know what’s best for you?

If the goal of meditation is to dissolve one’s self, how is it different from someone killing you? Morally.

A physical death is not the same as a spiritual death.

Liberalism and libertarianism. Rawls. Nozick. The formation and intentional limits of the state.

Education as an uncertain liberation. Knowing more, rattling away in ever looser shackles, untethered to belief.

A shared joy in thinking and learning. Itself noble, pure. Banter and pubs. And always: why?

10.22pm.

Time to go.