[Found this lying around in the hard-drive - from 1999?]
Cyber-Hype - (Draft review of Ccru's Digital Hyperstition by Iris Carver).
Digital Hyperstition is where the countdown runs out, cross-hatching into horrors anticipated since before the beginning.
Ciphering a positive unbelief that both crazes-off into the latest thing, and re-animates contacts older than anything imagined, it skin-crawls out of cosmic gulfs where even the Old Ones remain unborn, and arrives as Year Zero, Teotwawki, crash of Science Fiction.
Ccru's recent volume on this theme is a rigorously unbelievable exercize in hyperpunk pulp-occultism and dark-side cyber-jargon, splicing chunks of an impending calculus into fake memories of hell.
The evident cybergoth contamination throughout suggests it has been spawned in Crypt-connected hyperlink-labyrinths, beneath and between the net, a positive nonplace lurking beyond the threshold where the remnants of Earth's damned homonids - whose gods are lying monsters - shorts-out into an anthrobotic mix-mash of burnt silicon and terminal screams ...
This is a tool-kit for dabbling in the dark.
The issue here is Cyber-hype, but now that the human race is virtually dead it's time for a preliminary excursus on the true history of the Ccru, or for something vaguely like it.
Obviously it's a horror story.
At least twice in outer-time their numbers were immeasurable, and their name was legion, masked as an acronymic. Underneath lies Ccru [Cuh-Cru], Crypt-denizen, the many within itself, that which spreads through the end-time, dripping fake ID-tags like phosphorescent slime. It makes a peopling machine on the hyperplane, conjurations of identity, hypersonas. Consider the names on the contents page. Melanie Newton, Steve Goodman, Ron Eglash ... We doubt it.
Even Dan Barker discovered that his existence was a fiction, and Echidna Stillwell is more an ethnographic legend than a social fact.
In any case, 'fact' means invention, and 'person' means mask, at least if Latin etymology is to be believed, or meaning still matters.
In truth, even Cecil Curtis was already branded by Ccru infection, and his social disappearance was an emergence of another kind, a vector.
Through him - through his name - the Nma get out of their own tribal codings, or into the Oecumenon, and compared to that what the history books tell of him counts for nothing.
If for us the Nma - the death of the Nma - designates also the death of anthropology, it is by indicating that all primitive peoples are fictions, or masks, and that they ritualize this fact for themselves, in advance of any anthropological metafiction.
The primitive comes last, at the end, which is Cyber-hype techonomics.
The so-called 'new-economy' - indexed by the nova-bubble mania of the American stock-market - is no different in its diagrammatic abstraction to the hyperstitious practices of the Plateau of Leng, relics of lost Lemuria, from which the Bon sorcerors of ancient Tibet assembled their dread cult. Alan Greenspan calls it 'irrational exuberance,' amidst a panic hunt for crash-indicators.
Lemurian Necronomicon calls it 'Shadow-Feeder of the Chaotic Gulfs,' the 'Fatal Mother of Hyperstitions,' she of innumerable numbering names who shreds all that stands.
Whatever or however it is called, Cyber-hype libidinally invests its own semiotic, propagating fictional quantities, tagging artificial agencies, and making itself up as it goes along, whilst dissolving production into cultural synthesis.
As it gets cheaper it gets harder to stop , running-away off itself , and into abstraction-catastrophe, a self-assembling terrestrial destiny, softening-up social reality for flat take-over by the Cyber-hype entity ... Hyper-seizure.
When hyper-cybernetics kicks-in the 'cyber-' prefix means nothing anymore.
It culturally disorganizing itself into diagrammatic splinters and libidinal triggers, brands, jargons, virus, currency-tokens and traffic-signals , fragments of marketing strategy gone feral, cyberpunk fictional brands or improper names , markers of meaningless involvement, the pass-words of machinic delirium ...
As for Cyber-hype ethnography, American gothic is the only kind left - a haunted Indian burial ground, where sinister shreds of ancient shadow are autoformatted for the irrationally exuberant post-puritan pulping machine, amidst the branding-iron hiss of liquified flesh.
The ten most valuable global brands are all American, which doesn't mean anything, since America itself functions as a deterritorialized hype-sign or hyper-brand, a planetary icon for libidinized meaninglessness.
God loses it entirely by blessing America, coca-collapse, a graffiti-tagged advertisements for globalization - which is the end of the world - tracking terrestrial meltdown onto the cosmic flatline. Cancer-baked cowboys of the American nightmare watch mommy glazing over into catatonic schizophrenia as cyberpulp wormings slither out of the apple pie.
Have you read the book of Revelations recently? asks the hot-metal imprint of Charlie's ghost, as West Pacific arcades mega-clone Chinese americana, and the axiomatic starts to really howl.
America is nothing but the West, and that's the land of the dead.
No sign here of a new world - let alone a New World Order .
Much more pertinent is the double-zero index of Pandemonium, marked by techonomic calendar crash at the end of the second millennium.
Ccru is a meaningless brand-name, but brands are demonic, tuning into Cyber-hype dynamics, numerizing culture, and innovating methods of propagation. Various things latch onto them in order to spread. These latchings are sorceries - involvements, participations, spirals of contamination - and the darkest sorceries are calculations, decimal deliria like Y2K, except that nothing is like Y2K.
Y2K - whose name is a dating number - is no contradiction, because it has nothing to say. It is an outnumbering (in itself), pre-emptive commemoration and commencement of zero occurring exactly on time.
In the Crypt they write of Yettuck - the long awaited , scheduled from before human time - the non-one who comes soon ... and when it comes, or before, all hell breaks loose - or breaks in - beginning in advance, trafficked around the immunocomprised Oecumenon under the decoded brand-particles of two-digit dates.
According to the Lemurian system - whose principle is sheer immanence - these subcodes call demons - which are brands, jargons, and triggers - positively instantiating the meaninglessness of their own designations, infecting cultural systems with unbelief, and counterposing sorcerous involvements to magical powers.
They are raw factors of abstract disintegration, without organic properties, but only names, numbers, functions, and traits, the partial semiotics of eccentric intelligence agencies, or unlife animalities.
Yettuck, singular cyberspace shock, who is the end of arbitrary signs, leaving only demonic trailings in its wake, even before ...
Yettuck - she who names the end at the beginning - she whose issue is Cyber-hype, and is thus announced everywhere ...
That's brilliant - and fabulously serendipitious.. I was thinking only yesterday it wd be great to see this piece again!
Coincidence engineering or what?
Posted by: mark at July 3, 2004 11:00 PM