(Or, a Thought Experiment Gone Horribly Wrong)
3,249 words.
“Time is that which ends. Time is limited time experienced by a sentient creature. Sentient of time, that is – making adjustments to time in terms of what Korzybski calls neuro-muscular intention behaviour with respect to the environment as a whole … A plant turns towards the sun, nocturnal animal stirs at sun set … shit, piss, move, eat, fuck, die. Why does Control need humans? Control needs time. Control needs human time. Control needs your shit piss pain orgasm death.” – William S. Burroughs
There is no hidden agenda compelling me to denounce trains. For all intents and purposes, I have, like many of us, become so irradiated in this spermworld intoxicated by memes that I should default to train appreciation. Trains, and 15 Minute Cities. It was politics which landed me here, a culmination after serious talks with highly intelligent people who recounted the history of how there was once a war in America between advocates for advanced public transit and those who envisioned America defined by roads and the interstate highway network.
Without getting too deep into the weeds, the train lobby ultimately lost, as depicted in the neo-noir “Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
Trains lost the rhetorical battle against highways in the realm of politics, they lost the battle for the soul of America against the liberating automobile, and they are presently losing the battle even to maintain their rail lines, seeing as train infrastructure is currently on the brink of collapse. It is an unbelievable tragedy, unless you are a Highway Man; a gas-guzzling, pavement-brained, nitro-burning, smoke-belching carny demon straight off the Anarcho-Mestizo assembly line. More lanes, more offramps, more signs, more jugs of piss hurled into God’s creation as the daymoon grins down upon you knowingly.
This is a position staked against centralized planning, both practically and paranormally. I concede that trains are a superior way to transport freight and essential cargo, but I am not concerned about bourgeois survival. I concede that they make sense hidden underground as a way to ferry vomiting SSRI ladies between penile fight clubs. I am an immaterialist. As far as I know, shipping containers are all filled with fraudulent art and canned corn just being passed back and forth in some sort of transcontinental spreadsheet error. We are speaking instead of the ontological train.
I don’t even dislike trains. I mean I do, but I don’t.
You can pummel me with factoids on how many neurons might be saved by adopting whatever carnival of illusions Asia has achieved, and that we possess the technology to destroy traffic forever. It matters not. I do not trust the quest for total efficiency as a matter of course; as a certified expert in LEAN methodology, I know how the ceaseless extermination of redundancies and waste lead to extremely fragile production streams. I similarly understand how large-scale resource projects like scientific forestry have resulted with the destruction of entire ecosystems and, ultimately, the evaporation of the desired resource.
Examples of this can be found in the work of James C. Scott, an anarchist in spirit who detailed the failure of lumber utopianism in Germany and the desire to wipe clean the old growth forests to be replaced by a methodically-planted grid containing only those trees that offered maximum utility in the optimal distribution of space. Unfortunately after one successful generation, subsequent to the initial harvest the land would yield no lumber, stripped by the chaotic complexity that was deemed systemically irrelevant. There was no way to replace the complex organism of whimsical redundancies which took hundreds – perhaps thousands – of years to naturally accumulate.
You may be thinking the highway represents this cynical surgery of the grid. On the contrary, you idiot: highways are the birds and moss and spiderwebs. The highway is a rebellion against technical efficiency, and the apparent tilt towards faux communitarianism seemingly expressed by most radical political sectors.
The highway is the only place you can drive drunk alone. If you are drunk on a streetcar: an angel’s lament.
Entropy is magnetized to complexity like light to shadow, and we endeavor to create antifragile constructs to defeat it. This process appears to gather chaos around us as a permanent incursive forcefield that we define ourselves by in a dialectical tension. When you hear of a genetic code, what exactly is that code? It is a message that seeks to replicate itself and survive. DNA can in this framework is understood as information developing the most effective replication process possible, thereby creating a behemoth of meat and bone with which to withstand destruction for as long as possible.
A sinister universe optimizing the means of its own blessed destruction or the Word of God changing in tone throughout the ages, let’s put that aside.
In the example of civilizations and societies, entropic forces are not natural disasters or external conquest (those simply sweep to victory in the finale,) but something approximating Amphidemons and Cyclic Chronodemons of Lemurian Pandemonium. Don’t worry about it.
The center of power axiomatically births the fringe it deserves as it ascends the ladder of complexity, and its value can be measured by the quality of its counterculture. As we have seen, mechanisms of control are inevitable in an advanced society, and these attract the disease of wickedness which on a long enough timeline leaves the doors of the house open for the wolves and harsh winds. You cannot rebel against the a priori concept of control otherwise it takes on the form of a Strange God. It is very easy to fall into the trenches of nihilism this way, where even suicide affirms the curse of life too positively. Those who rebel against the entire group – even those who expel themselves from it – never break from living within the context of that group. They remain in orbit around its essence.
In the shadow of power, you find twisted clones of yourself and glorious mirrors to gaze into, through.
Do the hostile margins survive by sovereignty or pity? Simplifying to a previous state is out of the question; you simply make yourselves more inert human capital, incapable of legitimate rebellion. Those who reject cities and the civilizing forces they represent ignore the tumultuous histories of their creation, focusing instead on the utility to their immediate experience, choosing a life apart that ironically generates a deterritorialized zone of slavery. Is that the ideal configuration to withstand entropic forces, as idealistic biofuel? Savagery waltzes in as insectoid biomass.
All of this is to say that the center of power is revitalized by its periphery, and the fate of cities is inexorably tied to the spaces surrounding them. At the heart of this problem, we find the oppositional essences of two archetypes of masculinity that dominate internet discourse: the Barbarian and the Cowboy. It should be the Barbarian and the Knight but I don’t make the rules, I don’t even make money.
Both archetypes are pulled from history and stand as defiant external opposition against the apparent feminization of modern civilization. Both archetypes are doomed to fail, but we attempt to distill their revolts against the modern world. Through hyperstition we seek new methodologies to conjure these entities into the digital realm which increasingly constitutes our lived reality. One of these identities has a cartographic understanding of otherness and the inevitably of interfacing with centers of power, the other inhabits a cartoon metaphysic granting inert form to modernist rage.
Men who hunt for ideologies and collectives encircling an archetypical center are searching for fandoms. These demarcated zones within the warm embrace of power that one is allowed to roleplay as an approved vanguard, knowing that any revolution permitted by the system has been deemed nonthreatening.
The answer to the longhouse is the tallhouse, the concentric circles radiating outward streaked with blurred psycho-folkways dominated by traumatized terrorist knights surfing waves of mind-bending harsh Darwinian pressures. Cracked reflections in frames of speed and violence.
The cultural conflict between rural and city life is the result of fandoms animating the minds of the violently uninitiated. Ruralites of this stripe are blind to the soul of their people manifested across time in the urban zones, especially in examples such as London and Paris which makes it even more traumatic when they are overrun. Even when they truly fall, we remain magnetized to cities, understanding their eternal relevance not only geographically but spiritually. We continue to inhabit Rome and Athens, raising new developments around the ruins, while the galloping across the steppes has been commoditized as a comic book convention.
Similarly, city dwellers fail to see the rural areas as vast and intricate neural paths of folkways, essential components of the civilizational organism, recalling that much of what we know of the ancient world has been gathered from relics in villages and farms as cities became IQ shredders of their era. The fact that their most ambitious and maniacal seek to retreat to the surrounding forests is significant, although the dankest fantasies of our civilization – that as the hermit who outsmarts the sudden apocalypse – acts as a sort-of IQ Shredder in itself, assuring that those most capable of saving the world are lured into the same darkness that births their oppressors.
Total exile by way of rebellion against the center is impossible, as the topography you abscond to is that cracked reflection where mutants dwell. A system is not made antifragile by streamlining and you do not become more lethal as you become smaller. The center pivoting ever so slightly based on your demands is a paltry acquiescence as well. You have the ability to actualize the nightmares of the sleeping giant as long as you can navigate the backroads of its labyrinthine nervous system.
What we require is a bright and cleansing fire to surf the outermost edge of the periphery, one that can reverse course and roll through the nervous system of power at our soul’s warning.
We dissidents proclaim our love of collectivism as wandering outlaws, seeking connections yet hostile towards mainstream networks. Savage aristocrats waxing poetically of the populace they are doomed to exist on the margins of, like awestruck critique will open the drawbridge.
This treacherous insight we are cursed with comes with historical analysis of how these organisms arrive and thrive, more specifically how large populations can be controlled. These social orchestrations do not require the assistance of neurotoxins or psyops, although those certainly help. It can be achieved at any scale with a process simple as choice architecture, as outlined in the work of Richard Thaler. The application of choice architecture – whether executed by a state or on a one-to-one exchange – is bureaucratic psychoanalysis. The curated selection of choices is a form of consensus building and corralling people into a preferred contexts. For example, presenting you with a trio of solutions to a problem which appear in opposition but are in reality closely associated but represented as the totality of responses.
A form of pressure release many parents will understand as a tactic for expediting getting children ready in the morning, even the opposing binaries presented by power conceal manipulation, and one can be guided into new terrains of normalization through carefully curated conflicts over time.
Power lies not with the decisions of the player, but with whomever makes them feel the game is essential. This is how authorities manufacture consent, but more importantly how their time horizons appear to recede when it comes to achieving material goals.
And when I say manufacturing consent I do not use it in the fashion of Noam Chomsky, where it is simply when the government does a war and occasionally journalists agree. Radical presses can never do propaganda, only the state can do propaganda, unless it’s cloaked in civil rights, in which case it’s socialism which is the only valid form of government. War is good for business, unless it’s the war on poverty, in which case massive invasions are part of the plan. Democratic imperialism works when directed inward in a seppuku pose. Thank you Noam, love u nome.
The promises of socialist perfection are validated by the same bureaucracy that segmented your essence into that which is most easily quantifiable, unilaterally deciding that true freedom was measured by the totality of silence. It’s not that I an allergic to perfection, it’s that I am distrustful of utopia. According to the likes of Steven Pinker we are already living in the wealthiest, freest, and happiest period in human history. Why is everybody so miserable, he asks? The conclusion of him and his ilk: user error.
Highways represent anti-utopianism and the maximization of harsh Darwinian pressures. Put simply, once you remove all natural eugenic forces – conflict, disease, or socially removing dysgenics from the gene pool – destructive characteristics proliferate, eventually devouring Order from the bottom-up. Undesirables proliferate in a world optimized for total survival for the longest duration possible. The quest for utopia ends with 80 IQ pill addicts with inside-out penises and outside-in buttcheeks.
In this inescapable historical period, finding ourselves unable to truly submerge ourselves into the realm of nature except on an infrequent individual basis, we are tasked with seeking out new Darwinian pressures. A truck can be just as efficient as a train if it is massively fucked up enough and has a cowcatcher welded on the front to obliterate girlbosses who think driving isn’t the autoamputated extension of the sexual act.
Not long ago I spoke on an article titled “A General History of American Land Piracy,” written by a friend of mine on the historical record of privateering and piracy so foundational to the American identity.
“The tale of the term filibuster is soaked in the blood, sweat, and gore of thousands of English, French, and American pirates and patriots who died to satiate the expansionist thirst for land and profit. The American Gulf Coast from Florida to Texas was not peacefully purchased; it was conquered.” – Clossington
America was carved into existence through conquest, conflict, and what we would now classify as guerilla warfare. With these terms in mind it would be fair to categorize the ocean as the original highway; God’s Highway. And as our grievances echo those found in the 19th century, we now realize that we must surrender neither to drunk Filipinos.
When I lived in Toronto, on more than one occasion I was confronted by a naked black man wandering down the middle of the street in broad daylight, picking fights with cars in gridlocked traffic. I thought to myself: “I should be able to run this man over.” I should have the power to peelout this man’s bones to dust beneath the robust tires of my sport utility vehicle, my heart a whetstone as I drove off with the understanding that I likely prevented several home invasions. There exists a suite of ideologies and systems of belief on what we as a collective ought to do to handle individuals such as this. Our current paradigm demands we gaze upon them with pity, or as numbers on a graph to be solved with a downpour of material boons.
In my world populated with Agents of Change, we need only encase ourselves in screaming metal and hurl ourselves at it. Do you know what a hacked cybertruck can do to a man gagged with fupameat and chained to a brick wall with big blinking arrows and neon signs pointing towards him like Looney Tunes? Do you know what the wrong mugshot can do to an innocent man’s chances of being convicted in a court of law? Do you know what happens to a Judge’s face when a motorcycle careens roaring into the courtroom, launches off the benches, and smashes into it at full speed?
Ryan Dunn accomplished more politically than any cancer researcher in the 20th century.
Like I was saying, great cities across time and cultures have always been complex systems, and strategies were regularly initiated internally to sweep away the ancient labyrinthine pathways and replace them with rigid simplicity, typically planned by bureaucrats.
The curious thing about complex systems is they are not nearly as prone to collapse as our fantasies would lead us to believe. Rather than being disproportionately prone to natural calamities by way of butterflies flapping their wings against confoundingly numerous dominoes, it turns out that complex civilizations tend to fall in complex ways. For example, if one investigates the Bronze Age collapse, the main culprit is often depicted as the “Sea People” overtaking the Egyptian civilization. In reality, this was likely the final phase of a much longer descent, similar to the Huns moving into Rome; what preceded it was a chain of disasters in the form of earthquakes, famine, and war. The savages then proliferated like vermin feasting upon a corpse.
Collapses happen very gradually – the chainlink of centuries tell the tale – and usually involve several reconfigurations in response. Rather than defeated in short order by the hand of solemn providence, complexity seems to invite perversion and hijacking from within as it’s weakened by the increasing demands to withstand entropic oppression, and this drives the initial discombobulation that invited corruption more than seeding cancer.
While many of us yearn for the warm embrace of thermonuclear war, promises of cinematic decline have never been granted, and when they do have arrived it’s bewildering. A good example would be the concept of Peak Oil espoused in depth by activists such as Michael Ruppert. A commonsensical assertion to those who read the headlines, it can be summarized as: fossil fuels – specifically oil – are a non-renewable resource, and we will eventually reach the top of the bell curve where production begins to decline due to scarcity. As supple exponentially falls, a total global systems collapse will occur as no other renewable energy can swap in. Predictions on the date of peak oil have not occurred, and predictions that all large oil deposits being accounted for prove untrue.
An alternative theory is provided by Thomas Gold, who states in his “Deep Hot Biosphere” model that we don’t truly know how crude oil is produced, and it may be a naturally occurring function of the Earth’s mantle. This would mean there is no hard limit on oil availability at all, although hypothetically a demand could reach such a level that it outpaces supply. An even more alternative theory is put forward by Reza Negarestani, who paints an esoteric picture of oil as a demonic entity, a dark force seeping in from the incursion of negative space into the material world which demands to be made porous, one that acts as a lubricant to the metaphysical engines of war. Creation demands infiltration by the void and out destiny may be glorious dust.
I for one think both of these are valid, and they are made all the more convincing by the Adam McKays of the world being clownshoe-style rake-steppers forever. Until your system can create a predictive model that actually works, I substitute my own interpretations. I don’t need your highways to have highways. I endeavor to pierce your utopian project, breaking the sound barrier as I switch lanes, sniping my hulking metal between the curves of the most outrageous antimatter inhabiting the margins, exposing the antifragility of efficiency. I am not driven by a schematic, I am possessed by a shape.
It takes years of intense research to be this insane. This Toilet Kills Libs.
So, you see Clossington, this is why trains are gay as hell.