Cybernetic Culture Research Unit

> CCRU does not, has not, and will never exist.

CCRU Writings 1997-2003 was/is a great book that blends reality with weird smart referential alternate realities. Short stories & blurbs that build on one another. Social commentary mixes with quirky cyber-quasi-occultism.

I don't have a ton of other good CCRU materials that I got experience with, but buying CCRU was a good pick. Fun then, and a book I do in fact come back to now & again to be amused by.

It was/is great having such literary/conceptual artifacts from before the onset of There Is No Alternative really set in like it has today, before we settled so deeply into this groove of capitalism molding tech so thoroughly to it's ends.

Related ish, I'd put it off as not my style but I did finally pick up Charlie Stross's Laundry Files saga a couple years back, after being shockingly delighted with his Empire Games which I'd initially thought would be not my style. Laundry Files is a great spy thriller, cross computer geek, cross occult book, that reminded me of a more palatable & long form CCRU. If case anyone is interested in some other pretty solid fun very referential out there reads. That ability to get from here, from reality we have, to these fun nearby thought spaces is so delightful.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780995455061/writings-19972003/

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You can read many of their works directly here, on a site that (pleasantly) doesn’t seem to have changed since the 90s: http://www.ccru.net/archive.htm

Mark Fisher went on to become one of the most significant voices on the Left in the UK before his suicide in 2017. His many online leavings are worth a significant investment of time.

… or what happens when you give massive amounts of meth to academic pomo philosophy majors…

There were some interesting ideas in there in the beginning, albeit not as original as some thought. A lot of that stuff just goes back to cybernetics, psychedelia, and occultism. But then the CCRU turned a bit culty and some of them including Land lost their minds.

The Land went full fascist. There seems to be a connection between fascism and heavy stimulant abuse, like fascism is the politics of meth.

That association goes way back too. There’s a book called Blitzed about how the Nazis were using meth. Seems to check out since starting a war on two huge fronts is a total meth move.