it's kind of wild how many influential people and work either directly and indirectly came out of the CCRU. Someone else already mentioned Mark Fisher but also Nick Land during his time there when he was still producing academic work published some great pieces, Meltdown is I think a very prescient one. Astonishing that he wrote this in 1994 I think.
Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
11–20 of 44 posts
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#12[flagged]
it's crazy how much pre- and post-y2k Nick Lands would have reviled one another
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#13… 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 be…
I wonder if this is the result of becoming desensitized to ever-more-radical ideas until one arrives at either fascism or some other hardcore uncompromising -ism?
Kind of like a porn addiction but for philosophy, politics, and ethics.
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#14Tangential, but reminded me of Project Cybersyn An electronic country/society-wide dashboard devised in the early 70s for the Chilean government https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Anyone have links to any of the good takedown articles on Cybersyn?
There's plenty of pieces talking it up. And plenty demonizing American CIA actions around those time periods. But the effort itself was such a incredibly simple lo fi system, such a style over substance effort. The screen was literally manually painstakingly updated ahead of time.
As an idea I see why Cybersyn was so successful & enrapturing. And CCRU is quite in that mold, was far and away first & foremost a vibe (albeit I think Chile & the people working on the project would have been mortally insulted to have that said at the time). I appreciate that CCRU was engaged in deliberate mythologization of technology, of cybernetics. Where-as a shallow "pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" act like Cybersyn getting so outsizedly mythologized, being so popularized: that fires my cynicism up.
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#15Tangential, but reminded me of Project Cybersyn An electronic country/society-wide dashboard devised in the early 70s for the Chilean government https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
Anyone have links to any of the good takedown articles on Cybersyn? There's plenty of pieces talking it up. And plenty demonizing American CIA actions around those time periods. But the effort itself was such a incredibly simple lo fi system, such a style over substance effort. The screen was literally manually painstakingly updated ahead of time. As an idea I see why Cybersyn was so successful & enrapturing. And CCR…
The best thing to read is Eden Medina’s “Cybernetic Revolutionaries” (https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262525961/cybernetic-revolution...). There’s also a good Tech Won’t Save Us episode featuring the author: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/tech-wont-save-us/id15...
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#16Mark 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.
this looks relevant today
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#17… 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 be…
I wonder if this is the result of becoming desensitized to ever-more-radical ideas until one arrives at either fascism or some other hardcore uncompromising -ism? Kind of like a porn addiction but for philosophy, politics, and ethics.
In Land’s case I think it was meth plus the need to edgelord. If you simply must stay suitably edgy then you’ll eventually end up somewhere insane.
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#18The main result of the CCRU’s frantic, promiscuous research was a conveyor belt of cryptic articles, crammed with invented terms, sometimes speculative to the point of being fiction. A typical piece from 1996, “Swarmachines”, included a section on jungle, then the most intense strain of electronic dance music: “Jungle functions as a particle accelerator, seismic bass frequencies engineering a cellular drone which immerses the body ... rewinds and reloads conventional time into silicon blips of speed ... It’s not just music. Jungle is the abstract diagram of planetary inhuman becoming.”
The Warwick accelerationists saw themselves as participants, not traditional academic observers. They bought jungle records, went to clubs and organised DJs to play at eclectic public conferences, which they held at the university to publicise accelerationist ideas and attract like minds. Grant remembers these gatherings, staged in 1994, 1995 and 1996 under the name Virtual Futures, as attracting “every kind of nerd under the sun: science fiction fans, natural scientists, political scientists, philosophers from other universities”, but also cultural trend-spotters: “Someone from [the fashion magazine] the Face came to the first one.”
Like CCRU prose, the conferences could be challenging for non-initiates. Virtual Futures 96 was advertised as “an anti-disciplinary event” and “a conference in the post-humanities”. One session involved Nick Land “lying on the ground, croaking into a mic”, recalls Robin Mackay, while Mackay played jungle records in the background. “Some people were really appalled by it. They wanted a standard talk. One person in the audience stood up, and said, ‘Some of us are still Marxists, you know.’ And walked out.” [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/11/accelerationis...
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#19… 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 be…
It's funny, then, that meth is a prescription drug given to children (and adults) to increase their tolerance for existence within academic/corporate hierarchies.
Re: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit
#20Mark 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.
They can't be that good if they produced the UK left, which is one of the world's worst and least successful left movements and is currently promoting "intentionally making the country poorer". Since the UK is already becoming poorer, of course, nobody even needs them for that.