SPMP 4: "Free paperclips for everyone!"

some riff-raff...ignore this...just doing some notes for something….many passes with the sharpening stone for all these ideas needs to happen one day when I don’t feel so harried…. #decelerate….

Returning to my earlier thoughts on a shift from “Cathedral-State” governance to a “Cathedralibrary” system, I’m reminded of a statement from XS blog post titled nRx for Dummies: //the prospects for neoreactionary consensus – for a neoreactionary thing – depend upon disintegration. If we’re compelled to share a post-Cathedral state, we’ll kill each other. - http://www.xenosystems.net/neoreaction-for-dummies/ // It is the disintegration referred to here that I wish to view through a xenofeminist lens in the sense that a homogeneous and “complete” alienation can itself be metasystematized in the overlapping of A) an archive that has been overhauled to curate perspectival timelines rather than such a loose and amorphous concept as information, B) a blockchain-esque state structure that uses the ledger system to archive entire historico-geometric sets of ID-entities: their ramifications, fracturings, and integrations rather than a default individual numerical single-frame coding by a state that does not take into consideration its potential for alteration and fragmentation, and C) a paper-clip maximizer-type  AI programmed to maximize the archival and curation of these shifts, skynetically ending the info-lineage of any identity that overcodes another and recording theviolation for posterity. The single-frame identity linearizes, shearing off mutations and alterations that do not conform to the normativity of the over-frame or supra-frame, the dissolution-paradigm encourages mutations and alterations and safeguards them in hyperreal metabubbles of (virtual?) reality.

The progressive incursion/convergence of big data-mining, identity- and state-dissolution (both practices and entropic physical laws), and surveillance-media-social-state construction must at some point give way either to a 1)  permanent perfect archive, not only of current information but also in what ways this information has changed over time; or to a 2) pure fractal overload that alienates the system itself from its own informatic flows, generating a remarkable self-similarity to neural processing in which frames of contextual reference spontaneously emerge as metareality or hyperreality which must be successfully navigated in order to reach the topological reality underlying the illusory covering-image. These frames are entities, the cathedralibrary is the global cog-narrative “Universal Form” cf. Giordano Bruno’s conception of God.

Within these perspectival frames the same navigatory tools used in psychonautics can potentially be extended into archive-space as non-space becomes as relevant as info-space in terms of topological organization, allowing one to track the shape of the edge, “learning what it is that we do not know” and engaging a category-theoretic appropriation of this pattern-tracking to make highly educated guesses as to what is missing in any given frame, toroidally compressing potential #2 into potential #1 over time.

Spatial Metapolitics Wk3: Riversteading Waterworld

On the potential for affordable small-scale seasteading:

On the Mississippi River, the barge traffic is neverending in both directions. Docks on the miles-long industrial riverfront are like hives, with buzzing tugboats constantly looping and drifting around queues of barges lined up for filling or emptying. This massive industry is utterly attached to federal corporate welfare - Washington picks up more of the cost of riverborne shipping than any other type of logistics enterprise in the US, and subsidies generate as much revenue as actual profits (current statistics: river traffic moves less than 5% of american cargo, while taxpayers foot 90% of the bill - in contrast, rail is entirely self-funded, while highway/trucking is subsidised at around 20%). As the global and local social fields become more and more unstable due to factors such as climate change, viral political madness, and class warfare, an industry so significantly reliant on a government increasingly unwilling or unable to foot the bill I predict will inevitably fall victim to catastrophic failure to provide the services or the revenues that would be necessary to keep these businesses afloat. This pressure toward collapse already has a serious manifestation in the fact that both flooding and drought generate ridiculously dramatic dropoffs in the ability of a barge to navigate the river, and both have become more common as local weather has become more erratic.

These insights generate the possibility that a forward-thinking group could obtain incredibly cheap rates and well-leveraged bargaining positions on river-transport materiel and that the potential buyers’ position will only grow stronger over time. Currently, used flat-bottomed, open-topped, barges are roughly the cost of a used car, and towboats have been consistently dropping in price as the number of companies operating on the river drops due to failure to compete with multinationals like Cargill. One has but to look toward the better parts of a movie like Waterworld or an experiment like Sealand to imagine the possibilities in a modular, mobile system capable of holding 1400 tons of cargo per barge (soil for farming operations, housing structures?) at costs incredibly far below the average island, or yacht, or WWII weapons platform off the coast of England, or custom-built waterborne structure. That these barges and towboats are already designed to house people for long periods and be modularly (dis)connectable on a large scale increases their potential utility, while every day more of these units are discarded, abandoned, fall to ravages of disrepair. Every major city along the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Missouri rivers has a transport industry of significant size, and it is showing cracks at every stage of the process. I contend that this industry is ripe for pillaging and repurposing, and that it is only a matter of time before the river economy hits a startling bottom that, while destructive and fragmentary to the extreme for certain industries and industrial zones, could be very fruitful indeed for the intrepid seasteader.

http://thenewcentre.org/seminars/outer-edges-21st-century-spatial-metapolitics/

cathedralibrarynth

//For it takes a great deal of room, of sacrifice, of energy, a great deal of mutilation and of many corpses, in order for the "average man" to become auto-mobile and to take himself for a nomad. Gilles Chatelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs//

Thought experiment: A tactical inversion (occupation?) of the concepts Cathedral and Library seen through an anarchist/communitarian lens generates a ‘church of reason’ (“active nihilism as religion of zero”) governing a modular network of materially-independent monasteries dedicated to a politically-neutral system of free knowledge production and curation that can be extended to include the Academy and Nature itself (Groys). This structure can be further expanded into the /curation of realities/ in multiple ways, one of which being that it is not overshadowed or dominated by concurrent archiving attempts, rather parasiting off any available archive, growing in political and social power to the extent it makes information radically available to more users. The Library functions as a conduit holding open flows of information to particularly disenfranchised and lower-class individuals and groups, eliminating the need to purchase access (IE the internet, newspapers, etc) and effectively unionizing the pursuit of information. The library has no boundaries in terms of information/media with which it may interact or territorialize, and is potentially able to maintain informational flows of any shape, size, or source without bias. I contend that the library can (and should) be rethought into the primary administrative facility of any institution that possesses or generates one (reification/root system/social network), in order to subsume all functions of the institution into a rational topological framework capable of archiving any information, regardless of complexity, even information that lies in direct opposition to truth, dominant ideologies, cultural norms, etc, including an archive/arsenal of navigational toolkits. The Library resists censorship (“censorship is perceived as damage”) and could motivate that resistance toward limitations in capacities. This resistance could be achieved through use of blockchain administration, communitarian self-sufficiency (“charging” for library access with time-banked volunteering?), renewable resource usage (diverting current resources toward solar panels, urban farming endeavours, etc), and physical automation to systematically free resources and Librarians up for research; social tasks such as community safety, teaching, child care, and farming (any of which may be eventually automated themselves); and maintenance of the system (technological, physical, and mental health/engineering) while repackaging and repurposing the Church’s former glory and power with a religious zealotry for expansive, never-ending, radically inclusive education and information-dissemination. With this resistance to collapse engaged in an ongoing strategy of community-reification, we can suggest the Library as a gesture toward a complex triagonalism between Church, State, and Academy without diminishing the importance of, or interrelation between, the universes of discourse considered to be the purview of each (but with God in the proper section of the archives and an aggressively hyperinclusive acquisitions policy). In future essays I will unpack the religious angle more deeply, as well as further explore whether we can use the Library metaphor to construct a diagonal argument between democracy and meritocracy without collapsing into dictatorship and tyranny on the one hand // catastrophic homogeneity or rule by the least common denominator on the other - a system of rule by those most effective and creative at the protection, navigation, and dissemination of the broadest possible knowledge base(philosopher-king/guardian hybrid)?

1st Week contribution to
Outer Edges: 21st Century Spatial Metapolitics
http://thenewcentre.org/seminars/outer-edges-21st-century-spatial-metapolitics/