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.
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.
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.
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.
The 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]
In the spirit of CCRU, me and a few dozen other people have been having ongoing discussions on related topics under the banner of effective extropianism. I think it’s important to figure out how the landscape of rapidly evolving tech fits into our lives and vice versa. We’re working on a repository of adjacent texts.
If you’re interested, my Twitter handle is in my hn bio.
… 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.
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.
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.
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.
My thoughts exactly. What is striking is how the content created by CCRU is seeing a considerable resurgence in public consciousness, twenty years later.
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
An electronic country/society-wide dashboard devised in the early 70s for the Chilean government
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Cybersyn
[+] [-] rektide|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] nico|2 years ago|reply
Jodorowsky’s Dune
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky%27s_Dune
[+] [-] keiferski|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] breckinloggins|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] p_l|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thom|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|2 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exiting_the_Vampire_Castle
[+] [-] astrange|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jamal-kumar|2 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] izzygonzalez|2 years ago|reply
If you’re interested, my Twitter handle is in my hn bio.
[+] [-] galacticaactual|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|2 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] breckinloggins|2 years ago|reply
Kind of like a porn addiction but for philosophy, politics, and ethics.
[+] [-] FooBarBizBazz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] gexahaha|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Barrin92|2 years ago|reply
http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_melt.htm
[+] [-] xk_id|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] fnord77|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phonescreen_man|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|2 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] pizza|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frostburg|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]