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.
The technical implementation aspects of Cybersyn are, honestly, the least interesting parts of it.
The logistical, design underpinnings of how ultimately the men behind the curtains got the information to draw on the screen was the real improvement - effectively, it was the real "ugly scripts, notebooks and excel spreadsheets" of today even if the end result is sold to management through fancy looking visualizations that someone has to painstakingly manually edit.
In many ways, some of the ideas behind Cybersyn combine quite well with Toyota production system, except done on much larger scale. And unlike failing nearly by design soviet GosPlan, it incorporated the idea of shortening feedback loops instead of trying to deal with combinatorical explosion of variables at the top.
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.
Rather sharp rebuke of a reactive Leftism that, in an Adam Curtis fashion, had no real vision direction or purpose. Instead reduced to an angry forever defense, snapping out at violators of it's ideals, while rarely offering hope or possibility.
Incredibly stunning work that turns the mirror on a side that aptly I think wants to be better than the FUD it has to contend with so persistently.
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.
Fisher did not “produce” the UK left, he was an outspoken critic of Labor. Actual politicians these days rarely take notice of philosophers.
His main work, Capitalist Realism, was about the post-Cold war condition in which any alternative to Capitalism seems defeated before it gets off the ground—your comment is a splendid example of this phenomenon.
The UK can't escape capitalism because it hasn't escaped feudalism yet. Should try that first. It's run for the benefit of retirees and landlords at the moment.
I'm not super intimately familiar with Fishers work but from what I do know I think he would be extremely disappointed with most modern leftist movements.
Though most of what I've read from him is descriptive rather than prescriptive.
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.
Not a proper source, but have you ever met someone with undiagnosed ADD and wondered why do they drink obscene amounts of coffee or energy drinks? It's a self-medication; it makes it much easier to focus.
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.
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/