Half formed thoughts On ‘Ralphing’ and Compass Memes

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This week has been a week of difference influences swelling and receding like overlapping waves on the beach.

I’ve had on many hats for a few hours at a time this week.

I had a skype call with a narrative director of a large MMO about doing some work with them, which devolved into a conversation about Games Workshop finally listening to 40 years of customer complaints before we could really talk about the nature of the work.

Games Workshop Share Price

I was supposed to meet up for drinks with a ‘eerie ecology/film/geography/nonhuman art&research filmaker’. But had to move it to next week.

I also spoke to a VC briefly about maybe doing some strategy work with them, we’ll see how that goes too.

BBC Proms at the albert hall london

I also went to the Proms on Tuesday as the parents unfortunately couldn’t go themselves. Pretty standard week.

As I mentioned last week I’ve started making music again. This week I spent 2 evenings refreshing my memory on how to build synths from scratch. I was using the principles of subtractive synthesis in Renoise

Renoise Synth Building
FUN

Permanently Moved

301 – 1920 – Episode 50 (Sprint Review)

301 Permanently Moved Podcast Cover

S2E20

A nice round number seemed like a good time to review where I am at.

I discuss how the show has evolved, workflow, stats, â€œPerfectionism is the voice of the oppressor” and that making this weekly has done wonders for my psychological health.

You can subscribe to Permanently Moved in itunes: permanentlymoved.online/itunes or search in all your favourite podcatchers.

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Can’t believe I’ve made 50 of these so far. Big thanks to Warren for the idle morning.computer thought which became the catalyst for me last year to start making it.

Dipping the Stacks

Electric Boats Could Be Floating Batteries For Island Microgrids – IEEE Spectrum

Workers Seize the Shipyard That Built the Titanic, Plan to Make Renewable Energy There – VICE

As a shepherd, I know we have not ‘sheepwrecked’ Britain’s landscape
This whole article is basically “as a lumberjack, I know we haven’t over cut” 

German Peasants’ Song – Die Gedanken Sind Frei | Three Acres And A Cow

The Ministry

I started writing the half sketched bones of an essay to clarify my own thoughts that wasn’t going anywhere. As per this weeks podcast about pushing more stuff out I thought I’d flesh it out a bit and post it here

On Compasses and Quadrants

This week feels like the week that the weird Accelerationist political 4×4 compass levelled up out of cave twitter and went into wider consciousness.

The first in the genre I ever saw was on a friends computer at the workspace for “blockchain and utopian conspiracy Trust Support when I was speaking at P2P Web Berlin early last year.

This ACCompass came from Insta about a month ago

Hyperhuman Accelerationist Political Compass Meme

And this recent one is the one that has punched though.

I made a kinda-unhinged political compass of acceleration-assemblages. None of these are really mutually exclusive, but pick your preference! pic.twitter.com/4KG2QbTt78— Lilypatchwork (@Lilypatchwork) August 13, 2019

I should note that Lilypatchwork is a “post left is the most left” internet figure. They themselves pointed out the pipeline to this sort of worldview in a recent tweet

post/ultra-left ==> left-leaning u/acc ==> problematic g/acc

Note: G/acc BTW for the un-initiated stands for Gender Accelerationsist (IE: using gender’s own process of decay to destroy the gender class system) It’s like xenofems black goo mirror universe form. Anyway I’m pretty deep in these circles quite a few people have read my conspiracy essay and stacktivism stuff but its not relevant or where I was going – Back to the compasses:

I know many in the Milieu love the 2×2 for reasons that Venkat neatly summed up way back in 2009

The quadrant diagram has achieved the status of an intellectual farce. If you, as a presenter, do not make an ironic joke when you throw one on the screen, you will automatically lose a lot of credibility.

How to Draw and Judge Quadrant Diagrams

I have my own contribution to the genre as part of the Cross-quadrant Working Group when I was writing about Conspiracy Theories, the value of entertaining them, and why everyone needs a bootstrapped postmodern hermeneutics of their own back in 2016

Red button Quadrant Model

Anyways, the good Ahmet A. Sabancı (in my head I always add the A. to his name) wrote the following in his most recent newsletter

Give Me More Compasses

Jay’s Twitter thread got me thinking about how we’re thinking about the future itself and how most of the mainstream conversation is stuck. Compasses over there names many different possibilities we might face or some of us even facing —maybe not as extreme as a sci-fi novel. I think one powerful side of compasses is the fact that it gives all options/possibilities at once, overloading the mind and forcing you to think about it.

I think that’s something we need more. Not always compasses but ways to push people to think about the futures we might face and start working on it. Although it might seem that all of those futures are far away but when you start thinking about it, you also understand that most of those possibilities are already here and rest is just 5 minutes bus ride away.

Compasses —especially the ones like the one here— with their design and the information density is something perfect for our current social media madness. It interrupts the clickbait and will-be-forgotten-tomorrow news and never-ending outrages with its weirdness and pulls people out of it. Of course one needs to take another step after seeing this but if we’re stuck with the current situation for now, I think best we can do is to make it as weird as possible. So that we can lure people to blogs, newsletters and other dark sides of the internet where real conversation happens. To at least try to break that banality of the future.

The bold points are my own, but also key here and I think speak for them selves.

It is exactly the “all options/possibilities at once” which makes them such fascinating memetic objects. Far more so than the tired pedestrian chaotic alignment charts you see floating around. #ACCompasses are an uplifted version of the 2×2 grid that have ascended beyond intellectual farce into the world of illusion and imagination.

In my opinion, one of the interesting judo moves that the X/Acc scene has been developing the last few years is to use weirdness as a bait/hook for the real praxis (even if the praxis is further speculation for now).

In the Acc world things aren’t weird for weirdness sake. But weird because the weirdness interrupts the clickbait attention feed. FWIW I think Haraway’s “Cthulhuscene” attempted this move in the academic world but largely fell before finished. “Tentacular Thinking” however…. influenced this information/meme dynamic deeply.

I’m inclined to see these compasses as one of the first direct examples of “Accelerationsist Anti-praxis” propaganda.

Anti-praxis consists of two basic principles: making political action as impersonal as possible and intensifying the actually existing processes of liberation and emancipation, without situating our actions within/against capitalism, but following those political vectors which point directly towards a possible exit.

Applying Applied Ballardianism

Mr Bloggy himself AKA Mat of xenogothic.com wrote a good piece late last year on anti praxis

One of the things I think is clear about this form of compass media object is that they rapidly open up new cognitive territory. But they also seize and claim the new territory the moment that you realise that it has formed in your brain. Like laying tarot cards of a kind you have never seen before on the table, and before you can read the spread shouting SNAP and pulling them back.

In the meme theory back channels I frequent this is known as “Ralphing”

Ralph. Mind Virus Meme
Ralph is a mind virus

Each and every box in those x/Acc political compasses is Ralphing cognitive territory. If just for a moment.

Again some more Xenogoth on anti-praxis this time quoting Land

Here we find the anti-praxis of U/Acc emerging into view. As space-time disintegrates, you have to make yourself worthy of the process. Land concludes:

Any perspective that can actually be realized has already been localized by serial breakages. Nothing begins with the whole, unless as illusion. Today, we know this both empirically and transcendentally. Anything not done in pieces is not done in profound accordance with reality.

I’m running the risk of putting woke words into Land’s mouth here but I think the implications are far clearer here than they have ever been. Expect frequent referrals back to this post in the future.

DISINTEGRATIVE COSMIC ACCELERATIONISM

The ACCompass Meme is an illusion. A whole Ralph memetic object of weirdness that is the summation of its individual Ralphs. One so powerful as to pull you, even just for a moment from the day to day algorymic media madness.

Note for readers who feel they are hallucinating. I highly recommend Xenogoths U/ACC primer

UPDATE: I made my own

Reading

I started reading Atomic Habits by James Clear this week.

It’s not very good at all. I wouldn’t bother with it if you have ever thought about wanting to read it. The whole books reads like an advert for his blog which itself is a vehicle advertising James Clear.

I have of course been inhaling more warhammer 40k books. I read the BobbyG Primark series book, and started Spear of the Emperor but I’m only like 12% of the way in.

Music

I’ve been enjoying Pharmakon’s new track Spit It Out this week. It’s a claustrophobic noise hammer of epic proportions.

Pharmakon is the solo experimental music project of Margaret Chardiet. Her 2017 album Contact was fantastic.

I’ve also been listning to the new Album Collab Everything That Dies Someday Comes Back by Uniform & The Body ITS FANTASTIC

Remember kids:

DnD letter sign off alignment chart compass meme
I’ve worked with Europeans for so long, I’m Neutral Good.

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4 responses to “Half formed thoughts On ‘Ralphing’ and Compass Memes”

  1. […] 095 :: Half formed thoughts On ‘Ralphing’ and Compass Memes […]

  2. [
] writing on the Accelerationist political compasses last week I thought I’d make my own. The above is a kaleidoscopic compass of speculative multispecies [
]

  3. [
] may remember my writing on compass memes and the Multispecies Imaginaries Compass that I made last [
]

  4. […] so entertaining about the DALL·E mini image shares online. Then I realised that they remind me of political compass memes. Not just visually – I think that much is […]

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