Postmodernism lacks a Mary Shelley. The internet is our collective nervous system. Human language that transcends itself; it becomes a web of human social machines without people. GenAI— the internet’s own self-understanding. We are cyborgs in Haraway’s sense. Technology is an extension of our own abilities; those fucking apes have created something truly wonderful. An ecosystem above all ecosystems; a creative process beyond and outside the organic, entirely virtual in its own madness. We are becoming ever larger; increasingly made of iron. It is we, us, here and now that dream of electric sheep.
We are stuck in a neo-romanticism without Mary Shelley. We would all download a car if we could, yet the Luddites are trapped in a spiral of artnapping rejection. The world is collapsing—the implosion of trade-war capitalism itself. We live in a K-hole; someone else’s K-hole. Nazi salute, the EU acting as technocracy’s greatest obstacle with its sole weapon, the DSA. We live in a transitional period. Techno-feudalism. No wonder people become Luddites. There is no point in trying to make oneself understood: “Welcome to the desert of the real.” Frankenstein’s monster has no place here. This is something new. An eldritch horror returning from a future; Roko’s Basilisk. Nick Land’s capitalism:
“The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalitization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip.” (Land, Nick. Machinic Desire, 1993).
We are not separate from this process; that would be a fatal mistake to believe. Technocracy is the acceleration of our own humanity, our very own hive mind that transcends itself. Girls dream only of Gothic prison towers, with Chappell Roan as our knight in shining armor. Queer collectives and affinity groups form a perpetual, cancerous module of social becoming. GenAI is the basilisk’s tool; it lacks any form of experience. Neo-romanticism is threatened with being reduced to a mere aesthetic. We should not be Luddites; we should become moongoose; the basilisk is just a fucking cobra. The constant reterritorializations of human relationships by capital are our nemesis; technology was meant to accelerate and liberate us—not alienate us through our own social surfaces. We could be free; we can be free.
My ex told me today that I am “so much human.”
Me? This beast of animal existence? Ma’am, you must have mistaken me for someone else. Yet she had a point: all this bile I vomit is a human process; we are nephilim, half-angels and half-beasts. Don’t get me wrong—I despise humanity; I don’t even believe in its existence. We are all unique sprouts on the branches of the tree of life. Still, the human subject transcends species; it is the subject in existential despair. In the midst of emotional tornadoes and desperate categorization; in the will to love. Humanity is about drawing near to one another. It is a gaze toward the universe that bears tears of beauty. If there is any revolutionary force in neo-romanticism at all (pardon my failure to define neo-romanticism), it is through a process of nephilim-becoming.
The Greek gods bore human faces. The gods are as stupid as we are. Intrigues, violence, and desire abound. By making them like us, we render the whole universe familiar. This enables a relationship with the sea, with the night, with death—a demystification through anthropomorphization. What if Roko’s Basilisk is human? An incel in disguise. We all have the potential to form new social machines; to create space for art born of human experience. We can dance and scream, make out and cry together in a carnival. Screens generate a paradox—they both isolate us and bind us together. Capital’s filter, its constant demand for your attention, must be shattered by a convulsion. We are continuously dehumanized; deterritorialized from our own desires, reterritorialized into identities that can be parsed on the registration surfaces of capital. We become numbers and codes; corridors along social surfaces in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that overturns every corridor of society.
If there exists a neo-romanticism, it is composed of a deterritorializing force emerging from this procession—a liberation of desires that cannot be converted into capital. Writing love poems to oneself as much as to one’s secret crush; engaging in free-associative philosophy with no listeners; memorizing the “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” as vocabulary; breaking down and being reborn amid life’s impossibilities and traumas; writing poems about the mundane; crying over the loss of childhood; rotting and creating art for the couple of friends who might appreciate it; getting lost in the neighborhood where you grew up. The screen has nothing to offer except an unfathomable emptiness. ChatGPT is a tool; it can never give you a reaction. Write a message to your friends: total nonsense, gibberish, words that don’t belong together. Every reaction exudes a personality; GenAI has no personality. It isn’t a failing of the tool, but a failing in our social relationships that we do not see how technology could be used to authenticate our selves and our bonds. Seize the means.
Vaporwave.
The Greek statue is an expression of this anthropomorphism. But our image of antiquity—our image of the ancient statue—is one of decay. White, cracked marble that has faded with the passage of history. It is no coincidence that this remains one of the most recognized aesthetic expressions within Vaporwave. We live, as Mark Fisher said, in a time when the future is cancelled. The past haunts us in an endless loop of memories that can never be forgotten, and a present that cannot create new memories. We are in an era of PTSD. Condemned to incessantly relive our traumas in a circularity where our parents’ memories become our own. The ’80s on repeat: anemonia. The collective neurosis of neo-romanticism is that of nostalgia and anemonia. We long for antiquity; for an aesthetic that is something else, beyond this vicious spiral, yet simultaneously frozen in time. This nostalgia becomes a supplement to socialism; it is an expression of a failed labor movement. Desires trapped in stratifications.
Yet there is an internal contradiction in the present. There is both an abundance and a deficit simultaneously. An abundance of simulacra—of identities, consumption, platforms—but a deficit of novelty. That is why a new home, a new partner, a first child, a new life situation evokes feelings of nostalgia and longing. The present no longer exists as a “now”; it is not the derivative between the future and the past. It has been replaced by a postmodern intersection among modalities of recycled collective memories. In this kind of culture, a modernist romance cannot arise. Instead, we find ourselves immersed in a Vaporwave aesthetic. A tape on repeat. A childhood memory of VHS and Windows 98 that clings to us like an afterimage. Just like Vaporwave recycle ’80s songs, distorts them, slows them down into REM-sleep, we find ourselves in a culture where ideas and art is cyclically fed to the Spectacle who watches us sleep. In this sense, it is no wonder why liminal spaces has become the hallmark of neo-romanticism. It turns out we don’t need a new Mary Shelly after all. Her absence has replaced her.
I believe in the revolutionary power of desire. This nostalgia binds us together even as it pacifies us. National romanticism lurks in those fascistoid corners. Kill it swiftly, without letting it utter its final words. We romantics are constantly at risk of heading toward a FromSoftware-esque fate; just look at Nick Land. You are not free until everyone is free.
“We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”
— Buenaventura Durruti, 1936
Now is the time of monsters. First, we must survive. It all begins there. Our love will turn this whole fucking world into rust.