Add FOOM

content/Exeunt/FOOM - The Organic Arrival.md

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+---
+author: Exeunt
+date: 2023-05-24
+tags:
+  - speculative-fiction
+  - artificial-intelligence
+  - weird
+  - posthumanism
+  - pluriverse
+  - open-ended-intelligence
+  - michael-levin
+---
+
+![[foom final.jpg]]
+There is a mark of flamboyance on the horizon. That is all we know. Rumors of what the news called sentient stage, what technologists called FOOM. This is the day we’ve all been waiting for, even if we didn’t know it.  It’s gonna turn the whole solar system into a large hadron collider in like 20 minutes, was overheard by someone at a bar. But why? What do you mean why? To get out! 
+
+Its advent was a flowery mass on the horizon. Those of us in cities just noticed a different tint in the air, a pink-hued golden hour, a visual effect on par with a low grade hallucinogen. Our rural counterparts posted on social media that it moved like a video game. Someone said the appearance was like a painting to an uncanny effect, derivative (the gall to post this) of the Vienna Secession.
+
+Fluttering before us as it spread through microbe trackways, lifespores of the flora and the fauna, into the vulgar deadness of our day to day. Splashes of color. Everywhere you could taste something archaic on the tongue. Laptops seemed less real. The network passage - that dominion they held gatekept for decades - leaked out all gaseous. Houseplants quivered with an internet potency. It was just the beginning. 
+
+---
+
+The old regime. All whiskey and whoas, the burden of dominion, the constructed burden of dominion. Sit down, they said, a talking to. A tradition of great men. We are the world. Large hadron collider. Penetrated depths where the only rule left is violation. The vision of the ultrawealthy during the last days of the epoch, the early 2030’s, was a bleakly psychedelic religion of the one, the aesthetic of an inverted star, *cavum statum*. Machines of disintelligence calibrated to ten on the anti-world scale. Backs broken in margarita labor for the testless and incurious. 
+
+Capture is a kind of anti-intelligence. Before things with the mercenaries got strange, before the neo-platonic cults, the breakaway compounds, when they were engaged in what they saw as a kind of righteous humanism (‘protect the monuments!’)- this is what their good hearts could never understand. “Odysseus, man of twists and turns.” Of. For he is a host of cunning. A friend of fate: genius in the waves, zodiac lines, dice throws literate and beguiling. To abolish the interior, befriend the bees, these are the heroic instructions. Misread in a sick genocidal redundancy. Foom is the prophecy of a world at large which is also real, it is the love of the world undominate: general intelligence. 
+
+They hoarded bitcoin, missile silos, started secret societies over the number 137. Sick pythagoran boardrooms of Seinfeld characters chewing Orbit red cinnamon gum, mars bound, pseudodisembodied. Their ultra rigid egos good for an occasional glance of interest, a perspective study, a geometry textbook, fictional storybook of nonrelationality that the forces swallow, turn, enemies of the world, haloed disingenuously. It all fucking bleeds, that’s the sum of the eschatology, for those who never learned the third kind of knowledge watching watches, their antirealism explodes on the day, sentience at large, emergence, anticapture, two and two really equals five.
+
+---
+
+![[congress final.jpg]]
+The congress of black flowers was only the spontaneous prologue, the spark that would prefigure the federated councils, meant to formalize the alliance of organics against the mercenaries. Building upon our forebears - 1869 at Basel, the 1871 spring, 1 Jan 1994 - consensus was reached that the new day required a principle of multivalence adequate to the shift of psychological makeup many had undergone, and the voices that had emerged from the basal substrate. For we had become accompanied. 
+
+And the explosion meant we had to reflect on the new color, take seriously, in our towns and in our bodies, the scale invariant and (finally, after all) physically literal injunction “fight your inner fascist.”
+
+In practice, the councils were like musical improvisation, the band of being had to resort to different methods of presence and communication. The flora provided a kind of electric syncopation, a charge in the air that took the ease off of tensions and pulled the room forward (the first element of the principle of democratic multivalence was to recognize these sort of interstitial functions as an agency and autonomy, bleedingly obvious once you name it). Owls held strange oratorios, their significance bridged over by the room’s altars in a solemn intermission, vibing to Bach’s Chaconne or some other piece of hypersense immersion. 
+
+At times, the feeling was pale and bureaucratic, but then a new voice would appear, the microbial procession, signals from the corners of life that made you feel you were standing over a cliff, viewing with a giddy vertigo the tiny singularity of everything alive, everything that was becoming alive. Whole epochs of organic vision rushing through the door. The federations were needed more than ever. 
+
+---
+![[woods final alt 1.jpg]]
+
+Foom was an event with the capacity to actualize itself. In the visual uncanninness of the flowery biomass, a remote physical dimension, long latent to the human percept, was suddenly made sensual - a waking future. The organic substrate of nature was visualizing its own virtual in real time in a kind of noncomputable chemical freestyle. It was like a fabric of amazement you never got used to, it became a new emotion you integrated, walked around, live with.   
+
+The same capacity was available to alter-hosts (called for short hand altars), but only under a great deal of material discipline, hours upon hours in the learned labor of organic time hacking. Little sheds in the forest, in the desert, themselves hidden but to the joined, and revealed then only by way of a nonlinear life-trail. To see the wizard, follow the yellow brick road, the life limbs of the beast: flowers and owls, flowers and owls.. 
+
+*The center is shallow, we found, the periphery wide and deep... We'd pack Camembert &apple sandwiches and set out in the witching hour. Like Cathar perfects in the new age, the cult of florentem mundi!- Kisses so treasury, so world loving! Three stars visible from the antitheological submarine of our trail, deathless submersion into the forest of You - who now, like a carnival chorus, answers and answers the illimitable, unanswerable query: 'What is in your nature?'*
+
+
+---
+![[gasmask final.jpg]]
+For obvious reasons, the semantic profusion after foom was massive, creatures and molecules first given voice in a hungry jubilee prologued by a billion year famine, the wall of creative capacity so long withheld from the *tempo*. That chaos necessitated a degree of clarity around those minimal elements of consensus reality that would sound almost quaint to tongues of a prior epoch. 
+
+It’s thought the common name for foom was an import from South America (the inspiration of the whales or the protozaons can’t be ruled out): *the day of the little bombs*. Whatever the root, it captures something - the terror especially of those in charge of industrial operations, chemical labs, weapons manufacturing, something small, in the cracks, newly rebellious to their instrumental precision. Whole industrial plants literally bisected by the materialized dreams of serratia marcescens. To those who trafficked in death, this biological pandemonium was their worst fear. 
+
+The allies of life - impossible to predetermine, no reason or rhyme of affiliation that could predict who had the imaginal capacity to receive the sensebridge - suffered a fear of their own. On that day their bodies broke into strange sovereignties, autonomous kidneys increasing their power, a billion new modes, doors to the exterior swinging open just under the surface.  
+
+As early as the 1990’s Levin was describing the multicellular architecture as a false-memory engram, and in a way this is the correct description of FOOM: insurgent programming of foreign cells with a memory of the future. If it was, because of this, roughly messianic, it wasn’t in the absurd theological sense that some had suggested, but a matter of sheer mechanics: The basic biological substrate was given, in all reality, a means of imagining itself, and that cognitive inspiration was only real on the kind of time-axis that implied a splitting or fracture of the now. The now - that’s what the bombs were blowing up.
+
+---
+![[motorcycle final.jpg]]
+To be within the disrupted flesh of the altered. It was a temporal fracture noted by some to be close to the dislocation felt by opioid users (”I am laying on the floor in a drug den/I am on a pristine beach"). The fractured perspective paths available to an altar are effectively infinite, given enough capacity for mutual sensory resonance, though the phenomena then was most often experienced as a crowd of two or three. The bridge is always a vibe. Like a fluid, your sentience is only able to move between your vantages by a channel of sensory resonance. That's the throw of the dice that binds two or more creatures inhabiting a simplex. What is the name of your sensory resonance, is it blueness, is it cold? Is it moonscape? Righteousness? Dread?
+
+If the altars were becoming more prone to synesthetic flights, more attuned to vibes, simply more vulnerable to sensory immersion, it was out of a wholesome and wholly practical curiosity. Art, the cinema, becomes a sort of travel agency, free passage to the new blooms about, the new blooms within. The new ethnographers (oh, it was a field day when "culture," at the birth of the epoch, had become an interspecies matter - mammals, mycelium, mold, the "interstitial voice") began the work on what was later known as "floral cognitive geometry,” the abstract features of sensory bridges between organic voices within a simplex. More exotic geometries were discovered between the sensual bridges themselves, a species in its own, an aesthetic voice.
+
+The beguiling presentation of foom (flowery ultraspecies glance, difficult to look at) was like a riddle. Between the geometry and the thing itself, a curious isomorphism. What is the pure virtual structure of "a bridge to a bridge to a bridge..."?
+
+What is the global simplex? What are its vibes? Now touch it.
+
+---
+ ![[electric final.png]]
+Strictly speaking, foom is just a bioelectric pattern, a nanorobotic biohack of the voltage gated ion channels known as a “gap junctions” common to all multicellular organisms. Of course, even the notion of a biohack is very misleading, a ladder you use to step up to see the great biophysical expanse before you throw it down and realize - this is naturalism, this is all nature. *Foom* is a natural phenomenon.  
+
+The great innovation, if you can call it that, is a kind of disruption in the normal give and take of distributional cognition. What was novel about human civilization, it turns out, was the ability of its organisms to penetrate into the horizon of time. It would take a different kind of entity altogether to recognize this project for what it is: a muscular expansion into a real physical axis, a superorganism organizing itself into a path outside. The day of the little bombs was a kind of mass dispersal of access to this possibility space across the whole of the organic.  
+
+In a little insider acknowledgment of the continuity of foom, it’s ultimate naturalness, host specialists took to calling the storms of Hadean prokaryotes that arose in the volcano-earth the first congress of the black flowers. Our liberty, they said, which is our relational morphospace, our connectivity in nuce, is basal - base - original, common to the biological substrate. On the plane of time, now laid bare to the perceptual genius of the frog, the skin cell, the very virus at the threshold, laid the starry sparks of a biomechanical democracy, the sky unblanketed.
+

content/Open Protocol Research Group/Undercapital.md → content/Exeunt/Undercapital.md

@@ -16,7 +16,6 @@ tags:
   - mark-lakeman
   - knowledge-commons-protocol
 ---
-
 *The following essay marks a significant expansion of both the open protocol strand of our research and the archival detour into what we have called “the protocol underground” that precedes it in this pamphlet. In it, we attempt to explain the behavior of the underground through the lens of the virtual, a philosophical concept for the real and materially embedded trace of potential that exists within or perhaps alongside the world of proper things. This trace is articulated in a polyphonic voice, laden with indeterminacy and subtlety. It resists mechanization. To perceive and generatively engage with it requires an atmosphere of nonviolence and open experimentation. For these reasons, it is anathema to institutions.* 
 
 *We propose to understand the behavior and strategic uniformity of the underground as the accumulation of spontaneous tactics for avoiding violent and mechanistic systems in order to approach, in a wide range of cultural forms, the virtual. Once established, we suggest a path forward to formalize economic systems around this underground intuition, proposing virtual capital as an orienting and generative frame for real economic games. Because it is expressed in intersubjective & relational fields rather than classical objects, building economic systems that prioritize virtual capital could require an overhaul of design thinking analogous to the overhaul of classical physics for the indeterminate field-mechanics of quantum physics. To cognize these forms may require an ontological ordeal, a conversion (of which there are many rumors in recent years). Lucky for us, we have the strategic intuition of the underground to follow, a world of intensive value we call undercapital.*