“Sometimes, in bookstores, I experience waves of nausea when I think about adding even one more word to all that fucking print.”  -Hakim Bey, the 1993 audio from the T.A.Z. conference.

“To paraphrase Hakim Bey; sometimes when I look at the Internet, I experience waves of nausea when I think about adding  even more more pixel to all that fucking noise.” – Joseph Matheny

Innovators and creators of the world, this is to put you on notice. The your creations, the results of your inspirations will eventually be co-opted and used as tools for exploitation. No matter how hard you try to design around this inevitability, the gut maggots (and there are many)  will find a way, they always do.

Multiple mixed metaphor alert

The parasites have taken over the asylum. The systems were designed by them, so naturally they were designed to favor them. It’s the Casino principle. The house always wins. Even when the occasional dupe slips through the cracks, they are paraded around as marketing material, to show all that “they too can win”. Just keep the faith! Even in this simulacra of winning, one becomes the bait.

They will take your creations, born of sweat and tears, agony and ecstasy, notes from that rare congress with “the other” and twist them, weaponize them and utilize them as cogs in the great machine to feed themselves and grow fat upon that inspiration by vampirising others who, sensing some original kernel of transcendence in the ghost of your work, will chase a phantom carrot which has long since been replaced with the sign of a carrot pointing to the place the original liminal message used to occupy. Sign>signifier>ghost dance. They will build grotesque and macabre temples to the ghost to entice as many as possible to worship it.

You have at that point become an unconscious agent in the ever increasing, intrusion upon and occupation of the realization of true desire.

In the end, even Debord and the Situationist were colonized, commodified, and co-opted. The détournement of the Détournement. Dada and Surrealism as a T-Shirt.

I offer no solution, I do not call for any great art strike or (god forbid) some Galt like withdrawal, mostly because I know most of you don’t have the moxy to follow it through. You’re too busy constructing justifications for why you continue to participate, why what I write here is wrong, why what you’re doing is “different”.

Therefore, this is not a call to action, or a call to inaction. It is not even a warning. It is a statement and my last on this subject.

I leave you with this quote:

“…the best and most radical tactic will be to refuse to engage in spectacular violence, to withdraw from the area of simulation, to disappear.” – Hakim Bey