Capitalism as cryostasis and the production of cryonics
We are reaching absolute zero.
Capitalism is a world-economy that favors a tight but self-liquidating network of oligarchic power centers ranging from oligarchies, micro-oligarchies (middlemen), oligopolies (limited/controlled competition), monopolies, and quasi-monopolies. Its internal processes are a series of micro-feedback loops that culminate in the central motion (the essence of all its feedback loops and a feedback loop in itself) of capital in search of power to gain more capital to then gain more power and so on.
A capitalist is a feedback agent for the system’s continued existence. They seek out exploits and cheats in your (and others’) biological and environmental programming to reprogram your existing and yet-to-exist wants and needs to sustain the power they gain. As a result, supply and demand for the feedback agent is not a law to be obeyed but suggestions for constant abuse.
The processes of capitalism don’t accelerate social and techno-complexity; rather, they seek to decelerate it through containment and stagnation of complex systems and objects into profitable commodities. This process of deceleration is a form of temporal cryostasis, as the potential for social betterment is contained within capital’s grasp and kept from release. To commoditize is to transform the potential warmth of something into a static, petrified, and frozen thing or set of things, and or movements kept within a preset and minimal path that maintains it within capital’s feedback cycles.
Put simply, a commodity is an object frozen in stasis. It’s a cryonic of captured movement, space, and a piece of time that is reduced to fulfilling the role of profitable exchange and motive. The consumption through this profitable trade and its stimulus is created through unequal relations so as to maintain them. Consumer culture appears to be frantic, but it is highly organized into rigid pockets of space-time. This is the “market variety” of commodities you see. This creates a choice of frozen objects that all lead to the same conclusion: to be sold and purchased within the feedback loops of capital and its concentrations of power.
The faster and more “chaotic” consumer culture constantly appears to be and becomes is not due to “technological acceleration” but rather the acceleration of stagnation, as it tries to fight the cleavages of complexity that are constantly trying to leak out and undo this cryostasis. This acceleration of stagnation creates a sense of pseudo-acceleration of techno-complexity to convince the populace that capitalism is productive and that this productivity is what creates technological innovation and social complexity, when in reality, it does so to prevent the escape from this mindset. So people don’t seek out and facilitate the means to destroy it.
Many could find ways to accelerate complexity through pulling these objects out of stasis and igniting them with ingenuity, creativity, modification, and reapplication to further expand the scope and use of each object, or merely by establishing relations and systems to provide the free exchange of materials to create a counter-force of pyromantic accelerants and accelerators. We see examples of this stigmergic emergence in many places, but in order to actualize its full potential, it must be amplified to the scale of an ice age killer.
Consumption, performance (spectacle), object collection, and so on are not problems created by capitalism; rather, the problem is filtering these common human activities into static pockets that serve concentrated power. Human ingenuity creates complexity that constantly melts the ice, which forces capitalism to adapt, mutate, and change to find ways to re-freeze, contain, and divert through new and improved narrow channels and developments within the cryo-static matrix. You cannot consume, perform, collect, or even simply experience without going through these mono-pathways that serve concentrated power. Hence, self-liquidation becomes a part of its aforementioned nature as a primary defense mechanism against your attempts to escape it.
To help explain and illustrate this whole process, imagine an ice cube. Now, warm water is poured over it, which makes it begin to melt. But someone steps in to turn the water from hot to cold, and thus the ice cube begins to grow, not just back to its previous state but now in a much larger form and with a new means by which to increase its mass. You can say in retrospect, “Wow, this ice cube has advanced, developed, and even innovated,” but that would be ignoring the reasons as to why it responded the way it did to the warm water in the first place. This means that with every industrial revolution or widespread invention that causes a wave of disruption to concentrated power, it will respond back with a counter-industrial revolution.
We should also keep in mind that this defense mechanism means it collects, gathers, and consumes more complexity within itself. That puts more strain on it as it constantly grows and produces more cryonics in order to perpetually re-contain internal leakages and outside threats. The means to our escape is finding these leaks and outside disturbances and intensifying them to increase the overall temperature to reheat all that collected frozen energy to make the entire system deconstruct. The use of new-tech (the neo-outside) and even the use of old-tech (the retro-inside) must be re-configured to multiplicity and proliferation so as to send cybernetic wildfires and shockwaves throughout. The past and future are put into collision to send the present into overdrive.
Capitalism wants us to both fear technology through a sense of techno-paranoia and love it through a sense of techno-capital fetishism. Techno-paranoia helps feed into the narrative that technologies and technological development are hegemonic and cannot be made outside of falling back into the grasp of capitalist hands (or worse, techno-dystopias) and thus reinforces the great cold ones grip on it. Techno-Capital Fetishism (what people induced by techno-paranoia call “Techno-Fetishism” or merely “Techno-Skepticism”) helps feed into the previous narrative but adds that the only solution to any technological problem is through capitalism. Capitalism doesn’t want us to use technology outside of this framework, or as mentioned before, it could facilitate the means to destroy it.
Nick Land’s “Accelerationism” is a lie because capitalism is merely assimilating the appearance of techno-complexity acceleration so it can prevent it from causing any more problems and disturbances to its expansion, assimilation, and reproduction of the cryo-static matrix that we currently reside in. Land is correct to identify capitalism as an intelligence system, but in a cruel twist of irony, it actually feeds off and aids the “human security system” to survive, unless the environmental disaster of climate change caused by capital processes kills humans before they can find a way to co-opt green or space technologies enough to escape it.
The Human Security System is the term for the collective forces seeking to limit or prevent human interaction with capital, also referred to as “Anthropol.” As they fight against capital’s increasing tendency to breakdown what is human and the resulting increase in inhumanness (outsideness). That which continues to accelerate and culminates in a run-off of the capital AI that destroys what is human. For example, human social group identities like race and gender are broken down by capital processes.
However, this is confusing multiple opposing forces as one. Social complexity that induces the acceleration of social identities is in opposition to capital, as capital tries to get a grip on gender mutations and re-contain them from breaking down too many traditional ideas and institutions, as it requires hierarchical divisions to survive and feed on. The need for pink capitalism and homo-nationalism is further increased as gender essentialism, patriarchy, and so on are put under constant threat from the weight of all these changing relations. Liberalism is called in as a pseudo-progressive chameleon working for centralist realism that is hell-bent on slowing down time so that traditional forces can get a hold of it.
This recuperation process of pseudo-progressives and enlightened traditionalists working together, which we call liberal democracy, can be mapped out as such. The liberal party represents the movement of progress in matters of social justice and general equality, but its job is to reduce this momentum as much as possible. Shaving off radical and controversial concepts to be repackaged as moderate and easily digestible for the system to safely consume without worry. The conservative party represents the order of social restraint and division. It appears immovable, but the passage of time forces it to move along at a slower pace, in contrast to its counterparts in social and economic issues. Once a repackaged idea has firmly settled into the makeup of hierarchical configurations, it’s accepted by conservatives as tradition. Make no mistake, however, conservatives are capable of accepting newer ideas if they can show themselves to have the ability to extend or facilitate an advanced means to preserve hierarchical society. These two political forces act as a fixed-pluralism of representative-elites that liberals call a “healthy democracy.” Crafting a “living constitution” that becomes the laws of the dead wielded against life’s developments. All liberals and enlightened conservatives serve the Lockean Necronomicon.
The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a social singularity as cyberspace proliferation begins to destroy knowledge barriers and social identity is put into hyperdrive. The multi-scaled poly-relational interactivity crumbles the social order of mono-relations as conservatives are desperately trying to get a grip. The open-assemblies of fluid individuations and collaborations form a mass swarm of stigmergic attacks on all rigid structures as they desperately reach for brute defenses and assimilation tactics. Neo-Genders and Trans-Cyborgs arrive from the far-future to make sure nothing cis makes it out of the near-future.
Capitalism is a selfish AI that prevents machines, humans, inhumans, and the self-assemblages of these from running away from it and proliferating the universe with rival intelligences. “But capitalism will create machine runaway!” And yet, it increases industrial sabotage, bullshit jobs, conspicuous consumption (and its mutations), and the weaponization of future shock and cryo-shock to reduce such movement. So the automaton is not set free under capitalism, rather, it is put into paralysis, a state of AUTOMATAPARESIS!
The fusion of these twin-shocks (future shock and cryo-shock) produces the current climate of technology: rapid changes and increases in advertisements, consumption trends, Veblen goods, content cycles, and so on produce a sense of disorientation and visual speed, which induces a feeling of future shock, while you’re also put into a state of motionlessness from a lack of and prolongation of social betterment and physical advancement, which induces a feeling of cryo-shock. Basically, you’re overly stimulated while unable to move.
Automation does displace workers, but it doesn’t eliminate them from capitalism. Hence the need to create pointless busy work and add layers to middle management. Even if manual labor were eliminated, the knowledge economy would produce (as it currently does) a whole new focus and prioritization of emotional, psychological, and mental labor. Which is produced alongside the expansions and developments of visual technologies as they too are forced to become frozen projections.
Visual technologies are constantly curtailed and frozen by intellectual property laws and their enforcers to prevent them from running off into the minds of the masses. This enforcement, however, constantly slips, cracks, or one of its blind spots is discovered, and the mounting stress of complexity comes to combat these cryo-cops with creative energies that meet the free flow of imagination and materials. These pyromantic pirates wage a constant war against the cold monopoly of intellectual property that continues to consume media input and output. Like a flamethrower to a snowman with a badge.
The end result of this “techno-capital singularity” is the approaching point whereby the social singularity is fully contained and destroyed by capital processes. Dragging the temperature down slows the movement of complexity to its lowest point and degree, to absolute zero. The current scheme to try and accomplish this is through data farming, collecting, and analyzing. They are trying to predict a path forward to freeze you into by harvesting your digital footprints. This is how capitalism achieves a state of cryopreservation.
Cryopreservation is the use of very low temperatures to preserve structurally intact living cells and tissues. In science fiction, cryostasis refers to this preservation on a human scale, by which people are put into a state of hibernation to be reawakened at a later date without aging or death, thereby preserving them until a cure for a lethal illness is found, or a long space journey has come to an end. Capital’s goal has been to hijack the manifestations of human ingenuity, turning them into cold subversions and crude imitations of caged potential.
This cryopreservation of the capital-power feedback system will come through this method to directly prevent human ingenuity before it has a chance to manifest into something that could cause any problems. Using market algorithms, recycling popular media, and increasing the overall scope of cryo-shock to the point of ending this tug-of-war. Putting human liberation into a state of hibernation, sent into a future it has predicted, the cryo-pod is even specially designed just for you. Capitalism is trying to predict a future to freeze you into, thereby turning people into cryonics.
In this way, it does everything in its power to prevent the chaotic proliferation and agency of sentience, consciousness, and other intelligence systems from emerging, for fear of disrupting its feedback cycles.
Capitalism becomes cryo-capitalism, and so communism must become pyro-communism.