Card tricks, Utopias and Crusades out in the wild
Brussels residency, Istanbul, and Barbican in April, Berlin stuff in May, Protocol Berg mid-June
Just a lil’ stopgap entry serving as an events round-up until normal service resumes…
After spending all of March in London, I’m wandering around again. Here’s where and when stuff is happening, and links / details.
I’m currently in Istanbul, where we’ll do a Fau0x Salon workshop behind closed doors this weekend. It was going to be a public event, but given the state of things here we will instead run it with curated participation. This will be the third event with our expanded deck, since Unsound Festival’s Dissonant Cartomancies in Kraków and Something Else Symposium in Cairo. If you’re in town this weekend and would like to participate, let me know.
In collaboration with Wassim Z. Alsindi from Berlin’s 0xSalon AVTO hosts and archaeological workshop and participatory discussion exploring the AVTO archives through collective research. Two counter-institutional collectives converge to excavate the historical archives of AVTO guided by thinking machines from the east searching for patterns and insights among the ruins of our present.
At the centre of this event is FAU0X SALON, an evolving techno-esoteric cartomancy system developed by 0xSalon. The cards invite participants into a conversation about AVTO’s past trajectories, present contradictions , and speculative futures through the chaotic and autonomous moderation of a deck of tarot-style oracular cards. The session culminates in a collective playthrough of the FAU0X SALON card game, where participants adopt the personas of characters such as Rhizome Negarestani and The Xenofeminist, brainwashed by ideologies such as Acid Communism and Narcissist Realism, in order to explore discourses that resist linearity and institutional capture.
I’m shortly heading to Brussels, where I’ll do a mini-residency at Au Jus. Between 11th and 29th April, I’ll be living and working onsite, preparing a program of events including a Knightwork State LARP.
Coming up in a few weeks, London’s Barbican Centre is holding a Conservatory Day as part of their Concrete Garden program called Experiments in Utopia. Not that much information is online yet, but I’ll be onstage in the afternoon of Sunday 27th April, talking about communities of practice gesturing towards utopian horizons, and where reality might fall short, or lead us down another path (see below). Tickets are free, and will be available from here. It says it’s sold out already, but that is probably because formal announcement hasn’t happened yet.
Join us for a day of talks, performances, films and workshops centred around the history and current evolution of intentional community building. The programme will explore methods of fostering collectivity and ecological connection through the collective practices of dance, music, art-making, design & communal living.
Using a broad definition of Intentional Community across location based co-housing, radical arts collectives and digital communities, we explore topics and philosophies ranging from healing biotopes, free parties & rave culture, polyamorous love, the solidarity economy & decolonising plant relationality. Taking learnings from a lineage of intentional communities, the multidisciplinary programme will also contemplate new structures for speculative collective futures.
I’ll finally return to Berlin in May, and it’ll be time to spin up some happenings in the locale. Keep an eye out on the
newsletter for public events, or my little Telegram group for full updates.
Speaking of Berlin, one thing that is already announced and ticketed, is the upcoming second edition of Protocol Berg on June 12/13. Basically, the best possible configuration of blockchain-ish tech conference: free tickets (apply soon), no sponsors, strict application and vetting process for both speakers and attendees. The first edition was two years ago, and well, for once my striking at the very root of these socio-technical systems was well appreciated.
So, I am back with an updated presentation on the current thing i.e. the global (neo)reactionary turn, with a presentation on The Chain Mail Gaze, containing many updates due to both the (unfortunate) state of the world and (fortunate) progress with writing. I wrote quite a detailed blurb for the talk, drawing on materials which form the foundation of my soon-to-be-announced book.
With their dreams of new ‘Network State’ empires, resource extraction, and colonial domination, today’s tech overlords are the descendants of Europe’s mediaeval Crusaders: well-financed, zealous fanatics remaking the world in the name of their greater good. Through a psycho-political reading of scarcity, chauvinism, and colonialism, The Chain Mail Gaze connects Crusader ideologues’ desire for blood, land, and booty, to emerging ‘frontiers’ mediated by contemporary technologies.
THE CHAIN MAIL GAZE: the technocolonial legacy of the mediaeval Crusades
Today, new forms of techno-colonialism are emerging, led by a cabal of messianic technology elites who seek to remake our planet, its territorial divisions, and its populations. These would-be patriarchs wish to challenge the very foundation of the nation-state system through the creation of privatised zones of exception known as ‘Network States.’ These aligned, distributed communities, driven by a desire to secede from the Westphalian paradigm, aim to secure political legitimacy and ultimately sovereignty for their territorial acquisitions, echoing the spirit of the First Crusade’s aftermath in the Eastern Mediterranean. Though the methods differ, the underlying insatiable will of the ‘just’, ‘holy’, and ‘righteous’ to power and conquest—The Chain Mail Gaze itself—remains the same, enduring for over a thousand years.What if the mediaeval Crusades never truly ended? Instead, what if the brutal campaign of conquest by Latin Christian zealots became the template upon which modern finance and the capitalist economy was modelled: a blueprint that reveals its true horror in our current age of technology fanaticism? This project posits that the libidinal forces within mediaeval Christendom, which fuelled militarised pilgrimages to the ‘Promised Land’ in the late 11th century onwards, persist today, haunting contemporary politics and technology. The spectre of these forces manifests in the theatres of perpetual enmity that capital orchestrates, manipulating the occidental institutions of crown, church, and state to wage its battles.
Through a psycho-political analysis of scarcity, chauvinism, and colonialism, this project links the Crusaders' lust for land, blood, and plunder to present-day colonial frontiers emerging through networked finance and technology. The techno-libertarian vision of the Network State imbues US venture capital culture with nihilistic nation-faith: a place where Capital be thy God. Ideologically aligned, distributed communities crowdfund territorial acquisitions to create an archipelago of networked zones of exception, whilst seeking to exit the nation-state framework. This reactionary vision of ‘freedom’ is intimately bound to a prominent founder, so that the prophet (CEO) leads their followers (stakeholders) through adversity (financial risk) to the Promised Lands of abundance. Animated by a veneration of scarcity and ‘sovereign individuality’, the neoreactionary waters from which the Network State emerges are themselves a Chain Mail Gaze cocktail of Crusading zeal, techno-optimism, corporate armies, and other military-scale deployments of capital. From Pope Urban II to Christopher Columbus, from Eisenhower to George W. Bush, the concept of the Crusade as a righteous, civilization-defining war has left an indelible mark on world history. What lessons can be drawn from Athenian democracy and Mare Liberum to counter the Chain Mail Gaze of today’s captains of industry and their masculine (demi)urges?