Buying Street GHB To Treat My Crippling Narcolepsy

 Alt Title:  Wire Monkey State Mommy

"Before we start, I just want to know where you're leaning.  Are you thinking of getting the vaccines for your child?"

There were two families who were to have "vitamin K counselling".  In essence, all it meant was that these families had decided to forgo some of the injections at birth - one vaccine, one antibody, and one vitamin.

"Is there any particular reason why you don't want the jabs?"

We looked through the notes before the counselling, of course.  The reg reckoned this family would be more amenable to the vaccines.  Educated, but not health literate, she said.  

"The vitamin K injection is more important - everybody else's vaccinated, so you'll at least be protected by herd immunity."

There was a lot of wrangling on the reg's part.  Patient education.  Met with polite disinterest.  They had already made up their mind.  

So that was a bust.  The reg handed out the pamphlets, and she went off to document the interaction.  Just in case something bad did happen.  So we wouldn't get sued, of course.

***

Ever since the COVID pandemic, we have seen the sheer power of the state.  Remember:  the state had the power to transform a natural event - the virus itself - and problematise it, such that COVID became much more than the virus itself.  The virus was transmuted by institutions of the state - from lockdowns, to public health campaigns - into a swirling complex of the virus, its effects on us, and our responses to it.

This would not have been possible without the absolute power of the state.  No other entity has the legal or social right to power that would have enabled it to drastically alter the very contract of our lives.

It was as if at this moment, governments around the world apparently remembered the primacy of politics over all 3 other pillars of power (ideology, financial and military).  What's more, this political power had been seemingly amplified by technology over the years - systems of mass surveillance, both from shadowy sites across the world, to the semi voluntary panopticon of the internet.

Despite all the apparent return of power, we still remain in a depoliticised moment.  Despite that state of exception, state structures are confined to administration and bureaucratic tasks.  We are therefore in a state of permanent languid crisis - whereby we are confronted all at once by a disintegrating climate, a choking anomie and a pervasive nihilism - all of which we are currently combating by doing nothing.

The great powers of the state to mobilise, and perhaps more importantly, to antagonise sit empty, all whilst bearing greater potential than in any historical epoch.  For all of the state’s ability to dictate who lives and who dies, and whose lives are worth living in the first instance, such powers have fallen into sham mimicries of the past.

Indeed, even during the epoch of covid, liberal or “centre left” politics seemed to lack notions of bio or necropolitics.  For all the consternation regarding Boris Johnson’s “let the bodies pile up” approach, such opposition seemed to lack any consideration of the primacy of politics, and instead focused on “believing in the science”.  Even Boris Johnson’s plan, whilst seemingly political insomuch as it condemned masses to death, was in actuality a subordination of political considerations to economic powers.

As such, politics remains depoliticised, and yet its potency is not diminished.  The ability to consign thousands to debasement with a mere perfunctory stroke of the pen in the utter delusion and blindness of non-ideology is the hallmark of this Liberal age.

Worse still, should the state retreat from matters of life and death - should the functional organ of politics atrophy, these powers would not dissolve on their own.  The ability to deny the lives and lived essences has fled, sifted through the dying grasp of the state, and has landed in the open hands of marketised interests.  This is the final victory of the merchant class.  All power to the petit bourgeois, and so be it.

It is in this that we have created a tragic non-moment.  At the present, states stand all encompassing - from the icy deserts of Antartica to the North Pole, there lies no place where a state or that which seeks to become a state does not claim jurisdiction and jurisprudence.  Contrast this with early histories of man - take for example, from the Western and Eastern Zhou dynasties to the early warring states period, man could easily escape the grasp of the state.  Existential, sovereign powers were limited, and the state was marked by negativity, that is to say, the domains of the state were delineated by the absence of states.  Now we have not the means to escape states - even those in the meanest corners of America can rest assured knowing they can be called upon to die in Taiwan.

We have killed god, and in our exuberance, we have killed his son, politics.  But this cannot last.  

 

By means of the catastrophic changes in the 20th and 21st centuries, we are seeing the reperipheralisation of the metropole.  What the reperipheralisation of the metropole means however is the return of politics as an existential force.  And because it deals in life and death, it takes on a religious edge.  Yet in the absence of any totalising force, when confronting a vacuous universalism, belief structures undergo rapid, schizophrenic changes.  Incompatible, incoherent beliefs are given form, and all that can be agreed upon is the destruction of the present.  It is not merely that is it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, it is that the end of the world is preferable above all else.

In contrast to this natural crisis, this natural contagion, interpreted by man into a social contagion, artificial intelligence is an artificial "crisis" rendered natural.

Obviously artificial intelligence is artificial.  Yet through its portrayals of inevitability, and its piggybacking on modern notions of perpetual progress (such that the end of history and any sense of singularity might be one and the same), AI has morphed into a seemingly natural process we cannot stop.  Indeed, it is so powerful, so inevitable, it might as well be god.

This creates a great contradiction.  We have this silicon god.  And yet in what we can see, this silicon god's sole purpose appears to be to consume nuclear power plants' worth of energy to generate a 720p picture of garfield's removed testicles.  Far from a god of old that demonstrates its power by way of lightning, and thunder, famine, and death, this god lurks in the shadows.  Perhaps it rejects a loan application.  Perhaps it increases insurance premiums.  What is most important is the fact that these are all functions people can perform.    In fact, these AIs have no real agency of their own, and must rely on human inputs.  Indeed, rather than upending existing structures, AI serves to reinforce them to their breaking point

This is therefore an impotent god, akin to a hurricane churned up by a desk fan. 

It is a mundanely apocalyptic vision - the end of history by way of singularity, such that all decisions are rendered null by these thinking machines.

So indeed, as these machines demand more and more, the only path forward is to provide.  The only hope for the future left is the end of the future.

In all visions, in all crises, we have inklings of the end.  The last death rattle of exhaustion.  Long live modernity.