Fagged Pneumonia
accelerative futures show us the liminally eschatological, and the virus shows us that this liminality contains fates far worse than Death
Land's Sinofuturism is perhpas better imagined as a serofuturism. A neverending sequence of viral plagues, HIV being the first, Covid being the second, with new and esoteric forces of infection, colonisation of the body. If we extend our idea of the body to the mind then really the first of these viruses is narcsissm.
Once, it was that narcissism was a pathology, an aberration in human nature. Now it is not only endemic but aspirational; the motivating factor for peoples economic participation is cold revenge for a all-permeating sense of inadequacy, cultivated by an esoteric permeation of a sense of lack; a negative-econo-taxis, forcing people to part with their wealth in order to alleviate the pain at their original sin. New and more sophisticated mechanisms of cancerous bodies without organs, where free will breaks down itself to the point of death, emerge from the liminally eschatological; the zombified, the undying, the chronically ill. Long covid shows us this precisely; instead of the death we are owed from illness, we instead receive half-life; a semi-eternity of suffering resulting in something like Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream in which a malevolent AI called AM torments for eternity the last 5 humans it hasn't killed insome salvific (as of salvia) act of psychedelic cruelty:
Oh, Jesus sweet Jesus, if there ever was a Jesus and if there is a God, please please please let us out of here, or kill us. Because at that moment I think I realized completely, so that I was able to verbalize it: AM was intent on keeping us in his belly forever, twisting and torturing us forever. The machine hated us as no sentient creature had ever hated before. And we were helpless. It also became hideously clear: If there was a sweet Jesus and if there was a God, the God was AM.
Herein lies the "utopia" of meltdown; a technological singularity suspending us in post-death half-life forever. Death is the only antidote to nihilism, the ultimate structure of subjection (as of foucault). If we see capital as virus, or as a spore-adic eternemic fungus, a byproduct of any and all accelerative technological activity, then we must see it as satanic in that it preserves eternal half-life. We cease to be individuated beings capable of residing in utopia at all (any kind of "kingdom of god" if you like) and instead become another component of a higher emergent structure, a terminator, we are sub-machines of whatever alien force we are supposed to assist. For there to be a God, anthropologically and culturally, requires a full and complete death to be possible. Herein lies the necessity of the rites of funeral for society to function, to grow, to progress.
Supposing we as humans mange to effectively sidestep entropy to grow and exist long beyond the heat death of our observable universe, these viral futures become all the more pressing. As we progress, new and more intelligent outer gods (in a lovecraftian sense), of which the plagues represent will seek to absorb our growth, our prosperity. Like the god of rot from elden ring, its presence permeates life and seeks vessels in order to propogate itself, through the disease of scarlet rot.