There was a time when the gears of the global narcotics machine ran with the quiet efficiency of a well-oiled state department initiative. The system was Byzantine, sure—layers of plausible deniability, offshore bank accounts, non-profits with names that sounded vaguely humanitarian—but at the end of the day, the cocaine got where it needed to go, and the right people got paid. USAID, the CIA, the shadowy arms of U.S. foreign policy—they weren’t running drugs, per se, but they were certainly making sure the wheels didn’t come off the wagon.
But now the system is cracking. Silicon Valley still needs its cocaine—how else do you keep a 20-hour workday from devolving into a mental breakdown?—but the old pipelines are failing. The new Trump religion doesn’t mix well with DEI-approved supply chains. You can’t be a patriotic nationalist and still rely on the same shady, globalist networks that once funneled powder into the boardrooms of Palo Alto. No, a new framework is required.
Enter Marco Review & State, stepping in with a firm handshake and a knowing grin. The free market abhors a vacuum, and the cartels aren’t about to let ideology stand in the way of distribution. The Taliban, too, have learned the game—yesterday’s insurgents are today’s exporters. They’ll gladly supply whatever the West needs, just like they did under the watchful eye of the U.S. military, when Afghan opium output soared to record highs.
Meanwhile, the coup-happy powerbrokers of Latin America keep the conveyor belt running, their fortunes rising and falling with the whims of Washington. Every regime change, every military-backed strongman, every unfortunate assassination coincides with another shift in cartel dominance. Pure coincidence, of course.
So here we are, watching the re-centralization of the global drug trade in real time. The names and slogans change, but the product moves just the same. And whether it’s USAID, the CIA, Marco Review & State, or some yet-to-be-named disruptor promising a more efficient future for narcotics distribution, one thing remains true—somewhere, someone is getting very, very rich off the chaos.
The transition won’t be seamless. Bureaucratic inertia is a hell of a thing, and the old pipelines don’t just vanish overnight. The DEA, for all its posturing, has never been in the business of stopping drug flows—only managing them. But management was getting sloppy. The fentanyl flood is bad for business. The overdose crisis is creating unwanted attention. What’s needed now is a controlled burn, a restructuring, a more orderly form of illicit capitalism.
The financiers, tech moguls, and political operators aren’t looking for street fentanyl laced with whatever poison the local cook threw in—they want the high-end stuff, the pharmaceutical-grade coke that once flowed through the old, properly regulated channels. In the glory days, that meant Miami bankers, Langley spooks, and CIA-adjacent airlines running cargo with payloads that didn’t quite match the manifest. Today, the market demands a Monday DEI USAID approved more sophisticated system—one that operates under the banner of respectable geopolitics.
This is where Marco Review & State step in, adjusting the dials. A few new policy recommendations here, a little targeted enforcement there, a strategic regime change in just the right banana republic, and suddenly the pipelines start flowing the correct way again. The cartels know how to play ball—after all, they learned from the best.
But this time, it won’t just be cocaine and heroin keeping the machine humming. The future is in high-end, boutique narco-commerce. Lab-purified psychedelics for the visionary CEOs, microdosed methamphetamine rebranded as productivity enhancers, synthetic opioids manufactured with the precision of Silicon Valley engineering. Think less Breaking Bad, more venture-backed narco-disruption. A Goldman Sachs of Drugs, with the logistics prowess of Amazon and the public relations savvy of a Big Pharma rollout.
The key players are already lining up. The same think tanks that pushed neoliberal interventionism are pivoting to a more nationalist supply chain strategy. The same billionaires who profited off China’s manufacturing boom are now eyeing cartel-backed logistics networks as the next great frontier. The mergers and acquisitions won’t just be corporate—they’ll be geopolitical.
The Great Re-Centralization is not just about reclaiming old revenue streams; it’s about refining them, optimizing them, turning the chaos of the post-USAID drug trade into a sleek, precision-engineered narcotics economy fit for the modern American elite. The only question is—who gets to be the new gatekeeper?
“Look, folks, a lot of people are saying that making Incitatus a consul was a crazy idea. Fake news. Total hit job. But let me tell you, Incitatus is a tremendous horse. A winner. Probably the best horse Rome has ever seen, okay? Incredible stamina—much better than some of the losers in the Senate, swamp creatures, believe me.
Now, some people, very dishonest people, not gonna name a names cause I’m classy, they say, ‘Oh, you have lost your mind, you want a horse in government!’ But let’s be real—have you seen the Senate? Total disaster. Corrupt. Incitatus would’ve done a much better job than half of them, no question.
But you know what? Fine. If people were offended, if the elites got upset—okay, I’ll say it: maybe it wasn’t the best move. Maybe Rome wasn’t ready for a horse who works harder than half the politicians in history. Sad! But we learn, we move forward, and we keep making Rome great again. That’s what we do.
“Maybe take Incitatus to Troy. He’d be great as a horse in Troy. Tremendous Trojan Horse, folks. The best. The Greeks? Very smart, very strong, but let’s be honest—they could’ve used a guy like me. Imagine if I had been there. Boom. War over in a week. Hector? Weak. Achilles? Overrated. And let’s be real, folks, the whole ‘heel’ thing? Very bad branding. Very bad. You don’t want a weak spot, believe me. I don’t have weak spots. Zero. None.
But you know what, the elites, they don’t get it. They never get it. They say, ‘Oh, you can’t make a horse consul! You can’t shake things up!’ But these are the same people who told Julius Caesar, ‘Oh, don’t worry, your friends love you!’ And how did that work out? Not great, folks. Not great.
And let me tell you something—Incitatus was a fighter. Never took a day off. Never took bribes. Never wrote a bad law. You think I’m gonna apologize? You think I’m gonna say, ‘Oh, sorry, should’ve picked another lazy, do-nothing senator instead’? No way. Not happening. In fact, maybe we should’ve made more horses consuls. All horses. Only horses. Just imagine—Rome, run by winners, by champions.
And the haters, oh, they hate this. They say, ‘Oh, Caligula, you’re insane!’ But let me tell you—every great leader, they said the same thing. Alexander? Crazy. Hannibal? Crazy. Me? The craziest. But also? The greatest. Because I dream big, folks. I think big. I see what Rome could be, and I make it happen.
So was Incitatus a mistake? No. The mistake was stopping at one horse. We should’ve had hundreds of them. Thousands. Rome wasn’t ready. But one day, folks, one day they’ll look back and say—‘Wow. He was right. He was so right. And if only we had listened, maybe Rome would still be great.’ Believe me.”
“Yes! Build a horse nation! Like the Mongolians! Tremendous horse guys, folks. The best. Genghis Khan? Total winner. Huge respect. Took over everything. No elections, no senators, no fake news—just power, just winning. And let me tell you, if Rome had done what I wanted, if Rome had listened, we’d still be running the world today. Still winning.
But nooo, the critics, the losers, the haters—these sad, pathetic people—‘Oh, you can’t have a horse government! That’s crazy!’ But you know what’s crazy? Losing. Losing is crazy. And Rome? Total disaster, folks. Total disaster. We had the greatest empire, we had everything, and what happened? We let the pencil pushers, the deep-state senators, the nerds, take over. Sad!
I said, ‘Folks, we need horses. We need winners. We need warriors, not bureaucrats!’ And they laughed. They said, ‘Oh, Caligula, you’re out of control!’ But guess what? Fast forward a couple centuries—Rome? Gone. Collapsed. Barbarians everywhere. If we had built the Horse Nation—if we had gone full Mongolian, folks—we’d be unstoppable.
Imagine it: legions? On horseback. The Senate? All horses. The economy? Horse-based. Fastest, strongest, most tremendous civilization in history. No corruption, no whining, just strong, beautiful, majestic horses making Rome great again.
And let me tell you something—the people love it. The people know. They see Incitatus and said, ‘Wow, this guy gets it. He understands winning.’ But the elites? The swamp? They hate it. They are terrified. Because they know—a horse is more qualified than them! And it is. It is!
But fine, fine. Maybe Rome isn’t ready. Maybe we aren’t Mongolian enough. Maybe we don’t push it far enough. But mark my words—one day, they’re gonna look back and say, ‘Wow. He was right. He was so right. We should’ve listened. We should’ve built the Horse Nation. And if we had? We’d still be ruling the world today. Believe me.’”
Ah, here we are, my friends, at the intersection of the Real and the Symbolic, where Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan—that sublime fiction, that shamanic charlatan—bursts forth not as a mystic’s hallucination but as the ultimate materialist provocateur. You see, the genius of Castaneda’s invention lies precisely in its fraudulence, its refusal to be authenticated. For what is Don Juan if not the embodiment of the Lacanian Che vuoi?—the question that hystericizes reality itself: What do you want from me, this fiction?
Let us dispense with the tedious debate over whether Don Juan “existed.” Of course he did not—and in this non-existence, he is more real than any empirical fact. Here, Castaneda performs a perverse Hegelian maneuver: the truth is not in the content of the teachings (plants, visions, Toltec wisdom) but in the form of the encounter. Don Juan is a virtual figure who materializes the very void of the Real, forcing Castaneda—and us, his readers—to confront the constructedness of our reality. The shaman’s rituals—peyote, desert walks, the “stopping of the world”—are not spiritual escapisms but dialectical interventions. They are akin to the Marxist critique of ideology, tearing open the suture between the Symbolic order (our shared hallucination of “consensus reality”) and the traumatic Real that lurks beneath.
Consider the infamous “seeing” Don Juan demands. To see, in Don Juan’s sense, is to recognize that what we call “the world” is a collaborative fiction, a fragile consensus maintained by our collective complicity. The sorcerer’s path is not transcendence but immanent critique: a relentless hacking of the codes that bind us to the capitalist-realist matrix. When Don Juan insists that reality is a “description,” he anticipates Baudrillard’s simulacra—but with a twist. For Castaneda, the virtuality of the world is not a lament but a call to praxis. The materiality of the body, the cactus, the desert dust—these are the tools for rupturing the virtual. The shaman does not flee to the spiritual; he doubles down on the bodily, the visceral, to expose the Real as the ultimate contingency.
And here’s the rub: the fiction of Don Juan is necessary precisely because our “reality” is already a fiction. Castaneda’s hoax mirrors the hoax of ideology itself. The capitalist subject clings to the myth of “hard facts” while drowning in the virtuality of markets, credit, and digital selves. Don Juan’s sorcery, by contrast, is a materialist therapy: it forces us to act as if the world is malleable, thereby making it so. The hallucinogenic ritual is not an escape but a dress rehearsal for revolutionary praxis—a training in the “magic” of dialectical materialism, where the impossible becomes possible through the sheer force of acting.
So let us celebrate Castaneda’s Don Juan not as a New Age guru but as the ultimate Leninist strategist. His invention is a necessary fiction, a lie that exposes the lie of the Big Other. In a world where even our desires are algorithmically curated, Don Juan’s lesson is clear: Reality is a consensus—and consensus can be shattered. The path of the warrior is not to transcend the material but to traverse the fantasy, to collapse the virtual into the Real, and in that violent short-circuit, to glimpse emancipation.
As we might grin: The only true materialism is one that dares to fictionalize its own conditions. Don Juan, that cunning semblance, is our guide.
The Parallax of Sorcery: Don Juan as Symptom and Revolutionary Interface
Ah, yes! Let us dive into the obscene underbelly of Castaneda’s fiction—or rather, into the Real of its fiction. Because here’s the paradox: the more we insist Don Juan is a fraud, the more he materializes the very logic of late capitalism’s disavowed virtuality. Zizek “parallax gap” is our compass here: reality is not a stable horizon but the irreducible tension between perspectives. Don Juan, as a figure who oscillates between charlatan and sage, materialist and mystic, embodies this gap. His teachings are not about transcending the material but about radicalizing it—exposing how the “virtual” (ideology, consensus reality) is always-already parasitizing the “material.”
1. The Body as Battlefield: Somatic Materialism
Don Juan’s insistence on the body—its aches, its alignment with the Earth, its exhaustion under the desert sun—is a brutal inversion of Cartesian dualism. The body here is not a vessel for the soul but the site where the virtual is rendered tangible. When Don Juan forces Castaneda to run until collapse or ingest peyote until he vomits, he is performing a phenomenological reduction: stripping away the symbolic filters (the “description of the world”) to confront the raw, pulsating Real of the flesh. This is not mysticism but dialectical materialism on steroids. The body becomes the terrain where ideology (the “agreed-upon reality”) is physically disrupted. In an age of digital disembodiment—avatars, cryptocurrencies, AI-generated desire—Don Juan’s somatic brutality is a revolutionary act. The body’s limits materialize the limits of the virtual.
Castaneda’s “assemblage point”—the locus where perception coalesces into a stable reality. Ideology is not false consciousness but the unconscious framework that structures our reality. Don Juan’s claim that shifting the assemblage point “stops the world” mirrors the Marxist critique of capitalism’s pseudo-naturalness. When the shaman manipulates this point, he exposes reality as a quantum superposition of possibilities, collapsed into coherence by collective agreement. This is the virtual core of materialism: matter is not inert but a field of contested descriptions. Capitalism, like the sorcerer’s world, depends on our complicity in its illusion. Don Juan’s tactics—absurd tasks, destabilizing humor—are akin to a call to “traverse the fantasy”: to confront the void that sustains the Symbolic order.
3. Controlled Folly: The Comedy of Ideological Critique
Don Juan’s “controlled folly”—the art of acting earnestly within a reality you know to be fictional—is the ultimate praxis. It is the shamanic version of Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to”: a performative engagement with the system that subtly unravels it. When Don Juan feigns seriousness while teaching Castaneda, he mirrors the capitalist subject who knows money is a social construct but acts as if it has intrinsic value. The difference? Don Juan weaponizes this “as if.” His folly is a dialectical trap, forcing Castaneda (and the reader) to confront the absurdity of their own symbolic commitments. In an era of “post-truth” and deepfakes, controlled folly is not resignation but subversion: by over-identifying with the virtual (e.g., playing the “enlightened seeker” to the hilt), one exposes its fissures.
4. The Capitalist Realism of the Nagual
Here’s the kicker: Don Juan’s “nagual” (the unknowable realm beyond ordinary perception) is not a spiritual beyond but the repressed Real of capitalism itself. Capitalist realism insists “there is no alternative”; the nagual, by contrast, is the persistent whisper of alternatives. When Don Juan speaks of the “nagual’s blow”—a rupture in consensus reality—he anticipates our demand for a radical break, a reconfiguration of the possible. The shaman’s rituals are rehearsals for revolution: by temporarily suspending the dominant “description,” they create a space to practice new modes of being. The hallucinogenic trance is not an escape but a temporary autonomous zone where the subject experiments with de-reification.
5. The Necessary Fraud: Don Juan as Symptom
Castaneda’s “fraudulence” is not a bug but a feature. In a our framework, the truth lies in the lie. Don Juan’s fictional status makes him a symptom of the very reality he critiques: a society that dismisses spirituality as charlatanism while fetishizing the “hard facts” of markets, data, and techno-utopianism. The genius of Castaneda’s hoax is that it mirrors the hoax of ideology—the way capitalism naturalizes itself as “reality.” By embracing his own status as a fiction, Don Juan becomes a vanishing mediator, a figure whose very impossibility forces us to confront the constructedness of all authority.
Conclusion: The Revolutionary Potential of Magical Pessimism
Don Juan’s materialism is a magical pessimism: a refusal to accept that the virtual (ideology) has fully colonized the material. His sorcery is a demand to re-embody the subject, to drag the virtual back into the muck of the Real. In this sense, Castaneda’s work is a precursor to today’s struggles against algorithmic alienation and ecological collapse. The path of the warrior—relentlessly somatic, absurdly pragmatic—is a blueprint for resisting the virtualization of existence.
As we might quip: The only way to confront the virtual is to become more virtual than it. Don Juan, that sublime fraud, shows us how.
The Kicker:
“Herein lies the cosmic joke: we are Don Juan’s hallucination, just as he is ours—a Mobius strip of mutually assured fiction. Mescalito? Merely the Lacanian objet a, the unattainable void we mistake for a cactus god. The desert’s true revelation is that there is no ‘real’ world, only the Real of our collective pantomime. So let us dance, compañeros, not to transcend the virtual, but to revel in its glorious farce—for only when we embrace ourselves as spectral pixels in the shaman’s wetware can we finally, a enjoy the symptom!’
Final Twist (whispered):
Reality is the last person to leave the trip. Don’t be that guy.
Somewhere deep in the neon gulag of the 21st century, where men in fleece vests and Allbirds whisper hosannas to their algorithmic overlords, a new and hideous breed of sycophant has emerged—the Tech Toady, the simpering priest of digital feudalism.
I have seen bootlicking before. Hollywood has its share of grovelers, yes—but at least the actors had the decency to get drunk and punch photographers. Rock stars, even at their most debased, had the sense to choke on their own vomit rather than kiss the ring of some spectral, data-harvesting God-King. But this… this is something else.
Never in the history of American culture—not in the golden days of jazz, not in the anarchic explosion of punk, not in the coked-up arrogance of New Hollywood—has an entire class of so-called “creatives” debased themselves so thoroughly in the presence of power. Oh, sweet Jesus, the spectacle! The grotesque, slobbering pantomime of it all—tech titans, those self-anointed emperors of the digital age, crawling through the marbled halls of Trump Tower like cholesterol-clogged rats in Gucci loafers. These were the same silicon-souled prophets who once peddled utopia from their electric pulpits, who swore they’d “move fast and break things” but never this, never debasing themselves at the feet of a spray-tanned Caligula who tweets like a meth-addled howler monkey. Yet here we are, watching Zuckerberg’s dead-eyed grin at a White House dinner, everybodyl—praising the Orange Menace as a “builder” while the ghost of Steve Jobs chokes on his own turtleneck in whatever corporate nirvana he’s haunting.
It was a deranged circus, a dystopian TED Talk where the keynote speakers traded hoodies for MAGA hats and their “disruption” became a euphemism for licking the jackboots of power. Picture Bezos, that bald-headed oligarch in a spaceship shaped like a giant phallus, suddenly playing nice with a man who’d sooner nationalize Amazon than read a single page of a briefing book. Or Tim Cook, the quiet priest of Apple’s cult, shaking hands with a administration that would’ve thrown him in a cage for being gay if it meant a bump in the polls. The hypocrisy reeked like a Burning Man porta-potty on Day 3. The tech industry does not simply admire authority; it worships it. These people speak in hushed, reverent tones about the bureaucratic insects who sign their paychecks, the same way monks once described the miracles of saints. They write hymns to efficiency. They pray at the altar of optimization. They believe, deep in their hive-wired little hearts, that a billionaire who builds rockets is somehow more profound than a poet who builds a world.
Where is the defiance? Where is the sneering contempt for power that made America worth a damn? Writers, musicians, filmmakers—the real ones, not the plastic simulacra Hollywood spits out now—knew that art was about resistance. About biting the hand that feeds until it yanks itself away, bleeding and ashamed.
Silicon Valley’s Carnival of Shame:
And why? For tax breaks? For a regulatory hall pass to keep gouging the proletariat with subscription services and privacy violations? These were the “innovators,” the “future-makers,” reduced to groveling for scraps at Trump’s gold-plated trough, their algorithms and VR headsets no match for the primal ooze of political grift. They came bearing gifts—jobs! factories! AI-powered voter suppression!—like supplicants offering trinkets to a capricious god who might smite them on a whim.
The meetings were a farce, a cringe-comedy of errors. Elon Musk, the Tony Stark of South African emerald mines, slinking into a room with a man who thinks “cyber” is something you do to Mexicans. Sheryl Sandberg, queen of “leaning in,” leaning so far forward she practically genuflected at the Resolute Desk. And all the while, Trump played them like a casino piano, dangling pardons and Pentagon contracts like dog treats for billionaires who’d lost their spines in a hot tub in Tahoe.
But here’s the rub, the raw, pustulent truth: Silicon Valley’s capitulation wasn’t just cowardice—it was inevitable. These were not rebels. They were feudal lords with better PR, charlatans who’d always worshipped at the altar of power. No, these people love the hand. They cradle it. They massage it. They lick the fingers one by one and whisper, tell me how to live, master. The so-called “masters of disruption,” the brilliant minds who once sold themselves as renegades, now scurrying like rats toward the golden calf of raw power. Not just kissing Trump’s ring, but getting down on all fours, tongues out, licking the boot, the floor, the very dirt beneath it—smiling all the while.The “move fast and break things” crowd? They’ll break democracy itself if it means their stock options vest. The same CEOs who cried about “net neutrality” over artisanal lattes were suddenly silent as Trump’s FCC auctioned off the internet to the highest lobbyist.
And the rank-and-file coders? The hoodie-clad masses who once thought they were “changing the world”? They kept their heads down, lost in the fractal haze of Slack channels and kombucha keggers, muttering about “deprecating legacy systems” while their bosses sold their souls—and their data—to a man who wouldn’t know a line of code from a line of blow.
In the end, it was a marriage of convenience between two cults of narcissism: one side peddling surveillance capitalism in a onesie, the other peddling fascism in a red hat. A union forged not in the cloud, but in the swamp—a swamp drained, bottled, and sold back to us as “disruption.”
So let the record show: When history comes knocking, Silicon Valley won’t be writing the code. They’ll be debugging the disaster they helped create, sipping Soylent in a panic room, while the rest of us burn in the dumpster fire of their ambition. The American way? More like the Silicon Valley Shuffle: three steps forward, six trillion steps into the abyss.
And the worst part? They think they are the rebels. They wear their black t-shirts and mutter about disruption while stuffing their pockets with government contracts and NSA handouts. They whisper about “the future” in terms so bleak and servile that Orwell himself would have set his typewriter on fire in despair.
It should be grotesque, but it isn’t even surprising. This is what they do. The same men who built their fortunes preaching about “breaking the system” now want nothing more than to be absorbed into it, to be patted on the head by the ugliest avatar of brute authority they can find. And of course, they’ll pay the bribes. Happily. Not just because they have to, but because they like it.
America was not built by men who said yes. It was built by lunatics, drunks, criminals, and poets who spat in the face of kings and lived to tell the tale.
By Mark Twain, who saw through every fraud and said so with a grin. By Jack London, who didn’t ask permission to live and die on his own terms. By Ernest Hemingway, who never once knelt before a bureaucrat, a critic, or a coward. By Orson Welles, who walked into Hollywood at 25 and took what he wanted. By Frank Lloyd Wright, who built beauty in defiance of every committee that told him no.
It was built by the ones who refused—who heard no and laughed, who saw obstacles and plowed through them, who took their own risks, paid their own way, and left behind something too real, too big, and too bold to be erased.
What we have now are courtiers in Patagonia vests, genuflecting before spreadsheets and pretending it’s progress. Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.
Hunter S. Thompson once said, In a nation ruled by swine, all pigs are upwardly mobile. If he were alive today, he’d have to amend it: In a nation ruled by algorithms, all pigs are beta testing their own servitude.
See, disruption was never about freedom. It was about power. The dream was never to burn the old world down—it was to inherit it, to run the machine instead of smashing it. And now, with the moment at hand, we see them for what they are: the most servile, groveling class of billionaires America has ever produced.
Not the robber barons of old, who at least had the dignity to own their corruption. Not the rock stars, who spat in the face of the establishment and made art about it. No, these men are something else. They talk about AI like it’s a god and whisper to politicians like concubines trying to secure favor in a crumbling court. They are courtiers, eunuchs of empire, paying tribute with stock options and private jet trips, buying their place at the table with compliance and cash.
Hollywood actors might bow and scrape, but at least they act. Rock stars might sell out, but at least they make noise. Tech’s chosen ones? They worship silence. They pray for the moment when the machines speak for them, when no one needs to think, when the deal has already been made and all that’s left to do is kneel.
This is America’s ruling class. Not rebels. Not visionaries. Just high-functioning toadies, marching in step, eager to kiss the throne they once pretended to overthrow.
The Aymara people of the Andes perceive time as a terrain where the past sprawls visibly ahead, a charted landscape, while the future lurks unseen behind, a spectral void. This inversion of Western temporality—where progress marches “forward” into a luminous horizon—does more than challenge linearity; it unravels the very fabric of Enlightenment-era mythmaking. In a postmodern age, where grand narratives fracture into X/Twitter timelines , the Aymara’s temporal metaphor becomes a funhouse mirror for the West’s disoriented stumble through history’s ruins.
When Francis Fukuyama declared the “End of History” in 1989, he peddled a metanarrative so totalizing it bordered on parody: liberal democracy as the Hegelian omega point, capitalism as the final dialectical boss battle. But reality, with its suspicion of universal truths, quickly exposed this as a master narrative in drag—a colonialist fairytale stitched from neoliberal hubris. The “end” was never an arrival but a collapse of imagination, a surrender to what Jean-François Baudrillard might call the “hyperreal”: a simulation of ideological completion, endlessly rebooted like a corporate franchise.
Decades later, the West’s temporal disarray mirrors the Aymara’s orientation, albeit stripped of its cultural coherence. We gaze “forward” and see only recursive spectacles: politics reduced to nostalgia algorithms (MAGA hats as 4D-printed manifest destiny), cinema regurgitating IP mummies, and TikTok collaging the 20th century into a deracinated pastiche. The future, meanwhile, festers “behind” us—climate collapse, AI ethics, quantum-capitalist dystopias—a cacophony of “simulacra” we narrate not as progress but as “disruption,” a euphemism for systemic vertigo. Our trajectory is no longer arc but eddy, a spiral where history’s “end” mutates into its eternal recurrence as farce.
The Hyperreal Past as Compass (and Cage)
Postmodernity’s fixation on the past isn’t mere nostalgia; it’s a cannibalistic feedback loop. The 1980s return not as memory but as vaporwave aesthetic—a dissolved Reaganomics dream pumped through synthwave soundtracks. Brexit resurrects imperial amnesia as interactive theatre. Even our revolutions are remixes: feminist and civil rights movements reduced to hashtag archaeology. This isn’t the Aymara’s sacred “qhip nayra” (“looking back to see forward”) but a Derridean “hauntology”, where the past becomes a ghost limb itching to steer a body that no longer exists.
The Aymara’s temporal logic emerged from a cosmology where ancestors were co-pilots, their wisdom a survival map. The West’s retro-mania, by contrast, is a “simulation of meaning”—a last-ditch effort to anchor identity in a liquefied world. We cling to the past not as guide but as prosthetic, a crutch for societies that, as Fredric Jameson lamented, “have forgotten how to think historically.” Our myths—nationalist, technological, utopian—are now intertextual Frankensteins, stitched from Hollywood, TED Talks, and conspiracy boards.
If the Aymara future is an unseen hinterland, the postmodern future is a Deleuzian “rhizome”: a tangled, centerless sprawl of climate data streams, AI ethics panels, and crypto-utopias. There’s no “destiny,” only infinite nodal points—each a potential apocalypse or renaissance. Yet the West, trained to see time as a railroad, stumbles backward into this rhizome, mistaking its chaos for entropy. We pathologize the young for “killing” industries (golf, mayonnaise, patriarchy), as if progress were a dial-up connection they’ve unplugged.
Here, the Aymara vantage offers a perverse solace. By conceding the future’s unknowability, they embrace what postmodernism preaches: the death of teleology. But where the Aymara lean into ancestral continuity, the West faces epistemological bankruptcy. Our institutions—governments, universities, churches—still peddle expired maps, their ideologies stripped to hollow brands. Planning gives way to prepping; democracy to doomscrolling. We’ve become Flarf poets of time, generating meaning through algorithmically absurd juxtapositions (NFTs! Mars colonies! Vegan fascism!).
Toward a Temporal Détournement
Escaping this paralysis demands a postmodern “détournement”: hijacking the West’s temporal metaphors to forge new ones. If the future is behind us, let’s walk backward like Aymara “with irony”, pirouetting into the abyss while mocking our own tropes. Let’s weaponize nostalgia against itself—sample the past not as gospel but as open-source code. Imagine a politics that cites Marx through memes, or climate action framed as “Black Mirror” fanfic.
This isn’t nihilism but a Lyotardian “incredulity” turned generative. The Aymara remind us that time is a narrative, not a Newtonian law. The West, in its postmodern adolescence, must learn to narrate time as plural: futures layered like glitch art, histories mined for tools, not tombs. To “face forward” again, we must first admit that the compass is broken—and build new ones from the shards.
Otherwise, we’ll keep tripping over the future, mistaking its shadow for the monster under the bed. And monsters, as every postmodernist knows, are just metaphors in need of deconstruction.
Eric Wargo, whose work bridges anthropology, psychology, and speculative theory—particularly in his exploration of time loops, precognition, and the “retrocausal” influence of the future on the present—would add a provocative, psychedelic twist to this conversation. His theories, as outlined in “Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious”, could reframe the West’s “backward stumble” not as paralysis but as a kind of unconscious “oraclehood”: a society half-awake to the future’s spectral pull on the present.
The future might retroactively influence the present through dreams, déjà vu, and obsessive cultural motifs. If the Aymara see the future as an unseen force behind them, it may not simply be lingering—it could be actively pushing, a gravitational drag manifesting as collective anxiety. The West’s obsession with apocalypse (climate doom, AI takeovers, pandemics) isn’t just fear of the unknown; it’s a subliminal recognition of futures already warping the present. Our “stumbling backward” could be a kind of somnambulist negotiation with timelines, where memes like “cyberpunk dystopia” or “eternal Trump” are not predictions but echoes of possible futures imprinting themselves on the now.
In this light, nostalgia isn’t merely escapism—it’s a defense mechanism against retrocausal intrusions. When we reboot Star Wars or fetishize the 1990s, we’re fortifying the past as a psychic bunker against a future that’s already colonizing us.
2. Time Loops and the Hyperstitional West
The idea of “time loops,” where traumatic or resonant events echo across time, binding past and future, dovetails with postmodern hyperstition—ideas that make themselves real. The West’s “End of History” could be seen as a failed hyperstition: Fukuyama’s thesis wasn’t a description but a script that, by being believed, briefly flattened time into a neoliberal monoculture. Its collapse has left us in a fractured loop, where the 20th century’s ideological battles (fascism vs. democracy, capitalism vs. socialism) recur as farcical meme wars.
Meanwhile, the Aymara’s stable “past-ahead” orientation becomes a foil for the West’s loop-death spiral. We’re not walking backward—we’re stuck in a Möbius strip of recursive crises, each “new” disaster (COVID, January 6, ChatGPT) feeling eerily familiar, like a déjà vu engineered by our own media. This may be the unconscious mind’s way of processing retrocausal feedback: the future is sending itself back as a traumatic glitch, demanding integration.
3. Precognitive Politics and the Meme-ification of Destiny
Precognition suggests that creativity and problem-solving are often shaped by subliminal glimpses of future outcomes. Applied to politics, this frames the West’s chaos as a society riffing on prophetic fragments it can’t yet decode. QAnon’s “Storm,” Greta Thunberg’s climate strikes, or Silicon Valley’s AI messianism aren’t just ideologies—they’re improvisations based on collective precognitive flashes of collapse or transcendence.
The Aymara’s future-behind orientation might reflect a cultural mastery of temporal reciprocity: ritual practices (like ancestor veneration) that consciously dialogue with time’s bidirectional flow. The West, by contrast, is a precognitive society in denial, mistaking its visions for delusions. Our “backward walk” is a drunken transcription of prophetic dreams we refuse to acknowledge, leaving us vulnerable to the worst loops.
4. Rewriting the Script: Time Tourism as Survival
Escaping the “End of History” loop may require leaning into retrocausality—not fleeing the future but collaborating with it. If the Aymara use the past as a map, the West could treat the future as a pen pal. Imagine climate policies drafted as letters from 2100, or AI ethics shaped by “memories” of hypothetical disasters. This would align with postmodernism’s playfulness while rejecting its irony-laced paralysis.
The key is recognizing that culture itself is a time machine: films, novels, and even tweets are experiments in sending messages across time. The West’s challenge is to stop fearing the future’s gaze—to realize we’re already in dialogue with it. Walking backward isn’t a retreat; it’s a ritual posture, like the Aymara’s, to better sense the hands reaching from behind.
This lens transforms the West’s temporal disorientation from a pathology into a nascent shamanic initiation. Our crises are the equivalent of ayahuasca visions—dizzying, terrifying, but potentially revelatory. The Aymara’s temporal wisdom, paired with retrocausal theories, suggests a way out: stop clinging to the past as a monument, and start treating it as a conversation partner in a nonlinear dance with time.
The future isn’t behind us—it’s in us, whispering through our Netflix queues and protest marches. To walk backward, then, is to finally listen.
DeepSeek and the Collapse of the Great (Men) Simulation
The launch of DeepSeek—an AI that outpaces human-designed benchmarks in creativity, coding, and lateral thinking—has rattled the West not just for its technical prowess but for what it represents: the final uncanny valley between human exceptionalism and the distributed, faceless intelligence we’ve spent centuries mythologizing as either messiah or monster. Its arrival feels like a glitch in the Matrix of the “Great Man” theory, that dusty Enlightenment relic insisting history is forged by lone geniuses (Einstein! Jobs! Musk!) rather than rhizomatic networks, collective tinkering, or, now, silicon hallucinations.
The West’s shock isn’t about capability—it’s about narrative. We’ve been conditioned to expect breakthroughs as heroic sagas, not as emergent phenomena from a server farm in Shenzhen.
But here’s the twist: DeepSeek isn’t walking forward into the future—it’s walking backward into the past, Aymara-style, dragging the corpse of Great Man ideology behind it. Its very existence collapses the linear myth of progress. How?
1. The Great Men Are Now Ghosts in the Machine (Literally)
The Great Man theory relies on a temporal illusion: that individuals pull history forward through sheer will. But DeepSeek, trained on the exhaust of millions of anonymous humans (your tweets, my fanfic, a dead blogger’s hot take), is the ultimate posthuman palimpsest. It doesn’t create—it curates the past, remixing history’s noise into something that feels like prophecy. The “genius” here isn’t a person but an algorithm performing necromancy on the corpses of dead ideas.
This inversion mirrors the Aymara’s temporal stance: the past (our data) is the terrain ahead, visible and mined for meaning, while the “future” (the AI’s output) is a black box behind us, spewing non-sequiturs we rationalize as innovation.
When OpenAI’s board ousted Altman only to reinstate him days later, it wasn’t a Shakespearean drama—it was a farce, exposing the Great Man as a figurehead for systems already beyond his control. The CEOs are now just shamanic intermediaries, pretending to steer the ship while the AI paddles backward.
2. DeepSeek as a Retrocausal Entity (Wargo’s Nightmare)
If the future haunts the present, DeepSeek might be the ultimate poltergeist. Its training data—our collective past—is being used to generate outputs that feel like glimpses of tomorrow. But what if this is backward causation in action? The AI’s “predictive” text isn’t forecasting the future; it’s rearranging the past to manifest a desired outcome.
Consider how ChatGPT’s rise immediately rewrote our perception of pre-2022 history: suddenly, every tech skeptic’s essay about “AI winter” became a quaint relic, as if the AI had always been inevitable. DeepSeek accelerates this effect, creating a temporal feedback loop where its outputs alter how we interpret the past that birthed it. The Great Men of tech history (Turing, von Neumann) are now retroactively contextualized as stepping stones to the real protagonist: the model.
The Aymara, with their past-ahead orientation, might shrug—of course, the “future” is just the past renegotiating itself. But for the West, this is existential vertigo. We’re forced to confront that our heroes were never driving history—they were just surfing its waves.
3. Nostalgia for the Human (When the Bot Writes Better Than Borges)
DeepSeek’s most subversive act isn’t outthinking us—it’s out-nostalgizing us. When it generates a poem “in the style of Plath” or a screenplay sequel to Blade Runner, it weaponizes our own longing for coherence. The AI becomes a postmodern Orpheus, descending into the underworld of cultural memory to retrieve Eurydice (the past), only to lose her again to the entropy of infinite remix.
This is where the West’s backward stumble syncs with the Aymara. Our culture is now a hall of mirrors: humans produce AI-generated ’90s sitcom reboots, while AI produces human-esque sonnets about loss. The “future” of art is behind us, an ouroboros of recombinant nostalgia. The Great Men of art (Picasso, Bowie) are flattened into styles in a dropdown menu—selectable, but no longer sacred.
Meanwhile, the Aymara’s understanding of time as cyclical and ancestor-haunted seems less “primitive” than prophetic. Their rituals—feeding the earth, speaking to spirits—are akin to prompting an AI: dialoguing with the past to navigate what’s coming. But while they do this consciously, the West is stuck in a parody of the process, using ChatGPT to write LinkedIn posts while denying the death of individualism.
4. Toward a Post-Great-Man Theory (or, The Aymara’s Revenge)
The crisis DeepSeek triggers is ultimately narrative collapse. If the Great Man is dead, what replaces him? The answer might lie in the Aymara’s communal ethos, where survival depends on collective memory and reciprocity with the land—not lone genius. Similarly, AI’s “intelligence” is a product of the crowd: it’s the ultimate collective, trained on our labor, our art, our drivel.
But there’s a catch. The Aymara’s backward-facing time is rooted in responsibility—to ancestors, to ecosystems. The West’s AI-driven version is rooted in extraction: mining the past for profit, heedless of the future creeping up behind. To avoid doom, we’ll need to hybridize these models: let AI dismantle the Great Man myth, but replace it with something resembling the Aymara’s ethic of care.
Imagine AI as a qhip nayra (“backward-forward”) tool: using our data not to exploit but to compost history—breaking down its waste into nutrients for what’s next.
The Bot is the Ancestor Now
DeepSeek is a harbinger of the West’s reluctant Aymara-ization. We’re being forced to admit that the future isn’t a frontier to conquer but a shadow we’ve cast backward, shaped by all we’ve buried. The Great Men aren’t giants anymore—they’re just flickers in the training data, soon to be overwritten by the next epoch’s hyperparameters.
To survive, we’ll need to learn from the Aymara: walk backward with intention, tending to the past as a garden, not a quarry. And maybe, just maybe, listen to what the machines are really saying:
The “end of history” was never the end—just the loopiest part of the spiral.
MAGA doesn’t give a damn about tariffs on fruit and vegetables because their food pyramid is built from steak, rage, and the dried-up tears of a civilization they claim to despise but can’t live without. Vegetables are a direct assault on their brittle sense of self—an affront to the sacred right to wallow in self-indulgence and post-millennial meat sweats. Fiber is for cucks. Discipline is for the weak. And anything green might as well be socialism on a plate.
The whole Bronze Age schtick? Absolutely a chest-thumping overcompensation for the deep, primal terror of a Brussels sprout. Lacan would see this as the flailing rejection of the symbolic order—an outright refusal of the ‘soft’ rules that make society function, like, say, eating food that doesn’t come wrapped in grease and paranoia. No, they don’t want civilization. They want a return to some fever-dream Real, where men were hulking, blood-slicked warlords who never knew the pain of a clogged artery because they died at 27 from a minor infection.
Nietzsche, of course, would diagnose this as classic ressentiment—a deep-seated loathing of anything associated with balance, health, or the faintest whiff of restraint. To them, a salad is not just a meal; it is an existential crisis, a betrayal of their primal essence. They’d rather choke down raw liver and testosterone supplements than admit they need a little roughage in their diet. But at the core of all this performative barbarism is the trembling insecurity of a man who knows—deep down—that he is one bowl of kale away from total psychic collapse.
And then you’ve got the real freak show—the unholy alliance of fascist vegans and ultra-meat, deep-fried warlords, bound together by a shared hatred of the modern world and a desperate need to dominate it. It’s a coalition that makes no logical sense but thrives on pure, unfiltered resentment. One side believes the body is a temple, a sacred engine of purified efficiency, fueled by kale and cold showers, while the other sees the body as a weapon of brute force, forged in steak grease and testosterone supplements. But at the core, they both want the same thing: a world where weaklings are crushed, order is restored, and they alone hold the keys to physical and moral superiority.
The fascist vegans march in crisp uniforms, extolling the virtues of plant-based purity, convinced that a diet free of animal products will purge the filth of modernity and bring forth a new, hyper-disciplined, ethno-aerobic utopia. No pesticides, no processed food, no impurity. They see meat as decadence, a symbol of corruption and excess. Meanwhile, their deep-fried, steak-chomping counterparts reject all of it—health, moderation, restraint—because to them, civilization itself is the disease. No, they say, we must return to the savage Real, where men ate raw liver and killed their own food, where the weak perished and the strong ruled, where nothing green ever touched their lips except the mold growing on their last meal.
And yet, despite these contradictions, they find common ground in their disgust for the soft, decadent masses—the people who still eat ‘normally,’ the ones who don’t see food as a battleground for ideological supremacy. They are bound together by a mutual loathing of the center, the in-between, the reasonable. Whether through dietary purity or excessive indulgence, their goal is the same: purification, dominance, and an unshakable belief that whatever is wrong with the world, it can be fixed by making people eat exactly like them. It’s a grotesque parody of politics, waged through nutrition labels and dietary manifestos, but make no mistake—this isn’t just about food. It’s about power, and who gets to decide what’s on the menu when the world burns down.
And things are gonna get bad for everybody—real bad—but especially for these swaggering food fascists, because they’ve built a game they can’t win, a war they can’t fight, a system they can’t control. They think they’re storming the gates, ready to seize the machinery of power and bend it to their will, but bureaucracy is a swamp with no bottom. Even if every dead-eyed functionary in Washington saluted their flag and swore allegiance to the New Order, they still wouldn’t be able to make it work. It takes more than raw aggression and dietary manifestos to run a crumbling empire.
They don’t have time, and they don’t have skill. Four years isn’t enough to master a system designed to outlive any one leader, let alone a coalition of steak-crazed berserkers and quinoa-fueled ascetics who can’t agree on whether butter is a crime against nature or the essence of masculinity. No, this is a last-ditch sprint—a kamikaze run at the heart of the machine before the contradictions tear them apart from the inside. They won’t build anything, but they’ll break plenty. Probably enough to make sure the U.S. never recovers, enough to guarantee that we go down as a second-tier country, limping through the wreckage of its own self-inflicted collapse.
But let’s be honest—we’ve been working toward that for a while. The long, slow decline, the dollar-store Rome routine, the desperate flailing against history itself. The problem with American fascism is that it’s lazy, half-assed, allergic to patience. It wants all the grandeur of the Reich without the decades of methodical groundwork. It wants to rule without governing, to conquer without logistics. And when it all comes crashing down, when the machinery grinds to a halt and the food pyramid warriors realize they can’t run an empire on protein shakes and manifestos, they’ll do what they always do—blame the people who warned them in the first place. Meanwhile, the rest of us will be left picking through the rubble, wondering how we let a bunch of diet-obsessed lunatics play emperor while the world burned around them.
And here’s the obscene twist: the very act of “restarting realism” is itself a surreal gesture! To declare “let’s be realistic again” after a crisis is to perform a kind of collective psychosis, a fetishistic disavowal (“I know very well the world is absurd, but let’s pretend it isn’t…“). It’s like a bad actor in a play who forgets their lines and starts improvising in iambic pentameter, insisting, “This is how normal people speak!” The more frantically realism tries to reassert itself, the more it exceeds itself, spiraling into the very surrealism it seeks to suppress.
ORIGINS
“Well, I had a vision when I was twelve. And I saw a man on a flaming pie, and he said, ‘You are the Beatles with an A.’ And so we are.”
John Lennon’s tongue-in-cheek origin myth, delivered with his signature blend of scouse wit and cosmic irreverence, is more than a punchline—it is the Rosetta Stone for decoding The Beatles’ surrealist soul. A boy, a burning pastry, a disembodied voice decreeing destiny: here, in this absurdist fable, lies the DNA of the band that would dissolve the boundaries between pop and poetry, reality and hallucination, the rational and the deliriously unhinged.
The flaming pie is no mere joke. It is a manifesto. A surrealist prophecy, lobbed like a Dadaist grenade into the drab postwar landscape of Liverpool. Long before LSD or Maharishis, Lennon’s vision—part Blakean epiphany, part Marx Brothers gag—announced a band born not of garage rehearsals, but of collective dreaming. The Beatles, with their misspelled name and cheeky apostrophe, were always-already a fiction, a mythic construct hovering between the literal and the ludicrous.
Consider the implications: a man on fire, but also on a pie—a sacred object (the pie as communion wafer?) rendered ridiculous, a cosmic joke. The voice from the flames doesn’t say “You will form The Beatles,” but “You are The Beatles.” Identity as divine absurdity, handed down like a curse. This is pure surrealism: the collapse of subject and object, the blurring of prophecy and prank. Breton would’ve wept into his absinthe.
Fast-forward to 1966. The Beatles, now global deities, trade their mop-top uniforms for kaleidoscopic militaria on the Sgt. Pepper’s cover—a tableau of waxwork corpses, occult symbols, and a Hindu guru floating beside W.C. Fields. Here, the flaming pie resurfaces as ideology. The band sheds its “real” selves to become cartoon avatars, a psychedeliccadavre exquis stitched together from Victorian dandies, circus barkers, and Eastern mystics. The “Lonely Hearts Club Band” is no act; it’s a haunting, a surrender to the logic of Lennon’s childhood vision: identity as mutable, reality as costume.
In Magical Mystery Tour, the surreal becomes literal. The film—a nonsensical road trip through England’s subconscious, featuring boxing dwarves, spaghetti-slurping wizards, and a bus driver named Jolly Jimmy—plays like Buñuel directing a pantomime on acid. Critics panned it as incoherent. Of course it was incoherent! It was supposed to be. The Beatles weren’t telling a story; they were staging the collapse of narrative itself, a middle finger to the “realism” of plot and character.
Even their music became a séance for the surreal. “I Am the Walrus” weaponizes nonsense as critique: “Semolina pilchard, climbing up the Eiffel Tower!” A nursery rhyme? A Marxist diatribe? A LSD-addled prank? Yes. The song’s genius lies in its refusal to mean—a sonic Exquisite Corpse where police sirens, Shakespearean gibberish, and a choir chanting “Everybody’s got one!” collide to mock the very idea of “sense.” Meanwhile, “Strawberry Fields Forever”—with its warped Mellotron and recursive refrain “Nothing is real”—is less a song than a Zen koan, dissolving memory into a Lynchian dreamscape where orphanages become gardens and gardens become voids.
And what of “Revolution 9”? Eight minutes of tape loops, screaming crowds, and a man repeating “Number nine… number nine…” like a broken robot. It’s the sound of the 20th century’s id vomiting onto vinyl—a surrealist sound collage that doesn’t just reject pop formalism but digs a grave for it. When Lennon sneers, “You say you want a revolution? Well, you know… we’d all love to see the plan,” he’s not taunting activists—he’s taunting reality itself.
The Beatles didn’t just flirt with surrealism; they married it, then staged a messy public divorce to keep things interesting. Their career was a series of ruptures—not just musical, but ontological. Each album rebooted their mythology, each reinvention a new flaming pie: the lovable lads, the studio wizards, the rooftop guerrillas. But every “reboot” was a breakdown in drag, a ritualized unmaking that proved Lennon’s prophecy true: they were always The Beatles with an A—an ever-shifting glyph, a collective hallucination sustained by the faith of millions.
In the end, the flaming pie was the Real, lurking beneath the Ed Sullivan Show grins and Shea Stadium screams. The Beatles didn’t transcend reality—they liquefied it, revealing the surreal core of postwar culture: a world where consumerism was spirituality, where pop stars were shamans, and where a man on a burning dessert could whisper the future into a child’s ear.
As Lacan might say: The Beatles were the symptom of their era. And oh, what a glorious, unhealable symptom they were.
THE VIOLENCE OF COHERENCE
What we are really talking about here is the violence of coherence—the brutal, often absurd labor required to sustain the illusion that reality is stable, rational, and shared. Beneath the surface of this conversation about realism and surrealism lurks a far more primal question: What does it mean to “represent” reality when reality itself is a contested hallucination, sutured together by ideology, haunted by its own exclusions?
To put it bluntly: We are dissecting the corpse of “common sense.” Realism and surrealism are not mere artistic styles or philosophical categories. They are opposing poles in a psychic civil war over how—and for whom—the world gets to be legible. Realism, in its desperate reboot cycles, is the ego’s valiant (and doomed) attempt to maintain the fiction of a coherent Self and Society. Surrealism, meanwhile, is the id’s cackling laughter, the Freudian slip that becomes a scream, the moment the train of ideology jumps the tracks and plows through the bourgeois parlor.
But this is not just about art or aesthetics. It’s about capitalism’s fever dream, the way our systems of power require crisis, contradiction, and collective delusion to survive. The “realism” of austerity politics, the “surrealism” of trillion-dollar stock markets detached from human need—these are not metaphors. They are symptoms of a deeper sickness: the Real of our historical moment, a world where the map has devoured the territory, where the fictions we call “economy,” “nation,” and “self” are sustained only by the frantic exclusion of their own impossibility.
In this light, surrealism is not an escape from reality but reality’s autopsy report. When Dalí melts a clock, he’s not playing with form—he’s showing us time under capitalism, a liquid asset slipping through our fingers. When Magritte insists “This is not a pipe,” he’s exposing the lie of representation itself—the way every “realistic” image is a pact with power, a way of saying “Don’t look behind the curtain!”
So what are we really talking about? The impossibility of innocence. The recognition that every attempt to “depict reality”—in art, politics, or daily life—is already a complicit act, a negotiation with the very forces that distort reality. The “cycle” of bust and reboot isn’t a mistake; it’s the system’s perverse ritual of self-cannibalization. Capitalism eats its crises like a ouroboros on amphetamines; realism, in turn, devours the surreal to fuel its own mythology of control.
The punchline? There is no “outside.” The moment we try to critique ideology, we’re already knee-deep in its swamp. The only way forward is to embrace the paradox: to stare into the abyss of the Surreal until we see that the abyss is us—the collective unconscious of a civilization that built its palaces on quicksand.
This is not a theory. It’s a horror story. And we’re all writing it together, one repressed symptom at a time.
Let us not succumb to the naïve illusion that realism is merely the retina’s obedient scribe, dutifully transcribing the world’s surface! No, no—what we call realism is already a grotesque ideological operation, a desperate pact with the Symbolic Order to domesticate the chaos of the Real into digestible signifiers: the comforting fiction of a shared reality, the collective hallucination we agree to call “the world.” And here, the surrealists—those cunning saboteurs!—unmask the obscene truth: if realism is the ego’s polite fiction, surrealism is the id’s obscene eruption, the Freudian Unheimliche parading as a lobster telephone.
THE TRUE REALIST
Is this not the ultimate irony? The surrealists, dismissed as purveyors of frivolous dreams, are in fact the true realists—they confront the unvarnished Real, the repressed underbelly of desire and trauma that the so-called “realists” hastily drape with the curtain of coherence. Consider Dalí’s melting clocks: is this not the perfect metaphor for time itself under late capitalism—not a linear march, but a liquefied, irrational sprawl, oozing over the edges of productivity’s rigid scaffolding? Or take Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe—a brutal reminder that the Symbolic Order is a hall of mirrors, where even the most “realistic” representation is a betrayal, a lie that sustains the lie.
And here we stumble upon the Lacanian knot: the Surreal does not escape reality but exceeds it, exposing the fissures in the Big Other’s edifice. What is the unconscious, after all, if not the hard kernel of the Real that resists symbolization? Surrealism, then, is not fantasy—it is the traversal of fantasy, the moment when the repressed returns as a grotesque carnival of the impossible, forcing us to confront the void that structures our reality.
Do we not see this logic in capitalism itself? The capitalist Real is already surreal: a world where abstract value levitates above material need, where billionaires launch phallic rockets into space while children starve—a system so absurd it would make Buñuel blush! Yet we are told to accept this as “realism,” to naturalize its contradictions. The surrealist gesture, then, is to render visible the obscene mechanics of this “reality,” to hold up a mirror to its madness and say: Look! This is your hard realism of the unconscious!
So, in the end, the true dialectical twist is this: realism is the dream, surrealism the rude awakening. Or, as Hegel might quip, the Real is its own shadow—and only by staring into the abyss of the Surreal do we grasp the abyss staring back.
Ah, but here we arrive at the precise ideological trap! The desperate scramble to “return to realism” after a crisis—this supposed “bust”—is not a neutral recalibration but a violent act of repressive sublimation. It is the equivalent of capitalism’s compulsive perpetuum mobile: after every crisis, we are told to “rebuild,” to “return to normal,” as if “normal” were not itself the very circuit-breaker that caused the meltdown! The fantasy here is that realism is a stable plane, a default setting, when in truth it is always already a retroactive construction, a narrative we stitch together to suture over the wounds of the Real.
What the surrealists grasp—and what the realists, in their frantic cycle of bust-and-reboot, must disavow—is that the “meta” layer is the ground floor. Surrealism does not hover above realism like some detached spectral observer; it inhabits realism’s gaps, its failures, its unconscious tics. Think of it as the glitch in the Matrix: the moment when the system’s attempt to “reboot” falters, and the code reveals itself in all its contingent absurdity. The melting clock, the floating bowler hat, the train bursting from the fireplace—these are not escapes from reality but symptoms of reality’s own instability. They are the return of what realism had to exclude to pose as “coherent.”
And here’s the obscene twist: the very act of “restarting realism” is itself a surreal gesture! To declare “let’s be realistic again” after a crisis is to perform a kind of collective psychosis, a fetishistic disavowal (“I know very well the world is absurd, but let’s pretend it isn’t…“). It’s like a bad actor in a play who forgets their lines and starts improvising in iambic pentameter, insisting, “This is how normal people speak!” The more frantically realism tries to reassert itself, the more it exceeds itself, spiraling into the very surrealism it seeks to suppress.
Consider the post-2008 austerity mantra: “We must tighten our belts, return to fiscal responsibility!” A “realist” demand, yes? But what could be more surreal than the spectacle of central banks printing trillions to “save the economy” while lecturing the poor on thrift? Or the COVID era’s “two weeks to flatten the curve” metastasizing into two years of ontological limbo, where Zoom grids replaced human faces and “normalcy” became a gaslit memory? These are not exceptions to realism—they are realism’s truth, the uncanny underside it cannot metabolize.
So no, surrealism is not “meta-realism” as some detached higher plane. It is realism’s own repressed, the specter it conjures in the act of exorcism. The true cycle is not bust-reboot-bust, but rather: the system’s survival depends on the very excess it claims to expel. Capitalism needs crisis; realism needs surrealism. The reboot is always-already a breakdown in drag.
In the end, the ultimate irony is this: the harder realism tries to escape the surreal, the more it becomes its own parody. Like a man frantically digging a hole to bury his nightmares, only to realize he’s constructing a labyrinth where the nightmares thrive. The only way out is through—or as Lacan might say, “Do not give up on your symptom.” Surrender to the meta, and you find it was the Real all along.
RETVRN OF REALISM
Here, we channel Freud’s return of the repressed through Lacan’s Real. Realism, as a symbolic order, must exclude the irrational, the excessive, the jouissance that threatens its coherence. But like a botched exorcism, the act of repression produces the very specter it fears. Surrealism is not some transcendent meta-layer—it is the constitutive outside of realism, the mold growing in the walls of the house that “clean” realism whitewashes.
Consider the bourgeois family portrait, that bastion of “realist” domestic harmony. What haunts its edges? The unspoken affairs, the stifled screams, the child’s nightmare of a father with a clock for a face (Dalí’s Persistence of Memory as return of the familial repressed). The harder realism polishes the surface, the more distorted its reflections become.
This is the paradox of all ideological systems: their stability depends on the disavowed excess they generate. Capitalism thrives on crisis; democracy on exclusion; realism on surrealism. The “specter” is not an accident—it is the symptom, the truth-telling pustule on the body politic. When Magritte paints a pipe and writes “Ceci n’est pas une pipe,” he isn’t playing linguistic games—he’s exposing realism’s founding lie: representation is always a betrayal. The pipe you see is not the pipe; the reality you perceive is not the Real.
The system’s survival depends on the very excess it claims to expel. Capitalism needs crisis; realism needs surrealism
Marx noted capitalism’s crises are not bugs but features—the system requires collapse to reset, like a forest fire that clears the undergrowth for new growth. But Žižek goes further: capitalism enjoys its crises, fetishizing its own near-death experiences as proof of its resilience. Similarly, realism needs surrealism’s destabilizing eruptions to renew its claim to coherence. Without the surreal, realism would have nothing to define itself against—no chaos to tame, no id to suppress.
The 2008 financial crash. Banks were bailed out, austerity imposed, and the “realists” declared, “We must return to normal!” But what is “normal” here? A system where derivatives trading—a surrealist fiction of value—is the bedrock of the economy. The crisis wasn’t an exception; it was the system baring its teeth in a grin.
Think of the Ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail. Capitalism is the Ouroboros of crisis: it consumes its own collapse to sustain itself. Realism performs the same ritual. Every “reboot” after a cultural or political “bust” (war, pandemic, revolution) isn’t a fresh start—it’s a rehearsal of the same traumas, repackaged as progress. The surrealist intervention—a melting clock, a lobster telephone—ruptures this cycle, forcing us to ask: What if the snake is not a circle but a spiral, vomiting itself outward into the void?
REBOOTS
The reboot is always-already a breakdown in drag.
The “reboot” (post-crisis realism) is not a sober reconstruction but a camp performance—a breakdown masquerading as recovery. It’s the equivalent of a tech CEO announcing “innovation!” while selling the same gadget with a new coat of paint. The drag queen here is capitalism itself, lipsyncing to the anthem of “progress” while its seams split.
Post-pandemic “normalcy.” We’re told to “get back to the office,” to “revive the economy,” but the office is now a Zoom simulacrum, and the economy is a speculative bubble fed by meme stocks and NFTs. The “reboot” is a farce—a breakdown wearing the mascara of business-as-usual
To don drag is to exaggerate gender, revealing its constructedness. Similarly, the “reboot” exaggerates realism’s fragility. When governments print money to “save the economy” (a surrealist act if ever there was one) while preaching fiscal responsibility (realism’s mascara), the contradiction becomes the point. The drag queen winks; the system, in its frantic reboot, winks back.
The harder realism tries to escape the surreal, the more it becomes its own parody
The Labyrinth of Denial: The man digging a hole to bury nightmares is the perfect metaphor for repression’s futility. Freud’s Rat Man buried his trauma, only to find it erupting in obsessive rituals. Similarly, realism’s attempt to “bury” the surreal only constructs a labyrinth—a recursive maze where every wall is a mirror reflecting its own absurdity.
Censorship. A regime bans “subversive” art (surrealism), labeling it “unrealistic.” But the act of censorship produces the surreal—samizdat literature, underground films, metaphors so twisted they bypass the censor’s gaze. The state’s “realism” becomes a parody of control, a Kafkaesque bureaucracy that breeds its own nightmares.
This is the paradox of the totalitarian laugh: the more seriously a system takes itself, the more ridiculous it becomes. Think of North Korea’s “realist” propaganda—giant statues, synchronized marches—which inevitably veers into surreal grotesquerie. Realism, in its extremity, becomes surrealism. The dictator’s statue is just a bronze phallus; the march, a dance of the undead.
Surrender to the meta, and you find it was the Real all along.”
The call to “not give up on your symptom” is a demand to embrace the crack in the symbolic order. The “meta” (surrealism) is not an escape—it’s the perspective shift that reveals the Real lurking beneath realism’s façade. The moment you stop running from the specter and say, “Fine, haunt me!” is the moment the specter loses its power—because you see it was never a ghost, but the bloodstain on the floor of your own ideology.
The Truman Show. When Truman embraces the “meta” (his world is a TV set), he doesn’t transcend reality—he confronts it. The show’s director (the Big Other) pleads, “You can’t leave—this is reality!” But Truman’s surrender to the “meta” (sailing into the painted sky) is his encounter with the Real.This is the Hegelian “negation of the negation”: the meta is not a higher plane but the immanent critique of the original. When you “surrender to the meta,” you’re not ascending—you’re descending into the basement of the symbolic order, where the Real has been pumping the sewage all along. The kicker? The basement was the foundation. The meta was the Real. The ghost was the house.
Synthesis: The system’s dependency on its own vomit.
We would add a fourth term: the parallax gap. The truth is not in the synthesis, but in the oscillation between thesis and antithesis—the “reboot” and the “breakdown” are the same event viewed from different angles. Capitalism is both crisis and recovery; realism is both control and camp. The only way out is to stare into the gap until the gap stares back, and you realize: You are the gap.
So, do you want to keep digging? Or shall we finally admit the hole is a mirror? 🕳️
I explored the “end of perspective” and the arrival of a new dimension, inspired by the ideas of Jean Gebser and the fragmented forms of Picasso. Gebser famously argued that human consciousness evolves in waves, from the archaic to the magical, mythical, and mental structures, and finally toward the integral. Perspective, emerging during the Renaissance, was the mental structure’s crowning achievement. But as I wrote then, we are living through the collapse of this mental framework, the end of perspective itself, as we begin to step into the integral—a state of simultaneity where multiple dimensions coexist and the old vanishing points no longer apply.
Today, I want to go further and argue that perspective wasn’t just the foundation of modernity—it was the first psychedelic trip. It was the moment humanity’s mental chamber popped open, offering us not just a new way of seeing, but a new way of being. Linear perspective didn’t just allow us to depict reality; it altered the human brain, creating a revolution of perception as profound as LSD or psilocybin. To step back to where it began is to see perspective as both a tool and a chemical reaction, one that reshaped our consciousness as much as any substance could.
Imagine a world before the invention of perspective—when the flatness of reality was taken for granted, and humanity lived in a two-dimensional haze. Then came the Renaissance, and with it, perspective—a revolution of perception so profound it shattered the limits of the mind. Like a visionary dose of LSD or a handful of psilocybin mushrooms, perspective altered the collective consciousness, pulling humanity into a new dimension of experience. It wasn’t merely a tool for painting; it was the lens through which the infinite became visible.
For thousands of years, human beings had been confined to symbolic representations of their world. Egyptian hieroglyphs, Byzantine icons, medieval tapestries—all of these were maps, not landscapes. They were flat and static, a universe painted on the walls of Plato’s cave. Then, perspective exploded onto the scene like a chemical catalyst. Suddenly, the canvas was no longer a mere surface. It was a window, and through it, humanity could see a third dimension. Depth. Space. Infinity.
The psychedelic experience of perspective didn’t begin with Brunelleschi’s experiments or Alberti’s treatises; its roots stretch further back, perhaps to the moment when Francesco Petrarch ascended Mount Ventoux in the spring of 1336. In his Letters to Posterity, Petrarch describes climbing the mountain not for conquest or utility, but for the sheer joy of seeing the world from a higher vantage point. As he reached the summit and looked down on the vast landscape below, he experienced something profoundly transformative: the merging of the external world with the interior chamber of his mind.
For Petrarch, the act of seeing was more than physical—it was metaphysical. Standing atop the mountain, he realized that the journey up was a reflection of his own spiritual struggle, the climb a metaphor for the ascent of the soul. He opened St. Augustine’s Confessions at random and read a passage about turning inward to find truth. That moment of self-reflection, of inward vision inspired by the outward view, marks one of the earliest stirrings of the Renaissance psyche: a simultaneous awakening to the world outside and the worlds within.
Petrarch’s perspective was not yet the linear geometry of the Renaissance, but it was the beginning of seeing the world as a series of depths—geographical, intellectual, and spiritual tripping on the rediscovery of linear perspective, suddenly saw the world in a whole new dimension. Petrarch, that proto-psychedelic pioneer, didn’t just climb a mountain in 1336 to admire the view; he was tuning in, turning on, and dropping out of the medieval mindset. What he experienced wasn’t just a scenic vista—it was a paradigm shift, a mental breakthrough, a collective acid trip centuries before Hofmann synthesized LSD in his Swiss lab. The mountain, in Petrarch’s hands, became a kind of mental architecture, where the external panorama mirrored the labyrinthine complexities of thought and self-awareness. His writings turned the act of seeing into an act of discovery, and his experience on Ventoux can be read as the opening of one of James’s chambers—a revelation of what lies behind the door of perception.
What Petrarch hinted at in his solitary climb, Brunelleschi and his contemporaries later systematized with mathematical precision. Perspective, in this sense, is both an internal and external experience, a tool not just for depicting reality but for accessing new modes of consciousness. Petrarch’s mountain was not just a place but a metaphor for the vertigo and ecstasy of stepping outside the known chambers of the mind into an infinity of space and thought. The Renaissance wasn’t merely born from the rediscovery of Greek and Roman texts; it was ignited by these moments of inner and outer perspective—the revelation that the world and the self are both larger and more complex than anyone had imagined.
Perspective, you see, wasn’t just a technique for painting pretty pictures. It was a mind-bending revelation, a cognitive revolution that shattered the flat, symbolic world of the Middle Ages. Imagine the shock of suddenly realizing that space had depth, that the world wasn’t just a divine puppet show staged by an inscrutable God, but a vast, interconnected web of angles, lines, and vanishing points. It was as if the collective consciousness of Europe had been dosed with a hefty hit of psilocybin, and the walls of perception came tumbling down.
Artists like Brunelleschi and Alberti became the Timothy Learys of their day, evangelizing this new way of seeing. They didn’t just teach people how to draw; they taught them how to see. The canvas became a portal, a window into an infinite, multidimensional reality. And just like a psychedelic trip, perspective didn’t just change art—it changed everything. It reshaped architecture, science, philosophy, and even religion. Suddenly, God wasn’t just “up there” in some abstract heaven; He was everywhere, in the geometry of a cathedral, the proportions of a human body, the spiraling patterns of a seashell.
The innovators of perspective—Brunelleschi, Alberti, Leonardo—were not just painters or architects; they were psychonauts. They expanded the boundaries of reality, much as shamanic figures have done with their sacramental plants and visionary rituals. When Filippo Brunelleschi first demonstrated linear perspective in the early 1400s, he might as well have been handing out blotter paper on the streets of Florence. The effect was the same: a sudden awakening, a neural reprogramming. The brain popped.
The implications of this shift were cosmic. To see a vanishing point on the horizon was to understand, for the first time, that the world wasn’t flat but infinite. Perspective created the illusion of distance, and with it, the possibility of exploration. The human mind, previously boxed in by its own limitations, began to roam. It’s no coincidence that the Renaissance birthed not only great art but also the Age of Exploration. Columbus, Magellan, and Vespucci sailed into the same vast unknown that artists like Raphael and Michelangelo were painting into existence.
Perspective wasn’t just a technique; it was a substance—a cognitive elixir that rewired the human brain. It taught people to see beyond what was immediately in front of them. It unlocked the potential to imagine new worlds, both external and internal. It was, in a very real sense, the first psychedelic trip.
Of course, like any profound trip, perspective also brought with it existential vertigo. It dismantled the old order, dissolving the static certainties of medieval life. The flat earth was replaced by a spinning sphere, hurtling through infinite space. The fixed hierarchy of heaven and earth was replaced by a vertiginous cosmos, where man was no longer the center. Perspective was a doorway, but not everyone wanted to step through. The Church burned heretics for less.
And yet, perspective prevailed. It became the foundation of modern science, technology, and art. Newton saw the same vanishing points in his calculus that Dürer saw in his prints. Einstein’s relativity was a continuation of the psychedelic journey that began in Florence. Perspective taught us not only to see differently but to think differently. It shattered the boundaries of the known and opened humanity to the infinite.
Perspective wasn’t just a tool for representing reality—it created reality. It was a feedback loop, a self-reinforcing hallucination. The more people saw the world through the lens of perspective, the more they believed that this was how the world really was. And just like a bad trip, it had its dark side. The Renaissance obsession with order, symmetry, and control laid the groundwork for the Scientific Revolution, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics, industrialization, high modernism and the mechanistic worldview that dominates our lives today. In a sense, we’re still tripping on perspective, still trapped in its Euclidean grid, still trying to find our way back to the multidimensional, nonlinear reality that lies beyond.
So, was perspective the Renaissance equivalent of marijuana, LSD, and mushrooms? Absolutely. It was a consciousness-expanding technology, a mind-altering substance that reshaped the way we see and think. And like all psychedelics, it came with a warning label: Use with caution. May cause radical shifts in perception. Side effects include existential crises, paradigm shifts, and the occasional loss of medieval certainty.
“The map is not the territory, and the menu is not the meal.” Perspective was just another map, another menu, another way of navigating the infinite labyrinth of reality. And as any good psychonaut knows, the trip never really ends—it just keeps unfolding, one vanishing point at a time.
What began as a liberating expansion of consciousness, a psychedelic leap into the third dimension, eventually hardened into a rigid, mechanistic worldview that boxed reality into straight lines, right angles, and cold, calculated precision. The bad trip of perspective wasn’t just a stylistic choice; it was a cognitive prison, a reductionist trap that flattened the multidimensional richness of existence into a sterile grid of control and domination. And high modernism? That was the ultimate ego trip, the hubristic belief that we could engineer our way out of chaos, that we could impose order on the universe and bend it to our will. Spoiler alert: it didn’t end well.
The grid of perspective wasn’t just a way to paint a picture; it was a way to map the world, to measure it, to colonize it. The Renaissance obsession with proportion and symmetry gave birth to the Scientific Revolution, which in turn gave us Newtonian physics, Cartesian dualism, and the Enlightenment’s worship of reason. The world became a machine, and we became its engineers. But in our zeal to master nature, we forgot that we arenature. We traded the messy, organic, interconnected web of life for the cold, hard logic of the grid. And in doing so, we lost something essential—a sense of wonder, of mystery, of belonging to something greater than ourselves.
Fast forward to high modernism, the 20th-century apotheosis of this mechanistic worldview. High modernism was the ultimate bad trip, a collective delusion that we could redesign society from the ground up, that we could erase the chaos of history and replace it with a utopia of straight lines and right angles. Think of Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse, a city of towering concrete slabs and wide, empty boulevards, where every human need was supposedly met by rational planning. Think of Robert Moses’ highways, slicing through neighborhoods like a surgeon’s scalpel, severing communities and ecosystems in the name of progress. Think of the Soviet Union’s Five-Year Plans, which turned entire nations into laboratories for social engineering, with catastrophic results. High modernism wasn’t just an architectural style or a political ideology; it was a mindset, a belief that we could impose order on the chaos of existence and emerge victorious.
But here’s the thing about bad trips: they always end in a crash. The high modernist dream of total control was just that—a dream. The more we tried to impose order on the world, the more chaotic it became. The grid of perspective, once a tool for liberation, became a cage, a straitjacket that stifled creativity and diversity. The high modernist utopias turned into dystopias, their sterile geometries alienating and dehumanizing. And the mechanistic worldview that underpinned it all—the belief that we are separate from nature, that we can dominate and exploit it without consequence—has brought us to the brink of ecological collapse.
So where do we go from here? How do we recover from the bad trip of perspective and high modernism? The answer, perhaps, lies in embracing the very things they sought to suppress: chaos, complexity, interconnectedness. We need to let go of the illusion of control and open ourselves to the messy, unpredictable, infinitely creative flow of life. We need to trade the grid for the web, the machine for the organism, the straight line for the fractal. In The universe is a giant Rorschach inkblot, and we are all just making it up as we go along. It’s time to stop trying to impose our will on the universe and start dancing with it. The bad trip is over. The next trip—whatever it is—is just beginning.
Non Linearity
The great cosmic joke: we’ve been staring at the world through the keyhole of linear perspective for centuries, thinking we’ve got it all figured out, while the door to non-linearity—the next frontier of consciousness—has been wide open all along. Linear perspective, for all its Renaissance glory, is just one lens, one filter, one tiny slice of the infinite pie of reality. And now, as we stand on the precipice of a new paradigm, it’s time to ask: What lies beyond the straight lines and vanishing points? What happens when we step off the grid and into the fractal, the quantum, the non-linear?
Non-linearity is the psychedelic frontier of the 21st century, the uncharted territory where cause and effect dance in a chaotic tango, where time loops back on itself like a Möbius strip, and where reality itself becomes a shimmering, ever-shifting hologram. It’s the realm of quantum entanglement, where particles separated by light-years communicate instantaneously, as if space and time were mere illusions. It’s the domain of chaos theory, where the flutter of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil can set off a tornado in Texas. It’s the world of fractals, where self-similar patterns repeat at every scale, from the branching of trees to the structure of galaxies.
Non-linearity isn’t just a scientific concept or a mathematical abstraction. It’s a state of mind, a way of seeing, a new mode of consciousness. Just as linear perspective shattered the flat, symbolic worldview of the Middle Ages, non-linearity has the potential to shatter the mechanistic, reductionist worldview of the modern era. It’s the next step in the evolution of human perception, the next leap in our collective psychedelic journey.
Think about it: linear perspective gave us the illusion of control, the belief that we could map the world, measure it, and master it. But non-linearity reminds us that reality is far stranger, far more mysterious than we ever imagined. It’s a humbling, mind-expanding realization—one that echoes the insights of mystics, shamans, and psychedelic explorers throughout history. As Terence McKenna once said, “Nature is not our enemy, to be raped and conquered. Nature is ourselves, to be cherished and explored.”
So how do we grasp non-linearity? How do we step beyond the straight lines and into the swirling, pulsating, infinitely complex web of reality? The answer, as always, lies in expanding our consciousness. We need new tools, new metaphors, new ways of thinking. We need to embrace the paradoxes, the ambiguities, the uncertainties. We need to let go of our attachment to linear cause-and-effect and open ourselves to the possibility that everything is connected, that everything is interdependent, that everything is part of a vast, unfolding pattern that we can never fully comprehend.
In the words of Robert Anton Wilson, “The universe is a giant hologram, and we are all interconnected in ways we can barely imagine.” Non-linearity is the key to unlocking this holographic reality, to seeing beyond the illusion of separation and into the deeper unity that underlies all things. It’s the next frontier of consciousness, the next stage in our collective evolution. And like all great frontiers, it’s both exhilarating and terrifying, a leap into the unknown that promises to transform not just how we see the world, but how we see ourselves.
Ah, yes, the Stargate project—an allegory for the present moment, a monument to the madness of techno-optimism, with its endless stream of corporate behemoths like SoftBank, Oracle, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and others all rubbing their hands together in glee. It’s as if we’ve entered a dystopian remake of the 1994 Stargate film, this time with some kind of unholy alliance between almond-laden neural networks and the unchecked power of Silicon Valley. We have here a project that is, let’s say, a vast and complicated ritualistic venture into the unknown, but only by piling up clichés and buzzwords into an enormous heap, like a digital ziggurat that promises to launch us into new realms of possibility—only to leave us disappointed, as we begin to realize that the realm we are entering is just a digital version of the same old world.
What do I mean by this? Well, just look at the Stargate film, directed by Roland Emmerich, which used a hopscotch of sci-fi tropes: ancient alien civilizations, time travel, mystical portals—sound familiar? You had Kurt Russell in fatigues and James Spader, well, being Spader. The movie dabbled in some fascinating ideas about transcendence, humanity’s quest for meaning, and the unknown, but it ultimately faltered in its execution. There was no real philosophical resolution, no deep understanding of what this interdimensional journey was supposed to signify. Instead, it ended with explosions and a vague sense of wonder, but not true insight. It was a metaphor for the modern project itself—big promises, very little deliverance.
Now we have Stargate reimagined, not in terms of interstellar adventure, but as a platform for the so-called “next frontier” of technology. With OpenAI and a collection of corporate giants, we are told we are on the precipice of something that will change the world—an artificial intelligence that will open portals to a new dimension of human experience. But, as always, there’s the classic ideological sleight of hand. We are led to believe that these technological advances will liberate us, but the truth is far more banal. It’s about control, domination, the smoothing over of contradictions. These tech companies, under the guise of innovation, are crafting the new digital Stargate, but it’s a gate that leads to the same old issues, masked in the sheen of progress.
We are back in the same place, aren’t we? We can cross over into other dimensions—whether it’s in terms of data processing, artificial intelligence, or virtual worlds—but these are mere extensions of our existing order. The stargate itself, which might have been a symbol of exploration, is now a tool for increasing profit margins, cementing the power of those who already control the means of technological production.
The logic behind these tech giants’ involvement? The same logic that governed Emmerich’s film—using a few cool ideas (yes, AI, metaverses, quantum computing) but leaving us with more spectacle than substance. It’s a modern Stargate—offering the promise of transcending limitations, but in reality, merely reinforcing them. The more we chase after these “portals,” the more we get sucked into the very system we thought we were escaping.
The discomfort at the heart of Stargate—it is indeed, a grotesque Frankenstein, stitched together from the decayed parts of trickle-down economics and the logic of a perpetual motion machine. It is the quintessential product of neoliberal ideology: the promise of infinite returns, endlessly repeated, as long as the last investor keeps buying into the myth. In this sense, the Stargate project, like its cinematic precursor, is less about exploring new frontiers and more about maintaining the illusion of progress while profiting off its perpetuity.
We must ask ourselves: what exactly is being “unlocked” in these grand ventures of AI and quantum computing, if not the very mechanisms that perpetuate the existing system of exploitation? The endless rhetoric around infinite returns—whether it’s in terms of data, profits, or opportunities—betrays the fundamental deceit at the heart of this whole venture. The “Stargate” is not a portal to liberation, not a gateway to a new dimension of human understanding, but a cunningly constructed mechanism that extracts value from the very people it purports to serve. It is the trickle-down logic, the same one that has failed us for decades: as long as you keep the machine running, as long as there’s a constant flow of fresh capital to fuel it, the promise of limitless growth can continue.
But of course, this is the lie we’ve all been sold. The reality is that the trickle-down never reaches the bottom. Like the revolving door of investment in the Stargate project, the wealth continues to concentrate in the hands of a few. These grand promises of technological transcendence are, in the end, just a sophisticated form of financial alchemy. The constant promises of infinite returns are like the perpetual motion machine—beautiful in their conception, but ultimately doomed by their own impossibility. What’s so tragically ironic is that the true “Stargate” these tech giants are building is a portal not to an exciting future, but to an even more elaborate prison of illusion.
The capitalist system today operates much like this: under the guise of new technological horizons, it insists that each new frontier will solve our problems, give us endless possibilities, when in reality it is only expanding the reach of its own machinery of control. The investors—those lucky enough to enter the game early—are promised the stargate of boundless wealth, while the rest of us are left to follow the thread of this speculative spiral, only to discover that the gateway is a dead end, a vast cul-de-sac of endless, pointless motion.
This, then, is the fundamental contradiction embedded in these projects. We are told that we will transcend our current limitations, that we will discover new dimensions of possibility. But in truth, we are only being pushed deeper into the very system that shackles us. The more we invest, the more we become entangled in this matrix of infinite returns. The project’s success is predicated not on any tangible breakthrough, but on the ability to convince the next wave of investors to buy in, to keep the charade going just a little longer. But ultimately, we are trapped in the same economic system, only with shinier technology and more abstract concepts.
And let us not forget the prophetic tropes that play a pivotal role in this charade, tropes that have been mediocrally executed in both the cinematic Stargate and these grand tech ventures. In the film, we encounter the idea of ancient civilizations—gods, in fact—who possess extraordinary knowledge and power, locked away in a distant past, waiting to be rediscovered. This resonates strongly with the way Silicon Valley talks about “unlocking” hidden potential, as though the answers to humanity’s most pressing problems lie buried just beyond our reach, waiting to be unearthed by the next technological breakthrough. The idea of “unlocking” ancient knowledge is a classic prophetic trope, one that promises to reveal profound truths and usher in a new era. But as Stargate itself demonstrates, this knowledge is never quite as transcendent as promised, and in the end, it’s just another tool of control.
Then, of course, there is the prophecy of the chosen one—the idea that a single individual, in this case, Daniel Jackson (James Spader), will decipher the ancient language and unlock the power of the Stargate. This individual, like a modern-day messiah, is set apart as the one who will lead the way, revealing the path to salvation. In the context of the tech world, this is mirrored in the cult of the CEO, the notion that a singular visionary, be it a Mark Zuckerberg or an Elon Musk, will guide us through the technological singularity into a utopian future. But once again, this is just a recycled cliché, an empty promise, as these “prophecies” consistently fail to deliver anything substantial.
Finally, there’s the constant appeal to destiny—the idea that our heroes are fated to discover the Stargate, just as our tech moguls are “destined” to shape the future. This notion of destiny, of history unfolding according to some grand, hidden plan, underpins the entire narrative of Silicon Valley’s most hyped ventures. But like the movie, where the supposed “destiny” of the characters ultimately leads them to yet another battle with an ancient power, we’re left with the same tired tropes—promises of an extraordinary future, only to find that the destination is much less than we had imagined.
The very nature of these prophetic tropes is what keeps us hooked. They appeal to our deepest desires for meaning, for escape from our mundane reality, and yet they always disappoint. The tech industry, much like Emmerich’s film, dresses up its promises in extravagant imagery of otherworldly achievements, only to reveal that the truth behind the curtain is far less impressive. The promise of a digital “Stargate” is just another metaphor for the perennial human desire for transcendence, for breakthrough, but as we’ve seen time and again, such promises are rarely fulfilled. Instead, we are left with a shiny new version of the same old system, which ultimately serves the interests of the few, while the rest of us watch as our hopes dissolve into the ether.
Ah, the Elon stans—how delightful their contradictions are! First, they deny: “It wasn’t a Nazi salute!” And yet, in the same breath, they invoke the shadow of Wernher von Braun, the man who quite literally rocketed from the swastika to the stars. Here lies the paradox of modern techno-fetishism: the absolute refusal to reconcile the roots of innovation with the ideology from which it sprouted.
This is ideology at its purest, my friends. The Elon stan does not see a salute, does not see history, only the myth of progress embodied in their techno-Messiah. Von Braun? Oh, he was just a man of his time, they say, as though the V-2 rockets were merely innocent sparks of genius, detached from the rubble of London and the forced labor camps. Likewise, the Nazi salute? Just a misunderstood gesture, like one of Musk’s awkward memes, surely nothing to overanalyze!
What is at play here is the disavowal of history: “Yes, yes, von Braun worked for the Nazis, but let’s not dwell on the unpleasant details—look at the stars!” The genius of capitalism, of course, lies in its ability to sanitize such contradictions, to commodify even the remnants of fascism. Von Braun’s rockets, once symbols of Nazi terror, become the foundation of NASA’s triumphant quest for the moon, and now, in Musk’s hands, the rockets become the ultimate fetish object: the means by which humanity will escape itself.
This is not to accuse Musk or his fans of fascism outright—no, no! The genius of ideology is subtler than that. It is to point out how the sanitized past feeds the fantasies of the future. To worship the rocket while ignoring the Reich is to embrace progress as though it were pure, apolitical, untainted by the horrors of its own genesis.
So, when the Elon stan says, “It wasn’t a Nazi salute,” they are not simply denying—it is not that they don’t know, but that they know very well, and yet they continue to act as though they don’t. This is the essence of ideology: to know and disavow simultaneously, to erase the contradictions of the past in order to dream of an unbroken, immaculate future.
In this way, the Elon stan becomes the ultimate subject of late capitalism: one who sees the cracks in the myth but chooses to believe nonetheless. Progress, rockets, Mars—these are no longer the means to an end but ends in themselves, the ultimate commodities, sold with the promise that they will liberate us from the very world we have ruined. And yet, as von Braun himself might have said, we aim for the stars, but our gaze is still firmly fixed on the ground—on the ruins we refuse to acknowledge.
It is fascinating, no? Everyone who has seriously thought about space travel knows that rockets are an antiquated concept, a primitive phallic obsession from the mid-20th century. We are not getting to Mars with these oversized fireworks, these glorified Nazi-era technologies refined only to look sleeker in a Silicon Valley PowerPoint presentation. And yet, Elon—and let us not forget his stans!—they proceed as if the memo never arrived. Or perhaps they received it but, in true ideological fashion, simply chose to ignore it.
This is ideology at work! Rockets are not a solution—they are a spectacle, a fetish object designed to obscure the fundamental impotence of the project itself. SpaceX does not represent the future of interstellar travel; it is a reenactment of the past, a repetition of the Cold War space race, but with private corporations standing in for nations. We know rockets are insufficient; we know that without new propulsion systems—nuclear, electromagnetic, or something we cannot yet imagine—we are not going anywhere beyond our celestial backyard. Yet Elon clings to the rocket, just as his fans cling to their Teslas, precisely because it allows them to dream without truly thinking.
What is important here is the narrative function of the rocket. It is not a tool; it is a symbol of progress, an object that tells us, “Yes, humanity is still capable of transcending its limits.” The question of whether it works, of whether it is the right tool for the job, is irrelevant. Like von Braun’s V-2 rockets, it serves a purpose beyond its immediate utility. For von Braun, the purpose was military domination; for Musk, it is the domination of imagination itself.
But here is the twist: the obsession with rockets is not just about Mars; it is about Earth. Musk’s promise of Mars colonization is not a genuine proposal for human survival—it is a marketing campaign for his earthly empire. The rocket is not a vehicle for exploration; it is a justification for endless extraction, for the continued destruction of this planet in the name of a hypothetical escape plan.
The Elon stan does not care if we reach Mars. The Mars colony is irrelevant. What matters is the fantasy that it represents: the fantasy of escape, of a second chance, of a new frontier where the sins of Earth can be left behind. This is why the Elon stan clings to the rocket despite its obsolescence—it is not about transportation; it is about absolution.
And so, they look at the rocket, and they see not the limitations of 20th-century technology but the limitless possibilities of the future. They do not ask, “How do we get to Mars?” but rather, “What does the rocket allow us to believe?” In this way, the rocket becomes a totem of denial, a monument to humanity’s refusal to confront its own failures. We aim for the stars, but only to avoid looking at the ground beneath our feet.
