The Involution of Everything
& the emergence of 'digital covid' from the pixelated furnaces of simulation
It’s interesting to regard 2025 as the full-blown, stage four, 3SD ‘binfire of the manatees’. Looking back, everything was an involuting simulation of the world consumed by fire – by 2015? Since then we’ve just seen a further pixelation of values, then reality, then simulation itself – with the smell of burning plastic, and the hazy knowledge of sea life lying dead inside a toxic algal bloom, somewhere off the coast, somewhere…
It’s interesting to notice the paradox ruling the past decade: that nothing has changed and everything has gotten much worse. I see the ten years we’ve just lived through as the excrescence and involution of dynamics put in train in 1945, compounding and accelerating from 1973, concretising from 1989, and ‘setting’ in 2001, both with the stolen US Presidential Election and Bush Regime’s ‘War on Terror’ response to the 9/11 attacks, and with China’s (much quieter) accession to the WTO. Absent any extrinsic shocks – which surely also could have happened, and will happen1 – momentum and path dependence have carried the day to 2025 from 45-73-89-01, meaning were already slouching toward Bethlehem by 2015. I say this with such rage and grief2: it’s no stretch to call the last ten years a wasted decade; a decade of wastage; a decade of wasting.
Bloat and simulation; involution…
By 2025 I regard involution as a master process, maybe it’s the master process now. We now collectively endure involuted war in Ukraine, involuted genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, involuted civil war in Syria, Israel3 and Sudan, an involuted US in the US and the rest of the world, and involuted fascism in the US and Hungary and elsewhere. Reading what people have been writing of late, I feel I also notice involuted sadness, anger and ressentiment, and especially involuted ‘community’.
Involution is also affecting everything from cafes to airports to primary schools. Even within the realm of ‘first world problems’, nearly nothing is as good as it was; nearly everything has become the shithouse, pipiked version of what it was; everything that doesn’t deserve to exist persists – somehow for this precise reason. The strong are weak but still do what they please, and the weak suffer what they ‘must’…. why? Kinda because of Musil’s ‘principle of insufficient cause’ (ie, for no good reason).
In the community places I’m most familiar with, one ‘leader’ with the soul of a real estate agent wrecked the institution in their care and got a new job and a promotion for their troubles, while another stole tens of thousands from literal babies and children, then went cray-cray when they found out this might mean they might not get a reference, after they were stood down (you know, for, like, stealing money from children). From universities to corporations and whole countries, many of our most important institutions are run by emotionally immature sociopaths, malignant narcissists, paranoid weirdos, and Swedish Chef-level nincompoops, who enjoy the strange halo of immunity befitting the involuted culture in which their MO thrives. All around me, I noticed how intelligence and care tends to get ignored or swamped by stupidity, and the responsible and good faith actors in my midst tend to be taxed by drudgery or undermined by all the ambient shitness that abounds – most of it going uncensuredly on its morally indifferent way. In an involuted world, to the beanbag4 goes the spoils.
There’s no shortage of reasons how and why it got this bad; there’s never any shortage of causes (Koselleck). Actually, what would be healthy and feel good to acknowledge is just how ‘well supplied’ we are with dangerous stupidity and moral indifference of all kinds: like fentanyl in the American drug supply chain, there is a deadly supply of 3SD doing the rounds. It’s out there. You just wanted to get high and have fun, but look out: 3SD could kill you, and it may be coming to a (bean)bag near you.
(Bean)bagfuls of 3SD-style stupidity are being foisted on us hapless publics5. In terms of the goonish grinning supply of stupids, I’m reminded – again – of a panflash pervasive stupid from a decade ago: dockless bike schemes. At the time, in trying to think about O Bike, I noticed “the stubborn absence of demand relative to deafly enthusiastic supply”. Want O Bikes?! Too bad, you got ‘em.
Ten years on, Siri is still as comfortingly useless and half deaf as she was, but we can see the ‘too bad, you got em!’ Supply Foist throughout the AI solutioneering arriving of late via automatic updates on our phones and laptops. Whether or not I need or want or asked for Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, or insanely electricity-intensive AI-enhanced ‘search results’ from Google and Bing – too bad, I got ‘em!
High-speed networked computing and algorithmic data processing could be so amazing; instead we have this.
I see Silicon Valley’s big foist of all these AI-powered gizmos6 as the coercive imposition of a dependency-creating future, which we’re induced to focus on while the actual-real world suffers terribly, without us giving it our proper share of loving care and attention. To me this amounts to a bad trade in exchange for a shitty future, one that lines up perfectly with the power, interest, values, ideology, and vision of ‘what we should want’ that’s pervasive among tech bros now. Of course it’s what bro wants, in the same way that a 17 year old bro wants-and-gives a girl The Push: because they want to get blown, because this matches with their raging sense of entitlement, because negotiating consent makes them feel vulnerable and anxious and opens them to the possibility of the rejection they fear more than anything. So let’s be clear: every time one of the big SV corporations gives you The Push with some AI thing you never needed-wanted-asked for, it’s ‘cos they want you to blow them (4eva), and they don’t care that you might not want to, and they don’t really want you to have a say in it all. SV don’t love you; they just want to get blown; they don’t care how you feel. In SV since the onset of disruption over a decade ago, Blurred Lines still rules supreme.
‘Fail quickly and get blown’ is the real motto of SV. And don’t care.
Simulation is at the heart of all of Silicon Valley’s fears and fantasies and failures, all its hopes and dreams. And fantasy is no coincidence or accident. This is the key point I’m bending toward here: say what you will about the postwar dominated by the US’ victory in ‘45, neoliberalisations from ‘73, the end of the Cold War from ’89, America is now pinning everything on simulation (quick, before Xi grabs Taiwan, you got about two years!). If you thought Baudrillard might have gone too far by betting the house on simulation in ‘76 (Deleuze, Bourdieu, and Foucault all did, hey), consider AI and crypto by 2025.
In the 17-20C, America tried to solve everything that land appropriation couldn’t by way of Jesus, everything Jesus couldn’t solve by way of money, and everything money couldn’t solve – by shooting to kill. These are still the durable American backstops when all else fails, but it’s so conspicuous how seduced by simulation America has become. Baudrillard only made it into the Matrix by ’99; by 2025, his social theory runs the whole economy, the stock market, the internet, and a huge-growing-fatburg chunk of people’s minds and time and attention. Hot tip: feed Baudrillard PDFs to the LLM you’re also using to short Trumpcoin – you can’t lose. Give it The Push, your fantasy will come true. It doesn’t matter how the world feels.
To the obvious final point: the involution of everything isn’t just happening because of simulation7. However, simulation is compounding-and-accelerating the involution – including the involution of simulation, as well as the whole living world and 5+ billion of its now very angry, sad and broken human peoples. Never mind Woke Mind Virus or Trump Derangement Syndrome (I mean, ‘do’, but…) ; all the world’s sweatily afire with the delirious simulation of simulation right now. The simulation of simulation now not only controls the news cycle, but seemingly what it is actually possible to many people to say, do, think, and imagine. The apotheosis of this is Jia Tolentino in 2025: so articulate about being so broken by it… but… she won’t quit the apps, will she.
In 2025, the world also endures the febrile volatility of groups of people trading on the febrile volatility of groups of people trading on the febrile volatility of a set of simulated assets, whose value (which is ?only8? the value of those assets as assets with value as those assets) is reactively affected by what a strange9 orange con man with the mental and emotional age of a 7-8 year old boy ‘says’ about them in a given day.
And 99% of people are still totally cool to use Meta’s platforms, and won’t get off Twitter.
As this transpools and unspires, groups of supposedly more intelligent people (than platform produsers, that is) in California and coastal China race heedlessly ever further into the simulation of intelligence itself, ‘in the hope’ that they will not only win against the other racers, but produce an Artificial General Intelligence… that wants to serve us… and will smile kindly on its meat machine inventors…?
Even a glancing look at this from outside the race indicates a chancy and ill-advised enterprise. Yet the only people with agency and decisional authority are so deep in this simulation of intelligence they now only want to accelerate their headlong plunge – to be ‘the first’ to break humanity and destroy the world10?
In essence, simulation has spiraled into digital covid: it’s making people sick, crazy, and broken, but through their continued actions, they’ll ensure its global propagation.
Let us all jump feverishly into this fire, and be consumed, ‘cos that will be good.
~
The question – which is for the next post – is: how did we get here, via gaming… and Dungeons and Dragons?
The world is actually far more surprising and unruly than it has been 1945-2025, all things considered (I say that from the comfortable perspective of the Angocapitalist-OECD). Why we should then treat these peculiar conditions as the sustainable norm (just cos they’ve been comfortable ‘for us’)? This is another interesting thing to notice and pay critical attention to.
I think of Greta’s school protests in 2018, and the rise of Extinction Rebellion in that year… really as a liberal revivification of what we have known ‘but don’t know’ since radical ecology coalesced in the 70s, but something that ‘already’ happened seven years ago. Go and listen to Murray Bookchin here and tell me ‘we didn’t know’ 50 years ago. Why do we not know what we know?; this is an interesting question to me.
Both because of the huge disagreements within Jewish-Israeli society, and because the Palestinians are also a Semitic people and ‘one people’ with the dominant ethnocracy there, insofar as anyone has a hope of getting all parties out of this spiral of atrocities now. In a sense, there is already a two state solution (parliamentary democracy for Jewish Israelis, military domination for Arab Israelis and Palestinians); one state one law and equality… imagine…
Chris has recently talked evocatively about Beanbag Leaders.
We’re too busy doomscrolling while we try to poo? The average Australian now spends >5 hours a day on their phone. War and Peace is only 60 hours in audiobook; that’s twelve days of scroll holing.
As the state of Israel continues its involuted war of annihilation against its involuted enemy, in the name of its involuted citizenry, to achieve its involuted victory…
Billy Joel was right on this bit: ‘we’ didn’t ‘start’ the fire.
I mean, you can’t even buy drugs ‘safely’ anymore using BitCoin, no? Turns out everything digital is traceable: who knew?
Like Michael Jackson by Bad in ‘87, we don’t actually give enough phenomenological attention to how busted strange Trump is (Taibbi’s ‘insane clown president’ is apposite). As with MJ and Jimmy Saville, one day this will be the most obvious thing about him.
JD Vance’s recent comment about not being here to talk safety, but to talk opportunity, is the simulation equivalent of Rumsfeld’s ‘gloves are off’ comment vis torture. Unleashed spirals are uncontrollable…