The CCRU doesn’t exist. This book doesn’t exist. You don’t exist.
Ok, question – how am I so impatient with Baudrillard’s pretentious nonsensical wankery, and yet have time for this tome of insanity/inanity? Aesthetics? The fact that they seemed to at least recognise their own absurdity in a way that the French postmodernists seemingly didn’t? I don’t know. But there it is.
“This volume is sheer documentation. It is not expected to clarify anything, but rather, the reverse.”
This is our forewarning in the foreword. Which is good, really, because this one is a bit of a trip. Theory fiction is a fascinating medium. The CCRU has gained a bit of a cult reputation of the past decade or so. Ironic, as they seem to have started off as a gaggle of university misfits performing a sort of psychological terrorist attack on the stuffy and straight-jacketed ivory tower of academia, before moving out of halls, getting far too excited about the internet, mistaking speedballs for food and living in kata jungle-pumping raves, moving into Aleister Crowley’s old yard and accidentally forming a cult.
“And you don’t seem to understand…”
Nope. No, I don’t. I sort of wonder if this is one of those ‘read this through multiple times and then it starts to make sense’ deals. I also wonder if picking extra meanings up in this case is just signs of a glitching mind – psychofiles corrupted by infoviral transmission through the medium of a strange green book that can’t figure out if it’s a grimoire, a cyberpunk novel, conspiracy screed, cultural theory essay, or a philosophical treatise. To which, the CCRU answers: “Yes.” Communique two gives us, “CCRU is working on a cybergothic ‘unnon-fiction’.” If you’re aware of CCRU-adjacent writing, then, yes, expect an avalanche of weird techno-infused neologisms.
I’m wildly out of my depth here.
“AxS:03 Hypermythos of the 3-Faced God, with its stacked time domains (1st capitalist (((((indefinitely) deep) diachronic) re)axiomatising) Quasi- (2nd despotic (pure (( but always) retrospective)) ideal- (3rd aboriginal (poly-ancestral, cyclic) vague)) Chronos).”
Reading the CCRU texts, it’s hard to resist the urge to attempt to make some sort of diagram or wiki or something. I mean, aside from the bastardised Qliphoth thing, ‘The Numogram’. How else to tie together and keep track of all the bits of overlapping textual references and terminology floating around. You start to get the idea that they’re collectively alluding to some other bit of theory or what seems to have developed into an internal mythology, but what any of it points to with any specificity is well beyond me.
They seem initially obsessed with the whole Y2K thing. Presumably it’s acting as an analogy or symbolic of something else. It’s hard to imagine they actually imagined some abstracted technological doomsday was going to occur.
There’s a whole bunch of ‘k’ stuff. K just stands for ‘cyber’ or ‘digital’, i.e., Mark Fisher’s blog ‘K-Punk’. K-goth = cybergoth, k-noun = cybernoun, K-guerrillas, K-time, K-tactics etc., become a recurring theme for a while – cropping up in other texts, becoming memes, etc. I know that amongst a subsection of weird nerds, putting ‘k’ in front of words acts as a signalling device to other weird nerds that they are, in some way, affiliated with this weird area of theory from the mid-to-late 90s.
Even dealing with the expanded universe of ‘accelerationist’ texts – if they can be called/lumped in with such – or commentaries on CCRU-adjacent subjects, it becomes hard to know how much is theory and how much is fiction? It’s difficult without a bunch of research, to know how genuine they were about the whole kerfuffle around Y2K, the Gregorian calendar, etc. Are k-calendars and hyper-c topics people actually cared about? If they did, does anybody still care? If so… why? Nonetheless, the whole mess of tangled culture and theory wires is fascinating.
They seem to have invented some kind of delirious mythos wrapping around a series of real-world analogues sidestepped into a digital Lovecraftian (k-Lovecraftian?) dystopia? All of it layered on top of an underbelly of philosophy, social theory, cultural theses and the like. Take all of that and drown it in a bathtub of amphetamines set it to a soundtrack of 90s underground death garage and kata jungle. Got that? No? Right. Yeah, this stuff is generally impenetrable.
How seriously should you even take it? Hard to say, really. Certainly keep your tongue close to your cheek, that’s my general read. Some of it seems to be written in earnest, and Land’s nihilistic neologism-riddled prose poetry concerning the progressive redundancy of the human race in the face of an auto-manifesting cyber-consciousness born out of the steel and ink of capitalism, can give the impression of a thoroughly po-faced endeavour. But really, how serious can you possibly be if you’re filtering your grand theory of cyberculture and time, through the medium of Humpty-dumpty? For all the intensity and layering, there is also a sense that there remains the possibility that the whole escapade is a hoax that has run away with itself until it was far beyond recapture.
These were the guys who held seminars in university where they just blasted jungle and lay on the floor croaking into a microphone. Apparently, this kind of thing tended to piss off the kind of people who had really bought into the status mythology of The Academy. Which is hilarious. Which is to say, I can respect the people who wrote this unholy mess of a book.
This whole subsection of philosophy/culture theory isn’t even a rabbit hole – it’s a full-on rat warren. You can get lost down there and never emerge.
They keep talking about ‘the crypt’. The crypt is a shadow of cyberspace. Associate or linked with ‘artificial death’ (A-death). Also linked into their jumbled time/chronology concepts, which, again – doubtful that they’re 100% serious. Despite devoting tens of thousands of words to the idea, the fact that a good chunk of that mass of text is about, or related to, the ‘Lemurian time war’, a concept so absurd that it has since become a meme. I’m not even going to try to explain it.
I talk about a mythos being built, but that’s only half true. Presumably the different essays and chapters were written by different people, so I wonder where the overlap is here, because the mythos seems to be a side effect of a series of shared metaphors and intersections – but it’s debatable how consistent any interpretation or use of any singular element is from author to author. Texts feature a barrage of nouns that have no further expansion or pre-existing reference. Other nouns change states; ‘A-death’ seems to go from some kind of state of being to being referenced as a drug, like Snow Crash.
In the writing world there are two concepts for types of authors – plotters, where you get everything straight before you start writing, and pantsers, who just throw things together on the fly. At times, the CCRU writings resemble pantsing like few other authors could manage.
I know a lot of people would love it if every sentence were loaded with significance and allusion, a great multi-layered web of theory to explain an emerging web of cyberspace. But the reality is simply that a lot it reads more like white noise. There is far too much inconsistency from paragraph to paragraph and text to text, to make any substantive structure. Which is not to say it has no meaning, just that even the core bits of allusion and meta-narrative etc., while needing some kind of piecemeal jigsaw into a coherent structure are all individually obscured by a fog of red herrings.
At times a bunch of this overlaps with Baudrillard’s talk about signification and hyper-reality, but the specifics seem to be functionally non-existent. All the libidinal stuff is Bataille-centric and I don’t know shit about Bataille, save for a half-remembered explanation wherein the sun is a cosmic arsehole or something? Whatever.
Reading around the subject a bit, I’m bombarded by piles of theory jargon and name dropping that I don’t understand because I haven’t read the pre-requisite eleventy-billion authors and their own bizarre niche takes on this, that, and the other. So, once again, and as I knew going into this, I’m wildly out of my depth here. I suppose I should just stick to the aesthetics, name drop Deleuze once in a while on social media and repeat-post the three most known Nietzsche quotes ad nauseum, or something. On the other hand, the aesthetics are broadly interesting, albeit quite jumbled and inconsistent. There’s so much going on here that even at a surface aesthetic level it doesn’t quite mesh. It’s brilliantly fascinating but riven with fractures and cracks.
Culture-plague. Unlife. Uttunal. Yettuk. Pre-occupations with subcultures with subcultures and the thanatropic. And, of course, time.
Turn on to tune out. Xxignal were a real group. Death garage. If nothing else, this unearths such an interesting archive of art and media that it’s worth the read for that alone. Death garage gets written about like substance D, perhaps consciously.
Link two fragments together, you think you’ve got the start of a puzzle piece. Is it worth the effort?
Did you know that Echidna Stillwell refers to Vysparov’s ‘Time Circuit’ as ‘The Hex’? Well, she does. She demonstrates the arithmetical consistency between this region of the Numogram and the Chinese Classic of Change.
I wonder if you could put the CCRU writings to practical use. They mention ‘the Matrix’ several times, which makes me wonder if it’s possible to stealth inject bits of CCRU ‘thinking’ into random incel communities and observe the results. Idiots like Andrew Tate are always prattling about ‘the Matrix’ or whatever, but in leaving the definition of ‘the Matrix’ looser than your mum, to the point where the term is meaningless and literally anything can be attributed to ‘the Matrix’, there’s an opportunity to infiltrate and experiment with that community’s collective psychology. His followers aren’t exactly the smartest bunch, so they’re hardly likely to notice.
Has anybody ever tried injecting techno-temporal deamonology into an idiot cult before? They could make fascinating lab rats.
The CCRU writings start to take on an increasingly esoteric bent, the further into the book you go, and this concept of the Numogram starts to become a central pillar around which other aspects of the writing revolve.
It’s interesting to have a grimoire stuck in the middle of this messy mass of pseudo-cyberpunk theory fiction. I wonder if guys like Phil Hine ever looked into this? It seems like it’d be right up their alley.
The whole thing culminates with ‘The Book of Paths’, which is basically a bunch of poetry. I’m sure it’s relevant to the broader CCRU lore or whatever, but, much like Tolkien, every time an author starts throwing random verse around my eyes start to glaze over. I know, I’m a philistine. Sue me.
I get the impression that deep diving into any one aspect of this book could provide fodder for thousands of words. If I understood half the allusions and connections it might make more sense to me, or I might stop every other page to freak out over some new interpretation of some other text, which is a genuinely appealing notion. But I think it’s worth a gander if you’re into any of the bizarre intersections that this collection of essays represent. There are certainly a lot of bookmarks in my copy.
Words and Chaos 
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