<nettime> Ccru datastream5: Apocalypse- been in effect?

[katasonix <data@katasonix.demon.co.uk>]

Ccru: Cybernetic culture research unit
http://www.ccru.demon.co.uk
it@ccru.demon.co.uk

Y2k+ datastream 5
KO99                                            

APOCALYPSE - BEEN IN EFFECT? -
-Maria De Rosario-
- from the New England Educational Review, August, 1998 

* How do "aquapocalyptic" narratives about a return to the sea connect
with the Millennium Time-Bomb? Maria D'Resario reports on
"hyperfictional" and "ethnomathematical" studies of strange goings-on on
the Web, and asks: Are the Cyber-Time Cults just the latest craze, or a
new Millenial Mythology? * 

You'll be familiar with media scare-stories about "Cybergoths". But,
according to two young academics at Massachussetts' Miskatonic
University, it's time to put aside the moral panics about synthetic
drugs and cyberspace comas in order to take a more serious look at what
the Cybergoths are actually doing.

The Cybergoths - and the other cultic bodies that are beginning to
populate the Net - are not passing crazes, but "sophisticated
contemporary belief systems", more akin to popular religion than youth
culture. "The Cybergoths are a Cargo-Cult," claims Miskatonic's Dr Linda
Trent. "They integrate technology into their belief system, and
transform the past into the future. Or vice versa."

Like the Melanesian syncretic cults who turned Western detritus into
religious objects, the Cybergoths use the relics of the information age
as the sacred objects of a new mythic system. But Trent, who calls
herself an expert in "Fictional Systems", dislikes the term
"mythology.""It begs too many questions, and suggests archaism. What the
Cybergoth phenomenon shows, really powerfully, is the difficulty in
pinpointing where belief systems come from. 

In some ways, when you see the remarkable pattern-matching between the
Cybergoth system and older belief systems, it's tempting to see it is a
case of revivalism, but that doesn't seem ultimately persuasive. What
needs to be accounted for is the convergences across Time: are they a
coincidence? Which poses the further question: what is a coincidence?
And that's what the Cybergoths are all about." Trent says that the
Cybergoths are "natives" of Cyberspace, and the emergence of their
culture provides a unique opportunity for studying the process of the
formation of a belief system as it happens. 

Trent uses the term "hyperstition" for "cybernetic" belief systems such
as these. "It's not a simple matter of true or false with hyperstitious
systems. Belief here doesn't have a simply passive quality. The
situation is closer to the modern phenomenon of hype than to religious
belief as we'd ordinarily think about it. Hype actually makes things
happen, and uses belief as a positive power. Just because it's not
'real' now, doesn't mean it won't be real at some point in the future.
And once it's real, in a sense, it's always been." One key area of
Cybergoth activity is their response to the so-called "Millennium Bug"
(the computer glitch caused by the coding convention that renders years
as two, rather than four, digits) 

The Cybergoths - whose own communications substitute the letter 'K' for
the cyber-prefix - believe that the attempt to correct the Millennium
Bug is in fact a program for "Gregorian Restoration"; that "cyberspace
already has a calendar", a calendar counting up from 00 = 1900 to 99 =
1999. To avert the reversion back to 2000=00 (=1900!), the K-Goths
advocate not a "return" to the Gregorian calendar, but the
"continuation" of an "existing K-calendar", a continuation which will be
achieved by adding not 2 extra digits, but one. 

Instead of celebrating the Year 2000, then, the Cybergoths will be
"chilling out" to the year K-100. This, apparently, has brought them
into conflict with another ultra-secret web movement called "Hyper-C"
whose "chronopolitics" are, if anything, even more weird than those of
the K-goths. Little is known about Hyper-C, but its sporadically-issued
Internet communiques celebrate the very "return" that the K-calendar is
designed to avoid. Hyper-C seem to believe that computers have a message
for us: there is only one century, that counts from 0 to 99, forever.
"Hyper-C are another Cargo-Cult," says Trent. "But the time system they
operate with is very different to that of the Cybergoths. As far as I
can glean, their basic drift is that computers should not be tampered
with; that the Millennium Time-Bomb will explode western chronology.
There are many elements in common with so-called 'primitive' time; for
instance, the idea that there is only one year. 

One phrase keeps recurring; from [the rap group] Public Enemy:
'Apocalypse been in effect.'" The name Hyper-C puns on sea and C,
connecting the radical biological theory of hypersea (which argues that
"life on land" is an extension of the ocean) with key 'C' words such as
Century, Cybernetics and Cycle. Its shady operations are webbed into a
submerged world of what English theorist Kodwo Eshun has called "eso-
terrrorism", an "info-war" conducted principally through the (hyper)
medium of "sonic fiction". 

The techno outfit Drexciya are only one example of a wave of
contemporary eso-terrorists rumoured to be connected with Hyper-C. "In
the sleevenotes to the 'The Quest', their '97 concept double CD," Eshun
writes, "Drexciyans are revealed to be a marine species descended from
'pregnant American-bound African slaves' thrown overboard 'by the
thousands during labour for being sick and disruptive cargo. Could it be
possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in its mother's womb
is certainly alive in an aquatic environment. Is it possible that they
could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air? 

Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen, a
premature human infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid
oxygen through its underdeveloped lungs. These facts combined with
reported sightings of Gillmen and Swamp Monsters in the coastal swamps
of the Southeastern United States make the slave trade theory
startlingly feasible.'" Drexicya are part of the "hypersitious" network
described by Eshun in his recent * More Brilliant than the Sun:
Adventures in Sonic Fiction*, a network that includes Sun Ra, Public
Enemy, George Clinton and Underground Resistance. For Eshun, a crucial
theme in the sonic "discontinuum" he describes is abduction. "The idea
of alien abduction," he explains, "means that we've all been living in
an alien-nation since the 18th century. The mutation of the African male
and female slaves in the 18th century into what became negro, and into
the entire series of humans that were designed in America."

Abduction, of course, has been a major preoccupation in the recent
coverage of the Cybergoths, with outraged families complaining of their
children being swallowed into a world of artificial drugs and
schizophrenia. What abduction is really about, according to Trent, is
"missing time." "What's happening out there?" she asks. "In a sense, you
have to have been abducted to find out." For Trent, the struggle between
Hyper-C and the Cybergoths is part of an ongoing "time war" ("a war
that's only going to get worse, and which will affect all of us"). The
Cybergoths have what Dr Trent calls an "extremely sophisticated"
philosophy of time. "They use two interrelated diagrams or
graphizations: the 'Barker' spiral and the 'Stillwell' Numogram (which
includes the Pentazygon)."

"The Barker spiral maps a simple set of numeric relations, but these
relations have enormously complex implications," insists Dr Polly Wolfe,
a colleague of Trent's on Miskatonic's Time-Lapse sub-committee. On one
side of the spiral, Wolfe explains, all the numbers add up to 10 ( 1+9,
2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5); on the other, "occulted" side, 10 is subtracted,
and all the numbers are "twinned" to make up 9 (0 +9, 1+8, 2+7, 3+6,
4+5). Important here is the operation of "digital reduction", in which
any number can be reduced to a figure between 1 and 9, by adding up its
component numerals: for instance, 16 = 1+6 = 7, 17 = 1+7 = 8, etc. One
of the many odd effects Wolfe describes is the interchangable role of 9
and 0. "In digital reduction, 9 always functions as 0. Try it out. Take,
let's say, 92: it = 9 + 2 = 11 = 1 + 1 = 2. The same applies for any
number including 9. In a sense, you can just ignore the 9 - but only
because 9, like 0, is everywhere." "The Numogram could, in some ways, be
seen as an elaboration of the Spiral," Wolfe goes on. 

The numogram describes relations that emerge by combining the operations
of digital reduction with those of "triangular numbering". In triangular
numbering, you add up the sum of all the numbers in the numner-line up
to and including the number you are dealing with; for example, 3 becomes
6: 3 = 1+2+3= 6. 9=1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9= 45 (which, interestingly,
digitally reduces to [4+5 =] 9). Wolfe styles herself an
"Aftermathematician" or "Mechanomist." "I'm a dabbler," she said . "I
like to see how numbers behave; I'm not interested in reducing them to
instantiations of some pre-existing logical system." By contrast, Wolfe
insists, insitutionalized mathematics can be defined by its "hostility
to numbers." Dr Wolfe takes seriously the so-called "numerological"
traditions orthodox mathematics has defined itself against, noting the
correspondences between the radical proto-"aftermathematical" theories
she is interested in - Cantor's transfinite numbers, Godel's diagonal
numbering - and older, "vernacular numeric systems". "If you look at the
work ethnomathematicians like [Ohio State University's] Ron Eglash are
doing, you see examples of exactly the kinds of strange looped
coincidences and odd doublings Linda is interested in. 

In one piece, Eglash describes the parallels between Senagelese sand
divination systems and the Cantor set. No-one is seriously suggesting
that there is a line of influence or evolution here; there are parallel
routes to the same discovery. Numbers and what they do are no more
something we invent than they're already sitting in some Platonic
heaven." Hence mechanomics. "Mech because numeric dabbling is not
representational, but practical. Following what numbers do is an act of
production, but only because all production is really a matter of
discovery not ex nihilo creation. Making things up is always a matter of
subtracting from zero."

Of key importance here is the role of "infinitesimals", which, according
to Wolfe, are a major theme in "Gothic numerics". The term Gothic is
"not idle. Differential calculus was once dismissed as a 'Gothic
hypothesis', since it posits quantities irreducible to standard unitary
quantification. In a way, zero - so controversial when introduced into
Europe - is itself a Gothic quantity. And what the cybergoths call
'Uttunul' is crucially connected with Cantorian continuum." "Uttunul" is
one of the five "entities" that populate the Cybergoth system. ("It's
wrong, strictly speaking, to describe the system as belonging to the
Cybergoths," Trent interjects. "They use it, but its origins are very
mysterious." ) The five entities each correspond to a "Barker-twinning"
or "Syzygy", the pairings which make up 9 (1/8, 2/7, 3/6, 5/4, 9/0) and
which together constitute the "Pentazygon" ("Five-twin"). The first
three of these beings make up "the cycle of time", whilst the other two
are - in some sense - "outside" sequential time. The cycle the system
describes, Trent points out, is "multi-levelled"; it is also, for
instance, also a story about the journey from land to sea and back
again. Katak.(5/4) is "associated with the desert, with heat haze and
shimmer. In many ways, its key features - claw marks, teeth - seem to
recall werewolf legends. Its time is a time of cataclysm; its appearance
always presages disaster. Sometimes imaged as an hydrophobic or rabid
dog, Katak can partly be characterised by a horror of what will
supercede it in the cycle, Mur Mur (1/8), the Dreaming demon of
submersion. 

Mur Mur, meanwhile, carries echoes of the legends of Sea Beasts and
ancient serpents; its time is the Deep Time of the ocean bed. Like
Katak, it too, is horrified by what will follow it in the cycle; in this
case, Oddubb (2/7), the amphibious entity, associated with the crossing
out of water and the acquisition of lungs. What Mur Mur fears is the
division that Oddubb brings, the splitting of the undivided waters.
Oddubb is defined by ambiguous and elusive movement. As its name
suggests, it is a 'double-agency', a duplicitous creature. It has a
horror of dryness, of the state of being fully landlocked that comes
with Katak. Which brings us full circle." The two entities that are
"outside time" - Djynxx (3/6) - "a changeling figure, defined by a
jinking (eratic or zig-zagging) movement, a sudden cutting in or out" -
and Uttunul (9/0), the "flatline" entity, connoting "continuum, zero-
intensity, void - eternity not as infinitely extended time, but as No-
Time" - are in many ways the most fascinating and disturbing of the set,
associated as they are, for Trent, with old mythologies of "child
abduction" and Hell. But is all this merely an attempt to populate a
disenchanted world with old gods? Or is cyberspace - and the world -
really crawling with these creatures? "Perhaps it's all make-believe,"
Trent smiles enigmatically. "But don't underestimate the power of belief
to make things happen."
-- 
ccru via katasonix

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