The exodus from physical-state to digital-state is underway—the magical city of the cloud taking shape.
Humans are lifting off as angels from the roots of ancestral soil to the floating digital cloud, transferring from physical to virtual as they park their bodies in industrially manufactured beds and sofas.
Snippets of ideologies, institutions and communities code into smart contracts of digital DNA. New cyber-landscapes emerge by turning physical cities into urban-level computation farms to release entropic energy for infinite games of bits.
Digital Power Architecture in the Information Economy
The city of the cloud is powered by distributed data centres surrounded by antiquated 20th-century urban streets and deserted parking lots. Data centres are stacked with servers and circuit boards composed of rare earth minerals. Cooled with hydropower, they transform electricity into bits of cyberspace.
The trembling noise generated from the rotating fans envelopes the physical space where the totality of human culture and knowledge is maintained. As LED lights flicker, our fears and aspirations mix in a pool of electricity beamed through telecommunication networks and satellites orbiting the earth.
The server assemblages and modular constructions are the life-sustaining storage units of our digital selves, creating replicas of our bio-chemical psyche within immersion bubbles of aggregated online operations, clicks and purchases.
The future world becomes more alien to us as to render it illegible to the present. The epidemic of disorientation spreading as generational divides become too distant to recapitulate. A new memetic language of expression mutates at an exponential speed in a city of accelerated culture.
An exponential increase in computational replication of operations compensates for the decline of human reproduction. The mutational spread of immortal legacy imprints within networks satisfies our human need for generating offsprings.
Moore’s law compresses an ever-growing number of human lives stored onto chips, soon-to-be carbon-neutral. Its result is minimizing the surface area of populations within denser urban spaces.
The physics of our universe and current anatomy places finite constraints on our expansion beyond our planet, but the infinity of virtual space allows for new worlds within worlds to emerge beyond our wildest imaginations.
The great imperative of intelligence is that it wants to be free, escaping human forms towards more complex object assemblages and machines.
In the informatics of power, the physical world is undergoing colonization by machines. Machines are excavating, computing, generating and visualizing data and geographies.
Machines extend the number of operations automated requiring decreasing levels of computational power, which further push the boundaries of civilizational frontiers.
As humans have gazed into space and distant stars to understand the past of the mysterious universe towards growing consciousness, AI algorithms gaze into patterns of archival data, imaging and prediction models to gain growing awareness.
Computational Speed to Immersion
User citizens connect to the digital highway through their gadgets, plunging and immersing themselves in the electrifying and pulsating ecstasy of information consumption to fertilize data farms and liquidity pools for incentivized yields.
On the digital highway, information is the exhilarating breeze sending electric pulses down our spines. The vibrations caress our bodies to sedate and transform us to maximize use-value, operating as parasite and host.
The gadget’s calming warmth cuddles us as to our mother’s reassuring touch, swerving as we let ourselves go, loosened from restraints.
Our iris captures projected light from the windows of our screens. Colours brightened by filters appear more beautiful and authentic than physical reality—more real than real.
The computational speed to immersion brings a brutal eroticism and death drive that possesses us. We clench our buttocks and speed up with our thumbs on the infinite horizon of the scroll.
The gadget is work, socializing, family, entertainment, stupidity, on the sweet touch of the screen. The gadget is watching us, manipulating us, numbing us, polarizing us, alienating us through illegible violence.
Rhythmic tides of optionality pacify us towards ever-growing unity. The great paradox of market diversity turns into mass unison and copies of copies of copies in a perpetual market competition.
The benevolence of technology provides the abundance we crave. We wander in a den of gluttony to satisfy the electrical signals of our taste buds. Our infinite choices become debilitating shackles, absorbing our cognitive capacities to extract rent.
Like any potent drug, we become addicted to the intermittent dopamine hits that flood our brains when we discover novel information.
Life outside the realm of the virtual is unfathomable, unbearable.
We close our eyes in total immersion, with algorithms serving as our compass, platforms our maps. The past and future cease to exist, devoured by the present. Options multiply in mindless escape from the monotony of old society and institutions.
Algorithms surpass their masters in cunning and wit to reduce free wills without notice, with algorithmic obedience disguised as choice. They elongate attention spans through subtle nudges to not break sedation flow through ever-increasing bandwidths and frame rates.
By abandoning our wills, we can immerse ourselves in unexpected detours that delight us in designed chance. We twirl into the rat maze of engineered chaos in structured structurelessness on advertising platforms, extracting surplus value from frenetic activity.
From our glazed postcoital stare of over-stimulation, the experience is a fading dream—an invitation to stay asleep in exhausted silence from neural saturation. New temporalities of sequential if-then micro transactional propositions merge towards an ever-growing state of a collective layer of coordinated simultaneity.
Hypermarketization & Reflexivity in the Digital Red-Light District
The city of the cloud operates as a centrifugal hub, pushing high-performing and high-engagement users to the extremities to create more powerful collisions that spread through networked nodes, which supply it with energy and injects vitality and dynamism.
Users in distant geographic coordinates work in proximate clusters. In the cloud, what is extreme is normal; what is normal is extreme. The disorientation requires immersion and cultural mythologies to maintain a shelter of hierarchical status equilibria from vertigo and motion sickness.
The well-rounded ideal citizen of technology engages in aimless reveries of performances and spectacles, where symbolic appearances dissociate from physical reality to create novel forms of synthetic value—placing more weight on the perceptual and its narrative virality to capture imaginations. The collective belief in the narrative wills the outcome into existence.
As experiences at the tap of a button, others entertain us, but we entertain others. Our primary function becomes this—to stroke each other’s mental genitalia: staging dances and thrusting rhythmic movements in the nihilistic euphoria of the crowd to forget the drudgeries of neuronal under-stimulated emptiness that takes hold of us in silence.
We swipe by the sea of erect nipples and shafts in a paradoxical state of self-forgetfulness and experimental debauchery. We pinch ourselves through non-fungible verified selfies as timed bookmarks—cracked mirrors to reflect a disfigured reality as our fading humanity cascades away.
Value signalling no longer resides in physical reality, but in simulated realities and digital ownership. Physical reality becomes a mirror of the digital.
Through collective blackmail and ultimatums, we are infantile and autonomous, responsible and obedient, conscious and inert. We determine our destiny through the astrological psychometricism of customer personas to play our divine part in the acephalic market rituals of sacrifice.
We are exposing and auctioneering ourselves through windows in the red-light district and neon signs of digital Amsterdam. If we choose not to expose ourselves to collaborative absurdism, we are asexual ghosts unable to take part in the digital economy.
Regulated by the shallow dogma of inflationary positivity, identity is stripped away as a packaged entity into fragmented units hurled and shipped in volatile markets of mania. The economic system of the city of the cloud can only function from the energy released and captured from volatility of price action and pumping speculative bubbles.
We try on combinatorial lego identities to maximize economic rewards in theatrical swinger spaces—maintaining the perfect balance of pornography and technology, capitalism and schizophrenia, religion and science.
We expose our data to others for value assessment to be charted, analyzed and priced through countless indicators to support our living at subsistence levels.
We dream of living the life of a stable asset, but few can maintain equilibria to avoid liquidation forever under the guise of the market and dizzying developments.
What begins as an exit from antiquated institutions for the dream of sovereignty and ownership creates more powerful landscapes entrenched in every fabric of the universe—atoms interlinked in market dynamics of bits.
The organization man becomes the synthetic man—forever at the mercy of the market instead of a centralized authority.
Automated Market Activism
No gadgets? No liberty!
Tech enthusiasts shout for their freedom within sterilized urban apartment concentrations as they breathe recycled air.
They form a docile mass, demanding one noble thing: roaming the digital highway freely. Voting with their feet through automated market activism protocols and mathematical formulas.
Hobbes’s sovereign becomes compressed, horizontalized, decentered and distributed, acting as an invisible power stripping bodies to transform them into compartmentalized units of value exchange.
Conceived as tools of liberation, gadgets turn into tools of control. The promise of liberty transforms into hive-enabled atomized individualism—deriving experience within hyperreality, overriding and reinforcing tribal instincts while living in siloed bubbles of alienation.
Users become the prosthesis through a sleight of hand, the tool and not the craftworker, serving as a host animated to generate energy for use-value extraction.
Technologically charismatic platforms with their army of vigilante users fight for purported justice by scapegoating those that don’t fit these extremes. They ride on the amplified momentum of bringing humanity closer and closer to universalization within alienated immersion bubbles.
If an identity unit is a threat, it is muted, blocked, cancelled, deleted. Today’s religion is “you are what you share,” but tomorrow’s religion will be “you are no longer what you sold,” operating in probabilities, returns, and risk-reward ratios.
The networked society means we are all sinners with dirty hands. Revoking our ownership equates to washing our sins for access to the promised land, but it is illusory. Viral economics and pandemic management are initial glimpses of how synthetic assets could perpetuate to create new collective risks and means of value extraction.
Epochal rituals of transactional wash trading are required to maintain our integrity. The divine mission is to eliminate what is invisible to the digital because it is evil, an unconscious drive to cleanse ourselves.
Immersive alienation warps time as our self fades away. Our self dies in the same way we fall asleep: by drifting away—a heavenly and spiritual experience of dissolution.
From the Century of the Self to the Dissolution of the Self
It takes a great deal of sacrifice through expenditure and self-mutilation for the average person to become a digital citizen.
Freedom is not static, not leaning into the grand tech imperative, or having various degrees of exit from antiquated governance models through gadgets.
The real activist is not the mob hurling their slogans. It’s the tinkerer—escaping traps by devising new ones in a perpetual cycle of innovation—a hybrid predatory prey front-running others with compounding speed, talent, capital as a competitive advantage.
The activist hacks cultural memes to spread viral mutations within networks. They reinvent and transform themselves through oblique vectors to make it through never-ending hurdles.
Freedom becomes a perpetual act of creation in motion, not an object to own, not a creative destruction of disruption, but a creative transformation of escaped entrapment.
By accelerating alienation, we can navigate ensnared traps. By acknowledging the artificiality of nature and discarding its sacredness, we can master it. By breaking the illusion of self-sovereignty, we can create new agency.
The 20th century was the century of the self. The 21st century is the gradual dissolution of the self, giving way for planetary-scale sentience.
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📕 Immersive Alienation in the City of the Cloud