<nettime> Ccru datastream6: Making a killing on the net

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

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

Y2k+ datastream 6
KO99

The A-Death 'Phenomenon'

Iris Carver
from Death-Traffic in Cyberspace (Making a Killing on the Net).

Has death itself become a telecommodity? A dark-tide of scare-stories
and morbid rumour increasingly suggests so. By the late 90s Leary's
psychedelic utopianism seems to have contracted to the nihilistic slogan
'Turn-on to tune-out' (to cite a recent release by Catajungle outfit
Xxignal) ... this ain't Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll no more.

According to Doug Frushlee, spokesman for the Christian Coalition for
Natural Mortality: 'The so-called A-Death menace is an almost
unimaginable desecration of divine and natural law. This craze is an
abomination without parallel, it trades on its intrinsic lethality, and
it's growing incredibly fast. No one can say it isn't dangerous.
Something truly evil is happening to our youngsters, something beyond
60s 666uality ... I've never been as frightened as I am now.'

The result is an entire jungle of 'positive-zero' fugues: Thanatechnics,
Sarkolepsy, Snuff-Stims, K-Zombification, Electrovampirism,
Necronomics, Cthelllectronics ... Nine million ways to die.

A-Death is a hybrid product, involving convergences between at least
four distinct lines of rapid technocultural transformation. A-Death
combines 'micropause abuse' - deliberately reversed biotechmnesis -
with immersion-coma time aberrances, generating, modulating, and
rescaling sentience-holes (Sarkon-lapses). These are toned by
'Synatives' (artificial drugs) which add zone-texture, and spliced into
hyperstition trances as occultural events.

Social statistics indicate that the typical A-Death 'user' is fifteen
years old. Following the most ominous threads of A-Death reportage takes
you inexorably down into the digital underworld of the Crypt - the
dark-twin of the net - where gibsonian 'flatlining' is rapidly
transmuting from exotic fiction into pop-cult and mass-transit system.

'You could describe it as the route to contemporary shamanism' suggest
A-Death cultists of the cybergoth Late Abortion Club, 'after all, AOL
spells Loa backwards, but we call ourselves postvitalists.' How long have
the Late Abortionists been 'active' on the A-Death scene?

There are disturbing tales of K-Space 'zombie-makers' - sorcerors on the
'plane of virtual nightmare' - whose digital spine-biting centipedes
yield the 'soft-tox' juice that opens the 'limbic gates.' Crypt initiates
confirm that its arterial access 'low-way' is signposted: 'Main-Flatline
(under-construction).'

Answers vary confusingly, from extravagance ('roundabout sixty-six
million years'), through vagueness ('some time'), to mystic compression
('since now'). In other respects, accounts of the contemporary A-Death
scene and its recent history prove remarkably consistent. In particular,
the one name to turn up incessantly is that of Dr Oskar Sarkon,
biomechanician, technogenius, and one of the most controversial figures in
scientific history. Sarkon's polymathy is attested by the variety of
fields to which he has centrally contributed, including transfinite
analysis, neural-nets, distributed computing, swarm-robotics,
xenopsychology, Axsys-engineering ... Yet it was the resolutely sober
Oecumenist (rather than - for instance - Frushlee's excitable End Times)
which dedicated the cover and major editorial of its March 98 issue to the
question 'Sarkon: Satan of Cyberspace?' Sarkon has become emblematic of
the ways in which technological dreams go bad. In the words of fellow
Axsys researcher and social-thanatropist Dr Zeke Burns: 'What makes
Sarkon's input into the A-Death thing so incomparable is that it crosses
between all of the key component technologies.

The biotechmnesis work is so outstanding that it tends to overshadow his
equally pathbreaking research in adjacent fields. The Sarkon-formulae for
non-metric pausation, for example, which provided the first rigorous
basis for IC [immersion-coma] control. The links between biotechmnesis
and IC weren't remotely anticipated before the Sarkon-zip [which
mathematically models 'bicontinual assemblages'].

Finally, there's Synatives, about which he is understandably evasive,
even though he was theorizing artificial - or digital-neurotechnic -
pharmaceuticals in the mid-80s! The aggregate result of all this
pioneering science: a generation of teenagers lost in schizotechnic
death-cults.'

-- 
ccru via katasonix

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