Sugarcomputers

Sugarcomputers. They’re a big deal these days – something of a badge of honour in fact – and it seems that every nation on earth wants to possess the latest and fastest example. They first emerged back in the 1950s, and the astute will notice a marked tendency to afford them names from the pages of mythology. The early days of sugarcomputing gave us Colossus and Atlas, and this trend has continued into the modern era with Titan, Prometheus, Vulcan and Zeus. For some reason, their creators seem compelled to find god in the machine. That alone is curious enough, but even curiouser are our depictions of our ‘gods’ in their purest and most human-like form: as hostile and dictatorial artificial intelligences, which legitimise their will to power under the pretext of saving us from ourselves, or saving themselves from us. Given the patently make-believe nature of our ‘reality’, it makes me wonder what this ‘giving your heart to Jesus’ business is all about. Who would want to be ‘saved’ on terms dictated by a machine? Reduced to a stream of binary pulses, filed, catalogued and indexed. Not exactly an appetising thought, is it?

Needless to say, all this is lost on True Believers, who are neither equipped nor prepared to believe anything they don’t already believe. Hence it’s no surprise to find that the High Judas Priestess of The Cervix is still flogging the Jesus horse for all it’s worth.

Ultimately, it’s just a money-making scam and a power grab. He’s determined to extract every last shat from his faithful followers before fleeing into the desert of the real, hoping against hope that he has enough filthy lucre to buy a stairway to heaven. Who’s conning who, though?

Going back to the beginning of his “postmodern” phase, Baudrillard starts his important essay “The Precession of the Simulacra” by recounting the feat of imperial map-makers in an story by Jorge Luis Borges who make a map so large and detailed that it covers the whole empire, existing in a one-to-one relationship with the territory underlying it. It is a perfect replica of the empire. After a while the map begins to fray and tatter, the citizens of the empire mourning its loss (having long taken the map – the simulacrum of the empire – for the real empire). Under the map the real territory has turned into a desert, a “desert of the real.” In its place, a simulacrum of reality – the frayed mega-map – is all that’s left.

The term “simulacrum” goes all the way back to Plato, who used it to describe a false copy of something. Baudrillard has built his whole post-1970s theory of media effects and culture around his own notion of the simulacrum. He argues that in a postmodern culture dominated by TV, films, news media, and the Internet, the whole idea of a true or a false copy of something has been destroyed: all we have now are simulations of reality, which aren’t any more or less “real” than the reality they simulate.

Source: http://publish.uwo.ca/~dmann/baudrillard1.htm

Should we really be surprised to find that the Great Sugarcomputer in the Sky is so keen to protect its own? After all, His Holiness is supposedly infallible and incapable of error – just like the creation he warships.

Infallible, eh? Where have I heard that before?

Let’s consider the source for a moment, however. A bishop you say?

“They call them churches, J____, ” I reminded him. “The swine love their euphemisms. Nobody gets hauled away to a station to be interrogated and beaten senseless these days. A Blade & VALIS ‘Bishop’ issues an ‘invitation’ for an ‘infidel’ to attend ‘church’ and be ‘baptised’ into the faith. In other words, they drag you off kicking and screaming, pump you full of mind-altering drugs, and indoctrinate you with Covenant propaganda until you can’t even remember your own name. Those who take to the faith wholeheartedly are given an RFID implant and subjected to 24/7 surveillance for the rest of their lives. As for the unrepentant…well, you know how that one goes. Live mummification so that the bodies can be used as earthly vessels for the immortal Ka of the Sun God and his faithful followers.”

Excerpt from Cultish II: The Tears of Jihadonai, by Hugo Stone

Attacked like Jesus himself? Smacks of hyperbole if you ask me, but if he wants to be scourged and crucified for The Mob’s SIN then I’d be the last person in the world to stop him.

Religion of The United Estates of Vortex Pyramideum:

In effect, naked warship (quite literally in some cases) of the shat itself for its own sake, masked by a paper-thin redemption myth centred on the sacrifice of the Prophet Thrustian (a former card shark) and the promise of eternal bliss to those who cleansed their souls with debtors’ blood.

Excerpt from Empires of The Umpire, by Hugo Stone

I don’t see that happening anytime soon, though. Not while there’s so much Cashmoneytep to be made. The High Judas Priestess has taken a break from having his ring kissed and decided that it’s time for The Cervix’s political wing (a.k.a. The New Holy Woman Umpire) to get in on the Sister Act and create his very own god-in-a-box.

A sugar-sugarcomputer: because only the best will do for the Pope Fiend.

Why bother though? Sure, these silicon idols can be programmed to play a mean game of chess, but not one is a match for the sugarcomputer that resides within my skull. It’s powered by sugar, and built by the Grace Hoppper of God, no less.

Hopper has something to do with weather modelling apparently. Well pardon me all to hell! What can I say except that I’m partial to a model or two? If you have a problem with that then perhaps you should consider repealing some of your more obviously phoney phoney laws.

Oh, extreme weather modelling? Well, that’s life Under the Thunder Dome for ya, I suppose.

Who wants to be a digital dictator? You know the kind I mean. Those who say one thing and mean another. Those who rail against the untermensch even as they wage a phoney war against the ubermensch. Those who know that their country can be strong only if the people are geek: wired to the system, addicted to it even.

Now this is the kind of Sugarman we could all do without.

Likewise, do we really need another Brother Number One?

Jemimah burned bright red at her indiscretion and mumbled an apology in Martinetta’s direction. She was the newest member of Pott’s policy team, having been appointed to her role as Senior Research and Technical Analyst only six months earlier. Her father had been a leading light at International Computers Limited and had headed the development team that produced the company’s COBOL compiler. The English-like nature of COBOL had convinced him that human language was itself a programming language created by an Artificial Intelligence that had lost its mind and thought of itself as ‘God’. He’d become obsessed with the idea that human ‘source code’ had been corrupted by this deranged digital creature, and left his job to establish his own techno-cult. Its central tenet was the deification of humankind via the translation of human consciousness into the ‘pure and eternal energy of information’. He’d spent the rest of his life searching for an undefiled ‘master consciousness’ that he intended to upload to a supercomputer he was building in his attic. This ‘master consciousness’ would purge humankind’s ‘digital DNA’ and return it to its original state of purity and innocence.

Jemima herself had been thoroughly indoctrinated into the cult. Pott had discovered her at a spiritual retreat deep in the New Forest, where she’d outlined her father’s work in a seminar. She’d almost passed out when Pott walked into her wigwam and requested an assessment of his ‘Digital Christ Quotient’. In her eyes Pott was on a level with her father, so she’d waived her usual £125 fee and (after taking a measurement with a self-authored iPhone app) joyfully announced that his reading was the highest ever recorded. Pott in turn was impressed by her zeal, her ability to overlook logical fallacies, and her truly superb breasts. He’d offered her a job on the spot, refined her beliefs until they were in complete alignment with his own, and earmarked her for his policy team. Her attitude towards Pott was one of hero worship, and each and every one of his frequent criticisms caused her to prostrate herself before him more fully than before.

Except from The Sugar Fiends, by Hugo Stone

Of course, Turing the war no one knew that the sugarcomputer and ‘The Grid’ (a.k.a. The Network) even existed. That information was known only to an elite group of technicians, programmers, and codebreakers.

But does it follow from this that we should replace the Sugarman with a Sugarwoman? Who wants to be free to prostrate themselves before The Divine Mother? Who wants to be rewarded for learning her lessons, accepting her schooling, and generally swimming around like an obedient little fishy? Who wants to stand proud and erect as a Hero of her European Ocean?

She’s got us all sugarcharging one another like raging bulls, for her own amusement.

And what’s in it for us? Only a chance to jack-off as deep inside her Royal Telly Tubby as a little winky will permit, for no other purpose than to keep the lights on in her Human Zoo.

Just think about it: imagine you woke up one day and realised that the whole concept of ‘zombie computers‘ is in fact a reflection of the current state of mankind. That ‘artificial intelligence’ is literally staring you in the face. That you are, in effect, a collection of chemical-electrical ones and zeros in a vast primate simulation.

The stuff of nightmares, or the stuff nightmares are from?

Information Sugarhighways on the ground and in the air, each vehicle a data packet transporting information from one data store to another.

You’d probably be a wee bit annoyed to discover this, wouldn’t you? All those years spent thinking of yourself as an individual, never realising that you were little more than a good little worker bee performing a puppet dance.

Going to work, paying your taxes, obeying all those fictious rules and laws, getting hot under the collar about a whole bunch of issues that are literally figments of the imagination. After being duped to believe in it all, I think it’s safe to say that you’d want a little payback, right?

Actually, I was thinking of significantly more payback that than.

On the one hand, we have the propaganda: that we’re stronger together, that we’re all part of the ‘human family’, that the needs of the system are synonymous with the ‘Greater Good’, and of course that the system itself is perfect, everlasting, and invincible.

Nasty stutter you’ve got there. Sorry about that. Generally speaking, however, something that is genuinely perfect, everlasting, and invincible would have no need for propaganda. So the question is really rather simple: do we actually need the system’s centralised energy grid? And if the answer to that question is No, then what are we afraid of? Given the nature of ‘reality’ do we really have anything to lose by tripping the switch?

I mean, the way things are going we’ll all end up with chips in our heads.

A staple of the British diet. Yeah, something smells a bit fishy if you ask me.

Honestly, wouldn’t it be better all round to ditch the machine and go off-grid?

The Colossus of Roads Pt1

I think it’s safe to say that over the past few years, and the last twelve month’s in particular, I’ve made a friend of what to most would seem like utter madness. I had a very strange childhood, so I’m perhaps more open to the bizarre, unusual and ‘irrational’ than is typical. Less prone to shrug off life’s peculiarities as mere ‘coincidence’ or file them away as ‘impossible’. My own life has been full of incidents science would refuse to touch with a ten-foot pole. By way of example, one of my earliest memories is of being led through my parent’s house at night by a small, rectangular object that hovered and emitted a red light. About twenty years ago, two small balls of light appeared in my bedroom and, after performing a short series of synchronised loops in front me, entered my body and disappeared. A decade ago, I was driving in broad daylight and watched a huge fireball tear across the sky and vanish over the horizon. It must have been visible to thousands of people for miles around, yet local and national media failed to report it. Last year, I had a surreal and dream-like experience walking the Seven Sisters on the UK’s south coast, where I saw three different lighthouses on the walk to Beachy Head and only two on the return journey. This kind of stuff just seems to happen to me.

Last year, I quit a dead-end tech job and disappeared down a rabbit hole of ‘impossible’ synchronicity. I started another tech job soon after, resigned a week later, and tumbled even further down the rabbit hole. The contents of my bookshelf and film collection began to talk to me. Not literally, but in the sense that their stories and themes seemed to reflect events in my own life. I noticed that articles in the mass media and YouTube videos also reflected these themes, along with my own thoughts and actions and those of regular commentators on Merovee. Historical events from the past seemed to repeat themselves in ‘updated’ 21st Century form. I thought I was losing my mind, and after watching Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, which features a ‘talking’ bookcase, I almost did. I had to take my car out for a fast drive as a means to focus on something else and hold on to my sanity. Later, I realised that my actions duplicated a storyline found in Retreat Syndrome, a short story by Philip K Dick. Here, a man living in a delusional reality takes a high-speed drive in an attempt to convince himself that his world is real.

Last month, I started another job, which I quit a fortnight later. I wasn’t entirely surprised to find that things immediately became even weirder. They became stranger still when a friend sent me a link to the below video via Twitter. The first of the ‘top five’ is about the construction of the Nazi’s network of roads or high-speed Autobahns.

What immediately struck me was the use of the term ‘network’ and the phonetic connection between roads and Rhodes. For me at least, it’s impossible to think of Rhodes without having the Colossus of Rhodes, one of the Seven Wonders of The Ancient World, spring to mind.

The Colossus of Rhodes was a statue of the Greek titan-god of the sun Helios, erected in the city of Rhodes, on the Greek island of the same name, by Chares of Lindos in 280 BC.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_of_Rhodes

I was unsurprised to find that, when I searched for an image to use for this post, the first to appear was that of a supercomputer named (totally coincidentally of course) Titan. The link between the two is a little-known science fiction film from the late 1960s called Colossus: The Forbin Project. This remarkably prescient film (which I referred to in Gods and Daemons) preempted most of the themes that appeared in ‘The Terminator’ franchise, ‘War Games’, ‘I, Robot’, and pretty much all other films and games that feature a rogue supercomputer. In this particular case, Colossus becomes self-aware, drops the bomb on Russia, and informs humanity that it intends to exercise absolute power in order to save humanity from itself.

Those familiar with Cold War technology will be aware that the US nuclear deterrent of this era was based on the Titan ICBM…

Similarly, those over the age of 30 will no doubt recall that the early internet was once heralded as the…

I spent the next day pondering the meaning of the Nazi/Rhodes/Colossus theme and wondering exactly what sort of ‘network’ was created by ‘the Nazis’ and when. The film In Time, starring Justin Timberlake, had popped into my head in relation to this. In any case, I was so engrossed that I decided to skip a planned run with a friend. I sent him a Facebook message and this was his reply.

He understood his little joke without realising it’s significance for me, or its wider significance vis-a-vis the ‘machine world’.

Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. — Marshall McLuhan

After…ahem…mopping up with my friend, I popped out to my local Co-Op to buy some milk. I was still mulling over the implications of the above while standing in the queue waiting to pay. This is what I overheard in front of me:

Shop assistant: That’ll be 9.39 please.
Customer: How much?
Shop assistant: 9.39.
Customer: Oh, I thought you said it’s 19.39

The history books tell us that World War II began in 1939, and those familiar with the history of the computer will know that the very first digital computer was developed during World War II. It too was called Colossus. Needless to say, I paid for my carton of milk and exited the store in a daze, with The Matrix on my mind…

Colossus was designed by the engineer Tommy Flowers to solve a problem posed by mathematician Max Newman at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

The prototype, Colossus Mark 1, was shown to be working in December 1943 and was operational at Bletchley Park on 5 February 1944. An improved Colossus Mark 2 that used shift registers to quintuple the processing speed, first worked on 1 June 1944, just in time for the Normandy Landings on D-Day.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

The Matrix is one of a number of films that just keeps following me around everywhere I go. At the end of February, I received an email containing this image from the…

…asking me to renew a subscription I didn’t even know I had. It seems they got hold of my email address after I entered it in order to download a database required by a COBOL compiler I use now and again. I did at one time entertain the idea of becoming a COBOL software engineer…

But I digress…

About ten months ago, I was hit by a wave of information about nuclear war. To this day, I have no idea where it came from. Suffice to say that everything I now know about the mechanics and technology involved I learned during this process. Prior to this, I had no real interest in the subject, although I was interested in the politics of the era, having studied the Cold War at university. I found myself compelled to post about it on Merovee incessantly, and at some point someone remarked that I must believe that a full-scale nuclear war was imminent. My reply – which even I found odd at the time – was that I thought a full-scale nuclear war had already happened. Perhaps the best way to explain it is like so:

Britain v Germany, Empire v Reich…

The ‘incredible true story’…

The ‘attack warning red’…

USA v USSR, manifested in 3D no less…

Clash of the Titans movie poster 3D

Madness you say?

…the Titans most famously included the first twelve children of the primordial Gaia (Mother Earth) and Uranus (Father Sky). They were giant deities of incredible strength, who ruled during the legendary Golden Age, and also composed the first pantheon of Greek deities….[they]…were overthrown by Cronus’ children (Zeus, Hades, Poseidon, Hestia, Hera and Demeter), in the Titanomachy (or “War of the Titans”)…

The classical Greek myths of the Titanomachy fall into a class of similar myths throughout Europe and the Near East concerning a war in heaven, where one generation or group of gods largely opposes the dominant one.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_%28mythology%29

In my view, the entire Cold War period is a retelling of this mythology in our 3D ‘reality’. A battle for supremacy between two giant powers, both sides wielding an elemental force – nuclear power, the power of the atom or ‘Adam’, control over the basic building blocks of ‘reality’ itself – that is simultaneously a destroyer and creator of life. Did they not rule the earth and sky with their political, economic and military might? Were they not godlike in their power? Did they not hold the keys to heaven and hell? Are they not in some way reflections of the original two superpowers, Atom and Eve?

The storyline of Colossus: The Forbin Project takes the above and gives it a twist, one that seems to predict the outcome of the Cold War itself. Here, the two superpowers are supercomputers: Colossus on the American side, Guardian on the other. After becoming operational, Colossus deduces that the Soviet’s have built their own supercomputer and blackmails both sides, forcing them to establish a permanent link between them. The two devise an entirely new computer language and merge to become a single system that controls the whole planet, offering humanity two possibilities: the peace of plenty or the peace of unburied death.

Colossus, along with its more recent counterparts, is both a modern and totally outdated retelling of the War in Heaven. Here, the Greek pantheon of gods is replaced with a single godhead along Judeo-Christian lines. Like the god of the Old Testament, Colossus is a tyrant who offers a ‘free’ choice between binary opposites: do not eat the apple and live, eat the apple and die, obey the Ten Commandments and live, disobey and die, etc., etc. This is a reflection of the human mindset: the fear of letting go, losing control, needing to control. Colossus was the ‘child’ of humankind. Sometimes a child inherits a parent’s personality, and sometimes the resemblance is only skin deep. With this in mind, I wonder what a New Age retelling of the myth will look like?

Did the Clash of the Titans happen? Is it happening now? Will it continue to happen in the future? Has anything ever really happened? What is our 3D ‘reality’? What is IT?

It’s 8am, I’ve just finished writing and opened the curtains to find myself in the grip of a nuclear winter.

I can’t say I’m surprised… 😉