Futurism Forever

-Recording starts.
9:30 p.m. .
Chicago is the place.
This is Agent Nathan Forsythe.
I’m about to interview Dr. Jeremy Joule, former DARPA
technician.
Specific subject: the Project Purgatory incident.
Professor, would you like to begin or would you prefer me to
list some more technical data before we continue?

-As you said, my name is Jeremy Joule, I’m thirty-four years
old and I used to work as a national defense supervisor.
The last project I was assigned to…I was working with
Professor Henry Chavez, as a part of his equipe.
He already had his own office, he was well into DARPA, though
he was younger than me.-

-Chavez, the young promise of national cyberwarfare.
Sorry for the interruption…

-No, it’s okay, I’m having a little trouble talking right
now…

-I can see that, but relax.
We have all night and we got coffee and ice cream.
Eventually, I will accompany you home.
I would like you to return with your mind to Dr. Chavez, to
summarize your personal involvement, to make it easier for me to
write the report.-

-Well, officer…Chavez already created for our Nation the
maxifirewalls for 5G and the semi-autonomous malware filter DETOX.
He was a genius when it came to managing digital connections
and data traffic, so much that there were rumors in the offices that he could perceive data flows with his brain, a bit like those
migratory birds that can pinpoint directions with magnetic fields.
He was a national asset, more valuable than a general or a
secretary of state.
You understand that today we are back to Renaissance warfare,
with the super-specialized and restricted armies?-

-Of course, Professor: specialized armies acting and reacting
at lightning speed, so that the arsenals and bombers stay sleepy.
Therefore, their computing devices must be the ultimate in
technology and home support.-

-Exactly… the government has been investing billions of
dollars for years in experimental weapons but unfortunately we
won’t see anything truly revolutionary for another hundred years,
because the timeframe for scientific research is indeed long.-

-Chavez thought the same way you did?-

-No! He was much more superb, obsessed with speed…he wanted
to bring the magical speed of data traffic into the real world.
He was talking lucidly about the possibility of creating a new
reality, superior to the augmented reality proposed a few years
ago by private companies.
At times it seemed he was talking more about teleportation
technology than data transmission… you are aware of the concept
of teleportation, Officer?

-Pretty much, and I know that in the practical way of things,
if higher exoskeletons will take a hundred and fifty years,
teleportation awaits us in a millennium or have I heard
pessimistic rumors?-

-No no, too optimistic, officer! Techné has its own
weight, techné demands a tribute… a tribute that must not be
paid too quickly! But Chavez wouldn’t listen to reason… Oh God!-

-Have a glass of water, professor.
Want some ice cream?-

-Am I sweating, Officer?

-Yes but it’s hot and the fan isn’t too loud, so I don’t think
you’ll feel sick.
I need you, even at the cost of being cramped, not to withhold
any important details.-

-Officer, fifteen people died, all of them at the DARPA-
controlled X48 facility in Michigan, a secret facility used for
Chavez’s latest project…. we’re all researchers and five security
staff members.
The security measures proved not to be sufficient…not
sufficient at all!-

-It was an experiment involving a computer device, in an area
already controlled by satellite and with limited access.
With all due respect, doctor, no one expected anything like
this.-

-But you saw it, didn’t you? You saw what happened?-

-Sure professor: I was the first one to come and see what
happened and get you out from under that rubble.-

-And you… you also saw the conclusion! You saw what Chavez
had become! Or did I imagine it?-

-No, I can assure you that the event was traumatic and
disastrous.
I don’t want to belittle your suffering and the deaths of your
colleagues and security personnel, of course.
What happened was upsetting to me, and during my career this
is not the first time I have seen blood spilled in large
quantities.
And I didn’t see exactly what you saw, before I arrived.
I’m sorry.-

-There were no records saved, Officer.-

-That’s why your testimony is important, until we can get
something off the surviving hard drives.-

-Those databases and computers left whole should be
demagnetized and then burned, Agent Forsythe.
Chavez… your madness must remain buried in those ruins.
That technology… that madness!-

-Please, have some ice cream… slowly.-

-Thank you… Can I ask you something?-

-Sure.-

-Is there really a branch of the FBI that investigates
unexplained cases?-

-More like there is an urban legend about it.
Over the years, the government has commissioned a series of
special projects, with the more or less forced participation of
civilian specialists and various branches of the military and
security services.

These projects were official but approached in an
extraordinary way precisely because of their particularity.-

-But these projects appeared beginning in the 1930s, didn’t
they?-

-In the 1940s.-

-Like the Blue Book project? –

-Mhmmm.
That one in particular, though, is much later.
I guess you know what the final response of that work was: a
hole into water.
Reasonably, that small percentage of unexplained celestial
phenomena could not have aroused the government’s concern at all
more than the USSR’s projects could in reality.-

-Tell me, Officer, what about that story of hypnotic radio
signals from East Germany?-

-Interference and reverberations.
You know very well that if conspiracy theories were really
national secrets they wouldn’t appear in bookstores on multiple
best-selling titles.-

-Exactly, all those tactics are static screeching,
interference noise, right? And they’re meant to mask a hidden
transmission, aren’t they?-

-What are you suggesting, Doctor?-

-That conspiracy theories are used to cover up real mysteries
or real plots!-

-We’re getting off track here, Doctor.
Please return to the event…-

-Yeah, yeah… here’s what happened.
The project, the last project of Chavez…-

-This project was supposed to generate a prototype for a new
form of accelerated data sharing, capable of replacing the
artificial intelligences that have failed to deliver in recent
years.-

-Not just that.
I’m not claiming that Schadenfreude is something we can share,
of course…-

-Schaden what?-

-Joy in the misfortunes of others.
Did you see the explosions at the atomic laboratories in China
last year, officer?-

-Yes: another tragedy.-

-Caused by faulty artificial intelligence!-

-Exactly, but what does that have to do with anything?

-Listen, do you remember any of the old electronic games?
Before the collapse of the video game market?-

-Sort of.-

-You remember that the little men, the little figurines,
didn’t always work well, right?-

-Yes, I do. –

-Those were little artificial intelligences.
So, Chavez’s research to overcome the limits of traditional
artificial intelligence can be justified.
Many experts realized that, eventually, the idea of creating
augmented minds could be a viable replacement for the creation of
supercomputers that were too flawed or had little empathy for the
human realities they were supposed to help…
But believe me, officer, when I say that Chavez was not
motivated by humanitarian or patriotic motives: his scientific
curiosity was purely devoted to his own ambition, to the way he
wanted to shape reality in accordance with his own desires…-

-Doctor, describe Chavez’s project to me and please without
getting too carried away.
This will become an official report.-

-Yes, officer.
Chavez’s project was called, in both development and official
stages, Purgatory Network.
In essence, a more advanced version of state-of-the-art Cloud
technology, wired with highly efficient antennas, cameras and
projectors.
State-of-the-art computer processors combined with the wonders
of the entertainment industry.
Entertainment industry… what an ugly definition.-

-Well doctor, let’s be thankful that the movie business
collapsed along with electronic games. -Well, doctor, let’s be
thankful that the movie business collapsed along with electronic
games.-

-That’s right, Chavez often made jokes about that, too, and
said how all those people lacked perspective… that they hadn’t
been able, as he put it, to imagine the future.-

-The future as Chavez saw it.-

-Exactly.
Chavez proposed to our superiors and government
representatives the creation of a new form of shared human
intelligence, which would allow us to replace unreliable
artificial intelligences and maintain the supremacy of our Nation
in the world.-

-That is, to avoid being surpassed by the Chinese.

-More or less.
In fact, what they saw in Chavez’s idea was the invention of a
super-technological form of War Room…. if the Purgatory data
sharing system could also support something different than a group
of researchers able to share data with each other, as it is the
case in normal virtual reality.
Even a group of military personnel creating a project
together, present in different locations and with different data
packages…even that could have been possible!-.

-The Purgatory system wasn’t just a cloud system, what made it
special compared to what we already have?-

-Data shared on this network didn’t just come from devices.
The augmented reality manipulation systems were hardwired to
the users’ sensory organs and responded to stimuli emitted by the
users at the neurological level.-

-So the users of the system could see for themselves what was
going on, the information they were sending and receiving?-

-Much more! They could visualize consequences of their nerve
stimuli reprocessed by the system, thanks to the holographic
projectors even into the spacial perimeter of the building and not
only on their ocular and auditory peripherals, agent.-

-Are you suggesting that they could make their own thoughts
appear as holographic images or manifest actually with that
system?-

-You… you very quickly understood the nature of what Chavez
wanted to accomplish…-

-I had suspected something like that and I think it explains
well with what happened.
There seems to have been some sort of collective hysteria at
the facility.
That would explain the devastation.-

-I saw the whole thing, and you come pretty close to the
truth, but really, you should have seen what was going on.
You could project images and graphs and equations into the air
like a science fiction movie and even translate thoughts and
feelings into colors, figures and writing… Chavez had created
something incredible, and I assure you that no one, even though he
claimed to have explained the specifics, understood what was going
on!-

-Excuse me, you didn’t understand how the system could
illustrate your thoughts?-

-No, it was so natural, spontaneous… we could easily
communicate even from one room to another by sending a thought or
an illustration, and even combine them.-

-Such technology should be impossible by our current
standards.-

-Yes, but I guarantee there was something unnatural about it!
Magic! Chavez always seemed to have the upper hand, though.-

-What do you mean? –

-Maybe because he was the inventor, but he certainly had much,
much more control over the mechanism than we did.
His mastery was such that he modified himself through the
system.-

-What do you mean? His perception of himself?-

-More or less.
He was just using the system to project images onto his own
figure, changing his clothes at will, and even his own appearance.
And then… then he started to change everything.-

-Explain yourself, please. –

-He could… run faster, roll like a ball, grab every object.
At one point he had taken to turning into a cowboy and waving
a gun with an overly long barrel, blathering things like, “You
ain’t gonna run faster than my bullets, stranger.”-

-Excuse me, don’t you believe that your sensory capabilities
have been altered by Chavez to deceive and manipulate you to the
point of making you believe that reality was not only augmented,
but transformed?-

-Well, we understood that… but how can I put this when there
are no surviving recordings? Chavez had become capable of running
from room to room at an absurd speed, jumping four meters forward

from a standstill, and floating through the air… he seemed to
have become a living cartoon, like in “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.”-

-And he used this power of his to scare you, didn’t he? –

-Yes.
He said we were stupid and lacking in foresight and that we
were only serving him as computing processors.
He said he wanted to expand his system into the normal
network, that he wanted to change the world… he said that with
his Purgatory system, there would be no more distinction between
the real world and the world of the imagination.
The ghosts of the night would walk among the living and the
gods would sit again on the seats of Olympus, he repeated in the
last days.-

-Didn’t you try to call for help?

-We were in his power… we didn’t know if outside they agreed
with him, if instead we all had to be sacrificed for the
project…-

-And yet, you fought, or didn’t you? How else would you
explain the slaughter I found?-

-We… we had to do something, don’t you think? You said so
yourself! There was no time to call for help, Chavez had to be
stopped now!-

-Calm down, take a breath.-

-That monstrosity… Purgatory was a hoax, an excuse, a
terrible lie! He didn’t want to create a new augmented reality, he
wanted to destroy the real world, the world wanted and created by
God, and replace it with a satanic counterfeit! He wanted to turn America into Bosch’s garden of delights, with everyone losing
their heads behind ghosts that had become so real they could prey
on the living!-

-Please, you’re getting too hot.
First I motivated you to focus and talk, but now you’re in
danger of collapsing.-

-We figured out how to manipulate the system, how to project
our will, and we launched a counter-attack… for a whole day, we
projected our thoughts against Chavez’s, against that devil… he
took us one by one with the force of his unbridled diabolical
will, without restraints, scruples, no longer human and no longer
beast, but something completely different.
Yet, in the end, we got him… we reasoned like him, we
trapped him in an illogical circuit where he annihilated himself.
We had to take his gun and funnel it into a long bizarre form
like the one in the Tex Avery cartoons, and then… we turned his
energy on him.
He shot himself.
It cost us so much effort…only I stayed alive…-.

-The subject is unconscious but still alive.
We need to make sure he gets psychiatric help.
Most likely the trauma of the experience will be removed from
his memory.
Nothing seems to be left of the Purgatory mechanism.
I insert a personal assessment for the other members of the
association: I propose to have the project deleted and any
possible remaining components or back-ups destroyed.
I believe that our experts in paranormal and ESP matters will
be more helpful than computer consultants in understanding this
aberration.
Our war will be won with guns and blades, not smoke and
mirrors.

It is now a quarter past ten.
End of recording. –

The question has always been assimilation and destruction of our identity, or a just hostility and scorn for the wretched world which entrapped us. When I say scorn, I mean limitless hate of the invasive enemy, of the invisible enemy, of the assaulting hordes.

All acts are justified by virtue of self-defense, there are no excuses to be made for the terror. You are completely alien to them, you are foreign to them and they are foreign to you. Their actions against you did not need to happen, so our actions against them are necessitated. There is no action taken against the enemy which is wrong. It is righteous to destroy their sickly reality. Triumph awaits the martyred and the veteran among us, failure awaits the softened underbelly and those who hide away from just action.

To a sodomite nationalism, and to victory in martyrdom or a victory with the living. Avanti.

Chapter one
Finally, a glimpse of the great island where artists and various fanatics form a society on an extravagant tropical island. It took me too much time to fly to Cuba and to sail from there. After the Ship halted and I could finally leave, my papers got controlled by two rather fashionable soldiers. One Soldier was wearing a Japanese headband like the one Mishima wore on his final day, a black Balaclava under that, an extra white wife beater with the states badge sewed on it and wide black pants with leather boots under it. The other soldier almost didn’t look like a soldier at all. Instead he walked around with a very aesthetically pleasing purple/orange Hawaiian shirt with a Marlboro cigarette pack in his front pocket, classic pilot sunglasses that fit his long hair, short red pants while he wore white sneakers while wearing his State Badge around his neck like a detective. On this Island, soldiers are very free to wear what they want as long they can perform their duty in their outfits, the only thing they all have is their badge, a gun and a melee weapon. They let me through and I could finally start to explore the city and head to my hotel. The street lamps were made out of white stone, the stone was twisted so it looks like there was a tiny stair where mice could climb up to the umbrella type lamp on top. There was even a streetlamp disguised as a palm tree, to blend in with the many different palm trees scattered around the whole city. The Street is painted in pure black, while the footpath is painted in very abstract and colourful patterns that look hypnotizing. Almost all of these buildings were white, there are designed in such shapes that they seem brutal, enormous, powerful and over the top. Every window hat a different colour, everywhere on the buildings were neon lights to accompany them. The whole city gives such a neo-80s feeling like a Vaporwave album cover. However on the inside of those houses the people are free to decorate it however they want. That bookshop on the left is full of Bolshevist symbolism, the coiffeur near the gym is absolutely owned by a member of Hamas, the gym itself is built in honour of Mussolini and the church interior looks it was built in the 9th Century. The People themselves dress up so weird you can’t walk around like that in a normal Country. We got soldiers from another era, people still stuck in the 80s, national costume from different nations, mafioso’s, futurist clothing, terrorists, punks and people mixing whatever clothes they want to. Honestly a normal black suit makes me look like a complete stranger here. When I arrived inside of the Hotel, I was shocked by how unreal it looked like. The floor was black with pink lines stretching themselves all over it, the walls where a bit white when they touched the floor but otherwise were painted in an elegant light blue. Also on the walls were pictures of Mussolini and some of his Quotes like “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” or “Let us have a dagger between our teeth, a bomb in our hands and an infinite scorn in our hearts”. There were Roman pillars lightly shined on by the blue neon light, simple but comfortable looking armchairs were scattered all over the room with modern tables to accompany them. The receptions table was like out of roman marble and there was a statue of Mussolini’s enormous head and the music of this place was definitely some Vaporwave stuff. I recognized the rceptionist, it was my old friend named Mia. She came here 2 years prior to me and even got a tan. Her dress was rectangular, colourful and abstract, with a white Shirt under that and black thighs to the knee.
“Hello Mia, how are you today?”
“Bernd? Oh hello, yeah things are fine hope you are fine as well, anyway what brings you here on this island?”
“I got a job as brewer here, I got to be in this hotel for at least a week until I can find an apartment.”
“Wait, at Kaiser Ludwig? Respect. So for your room, it will be number 306 on the third floor and what money do you have on you?”
“I got Euros of course.”
“It costs 315 Euros, but for you only 300.”
“I thank you very much, also how about you show me the city a bit tomorrow?”
“Sure, tomorrow I got free so come around 1pm here again.”
“Sounds great”
Then I went off to my room, in front of the Reception Table was the first floor with an Elevator at the end. Along the walls where Futurist type of paintings, I assume the people of this island made it themselves. The floor was a marble white, with purple neon lights to shine on the floor and walls. Inside of the elevator, the buttons where scattered on the colourful walls with other fake buttons, it took me a bit to find the button for floor 3. The third floor walls were crimson red, the floor was black and the ceiling was with yellow neon light and on the walls were, to my surprise, paintings of various famous Communists like Lenin and Guevara. “How” I thought to myself, “how was this possible to exist, what is with inner decoration from Fascist to Communist? I have to ask Mia about that tomorrow.” Well, the door of my Room was out of dark oak wood. Stepping inside it looked rather simple. A big white bed, a cabinet made out of iron and glass, a dark oak wood cabinet with a flat screen TV on top. Everything else was white, except the oak floor. The bathroom looked normal and there was also a small balcony with a golden ashtray. The lights here are too neon lights and you could change the colour with remote control. Seriously, the people here have a weird obsession with neon lights, I have many questions on how this place works but I will rest for tonight.

“Guido Keller told me that he had just formed a company to guard the Commander, a company that he called La Disperata (The Desperate). Many soldiers who had come from Italy to volunteer were without papers and had not been accepted by the Command. Instead of leaving they were camped out in the town’s big shipyards. When he went to see what they were doing there, Keller found some of them naked diving from the prows of the moored ships, others attempting to manoeuvre the old locomotives that used to run between Fiume and Budapest, and others perched up on cranes, singing. He found them to be high-spirited and jolly, and he gathered them for inspection: they were all proud, handsome men, and he declared that they were the finest soldiers in Fiume. He mustered these soldiers, known to all as the ‘desperados’ in view of their situation, and offered them to the Commander as personal guards. This move scandalized superior officials, but the Commander accepted the offer. With the creation of this company, Keller began to put his ideas for a new military order into practice. These new soldiers spent most of the day swimming or rowing, or singing and marching through the city, bare-chested and dressed in shorts. They were not obliged to stay in the barracks… and in the evening they frequented a deserted area called La torretta, where they split into two groups and did battle with real hand grenades, often leading to injury… The presence of a number of morally dubious elements did not sully the company’s reputation, but rather gave it the crepuscular flavor of a group despised by the wise and the mediocre, and this was its greatest source of pride.””

““…oddities like the curious war hero Guido Keller, whose mascot was an eagle, who slept naked in the tops of trees, and who was one of the new commander’s main lieutenants”

Let us speak of Giudo Keller(1892-1929), last of the Hellenics, nationalist-nudist and tantric master, Keller the air pilot who raided Zeppelins and Airplanes and dropped roses in the vatican. In 1919 the Union of Yoga was founded by Giudo Keller alongside Giovanni Comisso and Mino Somenzi they launched the “Yoga” magazine which was self published in Fiume by Keller. While the magazine’s circulation and most of its members were concentrated in Fiume it had a global outreach intellectually and through correspondences to the Berlin Dada groups, and Leninist-Bolsheviks in Russia alongside some Hungarian communists. The Union of Yoga itself was made up of many artists and poets within the city itself alongside Japanese Buddhist-Influence from Harukichi Shimoi. They also organized a “peoples academy” which hosted debates in public on free love, monetary abolition, destruction of prisons, improving the city through art etc. 

The Union of Yoga was primarily based upon the philosophy of the Männerbund taken from the German Wanderwogel movement with its anti establishment youth culture and anti urban nature culture. 

Though Giudo Keller had a passing ideological and comradely fascination with Marinetti he critiqued futurism for what he perceived as its anti human pro machine qualities. Guido Keller posited what he called a “Dionysian humanism”in contrast to Marinettis more anti human ideology. The 4th issue of the Yoga magazine contained a long critique by Keller of Marinetti’s futurism claiming that it took out the most precious part of art. That being the  human aspect of the artist. 

Though Keller disliked Futurism the Yoga circle included Futurists alongside extreme nationalists,“communists and anarchists, Bolsheviks and William Morris-like socialists, bohemians and nihilists, Nietzscheans and Rosenkreutzers, Rousseauist dreamers and Utopian Proudhonists”. These various ideologies were brought together by a shared hatred of the current system and love for diversity of thought and spontaneity.

The Union of Yoga also delved into religious topics with interest in theosophy, Freemasonry, Esoteric Forms of Yoga, Zen Buddhism and Hinduism, and Hellenism. It drew many of these types from all around Europe and helped gather funding and support for Fiume from around the world.

Two main groups formed within the Union of Yoga the first being called the “brown lotus” promoting  an agrarian race-based earth society which was strongly anti capitalist anti city and anti technology. They were obsessed with mysticism and forms of esoteric eastern philosophy. Another group formed to rival them called the “red lotus” whose motto was “Moving. Living. Destroying. They were also Italian patriots but opposed crude racism and national chauvinism. Yoga saw the various human races uniting into a single “dionysus race” that would overcome ideology and politics and create a hedonistic ubermensch.

Yoga also believed that the “negative” races like French and British had shackled the Italians with international treaties and democratic institutions and that in order to renew the Italian race they needed to embrace hedonistic aristocracy and forge a new spiritual order. From this they formulated a kind of “eugenics of karma” where your spiritual race would determine your standing in life and that through the state the spirit could be improved. This shows that Keller was at least mildly influenced by the traditionalist school. A byproduct of this was the organization of peoples into corporations mirroring the later “charter of Fiume” and also the manifesto of “Sansepolcrismo”.
During the last days of Fiume Giudo Keller and his Yoga group were some of the last members to give up and leave the city, many of them became apolitical, some became Fascists, others joined anti fascist groups. Keller’s story does not end here but a full tale of his exploits will be told of in the next article

The greatest meaning anyone can have in this life is to achieve beauty.
In only one moment of your life, you flower.
We were meant to die then, at the climax.
Die beautifully.

let a thousand flowers bloom
to mark the eve of my death,
on the green base of my tomb
once i take my final breath.
let no man or woman mourn,
the conclusion to this play.
let not your heart become torn
on that blue and tranquil day.
do not cry, do not pity.
my fate was God’s will deserved.
‘he was a good soul.’ said He,
‘let his actions be preserved.’
i want to be remembered.
deep down, that’s always been true.
in a world that’s self centered,
i always thought about you,
because my life meant nothing.
nothing on its own, atleast,
but with you, i was something.
a human, not a wild beast.
with you, i could be truthful,
you saw the ‘me’ that was true.
please, let my death be useful,
let a thousand flowers bloom.

The blueprint appeared one day in a newspaper. It’s speculated that one of the printing centers was hijacked by the person or group of people that created this creature so they could share their work with the rest of the population. No one really understood first what it was, the only description that accompanied the steps to follow were ‘’Automatic Art.’’. Most people, at best, were curious but unwilling to do anything with this information offered to them. They brushed off the publication as articles in the printers getting mixed up, but when some people put themselves to work to satisfy their intrigue, the existence of the Automaton only kept revolutionizing the world around us at an unbelievable pace. Suddenly, from one day to another, we didn’t have a place in society anymore.

Some of us kept wondering about the reason and the morality behind the blueprint for the Automaton being published this way, to the whole public, instead of being sold to a big corporation knowing what a powerful tool it was at its discovery. What could have been better, this insane power of creation belonging only to the upper class, and leaving the most unfortunate ones dealing with very real artists as they always have been doing, or letting everyone have the same opportunity to ditch us as craftsmen to never procure our services and skills again? Ironically, most of us agree that the latter was better even if it meant the end of our careers and the decay of our soul. Before things turned out this way, we would totally reject anything that gave more power to those in the upper caste, anything that created more disbalance between the classes… and even in cases like this where we are torn between the lesser of evils for us, we will side with evil if it means there’s more power for the people. Even if the people are willing to betray us.

Not that this shift in paradigm only affected us in negative ways. Being freed from the chains of work, of craft, of utilitarianism and what was supposed to be good or bad, what was supposed to be beautiful or ugly, what was moral or immoral to depict, felt amazing for us. No one was there to critique our work anymore, no one was there to nag about details we misplaced, no angry parents to yell at us for expressing things they felt were inappropriate. To draw, to illustrate and to paint were not work anymore, and no one would put their eyes on us anymore. Our bosses ditched us, our regular commissioners stopped calling us for work, our patrons didn’t need us anymore to please their vanity, they had to pour their money into other vices now that art belonged to everyone and didn’t serve as a sign of wealth. Art was for everyone.

The Automaton was the perfect child everyone sought to have. It worked in the most effective way. There were many of them but they were all one in the same, connected to the same brain. You would describe something, and after a few minutes of whirring sounds of printers, it would return what was requested in a paper canvas. The Automaton wasn’t perfect, but it was assured that one time would be, as with every correction, the Automaton learned and would never commit the same mistake again. But that was the mistake itself in the Automaton’s philosophy of work that no one really thought about.

As its work started to get more and more refined, people found that it was hard to make the Automaton follow certain specific inputs, as it would have been ‘’corrected’’ out by other people who didn’t want certain characteristics in the work they petitioned to the machine. These characteristics could forcibly be introduced back to the Automaton’s brain after a few tries, not without correcting out characteristics others petitioned the Automaton to create, so it was a battle about erasing the inputs of others in favor of yours. Making an Automaton emulate the characteristics of a very individual forgotten style became a frustrating battle. People finally realized their first mistake: A machine seeking to perfect itself would never have a frame of error, something so typical of us humans. A machine would never have the soul to leave a small squiggly line coming together to make an harmonious shape, nor two colors with too much contrast between them that would catch all the eyes. The Automaton rather than creating, was simply emulating what was fed to it in its creation, its brain connected to an archive gallery of several hundreds of thousands -maybe millions- of works by artists made during all history. It had the brain of each one of them, but not one of its own. It only served humans, so the outcome of its work tended more and more to what the average person found beautiful and useful, as to become more efficient and work faster by having a smaller gallery to find its resources from, ditching those forgotten artists no one knew about, those the grand majority found unappealing or ugly, those the average person didn’t care to understand.

By then, they noticed that the Automaton could work in a specific way and that it wasn’t a useful machine for those who needed more specific and intricate work. So they wanted to call back the artists, but they were nowhere to be found.

We started to share the time with each other, only doing work in presence of each other, for each other. Only people like us could understand our now considered meaningless passion. For some time it felt comforting and more like therapy, back then when this thing just appeared and everyone ditched us so suddenly… we only had each other. But as time passed by and aside from doing art we started discussing and venting our frustrations, anger started seeping into each one of us. Many resisted it. The ones who did their best to not let pessimism conquer their soul were the ones who still did things out of passion. They still found ease in creating beautiful, honest works capable of moving people in the right way, but they couldn’t help growing bitter, so day by day there were less of them. Soon we only knew anger, frustration, resentment towards the whole world that turned its back on us. We started creating with hatred in our hands. We broke brushes, we spilled paint, our pen strokes were so rough they ached in our eyes, and some of us would get startled at the aggressiveness of some works. Yet it was an addictive feeling, there was joy in and euphoria in this way of work. We started to compete in a very friendly way to see who could be more offensive with their talent, who could be more revolutionarily gross. If the others had a machine that made beautiful things for others, then we didn’t need to care to create beautiful things for them anymore. Who taught us to do that anyways? Unlearning all the technical and moral rules we memorized by sheer exhausting repetition to paint acceptable things as service to the average person was a hard but satisfying process, constantly rewarded and incentivized by seeing what the depths of our comrades’ psyches had to offer. We had a morbid curiosity to see how ugly our creations could become. And we were finally identifying as a more or less cohesive group, with a particular philosophy and a common goal. That goal required us to move our gatherings from lone cul-de-sacs with walls conquered with our hostile paintings, outside the galleries that meant glory for us in the past but that now only knew the hands of angry social rejects. We needed to take our work to places where everyone would be able to see them and appreciate them again.

It was quite hard. Once they finally realized what we were doing, they started patrolling the streets very late into the night, the only moment where we could work. But we still found our way to get away with our plans. Our goal was to paint every government building and plaster them with our demons for everyone to see. They realized our pattern and intentions after the third attack, and then we couldn’t fulfill this task without violence. We had to, one way or another, stealth our way towards the backs of the officers policing these buildings and swiftly get rid of them without alerting another one. We would fail often and have to flee the place as policemen called upon the others and reinforcements. Yet they wouldn’t be able to stop what we did, out of frustration we would just simply paint a wall in a very busy avenue or a whole house. Families would appear in the newspapers extremely ashamed of the offenses depicted in the facade of their home, only calling more and more attention of people who witnessed the inusual canvas with morbid curiosity and disgust, yet unable to detach their view from such horrid images.

The impact was mixed, but even the most aghast voices that condemned the vandalism were in some level relieved to know that the artists were still out there, even if they had the pretense to terrorize them. The whole population was slowly growing devoid of art as the Automaton refused to print the images they needed. The machine was still in its journey towards perfection, and that was the catastrophe no one could imagine from the first moment, even if it was the end goal of it, written deep into its code, in the blueprint shared to everyone. So art got sanitized, art became sterile, art became a blurry image that was a mashup of all the pretty faces in paintings it could store and learn from… and that way looked that last canvas, the moment the Automaton hit its peak: The only image it could produce, no matter the input, was a depiction of a slender pale woman standing in a stylized serpentine pose, holding a very detailed piece of floral drapery, rendered in a way that didn’t match at all the face of the lady in the painting, that looked as if it was purposefully airbrushed, no gestures or details able to be discerned except for an outline of a smile and two pupils looking at the viewer. It could be said that the paintings that we did back then, despite the vulgar and offensive factors, despite how much we tried to deform the human shape to insult and spit on nature… they were still so full of life, energy and pure emotion in contrast with the uncanny, soulless aberration that this machine created.

Return to normalcy was slow. The population suffered a lack of visual stimulus for long months until the people tried to pour their energies into learning art themselves, and so we shyly emerged back to the world, now as teachers. And even if it was consensus that it was us the ones responsible for the waves of vandalism that occurred months before, no one would bring it up. Finally the people understood that, no matter what any working contract could say, art does not serve us, we serve art.

I still dream about her sometimes. She comes to me in my sleep. She slips her lips over mine, stealing my silence from me.
She comes into my bed, with only the darkness clothing her.
I can feel her heart beat…and her skin…soft to the touch.
Being with her, having her, takes me.
And in that moment, I arrive where I am always trying to go.
A place I am not even sure I will ever see.
Suddenly, I open my eyes, looking at the ceiling of a Red Roof Inn.
With only the pain in my heart to remind me where I could’ve been.
-Ronin

Futurism Forever has often been accused of holding a dogmatic attachment to the Italian Futurist movement. A movement that stated in it’s Manifesto that it wanted to be thrown into the dustbin of history and replaced with younger generations when the time comes. While it is true that Italian Futurism forms the foundation for what we do, we aim to take the general idea of Futurism, rejection of the past and embrace of the future, build upon it and make it relevant to the 21^st century. In this series I will highlight some of the points of the original movement in which we part ways with Marinetti as they are no longer relevant to 21^st century realities. I have stated most of these points on numerous occasion on the podcast, but I think they need to be highlighted in text form for easy referral.

First of all, what were the defining characteristics of Futurism? According to Marinetti in Geometrical and Mechanical Splendour and Sensitivity Toward Numbers:

It’s essential characteristics are: a healthy forgetfulness, hope, desire, unbridled strength, speed, light, the will, order, discipline, method; a feeling for the great city; an aggressive optimism stemming from a passion for sport and the toning of muscles; untrammelled imagination, being here, there and everywhere, brevity and simultaneity derived from tourism, business, and journalism; a passion for success, a pioneering instinct for breaking records, the enthusiastic emulation of electricity and machines; an essential conciseness and compactness; the sweet precision of machinery and of well oiled thought; the harmony of energies converging in one victorious path.

Much of the characteristics of Futurism, according to Marinetti, are fairly timeless and are just as relevant today as they were 100 years ago. The Futurist is above all things an innovator, somebody who is flexible and capable of thinking outside of the box, someone who is able to adapt to societal changes and flourish because of them, not in spite of them. What changes with the times are the details of Futurism. We don’t need to be super excited about planes or automobiles anymore. That would be dogmatism, and Futurists reject dogma. While it is easy to understand why Marinetti was excited about these things 100 years ago, they are common place now, and we need to continue to look forward as Marinetti did, not fetishize the technology that was new in Marinetti’s time. Pessimism over technology is not a fresh/new perspective either. Conservative Revolutionaries like Spengler and Niekisch took the opposite view on technology, that it would be destructive and have a negative influence on society and culture, and when one looks at the state of modern man, it could appear as if they were right. But in my view Technology is just a tool that is as good or as bad as the people in control of it. The culprit of modern bug man culture is capitalist consumerism and neoliberalism. Had technology been implemented along Futurist lines, rather than liberal ones, the results would be in stark contrast to modern consumerism.

But onto the topic of the first instalment of the Futurism and Dogmatism series. Marinetti famously declared war to be the worlds only hygiene. He was an outspoken proponent for Italy’s involvement in WWI. He and the rest of the movement took part in the war themselves, with several of them dying young in the process and countless others being injured. While I find Marinetti’s enthusiasm in the war and his willingness to sacrifice himself for Italy to be admirable, I don’t think this position is relevant to American dissidents today. When you support the troops or enlist yourself you are not fighting for your nation, your people or your community. You are fighting for private interests and American imperialism, which in real time means pushing the liberal values that we oppose onto every corner of the globe. This is not to say I’m a pacifist, far from it, but to paraphrase Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club, “our great war is a spiritual war, our great depression is our lives”. As dissidents our struggle is to break the chains of neoliberalism and capitalism. And right now, as our worldview is in the extreme minority, our focus should be on the greater, rather than the lesser war, which Julius Evola talks about in Metaphysics of war:

The greater holy war is of an inner and spiritual nature; the other is the material war waged externally against an enemy population with the particular intent of bringing “infidel” populations under the rule of “God’s Law” (al-Islam). The relationship between the “greater” and “lesser holy war”, however, mirrors the relationship between the soul and the body; in order to understand the heroic asceticism or “path of action”, it is necessary to understand the situation in which the two paths merge, the “lesser holy war” becoming the means through which a “greater holy war” is carried out, and vice versa: the “little holy war”, or the external one, becomes almost a ritual action that expresses and gives witness to the reality of the first.

While Evola is a Traditionalist and we are Futurists I feel this concept of the greater vs the lesser war is still relevant to what we are trying to do with Futurism Forever. FF is not an overtly political group. We are not apolitical either, but art and culture have always been our main focus. We hope to influence culture through art, so the war that concerns us is the culture war. In my view, culture (spirit) acts as the greater war and politics (material) the lesser war, since politics are downstream of culture.

War can take the form of tanks, bombs and guns, but this is not always the case. To quote Jose Luis Ontiveros:“Culture is a battlefield and its conquest is a necessity that precedes the seizure of power.” Now Mao Zedong: “Politics is war without bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed”. So war can take many forms. Many of our critics have complained that we “aren’t in the military or volunteering to fight in Ukraine. As war loving Futurists you should be out fighting in wars, not podcasting and blogging.” But these are not wars that concern or interest us. The culture war is what concerns us at this point in time. When we have the culture on our side we can engage with politics, and when we have conquered politics we can wage wars that we believe in. Good wars that fight injustice and cultural backwardness, not impose it.

You have to crawl before you can walk. When people try and engage in politics before the culture is on their side it results in failure and waste of time and resources. When people engage in violence without the power structure on their side it results in anti-social lone wolf attacks against people who are usually not in control of anything and these acts do more to hurt rather help your cause.

If I thought these approaches would be beneficial in helping us accomplish our goals right now, I would put my energies in that direction, but I genuinely think it is a waste of everyones time.

So as “cultural warriors” what are we opposed to and what are we in favour of?

We are opposed to empty and meaningless “postmodern” art that inspires nothing but boredom and indifference.

We are opposed to sterile and safe art.

We are opposed to rebooted and recycled ideas (Marvel, Star Wars, Friday the 13^th part 72 etc)

We are opposed to modern bugman culture.

We are in favour of art that is relevant to our lives and inspires strong feeling whether it be righteous anger, exuberant laughter or morose sadness. Just make us feel something again!

We are in favor of art that is bold and unafraid of upsetting bourgeious attitudes.

We are in favor of new ideas and demand new heros and villains.

We are in favor of vitality, a strong sense of community and comraderie and a cohesive culture that we can all genuinely take pride in.

It is also worth noting that while, for political reasons, the Italian Futurists glorified war, the Russian Futurists opposed the very same war, so an anti-war stance, in the conventional sense, given political circumstances, is not at all incompatible with a Futurist framework. War can be a powerful tool for social progress and change, but this is not always the case. The details matter, so a more nuanced view on the issue is necessary for the 21^st century Futurist. I would like to close this installment with a quote from Fen de Villers Manifesto for Aesthetic Reinvigoration: “Lets break through the walls of creative imprisonment, and march into a new era of aesthetic vigor.”

cowardice
is not having the will to do it.
it’s hesitance.
it is not finishing the job.
it’s broken ribs.
it is when you cannot commit.
it’s selfishness.
it’s a hidden, silent sob.