The Last Genius (Originally written in 2004 for an unpublished book, lost to history)

I have discovered that I have a few fragments of a long-lost book that I was writing in 2003-2004 about the world 20 years in the future. Now that we are 20 years in the future, it's interesting to see how relevant it remains. The theme of this essay is Hyper-modernism (which at the time I called Ultra-modernism). The basic concept is that modernism was the idea that psychology and politics could replace traditional culture and religion. However, people lost faith as the found out all modernist systems LIED- they were propaganda machines that could not deliver on their promises. Postmodernism has been dominated by consumerism - "culture" is simply meeting the demands of users and buyers of technology. During that period, people turned to fantasy worlds and demanded superheroes and escapist fun. Hypermodernism is the attempt to stop escaping and actually rewrite our day-to-day culture with the fantasies we had created, thus re-embedding people into a new reality inspired by postmodern fantasies. Instead of escaping from reality, recent fiction BECOMES our reality as it is more desirable than its alternatives.

The Last Genius: Prologue On the brink of total political chaos, a Great War swept across Europe. The Great powers took this excuse to reorder the international political system based on the latest economic theories, philosophical treatises, and cultural principles. Modernity was in full swing. But modernity was a trilogy of Tyrannies with the illusion of freedoms.

This paradigm was comprised by three extreme systems. The first, welfare democracy, was an excessively “liberal” economic system with an excessively illiberal ethnic hierarchy. The second, communism, was radically economically and politically authoritarian, while pretending that cultural differences no longer existed among people. The third option was the worst, of course. Fascism promoted extreme ethnical differences and extremely hierarchical arrangements of capital economy. Every system offered ugly trade-offs. War was inevitable because all three of these “modern” systems would quickly collapse without aggressive expansion. So the common persons’ lot in life was to swim towards food like a school of fish, while death chased their impotent bodies like a pack of hungry sharks. Hunt or die. The modern paradigm was, by nature, beyond the management of the leaders of the world without waging war.

Very quickly, the world decayed into mass psychosis, and re-emerged a neurotic mess. After the Great Depression of the entire world system, a second World War eventually cleansed the filthy hands of the administrators and decision-makers, who had squeezed the guts of society for drops of efficiency. This time, the big brains in charge pooled resources to devise an international system with checks and balances beyond the military-state apparatus. The list of new global organizations was quite long: the United Nations; World Bank; IMF; Bretton Woods agreements; Worth Trade Organization; International Court of Justice; Geneva Convention; the Bank of Settlements; G7; European Economic Community; and so on. With this constantly evolving and expanding structure, policing and planning for the Global Village, the world put faith in bright minds outside of political party systems. The Cold War and the threat of nuclear holocaust helped to drive policy away from mass violence, gradually but successfully. Leaders believed for awhile in the underlying intelligence of this evolving system of international community. Existential crisis had been averted.

Around 2000, attentive members of the Global Intelligentsia got the shakes again. After decades of events that continually tested the world system structure, accelerating complexity threatened the Global Village in many ways. Fragile financial systems, ecologies, and national identities revealed major cracks in the foundations of law and institutions. The bright minds in charge could no longer ignore the lie of postmodern peace. It wasn’t truly a peaceful arrangement holding the world intact, it was just a system of distractions and temporary incentives. Eventually the distractions and incentives ran out of efficacy.

“Of course the system doesn't work, per se”, said the Global Intelligentsia. “Of course there is no such thing as This or That Agenda of peace. Peace is just the mutual chasing of wealth. And when the chasing of wealth runs into dead ends, peace collapses. We know that. We always believed the system was close enough to working that we could keep patching up the holes on-the-fly. Just in time. No earlier or later. That’s how you steer a ship that has no destination. After all, this is a world of humans, not purely mathematical beings. Humans don't have a collective destination. When we talk of destinations, we get war. And this is the answer to war.” But the scattered narratives of postmodernity could not avert conflict. People want answers. Alienation increased when we made a distracted system of peace. Eventually, alienation from meaning and purpose becomes a fate worse than death. Eventually, people return to war - a psychological war, if no physical violence is permissible. And indeed that is what took place at the turn of the 21st century. The avant garde were saying: “The system is getting out of hand. Who now can pull the plug if they wanted to? No one really makes the rules anymore. Institutions operate themselves. Even the most powerful leaders can’t change the course of institutions. All we can do is react at the last possible minute to institutional errors. “ The world leaders responded: “It's all under control. Democracy is winning, culture is flattening, and we will never again have despots in charge. We have the right people working on the right problems. Of course the bureaucracy is getting gigantic, but a few capable aristocrats can't run this kind of world anyhow. Its just too darned complicated for any one person to understand. So no worries. The world is the best of all possible worlds, so long as you vote for stability. “

The avant garde, of course, laughed at this. “They don't seem to understand. That is what they are supposed to say. If they said anything else, they wouldn’t be in power! Everyone who stands at the top of institutions simply bubbled up to the top like carbonation in soda. They were selected by the institutions, not the people. They fit the job description of the organizations, which are all quite indifferent to voters. It's a human resources world, not a world of humans. We have built a system so large, complex, and automatic, that no one within it can stop that machinery - short of war. Indeed, now we know why we need wars. Without war, institutions and groups dominate human individuals. The system is developing its own ideas - ideas that should terrify us all. In short, the world system is becoming a posthuman intelligence that views humans themselves as the real problem. ”

The citizens of the global village had their own opinions. They didn't trust either the leaders or the intelligentsia. “Surviving is getting easier every day. But surviving feels psychologically harder and harder. How is that possible? Commercially we have more to look forward to with each passing year. Better cars, cheaper clothes, better computers. Still, we used to know how our world worked, or at least could pretend we did. We can’t pretend anymore. We don’t have a clue how anything works. It's all too immense and confusing. The easier it is to use technology, the harder it is to explain how it works. Is truth and right only to be determined by popular consensus? And what brand of life does a decent person live? I have so many neighbors with drastically different opinions. The community we share is television ads and internet chats. We try to keep our heads down and pointing forward so as not to be overwhelmed. And why, oh why, are we lonelier than ever before? How is this better than having something to die for?”

The Beat Generation, post WWII, was a time of orphans, widows, and dropouts. The Ultramodern Generation, slowly emerging in the early 2000s, is a generation of cultural orphans with information sickness. A teenager today could wade through stacks of top 40 albums until their youth was spent and never get through all of the hits of the last century. There’s simply no time to independently discover what’s good and what isn't. And who is qualified to set new traditions? In such an environment, we can expect what we see: darkness. Doom. Kids raised with wealth and comfort that quickly develop suicidal tendencies and drug habits. Every time a passionate voice gets raised, someone reminds them that its all been done. We have already explored all the positive reasons to live. What remains is to explore unspoken reasons and methods... to die.

The grandparents of the ultra moderns unwittingly made the situation worse. They said: “We already thought of every viewpoint. Ask us. We did it all! We created all the genres, we mapped all the art. We thought of every dark viewpoint, and it doesn't lead anywhere special. Nihilism has already been done - there is no good reason to die. Don't worry. Seek the lowest common denominator. Lighten up, sip don't chug, work hard but play light. Focus on money, kids, responsibility. Let your own offspring worry about what its all about. That’s what we did, after all. Democracy means letting other people worry about big problems. There are no sensible alternatives - communism failed, and so did libertarianism. There is a place for everything, and everything is already in its place. Your vote is wasted if it doesn't fit the center left or right. In fact, all paths are pretty much locked into place. Nothing extreme ever lasts- here’s to stability.”

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The time is ripe for a gigantic paradigm shift.

Currently there are great religions crawling about the world, still scampering and foraging, rounding up an ever-decreasing percentage of true believers in heaven on earth. Instead, the religions focus on defeating the postmodern condition on earth. Stop inventing. Praise simplicity. Pray and work.

Currently there are subtle spiritualities that rush ahead of religions. Like a Doppler Effect, we can hear the more note bending for the postmodern individuals. Morals keep changing so that nobody seems evil anymore. Evil? Mere personality flaws, cured by inclusiveness.

Still, there are corporate elites, riding the post-rational waves of mechanized cultures. They rapidly dig, plant, and crave out homes and offices, gardening the ex-Proletariat in networks of plantations….relocating nearly as soon as they have settled. Hiring, firing, turning over the old boss before the job is even done.

There are isms, words, memes like genes in a petrie dish - Web - spun about by semantic arachnids. The spiders draw nets across gaps in faith, built of junk food wisdom to catch the insects that buzz around erratically, seeking any possible insta-faith for comfort food. Procreating words, recreating, expanding and proliferating, mutating and devouring, just to regurgitate a few seconds of wit.

And wherever one turns, one may find the odd sanctity of identity. Identity? All may be known to be inhabited, tricked or smothered, by parasites - ideas - which seek their own survival through is. Identity is the right to be a messenger RNA.

What is human communion? Communities are just places where people gossip, now. There is no communion in these communities. Adding up all the bullshit that doesn't add up, these communities are built to decay, to scatter, and to spill every drop of authenticity. In a world of only the self, communion is a ritual. It is a ritual where you express things as if someone truly knowledgeable will hear you and know what you mean, even though you don't yet know what you mean. You cannot eloquently vocalize without imitating others’ turns of phrases. You go empty inside while you speak, and watch an opinion come pouring out your lips or keyboard. You don't buy into your own opinions. You sell them. You sure hope someone else is willing to buy what you say, so that you can buy back some emotional currency! Without this exchange, postmodern opinions have no value.

The ultramodern question is how to get past this paradox. There are some early clues to it, of course. Consider the 80s art of Jean-Michel Basquiat, protégé of Andy Warhol. Warhol knew art was leaving the postmodern condition soon. Someone needed to start making sense in new ways. Warhol expressed the maturity of the postmodern condition as the iconography of pop art - the commercialization of the mundane as a greater pursuit than high art. Now Warhol saw the future in Basquiat.

Jean-Michel knew best what parasites could be snatched out of the air and mounted on a wall. And so he literally “painted the town” of New York with memes. Thousands of them. All day long, he would mash together tiny ideas and tag the walls with graffiti, an effortless stream of beautiful/ugly little things. He proclaimed himself King Samo (SAMe-Old shit). Some saw his work as black-Buddhist koans. The majority of his artworks where phrases that strike you just right, so easily replicated you might think, but yet why don't you think of it first? And that’s really what set him apart. He always thought of it first. In a world screaming for lack of originality, his remixed phrases were rare instances of true originality. Warhol knew this was the future.

But then, when Basquiat was taken under Warhol’s wing, he immediately saw how few original creatives actually exist in any place anywhere- even in the art world. It is a world of curation, not creation. A world of attention, not wisdom. Andy knew how to sell wisdom to fools. From working with the silver-haired master, King Samo converted his wisdom into formats that rich, unhip art collectors could understand. Warhol taught him how to seize fifteen minutes of fame, not because the art would get better but because the world needed a new grandmaster! It was a painful sacrifice indeed. Samo created big canvasses the old postmodern guard of art could mount in their collections - literally the opposite of what made his street art truly authentic. Warhol had once been more like Basquiat, producing thousands of little works, but learned to fetishize his art for the history books.

His young prodigy was disturbed by this game, and never fully recovered. When Warhol died prematurely of AIDS, the one man who understood him was no longer available for counsel. Rumor has it that loneliness and alienation sent King Samo into despair and heroin needles. Ha had given up his kingdom so that culture could advance. He died shortly thereafter, at age 27. Basquiat died a sacrificial lamb to the postmodern condition. He found one good reason to die.

The parable of the ultramodern condition: King Samo’s world was to be built en masse...

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