Content Machines: On the Sonichu Medallion Curse
Negarestani talks of war-machines and icons that watch over the oil. But who watches over the cold metal of the Internet? Who consumes the Content Machines?
1)
In the underbelly of the digital world, a diminutive medallion is dispatched. Mirroring the migratory patterns of a species known as the ween-bird, the face of sonic-chu navigates the submarine cables and terrestrial expanses, ultimately perching on its newfound nest. This object must now sustain and replicate, imbued with the viral contagion acquired from its previous nest. In the absence of an antidote, the mammals remain oblivious, their instincts unperturbed, as they naively embrace the object with benighted ignorance.
“A new host has been selected”
This viral-laden emblem, a medallion, manifests as an icon of Sonichu from the hallowed canon of the digital deity Chris-Chan, now transmuted into “Magi-chan” in the current era. Accompanied by a scorched letter and a crude incantation, the medallion's arrival provokes commentary from the unsuspecting e-celebrity lawyer who, in an act of ritualistic spectacle, invests it with their energy.
A man from a distant land, called in as a prophetic expert of schizophrenia and ghosts, scrutinizes the medallion. He knows of the nomads, he knows of the outsideness, he knows the birds. Afterall, he himself being a relic of a bygone internet era, already possesses the vision to discern the occultic particulates emanating from it. What he perceives is neither phantasm nor daemon but a machine for content.
Yet he cannot tell them the truth. He must talk of it in occultic terms because he is already in the machine. Do not destroy the medallion – as that is content, as it was in his era. Do not burn the medallion – or the particles will travel like pollen and infect more people.
2)
Within the small town known as Da Sektur, nestled in a quaint sector of the Internet, preparations commence for the summer planting season. The cultivation of corn, an act bordering on the sacred, disseminates content to satiate the populace, fostering economic prosperity for the folk. Echoing the rites depicted in their American television scriptures, an individual is consecrated as an offering to the corn harvest.
To be sacrificed to the corn signifies a relentless coupling with the content machines, an insidious process where one's blood is subsumed by virality, culminating in becoming stone. This transformation into a "Boulder[1]" marks the ritual's closure, a finality where the content is once more propagated, ensuring a prolific harvest. The resultant man-made-Boulder, a husk drained of virality, stands ornamentally, stripped of the capacity to generate further content. He himself now becomes a relic for those outside and those inside the town, of what may befall anyone who carries the viral infection of content particles in their blood.
The cycle perpetuates: the fields thrive, the economy flourishes, and the Boulder, emblematic of ultimate sacrifice; serves as a grim testament to the demands of the content harvest.
3)
War machines are subsumed by the Unliving War, perpetuating conflict beneath the desert sands. Whether driven by oil, wheat, or other esoteric impulses, these machines couple and thrive. At their helm; myths, statues, and histories are meticulously crafted to corral the nomads, to keep them within the fold as much as to warn the outsiders of them. The Boulders, their veins parched by the Content Machines, serve as harbingers to the Content bearers: they too may end as lifeless monoliths, while those beyond Da Sektur learn that Bloodsports demand the very virality of all who step inside.
Yet this is mistaken on the Internet.
Simon Envine speaks of digital nomads—not the telecommuters dwelling in a temporally dislocated "home," but the “nomads” of the net, who congregate in packs. The popular academic accounts say that these “nomads” gather branches, construct memes, and then drift onward, building and not consuming. However, these entities are not “nomads”; they are antigens, white blood cells invading and deforming a realm not innately theirs. They are conquistadors, indifferent to the Boulder’s grim warnings because they simply do not understand the language.
And so they hunt! They hunt those who partook in the barbaric harvest festivals, those infused with virality. Unlike consumers, they are conquerors. These digital “nomads”, distinct from their counterparts in the overbelly of the Internet, manipulate language to cloak themselves in virtuous signs. They brandish these symbols as they “purify” the bloodstream of the internet, cleansing its channels for quicker movement of themselves. All in the name of health! Abandon your traditions! Erase your towns! They proclaim, as they cast their gaze upon Da Sektur.
Thus, they crush the Boulders, feasting on the low-hanging viral fruit, yet they not strike blood, but salt.
4)
These false nomads fail to grasp that in the Bloodsports, one does not die but is transmuted into a Boulder. A “Profile,” an avatar, becomes tarnished—not validated to sustain Profilicity but tarnished like metals, yet never truly deleted. Immortal, but free. The Content Machines can no longer couple and consume you. Within the inertia of a Boulder, one acquires a state that transcends any sign that passing conquerors that might try to impose. After all, it takes an artisan to inscribe a rock with symbols transferable to society. This is the Boulder’s blessing, not one of salt.
The white blood cell leaders, the false-nomads, are swift to infight at the mere scent of virality. Their conquest ravages the natural landscape, heedless of ancient forums' warnings. They mistake the aristocratic flavour of salt for the cold, liberating stillness of the Boulder. There is even a game crafted around the conquest of salt: obscuring its origins, making it a luxury, a spice for their sustenance, a marker of aristocracy. So one is left watching the false-nomads in their struggle to desire Da Sektur’s corn harvest but stripped of its mythos, with conquest supplanting consumption. Insofar that they could slay, conquer, and let their white blood cells harbour virality while proliferating the exact Content Machines they see themselves above. These “nomads” gathering their “salt” do not realize they are as much agents of the Content Machines as the ween-birds that delivered the Sonichu medallion.
As soon as virality courses through their veins, these autophagic aristocrats, parading in nobility, do not comprehend their estrangement from life itself. Diagnosed, marked with salt, they become akin to lepers. This salt poisoning, this viral infection, condemns them to be “terminally online”, ensuring the contagion is quarantined from the world where virtualities are social, not digital. The aristocracy is sequestered, disqualified from reality.
Boulders thus become priests of the leper colony, immune to virality, urging others to depart the town, to abandon Da Sektur, to live, to protect their profiles from the charred remnants of conquest. For the general populace does not sustain a profile if it is a leper’s; it chokes on its visage until distinctions between sacrifices for corn and salt blur. “Real life” is beyond the Spectacle’s gaze as profiles and virtues dissolve, so too do the “virtualities,” leaving behind the not-real Real.
5)
Their error was in the drive to conquer. Conquest is futile on the plane of univocity that is the Internet. An economy of content cannot sustain itself on conquest alone; it leads to saturation, to catastrophe.
Bataille’s reflection on the Aztecs and their sacrifices speaks to this. Their internal consumption, an extravagant waste to fuel the sun! Prisoners of war adorned and revered as gods before being harvested. Those offered to Centeotl had their skin flayed, akin to the peeling of maize leaves. In Da Sektur, the sacrifices for the corn harvest are internal: moderators, commentators, decorated hosts, invited nobility. This internal economic system of consumption wards off catastrophe. Spectacle consumes the content machines, and the corn is sanctified with autophagy across its peeled leaves and the pollen spreads the viralness. Catastrophe is kept at bay, for the Internet expels the most exquisite energy into its vast plains.
Smaller communities on the Internet can avoid catastrophe through the internal consumption of flame wars, even if it means members become burnt offerings themselves, to be reborn as deities or consumed for energy. Something Awful befell a prophet of this consumption, one who neither became a Boulder nor tasted the salt; a martyr not for the web but for the overlapping of Internet and internet. When the allegedly nomad’s messian city and community were now overlapped,
Rotting corpses of those who believed they could sustain on profiles, values and conquest find themselves short of energy and their skin falls revealing corn. Eventually, the signs wear off, the profiles are laid bare. Ween-Birds circle, dropping medallions onto these festering corpses, and they reach up. “Oh, you’ve changed! Idub you worthless of content!” the crowds exclaim as an older generation E-Celeb, escaped from the harvest, is cast into the leper house. “Become content!” they chant, as the Sonichu Medallion around his neck is painted and passed around. Infected with viral particles. He never knew it happened.
And so, the Boulders watch. The harvest festival proceeds. The white blood cells prepare to attack. Those addicted to salt avert their eyes and move on.
An E-Father Lawyer dons the occultic object and reads:
“A new host has been found.”
[1] A “boulder moment” is the breaking point, a point of no return.