Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse: Notes and Theories to 10,000 Years by Adalbert Arcane

Adalbert Arcane’s expanded Notes & Theories to Beta Testing the Ongoing Apocalypse (by Tom Kaczynski, Fantagraphics, 2022). This ongoing series of posts started here.

Slumbering Towards the Future

On the surface, 10,000 Years (10K YRS, originally published in MOME 8, 2007) resembles science fiction classics like HG Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes, or Edward Bellamy’s utopian magnum opus, Looking Backward. It follows the familiar trope of a sleeping man, who awakens far in the future through some unexplained time fluke. Most variants of this trope, depict the future as something concrete: something we fear or desire. The future tends to be either positive or negative, utopia or dystopia.

The main protagonist is probably named after Edgar Cayce, the famous Sleeping Prophet. Cayce is best known for predicting that Atlantis would be found in the ’60s in the vicinity of the Bahama Islands. Atlantean lore is an ongoing concern for the Author. A genealogy of this ancient lost world was explored in Trans Atlantis. Edgar Cayce also figures prominently in the notorious and unreleased “lost” chapter to Trans Terra [ 1 ] cycle of stories.

The one thing our modern imagination cannot fathom is a future that remains fundamentally the same. And yet, this was the state of humanity for millennia. Imagine a caveman troglodyte living during the paleolithic 40-50 thousand years ago. Was there a future for such a creature? Did he imagine a world of tomorrow? Was he imagining new super-Neolithic technologies? Judging by the scant evidence left to archaeologists, not much progress or change happened for tens of thousands of years. It seems impossible, yet it DID happen at some point. How? When? (See Music For Neanderthals). The gap between them and us is vast and difficult to bridge.

The Eternal Present

We see the eternal present as the provenance of non-human animals. Can we look at our ancient ancestors as less human? Modern humans have a glitch (or a gift, depending on your POV). We have an internal mirroring process (aka self-consciousness) that enables us to become stuck “out of time.” This glitch/gift is what makes us human.

At some point, we began to transform the environment around us. That transformation required more significant and fantastic planning (i.e., awareness of the future; more on this in future notes). Future awareness scales with human numbers. When humans began to congregate in large settlements, the gap between the future and the present decreased.

Paradoxically the past conditions the future. Depending on the success or failure of a community, the future imagination becomes influenced by past events. It becomes constrained by previous events. The community can develop a sense of helplessness and anticipate a future apocalypse. Or, a series of successes can instill visions of a brighter future and perpetual progress (of some sort).

End of History

We, the moderns, are split. We imagine either utopian possibilities or dire catastrophes. The one thing many of us cannot conceive is an unchanging present extending infinitely into the future. And yet, this is the predicament we find ourselves in. Since the mid-1970s, progress (technological, etc.) has stalled in many ways. The future imagined by our ancestors from the first half of the 20th century has stalled. No flying cars, no moon bases, etc. The technologies which have progressed since then: computers, digital communication, virtual reality, etc., are primarily cybernetic in the realm of personal augmentation. In fact, most of these technologies can be seen as elaborations on the mirror.

10,000 Years, Page 3, panels 9-11 (patent pending)

10K YRS story is remarkable for being written and published years before Peter Thiel’s Zero To One business screed. In this book, Thiel (did Thiel read this comic?) posits that the economic development of atoms (machines, devices, physical items, energy) has not kept up with the growth of bits (programmatic computer products like VR, big data, etc.) The power and speed of computers have increased, but we have not made much progress in the physical realm. Much of the world relies on the infrastructure invented, built, and developed in the 20th century. 10K YRS anticipated this analysis and stretched this idea into the far future. 10K YRS is a concise and prophetic elaboration of Fukuyama’s End of History thesis. We are forever suspended in this world like a dead fetus floating in embalming fluid unless something or someone can get us out.

Mars Attacks

The protagonist learns that he is a Martian or potentially Martian in the final sequence. It represents the author’s intuitive understanding that the current static social and political consensus can only be shaken loose by something external to capitalism, communism, civilization, humanity, and the planet.

Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Also Sprach Zarathustra

Mars in our present is a distant anchor of possibility. A tether stretches between Earth & Mars; Zarathustra’s rope upon which man/superman must learn to walk. The only other option: the slow entropic death of the last man flattened by the oppressive gravity of mother earth.

The external event alluded to is the colonization of Mars. (see Utopia Dividend) This event, in theory, would accelerate [ 2 ] technological development in the material sphere, exploit vast new energy sources, and generate a vast quantity of new economic opportunities in the off-world colonies (see Blade Runner).

Haunted or Haunting?

The vision of Marxist zombies on Mars is a nod to the specter that has haunted history: Marx and Marxism and the idea of progress itself. At one point, a Marxist revolution begins unfolding on Mars. The Marxists are depicted as zombies, an explicit call-out to George Romero’s later zombie films, which identify the proletariat with zombies. In his earlier films, zombies were bourgeois consumers wreaking havoc in shopping malls. Now zombies are the proletariat, forever hated, reduced to a zombie-like state; empathy withdrawn.

The Zombie is a figure that acquires new abilities and meanings during different epochs.

The author (Tom Kaczynski) melds those two interpretations via zombie Marx’s detourned speech: “A specter is haunting Mars – the specter of consumerism. […] Consumers of the solar system, save your receipts.” It is a haunting passage that both reaffirms that the revolutionary class is dead and permanently subsumed by the consumertariat.

The revolutionary potential of Marxism has been drained of all energy by the grey vampires [ 3 ]. Zombie Marx embodies the current form of late-capitalist-socialist activism: specifically, the “I’ve got the receipts” [ 4 ] brand of cancel culture that haunts social(ist) media. [ 5 ] The communism—the engine of the events of the 20thcentury—that haunted Marx’s 19th century is now a rotting husk of flesh shambling, decomposing, and liquefying into toxic sludge. Can anything grow in its wake?

Of the twin towers of the 20th century: capitalism & communism, one has already fallen. How long can the other stand?

Notes:

[ 1 ] The collected edition of Trans Terra has yet to be released.

[ 2 ] This is distinct from accelerationism.

[ 3 ] See Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle.

[ 4 ] Sometimes also manifested as complaints to managers or bosses in order to cause economic damage to the “canceled” person.

[ 5 ] It should be mentioned that the term “cancel culture” is controversial. It’s ontological status is generally questioned by the agents that perform the “cancelling.”

Social Media is a Web2 technology, and as such, it is seen by many as something new and unprecedented and by others as a simple, linear intensification of Web1 (the original internet). Initially, Social Media was hailed for its potential as a tool against authoritarian regimes. Who remembers that the Arab Spring was hailed as a beautifu Twitter Revolution? Today, Twitter Revolution bring connotations of “dark internet,” or “misinformation.” It is now viewed with more suspicion. Why is that? A case has been made (and more on this in future posts) that Social Media (as instantiated in the Web2 context) has achieved its true form. In form, it most resembles the Stasi citizen spying program developed by the East German Communist regime. It weaponized daily social interactions and created incentives for citizens to “keep tab”s on each other.