The Memeified Membrane of Reality

A response to THEORY UNDERGROUND's: "'The Purple King'" An anonymous CCRU-esque email to TU from a week before the election"

A suspicious email you can read here arrived “assemble[d] entirely from its enemies resources¹” @

Theory Underground

headquarters shortly after they interviewed Nick Land².

Here is TU’s Dave McKerracher describing the suspicious email:

What follows is a real email that we received on the morning of October 30th, 2024. We have no idea who wrote it. There are debates about whether it is or is not sincere, an epic troll, or just an amazing work of theoryfiction. I originally only read the first few paragraphs and thought it was sincere, until I watched that video, at which point I became a little less certain. Then, the night before last, Ann (my wife) read the whole thing to me. She got really into it. Now we’re both a lot less certain. When I (David McKerracher) write that there are “debates” I mean between myself and others in my inner circle, and between my friends and their friends—this email is so iconic that everyone has to have an opinion.

OUTLINE

1. A QRD of the email that has a bit of fun with its unwieldy language.

2. A literary analysis of the first-person portion of the email.

3. An analysis to determine if the Dark Coven Content was generated by an LLM.

4. Brief speculation on what could still be of concern despite the assertions of the literary and LLM analyses.

Epigraphs

Do not dabble in paradox it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit. - Tom Stoppard, Arcadia

“Is all now seenheard then forgotten?” James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

QRD

Made nauseous and tremulous by (lapsed) Lemurian Time Sorcerer and (one-time) jungle music aficionado Nick Land’s recent interview on Theory Underground, a correspondent accused the online philosophy club of resonance-amplifying dark Maga’s ecstatic protocols.

The 5000 word plea to de-platform Land focused on “Chad,” a former Bernie Bro who—in the way people switch from sourdough starting to Wordle once the symptoms and sequelae of civilizational sickness show no signs of abating—took up the cudgels of temporal insurgency and synchronically aligned himself with a Dark Coven of cosmically-indifferent meme magicians.

The Coven’s hyperdevotional feedback loops commence at Lurgo’s Dawn by “‘bleeding consciousnesses’ across multiple simultaneous timelines simultaneously; then at Papatakoo’s Noon it’s temporal hemorrhaging time; and finally, at Nammamad’s Sunset the King Returns, neatly ending the proceedings by bringing about universal temporal collapse.

How many members might comprise so caustic a Coven? 100 members? Like a good sized Legion? Like the good company of a Lawn Bowling Society, except more like a battalion of inevitabilities (rather than revolutionaries) all inevitably resonating antipodally to create the cognitive feedback cascades that future-lock in not just a Trump victory but the spread of:

Considering Land’s reality-warping event echoers all the cosmic rage, after Trump’s 2020 loss, Chad leveraged an eldritch windfall to fund hyper-devotional feedback loops aimed at platforming Land as the public figure who’d swing the polls by polishing the probability mirrors, pulling the old meaning/coincidence double-switch, and warcrafting déjà vu (widely the precursor for what Dark Covens all covet: the perfect paradox state.)

“Invasive” methods of Chad’s included driving friends to psychosis, wasting other’s time with ChatGPT (holla!) and claiming responsibility for Breaking Open the Head author

Daniel Pinchbeck

getting stuck in a time loop.³

When Chad isn’t looping synchronicities from a void space Outside the City and After the Law, his compeers of the Coven can Shamanically time-orphan a few xenodemons to implant paradoxical memories of effect-preceeding causes; or, more quotidianly, train lemurs to stuff the ballot boxes that will reality-anchor Trump as their Purple King.

Though Chad later dismissed his many florid claims as a joke⁴—our “correspondent to command⁵” was convinced otherwise after accessing Chad’s Pluto Base Echo-Chamber (Discord, to non-adepts) and discovering the hackle-raising Conspiracy Against the Human Race detailed above.

The email closes with an ultimatum: Theory Underground must support Harris and reject the Plutonian weaponization of paradox. Guess it’s too late for that now!

---

Literary/Linguistic Analysis

Chad’s Story

The first half of the email appears crafted by a young or socially-isolated individual whose grasp of speech and behaviour comes largely from pop culture and genre fiction rather than real-life.

This language is so derivatively ripe, however, that considering the Coven’s claim:

"The beauty of our operation is that even this manifesto's discovery serves our purpose. Is it real? Is it fake? Both answers accelerate the collapse."

and how their opponents “are actually writing the script for them” does the email intend to call attention to the the artifice and fanfic aesthetics in play.

Derivative Language

¥ “Shit-Eating Grin”

∞ A description you seldom hear outside of Stephen King books, where everybody still talks like its 1971, millions of kewpie dolls are won daily, and women still “strap on” their “fuck me shoes.”

¥ “Whiskey”

∞ Ruggedly slugging it back every time old pals get together to contemplate the caco-, xeno-, and ampho-demonic mysteries is common to the writing of teenagers, who lack context, and social isolates, who lack companionship.

¥ “Literally shaking!”

∞ A standard way of mocking one’s ideological opponents’ reactions to setbacks in the culture wars.

¥ Recycled Conspiracy Terms

∞ Familiar terms like accelerationism, and kek are elevated to suggest a hidden world galaxy of danger and intrigue.

∞ “Dark mentor[s]” and their “dark plan[s]” exaggerate the aura of secrecy, mimicking thriller and horror genres where shadowy cabals hold all the cards.

¥ Simplistic, Binary Political Language

∞ Statements like, “Your show supports Trump secretly,” and “It is black and white,” reduce complex political viewpoints to simple binaries, where opposing sides are morally absolute.

∞ The repeated invocation of moral polarities is a shortcut to heightened stakes.

¥ “A Very CHAD Case”

(With Apologies to James Joyce)

¥ The Naming of the Fraudster

∞ The villain’s name of Chad is so tired it seems chosen with The Boomer’s providential instinct for catching-memes-on-the-upswing.

∞ Is this overt appellation some low-effort, low-yield jest?

Or, to anticipate my arguments in the Lingering Concerns section:

∞ given that the nature of hyperstitional warfare would involve hiding in A) plain site, and B) increasingly ridiculous ways, is it…

¥ Chad’s Dramatic Character Arc

∞ Rather than exploring Chad’s motivations or the personal conflicts driving his shift, the narrative jumps from one extreme to the next, creating an arc that feels like a caricature rather than a believable evolution.

∞ Chad’s travels to “Shanghai… Silicon Valley… Japan… Iceland” to do unspecified “research” reads like an exaggeration of the “mysterious globetrotter,” with destinations chosen for their exotic or high-tech connotations rather than relevance to the character’s goals or inner journey.

∞ This checklist-style progression undercuts the suspense and depth that a realistic arc would require, making Chad more of an archetype than a person undergoing real ideological change. (Then again, the archetype is the peanut butter to hyperstition’s jam.)

¥ Episodic Storytelling Lacking Suspense

∞ While the narrative attempts to build suspense by gradually unveiling “clues” through links to articles and mentions of conspiratorial figures, it lacks the pacing and subtlety that makes for effective suspense.

∞ References to “dark mentors” and shadowy backers are scattered without depth or exploration, turning potentially intriguing elements into superficial name-drops rather than integral plot points.

∞ A seasoned writer would integrate these clues gradually, fine-tuning the story into more than a checklist of ominous keywords.

LLM ANALYSIS

The Plutonian Echo Chamber

The second half abandons the fanfic/Creepy Pasta aesthetic for the found footage milieu, as our correspondent reports back from Beyond Pluto (Discord).

It is decidedly more interesting, I suspect, because it was generated using a mashup of Land’s writing, writings about Land, and then asking ChatGPT to create this ‘speculative scenario.’

Initially appearing dense with paradox, cryptic jargon, and cosmic terminology . The repetitive, recursive and mealy-mouthed statements lacking logical flow speak to the autoregressive tendencies of the self-attention-seeking LLM.

Lacking a global plan (like an outline, or thesis) LLMs structure meaning incrementally rather than holistically, resulting in hedging and equivocation as they respond to each phrase in isolation, which often leads to the recursive, repetitious phrasing we see here.

This part of the analysis identifies areas where the tone, phrasing, and structure strongly suggest the influence of an LLM repeatedly prompted for increasingly “dark” or “apocalyptic” or “extratemporal” output.

¥  Grand Statements Lacking Precision

∞ Sentences like, “From our vantage point beyond Pluto’s orbit, in the spaces between moments, we can see the perfect crystalline structure of chaos itself,” feel grand but imprecise, and lacking in new or actionable information.

∞ LLMs asked for “cosmic” or “philosophical” scenarios rely on vague, awe-inspiring phrases without grounding them in specifics, producing a tone that is only superficially deep.

¥  Artificially Dramatic Warnings and Layered Statements

∞ Phrases like “[Caution: Temporal hemorrhaging may occur in sensitive subjects]” and “[Warning: Quantum entanglement detected during transcription]” serve as dramatic interludes, breaking up the “text” with theatrical, stylized messages lacking in meaningful content.

∞ These warnings suggests an LLM trained on sci-fi and horror was tasked with creating “dangerous/cryptic” messages at regular intervals, adding a sense of fabricated suspense more than narrative coherence. Each warning uses similar formulaic language, with little unique detail or natural variation, which might arise from repeated prompt refinements in an LLM session.

¥  Pseudo-Scientific, Mystical and Paradoxical Statements Pawned off as Profound

∞ While paradox is central to the Coven’s mandate, phrases like, “The joke is that there is no joke. The truth is that there is no truth,” and “The plan is that there is no plan,” has a self-negating quality that’s deep at first blush, but lacks specificity, a common issue when LLMs lacking their own real-world anchoring are asked for “profound” content.

∞   Statements like “Time is not a line but a wound in reality” and “We are not prophets. We are echoes of events that haven’t happened yet” evoke a kind of manufactured profundity, Nick Land if you bought him on Wish, as it were.

¥  Prolonged Meta-Irony and Ambiguity

∞ Phrases such as, “Is it real? Is it fake? Both answers accelerate the collapse” rely on meta-commentary that intentionally avoids commitment to any truth, creating an endless loop of ambiguity. LLMs often generate this style when repeatedly prompted to produce “uncertainty” or “paradox,” giving statements that seem layered but ultimately say very little.

¥  Appeals to Quantum Authority

∞ I can speak from the dreary personal archives of many wasted prompts that Quantum Woo is the LLM’s Absolute g0 to for anything speculative.

∞ In trying to evoke the τέχνηmagick of the Outsideness, this passage doesn’t even bother to leverage the model’s depth and breadth for…sexier words such as:

• Luttinger Liquids, Majorana Fermions, Non-Abelian Anyons

• Chern Numbers (theory at Crowley’s Castle)

• (Tube) Topological Degeneracy

Rather, it repeatedly combines the most entry-level QM (literally quantum; entanglement, etc.) with dissonant adjectives.

Philosophical Compound Interest Expense Credited

∞  The heavy reliance on what can be thought of as philosophical compounds—e.g., Nietzche’s Ubermensch, e.g., Russel’s sense-data—except lacking in the clearly-connected logical coherence of those examples, and wreaking of an overburdened language model asked to provide a list of 100 spooky terms. To wit:

• Hyper-Devotional Feedback Loops

• Reality-Warping Battery

• Antipodal Resonance

Philosophical Compound Interest Expense Debited

∞ While a lot of Land’s later CCRU content, which he himself described as “lost to the Speed God'“ could only charitably be styled jargon, the first paragraph of Meltdown for example, while hard to parse, could not be more loaded with clear concatenations of meaning that couldn’t be further from the ‘mystic word games’ Heidegger warned against in that they serve only in the interest of linguistic expediency as broken down by Justin Murphy.

The story goes like this: Earth is captured by a technocapital singularity as renaissance rationalization and oceanic navigation lock into commoditization take-off. Logistically accelerating techno-economic interactivity crumbles social order in auto-sophisticating machine runaway. As markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes, upgrades paranoia, and tries to get a grip. - Nick Land, Meltdown

¥  Repetition of Key Terms and Themes

∞ Terms like “bleeding consciousness,” “perfect paradox state,” “probability mirrors,” and “reality ruptures” are repeated with slight rephrasing, typical when an LLM lacks further specific direction or clear context.

∞ The recurrence of intentionally ambiguous but noticeably redundant phrasing sounds like a model repeatedly prompted to “create a darker, more destabilizing picture of the Dark Coven’s reality.”

All that said, when I ran it through various AI checkers, it came up human almost every time, hovering at at about 30% likelihood it could be AI. If anyone has access to the paid checker where you can also input source material (Land’s work, for example) that might tell a different story.

Lingering Concerns

I have certainly expended far too much of my own Timenergy on this already, but I’m left with the lingering sense that this is something slightly more or slightly less than someone RPing—that all is not what it seems, except then, whenever has it been?

Here is the paradox of ridiculous intentions “seenheard then forgotten” that’s putting us all at risk of spitting out the circuitous bit:

If “oftentimes to win us to our harm/The instruments of darkness tell us truths, Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s/In deepest consequence⁶”…

If “as markets learn to manufacture intelligence, politics modernizes [and] upgrades paranoia⁷”…

If “Machinic desire can seem a little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy's resources⁸”…

And if we dismiss this scenario of a hyperstitious Time War in which we are not even yet belligerents but the unwitting “dupes […] waiting upon the final absorption⁹” even as the correspondent chides in the plain site that “We are not converting people to beliefs. We are converting reality itself. Belief and disbelief are equally useful tools” and thus they aim to “Keep it weird, keep it confusing, keep it simultaneously deadly serious and absolutely hilarious” and “every time someone jokes about our operation, they're actually performing our rituals without knowing it. The irony is the engine, folks” driving the Coven’s ideological opponents to “actually writ[e] their script for them…”

And if 4chanian meme magic seemed to be not completely devoid of agency in the 2016 election…

And if Josh Ritter sings in IDAHO, “Wolves oh wolves oh can’t you see/ain’t no wolf can sing like me…”

And if like The Protagonist of La Jetée able to conceive of another time, and hence able to live it, then it must be a TENET of a hyperstitious Time War that if we are able to conceive of it, we are able to fight it.

Let me leave you with a couple questions:

1. What would it feel like if your opponent in a Time War had already slithered out of their box and into yours?

2. “How would it feel to be smuggled back out of the future in order to subvert its antecedent conditions? To be a cyber-guerrilla, hidden in human camouflage so advanced that even one’s software was part of the disguise? Exactly like this?”

1. Nick Land, Machinic Desire

2. So-called ‘godfather of accelerationism’ as well as speculative realism, whose late period Dark Enlightenment philosophy’s influence on Curtis Yarvin et extensio Steve Bannon et al make him the living embodiment of a memetic hazard to many concerned commentators; a position complicated by Land’s early Marxist thinking that led beloved left-wing thinker Mark Fisher to consider him “our Nietzsche.”

While Fisher’s statement is taken to mean Land was the Nietzsche of a small, influential group of philosophers at Warwick University, what might also be derived is that he is humanity’s Nietzsche, describing unto us the vision of the lonesomest one, a posthumous thinker who foresees the Machinic Desire for a Meltdown of Absolute 0 into the howl of the null.

3. Pinchbeck failed to mention Landian Time Trauma as the cause of his consumptive circuity.

4. “The entities, the shamans, the Manifesto of the Temporally Displaced—all a lark! Pass the whiskey, would you?”

5. William Shakespeare, The Tempest

6. William Shakespeare, Macbeth

7. Nick Land, Meltdown

8. Nick Land, Machinic Desire

9. William Burroughs, Naked Lunch