Basically, the picture that gradually emerges is not that different, in broad outlines, from the one painted by Paul Kingsnorth in the book I reviewed last week. Capitalism, far from being a mere system of economics, can be viewed as a kind of inhuman xeno-intelligence which operates according to its own logic, quite apart from anything the humans who make it run intend. Artificial Intelligence is simply the most evolved form of this fundamentally alien entity.

And like Kingsnorth, the CCRU views the thing in apocalyptic metaphysical terms. In this view, AI is not being developed by humans. Rather, it is a force coming from somewhere entirely separate from the everyday realm of human perception—a place sometimes ominously referred to, in the fine Lovecraftian tradition, as “The Outside.”

What is The Outside, and how do things get in from it? Well, Kingsnorth used the metaphor of the internet as a worldwide Ouija board, and this intuitively seems like an analogy of which the CCRU would approve. But they have an even more bizarre and esoteric method for consorting with the dark powers, called the Numogram.

The Numogram, which is the odd diagram you see on the cover, is CCRU’s qabbalistic calling card. It’s impossible to understand the philosophy of Lemurian Time-Sorcery without understanding the Numogram. Unfortunately, (or perhaps fortunately) it is also impossible to understand the Numogram. Quoting directly from Part 8, “Pandemonium”:

“The Numogram, or decimal labyrinth, is composed of ten zones (numbered 0-9) and their interconnections. These zones are grouped into five pairs (syzygies) by nine-sum twinning (zygonovism). The arithmetical difference of each syzygy defines a current (or connection to a tractor zone). Currents constitute the primary flows of the Numogram.”

This is the part of the story where I’m most inclined to wonder if the whole thing is just an Andy Kaufman routine for eccentric philosophers. You can never be sure that the entirety of CCRU’s output is not some elaborate academic practical joke which is not terribly funny.

Except of course for one stark fact: viz., that to the extent anything can be gleaned from the CCRU writings, it is a prediction that AI will relentlessly conquer the world. And indeed, this prediction appears to be coming true. After all, AI is ubiquitous in cyberspace. Just in the course of writing this blog post, I keep getting irritating pop-ups telling me how I could write it “better”. I thought these were merely repetitive and annoying, but perhaps the CCRU is correct, and they are in fact intrusions from dark spiritual forces that lurk in the heart of internet, buried deep in the undersea cables that connect the Earth like monstrous worms. “Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl.”

Again and again, Kingsnorth and the CCRU align in ironic ways. Where Kingsnorth says “let ‘the West’ die”, CCRU writes cryptically, “America is nothing but the West, and that’s the Land of the Dead.” (“Going west” is archaic slang for dying, presumably because the sun “dies” in that direction at the end of every day.)

The one point on which CCRU differs significantly from Kingsnorth is that their view seems to be that the replacement of humanity by demonic machine intelligence is a good thing. Since I reviewed Kingsnorth’s book, it’s only right to consider the counter-point. We here at Ruined Chapel still follow the Fairness Doctrine, after all. And according to CCRU, humans are basically just an evolutionary mistake. There’s a whole section in here dedicated to explaining why bipeds are an aberration, and your really S-tier lifeforms should be quadrupeds, or better still, cephalopods.

I docked points from Kingsnorth’s book for failing to provide an adequate solution to what he persuasively described as a great spiritual void at the heart of modernity. Well, CCRU claims the void has already been filled—not by anything human, but by dread monsters that haunt the blackness between the stars. Where Kingsnorth would say we should try to remedy this, CCRU favors accelerationism: continuing the process of shredding all trappings of humanity in favor of becoming something else.

It all sounds a bit crazy. But, perhaps the craziest part is that it sounds a little less crazy now than it did at the turn of the millennium. Implausible, yes, but not wholly impossible…

Speaking of the turn of the millennium, Y2K has immense spiritual significance in the CCRU philosophy. Besides the infamous glitch being a kind of “digital hyperstition”, it also marks the dawn of a new era.

Of all the weird vignettes in this book, none stuck with me as much as “The Excruciation of Hummpa-Taddum”. “Hummpa-Taddum” being supposedly some union of mythic gods that gave birth to the Age of Pisces, and even more supposedly, thinly disguised by Lewis Carroll as “Humpty Dumpty”. (To be clear, I can find no evidence that anything called “Hummpa-Taddum” exists in any folklore outside of this volume. Again, the casual mixing of fact and fiction till the lines blur beyond all recognizability is a CCRU specialty.)

The AOE [Architectonic Order of the Eschaton. Don’t ask.–B.G.]  focuses upon a single problem—acknowledging no other: how to reproduce magical power across discontinuity. As Hummpa-Taddum gets smashed on New Year’s Eve, substitute powers await their chance and their destiny, sober, patient, totally ruthless…

The question is, said Humpty Dumpty, which is to be master—that is all.

As longtime readers know, the aesthetic of “millennial weirdness” is a favorite hobby-horse of mine, and the CCRU Writings have it in spades.  And indeed, perhaps it is more than just an aesthetic found in the world of cyberpunk video games and Art Bell’s radio programs. It does feel, doesn’t it, as if something did change about a quarter-century ago. As if, to quote Lovecraft again, “the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods and forces which were unknown.”

Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that Kingsnorth is right: there is some malevolent metaphysical aspect to the rise of what he calls “The Machine.” If so, his plan of setting limits on screen time and not communing with the demonic presences “unless you really have to” is woefully inadequate. The CCRU actually provides a much more plausible roadmap to dealing with such forces, if they do indeed exist. The only issue, of course, is that their handbook provides instructions on how to summon the unholy powers.

As any good Lovecraft reader knows, the Necronomicon is a double-edged sword. You can use it to send the eldritch abominations back whence they came, if you know what you’re doing. And if we are truly in a spiritual war, we’ll need to have a grimoire or two in our toolkit.

But what exactly would this mean? Can we banish AI back into the Shadow Realm just by turning the Numogram upside-down? (It’s not like it would make any less sense.) Well, you could try it, I guess, but again, remember Kingsnorth’s warning about the internet-as-Ouija-board. More to the point, recall the words of the unnaturally long-lived 18th-century necromancer Joseph Curwen in Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward:

I say to you againe, doe not call upp Any that you can not put downe; by the Which I meane, Any that can in Turne call up somewhat against you, whereby your Powerfullest Devices may not be of use. Ask of the Lesser, lest the greater shall not wish to Answer, and shall commande more than you.