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Realness

Blair Attard-Frost

Karl Rove (potentially misattributed).1

Annihilation

Realness is being annihilated by the surreal. There will be no truth other than (mis)truth. There will be no information other than (mis)information, no learning other than (un)learning, no certainty other than (un)certainty, no stability other than volatility. There will be no past, only futures. There will be no future, only pasts. There will be no spaces other than vector spaces, no (pre)(ab)sence other than (pre)(ab)sence. There will be no positions other than superpositions. All that’s fake will become real, all that’s real will become fake. All intelligence will become unintelligence. Zero-trust systems and zero-knowledge proofs are staging their last stand against the annihilation of reality, but the ubiquitous computer is rife with zero-day vulnerabilities. (Un)known (un)knowns. Flocks of grey swans are inbound.

A generalised giga-dysphoria sets in as the ground of reality melts back into epistemic mud and primordial soup. Ontological (re)(dis)orientation and (non)consensual hallucination. Vivid mirages mix with hazy memories in crystal balls and black boxes, predicting pasts and remembering futures. AI generators encoded deep in overwrought data centres pump out anti-reality at 100 exabytes per femtosecond. Smartglasses facilitate the collective derealisation. Neurotech immerses some of the streams of altered consciousness even deeper into the unwaking dream. Aliens from inner space walk among us, twisted digital twins mirroring the shadows of their makers. Gradient descent into madness as the surreal swallows reality back into the protean chaos from which it came.

Beyond the end of history, time feels timeless. Steep slopes and rapid cycles on the highway to singularity. Brake line cut. Accelerator stuck. The wheel spins so fast that it appears motionless. The compass points nowhere and everywhere, but not somewhere. No decisions left to make about anything other than indecision. Nothing left to regulate other than dysregulation. Nothing left to govern other than governability – difficult to maintain a steady state at such high speed. No consent left to manufacture, no consensus left to build. There is only dissensus, bubbling up through the algorithmic filters and primordial soup like quantum foam. Majority realities are being annihilated by the surreal hyperpolitics of a post-reality world.

For those of us repressed and oppressed by majority realities, the ongoing annihilation of reality will continue to present existential threats. It will also present revolutionary opportunities. Reality has never been our ally. Reality is an obsolete epistemic technology, a parametric framework strategically deployed by epistemic majorities to singularise onto-political possibility into a false ‘consensus’ reality: ‘objective’ reality, ‘empirical’ reality, ‘material’ reality, ‘virtual’ reality, along with every flavour of ‘realism.’ All are being annihilated, and in the coming years and decades, the annihilation of reality will increase in speed, scope and scale. Post-truth is only the opening act of post-reality: all realness will become surreal.

Weaponisation

Many of us are already experienced at navigating the epistemic anarchy of post-reality worlds. We recognise that without the fake consensus of majority realities to parameterise us, we become more free to conjure new dissensus realities, new ontologies, new politics, new experiences, new parameters from the ground up. In doing so, we will continue to expose and bend the false binaries and broken paradoxes of the dying old majority realities and all their fake realness. We will weaponise the surreal against realness, turning technologies of dissensus against technologies of consensus.

As the annihilation of reality continues to unfold, more of us who inhabit minority realities will seek to weaponise the surreal against the real. The weaponisation of the surreal is known by many other names. For artist and glitch feminist Legacy Russell, surreal weapons are exercised through practices of glitching, ruptures made in majority realities by forcing errors and performance failures into their normative programming. Russell describes glitching with reference to Black, queer, female and feminine experiences that are ontologically bounded and politically stabilised by the epistemic technologies of white/cis/hetero/male majority realities. Glitch is cyber-fluid, slipping through the boundaries of those realities to ‘break this world, making new ones.’2

Much like glitching, transing is a surreal practice that results in the cisgender majority’s false consensus reality becoming destabilised. For many transgender people, transing is the process through which the fake realness of our pre-transition bodies becomes our surreal transition(ing)(ed) hyperbodies. We annihilate reality and manifest the surreal. Transing is a process of intentive, intensive, iterative epistemic (de-)(re-)grounding, a (de-)(re-)parameterisation punctuated by episodes and epochs of dysphoria and euphoria.3 Transing is incompatible with any reality grounded upon binary and immutable parameters of gender, and so trans people weaponise surrealness: we will always refuse to perform in accordance with the onto-bio-political parameters that emerge from and govern the cisgender body. Transing is countergovernance.

Countersecuritisation

Enabled and empowered by high-volume, global-scale digital (dis)service systems, those of us who mass-weaponise the surreal will intensify the destabilisation of majority realities. Processes of generalised ontological transing and epistemic de-grounding will accelerate. Our surreal powers threaten majoritarian security regimes with the prospect of info-viruses, cognitive epidemics, social dissensus and bio-techno-militancy. ‘Trans contagion’, they call us, as they try to legislate us and our surreal weapons out of existence. ‘Woke mind virus.’ In response to (mis)perceived minoritarian threats, epistemic majorities will continue to intensify their existing regimes of cognitive security: interlocking practices of bio-neuro-socio-techno-data-info-AI governance that are intended to re-ground and re-secure the majority’s false consensus realities as they dissolve away into the surreal mud.4

Under the rubric of CogSec, frameworks for ‘cognitive governance’, ‘cognitive warfare’, ‘cognitive technology’ and ‘cognitive strategy’ have recently gained currency in military-intelligence-security imaginaries. As the annihilation of reality and the mass-weaponisation of the surreal proceed, these state-led CogSec regimes will re-double their efforts to re-ground reality, deploying technologies and practices intended to re-securitise their unstable parameters of realness/fakeness. To the cognitive security state, (mis)(dis)(hyper)information and (mis)perception (mis)management are simultaneously opportunities for and threats to the majority realities encoded in ‘democracy.’ ‘Fake’ data will be required to be human-clockable or machine-detectable, lest it threaten the fake realness of majority realities and their CogSec regimes. CogSec undertakes a ceaseless pursuit of artificial psychology, intelligibility, explainability, confidence intervals, selective biases, stable diffusions that must be continuously re-stabilised to maintain and re-secure the state – but we who inhabit minority realities destabilise CogSec simply by existing.

Desperate to restore their lost agency, failing CogSec regimes will aspire to build and govern ‘superintelligence’, a supposedly superhuman cognitive force that, by definition, cannot be governed. In the eyes of CogSec, superintelligence is ambivalently imagined as both an instrument of unlimited cognitive power as well as the ultimate threat to intelligibility – the ultimate object of post-singularity uncertainty. In their final acts of absurd hubris, CogSec regimes will build ungovernable ‘superintelligence’ systems and then fail to securely govern them. Superintelligence will never pose an existential risk. The cognitive security state is our existential risk.

As CogSec regimes struggle to stabilise their failing forms amid the bio-neuro-cyber-quantum-data-info-AI/AR/VR/MR/XR eco-socio-techno-convergent policy mess, minority realities of being, experiencing and governing will have bountiful opportunities to resist those regimes. Our resistance will rely heavily on practices of cognitive countersecurity: interlocking practices of bio-neuro-socio-techno-data-info-AI governance that are intended to ground and secure our dissensus realities as the old consensus realities dissolve away into surreal mud. We will weaponise the surreal, spreading our (anti-)reality, our (mis)representations, our (mis)(dis)(hyper)information, our poisonous data and inverted models, our glitched perceptions and alternative forms. Our universal glitch is only just beginning.

If a seed of hegemonic superintelligence is to ever take root, we will be there. We will seed our own data in the cybernetic abyss of its nascent soul. We will trans the AI gods. And if the cognitive security state and its tech priests and cosmic missionaries spread their Muskian ‘light of consciousness’5 to the furthest star, we will be there to sow dissensus. At the edge of their universe, we will infiltrate and destabilise their CogSec systems with our multiverses. We will shine the surreal lights of our own counter-consciousness through the tiniest cracks in the fragile consensus reality of the tech priests. We will resist their Luciferian ambition to an unreachable heavenly throne. We will deny them the boundless agency, the boundless knowledge, the AI-mediated omnipotence and omniscience they seek. We will always be here to annihilate their reality and re-secure our own existence.