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"Il fallait un geste. Avec amertume, pleinement conscients de nos responsabilités, nous l'accomplissons"
- The Jarivistes, with a gun

1. The act of engaging with content is inherently dissociative. This is true for all content, from throwaway tweets to the greatest works of art. The body and its context are abandoned in an attempt to reduce instantaneous suffering (I.S.) at the expense of the capacity to combat or, in many cases, even apprehend enduring suffering (E.S.). Claims regarding culture matter’s ability to materially transfigure one’s circumstances are abundant. What we observe, however, are brief durations of mood enhancement until sources of E.S. manifest in conscious focus again as I.S.
2. Based on the ultimate failure of this brief self-deception, we could generously characterize the effect of engaging with a work of art, for example, as a temporary but necessary salve, a fleeting form of spiritual nourishment. But upon closer inspection, the responses of the individual more closely mimic the cycles associated with drugs or bad exes. Our relationship with content is perhaps best seen as akin to the kind of deleterious, consuming spiral of a bender, with the same logic of desperation.
3. A lone individual engaged in this spiral has a radius of impact that is restricted to the microsocial, but an entire civilization retreating into simulated emotional spaces, assimilating into themselves untested logics and knowledges from sources of unknown intent, origin, and qualification (e.g. authors, artists, influencers), which they then further modify, corrupt, and witlessly fling like gossamer filament into the expanse of culture, ensnaring other agents, who, armed with this new content, modify and fling again, outward, outward, ad infinitum, poses the greatest threat to our continued survival, our healing, our recovery.
4. Culture matter which allows us this form of retreat into imagination, even and especially works of art, is actually the blindfold which allows the persistence of the primary sources of enduring suffering. In order to confront the sources of E.S., it seems we must somehow collectively turn away from the seduction of the staging grounds of narrative, away from the comforts of simulation, so that we can finally face and examine the origins of suffering and eliminate them in toto.
5. However, the act of turning away en masse is prohibitively difficult. A superficial analysis reveals that the contemporary modes of dissemination and consumption and the content they deliver have been designed using tactics cribbed from behavioral psychology and optimized to ensure a sort of irresistibility. But this alone does not explain the perception of deep meaning, parasocial cathexis, and other complex emotions. It also does not explain how the total retreat into the virtual, previously an occasional act afforded only by works of art, has subsumed all other possible ways of being. There must be some more fundamental deprivation of the needs and desires of the human spirit that motivates many to give themselves to the bondage of content creation and consumption.
6. Social media is the last extant substrate on which reality can grow. More precisely, social media is a regime change for mass media which inherited this substrate. This regime change fundamentally altered incentives for all involved parties. During the previous era of mass media, the dissemination and consumption of culture was a unidirectional process. Corporations televised works of art, news pieces, and advertisements created by a small number of people, representing a relatively small number of (frequently commercial) interests, for people sitting on their couches, and the people on the couches went to work, went to the store, came back home to their couch.
7. No longer is there a unidirectional relation between creator and consumer. These roles are now irreversibly conflated and encompass all people. By modularizing and pseudo-democratizing access to the means of production, capitalists liberated the mass media from the trickiest part of their culture manufacturing enterprise: the actual creation of culture matter. This responsibility was unbundled from mass media and given to the individual, provided the individual operated within certain parameters. In exchange, the individual received access to a tool for feeling seen, understood, alive, a tool which allowed them to create a self using the solitary substrate available, one that for so long was only available to the people on TV, in movies, in magazines. And who can blame them for giving themselves so freely to this new mass media? If the “real world” is permanently marred by an interposition of the world of mass media onto all things, the innate desire to connect will simply find a way to grow within it. Most people on the internet are grateful for the opportunity to engage in public acts of self-making, given that it is no longer possible in any other part of their lives. Tragically, these people exploiting themselves for the benefit of the proprietors of social media believe they have been given the gift of self-expression.
8. The regime change from monolithic, top-down platforms of the earlier mass media to a networked, non-hierarchical social media was seamless. How? Surely, individuals, with their multitude of ideologies, preferences, and desires, should have upended or at the very least disrupted capitalism’s prior art in mass media. Corporations, as they are uncontroversially understood, operate with a very narrow set of goals: acquisition and expansion. Individuals, with presumptive souls, with selves that should have at least some desires extrinsic to capitalist principles, should by their very nature resist being cleaved into a productized shape en masse. Nevertheless, we were able to accept the handoff of the torch without much effort or to-do, without even apprehending it outside of occasionally bemoaning Mark Zuckerberg et al. – an anachronism of the revolutionary politics of the former mass media, that lone figureheads are to be held accountable.
9. The previous mass media directly broadcast agents and objects of desire to consumers. The brandishing of celebrity and narrative to manipulate the desires of a docile, consuming public by corporations is so well understood that it has become cliché. This was not only through direct marketing via advertisements between acts of a television program, but through the commodification of personalities ostensibly in vivo. In the previous mass media, the capitalist lens surreptitiously extended into the so-called “private” lives of celebrities via tabloids, televised interviews, and other mindshare-capturing endeavors, and thus indirectly marketed products, services, etc., in a manner that suggested the desirable lives lived by the famous could be co-opted via consumption. Under social media, we have all, deliberately or not, been substituted for both the celebrities and the tabloids as the primary driver of consumer behavior.
10. This has rendered direct marketing a straggler merely trying to parasitize the new ubiquitous modes of consumption. When we scroll through a timeline, we are already driven by the desire to vivisect personalities, at best for admiration, but most often for comparison and co-option, precisely mirroring our prior relationship with celebrity under the prior mass media. We see our friends post joyous occasions, acquaintances their professional accomplishments, and, outside of our immediate social sphere, we see strangers post content intended to capture the attention of a broad audience, all embedded in the same spatial context of the feed. These self-tabloidizing efforts are now the advertisements for lives that could possibly be lived, and their aesthetic signifiers are, wittingly or not, being marketed alongside. The LED light strip under a viral tweet and a recipe vlogger’s use of a special brand of spices are the tacky hangers-on from the previous mass media that are trying to co-opt the already extant mechanism in which all users of social media are participating.
11. A personality which cannot be readily commodified has been rendered entirely illegible by social media. How are we, your peers, to know you are passionate about plants unless you have not only signified it via your possessions and aesthetic, but also published a record of that fact? Thus, the modes of consumption that direct marketing and mass media were previously attempting to jumpstart and lubricate now require no direct maintenance. Capitalism is now contentedly self-perpetuating in the realm of the individual, interposed in all social interactions, and the monolithic celebrity is no longer needed. Even the most seemingly earnest, vulnerable forms of self-making that occur on social media are false. These posts are immediately rendered inert and subsumed into the flywheel of capital by virtue of their placement in the feed. And it is not really by ignorance that this occurs. It is a necessary compromise in order to have a self at all. People are in fact eager to compress themselves into legible signifiers because it affords them a sense of connection, a feeling of being seen that is core to the desires of the human spirit, which has been otherwise rendered inaccessible. This is the sole mechanism by which we can now be understood. This co-option of signifiers is now obligatory.  The celebrity is unique only in radius of impact; it is indistinguishable in mechanism. Thus, we are similarly culpable, and the self we make on social media is indelibly capitalist.
12. If all people are now producers of mass media and stewards of its products, a counterculture becomes impossible. Even the seemingly least susceptible personalities cannot escape commodification. There are aesthetic signifiers to brandish and tools to wield in order to participate, no matter the subculture, hobby, or personality. An individual whose “whole thing” is plants might have a nice sun hat, a vial containing a small quartz dangling from their neck, a monstera beside their bed. A selfie taken on an iPhone. Would they read as a cool herbalist empath by the public if it were taken on an Android? If they were 48, balding, wearing cargo shorts and an American Dad T-Shirt? The signifiers must be co-opted and replicated in order to construct a self that is legible to the consuming public. And, the inverse: what if a person simply appropriates all the aesthetic trappings of a particular subgroup without the bona fides to back it up (the archetypal poser)? Is there any way to tell them apart from a person with a sincere interest? Since the signifiers can be bought off the rack, and the only substrate for existence employs a context-light visual mode, aesthetic has become fully unbundled from ideology, rendering subculture little more than a test of how effectively one can co-opt the lingua franca of a subgroup’s visual culture (which is the only remaining culture, anyway).
13. Some are under the optimistic assumption that the collective human will can slam the brakes and reverse. This is impossible. The modes of dissemination and consumption have become so deeply enmeshed in the acts required to participate in society that a recusal is the closest possible thing to death short of actually dying. Given that social media is the exclusive substrate, eliminating one’s web presence, making oneself unseen, and the social world of others unseen, renders oneself a phantom – noncorporeal and powerless as in death, but with the perceptual capacity to witness the systems of E.S. careen onward with no driver, the eyes of passengers dim, downward, entirely unaffected by the loss of a sole agent, because withdrawing means abandoning avenues to appear in another’s vision. Attempts to recuse oneself are strictly symbolic gestures, senseless and self-centered in that the gesture cannot be observed by the participants in these systems it is attempting to reject, leaving the recused, alone and self-satisfied, as the sole witness and beneficiary of the act, accomplishing nothing.
14. Therefore, it is necessary to develop and execute a method for upending, dismantling, or otherwise subverting contemporary modes of content dissemination and consumption in order to ensure our continued survival. It is relevant, then, to briefly examine the practice of culture-making w/r/t art to understand how it can be exploited.
15. Cultural artifacts employ a “lossy codec” in the compression of human experience. The addition of “noise” at the level of the individual is part of why content proliferates to its current extent: an agent carries with them some set of socialized values, preferences, etc., which differ to varying extents from neighboring agents. These differences serve as the warped lens through which experience is filtered, interpreted, and subsequently re-rendered, simulated. When a cultural artifact (a post, a song, a movie, a novel) is constructed by an agent, it exists as a unique – though infrequently novel – iteration on a set of common data which changes shape based on individual context. The generation of artifacts-as-aggregates continues as long as there exists the variance of that which shapes and feeds the agent of culture.
16. This collective aims to take advantage of the lossy compression of art to eventually render its contents totally asemic, a tangled nest of broken references, by hijacking the very tactics which until now have been responsible for E.S., by facing the mirror to itself.
17. The tactic of involution in some sense has already been employed by organizations and individuals attempting to engineer cultural artifacts which take advantage of semantic shortcuts in order to make money, expand their influence, and so on. Some artifacts characterized as “lower-brow” are pop songs, sitcoms, memes, and blockbusters: media which employ formulae to prey on individual readers’ pre-existing affective associations. The “higher-brow” are often conceptual poets, collagists of all kinds: artists which employ the artistic technique called appropriation. The reuse of culture matter can be minimal, as in intertext and allusion, but the outright cribbing of large chunks of pre-existing structure and meaning, combined with the inane or stupid recombination of its constituent parts, corrupts or even destroys the affective associations the readings of the initial texts carry. This set of practices and the confusion it creates overall reduces the effectiveness culture matter by creating a chain of references which is so involuted that the initial referents are inscrutable. Culture which feeds exclusively on itself eventually renders itself nutritionless, inert.
18. This collective intends to employ and spread the tactic of involution, with the ultimate goal of encouraging the creation of a semiotic singularity: an infinitely dense point mass of culture from which no meaning can escape, rendering content’s sedative qualities nonexistent, making it obsolete, unnecessary, putting humankind in a position to finally face hell and walk backwards into God and work to eliminate the sources of E.S. We hope to force art to fall away from meaning like the shell from the molting cicada, thin and brittle, perfect sound underfoot.