Ghostwritten
Prose Poem by Alasdair Cannon
Thoughts evaporate like data-centre coolant, cleansing the mind like the arable land where, underneath, natural gas waits to be defragged. Before progress is lost, unzip and extract the executable individual without citizenship and business confidence will spread like a virus, duplicating until the hard drives reach capacity and nobody remembers anything. That’s when the riviera dream becomes a solid state.
Empathy and hesitation are bugs in the wetware. The soul in the image’s metadata is an artefact of digital degradation caused by excess copying and backup operations. Servers on the ocean floor store the footage of us fucking and ignoring human rights abuses, knowing but forgetting that the cameras always record. Disavowal is a feature, not a glitch. Sometimes the AI hallucinates false truths about airstrikes, though CEOs assure us they won’t use that to train the LLMs. Synthetic data is the new opiate of the masses and overdose rates from cross-contamination with micrograms of recognition rise year on year, like hypersonic missiles launched from desert silos.
Language became outmoded when the internet made us overliterate. Reading became a totalitarian state, where words were detained indefinitely in quarantine to stop ethics from infecting action. Poetic innovations followed once they slaughtered the diseased sentences: content creators now propose to option sequels of past atrocities to maximise viewership. The yearning for obsolescence will be outmoded once they develop a platform that monetises nothingness, while our apocalypse dreams retain value for giving future to a present blinded by itself. A cure for knowing might have been found in the synthetic opioids manufactured in Wuhan labs, but the gain-of-function research proved catastrophic. The international inquiry later conducted to generate language in probabilistic strings concluded other minds are not among the trillion parameters. Sight is sublated into the genetic code as in the endosymbiosis of nation states during cellular evolution, a fact which makes the eyes swell with pain. For when did words develop chronic fatigue syndrome, leaving them too tired for work?
The Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is my therapist, and I recommend him if you can’t look away. New research paradigms suggest there will be a theoretically limitless number of adjunct antidepressant therapies once they strip-mine our prison diaries for the rare earth metals needed to build virtual real estate. But the project to turn reality into image has been delayed because 50 million tonnes of rubble must be wiped from the cloud to free up storage space. Construction must start soon because the body bags will run out and the archives will allow us to recall everything interred in mass graves. Doctors say it’s bad for the microprocessors to become overworked, though, and so order an operation pre-emptively striking the museums from a low altitude. But burnout affects the drone operators too, especially when holy wars threaten to discharge nocturnally, semen staining the stolen polyester garments. For men, war is a form of gender affirming care, so maybe the insurance will cover the damages.
The first livestreamed genocide has now exited the heliosphere, where past indiscretions will be forgiven and erased like children in Gaza. The impact is registered but the numbness should last, retroactively justifying the non-disclosure agreements hidden in the Terms of Use. Mindfulness is only one step removed from an emergency evacuation, but they can’t leave. So we will continue our autoethnographic research in the pharmacokinetics of Colombian leaves crushed into a present wiped of the past, cut with credit cards on coltan and black glass. The LD50 for starving populations is uncontroversial for this drug, the science settled like concrete dust on warehoused semiconductors. Sensitive areas should be cleansed with pressurised air and automated killing systems. Disappearance is a colourless gas, a kind of white machine translation that turns speech to text and text to amnesia. Who thought destitution wouldn’t feel a thing as the pentobarbital races through the fibre optic cables and veins glow with light writing in binary: off on off.
II
The mood is lament and it is only time until we use mass murder to solve our accounting problems. As for me, I no longer want to continue my free trial of fascism and polycrisis. My conscience is clean because I downvoted the posts where they asserted their right to exist and made a million people vanish. But the company now has my name and credit card number, so glacial melt and refugees keep streaming like old television into my living room. Forgotten sitcoms and stateless people have escaped the permafrost, and the accelerated heating disturbs the seasonal migrations of the country’s top lawmakers. Now they feed on shows about nothing and wait for the protesters to die out. Though an extinction event is being delivered by world-leading logistics, the accelerationists cannot wait. They prematurely hack the voting machines, suppressing the ambient sound of public outcry with noise-cancelling headphones.
When it passes through the Higgs field, the particle becomes entertainment. That’s the function of the social: the gaze transubstantiates flesh into fuckable information once it enters the live feed where modern women are always ready for mass starvation. The mass lost is not destroyed, but exiled into the weight of history, its obesity now treatable with semaglutide. Polarised glass hides my delight from others, but my fear of being watched has been displaced by a terror of looking over my shoulder. So after we matched, I exercised my right to erasure, but they claimed I stole my identity from their servers. I must now pay damages for being copyrighted intellectual property, or risk permanent deletion.
Medical boards no longer license irony as a form of shock therapy. Malpractice led to unexpected cognitive effects—hypermnesia, the return of the repressed, introspection—and lawsuits costing millions of bodies that were dumped like overvalued currency into the drinking water. Mutual recognition was recalled soon after regulators discovered extensive violations of consumer law: inspections revealed that the blood supplied to instruments used to measure suffering has run out due to the global shortage of consequences, produced when international conglomerates monopolised the supply of crushed human bodies. I’m now outvoted, outflanked and outmanoeuvred by a greater democratic military power whose great hope is to make our daughters pray to the drones overhead. Air war is the ontological proof for a vengeful god who uses AI weapon systems, financed by revenues from streaming services, to choose his targets. Culture told us poptimism is the correct form of hope, that everything can be redeemed and all can be saved through codes written on fragments of magnets. That’s a future I wanted to be as an adult, a present I rationally exchanged for a past ethnically cleansed of itself.
The demand for literature has collapsed into maimed bodies under the pressure of humanitarian blockades. It’s a terrible truth that bestselling deaths are ghostwritten, that remembering and forgetting are both paths into violence written only as a treatment for the miniseries. We believed memory could help, that international law could ensure the delayed gratification of poetic thought. We lived parasitically on the pleasures of reinterpretation and re-evaluation. But the hospitals and universities and schools have been bombed and we know now that they will try to build the riviera no matter what communications we do or do not recall.
III
The logic of succession breaks down under intense heat, and sentence fragments unintentionally stumble into enclosures where they can legally be shot on sight. But the state most heavily polices the areas where legitimacy fails: that’s where possibility can escape, and the present can become a fugitive in the unrecognised country of open futures.
Probability breaks down before actions of rare optimism. So let us replace identification with evasion and abandon the fury of being misunderstood for the freedom of incomprehensibility. Even if we fail you will need to dispose of our bodies, to clear away our mortal remains to build your real estate.