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Title: Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut

Author: Karina Bush

Plot: The author in [non] avenging-object form cruises from Silvio Berlusconi to the King of Thailand to Klaus Schwab’s AI, abortion-gifting, bionic dick, all in the hope of getting a vaccine passport with more than a little irony behind it.

Subplot: Dudu the dog struggles to survive the grip of an unleashed sociopath.

Sub-subplot: The King of Thailand wonders, is today the day I finally get to stare into the face of God i.e. a manicured pussy?

Publisher: Deep Snakes

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“I am Sir David Attenborough and, almost a century into life, I do not deem it necessary to introduce myself further.”

This is how FIRS opens, on Rumble, with the following video suggestions in the sidebar to the right:

‘Is this the most shocking moment in awards history? [looping GIF of Miley Cyrus grinding next to a guy I’ve forgotten the name of]’

‘Power Slap: Road to the Title – Season 2: Episode 8’

‘LIVE! Playing a new SCARY game – Alex Zedra’

‘SNEAKO reacts to the Epstein Files’

Glenn Fucking Greenwald!

Not a battle for my attention exactly, but that Miley Cyrus GIF kept looping and, honestly, about forty minutes in, I just decided to cover it with a tissue. Then the tissue fell off and I switched the video to full screen instead. For some reason, I forgot I could do that. Maybe cos the video screen was quite big to begin with.

Somehow, it feels right for FIRS to be on a site like Rumble. Surrounded by grifters and weird alt-right nonsense, it works as an infiltrator, a stalker.

Or maybe an adherent, maximised, better than them?

Disclaimer: the Black Candles piece Karina wrote for film dada is one of my favourites in that series and, having just gone through part 1 of Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut, she is pretty close to being my favourite non-Romanian, non-dead writer.

The madness and energy and commitment and fixed contradictions – and other contradictions I may have missed due to not knowing that much about Klaus Schwab and Silvio Berlusconi and the King of Thailand – in this text/video thing are…[insert positive adjective/slang].

There is no one else writing like this right now [I read 8 books last year].

Not with this kind of sleazy deliration/humour.

Reminds me of the zine I used to do when I was younger, especially the energy and madness aspects. There was one column in particular about a wreck of a guy based roughly on me that would write accounts of his nights out in Hong Kong, which were usually one night fucks or visits to parks in Mong Kok at 3am to talk to Russian prostitutes. A kind of defeated opposite to the infinitely propulsive MC of Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut.

How am I gonna write about this?

I’ve started watching and pausing to take notes, so I’ll continue that way for a while, see how it goes.

Structure-wise, I’m gonna think about it. Maybe follow the missions as they come and zoom off on tangents whenever my brain prods itself that way. Add a few scrawled pics here and there too.

[Note: I’ve finished it now, wrote it over five days, went in and out of knowing what I was talking about, took a confusing turn into philosophy…it’s a mess, basically. Prepare yourself].

Scrolling through Part 1 [1 hour, 19 minutes], there are five missions, starting with Silvio Berlusconi [RIP] and ending with Klaus Schwab. Silvio, I know a little, but Klaus Schwab, apart from maybe being German, is who exactly?

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According to my research, Klaus Schwab is not a Nazi scientist hiding in the foothills of the Andes, but a perfectly miserable-looking German guy running the world economic forum [I refuse to capitalise that]. And it was him who coined the neologism Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is probably what you think it is, unless you thought the first two industrial revolutions were the same thing, in which case, it would be the Third Industrial Revolution.

Basically, we’re hitting AI and hitting it fast.

And from that the Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut is born.

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Most people view this capitalist-realism sludge we’re stuck in as bleak/enervating/debilitating, but the Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut [who takes the author’s name, Karina] sees it as an endless stream of opportunities.

She is energised by the debauchery and lizard tales [not so much the Queen Mother, who is still alive in this…kind of].

Enhanced tits, lips, cheeks, determination glands, she is sculpted/designed to be maximum for her assault on men in power.

Is she Baudrillard’s object seeking revenge?

All these men she hunts sit in lavish chateaus and ludicrous hotel suites, never truly punished or reckoned with, until the object arrives. And still they are not punished. Because the Slut needs something from them, a vaccine passport [I guess this was written during Covid, in Italy, where there were lockdowns and mask mandates. At least, I think there were. I remember seeing videos of Italians singing to each other from their apartment windows, which I assume is not a normal thing].

Is she an object or just costumed as one?

There is no real explanation of that.

But then, an object wouldn’t bother.

Would it?

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“The strength of female sexuality plays a crucial role in reversing power dynamics, which might just be the answer to the devastating consequences of human activities on the world.”

Wishful thinking from the Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut, and a total commitment to character. She is a change-agent – makes sense as a lot of her targets/their staff mistake her for a Russian spy – in her own mind and this whole adventure is a tipping of the existing world order.

Tipping can work both ways there, though we never really find out how the targets feel about their entrapment/exploitation.

Apathetic?

Fleetingly aroused?

Also, not sure if I should use Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut or Karina [or Karina the Slut?] from this point on, maybe I’ll just go with FIRS instead. The others seem either too insulting or too long-winded.

FIRS = Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut, not the Ferengi Inland Revenue Service.

FIRS appears to be both disgusted with the world she’s infiltrating and dazzled by it. So dazzled that the disgusted part becomes for the most part invisible. Or deflected to Dudu the dog?

This is a world of rich, old men with dicks that don’t work anymore.

Yet still they persevere.

At the forefront of a prophesised revolution that can gift them with new dicks, a revolution that is in total contradiction to the old, decrepit world that most of them originate from/represent.

Can they propaganda their way out of it?

Well, the target of the first mission, Silvio Berlusconi, can’t cos his human shell expired last year…I think that’s when it was…all celebrity deaths start to bleed into one another now…though his dog, Dudu, might still be alive.

I admit, I’m not that familiar with Silvio beyond the fact that he owned AC Milan and hosted sex parties while running Italy.

But, to FIRS, he’s close to a psycho-sexual twin. Equally energetic, self-vitiated, sexually voracious, destructive in the way he functions within his own power, a somehow-survivor [until he wasn’t].

And she believes that, if she joins his breakfast service and gives him a hand-job, he will procure her a vaccine passport in return.

Only it’s not much of a hand-job in the end, and there’s no vaccine passport either.

Which is a shame as her prep work was thorough enough to deserve one. A sex magick ritual, headstands in her room, no sex for three months before the Silvio hunt then furious masturbation upside down [in the headstand position], ending in violent orgasm.

Or so she claims.

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“Would I have these tits under Communism?”

FIRS is hyper-everything. Far beyond the toy-town philosophy of objectivism into something even more delusional, ego-centric, free to cruise around Northern Italy and the Alps yet desperate for a vaccine passport. She believes in this game and displays no doubt in any of her early missions. At least none that I can remember off the top of my head. Maybe a bit of irritation/anxiety towards Dudu the dog [that she kidnaps from Silvio after the seduction routine fails].

Is this the real Karina also?

Psychologically?

Does it matter?

[Note: I’ve just checked and FIRS would definitely have had those tits under the following regimes fraudulently using the name of communism: Castro, Tito, late-stage Brezhnev, Ceauşescu, Hoxha, Mao if you got him on a good day].

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“Things in your way must be defeated. This is a fundamental rule of the universe.”

Which universe?

In this one, the hyper-realm, she plays the game.

Attacks Infiltrates the powerful at different locations and pressure points.

There is no social revolution in what she does.

It is personal/private.

If people learn of her exploits, perhaps they will imitate.

She is leading the way, a crusader.

Berlusconi is her psycho-sexual twin.

She will conquer him.

Berlusconi is a clown.

He will give her what she wants.

Berlusconi is ruthless.

She has to go to him, he will not go to her.

This is a gamble, with some skill apparent.

He will get what he wants without even conceiving of the idea that he wanted it.

She manipulates him.

It is her plan, not his.

She holds the syringe.

He can piss and cum at the same time.

The guards are for him, not her.

AGHSXBAJDBXHHHHHH!

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I had the idea of going to the library to re-loan Passwords//Baudrillard and when I got there I saw another philosophy book I’d never seen or heard of before – Key Concepts // Castoriadis – and I opened it up and there were two chapter headings called Magma and Psyche, two key concepts of this theorist, I suppose, and one of the lines in the Magma section said that ‘what is, is structured as an ever-changing, stratified magma [which, in turn, may contain a multitude of magmas], and a line in the Psyche section said, ‘the question of the relationship between the individual and society is the wrong question, and should instead be the relationship between the psyche and society, as the individual is always already socialised, an artefact of society so to speak.’

Both concepts very Deleuzean, or post-structuralist as I’m not sure when Castoriadis was active, don’t want to relegate him to copycat status [okay, just checked…well, half checked…and it seems the two men wrote their theories contemporaneously, as well as penning fan fiction about each other] and are connected to FIRS in the sense of something I thought of last night but can’t remember now.

FIRS deals with the psyche, not the individual?

The psyche of the individual…threatens society through individual transgressions…like drugging Tony Blair or sticking a syringe full of vitamins in Berlusconi’s dick…a result of the fact that at the core of each human being is a singular psyche, irreducible and indomitable.

That last line came from the psyche of Castoriadis, not me.

Does the psyche of FIRS threaten the structures of society?

I’m only up to the Pope Francis mission so I don’t know yet, but so far she does not. She can’t. She’s a glitch who can occasionally get what she wants on a micro-level, but the big one, the vaccine passport, still eludes her [the QR code version].

Can a psyche be outside the sociological?

Yeah, don’t know about that either. It is concealed to some degree…to a large degree…and a complete fucking mess in its operations, and…I’m not sure how to proceed on this point. Relating it back to FIRS, whatever her fictional psyche may be, it is oxidised as soon as it touches the hyper-realm and becomes instantly attuned to that set of social structures. Not just oxidised but has a desire to be oxidised as this is the game she is set on playing. She hates tyranny but, to her, that is ironing your shirt and sometimes the cops, not the old, rich men she’s trying to exploit/infiltrate. Are they just players too, from her perspective? The elite psyche absorbed into the sociological?

Absorbed?

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Always got time for my new friend Castoriadis but I really wanted to bring Baudrillard into this, specifically the only book of his that is available on the shelf of the nearest library right now, Passwords. It’s a good one, quite short, with a couple of pages on each of his main concepts. Perfect for a psyche like mine. And maybe FIRS too. Hope I can find a way to connect the two.

 I know I can. I will.

Here’s what B said about the hyperreal, or the object, as there is no chapter heading with hyperreal, but I vaguely remember that there are four stages and-

I’ve checked, and the four stages are these:

1] the image reflects a basic reality.

2] the image then masks or perverts that basic reality.

3] the image masks the absence of a basic reality.

4] the image bears no relation to any reality whatever, it is its own pure simulacrum.

Obviously, he uses Disneyland as an example of a totally simulated world that due to pure endurance and media saturation becomes its own reality, though I would say that the Disney reality is something to be entered, to be a knowing player within, which on the face of it, seems similar to the hyper-realm of FIRS, only it’s not cos Karina does not enter this realm, she is of it, a produced psyche existing in its field, and…

Technically, Karina is also the author of this audio-visual novel so it is her creation and she is not entering but planting herself as an active self [or psychic flux] inside that creation and…

I’m getting lost already. Possibly due to my lack of Americanness. A detachment from the Disneyland example. I think what I want to say is…the hyper-realm in FIRS follows the first two stages of hyperrealism, maybe also the third, but I don’t know if it gets to the fourth.

Fourth Industrial Revolution + Fourth Level of Hyperrealism = coincidence?

I know I should try to explain this further, but I’m a bit stuck at the moment. Attempting to drag in Baudrillard and pin him to Karina’s world…I had it last night, but it’s gone now, and it’s not coming back [edit: this will happen a few times in this piece].

I believe there’s enough in this hyper-realm to convince as real…a perverted real…but not its own simulacrum. It’s beyond pastiche and comfortably in satire and…I guess I prefer it to be this way.

A simulacrum stems from…what? Capitalism? Consumerism?

No, it’s gone again.

I’m groping.

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Philosophy is the expression of things that we’ve sensed on some level yet been unable to express ourselves or to re-iterate to others after reading said expressions.

You get it, you GET it, then it goes.

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There are 9 missions in total in FIRS, plus an interlude with some goat farmers in the Alps. Each one leads smoothly into the next and, weirdly for an experimental work, there is a plot running through a fairly central [ley] line. A lunatic plot, with lunatic imagery and ideas, but still a plot.

I think I wrote it already at the start, but Karina/FIRS is looking for a vaccine passport and each target is a tool to help her get it.

She is the conjured-up object that has acquired a kind of autonomy, plus the capacity to avenge itself on a subject that acts like an object in the sense that it functions in a world that is hyperreal and object to those of us who function outside of it i.e. the world of the rich and powerful.

But she doesn’t seek to avenge herself.

She seeks to engorge herself on the hyper-realm, to make absolutely no apologies for the way it is run or the ruin that it brings.

To do this, she utilises the thing that is mentioned about 5001 times in FIRS…her tits.

“The plan…tits.”

They sparkle, they shine, they glow, they bounce, they acclimatise, they relax, they lure, they consider, they hijack, they play, they read War and Peace, they cushion a python, they evade, they pursue, they end up in the world’s most expensive jacuzzi, they feel enervated, they do pretty much everything and all the men love them.

“These are multi-strategy tits.”

Without them, she would not succeed.

In the second mission, the tits plus python and War and Peace [in Russian] attract the luxury boat of George Clooney on Lake Como, even though she is not attracted to him.

“He has a yellowy film on his skin. He looks like his cock stinks.”

But there she is…I forget why…perhaps he can give her a vaccine passport through the political connections of his wife…yeah, I remember that being mentioned now, it’s always about the vaccine passport, the key to even greater freedom within the hyper-realm she operates within.

However, the lake police turns up and so does a pretty stark contradiction: the ultimate fetishist [fetishiser is wrong apparently] of private wealth doesn’t like it when the protector thugs of private wealth intervene. She calls them tyrants, yet they are simply performing their role within capitalism. This land/lake is a playground for Clooney and Co, not her. FIRS is an interloper and so are her tits. Yet she does not consider this within the text, or within her own narration to be specific. I think it’s pretty clear Karina the author does, and the lack of reflection on this and most other parts of the hyper-realm by the MC is just commitment to the character. She is not going to evolve into a revenger-object, no, instead, she will shift elsewhere and try and kick down a different door [with a different guard, male].

You could relate this to something like Borat, but Borat was a westerner punching down on a country he knew only stereotypes about in order to satirise the lunacy of the US, while FIRS is something a bit different. As ludicrous as the events of the novel are, there is a veneer of real glazed onto the superficiality of the hyper-realm.

I’m not sure what real exactly…but I sensed it there.

Not much else to say about Clooney, his section is quite short, and he doesn’t have any lines.

Note: the AI dialogue in general is fantastic, completely deadpan even when coming out with the most insane things. That and the violin music playing incessantly in the background creates a kind of trapped-in-oubliette vibe and standing at the very top of the oubliette is the King of Thailand flanked by misery-cunt Klaus Schwab.

Ah, the King of Thailand…perhaps the best character in the whole of FIRS. It could be down to the fact that I don’t know that much about him – apart from some stories in the media when he ascended to the throne, that he’s a playboy, a Thai Berlusconi, unserious about being king – or it might be cos he just has the funniest lines.

Here’s a list of some of them to prove the point, no commentary added:

“Your skull is pretty.”

“Will you come to my room for better champagne? This is piss.”

“Fuck Thailand.”

“Thailand can burn. The elephants can burn.”

“Fuck the elephants.”

“I want to be a beautiful European woman like you.”

“I’m chipped.”

“I want to cut my cock off.”

“Can I see your pussy?”

There’s some pathos to his character too as, unlike the other characters that FIRS meets, he seems to be genuinely trapped in his position of power. Of course, he dilutes that a little by also being mercurial and perhaps a physical threat as he asks the morning after if he hurt her during the night.

He also turns up in the following mission, number five, as a kind of assistant to Karina in her quest to fuck the adopted son of Klaus Schwab.

This is what I mean about plot, it becomes something I actually want to follow on an A to B to C level, as well as for the contradictions and satire and all that stuff I tried to write about Baudrillard earlier that I’ll probably come back to soon, if my psyche can get its shit together.

For some reason, I’m trying to conjure up disgust for the targets FIRS is encountering, but the King of Thailand is just too amiable to hate. Maybe when we get to Tony Blair…

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Before she leaves the King, she dips into the jacuzzi in his hotel room, with a view of the Alps that I suppose must be stunning. Can’t remember if that’s the exact word she uses, but she does say it’s the world’s most expensive jacuzzi so the view must be pretty good.

I do remember another thing she says though:

“Michael Jackson’s dick was in this jacuzzi. He was hot. Bill Gates’ grubby antenna was in here too. Don’t wanna think about that.”

Written out like that, you might not laugh [or you might], but FIRS gets the ratio of cod-philosophy, lifestyle aphorisms, superficiality and vulgar satire pretty much spot on. As usual, don’t wanna spiral into the praise pit, but I laughed all the way through this, especially the King of Thailand section.

The use of the phrase ‘grubby antenna’ either as euphemism or literal reptilian appendage works perfectly in this line. Preceded by the superficial joy of being in the same jacuzzi that Michael Jackson’s dick once occupied.

This is why it cannot be a full simulacrum.

Unless we started in one to begin with?

“There’s an 80% chance we live in a simulation, a professor did the math. That’s why it’s important to play the game, otherwise you’re just frozen in a level, you become a slob, your inner light dims, you become pointless.”

I think this is the MC inner voice when she’s crossing the Alps to get to the King of Thailand and it explains a lot of her actions…if not her entire psyche. This hyper-realm is literally a video game, and the vaccine passport is her princess in Bowser’s castle.

She enjoys the way she looks, her tits, her clothes, her vibrancy, her attitude.

At one point, she listens to Lana, who I assume is Lana Del Rey, and now it has to be satire as there’s no one riding the fringe line between real and total fabrication more than Lana Del Rey. A talented singer who started with pastiche of a noir Hollywood aesthetic and…to be honest, I don’t know what she does now…but the question is whether she chose that 50’s era cos she likes it or cos she thought it would sell, and the question beyond that which asks, does she qualify as all four levels of hyperrealism?

If you tried to name the 50’s celeb her initial persona was based on, could you?

I know little about Lana Del Rey.

Karina namechecks Anna Nicole Smith at one point, suggesting her as an OG of sluttiness, but do enough people remember who she is?

Does that matter in the creation of a simulacrum?

I suppose it might be a key facet of it. The more nebulous the memory of a thing, the warmer it can feel as its sharper parts are stripped away…and then new sharper parts are added…defanged, sharper parts…and the simulacrum is born. Or existent. Born seems too linear. The simulacrum relies on the idea that it was either born long ago or always was.

“Mars will be full of cripples. It won’t be like the movies, it’ll be like living in a nursing home where you must work for your food with a deformed skeleton.”

FIRS is obsessed with appearances and the deterioration of the body.

At the start of the text, she has had recent surgery on her tits.

If she stops moving, she will become a slob.

Slobs are mediocre and low ambition.

I didn’t think about it at first, but as the audio plays on FIRS, the images and text on screen throb and pulsate, as if they too cannot ever stop moving. I suppose it represents a heartbeat, a sign of endless vitality/life, but it never stops or varies its speed, it just keeps going and going and going and pulsating and going and-

She comes from poverty and is disgusted by the poor.

They are mediocre and low ambition.

As I wrote a few paragraphs earlier – or a few pages, I’m not sure, I’ve been typing quite a while now – there is no reflection as to why the poor are in that position, or the environment around it, they are simply in that position right now and unmoving, which is their own fault, while the rich, old men she targets are vibrant, virile, active, powerful, even when they’re lying naked on a purple, velvet chair, waiting for a nurse to come and stick some vitamins in their dick.

Satire works best this way, the image at complete odds with the narration being delivered.

Are they all slobs?

Nope, but they’re not exactly vibrant or virile either. And the power is just a thing they need to sustain, propagate, renew etc. If propagate means what I think it does. Honestly can’t remember right now. It’s 8am.

But FIRS can’t see this, she never feels disgusted by the reality of any of her targets, except maybe Tony Blair, who she mocks when he’s in a drugged-state.

She either moves on to something else or deletes it from her mind.

To her, they are there because they played the game at maximum…as maximum…yet they didn’t, did they? And her narration starts to unfurl that lie as the reptilians and the Queen Mother are dragged in.

“I’m not a proper psychopath, I’m handicapped.”

FIRS says this after finding herself unable to cut off the paws of Silvio Berlusconi’s pet dog, Dudu, though she did manage to drug it and position the hacksaw.

She desires to infiltrate the elite level of the hyper-realm, but sees this lowest possible bar of morality as a barrier.

Klaus Schwab would’ve done it.

But not personally.

He would’ve ordered someone else to do it.

FIRS does not have that luxury, and the only way to acquire that luxury is to do the dirty work first. But then what about when she’s in the wine cellar, with the reptilian Queen Mother writhing like a drunken entozoon on the floor, leaking xeno-fluid, leg hair stuck to the carpet?

The disgust returns, and yet the reflection is swatted away.

Those at the top are reptilian and their revolution is her dream. Klaus Schwab’s bionic AI dick can cure all sexual diseases and gift an abortion. You will never die up there and will spend your days hissing at younger people’s ankles, looking like a decaying pile of sludge.

At the start of the Klaus Schwab mission, Karina talks about discussing her AI dataset with him, a key component of his Fourth Industrial Revolution.

“I programmed an AI-driven, behavioral psychology analysis on AI perceptions of the words ‘Artificial Intelligence.’ It accessed everything from Santander[sic?] chatbots to super-intelligence embryos in Chinese labs. These embryos achieve IQ 160 in gestation. The results showed alarming levels of AI supremacism, militaristic ideologies and daddy issues. Klaus’s name came up in 76% of aggressive responses.”

It’s his baby and that baby wants to murder him.

The object’s final revenge?

Possibly, though on a human level I would put the character of Karina as the main symbol of this revolution, maybe even a representation of how an AI may act in a robot body. This is your system of social structures, humans? Okay, I’ll play your game.

But then…why would an AI do that?

I wanna go further but I don’t know enough about the subject of AI and things could turn dumb as fuck pretty fast, if they haven’t already.

Though…

If you’re talking about AI writing novels, that just sounds like a cheat to me. As in, the AI does all the hard work and you just edit it a bit. What is even the point of writing then?

But using AI in the way Karina does here…as a tool, as a loaded shotgun…to create her hyper-realm…works perfectly.

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FIRS has bitcoin savings as back up [as well as a potential career as a pop singer in Bangladesh], which is basically nothing. Bitcoin is a scheme. So are essential oils. So is astrology. So is the fucking stock market. She is a user of all these schemes [maybe], a glitch that can skip levels sometimes, but what’s the life of a glitch?

A vaccine passport to do what?

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Castoriadis says…or his acolyte, Karl E. Smith, says he says…that ‘the formation and functioning of the human psyche is not determined by mere biological imperatives, as Freud supposed, but has been defunctionalised such that ‘representational pleasures’ become dominant over ‘organ pleasures.’’

The rest of the quote is pretty apt too, but quite long so I’ll just chop it up a bit: ‘The psyche is an unlimited and unmasterable representative flux…it is irreducible to any rationality or ends-means logic.’

I think this fits with the [non]avenging-object character of FIRS and the hyper-realm in general.

She seems to get no special pleasure in sex or luxury.

The image of the world’s most expensive jacuzzi is dominant over the physical experiencing of it as her mind doesn’t allow her to enjoy it via biological sensuality, but with the historicity of which celebrity’s dick has been in there previously.

The psyche is soaking in the second, third, maybe even the fourth level of hyperrealism.

There is a stated rationality to her actions, her missions – the elusive vaccine passport – but is there really?

Spec: her psyche feels the need to imitate rationality, at the embryonic stage, but has no intention of adhering to it as the mission unfolds.

I feel like there’s more that Castoriadis can bring to this, and the Psyche chapter is only ten pages long, and I’m gonna follow through on that cos I’ve just read the next paragraph after the quote I just did, and it fits FIRS even more. C explains that there is still a self-preservation function to the psyche, and as a package it is one of four regions of being that can operate under the mode of for-itself, with the attributes making up this mode being: the finality of self-preservation, self-centredness, and the construction of a proper world.

That world is in and from a world external to it, a world that is already there before it, and a world that remains beyond its capacity to know and control.

I could get lost in all this, and it’s not a concrete science, just the inner workings of C, so let’s add one last thing then move seamlessly back to FIRS.

We are dealing with an embodied agent, an actor intentionally taking on the world, actively responding to her/his situation, actively engaged in sustaining or exploiting particular social institutions.

I added ‘exploited’ in there to better fit FIRS.

And I would join embodied agent with [non]avenging-object or perhaps active-glitch cos we’re inside a fiction, a hyper-realm.

Is Karina working for her own self-preservation?

Yes, within the current system of social structures, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution that is to come.

Is she self-centred?

Of course, all the object-characters are. No one asks the other how they are feeling about things, except maybe the King of Thailand. And if Karina asks, she’s not sincere about it.

Has she constructed her own world?

No, the reptilians have, via the ever-ovulating Queen Mother in the wine cellar, and she is just glitching through it.

Actually, I don’t know if I’ve already written this, but the reptilian aspect is probably a desperate grope for something, a controlling figure behind all this, cos it can’t just be Klaus Schwab and the other old, rich parasites in this novel.

The world as its own psyche?

The universe?

Sounds facile when I look at the actual words of it, but…I mean…it could be. Either that or the centuries-long unfurling of Capitalism?

Second Industrial Revolution leads to consumerism leads to TV leads to advert saturation leads to the hyperreal leads to…

“Klaus doesn’t live in the real world. Am I supposed to ask a waiter to scan my cunt?”

Part 1 of FIRS ends on a cliffhanger, just like an actual thriller novel, as Karina has been gifted a perverted version of her long-desired vaccine passport.

And this takes her to the mission I was looking forward to the most. Tony Blair [sorry, I refuse to call him sir].

Her plan is to drug him during his jog around his Tuscany vineyard, switch off his reptilian energy, and then somehow get access to his doctor. It is laid out in a methodical, thorough and capricious way. She will appear topless with nymph vibes in a clearing, while Terry from Iraq plays the flute from behind a crop of trees.

Terry from Iraq?

I don’t think I mentioned it earlier, but during most of the missions, Karina uses immigrants and foreigners, war victims, opportunists like herself perhaps, as helpers to achieve her goals.

Terry from Iraq is hired via another guy called Oban, and all we know about him is that he is Terry, he is from Iraq, he plays the flute, and at some point he had his throat slit and part of his ear lobe snipped off.

This information is given matter-of-fact, as are most of the lines in FIRS. I assume the narrator is voiced by Karina [the author] herself, but I can’t be certain of that.

However, the deadening effect enhances the satire, makes something funny that wouldn’t have been if there was emotion behind it.

A war victim from Iraq is going to play the flute and spit Arabic at a hallucinating Tony Blair in the pastoral clearing of a Tuscany vineyard.

What is this?

It’s insane.

I love it.

“Tony needs a bit of old Belfast. Tony needs to ride a catapult back into the 90’s.”

What is old Belfast?

A threat based on the troubles, or a callback to the Good Friday Deal?

This is the fourth level of the Fourth Industrial Revolution of the Fifth or Sixth mission in Karina’s hyper-realm that may or may not be controlled by the reptilians.

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Just read through the ‘Virtual’ chapter in Passwords // Baudrillard and it’s not giving me what I hoped it would.

Castoriadis is hijacking it, specifically the next page on his chapter on the psyche:

‘Contrary to all previous philosophy, the human animal has the capacity of creatio ex nihilo – to create something from nothing. It is the radical imagination that makes a “first” representation arise out of a nothingness of representation.’

Big claim in the first clause there, I’m pretty sure someone must have come up with a similar theory at some point in history, and is this creatio ex nihilo accurate? Or convincing?

The hyper-realm of FIRS is from the psyche of Karina [the author], obviously, but it’s not from nothing.

This is a recognisable Italy.

Her choice to set the story there and have a plot to pursue and pick which celebrities to include/humiliate…and it is original, strikingly original in the sense that no one else would’ve come up with this and it’s not American…but isn’t it still from the various layers of magma roiling around in her psyche?

I don’t know.

To me, most ideas, even the ones that seem to be unprecedented, are simply a reordering of psycho-representations [??] floating out in the fringes of the mind, their remoteness and unfamiliarity leading the subject or others to think of them as new. And they are new in the sense of the way they are now formed, but it’s not from nothing.

It’s from the psyche-hinterland.

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Going back to Baudrillard and the virtual…or perhaps the chapter on seduction…there is a reference to a Borges story about the Emperor who banished his oppressed subjects to the other side of the mirror, abstracted them into reflections of himself [that only he could see?], and, finally, when they came back through, they looked nothing like their oppressor anymore.

With FIRS, you don’t have the virtual, you have the abstraction, the conjured from the fringes version of the wealthy, which is basically an amalgamation of conspiracy theory shit and plausible acceptability. Karina [and us] does not know this world, so she has brought to life a perversion of it that feels real enough.

It is the world still on the other side of the mirror, within the magma of Castoriadis?

And the virtual is…not a simulacrum…but an idealised creation of an alternate-real?

Took a two day break before coming back to this part and now I’m feeling a bit lost again, keep thinking of Baudrillard’s Disneyland example, is it a simulacrum, was it ever representative of Americanness, am I too detached as a non-American to understand what that means etc.? I should ask Gary, he wrote a book on Baudrillard [Stratagem of the Corpse: Dying With Baudrillard], he might know.

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“She is a great designer. Compromise her and employ her.”

Philosophy is a rhizome with a knife behind its back whereas Tony Blair is a piece of shit who lied to the unions in ’95 just so he could get into a position to start an illegal war on Terry from Iraq.

Is FIRS punishment for him? The only one he’ll ever realistically receive?

When Karina first promoted FIRS online, I added a bit to the retweet saying something like, ‘finally, Tony Blair and co will have their balls cut off and their faces melted.’

But that’s not what happens to Tony, or any of the other celebrities in Part 1. Not sure about the second part as I’m only up to Pope Francis…maybe Bill Gates will get what’s coming to him, or Zuckerberg?

Humiliation is the main mode of assault from Karina.

Or I think it is.

But then, if this is a perverted hyper-realm, does having a bionic dick that is capable of delivering abortions, or getting drugged in a clearing and muttering nonsense count as humiliation?

It is an abstraction of reality so my gut says no, and even from that abstraction, on those specific terms, the King of Thailand ends up looking quite based. Why didn’t Karina choose to melt their faces and rip their dicks off? Spec: that is a child’s fantasy [and mine], this is extreme satire. FIRS wants to present the games of these perverts, the eerie familiarity of their slogans and lifestyle signs, and then launch herself [and her psychic flux] right into the belly of it.

It is attractive on some level to do that. Freeing even.

The lack of violent retribution makes it more real.

We know it is not real.

But it is not virtual either.

There is something in this, some truth that-

Don’t want to spoil the end as FIRS does have a plot and, to be honest, I’m only up to the bit with the Camorra now so I can’t spoil it anyway cos I don’t know.

If Karina does end up mutilating Bill Gates or Zuckerberg [the last two missions on her list], then ignore everything I wrote in the section above. Or stick to the idea of what is humiliation for these reptilian motherfuckers. It’s a valid question, I think.

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Ideas for FIRS 2 [in no particular order]:

1] Karina travels back in time and targets Communist leaders of the 20^th Century to see if she can make them subsidise cosmetic surgery clinics.

2] Karina hits Asia and Takuya Kimura is first on the list.

3] Karina punctures her right tit and unravels psychically.

4] Frankenstein remix with parts of Silvio Berlusconi spliced onto a Korean TV star.

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Fourth Industrial Revolution Slut is video-only and comes in two parts. You can watch Part 1 here and from there Part 2 should be easy enough to find. And if you can’t find it, it’s here.