The diffuse crisis of the anthropocene as the apocalypse produces many systems of continual crisis. The myth of the technological age with its self-reflexive ability to regenerate and absorb shocks and ruptures through its multifaceted systems that are both external and internal, has allowed for a flattened false-dialect, that over the course of its numerous iterations and mutations produces asymmetrical algebras of normalization and rationality.

In this process both the negative and positive actions of the subject can often be regulated as trapped energy within this flatted cybernetic. The monetization of activity and the financialization of nearly every aspect of life encompassed within the many different varying levels of the vector creates a space, a cybernetic space, that allows for only motion of nodes, and therefore any movement outside of this path nearly impossible if at all. This issue of blocking off of possibilities can be considered a vectoral enclosure. This formation or superstructure is an inherently panoptic shape, however as the panoptic only allows for external monitoring and what we are dealing with now is not limited to what lay visible, it forms another structure one an over layer, termed the the Cryptopticon (Siva Vaidhyanathan.) an inherently smooth and hidden process that exists in data. This change has happened perhaps since the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s. This change in is accompanied by the allo/auto-crystallization or duplication of this loop internally, which of course remains layered and not evenly distributed.

Meaning, for the vast majority of human civilization, has been a hierarchical structure stratified and flowing from the top down, be it from god, capitalism, or whatever. With the shift to the neolibral individual, the tethers of meaning were now sewn in, the process now deemed to be made internally, and due to the ongoing flattening out and normalizing within the now vectoral system, this process of “freedom” as internalization in effect allows the vector to deterolize and reterratorolizes freedom mutating open space into a node, transforming the subject into what Han calls the “project” the auto-oppressive.

The auto-oppressive could be read as realized “homoekonomikus” the by product of the myth of the death drive or the dogmatics of the technocratic, it does not represent however a replacement of, or mark the disappearance of the disciplinary subject, but rather points towards a multivalent and inoculative system that operates with both auto and allo process that are layered. There is of course a difference between a day trader working 80 hours a week and an individual producing gloves in a forced labor camp in China.

In this form often rendered as bare life the inherent need for dissociation has peaked and the naturalization of inhuman and absurd conditions has created an overall hopelessness in which nihilism feels like hope. In this way vectoral enclosure has many forms of psychological warfare which it implants through external and internal systems of policing. The allo-auto oppressive dividual an archetype transformed into a tantalus through vectoral enclosure, is neither alive or dead but both. It grows increasingly more evident that in order to survive, in order to reproduce oneself, to some degree and shape one must contort into this tantalus figure. This of course is not an evenly dispersed method of power and each node within this cybernetic loop is both represented and abstracted to a varying degree and level.

The employment of difference under the vector as or a result of the capture of freedom has not only enclosed the horizon, through the violent extraction of energies and connections needed to develop the future but has pathologized the future turning nihilism into hope and the subject into tantalus. When I say the anthropocene is the apocalypse, it is an attempt to establish the apocalypse as myth and in doing so deconstruct the myth of civilization and progress. Both the manufactured existential crisis of meaning and the real corporeal and metaphysical continual-crisis as caused by the procession of civilization is a result of the management and dedicated systems to the creation and maintenance of the crisis-subject. The myth that technology is the actor of progress and change is the myth sustaining the myth of the eternality and immutability of the vector and capital. Technology is in this way never neutral but rather an extension of the systems of management and control, a form of enclosure. [NEXT] ❥