chor pharn lee, the architectures of intelligence and garden empires — ideas
for chor pham lee, china extends its historical tradition of state-led water control into climate engineering, minting regional metis (fictional intelligence tokens) tied to rainfall and energy infrastructure wonders. lee wonders which part of "network agglomerations of capital and skill shape developmental patterns that resist computational solutions" in china, that keep the rural areas seperated and uncapitalizable by the superstructural megalopolis. he imagines a set of skills that are ungrammatizable by whar he calls shoggoths in other writings
shoggoths are his conception of lovecraftian vast bodies of knowledge that allow realized abstractions to surpulfously multiply and scale into standardized world markets and intellectual packets, constellations that guide the world's intelligence mission. synthetic intelligence for chor is unrelated to anthropomorphic intelligence, which he believes is structurally different due to the way that scale interferes with the concept of a personality, the way realized abstractions move in real time and interfere with our understanding of capital as a force in a way we'd be used to imagining it.
a helpful framework to understanding where shoggoths struggle to fully predict and datafy human intelligence is the way in which his conceptualization of havens or as he calls them guarden empires interact with outbounded terraforming through the ritualized body of the subject bound to its territory as bound by an abstract law following indirect orders from capital. the focus on this subject is both neutral and moral in most historical accounts, documenting direct struggles and certain so-called unfair dispositions. but subjects, not only relative to their own conditions, are also relegated to the processes that they carry on, they're tied to the machinics that define them as entities involved in terraformation, that encode on top of their economic, sexual and sovereign belongings an enviornmental scale that helps to expand an economic metaphor into a live body. subjects in this view are less carriers of capital's mission and more sovereign vanguards of an arbitrary order
bodies themselves arent always enspirited by economic power, only those bodies that exist as bounded by the law of a particular land actually acquire the benefit of a lived experience that gets to interact with the process of a terraformation. the yielders of a terraforming in this sense are actually not the superstructure, they are interafaces and sometimes network connections that upkeep the terraforming itself. the terraformation doesnt arise as a climate crisis or as a response to shifting earthly ties and coalitions - the earth itself finally having achieved cosmic or supernatural status - but rather the sedimentation of communities that make use of speculative packeted intelligence (metis) themselves serve to only upkeep the terraformers, the class that faces the demons of capital head-on. this facing isnt brave, liberatory, suffragical, cosmetic, cosmic, labourious or any other description, it is a form of ritual tied to capital's access.
capital itself denies most of its subject to experience it, it relegates its elements to only the periphery, where its process of violent assault, discard, poverty and scarcity are its tools of experience, they are its offerings to us. the sacrificed subjects belong inside the gardens, where they are raised as bait or feed, where they drown into one another sequentially. the infrastructural argument makes sense when you understand the domesticity of a city-stack, when you can comprehend how unambigously similar everyone's lives are inside the bubbled matrix as opposed to the periphery.
peripherial activities don't shape or feed back into capital, they are the primary earthly activity. those same human skill-transfers are unpackagable because data as a concept isn't a colonialization or abstraction of lived labour experience, instead data is the wielded unique class-element of a parasite-host that operates through the infrastructural gates of intelligence packets.
the concept of the metis actually suffices to elaborate exactly how an economical and international network can operate through its circulatory capacity. commodities are not used up and recirculated from the west and into the east and into china's factory zones, rather china's factory zones make use of the product that the west considers a waste. the waste is processed as a social-organizational form inside the global west, where it has the least possible animation and the most secularized and cleansed finish. this cleansed finish is an inaccessability of value, it is capital gate-locking the true potential of a commodity form.
"the long avenues of factories show only blank faces to the world, the packs of girls and boys swallowed up inside. industry does not require movement and activity, but their opposite—street after street, there is only silence." writes leslie chang in factory girls
as opposed to theories of alienation spanning critical theory that propose that workers are alienated from their products due to the total span of production, it is actually waste-bearers that interact with them most. the aspects of exchange, symbol, circulation, use-value, instrumentalization and so on don't contain nearly as much total interaction with capital's gifts as somebody who has to reorganize its waste, climb its powerlines, construct its bridges, and so on. these pity-labourers experience the world's sheer realness and density as ritual objects impacting their own body, as experience that implant them with the real grit of capital's creative telological and libidinal potential.
for chor, new ritual structures produce garden empires when automated governemntal systems take the fun out of political ritual by using synthetic intelligence to implement auto-regulatory guidelines, and so people flock to clubs and various other superficially created institutional forms such as digital avatarizations "cryptobros" to supplement this desire. this reminds that ritualized governance itself is a ritual power game, one fully divorced from sociality but endowed with the gift of being included in capital's most animated and lively object-forms yet.
leslie chang shows us a clear imagine, where in china, railway station plazas, bus depots and talent market hubs serve as hotspots where sorting itself as a metaphor becomes a cosmological process. highway density and industrial zoning serve as terrain, plazas and station call-outs serve as ordering mechanisms that feed into ritualization networks that themselves form the aesthetics of an enviornment.
in a sixth tone article, a young girl by the name of liu yan is forced to work at a construction site ten hours a day for basic income, and then livestream this, including the promotional campaigning of this very written article i discovered this through. the level of precarity she goes through is most certainly real but off-loaded by the very existence of the campaign, yet it hints at at least two hundred years of history where likely millions of chinese people die, lose their bodies, minds and souls in mines, factories, industries and on top of rooftowers, bridges, canals and so on, working to keep the enviorment away from collapsing on top of china. "i usually don’t bother washing my face before leaving for work. the wind is strong and cold, and it stings wet skin. while i’m working, my glasses slide down; each time i push them back up, i leave another streak of grime. by the end of the day, i have the dirtiest face on the team." - writes liu yan.
the coldness of the air, her smudged-up face, her existence as a fragile being being held up by the workers around her, all of this is a ritual performance of scarcity. not to say that scarcity itself isnt prevalent in her life, she argues her family is one of the poorest in her already poor farming village. in one article, it writes about an irony where farmers from farming villages are escorted into cities, where they happen to once again be farming something but in a different sense of the world, or in third locations with similar processes, the process of farming itself. construction work is also much like farming, a day spent on menial processes that leave the body and mind exhausted, for very minimal perceived payout, essentially for the base fact of sustenance itself.
these processes are by no means socially useless, but urban engineering itself is a self-manifested trajectory. buildings exist in the form of investment real estate, bridges in the form of economic transportation safety nets and accelerators, in china buildings are torn down the same way they rise up, the city works in favor of machines instead of people, maps cease to exist or even be valuable because development is too fast to be written down, and the flux is too quick for machines to track it. malls are abandoned in two years, contractors are parasitical and self-regulatory. all of this points to the idea that investment projects themselves feed into a system of value that fundamentally dehumanizes all of the ironic aspects of dehumanization, but maintain the core behind it. the experience of trash as ritual itself is only the potential for an aesthetics of the city to emerge, and for skill to exist beneath it.
the city's coatings are made up of smell (sweat, coffee), noise (jackhammers), signage, trash and bags of vomit, elements of the enviornment that are re-digested and re-processed. those who are most inclined to these enviornments take in the most benefit. jackhammers are abstract screamers, trash and vomit pile up in particular places, trash itself needs to be identified. in dongguan, southern china, trash is the fundamental mode of experience, in the same way that commodities are a fundamental mode of experience for a bourgeoise household, except that they are empty and non-afflictive in comparison with the lived experience of somebody working in dongguan. the planetary consumption cycles present in the world's experience themselves hardly even constitute consumption as opposed to how dongguan workers process trash. their own bodies are used as sensors for types of plastics, they light them up, harness them, their bodies intertwine with them, they are poisoned, even having been said to throw up more after work than how much food they actually intake.
in "civilisation as a temporary arrangement" chor writes that "machine civilisation — if we may call it that — does not primarily optimise for meaning. it optimises for throughput. energy converted, packets routed, risks hedged, supply chains cleared. the goal is not transcendence but continuity. avoid failure. reduce variance. keep the grid stable. under such conditions, the human role subtly changes. no longer frontier settlers of the future, we become custodians of equilibrium. we do not design utopias. we prevent outages"
in this sense, it just so happens that this rerouting mechanism, this engridification of human life is the most transcendent activity we can attain in our phenomenal experience of the world. so as to say, pushing this idea away from a computentionalist and inhuman capital-obligated worldview and into subjectivity as a driver for the force and shaping of history, if pre-requisite social value is stored in supply chains as a basic unit of the navigation and maintenance of the world, then the exploring of the world itself happens in its peak manner only in the most boring and industrial settings, those that allow a direct experience of the grid or the terraforming, rather than the haven that only metabolizes the leftover energy of these experiences
the process of experiencing trash is one of a kind, the kind the first world subject is quite literally missing out on. it is said that sensors themselves are expensive, easy to break, requiring maintenance work and coming with social and reputational costs. a company is said to be able to hire a hundred workers per one of those sensors, who are better biosensors than actual machines. this is because machines themselves are innate compared to biomachines, and biomachines are meant to experience waste as a part of the commodity. in this case the plastic is the commodity, its markings, poisonous qualities and so on are ritual objects that intertwine with the body.
the inability to purchase a sensor mimic the inability for the first world commodity to resemble desire, but not just desire, it also shows how the fundamental uselessness of commodities actually show up as trash in the lived experience of the bourgeoise, who enact a "central periphery" opposed to the global periphery as providing the ability for trash to happen. first world trash is only a subproduct of the total experience of trash, which moves not as a unit to process but as a granting of the rights of making use of goods, which actually works in favor of the class most disposed to it. this class experiences the most suffrage, which is only a positive, ascetic experience under capitalist jurispridence.
in a sense, it can even be said that commodities, given that they historically date back to marx's analysis of british enviornmental and temporal aesthetics, can be said to be old-world, even somewhat theologized experiental units that are altered by contemporary developments in cybernetics that develops grids, audits, data, packets, synthetic intel units, and so on, altered in such a way where, because credit sytsems interact with supply chains in a manner divorced from markets but not divorced from the total travel-orientation of the commodity, which depends on its encounter with waste streams and juridisticitonal zones, commodity-experiences themselves can be thought of as abstractions that predict the exchange between textures in an enviornment, which is why commodity-forms only activate when met by migrant waste-yielders.
the bourgeoise class lifestylizes the commodity but only in such a manner that it cuts itself off from the flow of experience rather than the producer or maintainer of commodities. social exhcange itself isnt alienating in contemporary societies because alienating zones or grids have stratified far more than the possibility of relational exchange, its rather now true that alienation flows backwards through capital and into migrancy. think of a metis exchange where rainfall is triggered by bets on the rise of water levels, where a migrant worker is currently being forced to encounter the sea-shore and its rising tide directly. a terminal is an abstraction of the experience that doesnt exchange experiences of commodities but instructions on how to experience them. rural clans encounter irrigation as a battle of the forces in an envionrment, but this itself isn't any longer the experience of capital-time, which requires messing with terminal values. a rural clan can only truly encounter a commodity if it somehow has to both deal with the faulty break of a terminal, and the faulty break of the world around them caused by the terminal, whereas the middle class could never possibly encounter the terminal or its market-products, exchange-tokens or affiliated counter-produces as a commodity object, but only as a trash object in its own right
in factory girls, factories and dorms are seen as the real city units as opposed to neighbourhoods, where fake brands, counterfeit credentials, illegal taxis, faux contracts, exploitable market enviornments make up the basis of capital, the underneath of capital is a projection of a faux version of itself that actually perfects the commodity form. high class commodities are "dirty" copies of even cleaner fake versions of the same thing. in china, fake brands occupy empty malls that attempt to replicate the teleological experience of the malls, but in fact only create a more "realized" enviornment due to the fact that it is emptied of all the social-ritual intricacies that would make the real thing in the first world a form of second degree social organization rather than a first degree self-subsuming commodity. the aura of the mall remains, the social organization is removed, the process is self-revelatory, which is exactly the threefold requirement of a commodity. counterfeit itself is the mimicking of an order of reality that manages itself as a generalization of itself, and the more general commodity-enviornemnts get, the more reified their produce, experiences and marketing, the truerer they are to an actual idea of universal generality, of destiny as self-recurrance.
"it takes two hundred pairs of hands to make a running shoe. everything begins with a person called a cutter, who stamps a sheet of mesh fabric into curvy irregular pieces, like a child’s picture puzzle [...] finishers remove the lasts, check each shoe for flaws, and place matched pairs in cardboard boxes. the boxes are put in crates, ten boxes to a crate, and shipped to the world within three days. every shoe has a label on its tongue: made in china." in yue yuen factory, workers spend their time interacting with shoes in a way that runners dont. in fact, it can be said that runners dont interact with shoes at all or even use them, they simply happen to be wearing them. it is however amptly true that they put a lot of focus on their shoes, but this focus is abstract, symbolically thin, and uses the shoe as a vechile divorced from the corporeal experience itself. nike shoes as an example market themselves as wearable universes in the form of buildings with many nodes and currents, most of which remain inaccessible to the wearer. shoes are not modifiable intrinsically, only extrinsically, you can tie the laces in particular ways or adjust your wear, but you cant adjust the shoe, nor can you truly get to the bottom of the foam, you never get to even touch what makes the unecessary magic behind the simple act of running happen, if supposedly not by your own foot.
for the factory girls on the other hand, their entire existence is premised on the shoes, and they spend far more time actually considering them than shoe-wearers ever do. the store only borrows the shoe, the wearer only happens to have it on him, and only because it has been said that thats how running should be conducted. but nobody is convinced, other than the shoe-makers themselves. it is impossible to recognize the concept of precarity if not for ritual accomplishments tied to capital production as a totality. systems of supply and demand are given birth to by the arbitrary reality of production itself rather than by the way in which production somehow necessitates demand. demand itself is constructed backwards, its an organism that replicates only to justify itself post-replication.
the ritual forms that emerge from these experiences can also be nicely mapped from chen quifan's waste tide, which, just like real-world waste-processing practices in the pearl river delta in guangdon provice as seen in "factory girls", maps a fictional world called silicon valley occuring in the same location. in this place, informal plastics recycling villages existed where workers manually sorted, burned, and dismantled electronics and migrant labour exploitation and clan-based local power structures were real features of these industrial zones. what quifan does is recombine and amplify these elements into a narrative where migrant precarity, folk rituals and industrial toxicity interesect with speculative technology and clan politics, in a way that could actually emerge in the future. the rituals she hints at are the oil fire ritual, where a witch paints her face, wears garments, ignites a spell-charged bowl of oil, and runs through the streets at midnight, wailing until a passerby screams, in which case the flaming bowl is smashed and the passerby becomes a "holler proxy" in order to displace illness in a wealthy family that cant technologically mediate it. in another ritual, ghost money is spread around an ill person, where relatives kneel and collect it in the form of debt, kneeling as many times as the target's age, and in a third ritual, a feast is prepared on a highway (considered the intersection between domains), where migrants (waste people) have to not react in fear or look confused as it is prepared, or otherwise it transfers to them.
all three of these ritual-forms embody aspects of contaigon, illness-prevention and displacement that are cruical for the age of commodities. intellectual tokens are economic threshold-packets that trade informationally in retrospect to the way in which peripheral bodies trade curses in the middle of zones that don't allow for rituals that don't conform to the order of modernity. these very rituals themselves are partially aspects of capitalism's failure to totally conquer the soul, but on another hand, are displacement mechanisms that do in fact honor modernity, because they happen in severe cases where not only does modernity not have an answer, but create superficial enviornments where cursed objects aren't actually derivatives of capital's equipment. natural derivatives of the world of capital are appropriated accordingly, and the highway does show us an example where capital's enviornment is weaponized, but this happens in even more severe cases. worse of all, illnesses are theologically imposed objects in capital, they work as proof of capital's non-totality due to the way in which capital has actually promised their eradication. but if anything, tying curses to illnesses only further solidifies cpaital's conquest of virology.
"the barren wastes of abu dhabi, it turned out, were not worthless after all. the drifts of dust and the poisonous plains of salt had preserved a sea of oil for a tiny segment of humanity, the few thousand souls who defied nature and made their homes in that forsaken landscape. for their hardships, and those of their ancestors, they would be rewarded with custody of 8 percent of the world’s proven oil reserves." the "energy rich computational oases of the gulf" as pham refers to them, used to be rural hellscapes where kerosene light, barasti shacks, total lack of grid power and air conditioning, unsafe sanitation, scarce potable water, total lack of ice, minimal schooling and other such facts were the base texture of the society.
all of the above are descriptions in jim krane's city of gold, which show us how the natives describe people being buried in the sand, literally burning to death and being extinguished right away, firing up and into the ground, instantly tombstoned on the land. “dubai, by contrast, sat in darkness. literally.” "slaves worked aboard pearling dhows and lived in the walled compounds of prominent families. most were more like second-class family members or trusted domestic servants. in the early days of oil exploration, slaves even toiled with the crews of international oil companies".
in arabia, slaves are a part of the centralization machine, where sovereignity is exercised by the elite class through subsidiaries and selective modernization, creating states on top of states, centralizing centralization, totalizing power and other forms of reckoning with the enviornment. in this land, thousands are tricked into sex trafficking, slaves live and perish by the walls they build and construct, as has always been in the lands. in a sense, the heat, the need for surviving in such an enviornment makes being a "technological frontier" with its own assets impossible. the closest we get to such an enviornment are places such as texas, vegas, tulsa and co., where even then, cars serve as the pod-like units that make fragmentation possible. yet this fragmentation is only a byproduct of regimes of power that change the way desertification works
rituals in arabia progress through a slave-code, through prostitution as a base rule, through the dominion of one man over another. social harmony doesnt exist as a process because the enviornment forces it not to. in a sense, all symbolic capital is converted into territorial dispute, into an act of terraforming. sovereignty in arid landscapes produces centralized extraction regimes almost every time, whereas dispersal in the west leads to a pod-ification. but more than that, this influences the way in which bodies are enacted sovereignity upon. for example when america's slavery is described as more brutal than arabia's in "city of gold", this isn't just a literal historical description, but a symbolic one.
after all, the americas don't "need" slaves the same way arabia does, because bodies aren't acceptingly encoded by the enviornment in equal extents, violence is committed the more unecessary assumptions are stacked upon one another that don't immediately reflect in enviornmental necessity. terraforming doesnt happen as a regulatory protocol but as a means for waging control over real abstractions, for the formation of human classes as base social infrastructure. in the work, it is shown how the united arab emirates is the biggest greenhouse emitter per-capita (energy waster, world corrupter) in the world, one tenth of a point higher than the states, even when just seventy years ago it virtually lived exactly the opposite way.
this energy expenditure mimics the logic of modernity in the faulty chinese rural networks, where scarcity and family dishonor is only something to escape until you come to comprehend the way in which modernity also follows through rules of scarcity through the metaphor of trash, which itself sequentializes and serves as the back-road, the infrastructural secret behind all commodity capital. in this way, the emirates are racing to extract the energy of the world necessary to prevent themselves from being extracted by their landscapes, by arguing that it is their turn to waste the world's energy, the same way that kyoto argued the west had already done so previously, "repeating history's past mistakes". sheikh rashid pumping crude onto the creek bank is about him literally showing everyone around him that the land has symbolic value, but it's also about the luxury of never having to spill yourself over a piece of land again. it is an anti-terraformial proclamation, a sort of communication to migrant peripherality that the ritual obsession has arrived in the form of an alien substance.
pham lee argues that water is exchanged for intelligence tokens in these premises, but i'd argue metis is more about being allowed to experience the world-interior of capital. the golden sprawling underneath cities, city islands and skyscraper domes of the gulf are built so that emirates can experience the luxury of the west without any its content, aestheticizing their land as a projection of the futility of their own enviornment. in a sense, intelligence is the ability to not be ecologically intelligent in these enviornment. property as is conceieved in liberal european philosophy follows the same pattern, which is about the luxury of surviving without a community, and the luxury of usurping the world from underneath, the luxury of not having to deal with capitalism. the luxury is the freedom of not being an earthly subject, which is why it can be said that the first world floats, it is ultimately gnostic in this sense. western subjects project themselves in pods territorially as unterraformable beings, as cuts to a network-line, as belivers of a final arrival of commodity-logic that doesn't exist nor end with them.