Lifeless Dead.

a small note on cultural speciation.

“In shadows we circle
And in shadows we blend
Transcience and its resonance
No lifeless echo but a lifeless end”- Nature and Organization (Ft. Douglas P, Rose McDowell, David Tibet), “My Black Diary”.

We find ourselves in an age gazing across a vast sonic and noospheric wasteland—filled with dead concepts, nostalgic memories, and pleasant but empty principles that collapse at the slightest friction with changing realities. One of these niceties was known as communicative rationality or civil society: the idea that we could all gather in a shared public space to debate and discuss our beliefs and political ideas. This ideal was built on something rather flimsy—a presumed, shared understanding of what the Real actually is, and a mutual sense of purpose in striving for the “betterment” of society.

We are now forced to bear witness to the collapse of this ideal and to confront the bitter realization that we can no longer agree on even the most basic things, let alone on complex principles underlying a shared culture and form of governance. Or, as Anj recently put it in response to the popular Millennial Woes tweet about Leftists merely pretending not to understand things:

“This implies a general lexicon of concepts exists and Leftists are merely feigning ignorance, thus leaving the door open, in principle, for reconciliation. But discourse is impossible because there is no shared reality, no common experience, language, or values. We are speciating.”¹.

The 2020s—from the Covidian era to the post-Covid reality of politically motivated violence—have demonstrated the closing of this door. At a time when everyday life, both online and offline, grows increasingly complex, we are met with a blindingly simple axiomatic morality. It may have been briefly challenged in the past three years, yet it persists with an existential, frenzied immediacy nonetheless.

Political language, as it was once understood, was the first victim of this semantic collapse. We do not merely speak past each other; rather, the “other” ceases to exist altogether. Or, more precisely, the other is denied a life-world filled with nuance and inner narrative, reduced instead to a zombie-like figure that must be destroyed before it infects or devours us. This is why terms like fascist have lost their historical meaning but gained existential weight—they now function less as descriptors than as moral signals of who may live and who must die. One can look at the same event through a camera lens and perceive entirely different political signifiers: a political assassination versus an act of “preventing radicalization,” or the deportation of a criminal versus state-sanctioned savagery.

The science fiction writer R. S. Bakker, who coined the term, wrote about the Semantic Apocalypse on his blog in 2011 as the logical consequence of the information society, linking it to the development—and eventual stagnation—of global liberalism:

“In social terms, you could suggest that the Semantic Apocalypse has already happened. Consumer society is a society where liberal democratic states have retreated from the ‘meaning game’, leaving the intractable issue to its constituents. Given the interpretative ambiguity that permeates the Question of Meaning, there is no discursive or evidential way of commanding any kind of consensus: this is why states past and present had to resort to coercion to promote meaning solidarity. Absent coercion, people pretty much climb on whatever dogmatic bandwagon that appeals to them, typically the ones that most resonate with their childhood socialization, or as we like to call it, their ‘heart’.

The result of this heterogeniety is a society lacking any universal meaning-based imperatives: all the ‘shoulds’ of a meaningful life are either individual or subcultural. As a result, the only universal imperatives that remain are those arising out of our shared biology: our fears and hungers. Thus, consumer society, the efficient organization of humans around the facts of their shared animality.”²

In other words, what I have elsewhere called a sandbox society or sandbox culture—as discussed in a recent episode of Content Minded³—is one without direction or telos, without any collective purpose for the nation, culture, or civilization. In such a world, one can, like in The Sims games, choose one’s own aesthetic, religion, identity, and means of employment without reference to any rites, traditions, or guiding structures within one’s milieu. What would have seemed alien to earlier generations is now taken as the supreme expression of freedom in the so-called “open society”—an escape from history and hierarchy promised to the rest of the world. Yet, as Bakker points out, this only produces a proliferation of difference that devolves into a cacophonous mess.

Difference and heterogeneity are tricky things to qualify. The kind of “difference” celebrated in our age is largely superficial and has not, for some time, translated into genuinely new cultural forms, artistic movements, or meaningful benefits arising from our much-touted openness and mass literacy. There were, of course, moments when the emerging postmodern or hypermodern society did generate strange and transgressive bursts of genuine culture and avant-garde expression—but these were soon followed by long periods of stagnation and distortion.

The 1970s was one such period—a time marked by genuine interest in pop cultural criticism, New Journalism, experimental music, and mass media that still featured debates between public intellectuals. Many of the most meaningful countercultural writings and academic concepts emerged during this era (the Beats and Hippies of the 1960s, after all, had not yet finished graduate school). By contrast, the 1980s saw the rise of cheap, easy consumerism and the dominance of a spectacle-driven society. The early to mid-1990s brought a New Age revival and a sincere yearning for alternative culture and youth expression—both of which were quickly commodified, diluted, and made easy to consume.

The other side of the Semantic Apocalypse is that the only remaining sources of vital, existential difference are often hyper-political. However superficial these differences may be, they serve to provide meaning on a deeply personal level in an epoch when major public, cultural, and even religious institutions either refuse—or have lost the ability—to offer meta-narratives of identity and living. There are, moreover, new indicators of cultural speciation in the digital age: for instance, one’s ability (or failure) to recognize AI-generated imagery and content, or the ease with which one can be deceived by cheap visuals and shallow factoids mistaken for truth.

Bruce Charlton has pointed to the bleaker implications of cultural speciation in various writings, particularly its connection to a passive form of managerial totalitarianism in the contemporary Western world:

“The problem seems to lie too deep to be addressed - it lies, indeed, in changes in the nature of actual human beings, en masse; and it has to do with the nature of human groups, the relation of the individual with the collective.

Humans used to be effortlessly, because intrinsically, semi-collective beings - like it or like-it-not, we participated in the life of the group; and conceptualized ourselves thus.

That doesn’t happen any more. The 20th century replacement of group participation and religion was totalitarianism - which is top-down brainwashing, surveillance and group-control by massive propaganda, censorship, with bureaucratic linkage of all institutions/ organizations/ corporations etc (including treating the family, legally and in public discourse, as if it was an institution).

Western man (and increasingly all human beings) just are individuals - that is the fact of it: that is how we are built to experience the world and ourselves.”⁴

To slough off all familial, sacred, and institutional obligations has plunged the hypermodern subject into a state of constant inner precarity, uncertainty, and psychosis. In this condition, we come close to the position of Agamben’s Muselmann: a state of bare life—existence without past or future, a living corpse animated only by disparate and ever-shifting forces outside the self. In this sense, the modern subject loses all forms of purpose and signification. Yet unlike in the mid-twentieth century, when totalitarianism consumed individuals through centralized power, the process of bare life today operates as a form of inner self-effacement and self-exploitation.

Even the intense political radicalism and cavernous divides between ideological groups mentioned earlier are symptoms of this same dynamic, aggravated by memetic contagion and mutually reinforcing streams of madness. They may be encouraged by malevolent institutions or “bio-luminescent” forces, yet the self-destructive nature of contemporary culture-war politics requires no direct manipulation or orchestration. Projects like MKULTRA could never compete with the decentralized chaos of Discord grooming and the self-perpetuating delusions that now define political subcultures online.

In a way, one can hardly blame most people for choosing to passively consume—or at most, silently engage with—the online spectacle society. In the absence of any direction provided by historical mandates or institutional directives, the state can only manage life in such conditions, not point toward life’s flourishing. Yet Charlton does not despair over our modern condition; quite the opposite. He writes that there exists a vast ocean of opportunity for those few who can recognize and seize it:

“So -- collapse of The West (and maybe world society) is baked-in, accelerating; and attempts to avert it make things worse in the long term (indeed, often immediately); and there are no valid alternatives that will sustain The West - even in theory!

With zero possibility of large scale communal life - then we ought to be orientating away from it, surely?

Instead; the search for a political-communal answer gets more desperate - even as it gets lazier, less rigorous, less truthful - more superficial...

Yet, honestly conceived, all this is extraordinarily liberating; and points towards the necessity of a life that is more wholly creative in its fundamental nature, than anything that was possible (or desirable) at any earlier point in human history...

In other words, we first need to recognize in our hearts that Christianity is/ salvation is/ theosis is (and always was meant to be) ultimately, a personal and individual and creative matter.

We are not only much freer than we realize, we are much freer than most people want or are prepared to acknowledge; nonetheless, incrementally, the reality of that freedom is being forced upon us by circumstance.”⁵

There is, of course, a certain despair that accompanies the realization that we will never again belong to a larger social body, and that even our neighbours now inhabit vastly different realities. Even within the same racial or cultural groups, beliefs about the nature of the Real diverge more than they converge—doubly so in an era shaped by globalization and the mass movement of peoples across the world.

Yet there remains a glimmer of hope in the form of inward detachment and the cultivation of one’s own reality-tunnel—the effort to create something sincere and genuine in the world. If we are condemned to a supreme existential freedom from all constraints and inherited values, then we must venerate and bestow the values we create for ourselves, even if they run afoul of the empty yet oppressive moralities of secular transnational progressive global politics. Across the vast sonic horizon, one can glimpse individuals forming underground affiliations born of this same existential free play—a quiet revival of the avant-garde spirit, if one is careful enough to notice it.

Cultural theorists of the internet age, such as Byung-Chul Han and Boris Groys, have written about curation as a defining cultural condition: the idea that we are condemned to curate our own existence while ignoring the formative ideas and mandates that contradict the programming we consume. Yet the curation of being can also be liberating—if done consciously. It requires the cultivation of boundaries, the strength to say no to psychic pollution and informational trash. To curate what is good, true, aesthetically meaningful, and worthy of discourse is an art form of the living, which is itself a rejection and an antidote to the mindless consumption of the living dead.

1https://x.com/novusolus/status/1973491722740273186

2https://rsbakker.wordpress.com/2011/06/21/what-is-the-semantic-apocalypse/

3

4https://charltonteaching.blogspot.com/2024/12/collapse-suicide-of-west-everything.html

5Ibid.