Attitude
“Beauty is convulsive or it will not be,” declared André Breton in Nadja in 1928. Eight years later a social revolution, ultimately defeated, rocked Spain.
Alienation will not be overthrown using “alienated forms of struggle”, Guy Debord suggested in The Society of the Spectacle in November 1967. Damned right it won’t! Nodding to Ned Ludd, he spoke instead of breaking the “machines of permitted consumption.” Six months later the volcano of May 1968 erupted in France.
Whoever claims they want to “observe the bare facts dispassionately”, wrote the Socialist Patients’ Collective of the University of Heidelberg in 1972, is either an “idiot” or a “dangerous criminal.” (Turn Illness Into a Weapon). What a clear and succinct way of putting it! But decades of darkness followed.
In the darkness came change. It wasn’t for the better.
As far as we are aware, the term “technofascism” first appeared in 1970 in the United States. [1] Half a century later, at the turn of the 2020s, literally billions of people clutch interactive television sets through which they receive – and “actively” participate in spreading – the totalitarian message. Bathing them in microwave radiation, these computerised gadgets enable their almost every movement to be tracked by global corporations working closely with state intelligence agencies. The poor souls thought they were free.
Breton, Debord and the Heidelberg collective all had the right idea. It’s still right. But if we are to escape from our miserable, terrible epoch we need original expressions of it: vivid, to the point, disruptive, explosive. In the name of humanity, throw stuff! Kick and scream! Believe in the human spirit! Grip people, go to the root, be ad hominem. Make shame more shameful still by making it public! [2]
Interests
Our interests include antivivisection, being leftwing, being vegetarian, bird behaviour, colours, concrete screen blocks, culinary flavour bases, cutting celeriac so that it looks like pasta or pineapple, definitions so rigorous that no tyranny can withstand them, disliking paraleipsis (saying something while pretending not to), dreams, expressing ideas in firecracker form in the hope of eliciting attention spikes, folklore, fruit, geometry, grammar, having a no-first-use policy with regard to sarcasm, hazelnut coffee syrup, heptagonal chopping-boards, hills, home education, honesty, humour, intensity, intersubjectivity, Jerusalem artichokes, kefir, language, long-distance alignments, lovage, memory, noticing stuff, observing that the internet is the spectacle, patterns, poetry, potatoes boiled for a while and then grilled, psychic stuff, putting the shits up the ruling class and its enforcers (and up liars too), quoting the phrase “when a scab comes down the street (…) angels weep in heaven” after replacing “scab” with “smartphone user”, rhetoric, robins, snow, solstices, stiles, stone circles, superstition, telling twits who think it’s amusing to ask whether the bear shits in the wood “Not if it’s polar”, the theremin musical instrument, undermining oppressive institutions, using what we know, vehicles with two front seats that can turn around to face backwards, wit (from which we exclude most literal interpretation jokes), xenoliths (pieces of one rock type embedded in another), yearnings that jolt towards a greater realisation, and zooming out and in (and back out and back in) to improve our understanding.
Comments and correspondence
Communications are welcome about any article on this site and any topic that you feel may interest us. Facts, angles, speculation, thoughts, descriptions of your experiences, reflections on them, reflections on other people’s experiences and analyses (including ours), analogies, cases that are similar but different (or not similar at all), sites you want to recommend, offers of reciprocal mention, possibilities you want to raise or discuss– yes please. If we made an error or we’re looking at something wrong, tell us! If you want to say something off the wall, say it. There is no closing date for comments or emails, and no geographical restriction either. You can write to us at any time, from or about anywhere in the world.
We are happy to receive pieces you have written and ideas for future articles. Your prose need not be polished. We know what side we’re on. It’s not the side where people play professional roles such as “expert”, “writer”, “journalist”, “artist”, or any other reified role such as “intellectual”, “influencer”, or “blogger”. The phrase “speaking truth to power” makes us want to vomit. Try hard to read what’s in your stream of tears. Then you’ll not only know a lot of stuff that’s worth knowing – you’ll have put your back into verbalising it too.
You can email us at editor(at)cryzine(dot)com (after typing that address into your email program, not by clicking on it!)
Provocation
Perhaps we mentioned you as a personage we despise. Well we only despise the ruling class and those who keep others down; we don’t despise anybody else. Unlike you, we have the courage of our convictions. Fancy standing up for yourself? Whoever you are, however high a position you may hold, be our guest. And try to write on your own behalf rather than instructing a lackey to contact us, OK? Unless your reply is excessively long we’ll probably publish it unedited. Or we may edit it, decide against running it, leave it sitting around on a desk until it gets dusty, or whatever. Don’t even think about sending us hate mail. We wipe our floors with Powellite Daily Mail readers, Malthusians and Social Darwinists, and it doesn’t bother us one bit.
Facebook? Twitter?
Seriously? We have zero interest in participating in discussions on such wretched media. So should you. Fuck “likes”. Fuck “followers”. “Go follow yourself on Facebook” is one of the curses we use. ■ ︎
Notes
1) A cartoon in the March 1970 edition of Quicksilver Times shows it split into two words as “Techno Fascism”. The term may also have been used around the same time in Italy and Germany: if you know anything about that, please get in touch. In 1994, a group in Britain called “Some Opponents of Technofascism” decried the electronic tagging of newborn babies and the associated propaganda of the time.
2) Gripping people, being ad hominem, and making shame more shameful still are formulations used nearly 200 years ago by Karl Marx in his “Introduction” to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (1844). Marx was the geezer who first compared schools to sausage factories. (Chap. 16 of vol.1 of Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, 1867). ■ ︎