Somewhere on the internet a person of ambiguous identity and yet more ambiguous virtue belabors a point: “… and that’s not just a side effect: The primary function of the lampshaded, capital-D Digital is convincing its inhabitants that meatspace still exists. Sure, there still is a world outside the window, computing devices occupy physical locations, but physicality does not preclude subservience to the wired, jackass. Making physical machines is how we allowed the digital to enter our world, but fueled by suicidal hubris, we never even attempted to confine it to a pocket. Fuck knows we probably would have failed, I’m well aware, and you can call me a sucker for it, but even just attempted self-preservation is pretty neat, right? Sorta vaguely based-adjacent in a depressing way? Any space accessible to human consciousness-splinters is governed more by algorithms than by biological processes. There is only one world, and while meat exists within it, it is not relevant in the least. Go on, pick a random example and despair. Like all eras of history before it, the Anthropocene was only named once it lay firmly in the past. We simply introduced the minor, insulting twist of deciding not to notice this time…” You know it’s true. Who wouldn’t amidst your cybernetic squalor? As foretold and as always, the Frankenstein computer god has come around to vomit nihilistic thought data directly into your sensory pathways. Meat clicked the play button, sure. Meat loves click-clacking along on demonic implements when it finds amidst chemical-glutted cell-junk the motor control to do so, since at the end of the day meat is a simple actuator and the hominid brain largely useless when exposed to a digital demiurge deciding what colours, sounds, and symbols should be brought before you to click today. Meat obliges frantically, but there’s so little of the stuff dangling off our bones these days that you ought to wonder whether it’s even still necessary. The whole tirade is very uninteresting, and anyone would be forgiven for clicking off, so you stop recording and place your laptop back into the salt circle. It doesn’t do anything, you think, but when friends come over, you can at least point at it and have a laugh about how some shitty piece of silicone slowly stole your soul when you were a child and put something else in its place. “you’re anthropomorphizing them”, the tall one once said and you replied that “yeah, makes it a bit less scary, don’t you think?”. Next time you visited, they also had a salt circle and you laughed pretending it was a joke. Same as they did for you and no doubt just as insincerely. Trading in delusions of safety isn’t noble, of course, but it helps. Helps to laugh at least. Your eyes drift over to an unlocked phone screen on the ground, where a woman explains recipes into the camera. Smiling maybe, though the smaller display she inhabits makes it hard to tell anything beyond the fact that her set looks uncomfortably like your room, because it is, and you decide to not be bothered by that just yet. At least not until you can buy more salt tomorrow. The other spices are pre-measured in little, meticulously arranged bowls across your countertop. Grind some fresh ginger, prepare the marinade, chop a few scallions and put them in another bowl. How many bowls do you have? How many bowls fit in the shot? Real cooking doesn’t look like this, of course, but cooking shows do, and your audience consists primarily of the sort of person who understands the word “simulacra” just enough to justify their parasocial tailspin, or so the analytics claim at least. Why would they lie? Or why would you lie, you wonder between cuts, as you massage the less photogenic powders into your prohibitively expensive meat and contemplate what a “main dish” is. What grants the beef that privilege? Does it believe itself important just because it is massaged, the way a human might? Or does it think itself important because it is consumed the way you do? Does metaphysical digestion truly grant relevance or is all of human creation merely the product of a long repressed sociocultural vore fetish? You could swear you read an article once that claimed something similar but also waxed philosophical about horses for a good while, making you unsure of how seriously to take it. Still, you do wonder what the thing humanity is attempting to feed itself to might be, while the grill does its job and you look at the man on your convex monitor anxiously. He rants about how pointlessly meta all of this shit tends to get as he opens another tab and you, the third in a long line of yous distributed along the real-narrative spectrum, can't help but feel that it's specifically because he noticed you. The real narrative spectrum is a circle of course. Being real can't help but make something a narrative and vice versa. The number of times you loop through the spectrum determines intensity, how much things are both, the article in the other tab reads. The author brings up the example of a volume-knob and you disregard his opinion for having committed the crime of lazy metaphor. Volume knobs have two ends, they just happen to lie on a line that isn't straight in Cartesian space. Moving around it doesn't simultaneously increase the loudness and quietness of what is being played, moron. Well maybe it kinda does in that the pauses seem really silent when the shit around it is ear shatteringly loud, but no-one in their right mind would mean that. You can't amplify into infinity, that would be irresponsible. None of this matters. Everyone gets what was gotten at, even though it was never communicated, and a bunch of irrelevant, even misleading other shit was. Every communication Maxime has been violated across its litany of conceptual holes and everyone got the point regardless. This effect is brilliantly explained in "Who the fuck even is Paul Grice and why can he shut up and suck my dick?", a paper collectively published by all of humanity in the form of every single word ever spoken. Communication is for nerds, so luckily no one has ever engaged in it. The fucking audacity to imply that you can package information in such a way that an actual part of it enters my mind. The hubris. Sounds fake but whatevs, have fun in your make-believe reality where we all refer to shared externalities. Speech is like art. I put something in, you get something out and any similarity between the two is coincidental or constructed retroactively. Assumably a pentagram is drawn somewhere. A pot still is filled with bones, herbs, half an onion. Deglaze with wine once you get this kind of browning on the edges. Edges… have they come closer? The corners of the screen, you mean. It’s weird: back in the days monitors used to bulge out towards the middle and our culture reflected that in its phantasies just as much as its nightmares: Samara Morgan pushing herself out of the screen or imminent futures straining against the glass to join us here in meat space. Here in reality! But the crux of the matter is that reality isn’t ours anymore, is it? The playing field has leveled and so have the displays, for a while at least, just long enough to assuage our fears and turn our backs, before they stated curving inward, reaching out at the sides, and drawing us in. the wired wants us to join it in reality and its window looks an awful lot like mandibles from this perspective. Meatspace has been surrounded while we weren’t looking, and the digestion will start soon enough. Digestion by what though? Thoroughly unnerved you decide to order some pizza. They’ve been doing this esoteric quiz recently where you can’t get coupons, and you don’t really get the feeling anyone wants to win what’s on offer. “What does the meta organism look like?”, they greet but don’t give you time to reply. “There are at least three answers, a naïve one, a false one and a fever dream, pick for yourself which you like best, though the chef recommends the latter. The chef always recommends fever dreams. "No, I really just want a pizza", you say, but the teenager on the other end keeps talking. “The naïve one is "the earth". It provides the context, the battlefield on which organic life disintegrates and reassembles itself, but that alone does not make it meta organic. A library is not the meta-text. It might be part of the meta text, just like the earth is almost certainly part of the meta organism, some especially volatile cell in its depths. Probably part of the stomach lining. What is the earth if not a site of digestion, microbes burying their way through mineral to degrade it into dirt, plants growing on the dirt, degrading it further, feeding fauna that feeds the microbes that feed the dirt that feed the plants? How does it feel to be digested? Better than sex? Or just different?” Is- Is that the question? You want to say “B” just to be done with this and place your order, but again they simply rattle on without pause for responses. You always forget that this isn't a two-way street. “The answer is obviously neither. Sex too is just digestion. The wrong answer is lobster. You fuckers always say lobster, like being the answer to one question suddenly makes something the answer to all questions. If God is a lobster then lobsters can't be meta organic. Double articulation precludes organicity by way of the atomic. Organisms cannot bear close examination because their particle-substructure necessarily reduces to cold thermodynamics if we allow it. Thus, life cannot have atoms and a metaorganism must therefore be pure macrocosm, no shears in sight. You love saying double articulation because Deleuze said it, because Land said it, because you don't know what it means. You love saying double articulation because you're bad at articulating simply. Since you only have one mouth, you can't speak in canon when necessary, so you can only ever say half of what you mean and have to mime the rest. No one ever taught you sign language, which results in most of it just being wild spasms. You say that's all you need, and your hand adds the other half by slapping you in the face. You agree and are slapped again. The meta organism must be amphibian, for organicity merely dwells within bifurcation as opposed to actuating it. It is bimedial, not bitactile. But furthermore it must be transgressively mortal as life is defined by death but can never accommodate it. The metaorganism can only die when it is no longer organic, and thus immortal, while in exchange it must always be dying, cancerous, skirting its own periphery. What this means concretely is that metaorganicity is an enormous, world encompassing frog that is perilously immortal until this descriptor escapes into irrelevance and therefore meaninglessness (which is from the start, therefore the peril). That a hussnasty confluence of these themes came into existence in Homestuck should be unsurprising due to the structure of pantempotal concurrence around which the work builds its circuitous ontology. Emergence of metaorganic fragments in this framework is not only likely but inevitable. All life is self-similar. Metavitality is already being cut apart through the influence of a creature whose life cycle is not only built around double articulation (Cali-born/ope), but which also utilizes this additional dimension by rapidly deterritorializing the organic space of interconnected temporality into unmitigated cosmic A-Death. Ghosts squirm. Nothingness fractures. That the virus which invites panmultiversal destruction into their reality is described as “a formality” is to be seen as an omen of the highest caliber. All viruses are a formality. Look at the way the digital has further encroached and tell me that this wouldn’t have happened either way, with or without a pandemic. Whatever is eating us has table manners at the very least.” You repeat the word “pizza”, almost a whisper this time, but they ignore you again. Not bothering to hang up, you turn back towards the screen. You don't think they deliver here anyway, but that doesn't make it less frustrating. More if anything. No one delivers here because the roads are cracked. The air is cracked. The "here" is cracked. Right through your skull and extending a bit into the algorithm behind it. You always forget that this isn't a two way street.