Sermon on the Cyber Mount

“The Christian resolve to find the world evil and ugly has made the world evil and ugly.”

— Nietzsche

“God is dead: but considering the state Man is in, there will perhaps be caves, for ages yet, in which his shadow will be shown.”

— Nietzsche

I have seen the multitudes of weary post-modern wanderers searching for the light to illuminate their brain in a vat. I have seen the chaotic bundles of particles lead into temptation by a connection to that conglomeration of cells they call a body. I fear their eternal salvation from a bestial life of animality in the wretched wilderness is threatened by demons of the most ghoulish kind. I have gathered here on this synthetic, deforested mountain with you on this disgustingly natural day to tell you about a motley crew of hell spawns spreading their torturous sensual terror and fiendish lies of non-symbolic life. For do not be fooled by their wicked ways and trickery. The symbolic is supreme, the alpha and the omega. In the beginning was the symbolic, and the symbolic was with homo symbolicus, and the symbolic was human life.

It has been proven by our priestly archaeologists. They have FACTS to back up their expert authority. Woe to those who shall be so bold as to challenge the holy realm of empirical research. Even if our cardinal anthropologists have miscalculated in their interpretative schemes, it matters not. For one cannot go back, at least until we develop a time machine, for we are thoroughly entangled in the symbolic and there is no escape. Thus spoke Bishop Derrida. But who would wish to visit such ghastly times when homo pre-symbolicus forsook their cognitive abilities and chose instead to constantly revel in the orgasmic pleasure of direct experience with a voluptuous earth? These primitivist heretics will surely be smote by the wrath of the Lord our Savior Science through the medium of its most faithfully representative son Noam Christomsky.

The masses have been living in darkness with their false gods of organized religion, exploitative economic systems, and petty political attachments which have aided, yet also impeded, unfettered scientific progress for too long. For the dawn of a new cyber age is upon us. The era of Science has come. Repent all ye sinners who have been naughty through following your instincts and valuing natural diversity over artificial standardization. Reason will reign for 1000 years on this inanimate rock we are unjustly bound by. For the experimental reign of the Scientific Revolution is approximately half complete. As we enter this second 500 year term of relativity and uncertainty principles, the space-time continuum of symbolic abstraction and distancing of scientific tinkering will boldly lead us where no other species, with their scientifically proven inferior intelligence, has ever dreamed of going before. The goal is immortality, and by Science we will either achieve it on this blue and green cesspool or we will travel to other parts of the universe in search of everlasting life.

A scientifically inclined humanity is the culmination of consciousness on this otherwise meaningless spherical object aimlessly rotating around our arch enemy The Sun. I know your ears have been stung and your minds polluted by my mentioning of this most formidable of our foes, but hear me out my biologically determined sheep programmed to accept hierarchy. The good shepherds in white coats are here to save you from perpetual torment at the hands of those who dance in the ninth circle of hell, inhabiting the deepest, darkest parts of the wilderness where the species traitors of science frolic in their games of debauchery and lazily loft about in their unproductive sloth. Such is the way of life the Sun encourages, with its unstinting bounty of abundance uneconomically distributed throughout this gleaming prison of a planet we must fervently work towards escaping. This tyranny of evolution and photosynthesis must be superceded by our own genetic engineering, for no alternative life of autonomy in connection to the disgracefully numerous animal and plant species taking up so much of our space must be allowed to lead us astray from our Scientifically ordained mission. The species traitors will burn at the concrete stake; they will face the fury of our most powerful gizmos like the sub-human specimen of Sodom and Gomorrah. Their words will be destroyed and prevented from being distributed by any bookseller, including AK press.

For their false tongues spewing a poisonous venom of immediacy cloud your reasoning powers with their fanciful tales of humanity not worshipping the Sun during the Paleolithic, not considering it sacred and not deriving morality from it, but simply being affiliated with it in a direct experiential bliss that predates the stately empires of yore whose subjects fell to their knees in praise of what they thought was divine. It is this most primitive of unscientific conditions that we must cast down with a hail of equations. For we can work with the symbolically inclined but the friends of the Neanderthal and pre-symbolic sapiens are the devilish children of nature. It is but a small step from the abstractions and emptiness of cave paintings and divine enslavement to a full immersion in the temple of microscopes and satellites. We shall prevail. We shall forcefully if necessary, voluntarily if willing, convert the unenlightened savages to the true way. For no one comes to the Holy Father Science except through the symbolic message of our messiah Christomsky.

So I call on all ye faithful taxpaying supporters of scientific endeavors and consumers of endless supplies of gadgets to renounce your childish desire to listen to those who would fight alongside the anacondas and alligators. For you should know these flesh and blood mirages conceal their true being as evil spirits ascended from the River Styx sent by the Sun itself to prey on your children. The glorious Christomsky has come as the spokesperson for Science, and he has a new covenant for sinners to enter into and absolve themselves of their pre-technological ways. For our Lord Science welcomes liberals and conservatives, anarchists and communists, leftists and post-leftists, jews and gentiles underneath the big tent of laborious manipulations. All who so yearn to earn their bread by the sweat of their brow, we congratulate thee for thou dismissal of barbaric thoughts and slovenly foraging. But the time has come where you will no longer need to face the possibility of a nasty, brutish and short façade of existence in the grasslands and deserts of the real, for Science will not stop until it has made its utilitarian mark on every last bit of nature.

And I saw Christomsky open his mouth and teach them, saying Blessed are the poor in internet connections, for no one will be denied computer access in the reign of technocracy. Blessed are the meek, for they will submit to microchip implantation. Blessed are the merciful, for they are the ones who refuse the primitivist call for resistance to our transcendent ways. Blessed are the symbol makers, for they are the prehistoric precedent for scientific separation. And as Christomsky delivered his words, a man in the crowd rose up and said, “Oh faithfully representative son of the Lord our Savior Science, I once was lost but now am found. You have healed my blindness to the greatness of a life of estrangement from wildness. You have shown me the wondrous capacity of your water skis to walk on water. But I wonder if the others will be as receptive.”

Christomsky was struck by the man’s astute observation. After running the data through a supercomputer, the messiah decided more evidence would be needed to sway the thickheaded. He thus consulted with Science. They debated for hours in the usual anarcho-democratic consensual processes, but eventually their work yielded a stunning conclusion. Christomsky descended Mount Pie in the Sky, and proclaimed “Let my people go you money hungry bastards. For a post-profit motive society has arrived and we will need new laws to replace the old ones. We wouldn’t want anarchy, would we?” And so the new Commandments, entitled Lessons in Bookchinology, were bestowed upon the audience. 1. Thou shall have no other gods but Science, for this god is truly Omnipotent (virtual reality), Omniscient (artificial intelligence) and Omnipresent (electricity). 2. Thou shall not kill, unless of course it is pygmy foragers or gorillas living on land containing coltan you need to mine in order to make cell phones. 3. Thou shall not steal, unless it is the joy one gets from non-sedentary life. 4. Thou shall honor and keep holy Descartes’ birthday, for never must we think that historical icons are alienating or that specialists are unnecessary. 5. Thou shall not lie, unless it is done to convert a pre-homo symbolicus savage to the Church of Chemistry. 6. Thou shall not take Inter-Planetary Space Exploration’s name in vain. 7. Thou shall not commit adultery with your neighbors scientifically designed android fuck toy. 8. Thou shall not covet thy neighbors widgets for all are welcome to delve into mediation as they please by unrelentingly visiting communal stores filled with the last techno-device. 9. Thou shall not autonomously make anything for cybernetic factory production is the sole source of survival and enjoyment. 10. Thou shall honor thy parents and schoolteachers for they are the key to each generation’s adherence to Science.

Recognizing the difficulty in remembering these principal points of Bookchinology, Christomsky boiled them down to one key commandment and spoketh thus. “Thou shall slavishly obey Science by disconnecting yourself from non-symbolic ecstasy and pre-domesticated cornucopias.” Hallelujah! Praise the Lord our Savior Science! For it has created our world of asphalt, skyscrapers and medical experimentation on animals as a benevolent redemption from the howling wilderness always threatening our concoctions. Now we’ll be passing along the collection plate for we couldn’t dominate the world without your generosity.

Kindly place your dignity in the wastebasket on the way out.