Everything Everywhere All At Once: “In the seventh century in what is now Scotland but at the time was known as Northumbria, there lived a man named Cuthbert. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne. He was a bishop, a hermit, and a monk, back in the time before clerical careerism when one person could indeed be all of those things. Starting out, a young Cuthbert had taken religious orders and lived in a monastery with other monks, but he quickly found this life a bit too fancy for his liking. Seeking greater austerity, Cuthbert eventually got permission from his abbot to move some distance away from the other brothers into a cave. That was fine. Religious people have always been a little eccentric, and the faithful of Anglo-Saxon Britain were no exception. Still though, the brothers at the monastery worried about him, off all on his own, and so occasionally they would make the hike over to his cave to ensure that Cuthbert was doing okay.”
Money for Nothing and Nothing for Money: “Financialization was an effort to replace the economy of real production with a hologram of production. Financialization is a racket — and a racket, remember, is an effort to get something for nothing, that is, dishonestly. The blob feeds and thrives on dishonesty, its favorite food. Financialization seeks to replicate value not from wealth-producing activity but from things that only claim to represent wealth: stocks, bonds, currencies, and anything else that can pretend to hold value, clear up to notions and wishes. Its operations are based on ‘derivatives’ because they aim to derive additional ‘wealth’ from things that signify wealth, but which are not wealth itself. Each iteration of a derivative further abstracts its value from the real things originally signified, such as revenue-producing businesses, interest-bearing loans, leases, and contracts for delivery of commodities. Derivatives can be understood as false wealth, and when enough of them accumulate in a financialized economy, they will blow up the economy, spewing wreckage across an economic landscape.”
Nick Land on AI Acceleration: “The process we are witnessing is not coming from the past but from the future. Therefore, it cannot be stopped…Acceleration is similar to how the Greeks thought about their gods. You cannot stop the Gods, but you can participate in one god’s conflict with another god…The film The Matrix is to technological acceleration what idolatry is in religion: It captures the idea of a false superficial reality falling apart, but it’s still too profane and earthly: It blocks the truth more than it reveals.”
Sympathy for the Boomer: “The Winter Solstice approaches. This is Big Medicine. For those who kept (or keep still) to the old ways, they made it custom to greet the darkness of the long night with fire and defy its cold and death by adorning their home with living evergreen. For those of us who have placed our hope in Christ, Deity took on flesh and was born of a woman during this time. I believe these are potent auspices of a grand mystery. As many have intuited since time immemorial, it is during this season in our course through the heavens that a powerful truth touches the human heart and reveals itself in depths we can barely fathom and only begin to grasp through the portal of ritual and tradition; it whispers to us that even in the darkest visitations light refuses to abandon us, and though surrounded by the void its brightness shines all the more dear.”
The Red Hand Files: “Our truest and deepest relationships allow us the freedom to voice an opinion without fear of it being detrimental to the partnership. Disagreement tests the resilience and complexity of our relationships and need not be a destabilising force, it can instead be the thing that both toughens and softens the bond between two people. Often, to our surprise, we find that our most heated arguments are the upward sparks created by two colliding virtues.”
The Storm in the Soul: “It was at Coludi priory that [St.] Cuthbert first entered the sea to pray. In remote Egypt, St Antony could temper himself in the furnace of the desert sun, but north Britain offers no Christian the same opportunity. Here, the desert is the stone-grey sea. And so, Cuthbert does his true work in the water. Every night he enters the dark tempest of it. He raises his arms. He will not emerge again until the sun’s first light rises, as the True Light one day shall, in the east.”
