You think you know where you’re going but you’re not going anywhere.
The world as presented is not the world.
You’re in a small village in the mountains of Nepal and barely a week ago Kathmandu erupted in violence. You see no violence. You hear no violence. One morning, you walk through the town, and you notice the large white house now has burnt and blown-out windows. A week later, you go into Kathmandu and are confronted by the long arched windows of Singha Durbar (or Lion Palace) framed bonfires swelling out from their neoclassical cage to turn the night red but in the morning all that was left was the scorched aftermath. You are removed from the act and the seeing of the act is filtered—through news that is 6:1 paid PR people to independent journalists—through social media that feeds you a personalized stream of information, misinformation, skewed information—through the chatrooms of your friends and the twitter feeds of your favorite celebrities. What you see is not the thing as it is.
As your day evolves into a haiku of habits. As you wait for the moment when everything turns clear as crystal and a way out of your own decaying self. Who do you think you are? Who are you in truth?
We seem to have forgotten that we live in the 21st century and that we are actively working to end our world. We pretend that we can continue to evolve in classical Hegelian fashion from thesis (modernism) to antithesis (postmodernism) to synthesis (metamodernism) but that evolution assumes that the paradigm of progress is still progressing gently up its incline of innovation and toward some partial perfection. When—who thinks like that anymore?
1. Metamodernism
What is metamodernism? It’s have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too-ism. It’s a theory that just explains how people have grown sick of post-modernism even while they still practice a softer more emotional postmodernism. It is a theory that adds nothing but only explains the empty and purposeless trajectory of art in an age where civilization is literally ending. How tone deaf will Wes Anderson look when AMOC collapses or god forbid, America slides into autocracy under a bright orange strongman?
Because the train has indeed gone off the rails, folks. The train has become a bear and we are caged inside the belly of this beast as it cavorts towards the cliff. The end is more than nigh, it’s our daily nightmare. And the nightmares keep getting darker.
But what you see is not what you get.
The proponents of metamodernism claim that it engages with the resurgence of sincerity, hope, and romanticism while not forfeiting what we’ve learned from postmodernism. They claim it’s the natural successor of postmodernism and what we get when we take postmodern strategies and turn them on themselves. They call on the truly wonderful Everything Everywhere All at Once and David Foster Wallace, as well as Zadie Smith and others. And yes it accurately diagnoses a real cultural phenomenon, offers real epistemological tools, provides a vocabulary for discussing contemporary art, but it’s also vague and ill-defined, lacks critical power, avoids the harder work of choosing a position and acting on it, and remains confined to niche journals. And—ultimately—metamodernism is boring. It’s just a way to explain the lingering effects of postmodernism in a world that has moved beyond the polite irony of the late 20th century on account of it’s kind of sort of on fire right now, and the flames just keep on rising. Metamodernism doesn’t speak to the now. It speaks to the then-in-now.
We are watching as our world comes undone one extreme weather event—one autocratic power grab, one dystopian technology—at a time. We must see with new eyes and listen with new ears. As in—the end is a beginning—the eye is a hook that’s hooked us—to come unhooked you need to separate from the beast that eats from inside out—the internet, the AI, the economy that fuels them. The coming dead pray for the imminent ending of our systems of control and our endless diarrhea of plastic and the chokehold of our bureaucracies and the blindness—the constant blindness of all and every—because the eye is a hook and it’s been hooked.
Metamodernism will be a joke in the post-apocalypse. It is the little movement that couldn’t. It is a perfect example of the ostrich and his proverbial head in the sand.
Instead, we need to find the Real and to find the Real, we let go realism, surrealism, sincerity, or irony because we are suffering from a parasite that eats reality and excretes fantasy. The body politic has turned sick from a blinding fear of what terrors it is unleashing upon tomorrow even as tomorrow is flying up to meet today even as we barrel over the cliff.
This reality parasite is an algorithm. It’s a cancer of screens. It’s greed and complacency. But also the delusion of the artistic and intellectual class that we’re still living in the world of the 20th century and all its rules and hopes and possibilities when we’re already dead. We just don’t know it yet.
Metamodernism is the epitome of this delusion.
When here we are time travelers from the dead world of the future waiting for the apocalypse to catch up to the present.
Truths turned into truisms. The realism of the early twentieth century evolved into the fakery of the post-modern and its obnoxiously audacious claims, tantalizing at first but ultimately inane and nihilistic, that led the way directly to the post-truth age and its rampant authoritarianism and casual double speak. Lyotard’s truths evolved into a set of truisms that allowed for the end of America.
Although deeper than this is the move from a literature of meaning to a literature of meaninglessness. From Dostoevsky to Nathaniel West to Don Delillo. From a literature searching for meaning to a literature facing the ultimate meaninglessness to a literature that begins with meaninglessness and doesn’t really go anywhere. The history of modern literature in three movements.
But the worst is metamodernism. Metamodernism panders to itself. It is endlessly having its cake and eating it too as the sinkholes proliferate and the list of extinct species grows. It is a way for academics to legitimize their existence. It is forever looking back. It is the 20th century in drag as the 21st.
The answer to our times is a contemporary gnosticism.
2. Broligarchy
Recently, I watched a video by Carole Cadwalladr talking about what a digital coup looks like from April of this year, and in this video she talks about the broligarchy, by which she means the tech bro universe working in conjunction with the Trump administration as the international order collapses. “It is already later than we think,” she says.
Broligarchy, according to Cadwalladr refers to the alignment of interests running through Silicon Valley to the White House, marshaling global platforms and utilizing your data to create a coming autocracy-without-borders.
“It’s always about the data,” Cadwalladr says and the way to circumvent the data harvesting is to see differently. Look differently. Rather than trying to broadcast yourself. “We already have to act as if we live in East Germany and Instagram is the Stasi.” We are trapped into the machine through our eyes. We need to step outside of the technoverse. We need to look away. We need to build rooms outside the information universe, where we can rebuild civilization from scratch.
But more than this, we need discipline. “Privacy is power,” Cadwalladr says. “The moments I felt most powerless are the moments I was the most powerful.” We need to let go of the dreams that capture us and create new dreams in our more private moments and our more private spaces and that incorporate our local communities and that engage and involve us in the boring day-to-day.
Write by hand. Draw. Make music without recording it. Have meals where nobody documents them.
Let go of your eyes, so you can begin to see. Like Luke Skywalker at the end of A New Hope. That letting go is how we escape the gauntlet of internet subterfuge. Because the essential things are unseeable, unsalable, unknowable.
We know what we see and we know that what we see is not what we know. We have no ideological underpinnings. We have only belief. The future is coming. We write for this coming future. The world we live in is based on many elaborate fakeries. We write for the unspoken truths. We scream with our hands and we scramble through garbage for there is no place for us in the now of now. We will only have a place when we step out of here and into the outside of things.
As the instruments of power cannibalize their own citizenry and yet I do nothing. I sit and watch from the mountains of Nepal—as the police open fire on the protesters—as the halls of government burn—as the rolling curfews limit our movement—as the future becomes a shifting collage of the various unpleasant outcomes.
Looking at that video of Cadwalladr and comparing it to her talk of 2019 that led to the ongoing attack by Farage et al, you will see a dramatic difference. The younger Cadwalladr is bright and full of energy, the older one is skittish even as she speaks out with a dramatic boldness. Injured in her soul even when she says the things that no one else will say. We need to be like this.
Because you see it as hopeless. You want to walk on water and take up arms against a sea of troubles and kill the Buddha you see on the road so you can come to know your inherent Buddha nature and dance with the devil and ride shotgun with Presley and all the other metaphors and fantasies of the doomed when faced with their doomed status. But all you see are the four walls of the world you occupy and there are no doors out of it and this closed system is itself toppling over a cliff as you watch all the things in said room slide sickeningly to one side. This is you.
Let’s take you a step further.
We’re experiencing compounding system failure, with feedback loops between systems, while at the same time experiencing reality through layers of mediation that distort our perception.
You are stuck in a glittering trap. It looks pretty but all its prettiness is also the walls of the room. You know this already. You laugh about this with your friends. You reference the invisible prison and that scene in My Dinner with Andre where Andre Gregory talks about New York as a prison. But all the same, you continue to stare into the glittering trap.
3. Why Gnostic
The first time I heard the gnostic label was a Plastic Pills video on Why America has Gone Insane, in which he talks about imaginary America v. hyperreal America v. reality America, and specifically he makes the claim that what you do not see is and what you see is not, hence the idea of gnosticism.
It’s worth watching that video in its entirety. It goes back to Ivy Ledbetter Lee and the invention of PR and what it’s evolved into, i.e. messaging, but the most striking moment is around the 27 minute mark, when he strings together what feels like an endless stream of news clips referring to “Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry,” a phrase that immediately undermines confidence in any stat associated with it. Lee’s legacy comes down to this effort to undermine anything like objective truth by always trying to spin a fact as biased if it’s inconvenient and spin the client (Kamala, Israel, Trump) as positive through some clever and catchy phrase, i.e. “captains of industry.”
The news is not the news. It is only the most news-seeming.
At the heart of our current civilizational crisis is an epistemological issue that goes all the way back to Hume and Al-Ghazali, both of whom claimed that causation cannot be inherently known—the former as part of a larger epistemological minimalism and the latter as part of a theological maximalism. Hume’s gives us the example of one billiard ball clicking against another, and declares that for all we know an angel slipped between the two to cause the second’s motion—it is an act of faith to believe that the cue caused the motion of the ball—while Al-Ghazali describes fire brought to a piece of cotton—our idea that the fire causes the cotton to blacken is also an act of faith. Kant answered Hume’s skepticism by declaring the world beyond our minds unknowable in itself. Al-Ghazali answered his own skepticism by declaring faith as the ipso facto foundation of knowledge, and specifically dhawq, the idea of “tasting” knowledge. We want to revert to a world where knowledge is born from the inner eye. Only when we can see ourselves can we see anything at all. The current failure of the imagination is not just a failure to find a solution for climate change, but a failure to imagine for ourselves at all. Instead, we allow the world to imagine for us and by so doing cease to be able to see in as once we did. This trend started with Kant’s reply to Hume and the severing of knowledge from world, but Al-Ghazali shows us a way back from our relativistic and solipsistic failure to build a coherent social truth.
But—again—the problem is not just that the news is no longer objective—Post-Truth and Fox News and Lyotard’s bastard grandchildren and all of that—the problem is that knowledge was never going to be objective. It always serves a particular purpose and the Enlightenment and its dream of a world founded entirely on reason—a knowledge free from the corrupting influences of emotion, imagination, the biological reality of the knower, was always going to be a fallacy. Al-Ghazali got it more right than Kant. We, the gnostics of the end times must embrace the fundamental unknowability of the thing-in-itself as an illusion that manifests the mind and sweep aside our doubt in a Godless universe with a courageous heart willing to look our death in the face. Gone are the days of rational religionists declaring that the mind creates the world as understood. The ever-evolving skepticism this mindset gave rise to morphed easily and naturally into the algorithms of our contemporary society—from Kant to Freud, from Nietzsche to Adorno, from Camus to Carlin. Engage once again with the unseen world and by so doing, step outside those algorithms.
The heart knows what the mind cannot but to find your heart means living among the downtrodden. It means to see with the prophetic eye that cannot be so easily captured by these trends of the trend-setters and their efforts to be forever fiddling with our ganglia. It means to accept your own blindness even as you reach out blindly for a future you can only guess at like a person stumbling through a cave running their fingers along the contours of the wall in fluttering runs and pokes and hoping against hope that somewhere will come a break in the blackout. But unlike Al-Ghazali, it also means living in a Godless universe because to be gnostic is to belong to no known belief system, to be neither Christian, Buddhist, Atheist, or any other denominating factor, to believe in no object, a faith outside of faith. Let go of everything—as the power grid fails—as we fail together. Share in the vulnerability of the herd. The house is burning but every time you try to run out of it, you only make it worse. Sit in the burning house.
Cadwalladr talks about building “rooms outside the information universe.” Know your actual neighbors. Develop an analog internet of real-world networks that are both local and international. Localize yourself in the international many-minded mind and bring the international community into your living room. Resist by ceasing to exist in the seen world of the internet and rather to prop up the many unseen worlds. Civilization is the Demiurge. Gnosis can only come outside the belly of this beast. Extricate yourself.
The original goal of Gnosticism was to free the divine spark within each person from the prison of the material body and world, allowing it to return to the spiritual realm, but in the 21st century, our ambitions are much simpler. Free yourself from the prison of the virtual body and world, allowing yourself to return to the human. Become your own savior and save the world in the process.
Move beyond the dialectic and to a multilectic understanding in which empirical impossibilities coexist with political choose-your-own-adventure and a spiritual whodunnit. The cycle of history is shattering upon the wheels of progress and all that’s left are pieces and we’re here to pick up the pieces, but in our eagerness we’re reaching into the armageddons to come and reaching with fingers that have forgotten what it means to touch. We’ve been blinded by the prosthetic imaginations our masters have built for us.
4. The Future is Spiritual
The core of this new gnosticism is the imagination, a place deemed unapproachable by western philosophers, but the imagination is mechanism, organ, and engine, the mechanism through which we perceive a world beyond the immediacy of ourselves and this moment, the organ through which the mind functions, and the engine by which both self and world are continuously brought into being. Two more Muslim philosophers can give us the key to understanding what the imagination is and how to approach it. Pure imagination, according to Suhrawardi is a way to understand phenomena beyond the sensory and intellectual world. To Suhrawardi, your imagination is not mere fantasy, but the sense you use to see the suffering of others and see past your own suffering. It is the way to walk when you step out of the glittering maze and into the lived world and the people failing everywhere in it. We start from this position of Suhrawardi’s and go on to declare that the imagination is the most essential element of mind. You can only see out if you can see in. You can only see out if there’s a you to see it. You are the first and primary object of your imagination.
Suhrawardi’s philosophy positions imagination not as fantasy but as a faculty that accesses the “world of suspended images” or mundus imaginalis (see Henry Corbin’s essay of the same name for more on this) an actual ontological realm between matter and pure spirit. He distinguishes between “knowledge-by-presence” (direct, intuitive knowing) and “acquired knowledge” (representational, intellectual understanding). With the collapse of the latter, we require a return to the former.
Corbin emphasized that imagination is “not a mere fantasy but a means of accessing immaterial reality.” This is exactly what we mean when we refer to the imagination as mechanism, organ, and engine, but we argue that immaterial reality includes all that is not immediately sensible, in short everything beyond the senses. It is for this reason that the imaginal is at the core of gnostic practice. A disciplined imagination is the best school, the greatest teacher, and is how to restart a culture from the ground up from oral tradition on out.
Stop trying to think about reality and instead be present in it. Sit in your imagination as perceptual organ: from the imaginal world is “the land of visions” accessed through active imagination, where spiritual pilgrims encounter their “Perfect Nature,” but on to the world of symbols and the everyday world as just different unfoldings of mind from the airier heights of the visionary on down to the everydayness of our equally ephemeral laundry lists. Perceive the suffering of others down to the minutest details of their heart in your mind’s eye. Practice allegorical seeing. Look at the world around you—the tech bro, the algorithm, the devastation and horror—but when you do, look beyond to the symbolic underpinning and the overarching theme. The concrete is symbolic and the symbolic is concrete simultaneously.
The other Muslim philosopher I want to talk about, Ibn Arabi, also claims the world is imagination. He says of the imagination, “It is neither existent nor nonexistent, neither known nor unknown, neither affirmed nor denied.” What he says is true of the imagination. It is true of you. It is true of all that is or could be.
Embrace paradox as method. For Ibn Arabi, “the whole world is imaginational.” Recognize yourself as He/not He, She/not She, They/not They. You are both simultaneously Real and unreal, Being and nonexistence. You are complicit in the systems destroying the world AND you are the resistance to those systems. You are the algorithm’s product AND it’s subverter. Don’t resolve this paradox—inhabit it.
In Buddhist logic, there are four corners. There is that which is true, that which is untrue, that which is both true and untrue, and that which is neither true nor untrue. You are the third corner and the real world you inhabit is also this. It is a thing that is that also is not. The fallacies of the internet are fourth corner. Exist in the positive paradox of reality, not in the negative paradox of the virtual.
Write to explore what you don’t know. Get lost regularly in dangerous neighborhoods and unfamiliar countries. The known is the false. The known is the treadmill and this is a treadmill situated inside a larger landscape currently barreling over the cliff. Your goal is to find your way out of this larger landscape and to do that, you need to explore its most outlandish and alien landscapes. It is not easy to find a way into the depths of your imagination just as it is not easy to find a way out of the depths of your imagination. You need to do both.
The known is the glittering trash. The known is your comfort zone. The known is the techno-authoritarianism of today. The known is boring and worse than that it’s false. Only the unknown is fact.
This is neither a political or a religious or an artistic manifesto. It is all and none of them. It is what happens when the universe becomes unmoored—politically, economically, ecologically, epistemologically. When the paradigm of progress ceased to function, when there was no more future to work towards, no “better tomorrow” in which the experimental art of today is guiding us—when our climate models started blowing up and the global world order started breaking down—the need for this manifesto arose.
You see the invisible world. This is why you’re here. What you see is not the-thing-in-itself but a frame in which to place yourself. To inhabit the seen universe as it is—this is the challenge. Rather than using it as the screen on which we paint ourselves. The seen universe only has agency when we do not. Only when we blind ourselves does it see. Only when we are the universe looking back at ourselves, do we see.
The Ox Cart of the Buddhists and the LLMs of Silicon Valley are near identical. Their lack of inherent existence does nothing to the actual usage of them. We gasp at the seeming intelligence of the LLM because we too are nothing but language mimicry machines that convert reality into fantasy and the devices you surround yourself with only reinforce this process of unseeing the world but you can turn unseeing to your advantage. Turn your biases against yourself. Stop trying to make sense of the world.
Focus on no exact point and you will perceive all possible points indistinctly.
Gnosis is direct, experiential knowledge of divine reality, but what does this actually mean? It means the end is the beginning and the beginning is the end. It means seeing through a glass darkly. It means constructing castles in the sand but knowing that they’re sand. Can there be a divine reality and a dead God? Can we be atheists and still have a profound relationship with God? Think permanent revolution plus radical nonparticipation plus the creation of a new culture plus seeing-without-seeing. The hand you create with is the zombie hand of a dead deity. The struggle you fight is for no purpose but because to not fight is not an option. You are the youths in Hong Kong hopelessly throwing their lives away. You are creating new forms of art and literature even as the world around you goes up in smoke.
Because the world as is is not the true world. And the art that you make is not the real art. The real art is what happens to you when you make it. The real world is what happens after the ending of the world.
The killing of history and humanity requires your participation. Your complicity is necessary for their fictions to continue to function.
5. The Hope Is
Experience the freedom of the already dead. Or, as Roy Scranton puts it in Learning to Die in the Anthropocene: “The greatest challenge we face is a philosophical one: understanding that this civilization is already dead.” The world you inhabit is already doomed. Live for what’s to come. Dream yourself into the dead future. How will you survive it? How will it come about? How does this knowledge change who you are now? Imagine what paths you might thread through the coming tsunami.
Create art that can’t be monetized or algorithmically optimized—art emerges from the barzakh between what is and what could be—art that documents the unseeable—the suffering algorithms hide, the joy that doesn’t photograph well—the worlds of the mind obfuscated by Disney simplifications and Blockbuster storytelling logic.
We need practices for perceiving reality that can’t be easily captured or gamed by algorithms—not just so as to more properly live in the now but also to live for the afterlife of our already dead civilization. We are not rugged individualists but loose collectives functioning in our autonomous TAZ ecosystems. We do not dabble in utopian fantasy but develop a practical imagination—an imagination of the spirit is also everyday and poetic and political—both functioning in the paradigm of the failing system and building alternatives to that system. Think experimental pulp and role-playing game epistemologies. We are watchers in these dark times. We study the patterns of the past. We percieve the trends of the end times.
Literature as witness and as prophecy. Literature that teaches survival skills disguised as stories or presents itself as puzzle pieces looking for a puzzle. Literature that preserves knowledge for after, that influences which pathway we take through the building crisis, that creates poetries that can sing in the dark.
This is a world of small, interconnected communities. Not preppers retreating to bunkers but people embedded in place. Locally rooted but internationally connected. We will develop a culture that treats attention as sacred. Where looking away from screens is liberation. Imagination is contagious.
Autocracies are consolidating. The broligarchy is winning. As the fires spread and the ice sheets melt and the climate veers off toward Paleozoic extremes. This isn’t hypothetical but current facts and the necessary outcomes of current facts—but we’re not as helpless as we feel. The goal isn’t to prevent the end but to ensure something survives it. Hope is a discipline not a feeling. The art we make now is for the survivors.
And finally—why? Why do we do this?
Because fighting is better than surrendering. Because the act of resistance itself—even doomed resistance—preserves your humanity. Because the Hong Kong youths throwing their lives away aren’t idiots—they’re the only ones who understood that some things demand witness even in defeat.
