SONIC THANATICISM. A Sensology of The Sonic Capital

taken from the book “Ultrablack of Music”

you can order the book here or here

1

Consumer Citizen

Citizenship in the nation states of the early twenty-first century is inextricably bound to the praxis of consumption. Only if you consume in the requested, orderly, and obedient way, you can perform your full rights as a citizen. If you deny, question, ridicule, resignify or recontextualize the praxis of consumption and its sensological, panacoustic and nanopolitical implications, you might factually lose your citizen rights by policing actions directed towards your everyday life and you political agency. The citizen is therefore the main commodity and its consumer at the same time. In this way, it is an immensely valuable and literally inexhaustable asset to maximize sonic capital – and to expand it further, beyond any sustainable limits, in the direction of its full annihilation. This annihilation is its main goal, according to thanaticist capitalism: “a social order which subordinates the production of use values to the production of exchange value, to the point that the production of exchange value threatens to extinguish the conditions of existence of use value.” (McKenzie Wark)

2

Forces of Authoritarianism

There are four forces intrinsic to the cultural development in the early twenty-first century that foster the further unfolding of authoritarian and thanaticist capitalism on a planetary scale. These forces did evolve independently. They rely on cultural, technical and societal developments that do not necessarily depend on each other. However, in the current shape of technocultural development, they indeed seem to emerge almost consequentially out of each other. As soon as the critical mass of the first two are established, the last two might almost seem to snap into place, inevitably. These four forces are: the Commodification, the Dispositive, the Domestication, and the Ubiquity. How are these four fources then related to each other? The four forces characterize consumer products that seem at first to be just a new appendix connected to the consumer—but in the end they actually turn the consumer into a domesticized appendix of this new product. Be it a hardware gadget or a software app, a network you are permanently logged into or a hobby, an amateur fad, they draw you with an ever increasing intensity into their succinctly established forcefield of widespread connectivity, of prolific tracking, of profiling, and of ubiquitously employed pattern recognition for surveillance purposes. Consumer citizens are being consumed and domesticized in this ubiquitous dispositive—and they like it. Consumption and domestication can be considered as representing mutually fundamental conditions: they evolve out of each other as major categories of everyday life, of consumer citizenship, and of mere existence in consumer cultures and technoculturally driven societies—at least since the nineteenth century with the inception of Western industrialization. The two other categories though, dispositive and ubiquity, are not necessarily foundational to everyday life as they are far more relying on rather arbitrary developments of recent decades—only tentatively beginning in the second half of the twentieth century with the dissemination of Westernized mass media and its global networks. Briefly said: consumption and domestication dominate societies, on the one hand, without necessarily implying the ubiquitous distribution of sensory dispositives—these ubiquitous dispositives, on the other hand, are strictly unthinkable without relying on the grounding practices of domestication and consumption. Between these four powerful and radiating nuclei of consumption, dispositive, domestication, and ubiquity the known forms of surveillance emerge as the culturally and societally structuring forces one can observe in the twenty-first century, expanding and colonizing all areas known to humanoid aliens like us. In conclusion, they represent all in all the generative forces that conceive contemporary forms of authoritarianism.

3

Mediated Disappointment

New media hardware is one of the main material commodities in ubiquituously connected and pervasively monetarized societies of the early twenty-first century. They incite with every new release and every new update or version an easily exploitable desire for new sensory and experiential pleasures. The sensological addictions and dependencies of consumer citizens are attached to precisely these new media commodities. However, these commodities necessarily and recurrently promise too much. The artificial paradise I might imagine after having been object to one of the most recent commodity propaganda screenings surely is way more complex, intense and addictive than any factually given media commodity could ever provide. Therefore, a major disappointment between my imagination what this new gadget could provide for me, on the one side, and on the other side, my actual, mostly ridicoulus, weird, annoying or even repulsive experience with it, this disappointment again and again escorts the use and the domestication of new media commodities. Disappointment then must be regarded as one of the core experiences of consumer citizens with new media commodities. The addictive quality of these commodities and my consumption is precisely locate in this void of being disappointed, lost, alienated, yet still desiring, urging, curious and longing. In most cases though, this very disappointment is then being mediated and mitigated by individidual, social, and cultural habits of domesticizing those new media commodities and one’s sad and disappointing experience with it. You and I, we are trained in downplaying our disappointment and to assign it to our individual shortcomings, our incapabilities, our lacking skills and tricks in enjoying the products of these new media apparatuses. It cannot be the products themselves that are insufficiently, sloppyly, ignorantly if not outright hostilely designed. It must be our sensory corpuses that are incapable of understanding the complexity of these commodities, of dealing with our own flaws, and overcoming them with an intense training to meet the carefully crafted demands of these superior if not transcendent and precious gifts of contemporary capitalism. You are deficient and antiquated – not the commodities you crave, you are aroused by, you consume and desire.

4

Nanopolitics

Nanopolitics are everywhere. Neither are they however present in the foreground our lives nor intensely discussed, most of the time. They enter our everyday lives by way of all the micro-decisions one makes, by way of sensory preferences and routines, by way of inclinations and aversions consumer citizens might tend to follow. The sensologies of this era operate precisely through this form of politics. Whereas the established concepts of macropolitics and micropolitics refer to the state and nation politics or to regional and institutional politics, nanopolitics refers to a thoroughly implicit, camouflaged and subversive form of politics. It operates with and even within your desires and senses, obsessions and addictions, your pleasure and disdain. Nanopolitics govern and predetermine all the individual, sensory and corporeal constellations, situations and practices between body politics, perceptual politics, and pragmatics. Nanopolitics represent the sensorially intrusive operations with which the consumer culture in the early twenty-first century gets a final and lasting anchor in your and my affects and sensibilities. Examples for nanopolitics are all the gadgets and tools, games and applications, their audiovisual effects and narrative particles, that execute an everyday seduction: on one’s skin, in your nerve net, and on my practices of listening, seeing, touching, moving in everyday life. Drawing its players, its consumers, its users, readers, viewers into their outstretched system of tracking and surveillance, of data mining, of profiling by purchase, of labor and a new phase of somewhat ursprüngliche Akkumulation. A camouflaged colonization of the intimate and personal, an actual imperialist colonization of the individual bodies and perceptual techniques of all consumer citizens takes place. They are the actual body snatchers. They occupy any perceptual technique one could imagine, any actually practiced sensory habit. Politics of this kind are at your fingertips, you are contaminated with and occupied by them with every swoosh and swipe, with every obedient listening or indulging praise. The nanopolitics of the touchscreen, for instance, is an invasion of one’s skin and dexterity—as already was the introduction of the typewriter, the computer keyboard, or the computer mouse. Nanopolitics are kneading and thoroughly rearranging every single sensory corpus in reach. The skills of appropriating and domesticating the ubiquitously dominant apparatuses, connected and streaming incessantly, might reach a point where their sensory volume, their overwhelmingly massive impact on individual corpuses and sensibilities, is then turned into one major physical function without which you and I cannot anylonger imagine being alive. Pervasively, nanopolitcs are transforming rigidly and without further ado the sensory body of any humanoid playing with, using or consuming them: There is no distance in nanopolitics. Consumer citizens are swallowed, dismembered, digested, and defecated by sonic thanaticism.

5

Panacoustic Society


Networked societies revolving around commodities gravitate towards becoming a panacoustic society in full bloom. Whereas Foucault’s analysis of Bentham‘s Panopticon focused on its benefits in providing a seemingly full visual and as such external and moralist control, the concept of the Panacousticon is bringing to the foreground of our attention an incessant and ubiquitous sensory bond: a ubiquitous connection through sensory percepts, a visceral, corporeal experiences, and the shared situated, material and sensible circumstances. The panacoustic society transcends the edificices and mechanics of the panoptic society. It chains and imprisons all citizens – not only selected subjects in cases of military training, disease control, school teaching or jurisdictional correction – through its pervasive sensory presence. Sonic consumers are therefore claustrophobically enveloped in articulations, requests, and everyday practices of this pervasive sensology. They domesticate themselves, joyfully, ecstatically, and almost with a hedonistic pleasure, as an intrinsic constitutent of this contemporary sound culture and sound economy: as they enjoy it, as they play with it, as they perform in it, all those sonic patterns they assimilate, all those sonci experiences they encounter, they draw them even further into the panacoustic entanglements. These sonic technologies of the self might make our lives joyful and rich—and at the same time they turn me and you to merely functioning modules in the economy of sound and in the panacoustic society. Indeed, sonic consumers enjoy, horribile dictu, how all their single moves are recorded and answered with sonic signals: they expect even their every single action in the public sphere and in their personal spaces, in intimate relations and in public self-presentations, to be recorded, to be exploited, to be calculated – and to be fed into the generative labor, developing new sonic artifacts and new sensory commodities providing future pleasures for them. Sonic societies within thanaticist capitalism are basically panacoustic societies. To sonic consumers, though, its sensology of surveillance does not represent a threat or a horrifying dystopia. They have embraced the safety in ubiquitous surveillance. They have learned – again: joyfully! – to love and to crave them, to be digested within their results, their apparatuses, their probes. Sonic consumers are an intrinsic function of these operations. As a consequence, also your work as a sound designer and as a sonic prosumer contributes mainly to this expanding surveillance state. The silencing dispositive is running smoothly and your belief in the optimization by corporeal and sensory training and refinement contributes every single day to the maintenance of this state of sonic capital. If one fails to comply or to succeed, it clear that this might all just be their personal fault: they need to train better, they need to optimize their time management, their sensory management, their media consumption, their desire to communicate or to relate to other sonic and sensory prosumers. They need to work harder, party harder, get harder in order to endure this lifestyle and the requests of the sensory workforce and the panacoustic society. This dream of total exploitability and maximum optimization in order to contribute to this exploitation, this ultimate thanaticist utopia is step by step these days being realized by fostering the fourfold, sensological forcefield of authoritarianism.

6

Sensology

A sensology is the contemporary cultural form of what was known previously as an ideology. However, following Mario Perniola, whereas an ideology is represented and distributed in the nineteenth and early twentieth century largly by means of written treatises, party programmes, political speeches and rallies, all these formats seem to be almost irrelevant at present times. Already in the late twentieth and even more so in the early twenty-first century the formats by which ideologies are represented, distributed and implemented in people’s beliefs and habits are the formats of media commodities, entertainment formats, and experiences of sensory pleasure: they promote a sensology. This sensology is a combined one, consisting out of the humanoid sensorium on the one side and on the other side it is made out of the technological apparatus. Both consitutents interlocked provide the framework of what can be sensed, what can be thought, what can be conceptualized or discussed. Every single Mindfulness-training or dietary requirement, every Alt-Right-podcast, blockbuster superhero-movie or computer game, every touchpad and every VR-headset you and I might be using now and then – they are all operating sensologically. Renowned agitators or authors or even theorists, philosophers, they are no longer needed. The Entertainment exists. Consumer products of a sensological kind do not need to take a tedious detour via an argument, via lengthy proofs and evidence: sensological commodities transform your sensory system, unmitigated and unmediated. Your body and my body constitute therefore the main battlefield of sensological warfare: the conflicts of sensology are carried out in you and in me – physically, materially, sensory. Consumer citizens of the twenty-first century eat and smell, hear and swallow, touch and move into the sensory ideology of their times. The ideology that envelopes us is a sensology that already inhabitates us. It nourishes and entertains us, it distracts and excites us, it arouses and it relaxes us. It is operating in your and in my very corpus, in the sensory corpus that you and I actually are. My senses are already corrupt. Your desires are already distorted. They might have been forever corrupt and distorted. But their sensological control and instrumentalisation by corporate and state actors according to the demands of sonic capital – they attach to it a new, and unkown quality. But now, this libidinal economy implemented into these bodies runs perfectly smooth and effective as fuck.

7

Silencing Dispositive

The silencing dispositive represents the major processing structure in the panacoustic society. In its core it resembles a filtering process that relies on Claude Shannon’s basic model of communication, reduced – in its original context and time – for military purposes to the three notorious concepts of information source, transmitter, channel, receiver, and destination. By means of this model and the additional models of filtering and signal processing the sublime ideal of an undistorted process of communication and of a sound that should be crystal clear has been established and introjected. Sensologies start there. If one still applies in the twenty-first century this historical model of signals and of processing, of transduction, of information sources, of transmitters, channels, and receivers, even of messages and of communication, one is actually engaging in and actually affirming the historical discourse and the imagery of engineering and extraction cultures, not to speak of genocidal mining and harvesting, of extinction capitalism, represented in this nineteenth-century military dispositive. The consequence of this further affirmation of a historical, capitalist extraction thinking at present times is a load of its political practices – especially its ethics of silencing. It is this silencing dispositive of cleansing, filtering, and purifying that the other three forces of authoritarianism – that are: consumption, domestication and ubiquity – actively nurture, confirm, solidify, and even expand. Silencing is consumed, is advocated, is argued for, is fought for, is kidnapped, jailed, and killed for: it represents a major political, economical, scientifical, even artistic, and often then comprehensively spiritual goal of thanaticist capitalism. It is the silencing dispositive that is consumed, that is being domesticated, that is expanded into a nearly global ubiquity. This main dispositive of authoritarianism implies and promotes any useful form of violent cleansing, of exclusion, of domination and erasure that a silencing dispositive derived from signal transduction theories might offer. Noise regulation turns quickly into cultural regulation, exclusion, subjugation and expulsion. The dispositive fulfills its mission as soon as it is used against any form of unwanted sound: the mere notion of unwanted sound is hence in almost every case to be explicated by the notion of unwanted cultural practices, lifestyles, forms and expressions of existence. Sensory and sonic cleansing seem then to represent a bare necessity. As soon as this silencing dispositive is established, implemented, and believed, however, all sorts of sensologies, of violent cleansing, annihilating, and killing, can be performed with not the least doubt or hesitation. It is correct correction. It needs to be corrected and cleansed. It needs to be clear and unambiguous. It needs to sound clear and clean and distinct. Like nothing in this world. Like no one living and alive. The silencing dispositive is a necessary foundation for a thanticist capitalism and its joy of annihilation.

8

Sonic Affordances

Industrial design in the early twenty-first century operates to a large extent by crafting and fostering sensory affordances in all aspects of the everyday lives of consumer citizens. Sonic affordances are here the most prominent and the most efficient strategy to sensologically entering, transforming and controlling contemporary consumer citizens. Sonic affordances are addictive. But what is a sonic affordance? Following the concept of affordance in sensory ecology, proposed by James Jerome Gibson, it has quickly evolved into a widespread practice of generating and fostering sensory and sensological trajectories. Affordances are not necessarily restricted to the clean and simple textbook examples of material appearance and use; they can be crafted and refined into weapons through material desires and compulsive obsessions. If these weapons attack us, we only realize it, when we are already their victims. They are too adorable, too attractive, too exciting and arousing. Who wouldn’t want to engage with them? Who wouldn’t even agree to start, let’s say, a negotiation about the precise end of one’s existence – as long as one would be granted unlimited access to this excessively pleasurable realm of pure enjoyment, fulfillment and satisfaction? Or so it seems. These affordances are everything. They colonize everything. They shape and organize and sculpt my days and your days. They represent the goal and the aim and the main use of our nights and days. They are the days. And nights, and seconds, and decades, and the hours, and the centuries, the millennia. Sound design is what keeps you alive. Sound design is what fuels my desire. Sound design is what provides one major entrance into sonic capitalism. Sonic affordances are its central bank and its biggest, intercontinental and sometimes in the future probably interplanetary corporation. Sonic affordances are happy to welcome you: they are Oh, so happy! to include you, to assimilate you, to process you, to eject you, to discard you. Sonic capital is always happy to receive new material to be processed into even larger amounts of even more capable capital. This sonic capital in particular is happy to welcome you, you obedient consumer, you partaker in its workforce, you seemingly inexhaustible motor of its acceleration, expansion, grift, harvesting, burning and heating. You heat the affordances up. You fuel the sound design with your practices and your presence. Simply by agreeing to consume these affordances you agree also to the sonic capital’s request for consuming you, without rest. Without a doubt. Without hestiation. You are its desired affordance. You work perfectly, precisely according to its guidelines. You are useful and so easy to exploit.

9

Sonic Capital

Capital in a sensological culture presents itself as sensory. Instead of presenting itself in valuable metals, resources, or even very rare and crafted jewellery, instead of being encapsuled in attire and habitus, in eminent castles, opera houses, new bridges or museums of modern art, instead of retracting to a series of numbers with a seemingly endless amount of digits representing endless credit, endless affordances for finance oprations, instead all of this, the sensory representation and avatar of capital is its most prolific in the early twenty-first century. Especially sonic capital must be regarded as the apex of contemporary sensological thanaticism. Sonic capital is the power, it is the agency, the wealth and also the distinction embodied in sound experiences, sound practices, auditory dispositives and sound theories. Sonic capital is present in the currently most impactful companies of planetary music and sound distribution. Sonic capital is also actualized when consumer citizens learn to live with certain sound practices and auditory dispositives on a daily basis. Sonic capital is as well present and dominant as soon as it is wielding its power when performers of any kind and on any media stage manage to gather an unimaginably large audience around them – be it mediated or present. However, sonic capital is most strikingly manifested when a vocal or performative rhetoric of a public figure, a mediated persona, is able to silence other voices, other positions, and other agents of the public discourse, just by their mere material presence, activity and impact. These sonic personae then represent nothing else than sonic capital and its silencing techniques. They are embodying then the silencing dispositive and its filtering, its selecting, its regulating, and its annihilating power. Sonic capital wants to expand: it wants to territorialize and extract, it wants to process and to burn, it wants to annihilate and disrupt everything that is present. Sonic capital is the great lever. It makes all entities equal and equally irrelevant. It does not spare anyone – not the powerful. not the wealthy, not the well-known or the gifted. Sonic capital radiates and exploits, it expands and it rules. Sonic capital is the perfectly processual form of capital. It doesn’t even need to camouflage itself in some stable objects, personae or institutions. Ir proceeds merely be proceeding, be propagating, be protruding, and prosuming. Within sonic capital the thanaticist empire of capitalism is being closed so elegantly and unavoidably, it seems.

10

Sonic Consumer

Every single citizen is a sonic consumer. This is not optional. The silencing dispositive in which and the sensology under which you live, won’t leave you actually any choice. You are factually required to perform as a sonic consumer under the conditions of sonic capital. To this end, sonic affordances are the perfectly addictive and effortlessly expandable resources to turn the process of consumption, the basic operation of this society, into an otherworldly dimension of accumulating capital with almost every single action or even non-action such a consumer might be performing during the day. How can that be? As a consumer citizen your citizenship depends on consumption. Sonic capital has established sonic consumption and its affordances as a perfectly exploitable commodity: and all the companies, corporations, independent associations and our situated and intimate ties to these sounds and sonic distribution and reproduction apparatuses confirms and fortifies this development. Being a sonic consumer resembles therefore at the same time a basic requirement for partaking in this panacoustic society – as it also meets its highest moralist expectations. It is now a moralist demand to connect to these sonic apparatuses of distribution and reproduction. It resembles already one of those requirements that might in the not so far future indeed be demanded by law, by constitution, by contract from you. By being connected, tied, chained and bound to these apparatuses we are already perfectly in tune and in line for exploitation. My listening and your attention, my sensibilities and your desires are already monitored and tweaked, milked and postproduced, bottled and shipped, synthesized and reproduced, tested and applied. Our sensory abilities and disabilities, our corporeal desires and our audile needs can be so easily fulfilled and quenched and answered. It leaves me breathless. It might astound you. It is us – in sound. It is you and me as a sonic product. In a panacoustic society like ours, with its nanopolitical operations, the sonic consumer is most definitely the preferred model of the consumer citizen.

11

Sonic Labor

There is almost no action a sonic consumer might be performing that would not qualify also as sonic labor. Sonic labor is every of your action – at least potentially it can be milked and exploited, processed and utilized for the benefit of sonic capital. Sonic labor is therefore one of the main forms of labor in sensological cultures of a panacoustic society. The conflation of sonic consumption with sonic labor is therefore an unimaginably prolific nucleus out of which sonic capital and all the glorious horrors of thanaticist capitalism can emerge and unfold more quickly than ever before. Sonic labor operates by sounds, through sounds and within sounds at the same time and probably at almost all times, all over this planet – and even beyond, as soon as it seems possible, feasible, desireable. There is not anylonger any distinct or separated product that would be fabricated and that can be recognized as separated from sonic labor, there is not anylonger any situation of sonic fabrication that would be separated from its product or even a workforce that could operate outside of its fabricated products and commodities. In sonic labor all of these categories are pervasively conflated into one, often seemingly inescapeable situation. Sonic labor is the perfect fabbrica diffusa that entangles, envelopes, and quite possibly suffocates us all. Everything can be understood as sonic labor. Everything can be connected to sonic labor. Everything can be exploited as a form of sonic labor. This is possible, because – at the same time – this very sonic labor is so enjoyable, so pleasurable, and so endlessly desireable, right? Isn’t it? Aren’t you desiring a sound, a sound production, a sound design right now? Aren’t you engulfed and evenloped, maybe suffocated by some technical sound design, some entertaining sound design, some imperative and functional sound design right now? You might detest it, you might reject it, you might even try to ignore and to live outside of it. Still, you are included. Still, you are being exploited. Still, you are and remain and will be a sonic consumer. The closure in the sonic is already taking place. One single sonic consumer positioning itself outside of sonic labor might not change a lot. Sonic labor expands.

12

Sonic Punctuation

Our days are punctuated by sounds. My body is pinched and perforated by instantaneous signals. Your body might be guided and coerced by certain songs and sound events, signals and invocations. Every single day and all its hours are perforated and structured by a seemingly endless series of minuscule nanopinches of sound: sonic needles run through my skin, my eardrum, my diaphragm, my larynx, my amygdala, my intestines, my knee joint and my lungs, my heart muscle. When moving through a space in the formerly so-called public sphere that turned into a gated and securitized object for surveillance and data mining, when moving and dwelling in these areas, I am never in control of my sensing, listening and sounding. I am sonically consumed by capital. My sensory corpus is under surveillance and under control: my sensibility is under control, under siege, under guidance and coercion by these needles of sound. They are ubiquitous. They can be instantaneously present and activated and attacking. They are everywhere – and if they might not, then they can be deployed almost everywhere, by all means at hand. This punctuation of society, of culture, and of this whole planet is the audible substance of surveillance governance. Sonic needles are what this panacoustic society needs to fulfill the goals of thanaticis capitalism: sonic capital needs to expand, sonic labor needs to be dominant. Sonic punctuations are the materially spiritual reminders of the ruling capitalist practices and forces of authoritarianism that are proceeding to envelope all of our lives. Being an object of these punctuations leaves no doubt who is in charge and who is not: who is to be exploited and to be processed in this sonic order. These punctuations are at the same time the most noble products provided by sonic prosumers and sound designers all over this planet. They are serving the master and the major forces that are only set out to consume, to process, and to annihilate them. There is not really a way out that can be conceived right now for those belonging to this workforce. Generating new punctuations and at the same time being coerced to do so by punctuations generated by others is the life in sound. The thanaticism in sound. The thanaticism in the senses: in the flesh.

13

Sonic Workforce

The sonic workforce is endless. Sound designers and ringtone prosumers, signal crafting designers and designers who provide the characteristics of the next craze in electronic dance music or in popular charts music, designers who invent sounds for electric cars and scooters, for the next mobile gadget and the next gaming platform, the next social network application. These sounds are crafted all over this planet, by a widely scattered army of sound designers who might be in touch punctually – but who might not be in touch with all of their fellow sound designers. This workforce is massive, it is needed, and it produces incessantly. However, this sonic workforce is – as of today – not the least organized. Sound designers and sonic prosumers understand themselves still as independent, often isolated and separated freelancers. They lack, apparently, any major and comprehensive idea of how many of them work at any given moment for the sound design, the sonic punctuations, and the sensological addictions of contemporary panacoustic societies. They are an immense workforce, a planetary army, a potentially disruptive rebel army in, out of, and for sound. Why is it so hard to let this substance coalesce into a material force? Isn’t it only a logical consequence for this sonic workforce (and, similarly, also for other sensory workforces, maybe yet to be evolve) to understand and to organize itself along these lines of worker association and syndication. It would be only a small and tiny step in these times of planetary connectivity. On the other hand: not to do so, not to coalesce into a strong and pervasive workforce will (maybe forever) leave the agency, the exploitative framework, and also the major surveillance abuse of their crafts, skills, and practices mainly in the hands of actors who are not actively designing sound – but employing it for purposes of doubtful political or economical gain. This is a future one should not allow to unfold. There are alternative futures to be grasped and crafted, to be fostered, generated, and worked for. It might be way too late soon. The primitive accumulation is still in full swing and grift in sonic thanaticism. Soon it might seem too hard to work against it. So, why not associate and syndicate – right now?

14

Supermegametainfrastructure

Sonic thanaticism acknowledges that contemporary sound cultures as well as sound design professionals and sonic consumers operate within a thanaticist capitalism that offers seemingly no way out. This structure without an exit is, however, not even fully closed. But closure is not too far into the future. It is no remote or surprising idea, that from one certain point in the next few decades any lifeform, any social or economic practice, any craft or any skill, any form of interpersonal relation outside of this infrastructure provided by thanaticist capitalism might seem archaic, esoteric, insane, and even life-threatening, self-destructive, hateful. Such practices, desires, or even just inclinations will surely be categorized as pathologies, as deviant behaviour or even as a criminal act against social cohesion and political affairs. It will be hard for you or me to perform these acts outside of this stable infrastructure that has been deeply anchored in your and my body, into your and my personal experience, and that does structure, guide, and basically constitute each and every single day of our lives in this thanaticist empire. It is not just some infrastructure. It is a supermegametainfrastructure that is attached to indeed every single consumer citizen and to every single moment and practice of activity and experience someone performing within this consumerist citizenship could wish to indulge in. It is unavoidable and inescapable. It is the total framework of existence. If you are now scared and frightened or if you consider these words to present a paranoid if not conspiracy ridden concept of the world, then it is important to remember: unavoidable and inescapable structures for everyday life have escorted existence on this planet for humanoid aliens like you and me ever since. Religions, monarchies, slavery are exactly that: the unavoidable and almost inescapable frameworks they provide or provided seem horrific and cruel from the ouside of anyone claiming to be a free and independent individual within liberal capitalist lifestyles; but only as long as one does not recognize the closures and ties that exactly your own lifestyle, your beliefs and ontological assumptions represent. You have been chained, tied and bound all along. Sonic thanaticism continues, furthers and completes to a certain degree this already existing closure and existential bond. Sonic thanaticism will be our future. Sonic thanaticism is already the foundation of our lives right now.

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