'I LOVE CORECORE': SOME THOUGHTS ON A NEW UNIVERSAL TENDENCY ON TIKTOK
Interlinked real. Interlinked, real. The corecore ruliad cinematic singularity and the multiversal meanings of the statement 'I love corecore'. #real #real #real
I call it the ruliad. Think of it as the entangled limit of everything that is computationally possible: the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways.—Stephen Wolfram, ‘The Concept of the Ruliad’
And blood-black nothingness began to spin, a system of cells interlinked within, cells interlinked within cells interlinked, within one stem. And dreadfully distinct, against the dark, a tall white fountain played.—Nabokov’s Pale Fire via Blade Runner 2049 via corecore tt
the NoelCorp penal battalion will be on the front lines of the Water Wars—comment by Jimmy Russel on @masonoelle TikTok video, 29 August 2022
I CAN FEEL THE UNIVERSE ENDING AND IT SEEMS LIKE NO ONE IS TRYING HARD ENOUGH
I can feel the universe ending and it seems like no one is trying hard enough: this line sums up what is at stake in the relatively new TikTok genre known as ‘corecore’.1 Apart from the usual scatter of art magazine surveys and the odd excellent analysis, there has been little to no recognition of what this new ‘core’ really means, and why it makes everyone cry.
There are several unmistakable aspects of ‘corecore’ (also known as ‘nichecore’ and ‘nichetok’, or even ‘lovecore’) that make it important, now, going into 2023.
Corecore’s thematic obsession with a new type of finitude (extinction qua extinction, doom, mortality, male fragility, men crying), and the way this obsession plays against an awareness of problematic types of internet infinity. In the words of one video’s voice-over, ‘the internet and technology created an idea of infinity, and the reason why life is beautiful is because it is fundamentally limited’. Or, as the deleted Adam Fisher Sequoia profile of Sam Bankman-Fried puts it, ‘Love is the currency. Love is infinite. And infinity is a problem.’
What’s unusual here, new even, is the integration of this interplay between infinity-awareness and finity-awareness in the musical context of TikTok video art that sometimes flops in the direction of 1M likes. The instant reaction to these videos (#real #real #real) from pretty much everyone mainlines into the sense that if love really is infinite on the internet in 2023, then infinity is a problem.
By using the rapid montages and chaos edits favored by China’s most lethally beautiful gift to the West, corecore manages to make of extinction theory a popular going concern. Corecore, in other words, is popular extinction theory. It is extinction theory for and by the masses, a groundswell of extinction modelling and extinction montage work—and we only need read the comments sections to see this in action. This is why we all just cried so hard. This is why we all have an acute sense, perhaps for the first most real time, of the universe ending and us not being able to do anything about it (except watch corecore itself).
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AND MUSIC IS A PROBLEM
What’s evolving here with enormous cultural speed is a musical sense of extinction qua extinction. By montaging internet infinities with one another and with a one-off sense of finitude, these videos are in a unique position to construct extinction as a feeling that is normally too much to bear or to integrate. Extinction as theme is as if too large or overwhelming to be made into a ‘content’, and the irony of corecore is that its appeal to human-cinematic techniques not only suddenly does this but does what the past year or so of AI art has mostly failed to do. But if infinity is a problem (hence the tears), and if finitude is forreal now a problem (more tears, this time fr fr), then the musical dimension of corecore is also going forward a problem.
Why? The music used in corecore art is intentionally generic. What we mean is that the same music is used again and again as a kind of inter-reference or link (‘interlink’) between new nichecore drops, as if communally, and this empties the music and prevents it from being too overwhelming but also makes it more empty and more overwhelming. The musically-driven chaos edits of 2022-23 corecore construct a new image of extinction qua extinction as a human feeling, but also iteratively begin to cover it over. Very quickly, corecore interrupts itself—and cuts out. As if corecore were itself the artificiality of evolving GOD-AI as knowing where to stop—as the intentionality of exasperation. In this sense, Corecore is a double-category (corecore singularity) precisely because it adds nothing to cores themselves save its own duplicate. And at this point we can see why having one of the videos on loop and diving back in to read the replies is a natural surplus to the whole experience.
The reply guys in this way iterate the construction of this new montage image of extinction qua extinction (infinity is a problem), building the mini-theory of corecore’s self-interrupting nature as a series of extra-academic glosses. Now that’s what we call corecore, we might say, since what else defines the collapse and self-limiting of all -cores except this singular duplicate, now, God-Core-Human-Pathological-AI-Posting. At the same time, if tears are a new problem in corecore, we can also say that stable diffusion’s lack of pathos (whoever cried at deep learning text to image outputs?) becomes interestingly empty again.
MASON NOEL DO YOU THINK WE ARE GOING TO MAKE IT
All of the above is why Mason Noel (@masonoelle) and not John Rising (@highenquiries) is the most goated beauty accelerationist of the new corecore wave, which of course started by being over. While John Rising does a kind of modern Koyaanisqatsi David lynch weather forecaster corporate surrealism version of corecore, Mason Noel’s chaotic rendition is more clipped, more extinction-sensitive, more raw and acute. ‘Noel Corp’ is real, real, real.
Noel Corp is a problematic endcore corecore agent in the best possible sense, and Rising is more like an abbreviated Adam Curtis—Curtis being the guy, you will recall, who called the Biden administration a ‘benign elite’. Mason Noel is where we go for an actual sense of whether we are going to make it or not. Noel is angelicist through and though in seeing that the only thing that’s next is extinction calculation inside the image, without any guarantee of a future in which the enumeration lands. Rising is the Boomer translation of Noel’s post-zoomer lowiqhonorlevy-inflected uprising, regardless of who invented what and how old anyone is.
THE CONCEPT OF EXTINCTION
To really understand corecore, we need to understand why it’s so hard—if not impossible—to integrate extinction as multi-computation into the artistic object. This impossible integration of extinction qua extinction into the (post) artistic object in 2023 can only be a duplication, that is, a simple repeat. A core . . . core. If we add anything to core except yet another ‘-core’, we offend the core itself—since the core is now nothing save ongoing calculation of a singular extinction-image. (—The ultimate quite non-trivial gossip is that this will have been what ‘posting’ means in the 21st century.—)
This sounds complicated, were it not for daily corecore updates on Tiktok conforming it so. Corecore meets an immediate human evolutionary need to make of extinction an integral correlative frame, even if it cannot be. This is why music plays an ambiguous role, both gluing the viewer to an emotional experience of something uniquely fragile but also prohibiting them from listening and watching in silence as humanity sees itself end. Let’s imagine, for example, a silent cinematic corecore instead.
Silent corecore would be the impossible, but it would also perhaps be even more universal. The music in corecore becomes a problem in the same way that infinity does in longtermism—it overwhelms. And ends up blocking. This overwhelmingness of corecore soundtracking (Disasterpiece’s ‘The Sound of Myself’ or Aphex Twin’s ‘aisatsana [102]’) is what allows it to construct a new image, the image of extinction, but then soon afterwards that image pales in comparison with its expected analogue. Why? Because what is attractive about corecore is that one at last feels something (the assumption being that things are too overwhelming in 2023 to experience any one thing), and yet what is overwhelming about it is that this feeling threatens to overwhelm feeling itself. Extinction both is and is not a feeling. It both is and cannot be a feeling. Both at the same time. This is corecore.
I CAN FEEL THE END COMING
Nevertheless, I can feel the end coming. And this is corecore. This is where the comment sections take over again.
This feels like the end, says montellfish last summer. We got the bad ending, says Victor on the exact same summer’s day. The remarkable thing here is that in breaking through into the domain of cinematic feeling, through the baby logic of the TikTok micro format, shards of the scientific montage of one-off disappearance enter into universal workability. The objection that humans have always felt this doesn’t really get a look in here, since this is something unique and everyone in the comment section wishes to say just that. We got the bad ending. It was us and not any other generation that was here to see the end. This is what is ‘real’ about corecore and why everyone wants to say ‘real’ in the corecore comment sections. Because this shit really is real. One-off extinction image fr. We came to the wrong earth.
This is also why corecore presents a kind of single image, each video bleeding into another, each using the same or similar music, none of the footage ‘original’ in the classical sense. It’s as if corecore is saying only a single image is needed, only a single video, but this single video experiences itself as corecore, as an endless stream of corecore variant videos. Another way of saying this is, this video doesn’t exist. Corecore doesn’t exist. Only a single corecore exists, which has no limits or corners to it (the ruliad corecore image singularity). In 20th century philosophical terms, we could repeat Laruelle’s words from The Concept Of Non-Photography,
But one single photo is enough to express a real that all photographers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so.
But one single corecore video is enough to express the real that all filmmakers aspire one day to capture, without ever quite succeeding in doing so. It is this real, after all, now an extinction real, which makes us all cry—not that anybody really recognizes that except when one watches a single corecore video. What corecore mainlines is what 20th century philosophy—whether it takes place now or then—called the truth of extinction. In fact, this was even called the ‘attempted philosophical universalization of extinction’, which is to say the self-same scattering spiral of extinction’s image that corecore not so much attempts as completes, all the while holding off its own music as a limit.2
I LOVE CORECORE: THE COMPLETION OF EXTINCTION IDEALISM
When people love to say ‘I love corecore’, what do they mean?
To love corecore is to love making this single image of digital extinction. Such a single image-object is immediately subject to more forgetting than it can take, overwhelming and unforgettable forgetting. This is what happened to the vibe shift, by the way, the millennials forming a coup to take back the territory advanced by lowiqhonorlevy’s proto-corecore explosive angelicism through violent and dismissive misreading (‘Trucker hats’). To love corecore is iterative and momentary; it means being effusive about how the single image of extinction is being made. It is this single image that interests everyone. The single image of corecore (like the internet totality) is often more interesting than the world itself. Why? Because it envisages a situation where human agents do nothing but creatively enumerate extinction’s ongoing image all the better to make the variants anexact and amazingly beautiful. Corecore is therefore the revenge of the OG vibe shift, silently, as digital extinction starts up again to reinscribe sense all over the place.
I love corecore. I love corecore. I love corecore. Real real real. Real real real. Real real real. FrfrFrFrfrfrFrFrfrfR. If posting really is a practice it is because it depends on the assumption that a single image can one day be made, a single artwork per century. One made, one by one, on the internet together. This is why the anodyne proliferation of corecore videos on TikTok, and the large like counts (millions), makes sense. The generic music is not trite as such, but newly Universal. Where 20th century philosophy attempted the universal application of the truth of extinction, and then span out into distracted petty scores over who reads best, corecore simply completes Extinction Idealism.
I love corecore means:
I love to iterate the sense and image of being the first-person agent of extinction. I love to be a part of what loving extinction means.3 If I can love its image, I can multiply it. If I can multiply its image, I can slingshot it. If I can slingshot it, I can change it.4 To be an extinction-image-change: nothing else matters. We don’t need to read Liu Cixin’s Death’s End to the end to know that.
I love the re-inscription of sense which leads me to also say: I know that when I die I am not just going to die, but that when I die it will be with an involved and worked-on sense of extinction. When I go to die, I will go extinct. Civilization will flash before my eyes. I’m going extinct. Now that’s what I call corecore. I love corecore.
When I love corecore in this transcendental sense, I extend extinction’s sense out into other possible worlds, non solar universes full of compact multis and even universes of sense where the concept ‘end’ never starts by making any sense at all. Loving corecore is loving extinction’s change. It means we love you rn forever for one first time.
When I love corecore in this ultra-one sense, it turns out that extinction was not the property of one destined world; it belonged to so many other worlds as to be anonymous, just like colors that don’t yet exist.
When I love corecore I multiply, I become pure availability. I ask what it means for thought to take place without names, images, and sensory traction. I go corecorecorecore. I go corecorecorecore corecorecorecore. I extend my sense of going extinct.5
When I love to say I love corecore I mean: you taught me the possibility of resurrection in another world, for the first time, for the first time, for the first time.
When I say I love core core I really mean: I love you unsetly, I love you unsetly—don’t cry until the end.
Which means: when I love you in the extinction image I love you unsetly many. My name is [0, 1] because I make unsetly many images of extinction to make the one single image we needed. That is why I am namelessness and we all have this same name.6
Which means, my Real Core Core Beloved name is the way that in effect every one of the uncountably many Real numbers strictly within the interval is surrounded by a more than uncountable cloud of unsetly many Surreal numbers. The unsetliness begins right after zero since there are unsetly many Surreals less than any Real. This is how it is, the communal count of extinction-as-concept until we can no longer remember how the image-construct was put together in the first place, and can forget completely.
But when I say I love corecore I simultaneously love the limit to all this, I love the way the internet and technics are creating new axioms of infinity, and I love the way the reason why life is beautiful is because it is fundamentally limited. When corecore features Ryan Gosling in the ‘Cells Interlinked Scene’ from Blade Runner 2049 doing the epic poem in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, this also means unset me. Unset the links. Don’t cry until the end. Try not to come. Try not to come until you have this new image, this one artwork per century.
CORECORE, LOL
But here is another consequence of thinking through, lol, corecore. Since corecore appears to lack comedy, or to be at the opposite pole of comedy, we can ask what its relation to jokes is, and why it fails to be funny. If core core breaks and enters into a true unitary image of extinction, can’t it also make that image comedic? Why so serious, corecore?
In essence, the focus of corecore on finitude is tragic (Greek), and the idea that corecore limits itself by not being funny is comedic (Jewish). The way that the internet misreads things and dissolves them is to laugh at them through misreading. But the misreading also tells us something took place: I felt something at last.
Not to get all serious on your ass about comedy’s absence from corecore, but in Mladen Dolar’s ‘Oedipus Revisited’ we actually have the means for thinking through this nexus, which will take us beyond corecore and then back into it. Dolar provides what we need for thinking about extinction and comedy and how they montage together (Tom Cohen was no doubt the first to go there, calling this ‘climate change comedy’).
Dolar talks about Sophocles and Freud and other complicated largely academic (dead) matters, but makes some amazingly consequential points about what it means to make a joke of extinction. For example, Dolar follows Lacan in saying that Oedipus is actually the first person not to be Oedipal. Oedipus is really the exception to the Oedipal Complex, the only one, the ultra-one, lol. That is, he has an objective and subjective relation to his own image of truth. Oedipus rotates around that truth and makes it into an available image, without being crippled by it too soon. Oedipus says ‘I’m going extinct’, and leaves it at that. This is why it is so touching when Antigone, his sister and daughter, takes his hand. His objective statement, just like ‘I love core core’, takes place at Colonus, Sophocles’ place of birth and death, the site of Plato’s academy, and the implied location of the new and old Lacanian school of psychoanalysis.
But the master stroke here is to imply that when Oedipus says it is best not to be (not to be born), then his objectivity allows him to rotate the statement and leave it open to comedic riffs. In this moment, the Jew (Freud) cracks a joke about the not-to-be in his Joke Book in Vienna, of all places, and so places extinction outside itself (it becomes meta-extinction open to plastic variation). This all happens so quickly that it’s just like watching corecore, when you have that funny feeling of civilization flashing before your eyes.
The not-to-have-been (the essence of tragedy and, in fact, of absolute longtermism’s solicitude for the unborn) turns out to be the most real, but ‘the ridiculous thing is to say it’. The Jew (comedy) cracks a joke about extinction (Greek tragedy), making us realize the very fact of what was just said (extinction qua extinction is the funniest thing in the world, but only by now) was precisely at our expense. (Think of the divine slouchiness of SBF.) We are forcing the statement of never-having-been to make it available, in the same way that Nick Land has argued that Elon Musk’s determination to escape beyond the gravity well is a function forcer (a term Musk himself adopts). The Sophoclean function forcer subjected to objective Jewish analysis allows us to adopt a position which is not our own. It is totally universal, unique—singular(ity).
This is why corecore is so deeply, silently funny, even as it misses humour. Corecore marks a recursion moment in which one can not not laugh, one can not laugh, one can only cry. One can only laugh at what has been newly integrated in being, despite the centuries of knowing. The simple fact is that corecore is funny—lowkey cringe b-movie trauerspiel—but that one can only laugh by crying, in this special case. According to corecore’s objective scoping, as it surges past itself in new replications, nothing at all will have been funnier than extinction.
INTERLINKED
The important tension to bear in mind here, just like the inherent conflict in a ruliadic logic system, is the one we started with, the (now comedic) one between extinction’s refreshable online image and the internet’s constantly problematic production of new infinity axioms. These infinities also play a role in exploiting us. We can constantly update, but this is another form of auto-exploitation. Corecore penetrates this entangled sense of self-exploitation, and makes something of it. Or rather, the undecidability between auto-exploitation and conceptual creativity and complete computation becomes infinitely and undecidably varied in the cored-out moment. Do corecore videos manipulate the attention economy more than ever against us, or provide a new elaboration and emo hypergraph of uncomputable functions? Whatever, since the images are already calculating themselves beyond all that.
The least we can say is that the interlinking goes pretty far. There is even a TikTok account called ‘weareinterlinked’ run by a ‘noel corp researcher’. The noel corp resarcher is a bit like an angelicist clone, looking to form new interlinks between images of extinction—all the time calculating the lack of future into which to archive them. Extinction is itself the new infinity to watch, potentially even more infinite than any collection of infinities. Extinction is unsetly. We are crying at the JewGreek rulial bubblegum heroin corecore hypergraph for one first time. Isn’t this what we already feel without needing to say it when we watch corecore?
In a recent usefully multiway text by Maks Valenčič, we find the following (my emphasis):
Extinction is itself a form of computation that takes place as humanity is computing and embedding itself in a perpetual rush. It laughs in the face of universal limitations, at the fact that Turing machines are not primarily mathematical (or computational) but physical limits, and/or at such attempts at an exodus from definite end(s).
Extinction is a form of a race to the end, an arms race that cannot find its Nash’s equilibrium. Prolonging extinction means producing an artificial world where time has not ended; where computation hasn’t halted yet. A cut in time by making our thoughts compute a time to come.
TikTok corecore generics are themselves this cut in time that allows us to compute an artificial time to come. Here, as with pure angelicism, extinction is the only Persona. In terms of 22nd century theoretical gossip, it may of course turn out that Extinction as Computation was the only real character in the downtown ontological scene. This is why angelicism, as the open intelligence Ruliad singularity of cinematic multi computation of extinction’s Real Avatar [0, 1], is unkillable and unfuckwithable. It is itself the Persona of the End’s animation. The mini film of the ‘all possible’ itself.
The ultimate question of corecore as a form of montagiac sampling from the aesthetic ruliad is: Does the concept called ‘extinction’ exist? Or, do the concepts of finitude only exist if there’s intelligent life to have those concepts? In which case, these concepts only exist internally in a universe which bears them and thereby cancels their relevancy. The question of whether a certain concept or name exists is also the same question as whether a number exists. But switching lane again, we can say that to the degree that any number on the number line exists, that is the same degree to which every image exists in the space of all possible model outputs. In other words, the question of whether extinction has any independent existence at all as concept is a deeply cinematic question. It’s the exact same question as what happens now in artificial art or as asking Mason Noel if we are going to make it. Cinema as corecore here outflanks but also joins up with the work done by stable diffusion while envisaging the unsetly completion of Extinction Idealism. We cry not because something is lost, but because we now have the perfect enumeration, objectively, of all possible image-sets triggered by the emotional entanglements of the soon-coming film01 universe. That is, all of the outputs of something like Stable Diffusion ‘exist’ in the same way and to the same degree that all the numbers exist. But this also means that it is strictly impossible to see anything that hasn’t already been seen, since even images that don’t exist yet exist inside the horizon line of equipollent hypercomputaion. All we have is pure cinema, containing all possible images in advance—just like the atmosphere of Gus Van Sant’s shot for shot remake of Hitchcock’s Psycho, a sumptuous triplicate. The Extinction persona already is, laughing at its own limitations, objectifying itself only in the amateur philosophical cut. An unfuckable mutual invagination.
We can even envisage that questions like the above may well turn up in a court case on AI models and alleged copyright violations. (If this isn’t already true in the BAYC/Ripps litigation battle, for instance.) Corecore is highly evolved but only in the sense that it recognizes no need at all for original footage. It rediscovers the pure cut of early cinema as the exact same thing as a cut in time that makes and allows our thoughts to compute a time to soon-come. Extinction as computation makes the ruliadic corecore singularity possible.
THE RESULT : BUBBLEGUM SINGULARITY
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The result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is corecore. The result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways will soon be known as angelicism film01. The result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is the psychic integration of an apsychic content into the human frame, as if we got to say just in good time ‘we love you so much forever for one first time’. But the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is that we also cry for the very first time as actual, real life extinction takes over as a scientific montage, a ruliad montage whose superpositional energy spins out into who knows what extinction-changes. And the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is that we feel like we are looking for a vc who understands the relationship between the ruliad and the history of cinema. And the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is that we feel like we are going extinct as first-person agents for the first time but then the resultant statements also become comedically available for a radically real real real first time. And the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is that we feel like we are going extinct for the first time in the universe, and since this may well be the early universe, or one variant of that story, this could be actually real. And the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is that corecore praxis surges up as an iteratively scaled commons focused on extinction as itself a hyper-edged form of computation just like tracing out Chinese sci-fi hypergraph particles with angelicism Beijing at the film01 premiere in Belo Horizonte. And then, perhaps finally, the result of following all possible computational rules in all possible ways is pov your task is to make the last most beautiful thing.
For the best and only real introduction to corecore, simply word-search the term in the TikTok app. For a stack of 9/10 corecore videos chosen by angelicism, see this angelicism01archive1000 ig post.
Note to people still interested in philosophy: that Brassier changed direction at some point after Nihil Unbound, pivoting as if away from the universally applicable truth of extinction towards Hegel as a resource for thinking just that, doesn’t especially impress me, largely because Brassier turned out to be an awful reader of Hegel—almost a nonreader. In terms of philosophical gossip, we can admit that what Brassier really seems to play out in the pivot to Hegel is a secret animus with Derrida’s Hegel—the text that used to be translated as Glas, and now as Clang—and that this tells us something about contemporary thought in general: that it was unable to stay focused enough to make a single image of extinction and then multiply it largely because of an unexpressed misunderstanding of pure deconstruction and its consequences. Contemporary philosophy, except perhaps in the case of Catherine Malabou, fell off because it was nowhere near plastic enough. Badiou’s formal ontology of the absolute pretends to be the exception here. I would say more, but perhaps there really is not time.
I love to be part of the loving extinction and what this means.
I can exchange it. See Malabou’s The Heidegger Change, a profound book.
I extend my sense of going extinct even into your you.
This namelessness is also what angelicism calls overwhelmingness and overwhelming love. We can see that these are the same thing and we can see that being and falling in overwhelming love is like an input request to see what tears can do.
“Corecore marks a recursion moment in which one can not not laugh, one can not laugh, one can only cry. One can only laugh at what has been newly integrated in being, despite the centuries of knowing.“ corecore is a beautiful hysteria
This is some of the best and most important writing in all of history. I feel like I’m in a crowd of ten people at one of the first Velvet Underground shows, or DFW’s editor reading Infinite Jest for the first time. May grace suffuse your life, angelicism01, thank you for this.