R.I.P. Kantbot: '2020', A Review, Part 3
Trump couldn't do it, Xi Dada couldn't do it, Biden certainly won't have done it . . . Kantbot couldn't do it either.
Minecraft yourself. The dog deserves a face-to-face apology.—‘| #YOBA#BakedAlaska | #FLAGSTAFF TRIP #IRL#ip2’
Is Kantbot Dead?
First principle: Kantbot is a bot. Yes, he is a robot. He came to us in the flame wars of early 2017, drenched in the infamy of LD50, tagged by waves of cancellation whose completion we are now seeing, and remembered for his meta-autistic November 2016 oration on Trumpian German idealism. This latter moment is well-known. It will remain so on YouTube, or some such platform, for as long as these platforms exist. It also remains to be read, like many of the relics of Trump’s first term.
Not only is the video a choice televisual moment of the last decade, it is also a historical document. The first raw footage is dated 17 November 2016, that is, a fortnight or so after Trump’s victory. But one imagines the speech was delivered earlier, even on election night itself, and it’s certainly possible it was partially staged, given the prompts from Logo. One other posting of a shorter version is explicitly described as Kantbot ‘giving a rousing speech on election night 2016’, so perhaps it’s as simple as that. The coup de genius occurs when this speech of generational analyticity is combined by a YouTube user called ‘Jonathan’ with music and slide cards. Then the early signs of Trumpian beauty are outlined forever:
The indifference to death conceived by any ‘bot’—especially one plugged into a transcendental aesthetic (do we still call this ‘cope’? is tropological defence and addiction by very early 2021 itself the recurrent structuring of general cope?)—brings with it the appearance of a smooth release from the moorings of history (the same can be said of the #wormpill). Somehow, Kantbot wandered into the city, a robot in the crowd, and was able to make a pop video with these lyrics, a good four years ago now, a whole ‘term’ away:
Trump is going to make German Idealism real. He’s going to complete the system. Kant, he could not complete the system of German idealism. Trump is going to complete the system. He is going to derive the complete system . . . [after a prompt] It terrifies me. How can we complete the system of German Idealism? . . . [after a question, which may be a prompt] . . . Hegel couldn’t do it. Schelling couldn’t do it. Fichte couldn’t do it. Maimon couldn’t do it. Noone could complete the system of German Idealism. . . . Trump is a Kantian. Donald Trump is a Kantian. He’s a German Idealist.
The words, looking back, are themselves the delirium of a system as it venerates itself in a runaway moment of indifference. If there is some degree of initial historical irony in adopted speech format, as it gains pace all such irony is automated out of historical consciousness as Kant is joined, precisely, to Bot. It is often said of Kantbot that he is the ultimate beta guy (fat, we mean) with alpha energy, and one may add that this is so because of this delirium of the machine as it runs away from and appropriates his flesh. Once the machine (bot) reaches it user (an obese Kant), its mechanical supplementation of the mind is, in principle, euphoric—which is to say, once the debt to invention has been paid off (Trump births Kantbot—to some extent, they are robo-twins), the machine goes on platforming for free, and by the facility of the hero in its and our own illusion is said to have a ‘powerful performance’ in mind.
In this video, therefore, we are in the heart of early meme magic, the hall of mirrors that happened ~ between November 3 2016, the suicide of Mark Fisher, and the multiple closings of the LD50 gallery, until the time that Lucia Diego appeared to flee the internet forever, like the Snow Queen and Pythia of the Art World she was.
Later on, the media-heads and academics catch up, at least a little. But the combination of automation (robots) and idealism (Kant) remains intractable, which is to say popular. As sketched in part 2, the Negerastanian project of geistig intelligence is little more, in mythical terms, than what N’s latest work calls counter-factual speculation. Intensified completion is achieved or at least projected—here there is the hesitation we identified—at the level of imagination, so that there is indeed a world better than this one but it is not detached. Our short description of the grammar of Kantbot’s 2016 speech, and the way it pursues a delirium that it completes and yet which unravels its functioning as it goes along (all the way into 2021 and Kantbot’s downfall, one might say), also tells us all we need to know about the Negerastanian modes of imaginative completion. The indifference to death which becoming a ‘bot’ or ‘avatar’ involves is conducive to euphoria, and yet it is also troublesome for any such euphoria, and generates aberrations in and of the text of intelligence that is produced (take Kantbot’s prompts, for instance, as if automated thought is still needed, the softcore support of memory, or the Existential-Risk dream’s failcore). AGI is, for now, always quirking up.
Soon after the famous shit-speech, Kantbot is part of the series of caves and trapdoors that Lucia Diego created, the ‘Posadist-Hoxhaist-Landian synthesis’, the ‘kubic bunker-caves in transcendence’, the moment where ‘#rhetttwitter turns to #cavetwitter’, and so on. Kantbot’s completion therefore traverses the original and most important LD50 exhibit, itself a totalisation we can’t forget—the thing called 718222666, which ran from 11 November, when Kantbot’s video appeared, to 7 January 2017. The exhibition included or was inspired by Kantbot2000, realDonaldTrump, HbdNrx, e-terrorist, revelation_moon, Logo_Daedalus, Outsideness, Mencius Moldbug, ElliotRodger, TayAI, Hew,👨spook’s son, BronzeAgePerv, Brett Stevens, ⚡️melchizekek⚡️, Steve Sailer, Mark Citadel, menaquinone4, Autistotle™, woke8yearold, Kantbot Jr., jokeocrazy, and Kekpriest. In other words, Diego’s gesture was to include even the ident of the new president—realDonaldTrump, now finally cancelled—in the zone of her anexact curations. This was the moment just before the attempt to close the gallery by a group known as SDLD50 (which included by now easily identifiable figures such as Suhail Malik, Danny Hayward and Andrew Osbourne). As has already been written,
What was never resolved by SDLD50, in fact, was essentially the Fermi Paradox. The inability to cancel ‘reaction’ is basically a cosmological question. Worse or better still, the overhasty arbitration of what reaction was and is—and of why it can’t be cancelled at all, except by ceding to outright cancellation itself (Auslöschung)—presents itself as the only explanation for the Fermi Paradox. The lesson is that it was Diego, and not her cancellers, who closed down the space of aesthetic modernism by placing the veiled artefacts of an arche-cosmologico-pessimism into a museum setting. The right dose (LD50) was, well, already the right dose (SD(LD50)).
RIP-Kantbot
From November 2016 to January 2021, the least we can is that the comic dialectic is sharpened. Now, perhaps we are missing a ratchet or three. The reply guy coup is on, and right now Kantbot is backing down—or so it seems. As time has progressed, the intent and aim of Kantbot’s trolling has, as it were, narrowed, which is perhaps the recompense of a certain automated delirium. This last year, in 2020, there was collapse again into the universal autist completist temptation—a kind of giant acosmic autism—and this time in writing, in something called ‘Acosmism and the Non-Existence of the World’. The text is interesting, somewhat glorious, and nicely obscure, but it turns out that Kantbot can’t quite write like he talks and that nothing here matches the inception of delirium in November 2016. The bot says for example,
I’m working on Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds as a von Mises calculation problem, and about Kantian technics producing world-images (Weltanschauung) as a toxic waste byproduct that German sociology was developed to process. The world illusion. World-Judgement as modeling. The internet as the grandest scale simulation/game theoretic model of ‘The World’ ever created, which ultimately produces in society a sense of permanent collapse as a feeling of sublime world terror.
Kantbot’s machine of writing easily predicts new parts of itself here, involving world-models and world-judgements, borrowed limbs that mock up a new post-trollogical doll of completion, and this too with a sense of permanent collapse as menace. Such is what KB has begun to project onto Twitter Inc., sometimes scorching his scattering followers with taunts and challenges, that one thinks again of Kleistian totalisation and de Man’s grammars of dismemberment. Like Negarestani’s machine, which as shown produces as if miniature error-machines, per Moynihan, which are then waiting for their signature and verification, Kantbot’s totalisations have been predicative from the start, and all the way through Diego’s curations, of further legislations and delegations, for example in the form of new taunts and insults, and even excuses (alibis), confusions, bots, and aberrations.
It is ironic that, as our greatest theorist of reading that, after reading you, reading any other mode of writing becomes immediately unappealing. What would a return to 'reading' Twitter be, anyway, in these dog-days, post-days? Your writing flutters at the edge of the edge.
wow first time reading this one angel and wow wow wow always wow