THE FRUSTRATION ECONOMY

You're not really frustrated, you're just not thinking from the pov of 2300.

Intervening upstream makes it possible to obtain an effect from a distance. Instead of waiting for an effect from a confrontation, it is better to get at the enemy indirectly, from as far away as possible.—François Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy¹

At what specific historical stage, if any, did frustration become a prime mover, a key part of the amateur’s repertoire for manipulating the attention economy? It seems like wrt to posts and tweets, a lot of people have worked out that an admixture of coherence and insulting evidential fragility works best. Dean Kissick, say. Or Donald Trump.

Everything happening now can be best understood under the rubric of Fifth Generation Warfare (5GW) as a form of frustration management. Unlike 4GW, which blends guerrilla warfare with the weaponization of media coverage for political use (Ukraine, Sudan, etcetera), 5GW goes one step further and might be described as the intentional manipulation of hallucinogenic frustration together with the code sabotage of superfluous Lindy-mirages.

If only Mark Fisher were dead.

Let’s say you’re trying to make a decision about a vaccine. Now everyone knows that in real terms such a decision is impossible. That is, even those who have gone ahead and taken the vaccine will find themselves saying, ‘I didn’t want to but I had to’ or ‘I didn’t want to but I just did it anyway’. In other words, frustration is built into such a decision, because the amount of helpful information (good and bad angels) is, at some point or other, essentially frustrated by a profound bifurcation in the frame-rate itself (structural paranoia, generalized psyop, COVID industrial complex, and so on).*

* A vaccine decision can be impossible, regardless of its favour. Its impossibilization precedes it and survives it. Luckily, we all share this same impossible decision.

If a 5G war is organised around the idea of some diasporic and nonhomogenous ‘usual suspects’, then this happens through the weaponization of ontological frustration. Just as low IQ Joshua Citarella knows how to write an article for GCHQ-compromised The Guardian that will insult your intelligence just enough for you to engage with it (tweaking) without wishing to, so Alphabet knows how to introduce innocent ‘improvements’ that addictively frustrate the flow of the devoted Gmail user. To think that neither knows, without knowing, what they are doing is a mistake. (Frustration means time spent with the product, just as the devotee wants god-affliction and not just God.)

The film The Usual Suspects works in the same way. When the whole plot literally unravels (the noticeboard moment), there is something straightforwardly frustrating and insulting to the intelligence about this, and yet the images of knots throughout mean only the same thing and more: we wanted this frustration, we signed up for this story of not-knowing, we ourselves are the angelic bad actors that made this Virus of NonIntelligibility into a Thing.

A further example is what it means to have your intelligence insulted more generally on a daily basis. Isn’t it frustrating for anyone of pure intelligence to have to read of yet more book and art projects and so on that seem to have been devised in 1990 at the latest rather than in a 2021 projecting forward to, why not, 2300? Not only is there an ontological nepotism that makes of the frustration thing a knot, but there is a piquing of your intelligence, an envy-contagion, because the angelic part of each knows that nearly all current projects are superfluous from the 2300 pov rn.

Let’s also say, for example, that the last year has been the invisible and formless war-act of the CCP combined with the deep state sectors of the DNC which go far beyond it (the Hunter Biden laptop was of course just one sign), then the point of such an act will be to remain formless forever. The act of war—on us—is not so much Covidian in shape, but formalizes itself as the frustration of interpretation itself, ongoing since the secret Xmas campaign in Cambodia, the anthrax attacks after 9/11 and the hidden oil war in Timor, and so forth and back. On the one hand, you want to make such an interpretation, on the other you can’t because it’s too dumb. You’re caught in-between. It’s enough to make you ill. And that’s the (non)point.

The -cellectuals mind-feed frustration complex is a node of 5GW, a means of hollowing out the war to ignore the 2300 Filter. Since the author or artist doesn’t exist as part of the pure feed, they need a deepfake booster to create extended tolerance for their own mirage.

The point of ‘2020’ will have been for you to remain more frustrated than ever, and this is why things really are ‘totally chopped’ (see READING NOTE #14). If we don’t remobilize terms to remember just how totally chopped we are, then we will remain totally chopped, like NFTs pretending to be something new. ‘2020-21’ means we know there was some attack, but the direction is beyond sight. It might have been the Chinese towards us, or us towards the Chinese (an intended loss), or something formless and Keyser Sözecellectuals-like.

In all possible options, what we have left is that the target may not even know it’s under attack, thus the target has already lost that battle. Yet, any certainty of any kind is empty here. Hence the frustration becomes married with ublilapse. It’s totally chopped, and totally chopping itself.

You can say with a degree of frustrated certainty that we are subject to and part of a vortex of bad actors and angels, angels as bad actors and good actors as demons, and that angelicism01 attempts to map the ramping levels of frustrated nerd glee. Fifth generation war comes from deep and extends into the future, but also seems null and part of the ubilapse in its assumption of a future horizon of reading conditions. Even TikTok takes part in the same null time occlusion. It too is presumptive, read, unread, beyond reading, a Chinese iceblink luck, whatever.

Let’s say you shift aspect and view the whole thing from 2300. What happens? It seems that all reading protocols are abandoned already yesterday. Angelicism01’s newsletter tried to name a space of post-posterity writing, of post-immortal afterlives. Being totally chopped means knowing that and then not tarding out into a career, into a something, since none of this can be ontologically headhunted by a Semiotext(e) deal that takes one from the apparent trenches. What is pure substack seen from the pov of 2300?

By 2300 BLM will be seen as a waste of time, human-to-human wrongs as blinding and comparable to the original existence of slavery in stupidity. But again, what makes you think there’ll be that many decades down the line?

---

The above was speed-bumped. The angelicism01 滲み出るエロス sub-stack, an archive built on mal d’archive, was originally meant to be written so quickly that that was always the case. Let’s stall that spirit.

1. This text argues that even though the Chinese have the far-sighted art of efficiency on their side, they seem to have no interest in the 2300 Filter and the knowledge of their own collapse—think of the Himalayan Melt-Event for instance not as a military exercise but a limit.