'YOU FELL FOR IT AGAIN': ON AMERICA'S TRIUMPHAL REGRESSION

What kind of decisionism was Musk on when he said 'fuck earth'? Function forcers meet the Zeigarnik effect; it’s not pretty. Avital Ronell's America (2024), a roaming review.

Call it a regression, even if it doesn’t look like one. The Trump 2.0 transition has been greeted by Nick Land and others as a time of eloquent miracles, but really one assumes something else is happening here, more in tune with what Avital Ronell’s recent book calls the Gestell from hell, a techno episode (in every sense of the word) from the faltering of America’s ongoing running on empty. Nick Fuentes wasn’t as far away from America: The Troubled Continent of Thought as might be imagined when recently he suddenly cut through to one of the truths the ‘new regime’ most needs to miss:

And here’s the point. This is the simplest form of the idea you need to understand. That I need to impress upon you now, today, the first week of the Trump administration. At a certain point in the last couple of years—maybe it was October 7th, maybe it was something else—but at a certain point a decision was made that the system would let Trump win. That’s the simplest form of the idea.

Ironic on multiple levels that it would be left to the groyper spirit of 2017 to call back this new delirium to its own limit: the fact that the new regime is not a time of miracles, nor even a new sloptimism (except a cruel one of course)—but is rather the failsafe falloff of a non-eternal return. The racist Fuentes is doing you a favor here, in a sequence called ‘You Fell For It Again’, not that you will listen. The last thing you will want to hear is that there is no new regime to be part of at all.

Fuentes is right, then, to read the timeline as a new type of organism thriving on the physics of roboticized denihilism (yes, denialism as nihilism). So much of the timeline, he mock-quips, is posting cope about Trump just to get back at the groypers. So much of the timeline is posting cope, period. Sure, but the timeline just is the metaphysics of cope, and that is the only ‘vibe rush’ now taking place. Fully automated dementia of the young ideologue crashing out on regimented newness.

The Trumpocence 2.0 Gestell from Hell indicated in Ronell’s new book itself mixes up the times, as must be done, by collecting one text from at least 2021 and another that seems to have existed in lecture-form well before Trump’s second win. Remember though, those of you piggybacking on the back of Trump’s win, that it was no win at all (just like in 2020, remember that?). You have your permissions here from those who wished to give them, and nothing else. You all—from Vivek to Vitalik to Xenocosmography to Cl0udyh3art—really did fall for it again.

Lil X in the White House, snow on the ground . . .

For Land, Rich Lowry as the editor of the right-wing National Review using the N word to describe Haitians is what makes this a time of miracles. Land literally thinks, lo and behold, that things have been reversed. Land reads off the ‘new’ preference cascade on the TL of previously-concealed anti-Wokism as the confirmation of every aspect of his numerically beloved and belated Christianity (called by him on repeat, as if it were something different, ‘solemn providence’). Again, far be it from Fuentes to teach anyone anything, but he goes on with strange clarity as follows:

Some time in the past two years the system decided they were going to let Trump win. They made peace with it. They decided they were going to make a compromise. They were going to let Trump win. They were going to even let Trump do certain things. And in exchange they’re getting the stuff that matters. The robust support for Israel. The investment into AI. They’re getting the cheap energy. They get to get away with this new Gilded Age culture. And it could not be more obvious that Trump is now system-approved.

Fuentes gives as proof Elon Musk getting the white-knighting from Netanyahu and the ADL. Remember Ye’s digital lynching anyone? No, of course not. The American Gestell kicks in instead into full-on regression and forgetting, the likes of which we have seen refreshed in many such cases before (nothing new here in the immense impression/repression of newness). The techno in the tech—the Gestell of the internet itself as a kind of ‘framing’, for real—only knows forward motion that has no way of knowing if it has actually found itself way back when.

Ronell’s America can hardly be said to be some easily tracked warning; it’s always more complex than that once we remember ‘the timeline’ is just more writing. But she does enough work to set in motion a series of worries about what the supposedly new turn in politics and techno-graphemes on and off the internet can now mean according to a past always there to make of each startup only another unworlding.

Reading Ronell, one recalls that perhaps for the first time in the world, lacking a female POTUS, the greatest thinkers are female. Taken together with Malabou and a few others, the students of deconstruction remain the most (un)timely, the ones prepared to get anachronic to see what might (not) come. Even Aria Dean has started to evoke the early history of theory-drenched opposition to the NYC downtown scenes now made digital (referencing Craig Owens’ forgotten ‘The Problem With Puerilism’ (1984) as if one could wave a magic ‘always historicize’ wand and erase all the hurt and lack of taste of ‘Dimes’). To be the thinker of nothing less than ‘America’ in 2025, really? Let’s not forget the lame-brain protestations of Andrea Long Chu that Ronell

is *not* a feminist theorist, nor a prominent feminist. she’s a hardline deconstructionist working almost exclusively on canonical misogynists

which are hardly worth debunking even given America’s careful attempt to thread Geschlecht—gender, gender marks, race, species, the trans body, and so on—into much of what it says about everything from ‘lol’ to Trakl. And yet very quickly, the question of our species-being (Geschlecht is also very much just that) is put under pressure from what she calls ‘willed extinction’ (already on p. 5). What is it about the species-(being)-becoming-American that makes it go on as if it forever could, with no horizon and less than zero externalities? The existence of such a question is why Ronell’s book deploys various figures of running out, depletion, emptiness, fatigue in contrast to the assumed assumption that we should simply go on at any and all costs. A new America, really? Once again? And for how many centuries to come? You really think the delirium of the Timeline—a master of sorts to plenty of new slaves—can make us not-think that, without seizures of resistance and pockets of catatonic doubting?

America, here, in the book America, equals not only ‘philosophical fatigue’, but species-fatigue (tiredness and deconstruction of the word Geschlecht itself). In truth, what ‘America’ must—might, but will not, hardly now can—come to terms with is the deconstructive work (a portrait of Paul de Man on Gerardo Contreras’ Facebook page in early 2017) that passed through it and set it even so on its amazingly founding/foundering way. The demented triumph of the online right? There where the founders simply know they are the creators, and can ignore what a grounder might say instead? Return without relapse and relapse without return? Making America great again when nobody knows just how long we have left? Curtis Yarvin interviewed in the New York Times means we came online and won forever but this time for real? Elon Musk proximity-baited into saying ‘the vibe shift is real’ on X? Waking up with $2 of revolutionary fervor? Ending with $0 praxis?

Ronell sets out in America to read ‘America’ anew, but first of all by wondering what’s new with that when it all goes too up. MAGA, sure, but nobody is even watching that little word ‘again’, as it again makes its rounds:

The ‘again’ lodged in ‘great again’ is part of a ghostly retrieval system that calls upon the revenant, no matter how voided the origin or fake the claim.

Again, again, then—first 2016, then 2020 (depending on how blackpilled on the electronic vote you are), and then (but repeating which of these?), 2024. What’s new, again, this time, in ‘America’? You fell for it again, says Nick Fuentes; for real, says Avital Ronell, you fell for the again of Make America Great Again—you fell for the again, again.

But what’s so up with the again? What’s your problem? Ronell notes in brief that part of Derrida’s whole problem with Nietzsche’s eternal return is that it acts like a no-loss horizon, a safety phrase that screens out any and all future problematic contents (such as ‘willed extinction’, but that’s hardly just an example). Coming online, again, and winning forever, but this time, for real, is always this earmarked and watermarked and -logged problem of externalities-aversion running wild (aversion: this word that Ronell’s book plays around with in Stanley Cavell’s own American engagements). MAGA effaces niche finitude with the hyper cruel sloptimism of its serial agains.

Gerardo Contreras of ‘Preteen Gallery’, who curated a show called DERRIDA.PDF in Vienna in November 2012. The Facebook update is from 2017 (deleted).

On another beat, Ronell follows the ‘returns of America’, the ‘flashbacks, mythical retrievals, regressive stalls, and traumatic blankouts’. Can’t you feel it? The immense ‘stall’ that ‘America’ now is. Sure, D.O.G.E. is already somewhat successful as part of the ‘deconstruction of the administrative state’ Bannon was pushed out of implementing first time round, and the J6 prisoners were just that and mostly worthy of pardon, but the larger frame of tech-lord mask-off decisionism remains in place. The fuck earth bet for all-in AI actually dates back (at least) to 2014, when Musk literally said that: fuck earth. Just that assumption that the earth can already be, has already been abandoned, is all well and good as advanced accelerationism takes for granted compact multis of superhabitable earths, but in 2025 it only underlines a situation where a technical race takes place with the added bite that racing harder doesn’t just divert resources from other things as a side effect of gaining a relative advantage, but also has an increasing direct chance of destroying the world. The rub is that in taking a bet on A.I. to resolve everything later on, the insolvability of everything increases, and the pharmacological structure (game theory of cure and kill) stalls. ‘Turbo America’ is just the fever dream of a country on life support, Musk’s ‘fuck Earth’ ethos metastasized into a national death drive.

Given such a diagnosis, one can perhaps only pan out and read. Ye’s recent now-deleted X post to the effect that reading too should be fucked—‘Fuck reading and anyone who can do it’—is to be taken as part of the same mask-off passive assumptionism: it’s okay to fuck reading because it’s okay to fuck earth. But reading retains for now a sheer force of artificial anarchism, time travel of the most elegant kind, allowing as it does the creation of one’s own time and time-line. Ronell reads Cavell on the stalled grounding of America, wherein Cavell admits that reading-time turns time on its head:

But since my earlier inheritance of the later (of Wittgenstein, and before him of Austin) is equally the basis of my later inheritance of the earlier (of Emerson, and before him of Thoreau), what is basic?

Wittgenstein and Austin before Emerson and Thoreau, who came after—such is what Cavell says in This New Yet Unapproachable America in 1987, as read now by Ronell during the second term, causing infinite ‘basic’ problems to do with what grounds and what found(er)s the American zone. Fuck earth mask-off decisionism reads itself as the only dialectical position we can take, now, the one in which Trump will yet be cancelled (as Musk), but Trumpism remains and reads off as the defeat of the left—the second term becomes a forcing function (a favorite term of Musk’s), Trump as true icon and not just presence. In a sense, this is what Musk’s hovering appearance at the seat of power means. ‘Fuck earth’ tallies, to an extent, with irreversible reading cues, one thing always coming after the other. Instead of ‘the bark of Columbus near[ing] the shore of America’ and teaching us that ‘the universe is the property of every individual in it and shines for us’, perhaps ‘the world exists as it were for its own reasons, and a new America is said to be unapproachable’ (Cavell). A new America: yet to be founded, created, staged, or approached. A new America: which must pass the Great Filter (as Musk insists) once administrative power has been formalized, assuring us continuity of the race. Columbus, once again, is about to set sail, but this time with speed. I can assure you—says Nick Land, certain that a joint press conference with Trump is akin to dying and being in paradise—we are about to get there. This time this really is it—after so many times when the time wasn’t yet the time, the mega political time of Kairos has now come good.

Let’s attempt to at least get the reading of this moment of decision right—or pretend to. ‘I think we have a duty to maintain the light of consciousness’, says Musk, ‘to make sure it continues into the future.’ The earth is fucked and left behind, in other words, so that a more infinite horizon may be scoped, the interplanetary (‘light’ itself), the absolutely fucking infinite. In some ways Muskian decisionism—which is an assumed, sovereign decisionism—is comparable in the philosophical and mathematical domain to Badiou’s presumptive decision for being qua being at the start of Being and Event. Mask-off mathematical decisionism is the idea that set theory, like former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt, knows better. Mathematics, says Badiou, ‘is rather the sole discourse which “knows” absolutely what it is talking about’. In the same way that Sam Altman says AI will ‘solve physics’ and Schmidt maintains that since the energy demands for AI are infinite and we are never going to meet our climate goals anyway then we may as well bet on building AI to solve the problem, so Badiou takes up the decision for being qua being (infinities) over loss-orientated poetic ontologies of Being, even if this decision itself is caught for him always somewhere between hypothesis and thesis. What the deciders know in our place in effect—that the earth is there only to be abandoned because of infinite supply—is known merely as a ‘bet’, a bet that dares life itself as if some kind of joke and pretends to be an informed axiomatic ‘choice’. ‘Lol’, said Trakl’s sister 2hollis.

We find ourselves on the brink of a decision, a decision to break with the arcana of the one and the multiple in which philosophy is born and buried, phoenix of its own sophistic consumption. This decision can take no other form than the following: the one is not.—Badiou

Now, Musk’s decisionism—which is shared—is not without appeal. ‘X’—the app—names in this case the white hole of abstract decisionism itself, a kind of abstract online expressionism of infinity’s own optimism. We might imagine for example a hermeneutic form of D.O.G.E. that strips back any informational content that does not gravitate towards getting past the great filter. Anything else is a waste of time. In fact, from this X-ian point of view, anything online right now should not be online, save consensus-posting towards a forced ontology (see Frank Ruda on the end of set theory) of techno-infinitism. Group-effort here tells us both that it must be right and that the outlier now has no place at all. Musk is on the side of life, therefore; the bet he takes is the only choice (preference) that exists, the bet on and for life (X); infinity’s forced and totalized decision, getting out of the gravity well (I feel the air of another planet). To censor towards the online fun of infinite life-affirmation and to censor towards woke-scold hegemony, these are not at all the same thing. X, X-risk, extinction, ext. The formalization is both semi-artistic and breathtaking:

‘Fuck Earth!’ Elon Musk said to me, laughing. ‘Who cares about Earth?’ We were sitting in his cubicle, in the front corner of a large open-plan office at SpaceX headquarters in Los Angeles. It was a sunny afternoon, a Thursday, one of three designated weekdays Musk spends at SpaceX. Musk was laughing because he was joking: He cares a great deal about Earth.

If there is a problem here, in all this new American accelerationism, it lies perhaps on the side of certainty itself—in the absence of all perhapses. What ends up happening to the text of Badiou’s decision for being qua being (infinite dissemination), as we read it, is that the decision is slowed down, stalled, and on repeat, as soon as one notices a certain glitch, as ‘decision’ comes to name a cipher for the disjunction between a hypothesized experience (the infinity of being) and the pre-positing of that experience (its pre-assumption in artistic objects or the decision itself). Reading is sublime and not entirely to be fucked because it itself spaces, sends a stutter into the heart of procedural calculation. All reading thoroughly deconstructs the decision-state, slowing it down with a speed that really beggars calculation. The decision purely for life—one’s only decision, if one is to love at all—may always flip out onto the side of mechanized extinction, without knowing it, meaning that we never really know who and how has decided for what. Defunding DEI may be a good local example here, since the valences of ‘the woke’ are yet to be fully decided. Rather than being the human analogue for super-intelligent decision-making, Musk may simply be a tone-deaf, room-hogging transphobe sucking up poor Donald’s air.

But it remains almost certain that contemporary ‘America’ is a massive test site and experience for and of something. Returning to Ronell as herself the thinker of the test and the test drive under the guise of many newer modalities, we may read, again, the following passage from The Test Drive:

The provisional logic of the test infiltrates the very core of the technological project, exceeding the range of any model or machine. The test site as protoreal marks out the primary atopos, therefore, producing a ‘place’ where the real is put on the line, awaiting confirmation. If it were the case that technology had a finite, computable task—efficiency, minimization of labor, domination of nature—it would have destined its own finitude or homeostatic completion. Instead, technology ensures its own evolving perpetuation by positing, as its purpose, an infinite Testing severed from any empirical function. In effect, this means that an elliptical circuit has been established between Testing and the Real; a circuit so radically installed cancels the difference between the test and ‘the real thing’. At this point, ethical dilemmas of the present negotiate matters of life and death through indirect media and according to a question which has more to do with testing than with certainty: Whom do we expose to risk?

The shift from certainty to test must be imagined to be already in play and at large in technological projects across the board in 2025 and beyond, which function precisely by confusing thesis and hypothesis and then ignoring the rhetorical dimension (grammatical externalities) that works from outside to deconstruct the testing zone itself, all the while conflating forcing function (Musk) and forced absolute ontology (Ruda) as givens. Set up on the side of an unconscious Infinite Testing, the techno-project suffers mission creep, looks to cancel externalities altogether, and makes a decision that isn’t even one. No X app therefore without the chanciness of X-risk, and no X-risk without ext of extinction, the running risk that may always rhetorically ru(i)n the whole show: exposing one certainty to another, dead certainty to extinct certainty, and so on. The Testing looks like the real which it is not. For life to go on, if it goes on, it must, perhaps, find its test-basis in total undecidability—in the deconstruction, slow and fast, that Derrida once famously said was America itself.