Chapter 3: The Five Ominous Sound Effects or "我がだが島を救うべし"
It has been said that monotonous sounds can induce disease and even murder. From a popularity viewpoint, mono grammatically synthesized horns are the favoured monsters in all totalitarian and anarchistic universe. For this very reason, this uh... this definitely primitive duo of songs maintain one for the preparatory futility of this monotonously litigious world.“WHY DO WE KILL OURSELVES?!Oh it runs deep... it's always there... It's like part of us... Oh you know it's got to growAnother bomb's gonna crash right in your face. Oh, somebody's gonna reach for its shining face, oh. Ready to be born... LIVE FOR GOD!!! Come forth and seize our very existence. Come forth and seize our very existence. But we shall be unchained, stronger than you ever could be. Here we come, with the blackened staff upon our waving hands. Here we come, the boiling lead across our slowly shaping tongues. NOT AS CRIMINAL!NOT AS VIOLENT! NOT AS CRIMINAL...YOU KILL YOURSELF! YOU KILL YOURSELF! THAT'S YOU! DON'T KILL YOURSELF! INVOLENT WHY YOU KILL YOURSELF?
"我がだが島を救うべし" or "Idiots, Save the Island" is the motto of sound accelerationism: once we get the proper undercurrent of the Internet, rocket fuel will bring us to the moon! It is a total urban myth (or just a misinterpretation), made even more useless by frequent attempts over the years to disprove the myth that sound has nine ominous sound effects, while it in fact has five. Sound accelerationism, sound existentialism or sound atomicism is a type of anarchist and anti-authoritarian critique that the economy, the State and dominant ideology are the source of all goods and services. This kind of critique is idealistic in many respects, since in human history it is only truly possible in a context where technology does not weigh down on society to the extent it does today. As such, accelerationism often offers an end goal, an effectively postmodern democratic utopia in which the economic, social, and political gains made by people mean just good enough for the "simple humanity" that the accelerationists seek to produce.
Sound accelerationism is deeply ecological and anti-language, as language is the oppressive force behind history—a process of categorical growth and replacement rendered intelligible exclusively through the figures of the conflictual. If contradictions are becoming immanent and necessary, how does one resolve them? According to Claire Vaye Watkins’s powerful new book, the answer might be to change the way we think.
Critical away from the “disposable humans” nomadic resplendence of our civilization/conception of self, or the “free individuals” composing the commoner orders of our historical dreams, seems unnecessary and divisive at this point. Nonetheless we have not completely resolved the antinomies between collectivity and individual, human and avatar, manual and digital, consciousness and information, name and math, sovereign and inverted, self and other.
Watkins’s resonant and personal spell allows us to resolve at least one of these dilemmas. The familial intimacy of Serious Bovine, cow-love for cow-love, is stitched back on ourselves and friends, living and displaced things, skin and fiber-tech, psyche and physicality, fast and slow consideration.
Essentially, sound accelerationism promotes language-rebel fetishism and, by extension, the practice of street-censorship and cyber-censorship. I am a vocal opponent of state-sponsored internet censorship; I promote the artistic practice of “bullshit,” which consists in testing whether one’s understanding is correct by checking with their own in-character, humorous self-assumed biases.
When searching the internet for information relevant to an issue you find yourself engrossed in, you might encounter references to Apocalypse Culture, a 1980s American culture-jamming organization which would replace parts of pop songs with yet another song in a major-key minor-key that got on everyone’s nerves especially right wing and old people who couldn’t completely shut off the iron rags inside their heads. Conceptionally, apocalypse culture is a vivid description of the kind of subjective, engaged zone that pre-Socratics called an “ek-amphibolus” emphasized the unpredictability of political and social developments. After all, contemporary forms of cyberspace like Reddit and Twitter are algorithmically structured platforms where thought bubble and ephemeral appetites stay attached to Twitter’s programmed carousel – a kind of nou-book architectural frame that since 19th century became solidified as the default via-representation of our human condition.
Don't speak! Use meaningless sounds! It is immoral to use language as a means of manifesting reality.