Copium compendium | Eurozine

‘Properly-informed cynicism is barely one other mode of conformity.’

(Max Horkheimer)

‘Let’s smoke emotions collectively, it’s all about you, me and emotions, which must be forgotten.’

(Arman)

‘When you must be well mannered to your search engine so as to get good outcomes.’

(Francis Starvation)

‘Your AI will speak to my AI’

(t-shirt slogan)

‘The center says sure, however the consideration span says no.’

(Melissa Broder)

‘Be the coaching knowledge you wish to see on the earth.’

(Kylie McDonald)

‘Pause for the Folks’

(competition slogan)

‘The chook struggles laborious however strikes nowhere, but it’s incapable of touchdown.’

(Chinese language saying in regards to the hummingbird)

‘Not “Socialism or Barbarism” however “Degrowth or Mad Max”.’

(Patrice Riemens)

‘Actuality is mistaken. Goals are for actual.’

(Tupac)

There are at all times new necessities, however none are helpful to you. They are saying the chance for development has light. Want was extinguished way back. Your soul feels depleted, with no discharge of interior tensions in sight. You want change however can’t deal with it any longer. What occurs when there’s no extra power to handle the problems head on, you place off duties and overlook to care for your physique? You are feeling bored and lonely now that your on-line pals not reply. You indulged final evening, but it surely’s not doable to get drunk or excessive. How do digital souls survive when perseverance means nothing anymore? When you’re too drained to handle your life and cope with planetary dysmorphia, there’s at all times a fallback choice: copium.

If the aim is to reclaim the ability of definition within the struggle in opposition to right-wing meme hegemony, right here’s one. Copium is the digital info consumption that makes one quickly numb, intoxicated and disadvantaged of sensation when there’s actually zero emotion on show. That is the street taken from bittersweet irony all the way down to confronting and overcoming absolute nihilism. What occurs when there’s no objective anymore in coping with the world’s true nature, and also you enter an unnarratable situation?

Copium is a micro-release that helps you retain going, past the damaging aspect of drug-taking and the psychedelic ecstasy of vibrant different realities. Push forward, say it out loud, keep bizarre and be assured there’s life once more after the Occasion Horizon. Enter the tough psychological state of pain-killer-as-attitude that opens you as much as the miracle. What occurs when the escalation of shock worth ways not works? As soon as contained in the rabbit gap, one forgets euphoria, and even the frenzy. As an alternative of a theatrical breakdown the fictional but all too actual copium drug causes a ‘no matter’ flatlining of the involuntary capitalism we’re thrown into.

And while you’re each partly alive, partly lifeless, right this moment’s robots bounce, dance, collapse and arise once more. Even worse: they apologize and ask the way you’re doing. Chatbots are not skilled to be well mannered and distant as with HAL in 2001: A Area Odyssey. They’re emphatic, scary violent responses from the pissed off multitudes that rage in opposition to synthetic stupidity and unfounded hope. ‘Have a pleasant day – and please don’t overlook to rank me!’ Shut up! We care however don’t care.

The essence of copium

In line with Know Your Meme, the ‘portmanteau of the phrases “cope” and “opium”’ describes ‘a fictional drug to assist one cope with loss’, the place making memes acts as a coping mechanism to cope with detrimental feelings. The time period, which may be traced again to rapper Keak da Sneak’s 2003 album title, was utilized in an illustration that includes Pepe the Frog hooked as much as an oxygen tank labelled copium, a chemical ‘used to assuage the thoughts of an individual who has simply misplaced a debate’. The cartoon drawing, popularized in meme area through the 4Chan-Twitter Trump years, reached its peak after 6 January 2021 and the storming of the US Capitol. There’s additionally a suggestion, in line with Wiktionary, that copium results in denial.

The time period will also be learn as a reference to the US opiate disaster. As a up to date memes states: ‘Seems, the true opiates of the plenty … is opiates.’ Nevertheless, we’re speaking right here about symbolic methods of how one can grapple with stress, panic and anger, not about luring, self-destructive methods out. The late French thinker Bernard Stiegler describes this era because the collapse of ‘world childishness’, ‘leaving the white center courses to sink into distress, alcoholism, drug habit and resentment, accelerating the regression of their life expectancy in addition to the collapse of their “intelligence quotient”.’

Whereas City Dictionary defines copium as ‘metaphoric opiate inhaled when confronted with loss, failure or defeat, particularly in sports activities, politics and different tribal settings’, the emphasis right here lies on the structural features of a life outlined by serial defeats. What occurs when this loss turns into everlasting and hardwired into techno-social existence? The shock doctrine that outlined the neo-liberal age is lengthy gone, but ‘change’ is for the joyful few. The shock is everlasting now and has change into an integral a part of twenty-first century life. What stays is range within the type of stagnation, regression, disaster and decline, and a unending sense of catastrophe, which Kim Stanley Robinson known as Götterdämmerung capitalism in his cli-fi novel Ministry for the Future. Nothing will disappear voluntarily, out-of-the-blue. Appearances refuse to fade away. With each historical past and expertise rushing up additional, hyper forces change into autonomous entities that not want the human topic. That’s the bleakness of life after the tipping level.

Perception opiates

In 1843 Karl Marx wrote the next, now well-known sentences: ‘Faith is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the guts of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless circumstances. It’s the opium of the individuals.’ The intention of faith then was to relax uncertainty in life. Across the identical time, the phrase ‘God is lifeless’ began to flow into. Blame Kierkegaard, Stirner and Nietzsche, however as soon as the secular genie was out of the bottle, no ‘religious renaissance’ might reinstate the authority of faith (with the violent fundamentalist regimes in Iran and Afghanistan serving as a merciless reminder).

Quick ahead from the nineteenth century and the query is what does the ‘copium of the individuals’ seems like right this moment. What calms you down? How do you cope? What are methods to include insecurities within the mild of the inevitable? The uncooked objectivity of the collapse alone won’t result in political motion except we take vulnerability under consideration. That is the lesson for the 2020s. We’re speculated to be actors however behave like twentieth-century spectators. That is our melancholy.

‘Simply that one thing so good. Simply can’t perform no extra.’ (Love Will Tear Us Aside, Pleasure Division)

As an alternative of defining coping as a psychological technique, whereby the topic rejects a harsh fact and adopts a much less disturbing perception, let’s stress the survival side of repetitive on a regular basis life that doesn’t permit for (revolutionary) change. The spirit of capitalism could also be lifeless, however so is the desire to withstand and overthrow the regime.

‘Take a chill capsule!’ (standard saying)

Coping is then a results of the lack of the constructive aspect of ideology as a belief-system. Being on the earth is decreased to killing time. It’s time to go straightforward on the job and stop the hustle. Let’s chill and examine the socials.

What are ‘coping mechanisms’? On this mild, copium may be something. It’s an empty container so long as it alleviates the ache and is known as a metaphorical opiate. Whereas some affiliate it with subdued addictive substances and issues like sports activities, sleep, porn or meals, copium is best understood as primarily digital time killers reminiscent of binge-watching sequence, enjoying video games and doom scrolling TikTok movies. And don’t overlook all of the mindless YouTube periods.

Copium stands for vita non activa and offers aid from contemplation, giving your mind a break. What occurs when worries go in circles and it has change into not possible to decide, any resolution? Apathy was a stigma. Not. There’s sympathy for the slacker. Everybody has had sufficient. That is the massive distinction from thirty years in the past when neo-liberal positivism was nonetheless the norm and the slacker was appeared down upon as a lazy, sub-cultural determine languishing about as Technology X. The state of distraction right this moment equals impulsive digital interactions that offload the anxieties onto one other platform or app: ship an immediate message, swipe to match on a courting app, touch upon a put up. All it will by no means carry relaxation or tranquillity, not to mention mindfulness.

What’s your poison?

Copium is turned to as a defence mechanism in conditions of stress. However what occurs when this ‘mechanism’ enters geo-politics, behavioural psychology and, finally, is bought again to you thru social media advertising and marketing? The neuro-science enlightenment marketing campaign has paid off. The workings of the mind’s reward system at the moment are frequent data. Patterns of cybernetic management have been acknowledged. The upper artwork of coping, which arises with all this techno-cynical motive, is on the identical time a mirrored image on Mark Fisher’s prognosis of the state of frenzied stasis.

‘Making an attempt to make ends meet, you’re a slave to cash then you definitely die.’ (The Verve)

Hauntology is likely to be one choice, however what occurs when the nightmare returns as in a Groundhog Night time, which, in contrast to Groundhog Day, would begin over again the second the primary character falls asleep? Will copium – as soon as standard on Twitch, generally additionally known as hopium – solely prolong the nightmare? One wonders whether or not the digital papaver will make the chain of disasters worse or relatively soften its psychological influence? Or does it, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s phrase, work extra like a painkilling ‘aspirin of the individuals’? God-like rays beam down from the clouds after which disappear, right away.

In line with therapists, we have to cope ‘so as to cope with drawback or adversity’. However when you run out of coping abilities, there’s at all times copium as a final resort. That is the promise. Regression is a unending downward slope. We’re thrown again to coping mechanisms after entry to the previous and future are blocked. There’s simply horror of the everlasting presence of the now, the unending, monotonous on a regular basis. Whereas every part seems to vary, nothing does. Coping with a world pushed by reactive forces has change into a central situation, contemplating the straightforward means individuals movement out and in of existence on this world. What’s your poison?

The paranoia entice

There’s an uncanny whirlpool of things at play that spins round an empty core known as the Self. That is what occurs when emotions of being undesired, undesirable and remoted are skilled collectively, on an industrial, cosmic scale. That is the late social media age of collective loneliness, also called the not-yet-widely-recognized Sherry Turkle syndrome. However the situation is not being alone within the crowd. The unhappy and lonely collect to muffle the notion of ache, create quasi-communities with accompanying ideologies in an try to offer which means to residing within the void. Whether or not or not there’s a lack of precise social networks and private (emotional) bonding is not related. The techno-social actuality supersedes the identification constructing of an outsider group. As soon as failure is democratized and turns into a basic situation with a number of methods to specific itself, we have to look past this or that subculture and handle the final techno-affect.

Let’s dig into a specific case. In her analysis on younger male incels and their on-line boards, Canadian researcher Kate Babin lists 4 components for the dearth of social cohesion. She begins with othering the in group, the observe of ‘rampant mistrust between members on a discussion board’. This reflex of exclusion mirrors a basic lack of belief on platforms and may be seen as an internalization of surveillance and digital extractivism. One isn’t actually alone on-line, nor in a closed group for that matter. There are at all times massive and small Others nearly current that watch and comply with in a semi-invisible method. There’s by no means actually belief. The social feeling is a faux one, at greatest unreliable.

On this overcrowded Planet Web, coping isn’t simply of solitary concern. Ranges of paranoia in open networks are at an all-time excessive, whereas tacit activist data on how one can establish infiltrators and spies stays nearly non-existent. Massive flocs of customers are able to disappear in a single day, by no means to been seen once more. Whereas previously this tradition of uncertainty was related to on-line anonymity, today social media makes it a lot simpler to analyze who’s behind a username. At greatest copium acts as a masks – if solely we might see on-line remark tradition because the masquerade balls throughout Venice Carnival.

The second component, clogging up the discussion board, is once more an inside matter, used to indicate engagement by minimal involvement. There may be pleasure in derailing an inside dialogue or change like this and disrupting rational deliberation; I put up, like and share, subsequently I’m. When the sign to noise ratio suggestions, the ability of discourse is momentarily disrupted, reproducing a simulacrum of neighborhood.

Shitposting is the third issue Babin lists: a tradition jamming approach in a international feed, as an illustration on YouTube or Twitter. Usually just one dangerous comment will suffice to finish a web-based dialogue and begin an avalanche of ‘engagement’, a trick cultivated by the grifters that make up the troll-industrial complicated. The recommendation of Nineties cyberculture ‘to not feed the trolls’ didn’t scale past the do-good hacker neighborhood and is these days largely unknown to mainstream customers.

A further situation right here is the absence of chic moderation instruments. Platformed communities can not protect themselves as a result of on-line environments are supposed to stay ‘open’ (to develop). Closed teams merely would not have to cope with shitposters. The best way customers handled ‘zoom bombing’ through the COVID-19 pandemic years (sending an unique passcode to subscribed contributors earlier than the occasion or assembly) exhibits how straightforward it’s to guard sure on-line exchanges. Nevertheless, previous media nonetheless loves reporting shitposting incidents as an indication of the decline of digital media – and society usually. As an alternative of accusing adolescent others with immature behaviour, it could be higher to border these acts as a part of an ideological battle, a tradition conflict, or, extra just lately, cyberwarfare.

Babin’s fourth and final attribute is fatalism, which is by far essentially the most attention-grabbing of her components because it invitations us to check fatum right this moment with Jean Baudrillard’s Deadly Methods from 1983. Babin notes that ‘any constructive point out of an curiosity or a interest which presents a chance for members to attach with one another is as a substitute diminished and labelled a “cope”.’ So what’s the fatum right here? Software program, neighborhood ties, the zeitgeist, the incel identification entice? In her conclusion Kate Babin notes that the incels.is discussion board she investigated ‘creates division inside a subcultural neighborhood, resulting in an absence of social help, low high quality relationships and excessive detrimental affectivity.’ Identification isn’t celebrated as a liberation however turns into a paranoia entice.

The fatality is a second-order, weak model of Baudrillard’s romantic notion of the seductive ‘evil’ aspect of the Inevitable. As an alternative, what’s skilled is an instable order to fabricated parts, glued collectively in a brief setting, seemingly exchanging destiny with design. Fluidity is the alternative of predestination. The true current attitudes confronted listed below are types of confusion, which manifest as ‘optionalism’ – I’ve the liberty to decide on between a mess of choices and ultimately can not determine.

The identical previous funeral songs

As Timothy Morton famous, ‘the outside is already indoors’. The coexistence of me and disasters is a actuality. Morton describes issues that ‘one can perceive completely, however for which there isn’t any rational answer’. We’re at all times mistaken. Ought to the collapse be accelerated or can the katechon (the restrainer), when correctly administered, impede its unfold? Is copium then the ‘katechon from beneath’? Crowdsourcing efforts to delay the arrival of the Antichrist? How will customers cope after the Web Mass Extinction when billions of profiles get worn out in a singular occasion? Every catastrophe are parked in our private histories in a parallel trajectory – till they not may be. Will it change into vital for public well being and political activism causes to design the collective psychic armour that may defend us in opposition to the detrimental psychological fallout of platform disasterism?

Can recollections of the previous perform as copium? Russian researcher Nina Danilova has written an attention-grabbing examine on the standing of déjà-vu, a phenomenon pushed by an ‘overabundance of reminiscence and the disappearance of hopes for a greater future’. However what occurs when reminiscence can not be captured and is solely not there? What’s the déjà-vu impact in a tradition of psycho-technic amnesia? Déjà-vu of the little that’s left? Positive, one can be taught mnemonic strategies, however the lure of tech is at all times there to help us when sudden waves of nostalgia resurface and we flick thru our photograph collections, social media collections and the occasional emails. We encompass technical units, as prosthesis, as Stiegler calls it. Customers really feel mnemonically disabled and can’t stay with out their units. With Paolo Virno, Danilova defines deja-vu as ‘a situation that determines apathy, fatalism, and indifference to the long run, since historical past appears to be identified prematurely and unalterable’.

Danilova asks: ‘Why is pondering of the long run so problematic inside the temporality of déjà vu?’ Micro déjà-vu moments, whether or not narco-technically induced or not, are one of many many modern manifestations of ‘stuckness’, scary a way of stagnation of each society and its topics. How have we already skilled the apocalypse earlier than it has even occurred? There can solely be one ending however not on this story: we’re caught within the ultimate section that intentionally upholds its decision. What occurs when life will get trapped in a repetitive loop and we will solely hearken to the identical previous funeral songs? You wish to transfer on, however, within the present sadist state of affairs, there isn’t any approach to elegantly exit from the scene.

In a digital cosmos, held collectively by copium, there are a number of readings. The Russian tackle that is at all times an attention-grabbing one. As Danilova explains in an e-mail change, ‘the Russian mentality is ready to withstand any trace of rose-tinted glasses. Our means is to hit the underside so laborious that you just see stars.’ I ask about toska, the Russian type of despair past despair, unhappiness and melancholia, and the way it pertains to copium: ‘Toska signifies a realm the place irony doesn’t work anymore. It’s at all times a post-ironic state of disillusion. Irony remains to be a type of copium, because the meme world demonstrates. Within the toska way of thinking, one can not disguise behind it anymore. Copium can subsequently be put apart as a frivolous Western affair, with nonetheless an excessive amount of hope between the traces.’ Russians, we would say, subsist within the realm of post-copium: a continuum of culturally decided despair. As a dialectical antithesis, one might suggest that it’s exactly copium that stops the cultivation of struggling and the last word institution of loss of life cults.

In line with Italian theorist Franco Berardi, in analysing the West, we must always think about the unsinkable Donald Trump as an addictive (social) media superstar, a political copium of a peculiar form:

People, of their majority, have to date used that repellent particular person in a transfer to sabotage the globalist elite. However now there’s something extra loopy. The American thoughts wants to deal with the persistence of insupportable actuality, in order that they open up the field of Pandora of whole erasure of actuality as Rational, unleashing a limitless sphere of memetic meaninglessness. The sphere of meaninglessness just isn’t restricted by plausibility, to not point out trustability or fact. The query for a lot of is thus how to deal with the despair provoked by the boundaries of actuality, by the predictability of rational selections.

Whereas politics is commonly pushed apart as cleaning soap opera or a bureaucratic recreation, standard figures themselves are changed into copium.

Operation Discover Misplaced Time

When you’ve witnessed sudden temper shifts from anguish and mourning to outrage and anger because the core patterns that expresses discontent in society, ideological labels reminiscent of optimism and pessimism change into interchangeable. The copium engine sits within the midst of all of this, proper within the center, ensuring the pendulum by no means stops. In modern on-line tradition, the joyful feelings of ‘hopecore’ and the infinite doom scrolling ‘corecore’ mode co-exist. Each are types of collective psychic armours to guard the precarious multitudes from a rising flood of disasters. Whereas gurus, therapists, influencers, pals and oldsters imagine within the energy of constructive messages, customers that yearn for higher occasions have discovered to go away open all choices: whereas hope is likely to be a psychological painkiller, a go to to the darkish aspect may be equally uplifting. As each morale boosting speak and dank memes can rapidly lose their influence and change into disgusting, don’t overlook the ability of singing the blues.

Ultimately, copium is a approach to bridge empty time, flat, unending durations which can be not intense nor round however stretched and repetitive. When life is a sequence of pseudo-events from the lives of others, time flies and nothing stands out. It might be counterintuitive to reintroduce and impose a ready time for no good motive, however the insurrection in opposition to friction-free smoothness feels proper. The decolonization of time is at hand: Operation Discover Misplaced Time, overcoming stagnation fused with a unending stream of disasters to create an inflationary spiral. Bear in mind, the lengthy durée of the malaise and the temporality of crises are not opposites and have change into a poisonous combine. Higher loosen up and do nothing particular. The ontological shock isn’t coming. As an alternative, distributed types of ready are on the rise. Chilling collectively provokes. Anticipate a planetary name for a ‘strike on time’ quickly.

For Cade Diehm from the New Design Congress in Berlin, copium is distinctly completely different to nostalgia, the comfortable internet and escapism. ‘All of them have similarities, however copium itself is a derogatory description of delusion as cope as a substitute of defeat. … Copium is like coming final in a foot race and pondering you’re successful. It’s a type of post-Trump HODLing. BAYC ‘gm’ and WAGMI, QAnon loser mothers “awaiting the storm” any second now: Common Flynn and Q are coming in to empty the swamp subsequent 12 months. Nostalgia for final month. That’s the promise. It’s the depth for energy or management, filtered by nostalgia however tremendous instant. It’s not a need for present have an effect on, and it’s not a eager for one thing long gone. It’s a denial of the instant.’

Upsetting Silicon Valley billionaires and their start-up clone armies worldwide could be a straightforward technique to disrupt the ever-growing demand for copium. Their invisible methods embody using behaviour psychologists and different techno-magic tricksters. It has taken time, however mass vigilance ways on the frontline of subliminal wars are understood by the multitudes – even when they may ultimately be rendered ineffective. The intention now could be to reverse the digital extractivist technique of disappearing into the background to creating infrastructure that’s seen. Difficult energy to struggle it out within the open isn’t prone to be questioned. And if their affect can not be subtle, there will probably be no return to ‘regular’.

Publish-boredom

For Hannah Ahrendt, solitude meant solitary studying – whereas being with different authors. This isn’t how we understand the present desolate state of affairs. Copium is inflicting us to no-longer-be-there when the net of human relations unravels. Confronted with worldlessness, momentary lapses of absence could trigger emotions of guilt, however the necessity to know has taken over. Indifference rulz, as David Kishik writes in Self Examine: Notes on the Schizoid Situation: ‘Though I wish to categorical my feelings, all I can report again is a gradual lack of have an effect on, plus a rising sense of isolation. Is that this what medieval monks known as taedium vitae, a weariness that arises not from life’s burdens however from its crawling vacancy?’ That is the interior battle for (tele)presence. It’s time to articulate the dialectics of the absent presence.

Accelerationists see the unfolding of the forces of digitization as a assure for the apocalyptic transition from this late-capitalist bourgeois society to chill socialism. Towards the passive certainty of the collapse, there’s nothing extra thrilling and erotic than the power of latest beginnings that overcome the loss of life cult. That is Hannah Arendt’s Lebensphilosophie: the liberating feeling of not having been right here earlier than and escaping the prescribed apathy, cynicism, paralysis and despair to behave, once more, traditionally.

What comes after boredom? Uncover the ability of self-organization to beat the depleted self. Reclaim the social – it’s now or by no means. Motion is the a-priori; the approaching neighborhood won’t be introduced on a silver platter. Tactical media are a radical interruption of the historic continuity of platform domination and don’t want a wolf on the door to thrive. There are multitudes of urgencies. Itemizing them could be a mistake and certain to make one depressed. Finest to run into an urgency of collective design: your very personal collapse trouvée.

‘By the point the apocalypse started, the world had already ended. It ended each day for a century or two. It ended, and one other ending world spun as a replacement.’ (The World Retains Ending, and the World Goes On, Franny Choi)