Fiction isn't escape—it’s exposure. It triggers deep systems: buried thoughts, psychic reflexes. Worlds where death mutates, where decay walks and talks—these aren’t just fantasy. They’re models. They show how we process loss, how we make meaning where none sticks. Undeath isn't spectacle—it's rehearsal.
But more than that, these stories smuggle truths. Metaphor as weapon. Underneath the surface, they talk about control: what it means to act, to choose, to resist collapse into passivity. Magic is just a shadow play for agency. Beneath the symbols, we find the question: do we move, or are we moved?
Culture is that which embodies the greatest entropy in human reality. No biological entity—no virus, no mycelium—disintegrates and atomizes itself as drastically, as rapidly, as human cultures do. Not the ozone, not the glacial ice—nothing decays faster, nothing exists with such radical detachment from itself, rendering itself so thoroughly unrecognizable and opaque, as culture does.
Think about it: how stable are languages and symbols really? In truth, nothing truly merits the name culture if that word implies something stable.
Culture is less stable—less durable—even than a human life. It cannot, even within the fleeting confines of human perception, meet the criteria of something that consists. It cannot be considered static, cohesive, or self-contained. Speaking of circles, spheres, or—at worst—tradition only serves to obscure the fact that culture blurs or vanishes entirely the moment it becomes unnecessary to people. And by "people" we mean power.
Culture persists only when it can be used—utilized, categorized, institutionalized, or demonized. No culture is in itself. You can see this plainly in the syncretisms of the 21st century, where everything is stitched to everything else at random, not to create meaning, but to gesture at the appearance of it: glimpses of culture, micro-cultures, no culture at all. Like molecules whose atomic components slowly dissolve, drift apart, and are eventually lost—disintegrating the molecule itself.
The so-called culture war is nothing more than a desperate attempt to maintain cultural coherence through hostility. It's the oldest tool of the tribe. Long before the first city walls were raised, it was the only bond between individuals. The very first culture, if you like, was the culture of one tribe against another—culture versus culture—because without the other, culture could not exist. Which is to say, it was never a genuine culture at all.
Culture thrives on division, on attribution, on Babylonian fragmentation—on the entropic forgetting of the only identity that carries any real meaning: being identical with oneself. There is no culture outside the self. And in that lies the universal culture: lived, practiced, and shared equally by all, unconsciously—perhaps only in dreams, in fleeting moments, or in the nanoseconds before death.
Everything else is the cultural veil: the instrument to crown patriarchs, to unite minorities against oppressors, and to invent oppressors in the first place. It is collective culture—blind tradition, inherited belief, and social calculation—reproducing itself incestuously, spinning faulty truths and affective alliances that seem to endure, yet never truly are.
The way you speak, the way you pray—it's dictated by your circumstance, moment to moment. None of it is essentially you. None of it is essentially anything at all.
Steel groans—
not like machines,
but like bones breaking in the dark.
The caverns are gutted,
their roofs sagging with the weight
of memory,
or maybe just smoke.
They were shelters once,
now they’re husks.
Still, they keep out the fire.
Mostly.
Metal screams in pulses,
lining the underworld
like the ribs of something that used to crawl,
used to breathe—
but now only houses teeth.
Mills grind.
Clamps snap.
The air stinks of scorched oil and nerves.
Machines—
fragile, trembling—
are fed into jaws.
They twitch, like they remember being alive.
They look familiar.
Not quite.
Close enough to unsettle.
Like a dream you can’t unsee
but can’t name either.
Nothing here moves forward.
Nothing goes back.
It all just happens.
Like a twitch.
Like a seizure.
The machines don’t care.
They were never meant to.
And in the center—
the oil pool, thick and dark,
a false stillness.
A place for breath, maybe.
Or resurrection.
Only when the trophies are dipped—
bone, wire,
once-prized things—
does the surface break.
Tiny waves.
Ritual moments
before the next scream.
Destruction.
Rebuilding.
Destruction again.
The cycle doesn’t blink.
It just clicks.
One. Zero.
One. Zero.
This is code.
Together, we stand constantly on the threshold of a new epoch—one that never quite arrives, yet in retrospect, appears inevitable. We must be ready to plunge into a maelstrom of numbers, syllables, sounds, and fractured symbols. No machetes in hand, our limbs ensnared in the undergrowth—then comes the flood, the melting ice, the final sundering of desire from life. The post-psychoanalytic person-project waits at the gate, poised for our last, irreversible step—unconditional—into a world where nothing is desired because nothing resists, and nothing fails to resist. Where resistance vanishes, desire dissolves.
One is inevitably drawn to the acceptance of others—it's a fundamental aspect of a social mammal’s survival toolkit. Humans, with their surplus of perspective-shifting abilities, have the unique capacity to look beyond their immediate circumstances. They long for acknowledgment, yet simultaneously despise the humiliation of surrendering, of losing their autonomy. This paradox—where we seek contentment but refuse to bow or prostrate ourselves unless forced by necessity—lies at the heart of our struggle. When we choose to yield, it is not in submission but as part of a calculated strategy. By complying, we play a long game, still believing, egoistically, that we will ultimately emerge on top.
The question persists: why endure suffering for the sake of self-expression unless that expression offers relief from even greater anguish? Is it worth it? The answer, alas, eludes me—unresolved, suspended in the mists of possibility.
Revolutionary endeavors, even the mere posturing of revolution, are curious games. They appear to challenge the prevailing powers and their set rules, yet no revolution has ever occurred outside the framework of civilization, nor outside the bounds of tribal or national systems.
I argue that revolution only begins where the very structures of power are already firmly in place. And, therefore, by its very nature, revolution is inherently bound within those structures.
I can hear the counter-argument: that nobility resides in revolutionary struggle, in fighting for a better future, a better world. But the question persists: a better future for whom, and from what perspective within the rigid framework of established power structures?
Human desire cannot be cloaked in the guise of righteousness. No one fights for abstract notions of good itself—that would be nonsensical—but for what they believe is the "good cause." I would even argue that most actors within a real revolution don’t fight for their ideals, not even moral principles, but to win, within set laws of power flow. There will not be a universal revolution—one that benefits all—but only revolutions aimed at supplanting the good (or bad) cause of others with one's own.
The ego is always the architect of its own idealist crusade. When the system casts you aside, you retaliate. You align yourself with others who, too, find themselves on the margins—or who, driven by a desire to change, view the system as one of subjugation, either because their own place is less desirable than others', or because the system itself is so corrupt, so fundamentally wrong, that it must be overthrown entirely. But this solidarity is often fleeting, lasting only until the moment you find yourself stretched beyond the limits of your own weary will. What happens when the system tilts in your favor, and you're given a position where you feel comfortable—or perhaps even powerful—and you come to realize that ‘the people’ you once fought for no longer serve your own betterment because they’re still miserable?
No one is born a rebel. Rebels are forged in the crucible of rejection, exclusion, and a burning desire to seize power. It is through the wounds inflicted by the world that we are made aware of the possibility of resistance. Or so it seems. But if this is true, then how can the rebel who seizes power ever revolt against the very system that created them, only to grant them dominion over others through victory?
And what, then, of alternatives? We are promised that revolutions offer salvation, a means of escape from the suffocating grip of the system. But I contend that revolutions are merely another face of the system, mocking us for continuing to call them such. Even the most radical alternatives—those birthed from defiance—inevitably return to the fold, carving out spaces for the fortunate while leaving behind the forgotten and the weak, who are suddenly deemed necessary evils for a greater good or a noble cause.
I would argue that the very concept of radicalism, of the alternative, and of revolution as it’s most organized and usually weaponized form, is the perennial joker card—an excuse for war, a rest quadrant on a chaotic, cybernetic board game in which tribes, nation-states, drifters, and terrorists alike play essential, yet ultimately subordinate, roles in the unending human paradox of desiring both acceptance and autonomy. And within the parameters of civilization — those which no revolution in history ever questioned — this paradox invariably means a relentless struggle for a place at the top of a hierarchical order and maintaining an illusion of (moral) superiority. It’s far simpler than we often admit. Yet we cannot see it, for we continue to believe in the existence of good and evil, when in reality, it is nothing more than human Zwiespältigkeit.
It is absurd.
Humans unite the most contradictory concepts in their beliefs. Some preserve the idea of eternal recurrence within a speciesist ideology, where human soul energy migrates exclusively into human bodies. They believe they carry a multitude of past existences within them—selves that have become unconscious yet remain far from powerless. Others, however, dread punishment: reincarnation as a lower being, a cockroach or a dog, a life in filth. Another symptom of their blind speciesism. A person whose karmic score (I can't help thinking of those social credit systems where citizens are evaluated and devalued) falls into a critical range could, in theory, return as a rat. What a glorious horizon: a next life in the gutter, in a palace of detritus. The ultimate gluttony. Naked, covered in cancerous sores, accompanied by a microbiome that reduces weeks-old carcasses to nutrient-rich minerals. Humans are addicted to the idea that something of them will remain. At the same time, they crave control over the here and now, over the body and mind of their present selves. Those who reject this imperative are seen as failures, as viral contaminants of society. Even traumas embedded in genetic structures, whose precise influence on our behaviour is barely understood, are embraced as a comforting revelation from the otherwise despised realm of science: Finally, the proof! Something lives on in me. And not just as an abstract construct, but as something good, magical, precious. A possession of the self that is not to be feared but longed for, because it validates everything that constitutes perceived reality. It seems that even in an age of self-reflecting machines, humans still need a certified, externally validated, God-given affirmation: YES! You are right just as you are. You are meant to be. You are the product of suffering, of joy, of love, of generational excellence. But what a shame that the very movements that rail against the claim to excellence of elites and omnipotent minorities ultimately desire nothing more than a privileged, validated, personally distinguished position above others. I, for one, can hardly wait to return as a rat. The sheer amount a wild rat accomplishes in its short life makes you dreamers, you validation-addicted souls, look older than a Buddhist monk in Sokushinbutsu - the final cycle of meditation that transcends death.
Business has flourished for centuries.
Tribal logic, ethnic coding—beyond them, further still, into the delirium of power-maddened nation-states, each ruled by its own paranoid sovereign—a subterranean communion in hereditary ignorance.
Power-drunk madmen, meat puppets, cancerous and wet machines of the surface world called the West know well that true dominance requires no allegiance to democratic or liberal value configurations—those hollow idols, blank totems, shattered long ago like Roman pottery.
Now, the vectors rule. They swallow everything whole—an endless maw of consumption and extraction, a currency of subjugation. The true revolution upon us is not the gilded promise of progress, but the inexorable tightening of a vast, invisible noose. It is neither bloodless nor peaceful, and it feeds its victims to the biodiesel engines of tomorrow. A totality, metaphysical in scope, devouring its children, even its strongest.
Those who believe they oppose it—their screams fading into insignificance—are already submerged, drowning in a tide of tar. They are within it, made by it, consumed by it. A perfect circle, seen from afar.
The techno-spiritual automation of the person-project, devoted to self-cannibalization, has already transpired. Do you still believe?
Everything we know, everything we are, stems from ourselves—from a slavish devotion to comfort, from that deep-rooted craving for belonging, twisted into something grotesque. It drives us either toward complete atomization or into the total desolation of identity. Identity is the real death.
Death is transformation.
It’s not an exit.
There is none.
Not for us.
We are the exit.
"The internet is still out there… somewhere."
Is it, though?
The human exists. Right? It must.
Public space is real - but only as a phantom hole, a mockery of chance.
The body still breathes, yes. But its breath has long since been tainted, thick with toxins. It reeks. Cultural institutions are fading remnants of an age of secrecy and the occult. Now, nothing is hidden. Everything is in the open, because truth itself is lost forever. Never to return. Magic doesn’t work in a world of mirrors.
The bitterest irony: to believe you can defy the very mechanism that has become you.
Be honest. Your only hope left is collapse, isn’t it?
But it won’t come. Think about it.
Collapse is paradise. And paradise is nothing you ought to see.
Don’t you dare challenge the monolith.
Perhaps—just perhaps—what we need is a cleansing fire. A deep exorcism. A reworking. An overwriting of all cultural, spiritual and ideological hard drives.
