These posts are about fatal strategies. In his late period, Baudrillard advocated a sort of nihilistic indulgence in place of perpetual resistance, and Carles has decided to dabble in this sort of paradoxico-ironical epistemology. "when will HRO end? should HRO have ended _ years ago?" Carles wonders, and leaps directly into enacting his tentative answer, that silence is the best response to co-optation, to the pressure of always having to find new ways to resist. "Trends/fads/websites that are ‘kewl’ and ‘authentic’ can’t always stay what u think they are," he notes ruefully, capturing the relentless churn of fashion's wheel and the cries of the souls crushed beneath it. How to avoid being ground in its gears, gears for which Carles himself, he now admits, had been supplying the grease. Chasing authenticity is the guarantee it will never be achieved. But as Baudrillard advocates, "We will not be looking for change, and will not oppose the fixed to the mobile; we will look for the more mobile than mobile: metamorphosis."
Enter "Jeffbro," the metamorphosis of Carles. "My name’s Jeff, and I’m gonna be takin’ over here at hipster runoff HQ! Needless to say, it’s gonna be tough to fill Carlester’s shoes, but I think I can do it if you just give me a chance." The only escape from the strictures of identity and authenticity is to present an entire new identity; schizophrenia, as Deleuze and Guittari had suggested in Anti-Oedipus, becomes the inevitable response to the structural necessity of capitalism to fashion a lack in the midst of excess. "There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together," they write. Similarly, there is no such thing as Carles of Jeff, only a processor -- the data network through which we view their communications -- that couples them together. They are produced within the matrix of information flows as the opposite of one another in a perfectly incomplete synthesis.
Carles confronts the unstable identity relation, as formulated by this tautology: "1 day, HRO will not exist u will still be alive." But we shouldn't make the mistake of conflating biological vitality with being, as Carles well knows. Hence the "natural life" mentioned in the title of the first post under consideration here is thrown into ontological confusion as it becomes bound up with the digital life cycle of memes, themselves subject to the inexorable laws of capitalism and the circulation of commodities in what may be considered their life cycle. Jeff, a fictional derivative of Carles, has a life cycle that expands to infinity as his usefulness as an anti-real meme is realized and spent. "Everything dies–even humans, Every thing has a natural life." But when humans are reconceptualized as desiring machines and retro fitted with cloud-computing-derived extensibility and perpetuity? Is Jeff a the first rain from that cloud? Are we all to expect to see Jeff in our mirrors, some unsuspecting morning?
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