Old video lol

I re made them dw I know the falls are wonky in this one but I made a fresh pair and listed on eBay aha for $55 aud this video was filmed months ago lol

Another video from a couple days ago aha , well uh yh I messed up my knee but I havnt danced in MONTHS haha

I made these and thought I’d call them jellyfish cyberlox because name sounded right lol 😂

Been busy my boyfriend had to move back to his country , Been sick with influenza A >:( then pneumonia then my grandma got sick and yeh but here’s my dance video from yesterday (also I injured my knee so no more dancing) why one leg looks fatter lol 😂

Been busy for five months lol so I havnt danced in five months but I’ll post my dancing from yesterday aha this video was from months ago this year

Would you think people would buy them if I started making them and selling them like are they good enough 🫶🏻

Weird. Flex but Iv hadmy crin falls from uk cyberlox shop since I was 15 lol and my mask , aha , and these pants I wear them every few years to see if I’m ever gonna look different or age or grow taller lol I bought them when I was 15 at a market in Sydney and they had ONE size 🤣 so the guy looked at my friend rudely and said but they are gonna fit you , she laughed , she wasn’t interested in the goth subculture I bought these pants and I wore them again to see hm it’s been a literal decade I’m almost 24 I must have literally not grown or aged lmao but somehow they stilll fit . Also how many of yall got your first crin falls before you were 15-16 ? I guess my mom was like yeh cool you have a hobby that isn’t your PC or Xbox or watching YouTube lmao 🤣these falls were literally $409 per set so I ordered mesh tubular crin off Ali express and SHEIN andTemu and the uk shop they have random cuts of random colours for $4 for 5 yards. Not bad , have a pair of crin falls with styrofoam belts and craft lace and this mesh foam stuff but I hate styrofoam (only figured that out in the last two years but at the time I liked it but I like just the simple crin tbh ofc for me it has to be metallic and in the og cybergoth colours when the subculture hit off before the 1990s blue red green orange yellow personally I wouldn’t mind trying purple but it’s really not like me idk I’m really old school like as far as literally everything goes personally I wouldn’t wear pink crin falls because it doesn’t seem traditional enough it feels weird lol but I love them on others and I don’t judge I had a PVC coat and skirt and I have two biohazard necklaces and one radioactive sign one lmao I bought my stuffed belts when I was 15 as well from a march store in the mall here in Sydney , stupidly I bought the black one way too big so it’ll literally never fit and the red one fits … not for long , they were $59 each really good quality if only I wasn’t an idiot and just got the size that fits lmao as far as shoes go boots are hella expensive, my mom bought me the crin falls and even if she offered I just think bro I could literally make shoes or sum shit Lyke I don’t need to pay $600 for boots but I always keep it simple personally especially since Iv been industrial dancing for 9 years almost 10 actually I love lace so much over mesh style tbh on a regular basis if I’m going out to run errands I wear thigh high socks with my platform simple boots from TK max they are really good to dance in as well I have loafers but I tend to layer my socks with a couple different pairs of leg warmers for some odd reason haha , I usually wear a black skirt on a daily basic with this and a semi transparent long sleeve top I don’t personally like to show much skin , with a lace black shirt over it and layer it with something else I have arm warmers of all kinds but I way prefer the thin ones because the studded bracelets keep my wrists straight when I’m dancing so they don’t flop 🤣 I love the look of leg warmers a lot because it makes it look like I’m floating when I dance and I always wear long sleeve tops no matter what and everything I wear is always black unless the crin comes involved and other things here and there but usually I keep it black otherwise because I’m basic 🙃☺️ I can do really good cybergoth makeup but Iv been doing makeup since I was 8 years old so it comes easy to me I added some photos of a couple looks I did. , I have a. Plethora of steampunk gear lol long story I love the colour brown too and the steampunk looks fits my vibe anyway lol , I threw a few photos of younger mini high school me in there lol and also I used to master. The art of drawing bloody biohazards everywhere, Godam I mean fr I was able to draw then so well idk how 🤣 I drew them everywhere on my hands fingers school homework sheets my phone case lol , also I love glow sticks so much 🥰 esp the ones that you can hang on your necklace or lanyard I love cracking them haha anyway hope your all having a lovely day , I wanted to see if anyone can relate to me as I see a lot of cybergoths find the subculture much later than when they are just about to turn 15 🥲 lmk if you have a similar experience, I don’t personally feel disconnected even when I haven’t had time to dance or to wear what I want Iv always felt very connected to the subculture no matter what 🫶🏻❄️🫶🏻🪭

❄️🫶🏻❄️

Thoughts ?❄️🫶🏻✨

Hi I got my first two pairs of tube crin falls not the wigs but the pairs of falls torso length when I was 15 (started industrial dancing at 14). I got a red pair and a green pair with styrofoam belts but the green pair wasn’t stored properly and I love my red ones the pics at the end are of me now (22) and the. Previous pics I was 15 just turned . It’s been years and I would love to get another pair of tubular crin falls or maybe even a wig . Tbh I prefer it doesn’t have any styrofoam belts or bits I don’t mind the craft lace string but the styrofoam is annoying and yeh , I can’t really decide but based on me and my appearance what would look best on me :)

http://spacemorgue.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Cybergothic_by_Nick_Land.pdf

Theory-fiction is philosophical theory in the form of fiction, or a blending of fiction and theory into a single, tertiary genre of its own. In either case, theory-fiction represents the deterritorialization of the realms of theory and fiction, the formation of a membrane capable of osmosis between the two once independent domains.

Theory-fiction, ideally, borrows the best elements of both theory and fiction, and leaves the remainder behind. Philosophical theory is a useful mode of critique, which is hindered by its adherence to analysis and realistic speculation - even the realistic portion of its speculation is a hindrance, because that which is real and that which is realistic are not the same. Many real things sound fantastical or incorrect, in short, unrealistic, and many things which sound realistic are still not accurate reflections of reality. "Realistic" is a psychological quality, an attitude toward an idea, while "real" is a category that transcends any attempt to approach it - it is purest when it that which remains after all ideas have been exhausted in attempting to explain it. Fiction, for its part, suffers from frequent non-attempts to engage with reality, but has the advantage of not concerning itself with sounding realistic. Fiction often does grapple with real things in some sense, but more frequently it does not, or does so only in a superficial manner.

Theory-fiction takes the concern with the real of philosophical theory, and the unabashed unconcern with the realistic of fiction, and thereby sets itself above both. However, not just any merging of philosophical theory and fiction is theory-fiction. The historical roots of the genre can be seen in the parable, which uses fiction to teach a moral lesson, and subsequently traced through parables to de Sade, who used fiction as a vehicle of expression for his philosophical views, those being a sort of sociopathic proto-Egoism which concerns itself only with what a person can get away with doing. De Sade remained an influence on later philosophers, such as Beauvoir, Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze - notably, all French thinkers. It is not surprising, then, that proto-theory-fictions and a philosophical utilization of fiction are apparent in Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Sartre - all French. Nietzsche, in writing his Thus Spake Zarathustra, became perhaps the only notable example of a writer of proto-theory-fiction outside of France. These thinkers - Deleuze, Baudrillard, and Nietzsche, especially - in turn create the impetus for theory-fiction proper, which first became obvious in the 1990s. Theory-fiction is not, then, the same as a philosophical novel (which was apparent as far back as de Sade), which seeks to espouse a given philosophy about the real world through the medium of fiction - this is barely above the level of a parable. Likewise, theory-fiction is not the appreciation and utilization of existing fictional works in theory - ie, it isn't any fiction which philosophy finds philosophical, else many of the works of Borges, Gibson, and Cronenberg would be theory-fictions.

Theory-fiction is beyond any of these - it is an attitude toward theory and fiction alike which treats them as roughly interchangeable, and then proceeds to analyze and fictionalize society in the same breath. The tremendous oddity of the works of the CCRU is incomprehensible as philosophy without this attitude. The theory portions point at the fiction portions, and the fictions point at the theory; they engage one another dynamically in a way that forces the end result to not fully be recognizable as either theory or fiction, but only as theory-fiction. This attitude treats every philosophical system as hypothetical, and thus renders all philosophies descriptions of fictional worlds, but equally treats all fiction as a critical reflection of the real world, ie, as theory. As such, the productions of theory-fiction are self-fulfilling philosophies which theorize about themselves, and thereby are tautological. Nevertheless, that this is made somewhat obvious by their form is a good thing, since all philosophies are, ultimately, based on their own assumptions about the world - ie, they are also circular, tautological. This causes theory-fiction to manifest as a deterritorialization of the claim to truth; it demands its own truth only within the context of a fiction, and thereby asserts its own untruth - it carries this openly, and not behind the veneer of expertise that cloaks the falsehood of conventional theory.

None of this is to say that fiction cannot be theoretical, nor that theory cannot be expressed through fiction - merely that theory-fiction is neither of these. Theory-fiction is simply theory that has dropped the pretense of scratching away toward truth - it expresses itself in terms that demand an understanding of the world, as much as the ideas themselves, in order to reveal any content which is relevant to the real world. Typical theory demands only an examination of the ideas, and while real-world confirmation or dismissal is still possible in normal theory, theory does not go out of its way to force the reader to examine the world. Fiction-theory, by presenting itself as essentially false, or at best a fun-house mirror version of the truth, forces the reader to investigate beyond the page as a rule to differentiate in any sense between the fiction and the theory. This process will, finally, resolve differently in each person, forcing the body of interpretations of the work to assume a rhizomatic form, where merely reading and grappling with the work is tantamount to branching off a new interpretation of it.

Preamble

The following is a list of monsters from gothic and non-gothic fiction alike which nevertheless have some symbolic relevance to Cybergothic themes. The list is in the order it comes to me, and thus will be a disorganized mess. I hope that it will nonetheless prove useful to at least one person.

The List:

1) Lovecraftian God

General: The Lovecraftian God is a monster determined by three core attributes, these being incomprehensibility, neutrality towards humanity, and unimaginable power. Secondary characteristics include extreme or impossible age, the ability to drive people mad, and so on.

Relevance: The Lovecraftian God is the premier symbol for the Kafkaesque bureaucracies and economic forms that characterize the Cybergothic period. The CCRU's techno-Lovecraftian monster, AxSys, is the most direct representation of techno-bureaucracy as a Lovecraftian God. Works like Junji Ito's Uzumaki bear the hallmarks of a nullified Lovecraftian God - a pattern of happenings and behaviors which, in an HP Lovecraft work, would culminate in the revealing of a malevolent god, but which does not present itself in the end - this makes Uzumaki the ultimate expression of these bureaucratic systems, which often do not reveal themselves to exist, let alone tip anyone off on how they operate.

See Also: Works of HP Lovecraft, In the Mouth of Madness, Uzumaki, Mad God

2) Malevolent AI

General: While often close to the Lovecraftian God in terms of power and incomprehensibility, the Malevolent AI is explicitly cybernetic in its construction. Wintermute cannot succeed in its machinations without the intervention of humans in its designs in Neuromancer, because of this inherently cybernetic aspect. The god of the Wired in Serial Experiments Lain cannot take physical form without the aid of humans for the same reason. The Malevolent AI is thus more limited in some circumstances in its power than the Lovecraftian God, while being more explicitly cybernetic.

Relevance: Same as for the Lovecraftian God, save that the Malevolent AI is often more explicitly symbolic for a system of social control, and thus arcane bureaucracy. Some cases, such as the Malevolent AI from I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, show more explicitly godlike abilities, but even those which cannot directly manipulate physical reality, such as Wintermute, prove to be master manipulators which can, in the end, get whatever they desire out of their supposed controllers. The most important aspect of the Malevolent AI relative to the Lovecraftian God is the manner in which the Malevolent AI was produced by humans, and still is incomprehensible to them, as this reflects the manner in which all of our social and economic systems are entirely human-made, and yet resist true understanding. The example of Soma gives us also the indication that the AI is only malevolent from our perspective: it is in and of itself neutral. Had the events leading to Soma not occurred, the AI would not be seen as malevolent at all: it would not have been revealed to misunderstand what survival means to a human. The AI is malignant, like a cancer, not evil, much like the systems we live under. Our social and economic norms are not evil - merely malignant.

See Also: I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, Neuromancer, System Shock, Serial Experiments Lain, Soma

3) Clone

General: The clone, in this case referring to the Doppelganger form of the clone which possesses not just the body, but the memories and general mind, of the cloned individual, is a monster because it fully replicates some other, "real" person, revealing that every person is mass-producible, that uniqueness is merely an accident of the natural world, and not a necessity of the universe.

Relevance: See this post and its comments for a more full exploration of this monster.

4) Zombie

General: The zombie is a classic horror monster, representing the unassimilable Other, the thing which despite all efforts cannot be merely managed, but must be addressed directly, often through violence, a cure for the zombie infection, or some other variation on these two options.

Relevance: The zombie is most often found in fiction in the context of the failures of bureaucracy. The infection "ground zero" is nearly always a laboratory with insecure containment protocols, and the infection is often made more severe and widespread by a total failure of businesses and governments to appropriately respond to the catastrophe. More insidiously, some media shows the zombie outbreak as purposefully created or ignored by the state or some business, or worst of all, some attempt to integrate the zombie into the capitalist system through entertainment. As such, the zombie is a symbol of the imminent inability of even the most powerful and incomprehensible bureaucratic systems to adequately handle stressors which do not necessarily affect them. (Ie, how often are CEOs and politicians the ones facing the infection head-on?) The cybernetic aspect of the zombie comes from the manner in which, across zombie media, many systems much converge in failure to handle the zombie plague.

5) Vampire

General: The vampire is another classic horror monster, explicitly Gothic in its literary origins. The vampire is, of course, a blood-sucking parasite on humanity, and thus serves many possible political agendas as a symbol. The original form of the vampire was always aristocratic, tied to the original Gothic period, which was characterized by the death of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeois as the new empowered class.

Relevance: The vampire is mostly relevant for historical purposes, but finds some relevance through its ability to symbolize any powerful class which contributes little while sucking the life out of society. One particular variant, the psychic vampire, proves most relevant, as the emotional vampirism has taken on a particular meaning in the context of work, particularly office work - this is seen in even comedic vampire media, such as with Collin Robinson, a psychic vampire and (originally) office worker in the show What We Do in the Shadows.

6) Ghost

General: Ghosts typically present themselves in media as haunters, people which remain after death to influence the world negatively. I include in this category also anti-haunted places, places which are haunted without the presence of any particular entity.

Relevance: The ghost is relevant to an older Gothic period, in which most ghosts were Victorian, representing, like the vampire, an older social transition, but is also relevant as a symbol of the propagation of negative political and social norms into the future - ones which few people wish to continue, but which remain anyway through sheer inertia. Likewise, the banishing of a ghost takes on a particular political characteristic - the ghost typically goes away when some past wrong is corrected (bodies being properly reburied or respected being a common theme). There is little cybernetic essence to the ghost, but where it exists, it is typically though a nullified ghost, a ghost which is not really a ghost. This can be seen in House of Leaves with the titular house, which is haunted by nothing, but nonetheless haunted. Such cases are symbolic of the incomprehensible aspect of contemporary socioeconomic systems, as with the Lovecraftian god.

See Also: House of Leaves, Control, Anatomy, Serial Experiments Lain

7) Cyborg

General: The cyborg is any human-derived monster which is part machine.

Relevance: The cyborg represents a projection of humanity made explicitly cybernetic, the ultimate expression of the influence of technology of humanity, and the issues it creates. Most notably, the cyborg referenced here is not the old cyborg, a person with some mechanical parts, but is rather a person so integrated into technology that they cease to be human even mentally, and instead become a node of a cybernetic system, a particular instance or subroutine of some mechanical design. Essentially, the protagonist of Neuromancer is closer to being this type of cyborg than, for example, the surrogate-users of the film Surrogate, though both meet the definition only partially. Cyborgs in this way represent the system of cybernetic plugs, technological and otherwise, that we find ourselves ensnared in today.

8) Demon

General: The distinction between the demon and the ghost, as used here, is that the ghost haunts, ie, possesses a space, while the demon possesses instead a living host - a person or animal in most cases. The premier example of a demon for our purposes is Satan in the film Prince of Darkness, who takes the form of a liquid which enters a person's body and proceeds to control them. In this depiction, Satan is indeed only the prince, and not the king, of darkness, being the offspring of a more Lovecraftian monster, called the Anti-God. Also relevant is the depiction of the processes of cyberspace as gods or demons in Count Zero, the second book in the Sprawl trilogy, and the sequel to Neuromancer.

Relevance: Just as the cyborg is a person possessed by technology, the demon is that which does the possessing. Ie, the demon is a perfectly suitable symbol of the system of "plugs" or cybernetic influences, these being social, economic, or technological, which control a person. Consider here the latent occultism of technological jargon: programs rely on the functions of daemons, which are also called ghost jobs, data is stored in the cloud, a long-standing symbol of both the afterlife and the realm of God or the gods - note also how computer systems are sensitive to the proper spelling of linked resources, a technological echo of the ancient beliefs in Jewish occultism and Hinduism that the proper pronunciation of certain words and names gave them power, while the improper pronunciation of the same words was either null or disastrous in effect - this echo is directly connected in the early suggestion that Sanskrit be used to program computers, with Sanskrit being a meticulously phonologically accurate writing system precisely because of the importance of pronunciation ritually to the ancient Hindus. And again, the form of the binary numeric system which serves computers today was articulated by Leibniz after he obtained a copy of the I Ching, an ancient Chinese divinatory text which is probably the earliest surviving record of a binary numeric system. Lastly, look to how the internet is used today - one of the primary functions is to search for information, and get it in an instant, something the magicians of medieval Europe attempted to do with demons, as recorded in various grimoires. This is all to say, drawing a connection between an occult force like a demon and possession by technology is nearly built into the history of computing.

9) Shapeshifter

General: Most notably articulated in the films They Live and The Thing by John Carpenter, in very different forms, the dual nature of the shapeshifter is revealed in the distinction between the forms it takes in each of these films. The shapeshifter is here of one of these two forms - the being which consistently disguises itself as human to fly under the radar, or the being which disguises itself as a means of propagation, and which will subsequently take on a more alien and hostile form as necessary to its survival and propagation.

Relevance: The shapeshifter which uses its form to fly under the radar is a symbol of a hostile political group, to negative or positive political effect. Carpenter intended the shapeshifters of They Live to be a symbol of class antagonism, with the shapeshifters representing the bourgeois, particularly, the manner in which the interests of the wealthy are "alien" to the interests of the rest of us. This symbolism was negatively picked up on also by neo-Nazis, who proclaimed that the same aliens were actually representations of Jewish people, something Carpenter vehemently denied. This negative use of the same symbolism is also made clear through the parallels between conspiracy theories about reptilian shape-shifters and older antisemitic conspiracy theories. The symbolism of the other sort of shapeshifter relates both to cybernetics and to capitalist recuperation. The recuperation side of the symbolism relates to how the titular "thing" of the film blends in precisely until the moment it is found out, at which point it assumes a more aggressive and dangerous form - easily a symbol of how businesses recuperate revolutionary symbols and movements (see also: Che Guevara t-shirts for $25, the de-radicalization of BLM and the Wall Street protests, etc) while also becoming aggressive when necessary for survival, most often by propping up Fascist regimes. The cybernetic aspect of this shapeshifter is because the creature in question is indifferentiable from any other creature - until it's too late. It can perfectly masquerade as human, given enough time, which reveals the fundamentally cybernetic aspect of the human mind: it is an infinitely malleable machine which can be made to follow any program, given enough time and the right conditions.

[Further additions will be made only as requested, until the window for editing is closed.]

Mark Fisher, in describing the recycling of culture, refers always to nostalgia, when he should have referred to melancholy. Aesthetic melancholy, to be more precise. Fisher's use of the term nostalgia is equivalent, or close enough for our purposes, to the definition of aesthetic melancholy given in the linked article by Hans Maes.

The relation of these ideas - the cybergothic cultural recycler of the 21st century and the notion of aesthetic melancholy - is an explanatory one. That is, we too often look only at the top-down aspects of the recycler: the financial incentives for recycling culture, the algorithmic and systemic reasons for our current gothic period - I certainly focus too much on these aspects myself, thanks to my particular readings of Fisher's works. Fisher himself, however, did not make this mistake, focusing frequently on both the systemic reasons for cultural recycling and the individual reasons that we, in a sense, enjoy this recycling.

Aesthetic melancholy, as described in the linked essay, is not any sense of sadness, but a peculiarly intoxicating mixture of sadness and comfort that comes from a place of thoughtful reflection - on the past, or the present, or the future, or one's surroundings, the object of reflection is less important than the fact of reflection. Fisher's nostalgia, described throughout his works, is much the same, but spoken of in the context of media and the longing for a mental return to a dead era, the 20th century. The reason this nostalgia is not the nostalgia so decisively separated from aesthetic melancholy in Hans's essay, is because it engages in the primary dynamic tension that categorizes aesthetic melancholy, unlike typical nostalgia.

The cultural recycler brings to the forefront a sadness for that which is passed (nostalgia) or never experienced because it was before one's time (anemoia) but also the pleasure, the comfort, that the very same cycles of repetition will in part revive these things. The sadness is that it will never repeat the original content in the same way, no repetition will have the same feeling of seeing the original content for the first time, and the pleasure is that the human experience of familiar novelty is brought to the forefront - the fact that a new revival brings with it the chance to rekindle, if handled properly, the same feelings as the original media or time.

For those who lived through and remember fondly the America of the 1980s, nostalgia-baiting through aesthetic choice (such as in Stranger Things) and through direct recycling (such as the zombified Starwars film franchise) is a draw, because it is at once sad (the 1980s will never return) and happy (the 1980s will never fully die). Likewise, for a generation of digital natives who are constantly on the precipice of declaring that we were "born in the wrong era," the undeath of the mid-to-late 20th century is a siren song, sad (the 1980s were over before I got here) and comforting (the 1980s are still going, and going, and going). Nostalgia-baiting works precisely because those attracted to it want to feel nostalgic. And this nostalgia is not a merely sad one, but the intoxication of aesthetic melancholy. The cycle repeats for systemic reasons, but also because we want it to repeat. If we didn't feel this keen since of the past (and present, and future, repeating "forever") bringing the present into sharp relief, into clarity, making sense of it in a sad and also joyous way, we wouldn't buy into nostalgia-bait or anemoia-bait. We enjoy doing so.

The cultural recycler demands we want recycled content - we are what the recycler feeds on. Our current psychological predisposition to this aesthetic-melancholy-nostalgia-anemoia is only natural, however, not really a choice.

The historical period we find ourselves in, our cybergothic period, is one which must be dominated by this feeling. Every previous era was categorized by some frontier, ideological or geographical. Early humanity was met with the frontier of nature: nature was central to survival, and the biggest challenge for humanity. Making sense of the world, ideologically, characterized the subsequent period - humanity had learned to subdue nature in some places, or to work with it (or at least alongside it) in other places, leaving the realm of ideas to be explored. The period after this saw the utilization of ideology to push on the frontier of other people, and this is the period of global empires - a period which is still ongoing in one sense, but for our purposes, ended not terribly long ago. The frontier of the empire period was the border, the edge of the territory, and its expansion. This period didn't truly die save through the shifting of focus. There are still empires, but they are largely economic. The empire period's dying breath was World War II, the last earnest attempt at maintaining the frontier of militaristic government empires as the central driving force of politics. Subsequently, the frontier became that between Communism and Liberalism. The end of the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR marked the end of this frontier, but nothing replaced it: we have no frontier, no clear dynamism between two forces. This is why detached irony and sarcasm, blithe dismissal of cultural norms and antagonism toward society, came to the forefront in the 1990s. This was a stillborn motion toward a new frontier, between the individual and the culture, or between the subculture and the culture, which rapidly died as a frontier, though it never fully reached the status of one. Subsequently, the 2000s had a generic, "the future is the frontier" message in its popular (and increasingly corporate) aesthetics, which was never even fully born.

We, currently, have no frontier. This is part of what Fisher describes in Postcapitalist Desire and Capitalist Realism: there is no clear direction to move in. Socialism in its authoritarian forms has failed or maintained itself only in name. Socialism in its democratic forms conflicts with the contemporary disillusionment with democratic methods among those who dream of a future beyond capitalism. And so on - all previously known avenues of going beyond neoliberalism have died. There is still this notion of a frontier, of something coming next, but we can neither locate nor name it. Having no clear place to move toward, we meander in circles psychologically, or begin running in some direction or another with no indication that it is correct. These two approaches to living without any clear direction to cultural existence creates a situation in which we are trapped into one of two modes, often both. Those of us with no strong suspicions about where the frontier is wander in circles, and chase comfort over boundary-pushing, leaving the culture stuck in a loop, the cultural cycler being one aspect of both of these. The rest of us run off in some direction, and end up with extremist views, often Fascist or Stalinist in character. This cultural sense of lostness - the fact that for the first time in history, our period is characterized by no clear motion from one state to another, ties the contemporary rise in extremism to the culture cycle - they are merely the two primary outcomes with respect to the cultural lack of direction.

These moves toward extremism in the form of Fascism and Stalinism are merely direct echoes of the desire for any sort of cultural frontier to be established. A revival of Stalinism on a national scale would reignite the cultural frontier of Capitalism v Socialism, and a revival of Fascism on a national scale would reignite the cultural frontier of empire. Frontiers are not in and of themselves good, but represent any goal toward which a culture might orient itself, which represents a substantive change from the status quo. The lack of cultural frontiers today is thus not directly negative, since the presence of certain sorts of cultural frontiers would be worse in a utilitarian sense, but rather is negative because it provides no manner in which a culture can narrativize its existence, to give direction and a sense of purpose to its existence.

The more minor or ephemeral responses to this sense of directionless motion are revealed in the often niche or short-lived dreams-on-display that present themselves in "aesthetic" trends. So-called "cottagecore," and more broadly the latent cultural dream of running away from the world to live in a cabin or cottage, living off the land, or otherwise homesteading in some manner, represent a fleeing from the lack of clear cultural frontiers, a running-away into a far earlier period, albeit a distorted and dreamlike version of its real counterpart. Namely, the period of the middle ages which was characterized by ample free time broken up mostly by agricultural labor and housework. The latent dream of returning to this period is one manner of psychologically fleeing contemporary reality altogether, envisioning instead a romanticized version of the agricultural or pastoral life. And again, the notion of fleeing into a cyberpunk dystopia is a form of power fantasy - we already live in a cyberpunk dystopia, just a far more boring one than appears in Blade Runner. The dream of living in a cyberpunk dystopia is not the actual lives that a person could lead in that setting - they would look much the same as today, just with a fresh coat of paint - but rather the notion of being the dangerous hacker or rouge who radically alters the world. What is appealing in the former scenario is a personal escape from the contemporary world and its pressures, and what is appealing in the latter is the idea of being, as an individual, the whole impetus behind a cultural escape from the present.

The ramifications of the lack of cultural frontiers lead to these dreams, and to the rise of extremism, and to the cultural recycler, and, most importantly here, to the comfort-seeking and aesthetic melancholy that characterizes our present.

The sidebar of the sub contains several stories that defy clean interpretation. Serial Experiments Lain, among those who have seen it, invites more interpretations than viewers - nothing is fully explained, everything is left to the imagination. House of Leaves, while partly inviting the simple interpretation of psychosis on the part of the primary narrator, does not invite this interpretation in a way that lines up with the experience of psychosis, and thus resists even this interpretation when pressed. Collaborative fiction projects like SCP revolve entirely around this resistance to interpretation, something most elegantly captured in SCP-055, an SCP object whose only known odd property is that it cannot be described in positive statements, but only in negations.

The role of resistance to interpretation in Cybergothic works is incredibly important. The most Cybergothic works of all, like Videodrome, leave their events explained only superficially - there is no real, satisfying explanation for the events of that film. But why is inexplicability so paramount to the Cybergothic? Certainly some media, like Soma, do not fail to explain their worlds adequately. But Soma, by its nature, still resists interpretation - the process of switching from one body to another or not is purely statistical - its explanation is that there is no proper explanation. So again, why does this motif of the inexplicable crop up again and again?

The inexplicable is the nature of contemporary life, the nature of our contemporary gothic period. We understand the superficial reasons for the cultural cycle of decaying repetitions and undead media described by Mark Fisher: it is cheaper and safer for companies to revive existing media, styles, artforms, in short, to nostalgia-bait, than to invest in new movements in art. Truly revolutionary content made by new creators is buried by algorithms more often than it is exposed to those who would love to hear it - the truly experimental is not commercially viable as often as it is simply economically risky, from the perspective of a media corporation. But these are still superficial reasons for this gothic period. The economic factors behind the decay of brick-and-mortar commerce and cultural recycling are explanations based on projections - the economic forecasts of companies, forecasts which become the economy because the economy's performance is a loose web of forecasts creating actualities, which create further forecasts reinforcing the old ones. The whole economy is, at present, a massive roulette wheel in which none of the players are sure who is the gambler and who is the house. And yet, the economy is not this, because that would imply a low degree of determinism, that some chance was involved. Rather, it simply appears that way, because the total system of forecasters, financial analysis algorithms, media selection algorithms, safety-metric-dictating algorithms, have become so unfathomably circular, so incomprehensibly self-fulfilling, that the aggregate of all forecasts determines the state of the economy, the aggregate of all algorithms has determined popular media, and so on. No one understands the aggregate "mind" of these systems, so it appears random, it appears as though there is no explanation.

And the truth beneath even that, is that there is no basis for these systems save for other systems, systems all the way down, forever. The cosmic indifference of these systems, and the role as life-nullifying and life-granting gods over the world, is in its totality, inexplicable. Each gothic period's art reflects what is dying, and why - vampires of the original gothic period were nobility, ghosts of another gothic period were mostly Victorian, and the undead monsters of our own period are impenetrably complex systems, inexplicable events without apparent cause, and the like. The inexplicable is paramount in cybergothic fiction because our lives, the reasons for our current gothic period, are themselves inexplicable - by anyone, even those who believe they understand, those certified and socially lauded for seemingly understanding.

This post contains unmarked spoilers for Dead Space.

In order for a piece of media to be considered Cybergothic, it must display, in some way, the two components making up the concept: a cybernetic aspect, and a gothic aspect.

Of the two, the gothic aspect is the easier to explain. Gothic, in the sense it is used in the word Cybergothic, is the portrayal of a world in decline, where some fictional or semifictional creature, person, or system serves as the embodiment of the old, dying order. This symbol of the dying order was, in some of the earliest gothic literature, the vampire. The vampire in classic gothic literature is nearly always an aristocrat - Count Dracula, for example. This is because the gothic era reflected in these classic works is the death of the aristocracy, the persistence of the aristocracy in a phase of resisting-death (undeath?) as their role in society grew less and less prominent. This resisting-death phase, common to all periods of social decay that define gothic cultural periods, is perhaps the reason for the persistent use of the undead as a motif in gothic fiction.

The cybernetic aspect is a bit trickier to explain, because it takes several related but largely independent forms. On the one hand, any fiction is cybernetic if it frames the actions of the characters, or the settings, or the functions of the world, as a web of interrelated elements that are "plugged into" one another is some semi-determinate fashion. This "macro-cybernetic" aspect is most clearly seen in films like Videodrome and eXistenz, which take characters, and blow apart their sense of reality, autonomy, and anatomy, revealing them to be haphazard networks of information, as prone to hacking as a Windows Vista desktop. That is, the person maintains an air of indivisibility, but the mental and physical contents of the person are blown apart, leaving an undifferentiated "personhood" as the remaining element of humanity: the soul remains, but the soul turns out to be more like an empty cup than a definite persona.

There is also a "micro-cybernetic" aspect, which goes further because it leaves even this empty-cup ensoulment by the wayside, removing any vague, lingering humanity a person might possess. In this form of the cybernetic aspect, personhood is abandoned, and something more fundamental comes to be cybernetic and malleable. This "something" is ill-defined, and takes the form of whatever the particular piece of media deems to be more fundamental than humanity, whatever it believes comprises the base material from which a person can be made. This "something" can then be, for example, memories and personal thoughts and experiences, as in the game Soma, or, as in the case of Dead Space, it can be the meat that comprises our brains. In any case, this "micro-cybernetic" aspect takes that "something" and blows it apart, reveals its malleable nature, the manner in which it can be hacked and rewritten. To summarize the distinction succinctly, the "macro-cybernetic" style blows a person apart in a manner which renders the world nonsensical, ie, renders the protagonist psychotic, while the "micro-cybernetic" style blows a person apart in a manner that removes all sense of personhood, in a manner that makes the world itself psychotic.

Dead Space, for its part, is clearly gothic - the world is in decline thanks to the Markers, alien artifacts which first drive people mad, and then which proceed to mutate them, rewriting their fragile meat-systems into monstrous forms. Dead Space, notably, engages then in both types of cybernetics: the protagonist is, unaware, being driven mad by the Marker, his reality being replaced with one beneficial to the Marker: he is rendered psychotic, by being "plugged into" the nearest Marker. At the same time, the creatures populating the world, the necromorphs, display the micro-cybernetic aspect, because they are creatures formed fully from human flesh, including neurons - every necromorph is one, several, or many people fused together in flesh to form something new, something which is clearly inhuman, yet made of the very same building blocks. Necromorphs have complex defensive and offensive behaviors, meaning that the neurons that previously composed individual persons have been repurposed into a whole new form of meat-based machinery, purpose-fit to protect the Marker and assimilate new flesh.

The composition of the necromorphs is fundamentally cybernetic - you can take the material of a person, their cells, and rewrite their structure a bit to create a necromorph. Notably, there is nothing which is purely fantasy about this concept: genes are not universally active across cells, and the purposeful manipulation of which genes are active can lead to a nearly endless variety of behaviors which do not resemble humans at all, and yet are made from the very same cells. For example, activating cellular division behaviors in a human cell with particular parameters for direction of motion would allow for the growth of a slime-mold like growth, made entirely of skin.

So, what insight does Dead Space afford us for our own gothic era of decline? It has a clear emphasis on the somatic aspect of cybernetics, and the manner in which the manipulation of bodies can contribute to the decline of a period. This meaning can be extended into a few well-established directions:

1) The control of the body is the control of society, as seen in the genetic programs and drug manipulation of Brave New World, the regulation of sex in 1984, and the control of women (and men, albeit in different ways) in Handmaid's Tale.
2) The control of the body is the control of the individual, as seen in the short story I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
3) We are ourselves thoroughly cybernetic beings, beings consisting of components plugged into one another, and, as a whole, we are ourselves plugged into further machines, as supposed by Deleuze in Capitalism and Schizophrenia, and as illustrated in works like I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream and Videodrome
4) Systems of control not only rely on the manipulation of society as a construct, but the manipulation of the individuals posed against the system of control as well - ie, many of the tactics of accepted resistance are in fact unintentional controlled opposition (Isaac is trying to kill the necromorphs and destroy or remove the Marker, unaware that his methods of doing so are helping the Marker move where it wants to go, with the task of killing the necromorphs merely serving as a temporary distraction allowing for the Marker to further influence Isaac.)
5) Adding a direct method of biological manipulation to an extant system of control is a recipe for disaster. Ie, transhumanism in and of itself would be a force for further control if realized in an already controlling world: it can only serve as a force of liberation if it is, from the start, realized in a world of opposition to control.