WHAT WE BELIEVE is provocative of the present-tense tensions that contribute to the new. It embraces doubt not as a critical scapegoat for techno-cultural insecurity, but as a starting point towards decision-making. As Kanye West told a group of Oxford students last year, it could be “completely fucking with you, and the world, the entire time.” It then moves past doubt, with a Kanye-level measure of conviction. WHAT WE BELIEVE harvests energy from the irritations and confrontations of the now, in the service of the future. We don’t know this, but we’re telling you anyway.

Energy is the capacity to do work, and to produce change. It may well produce change, but will never quantitatively undergo it. It is contained in every object, person, animal and system. By the laws of energy conservation, it cannot be lost or, despite the usual eco-vocabulary, wasted. Thermodynamic entropy will cool your soup or melt the ice cubes in your drink, but as a measure of disorder and chaos in media as well as physics, entropy is an overlooked function. With information entropy, noise balances that information by increasing with it, as nonsense does with sense. Messages are thus communicated transformatively, without for a second losing power. That is the process that incurs the most powerful and productive kind of change.

Sex is at once the most commercialized thing on the planet and the most resistant to commercialization. It has been made phenomenally public and yet it remains deeply private. It is an instance or state of being that is thought and talked about constantly, but not in any proper terms, because it is a physical matter, a question of impulse, not intellect. It is beautiful and it is horrifying. It is impermeable to the perversion of culture and it is the perversion of culture. So it is, officially, the most mysterious non-mystery ever – a paradox so unfathomable that the only thing to do about it is embrace our fascination. Obsess about it. Reproduce it, and sell it. Censor it. Celebrate it. Practice it as much as possible. It will never lose interest, and it will never lose power. Fighting it is to fight a losing battle. So just let sex win.

"Intercourse" also means communication with others. Hot!

If you reject work, you are not doing it properly. If you think work is exclusive of magic, you are not being creative enough. If you think work is exclusive of pleasure, you are old-fashioned. “Balance” only matters if you perceive the creative world in a binary of black and white. INDUSTRY IS SEXY. The impulse to work should be as unapologetic and immediate as the impulse to eat or to fuck.

WORKING VS. STEALING

There is a meme re­circulating right now that quotes Fran Lebowitz’s argument that no one “earns” $100 million a year – they steal it. People “earn” $10 an hour, she says, or $40,000 a year; they “steal” their $100 million. We’re not actually condemning thieves – or anyone else. It’s just essential that every­ one understands these nuances.

You are mistaken if you think using the word “love” is enough to conjure the thing itself. Love is an inclusive form of energy. Do it hard, impossibly, radically, and as often as possible. Understand that love is not opposed to entropy, to mutiny, to mold, or to matter. Understand that while love is changeable, it is not exchangeable. To commodify it is corrupt, like deep-drilling for fuel when renewable energy surrounds us in the earth, air, and sea.

It is naïve to exclude work and politics from a family model based on love. To speak of “making time” for family is to make it exclusive of social and creative life. But the family is immersive, a function of a greater communal impulse. The nuclear private life is an outmoded, Anglo-Saxon constraint, a construction that carries on in a merely 3-D reality while the rest of the universe expands, rapidly. We count dimensions in double digits now.

We believe in an inherent politics to every gesture, word, and image. This is not a cop-out, and it is not a dismissal of outspoken politics. It is a view towards political immanence that takes responsibility for the role and influence of cultural output. It acknowledges the potential meaning – in context, content, function, and form – of the building as it is architected, the body as it is photographed, the page as it is laid out, and the technology as it is engineered. Acknowledge the politics of your product, then be recklessly accountable for it.

Earth has become atmospherically unstable. As our computer simulation models for forecast and early warning improve, weather and seismic patterns seem to become increasingly unpredictable, and dramatically so. The repetitive rhythm of the seasons once ingrained in our understanding of the world have been violently disrupted.

Meanwhile, we cling stubbornly to the learned cycle. Yet this clinging is no way to survive an atmospheric disturbance, let alone move forward within it. Rafters are told to remain supple and lithe should they fall into river rapids, allowing their bodies to bend to the rocks and other dangers they may encounter as they are propelled downstream. Rigidly resisting the current will get you killed. Letting yourself flow with it will take you somewhere new. It is time to embrace instability on a universal level. Stable systems are flat, static. Instability is volatility. It is seismic change. It is volcanic activity. In structural engineering, a system can become unstable when excessive load is applied. But excess is sexy – apply it freely. Destabilize your life, and live at the accelerated pace of the world.

IRRITATION IS UNPLEASANT. TO IRRITATE IS TO ROUSE IMPATIENCE, ANGER, OR EVEN PAIN. IT IS TO ANNOY OR CHAFE, AND SOMETIMES IT IS TO BURN, OR ENFLAME. THEREIN LIES ITS POSITIVE POTENTIAL. UNPLEASANT OR NOT, AN IRRITATION IS A PROVOCATION. JUST AS AN ITCH DEMANDS TO BE SCRATCHED, AN IRRITATION TRIGGERS AN ACTIVE RESPONSE – A DIRECT, SOMETIMES AGGRESSIVE ENGAGEMENT WITH THE SITUATION AT HAND. IRRITATION IS PRODUCTIVE, A NATURAL STIMULANT. AN OYSTER RESPONDS TO AN IRRITANT BY DEPOSITING LAYERS OF CALCIUM CARBONATE AROUND THE OBJECT TO FORM A PEARL – AN ORIGINAL THING BORN FROM TRIVIAL DEBRIS. SEEN AS A PROVOCATION, IRRITATION BECOMES A POSITIVE EFFECT, JUST AS DIALOGUE IS MORE PRODUCTIVE THAN SILENCE, AND REACTION PREFERABLE TO STASIS.

In 1988, WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS was in London trying to explain ALFRED KORZYBSKI to KATHY ACKER when he said, perhaps obviously, that “one of the basic errors of Western thought is either/or. Something is either instinctive or intellectual, either hereditary or environmental – this split which of course does not exist in fact. It’s both/and.” That means, for instance, that it is possible to be both hard and soft at the same time, which is fantastic. Casually repeating oneself is nonchalance distilled, which is chic. Thus duplicity isn’t a vice at all – it’s a virtue – and multiplicity is even better. Remember that promiscuity is not antithetical to rigor. This is the 21st century: anything trying to appear exclusive looks conservative now, and the cult of authenticity looks naïve. Disconnect, unhinge yourself from absolutes and you won’t even need to think about things like intellectual property, because you will have moved on to the next idea.

Intransitive whining is a bad idea. Complaints regarding workload, illness, elective activities, and lack or excess of sleep or sex are especially counter-productive. Exceptions to this include complaints that are formulated in a way that is either incredibly entertaining, or directly provocative of change. A grievance that is neither stimulant nor dynamic is a waste of time that could be spent building, researching, chasing, or fucking something.

Just because a colleague, a lover, or a comrade is not complaining doesn’t mean he or she might not need a hand from time to time. Being generous and impulsive with your spirit is community-building and fun. Generally speaking, you should never address life by seeking to expend less energy, resources, or enthusiasm; you should make more instead. (This doesn’t mean you have to be patient, however. There just isn’t time for that anymore.

The celebrity selfie has come to be seen as an act of populist generosity. Group shots involving presidents and popes may feel big-hearted and authentic, their share statistics seldom rival those of Hollywood’s Instagram elite, however. In an op-ed for The New York Times called “The Meanings of the Selfie,” James Franco wrote that as a social media self-portraitist, “You’re safe if you trade ‘one for them’ with ‘one for yourself,’ meaning that for every photo of a book, painting or poem, I try to post a selfie with a puppy, a topless selfie or a selfie with Seth Rogen, because these are all things that are generally liked.” As this issue of 032c went to print, the latest item on the Fox News website read, “Kim Kardashian’s corset selfie raises questions: How dangerous is the practice of corseting?” The selfie is not merely a medium through which the celebrity can use his or her abundant beauty to spread happiness to his or her followers: it is a platform to raise aware- ness about critical social issues – including those stemming from controversial fashion conventions! And the purchase of a new accessory such as a corset, but more commonly a hat, is a wonderful occasion for anyone to share and to educate.

PEOPLE ALWAYS TALK ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT THEY “HAVE IT ALL.” IT’S A PASSIVE, POSSESSION-ORIENTED PREOCCUPATION THAT CLEARLY PREDATES – AND IS OUTDATED BY – THE POST-DIGITAL AGE, IN WHICH THIS IDEA OF FINITE SELF-COMPLETION HAS BEEN REPLACED WITH AN UNKNOWABLE, EVER-EXPANDING WHOLE. STOP TAKING INTERNAL INVENTORY AND EMBRACE AN OUTWARD OUTLOOK AND YOU WILL SEE THAT “ALL” MEANS NOTHING, AND THAT LIVING FOR EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING.

17. PLATEAU

We would rather be falling into a creative abyss than ceasing to change at all. Like the element mercury, we are fiercely reliable, but reliably changeable. We believe in reciprocity, not permanence. We believe in touching, not in the partition. We split our time between high and low like we are in a long-distance relationship. This is clearly reflective of the current industry climate and
those who are immovable will vanish from it soon.

The only possible way to do or make anything, ever, is by experimentation. Even a toddler’s existence is a series of experiments, mini-challenges pressed upon its environment and explored by trial-and-error. To cease to experiment is not only to cease to create in this world, but to renounce participation altogether. Non-experimentation is inert. In fact, if you are not experimenting, you might be dead. Stay as alive as possible.

Freedom from the known is a necessary condition for creation. This is not simply a question of material freedom, of a geographical mobility or lack of physical boundaries. It is a question of intellectual, emotional and carnal liberty. It is a rejection of the accepted and the acceptable, of the familiar. It is an impulse towards the unseen and the unknown, a thirst for newness.

Freedom from the known is structurally embedded into the Berlin cityscape. Physical space is abundant and accessible, and any site is fair game. A mere subway ride separates NATO and the Warsaw pact. But beyond that cliché,
Berlin combines and entangles the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real components of freedom. The city has become a global symbol of post intellectual creative life – a center in time where the walls of social convention and perceived truths are endlessly crumbling. Embrace the freedom from the known that grows there, and make it global.

Edmund Burke called print media the “fourth estate” during a parliamentary debate in 1787. In an 1891 essay called “The Soul of Man Under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde cattily called it “the only estate.” Whether or not it had in fact crushed the traditional three that preceded it – nobility, clergy, and common people – this fourth power had entered a canon of social order that had structured Europe since the Middle Ages.

Dictionary.com estimates that the “fifth estate” came about as an idiom in the 1960s – well before the blogosphere, Julian Assange, and WikiLeaks: The Movie. (There is, for instance, an anarchist periodical called the Fifth Estate that has been opera­tive since 1965.) Each additional “estate” seeks to lay claim to an unregulated space “outside” the tyranny of pre­established social order. Yet each one calcifies in a matter of decades, begging the creation of another. There is nothing radical about this proliferation. The formulation of a fifth estate does nothing to dismantle the hierarchical systems in place; it simply shifts power – or the public perception thereof – to new leadership. We must retire “The Estate.” Murderers serve less prison time than hackers and whistle­blowers in the United States now. This shows us that information is sovereign, not the social orders that feebly attempt to control and exchange it.

Blind faith has been out of vogue for some time now. The well-­traveled left-leaner decries “organized religion,” “national pride,” “partisanship,” and/or similar communal impulses as such. Tell him/her that kale is healthy and that gluten is not, however, and he/she will swallow and regurgitate it as gospel, fucking with menus from Portland to Paris. This is the myopic, literal-minded behavior of the privileged, and it is irritating and corrosive.

Of course, the offender is not the belief, or the “believer” – be his/her convictions spiritual, political, or indeed, retarded – but rather the visionless, literal mind so occupied by “lifestyle” that it is incapable of big­picture thought. “Bread” is far greater than the plain combination of its ingredients – it is something that we break together.

As noted above, information is really hot right now. It’s also become difficult to disentangle from aspiration. Our 21st­ century technological reality is reflective of a cyberdream that originated during the Space Race and the initial cinematic release of 2001: A Space Odyssey, which prefaced Skype video calls and the “tablet.” Start­up offices look like Babylon 5. The headquarters of Bahnhof, the ISP in Stockholm that used to house the WikiLeaks server, make explicit architectural reference to villain­ lair design in early Bond films. Raw, honest data is housed in environments saturated with fantasy; it is only as “true” and as strong as our ability to recognize the emotional, subjective aspects of these scenarios.

Speaking of 007, in Skyfall (2012), the twenty-­third film in the James Bond franchise, M, played by Judy Dench, must defend her branch of military intelligence against accusations that the digital age has made its old ­school espionage methods obsolete. For some reason, M opts to read the closing lines of Lord Alfred Tennyson’s Ulysses during her public inquiry, bypassing the best part: “Come, my friends, ’tis not too late to seek a newer world.”