In a note written feverishly on a random night earlier in the past year I mentioned that if you didn’t feel like this before covid you succeeded (and thus failed in life). I have since thought more about the idea of a post-covid world, the big change that supposedly happened (or how nothing happened (or how nothing started to happen)).
Spending nights away digging through internet discussions and books, this idea of a post-covid world continues to haunt me. Currently I’m working on a large work on Korea and K-Pop (which is taking me much longer than expected (which doesn’t really matter anyway because K-Pop is dying (and is future))) and I’ve been looking into the Itaewon area which used to be (or still is (or isn’t anymore)) the foreigner area in Seoul and how it has supposedly changed after covid. It is described on the internet as “killed by covid”.
Areas get killed all the time though there is perhaps a funny irony in a geographical area being killed by covid. Everyone always thinks every area is better than it was right? Certainly Itaewon must have changed from its heyday as the stomping ground of the American army. As I’m still trying to plunge myself into K-fever (I’m really looking forward to writing about the Russian 90s and Tusovka’s but it will have to wait (even though nothing can actually wait)), we’re discussing a lot of the K-Indie scene and K-Gaze scene. I’m reading an interview with Parannoul. He says that Hongdae used to be a hotbed of indie but that it isn’t anymore (I wonder if I should incorporate this into my work on Korea?) He hopes that K-Pop might provide new attention to the arts in Korea. Everything I’ll ever write will be obsolete before I’ve written it down.
Thinking back on the sentence that I wrote back then, how I implied that there was a distinction between those who felt the sheer attraction of the void before covid and those who only started to feel like that during and after covid and what that said about you. About where you came from and where you were heading but more importantly whether you had a capacity to really understand anything at all. The normie sees covid as an event that changed everything. But obviously nothing actually changed (isn’t that the complaint anyhow?), what happened instead was a revelation of what was already underneath. The reason why the normie gets to be congratulated for only feeling like this in the aftermath of covid is because the normie (by letting everything happen to him) succeeds by failing.
What happened after covid was not in fact anything different then a process that was already largely happening long before covid. What covid did was lift the veil by forcing everyone to interact with the niche online and thus propel these talking points into the mainstream narrative and the sensibility of the normgroid (who as of late cannot stop talking about everything that everybody with a non-broken radar (that is: every human) had sensed long before). The normie is congratulated because the mainstreamification of something is both its totalization and its rebirth. That is to say, the normie, by being an unaware vector both succeeds and fails because it kills whatever it touches and yet by touching it it turns it into history, it materializes it; and as things are ever quickly returning, it increasingly prophesizes the future. In this regard we might say that the bizarre events of the past 6 years are largely caused by the mainstreamification of these things.
Bizarre events or not, I feel myself increasingly uninterested in the day to day events. Trump wants Greenland (who cares? (you should care this is a potentially huge event (But I really just can’t be bothered to care, its up to the normies to carry the future and thus to care about the future (no wait I was right. (When I started writing this this was a thing but we've moved on (ofcourse with nothing having really changed)))))). Silver is moving like a pumpfun memecoin in 2024 and crypto at the moment is moving like it's the burst of the dot-com bubble. Of course the big buzz of the day are the Epstein files and the egregious posts on all sides regarding this, a full on display of the post-covid epistemological collapse hitting both the normie and the western world like a brick, providing increasing legitimacy that even online conspiracytards have narratives closer to the truth than the government. Posts regarding people extrapolating that elites were cooking up baby stew are interspersed with analysis what this could all mean for the western world. Of course most of this commentary is made up by blue checkmark (I have a blue checkmark) owning slopaccounts (50% of the time run by LLMs), who seem to be jumping in the God/Gov-shaped hole to provide a narrative to the desperate.
And yet when I see this all I don't feel much more than annoyance. Perhaps it's because none of this feels important, though I am ensured all the time that it is. Historically we are living through events that are world-changing (or so they say (as I am typing this I see a message pop up about the doomsclock (talk about memes returning) is 85 seconds to midnight or whatever (which is apparently the closest it's ever been (whatever))). And yet what changes (maybe I'm just selfish and I don't feel anything changes because nothing changes for me).
“Nothing ever happens” is of course so old now (at least in internet-timeline (which is now the timeline)), that using could potentially make me one of the new trendsetters (as every new trend is just an old trend), but perhaps its because everything is important but none of it is important in the sense that everything is happening but nothing changes. See, because I’ve been writing about K(ondratieff(yber(orean)))-Waves i’ve become somewhat of a wave-obsessive (which perfectly fits a hyperfinancialized world i’d say). I’ve decided that acceleration is probably the contraction of waves (which works fine for my Korean article (plus I heard Anna Greenspan say this (I swear though that I already had thought about this before I heard her say it))) and that the macro-process might be something like the acceleration of waves.
I feel that there is in some sense several corridors or peak waves that feel like an increasing escape from humanity, (that is to say to the process not being for us (that is to say the experience that even if many things are happening, nothing ever changes (it might be said that this is about the least novel insight one could have, which wouldn't be too wrong, and yet what most of the Hauntologists and their ilk get wrong is that obviously things are changing). It feels like some of these "corridors-as-peak-waves” function as intensifiers of the process, paradoxically by killing the thing that led up to it (or at least keeping it dormant for a few years until a next wave decides its time for a new iteration). I think 68/69 is an important first step. With its combination of political change, Woodstock, the moonlanding (which seems to me to be mankind's move from modernity’s controlling the earth to moving outside the earth) Even if we take the term post-modernity (a term which I’m not a fan of) and ARPAnet (which seems to be the opposite move, a move away from society towards going deeper within technology itself).
Of course what is especially interesting about this “corridor” or peak wave, is that it once again shows the combination between on the one hand the culmination of a process long ongoing (the post world-war 2 opposition against and obsession with Fascism in 1968 and the rock ’n roll and later rock derived hippie culture with Woodstock), followed by a much gloomier period (while the world can be said to have changed, post ’68 philosophy was mostly about how things had not and would not change, just like Woodstuck (not a typo) was almost directly followed by the gloom of the 70’s). That is, mainstreamification is the peak, after which a slow decline sets in (but ofcourse, as the peaks themselves increasingly remove agency from humanity (if we accept this for a moment, there are all kinds of interesting counteraguments you can give) whatever is new is just an old peak repackaged), while simultaneously new developments give an idea of what the new wave might look like, which at that time is still obscure to most.
Of course this was only a first corridor (or first peak of what i would then perhaps call hyper-modernity) and I would say that in this moment everything still felt like it was very much for us (maybe it was because I wasn't there...). The narrative seemed centered on us. Rock music did sort of quite quickly become the global standard (and even later variants as hiphop are in many parts derivative, as well as electronic with kraftwerk and the United States of America etc. let alone punk, metal etc.) but ofcourse you still had other lanes and much of the later variations of music would feel inrecognizable. Culture still seemed to be about us.
I think 1989-1993 is another corridor, where the story still is somewhat about us but it is already much more vague. It coincides with pervading nihilism and with the "end of history". Digitalization does provide a sort of new story but it is actually a story of the move away from exactly this pervasive moment, of the state; and there is already a sentiment of things increasingly not moving further.
Now there is an argument that 2001 is actually the re-instatement of "caring" which is interesting but I also think (for various reasons too lengthy to get into) is quite unsatisfying. It seems more like a continuation of the cold-war but now with increasingly more spectacle as technology further advances. I actually instead think a third corridor takes place roughly in the late 2000s and early 2010s (one of the annoying things of analyzing recent history is that, other than with things like "the renaissance", where everybody understands that it roughly started in the late 13th century, when it comes to recent years everybody demands exact years) with both the financial crisis, Occupy Wallstreet as complete failure and the start of the social media platforms that would come to dominate our day to day lives up until this day. While at the time it might have still felt exciting (though ofcourse theorists had been at that point making statements since the 1970s that there was no more narrative), there seemed to already be no actual "new anymore, or at least no “future” within the new.
I would argue that from covid up until today we are in a fourth corridor (though covid is difficult because (though I think at this point it is not entirely controversial anymore to suggest that the virus might have originated in a lab) it was a natural disaster, not something that had an onset). Post covid the pervasive mood seems to be one of epistemological crisis, world leaders acting out, the western order collapsing, live streamed genocide, tiktok taking over our lives, AI and its influence, the hyperfinancialization of everything, truth has collapsed not in the sense that we doubt metanarratives but that everybody doubts everything (and simultaneously has their own truth), that there is no meaning or narrative anymore, etc. where almost everybody now feels as if something has gone terribly wrong and everybody feels increasingly like there is something inhuman about where we've ended up at.
Ofcourse if we want to get a bit accelerationist here (i have become extremely disinterested in accelerationism) if these “corridors” or “peak waves” are correct than there is something interesting in the fact that these corridors seem themselves to be speeding up. The end of corridor 1 to beginning of corridor 2 being 24 years, the end of corridor 2 to corridor 3 being 15 years, the end of corridor 3 to corridor 4 being 8 years (or 10 if you don't want to count covid), each corridor turning the human a little more into a node in a circuit by surgically removing humanness from the process.
Anyway, whether I think covid was an event or just the peak of the wave that unveiled what had long been bubbling makes little difference, as what is mainstream is mainstream. So perhaps its time to get invested again. The timeline(and thus the totalization (and the future (which is past))) is decided by normcattle who increasingly meme about current events in an onset of faux-nihilism where their concern with todays events - whether these are those geopolitical events, AI developments, the mainstreamification of nazi-slop, the supposed “woke resurgence” as a reaction to this and the proliferation of old looksmaxxing content - is all in service of one or another form of reward chasing, whether it is direct monetary rewards or simply the dopamine high of likes - all the while oscillating between insisting to you that none of it really matters or that it all really really matters (if it can provide them with the reward (which other normies, doing the same then respond to and call out (something I’m doing as well right now, which might mean I’m on my way to success, or to normiedom))).
Perhaps its time to get invested again. Nothing matters unless you are a chadmaxxed, sloppified, gigamillionaire; or something. I don’t know. Its weird, these terms have just completely lost their touch but there is also nothing new. Or maybe I just lost touch (which means I might be becoming a normie (which means both failure and success)). Anyway I mock at these terms while using them, perhaps I really am on my way to normiedom. Which means having to act like a normie, which I am already doing as nothing new is arising. It’s weird. I feel like archive fashion is normie-coded now. But then again, ironically wearing “brands” is also kind of normie right? Maybe in truly Korean fashion I should become a conformist TNF jacket wearing Uniqloguy.
Perhaps it is time to invest again. Elon puts enough egregious normgroid takes on my timeline for me to make it so that I can invest in whatever I think the new narrative is going to become. Or perhaps things are simply going to fast to do so if one is not a node. Perhaps becoming a node is exactly what is necessary to become the future (or the non future).
I’ve been listening to a lot of random Classical court music from various countries (though I’m still deep in the K-Pop trenches, with K-Pop stan twitter in its heyday still being a blast of toxicity (I’m completely blanking on whether K-Pop stans qualify as normies, even in the already convoluted understanding of the term here)) while trying to avoid the normgroid spam.
I’ve been looking into cults. If the normie is a node then the cult seems to be the perfect entity to envelop them. I’ve been hyperobsessed with everything from Aleph to Heaven’s Gate. The normie seems to scream for a cult. It has already turned himself into a node. The normie screams for sincerity and for nihilism, that is, it screams for you to provide the hope of money as the post-covid narrative is that money provides the path to the future.
The cult on the other hand needs the normie nowadays if it ever hopes to make it to the future. If the looksmaxxing retardation shows us anything it is that the normie craves the cult, the narrative that when nothing matters, their lives still matter, and it is completely willing to turn himself into a node, a vessel for the future, to become the future, in service of that. The cult thus needs to provide the normie with a narrative that can entice them in what they call a post-covid world; the narrative they have internalized and which has now become old that nothing matters anymore (and that because of that, everything matters (it is my belief that it is in fact the case that everything matters and because of that nothing matters (but then again what I want does’t matter as either subconsciously (by standing still) or consciously (by investing) I’m going to be steered by the normies (who are nodes)))).
The post-covid world is fake in the sense that it is a continuation of a long simmering process where increasingly everything changes but nothing changes for us (and thus of everything returning (and thus of a future that was already always here (in other words it reveals that everything is fake (but that in itself is fake)))) but it is more real than anything else as it is only in the post-covid world that the ideas and experiences which pre-covid were fringe, niche and radical diagnoses of society and the terminology etc. materializes as it turns mainstream; its origins obscured.
As soon as the normie touches these things, it ruins them by actualizing; the normie cannot-not-(not?) ruin anything because it has no capacity to interact with anything on a level beyond its surface instinctual drives. The cult format must continue to innovate; to influence the normie with its ideas, balancing continuously between making enough of them devotees, while never being the direct source of mainstreamification, always one step ahead. The cult must walk a path between shadow and light (or the ancient esoteric and exoteric distinction), accepting the decimation of many of its ideas through their mainstreamification by ever-more puppeteering the normie from the shadows.
In a post-covid world where the narrative is that nothing exists and where formerly fringe distrust of the narratives of institutions have become mainstream, the cult allows the promise of gold at the end of the rainbow (which is both a lie and a truth (as the gold is both the possibility of a future and the future ripped out of the hands of normies)).
Abou has tweeted: “I'm not asking you to become SAIF. I'm saying, when the time is right, you will look in the mirror and already be SAIF.” (Abou Barchos, 2026).
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