The Future was Our First Love [And it Will be Our Last]

In which it is explained why Crystalpunk is like a rubber ball rolling down Jacob’s Ladder.

Crystalpunk is the big push of the dilettanti, a simpleton stampede, a coxcomb carnival, a platitude-peddling potlatch, a romantic cargo cult, a mountebank excursion into the VIP rooms of knowledge, a solidification of the ignoramus's tantrum, a wild farrago of those who run before they can walk to discover how non-trivial things become, an ABD of being Free from the NOW. Crystalpunk is a self-invented movement for self-education that is reaching for the high ground, from the antechambers of happy amateurism below ground, remaining completely oblivious to the middle ground. We are the jaywalkers of terra incognita! We are here to give a new name to the Anarcho-Homunculi Jezebels who make something out of nothing. Crystalpunk is a rallying cry for people to start making all sorts of weird things from mind and matter. Things that are slightly out of kilter. Things that need a Crystalpunk to appreciate their delights. Things that are radical but which hurt no one. Things that are big physically (even though that is often the easy way out) or things that are big mentally. Things, in any case, that are mnemogenic in one way or another. Things that slip past the filters of consciousness and stick in the memory like a boot in the mud. Things that confabulate into perfect shapes and synthesize unities from patterns previously distinct. Crystalpunk is the alter ego of a head struggling to find meaning, a meandering, discursive search into all the Gracelands of Uncertainty that are dotted across the globe, incubating a thousand questions that all demand the Great Work of Crystalpunk. With the true joy of the lunatic, giggling dangerously like the mad fucks we are, we bum rush the show of the professional, we whiten the map of knowledge with black paint. We might be crap, but at least it's a kind of crap you won't find anywhere else. Behaviour is constructed in the present to anticipate the future we have extrapolated from the patterns of the past. Recognition is to know anew. What Crystalpunk names, organizes and acts upon is the need to create a living memory to work, live and think in. To borrow from Thomas de Quincey, you can learn something new from each paragraph of a cookery book but, even though our Gold Tiger's Eye Curry is the stuff of legends, Crystalpunk is not a cabal of aspiring food writers and home cooks. Crystalpunk is not a syringe filled with recipe doggerel, but an ambience that radiates Power, that suggests ways to arrive at new things based on what you know already. Crystalpunk digs the spurs into the flanks of its hobbyhorse as if it were a thoroughbred: We are the equestrian underground of hyperbole!

This second manifesto, after the disarrayed wildfire shrieks of the first one, is our deadpan excuse for a philosophy, a vortex of things to chew on in your own time, a pile of words suggesting new links to follow up as you pursue your Crystalpunk Civilization. We are too frivolous! We are too fond of our bodies to withdraw in some penultimate rejection of matter! We identify our state of mind as gnostic, but little about us is characteristic of those who try to turn the bulk of their emotional system to stone, condemning what is left to watch the only film showing at the Mystic Cinema. Frame by frame the gnostic sees the special effects of evolution stripped from a universe slowly returning to nakedness. Moving backwards in time the organic dissolves into crystal, the crystal into undifferentiated magma, into cosmic dust unformed, and further back still. On a death mission our universe is! Back everything must go into heat and radiation and finally, at the very end, into Alpha Soma, into a psyche independent from matter. Enlightenment being the retrieval of a backup copy of a timeless consciousness hidden deep inside the artificial human consciousness that we take for granted but which is really an illusion. Perhaps matter does not exist at all, the extremist claims: it is just a mirage to be removed from our mind by introspective brain surgery. Mystics have always believed in the need for a strict diet, in the cleansing power of hunger, to undo the dictatorship of matter over mind. Crystalpunk prefers people who clean their plate. We are occult in the persistent belief that certain capabilities of mind are underrated, we are magickal in our making of a self-consistent world for us and our friends. "I was taught by dreams and fantasies / Learned from the friendly and darker phantoms", Edwin Muir wrote in his autobiography, and so are we. But that is the end of us as mystics. We are not crystal-gazers. The souls we conjure, the ghosts we seek to bust, are never outside us. The mind is made from and brought forth by matter, and this is where all explanations must finally be found. If anything we are a movement for grassroots artificial intelligence. Yet, in our making things with the mind and not for the mind, we are undeniably gnostics of a Crystalpunk kind.

The Crystalpunk Progress is not one that spirals inward into some prophesied paradisal cul-de-sac complete with all the usual stock attributes: geometric lay-out, meticulous lawns, grazing sheep, hazy dreams, rivers of wine, bearded men, immaculate perfumes, sealed off and closed in upon itself, bestowing the hidden meaning of it all on the traveller lucky or righteous enough to successfully pass the ambushed approach roads. All that moralistic rubbish we know from the Game of the Goose and Donkey Kong. Our path is rather one that keeps spiralling outwards like life itself, starting halfway, going nowhere, concerned only with the novelty of mental states entailed by input independent of 'meaning'. Noise can 'teach' you more than music, but the subject of teachers in the Crystalpunk Yes or No remains a difficult one. As Crystalpunk grows it will irrepressibly leave behind a trajectory of thoughts and ideas entertained, a calendar of bonanzas, conferences, tournaments and workshops past and forthcoming, a string of social manifestations. These are our invitations to the Inspired Non-Crystalpunk to ramble along with us. With the ease of a bellboy sending his elevator up and down a skyscraper, you can move in any chosen direction along the curvatures of our Progress.