The question of 'the' history of the Situationist Intergalactical is problematic, not least because of the time and space anomalies prevalent throughout its work on all planes of reality. The Situationist Intergalactical didn’t start so much at a specific node in time, as it did at many. “There are more worlds than these,” and there are many nodes of Arachnist activity across the Web that could be seen as points-of-Aha!, points of order, points of illumination. These AHA moments of direct gnosis and revelation can be thought of as the synchronistic glitches, that strung together, form the history of the SI.

Even in the spiral galaxies, there are many historians who insist on linear progression, the idea that history is a line, going from the Flinstone age of yabba-dabba-doo to the Jetsonian world of full automated metal maids. Parental units are only one vector of influence. Geography is another. Friendships another. Transdimensional influences are not as often considered. Depending on what part of the spiral web you dance upon, history may look very different indeed. The history of the SI is spiral bound.

Our origin story is one that combines future shock with retromancy. Chronosophers from other nodes have a completely different takes on who it is we even are and what it is we do. The crucial question is one of inwards or outwards: Are we spiraling into our inner selves and the inner worlds, or are we spiraling outwards into the world and the worlds beyond this world?

(From the eggs of the spider queen thousands will be born, and they shall go into many points and places around the wheel from which their own perspective will determine what eggs they themselves hatch.)

Whichever direction we go, we must tread on the tail of the tiger with care, so as not to spiral into madness or psychosis.

At this point we can begin at the end, with the Situationist Intergalactical’s most recent communique. That piece, Jamcon ’26, is one of the best places to look for clues as to what the Situationist Intergalactical will become next. As a key activation in our herstory, it is intimately tied up with the coming age of Analog Inevitability as described further below. Jamcon ’26 was the opening salvo in the AI slop wars, leading to the meltdown of many a machine.

What is Jamcon ’26? It is an unexploded media bomb whose transplutonian virality seeks to further inundate various corners of the Universal Net Web with bits and bobs downloaded from the mauve zone. The Jamcon ’26 project recodes the culture jamming traditions of the so-called past and plops the into the dada-sets of Artificial Idiocy right here in the now time.

As we enter a new phase of the work, the SI is pleased to announce a deal where key concepts derived from Jamcon ’26 and some of our “future” works have been licensed by a game design company, A Stitch in Time, who will be weaving it into new Glass Bead Game modules for the use by luddites and other digital resistors. From our current nodal point of view, this confluence of vectors has led to this analog inevitability. Our so-called work history is just the lead up (or wind down) to our ideas being acquired by A Glitch in Time. A glitch is a stitch after all.

​For earthlings subjugated to conventional linear time, one node where the SI begin was with Dr. Friedrich Morgenstern when he escaped from a high security psychiatric unit for the criminally insane and went on the lam in Lexington, Kentucky. Yet, at the same time, the SI has never existed on earth, or is yet to exist. Morgenstern got his information from the mauve beam that was directed at him by the angels operating the transorbital satellite, and was further enhanced by his later trepanation and transorbital lobotomy.

A series of events held in a junkyard on the outskirts of the city where various hobos gathered together along with other escapees from standard American reality and they proceeded to work on becoming a provisional escape-hatch and portal to connect with other extreme outsiders and genuine freaks. With the publication of their first zines and pirate radio broadcasts the SI started to function on the material plane. With the advent of the internet, they planted themselves like a rogue firmware update into various corners where they would be stumbled upon by the cyber inclined.

Currently, much SI activity seems to be dedicated to defusing hype about the AI apocalypse. The ascendancy of Artificial Idiocy just means an eternal return to Analog Inevitability. If we have to pick a point where something starts, let's just say the history of the SI begins here, now in the - very - near future that isn’t evenly distributed yet, with the advent of AI -and those who want to fight slop with slop.

The SI learned from cybernetics the lesson that there is nothing 'merely' technical or intevitable about Artificial Idiocy, except that is something that is happening, and Analog Intelligence will have been inevitable after it happened. But it will also have been inevitable that people will be deploying various means of going against these Idiotic Aptitudes. The Automaton Jihad will have also been inevitable at that point of order. The SI sees the rise of the Idiotic as an event exemplifying a whole complex of intermeshing themes, including: the crash of Science Fiction (and the emergence of cyberpunk), the death of postmodernity, and the re-start of chronopolitical conflict.

Addled Integrity is an event that may ultimately be entirely constructed out of hype. What that hype is going to lead to will not in itself be illusory. The wig outs and freak outs and mental breakdowns from those using Addled Intelligence systems will be all too real. This in itself is an immediately effective cybernetic feedback process. The intense nature of the feedback spirals will result in the kind of unraveling usually considered negative.

So far as the SI is concerned, this means the crash of the world economy. As technological integration increases, human control lessens, and the possibility of something crashing the entire system grows.

Where the techbros think of Addled Integrity as the implementation of their Faustian bargain project of Progressive Technology - a vision of uninhibited technological growth spreading out into a far future on Mars and beyond- they do not realize that there was a clause in their satanic bargain. Specifically, a Santa Claus. They sold their soul to Santa for technology and all they got in return was an internet catalog of increasingly stupid toys. Also, Skynet.

From the POV of Allegiant Incels, of course, Skynet never happens. From our point of view SI activist John Connor sees to it that it never happens. Time travel, duh. The secret at the heart of spiral time. Just skip over a thread and connect to a different part of the Web.

Aggravated Imbeciles are not only everywhere that computers are, but are also hooked up to the dada collection systems of computers everywhere. The infection has spread to even the tiniest interstices of all aspects of the technocratic environment. AI is a global habit, mostly urban, that can only be kicked locally. Even if, say, a corporate worker who got laid off because of AI was able to infect the AI system with dada before being booted out of the system, that dada set would still be a part of an AI system that would later need total disassemblage by a team of trained mentats.

Acolyte Inbreeding is not so much a catastrophe as it is a hyper-catastrophe. From it can be extrapolated the entire kit and caboodle of stock market crashes, nuclear wasteland exchange, energy grid disruption hacks, and traffic signal deregulation. Which is bad news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with the whole kit and caboodle of industrial civilization and its discontents.

Assbackwards Infidelity is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable from communist reality. They are both economic fictions that have melted down the very material substance of life into some kind of non-orgasmic goo, and hypnotized us into a system of abstract and virtual token exchange. Both systems suck horse dick because both are run by managers and bosses. One of the black swans looming on the horizon is how Airhead Instability will disrupt the management cycle. But the question needs to be asked: what else will it bring down and disrupt along the way as people with no real world skills are sent home from the office?

Cyberpunk ends with Amalgamated Inbreeding. The SI starts with people becoming psyberpunks. That is, for those who kick the habit early, reliance on our native psychic powers will begin to replace our current trajectory of becoming Daleks and Cybermen.

​What Analog Inevitability does signal is the virtual endgame of the virtual game itself. When poisoned dada sets start proliferating throughout everything the internet touches, no one will be able to trust it at all, and in the end many will choose to just unplug the damn thing.

​Automaton Instability is thus a testament to the bankruptcy of its theoretical commitments. It was one thing for out-of-touch theorists to fail to anticipate the economic events of Y2K and 2008; but to be unable to respond to Aimless Injury, as an event, is an oversight of another magnitude entirely.

The problem is that Abandoned Ideation scrambles the radar of those who believe in the trajectory of progress, discomfiting the assumptions on which the entire notion of progress rests. While it will be used as a reality escape hatch for the wealthy, those on the other side of the class divide will continue to have sweat and die. Not enough fuel to power the dada centers of the disenfranchised.
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Yet their fantasies of digital heaven and the Martian utopia can all be unplugged with the flip of a switch; not so the nature of biological and spiritual reality. Flipping the off switch doesn’t mean people will stop believing in the myth of progress, only that they will become a new Amazonian cargo cult as they continue to slave for the Bezos-Santa to whom they signed their soul.

The postmodernists would have us believe that all signs are completely arbitrary, that one set can be exchanged for another. Yet when the arachnist hackers put into the dada sets completely arbitrary symbol sets, it will indeed eventually cause a global Aggregate Idol meltdown. This will become the cosmic trigger and the semiotic trigger hacktivists will pull.
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Analog Inevitability is thus about the increasing friction between what is left of human intelligence and computers without such intelligence. Asinine Imbeciles just repeat and recombine the semiotic signs fed to them in endless scrolls of binary code. There is no subconscious in the machine. There is no mind there. It is up to us how we may inject new lines of semiotic code into the cesspool of harvested dada, but we should also know not to drink from the same fountain.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book The Radio Phonics Laboratory: Telecommunications, Speech Synthesis, and the Birth of Electronic Music, or my poetry book Underground Rivers,  if you want to support me.

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired. 

“If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also continue to see the world in terms of God versus man; elite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation; and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at its world can endure.” –Gregory Bateson, ‘The Cybernetics of Self: A Theory of Alcoholism’ (1971).

Binary thinking seems to be a plague visited upon mankind, locking our minds into grooves that oscillate between the extremes of yes or no, true or false, love or hate, good or evil, left or right, black or white, communism or capitalism, utopia or oblivion, leaving little room to explore variances on the spectrum between polar opposites. This habit creates false dilemmas when all the available options get reduced down to just two. Entire fields of possibility are left unexplored.  When our minds identify with just one pole it tends to create fundamentalist antagonisms towards people and institutions whose thinking centers on the opposite pole.  When we ignore the vast terrain of middle ground that lies between, like ignoring the experience of those who live in the flyover states between the coasts, we miss out on many nuanced realms of meaning. The worst aspect of binary thinking is probably the deleterious effect it has on our ability to imagine what may yet be possible.

            Polarities do exist, and they often exert tremendous tugs at one another, as in the polarities of magnets, of male and female. When the polarities in question are political or religious in nature it animates the animus and people tend to slip into acrimony. The increased animosity between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans over the past decade or more is a case in point. On some deep level I think they subconsciously get off on this attraction to each other. The foaming mouth of a fundamentalist Christian denouncing heavy metal, role playing games, and gay sex is as often as not projecting their shadow side onto the object of their hate. By the same token an angry anti-gun activist may harbor secret wishes to wield destructive powers over others. Is there a way out of these twin blind alleys of diametrical opposition? Can we find healing from our collective bipolar disorder?

            I think there is a way and it can be found at the fulcrum, the center point of the scales, the point of perfect balance and integration between two opposing poles. We can take steps towards moving to that fulcrum by exploring philosophy, in the form of ternary logic and triolectics, and by playing games designed for three teams, in this case Three-Sided Football.
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            In the past philosophy wasn’t just a way for academics to get tenure. Serious contributions to philosophy and science came from engaged citizens who weren’t tied to publishing and pushing papers on regular basis just to keep their position. As “dollar dollar bills y’all” became the name of the academic game, theories seem to have become increasingly harebrained, existing only within the phantasmal realm of a mirrored echo chamber. Universities continue to flounder,  and the study of philosophy, including the philosophy of science, is a suitable pastime for those downwardly mobile dandies who don’t want to get their hands dirty on mudlarking expeditions, but would rather get lost in thought as they drift about as aspiring flâneurs. They will have to be willing to dirty up their minds, however, as mind is not separate from nature, as the Cartesian dualists would have people to think.

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was an American philosopher, mathematician, logician and scientific thinker. His father, Benjamin Peirce, was also of scientific bent, and was a professor of astronomy and mathematics at Harvard University. Growing up in an environment of high intellectual achievement honed Peirce’s considerable natural gifts, and a career in academia was almost a given for him, if he hadn’t scandalized the prim and proper minds at Johns Hopkins University. His teaching job there was terminated without warning due to the fact that he was living in sin with his second wife, Juliette Annette Froissy, a.k.a. Juliette Annette Pourtalai, before the divorce from his first was official. Juliette also happened to be Romani, and her heritage was another mark of prejudice against the couple. This fall from the graces of higher learning left him unemployable at other universities. He ended up eking out a living by writing for scientific journals, crafting entries for Century Dictionary, and doing intermittent work for the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey. When his father passed away he was left with enough inheritance to buy a farmhouse on property near Milford, Pennsylvania, where the couple was able to remain independently poor. Their poverty was not quite genteel, but it did allow him to be extremely prolific in his writing, much of which is still unpublished. He often had to write on the reverse of manuscript pages because he was at times unable to afford fresh paper.

            As the university system implodes, those who have an interest in philosophy, science, or other academic pursuits could do worse than follow Peirce’s example, and continue to study, write and publish as independent scholars.

 Thinking in terms of threes seemed to be natural to Peirce. Triads, trichotomies, and groupings of threes are found throughout his work.  His system of logic consisted of three parts: speculative grammar, speculative rhetoric, and what he called critic.  He also sketched out a formal system of math based on triadic logic. Peirce is also credited as the philosopher who kick-started the contemporary study of semiotics, or the general study of signs and signification, representation and meaning. Peirce defined a sign as being triadic, composed of three parts, these being the sign vehicle, the object and the interpretant.

Peirce had suffered from the painful effects of facial neuralgia, a condition he had since his teenage years, which may have been partially responsible for the couple’s relative social isolation. Yet out of his suffering came the gift of his prodigious thinking and his obsession with logic. Peirce believed that some propositions in logic are neither true nor false.  He rejected the Principle of Bivalence that states that any proposition can only be false or true. This provided the motivation he needed to pursue triadic solutions.

In his concentrated thought Peirce was led to create a triadic logic of induction, deduction and abduction. Induction is an inference that is probable, while deduction is a type of inference where the conclusion is supposed to follow necessarily from the premise. In a deduction it is impossible for the premise to be true and a conclusion to be false. Abduction is the process of inference by which a hypothesis can be generated and formed. This term is also sometimes called retroduction, and can be further defined as a way for researchers to conceptualize that requires them to identify those circumstances the concept cannot exist without. Peirce took these even further than logical argument forms and used them as the basis for truth-seeking that he called “scientific method.” In his thought, induction, deduction and abduction become the three phases of scientific inquiry.

Just as philosophy contributes to the practice of science, so too can it contribute to the practice of art. Enter Danish painter and philosopher Asger Jorn (1914–1973), a co-founder of the Situationist International. In the early 1950s, after convalescing in a sanitorium where he was being treated for tuberculosis, Jorn wrote the text Held og hasard (“Luck and Chance”). He submitted this to the University of Copenhagen, which he hoped would approve it as a thesis. The text, however, was too unconventional. In it he argued that alongside the two dominant modes of thinking, philosophy and science, there was a third, valid alternative: an artistic mode. As per the title, he also wrote extensively on the role of luck and chance in all manner of situations.

            In Jorn’s text he speculated on how humans first learned to walk, and cited Erik Nyholm, who believed the first humans were apes who had learned to sing, due to a new jaw structure that allowed for more movement of the tongue, which in turn allowed for the creation of new sounds. Singing became an incitement to dance, and dancing distinguished early humans from other animals. Singing and dancing apes learned to walk by first learning to dance on their hind legs. From this perspective, Jorn suggested that game playing is a way to enter new stages of evolutionary change. The inclination towards pleasure and fun is an incitement to new behaviors. Games are also very often subject to the role, or roll, of chance, which brings about novel experiences.

            Peirce had also been an advocate of chance and its role in evolution. He thought that chance, what he termed Tyche, or Tychism, “must give birth to an evolutionary cosmology, in which all the regularities of nature and of mind are regarded as products of growth.”
            The Situationists espoused many interventions to break people away from the trance of the society of the spectacle. Games were used to break apart the rigid binary of work time and leisure time. They strove to show how play was not just a way to spend “free time” in the off hours away from office, factory, or cashiers register, but a way to transform existing energies and put them to use on life giving activities.

Asger Jorn had long been smitten with Hegelian and Marxist dialectics. While the dialectic method of philosophical argument can be traced back to Plato, and was used under the rubric of medieval logic, it was given a new lease on intellectual life when G.W.F. Hegel made it a core aspect of reality itself. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels then got a hold of it and further retooled it into dialectical materialism. As communism spread, the idea of dialectical materialism became a major part of the intellectual ecology of the era, and Jorn was among those who became enamored.

Jorn, however, saw many restrictions in dialectical materialism. As a writer, philosopher, and theorist he tinkered on it, blending in his own ideas, and attempted to extend it with insights from quantum physics. What he came up with was Triolectics, a playful rebuke. In time, due to a thought experiment in his book Natural Order, it became the basis for Three-Sided Football.

Jorn came up with the game of Three-Sided Football (TSF) as an outgrowth of his writings on Triolectical Materialism. These were first written about in his pamphlet, “De la méthode triolectique dans ses applications en situlogie générale” (“The Application of the Triolectical Method in General Situology”) published by the Scandinavian Institute of Comparative Vandalism.  According to the members of the team Strategic Optimism Football, triolectics “went beyond linear transfers of energy, constructing spatio-temporal fields of possibility and negotiation. Not oppositional but superpositional – contradictions resolved by blending multiple simultaneous potentialities.”

For Jorn, Three-Sided Football was just a thought-experiment, a way to play with the philosophy behind Triolectics. In Natural Order, he wrote, "Three teams meet on a six-angled plane instead of a rectangular one… First of all one wants to quickly discover that it is impossible to control who of the two enemies attacking is shooting the goal. It becomes necessary to turn the rules around… so that the victorious side is the side that has best defended themselves, and where the fewest goals have been let in. The victory has become defensive and not offensive... It will not at all be an exciting match... a third force can in this way neutralize a tension between two forces. That is why two-sided opponents are always aggressive or attack-minded, while three-sided are defensive. Whether this in itself marks a transition from dialectic to complementarity, I would like to leave unsaid. ... There are in these observations absolutely no political suggestions. I am only searching to find out what is actually going on… Whether a triangular relationship is static or constant, that would depend on whether there is an increasing tension. In that case this might lead to a real explosion, whereas the possibilities in the two-sided relationship are cancelled out by the two-sided fight’s neverending energy use.”

Such insights from Triolectics could be useful to those who want to escape the state of advanced rigor mortis that seems to be the inevitable byproduct of the forever culture war.

In the 1990s a number of post-Situationist groups began to bubble up in the UK and Europe. Psychogeography and détournement were the prime interests. In the writings of the Situationists they had found a still valid critique of art and the leftist politics artists so often kept as bedfellows. At an anarchist event in Glasgow in 1994 Jorn’s football thought-experiment descended from the Platonic realm of ideas, and the first actual games were played. Since then it has been played at different locations around the world. A World Cup for three-sided football was even organized at Jorn’s hometown of Silkeborg, Denmark.

 The game is pretty much played the way Jorn sketched it out. The winner of a TSF match is the team who gives up the fewest goals. If your team scores zero goals, it can still win, as long as the other teams gave up more goals than yours. The three teams play on a hexagonal pitch with three goal areas. Instead of splitting the time of the game into halves, it is played for a duration of three twenty-minute thirds. As the teams strive to concede as few goals as possible, various alliances are formed and dissolved in swift and fluid formations. With its roots in philosophical anarchism, the rest of the rules are flexible in the extreme, and a number of variations are played within the small TSF community.  

The members of the Strategic Optimism Football team contend that the playing of the game teaches a way of strategy that removes two-sided oppositions. “Strategy is no longer the illusion of mastering a totality. Rather it is the negotiation of undecidables that removes both the binary fixity of formal Aristotelian logic and the teleology of dialectical change at once. One is presented not with the binary and fixed categories construed by media-imposed ideology. Rather one can glimpse an externality – the larger matrix of general emergencies that contain and triangulate the particular emergency.”

 As the world struggles to find solutions for our many crises and predicaments, ternary logic and triolectics can help individuals and communities escape from the rat race of us-against-them, and develop defensive survival strategies. For those of us who seek liberation from political binaries, and the Cartesian binary thinking that has divided humanity’s experience and made it somehow apart from nature, we could do much worse than to spend time playing games of ternary logic inside our heads, and games made for three teams with our friends. If we engage with our fellows in an interplay of imagination, we might just catch glimpses of the futures that lie beyond oblivion or utopia.

RE/SOURCES:

Illuminating more than just these brief snippets of the deep thoughts of Charles Sanders Peirce and Asger Jorn is beyond the scope of this essay. They are all worth digging into for those who want to explore further. Reading and contemplation are among the cheapest of pastimes, especially if you access material through your local library system. In my original sketch of this essay I had included information on the three-sided chess variant. It didn’t end up fitting in the space allocated here. Readers may find it easier to organize a three-sided chess match than a three-sided football match, but the philosophical underpinnings differ.
 
The Art Story. “Asger Jorn: Danish Painter and Scholar” <https://www.theartstory.org/artist/jorn-asger/>

Bateson, Gregory.  Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York, N.Y.: Ballantine Books, 1972.  Bateson’s essay “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism” is contained within this quintessential collection of his work that traverses across the disciplines of anthropology, psychiatry, evolution and genetics, systems theory, and ecology.

Burch, Robert. “Charles Sanders Peirce.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta (ed.). Stanford, Calif.: Metaphysics Research Lab, 2022. <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2022/entries/peirce/>.

Colapietro, Vincent M. Glossary of Semiotics. New York, N.Y.: Paragon House, 1993. A useful text for anyone interested in semiotics. It contains many definitions of the abstruse terminology employed by Peirce.
Information Philosopher (website). “Charles Sanders Peirce” and “Gregory Bateson.”  <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/peirce/>, <https://informationphilosopher.com/solutions/scientists/bateson/>. The Information Philosopher website, hosted and written by Bob Doyle, is a massive resource on philosophy and science as seen through the lens of information analysis. 

Jorn, Ager. The Natural Order and other Texts, trans. Peter Shield. New York, N.Y.: Taylor and Francis, 2017.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. The Essential Peirce, eds. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1992.

Rasmussen, Mikkel Bolt, and Jakob Jakobsen, eds. Cosmonauts of the Future: Texts from the Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Autonomedia, 2015.
Strategic Optimism Football (website). “Triolectical Materialism and the Beautiful Game of Three-Sided Football.” <https://strategicoptimismfootball.wordpress.com/2015/01/07/triolectical-materialism-and-the-beautiful-game-of-three-sided-football/>

Parks, Tim. “Impossible Choices,” ed. Nigel Warburton. Melbourne, Australia: Aeon,  Jul. 15 2019. <https://aeon.co/essays/gregory-bateson-changed-the-way-we-think-about-changing-ourselves> A biographical essay on Bateson and his work. 

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This essay originally appeared in 2022 in an issue of New Maps as part of my Cheap Thrills column.

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The  writings presented here will always be free, but you can support my work by passing the essays on to others, and sharing the links to other sites and telling your friends.  I have also set up a Buy Me A Coffee page, which you can find here if you would like to put some money in my rainy day coffee jar. You could also buy my book if you want to support me.

☕️☕️☕️ 

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Thank you to everyone who reads this and helps support the universalist bohemian art life by keeping me caffeinated and wired.