One Tower: On the Mercantile Feudalism of the Media
The most vast and ambitious commercial enterprises of all times are the contemporary media conglomerates, an existing but not tangible corpse of powers. Predators of faces, dates, impulses and sensuals, media conglomerates gained dominance in a nick time by developing an image technology through mobilizing waves, having steadily rolled out all the possibilities and capabilities that opportunities gave them. They vertiginously accelerated the placing of people under tutelage, subverting them to blind obedience through the doomed metaphysics of believing in them. Their magic worked beyond human strength, and it retrieved a specific content which ran no risk at all by merging with politics and political ideals.
Security and perfection were this specific content, which received support from all walks of life towards their quasi-ness, or to the accepting and even appreciating of such void states: a resembling, seeming, virtual ‘as if’ transcendentality that debilitates its subjects. Taking the place of the debilitated, as if performing a horizontal gene transfer, they started to occupy political positions, which resulted in an infinite growth potential. Decomposing intensively by mimicking political currents, whether democratization, equal opportunities and the kinds – i.e. resembling the political ethos; having some, but not all the features of environmental issues, proposing instead quasi-definitions, like sustainability; showing democratic queasiness in outlook, but totalitarian shrewdness in practice – they steadily devaluated values. Their disposition to cunning practices and trickery, just as their infinite imaginary plasticity, being shaped and formed according to opportunism, was honest only to their replicator quasi-substance, their capacity for being molded by the occasional pressure of necessities.
Coming now to the other point, to the feudalisation of the mercantile media body, where a civil principality becomes the lord of the region, neither by political election, nor by violence, but coming to control the entirety of the social and institutional sphere by pure queasiness, thus considering the social-historical model of ‘feudal society’ as something approximating a Weberian ideal type. This civil principality approaches the legal definition of feudalism, in the form of a service tenement based on fief[1] or other supplies. Naturally, given that the top priority of vassalage[2] is total rule, in spite of opinions to the contrary vassalage everywhere leads to tyranny. Now certainly such parallels can be taken too far, but to some extent there is an almost inevitable tendency to lead towards this conclusion whenever the public is ruled by large corporate bodies like military units or professional interest groups. Under feudalism mercantile bodies had little voice (at least in Christian Europe), but now they became in bed together with the state. Such authoritarian and centralised enterprises can only thrive where the state rules in their interest. Under such conditions they can control or abolish individual business ventures, just as private households.
In reality, the main requirement for their operations is to extract supplies that could be used by or traded for other supplies. In our case the media corpse collects revenues, harvesting the goods manufactured through the enterprises in its possession. Its vassals live without civil rights, inheritance or safety net, offering their mental properties. The mind with its vibrating feeling and sensuals is itself recognised as an exchangeable good. Practically all of us are in vassalage, and the service or fealty that was required by the media body was our wave vibrating sensuals (Horvath 2021), in the production of commodities, the vassalage was the producer of goods, the obligations to which a vassal was liable was our pain/pleasure effluences as goods. Guided by the profit generated through the prevailing array of wave growth, the decisions of the One Tower rise to a streamlined merchant structure in a feudal coat. The pleasure-pain game results in brute servitude under the disruptive potential of the feudal merchant, organised into an attracting-repelling feeling machine, ever pulsating.
If one searches for a definition of ‘media corpse’, it is likely to be around there where cohesion was built up within this corpse through a definite reason for leading its interest and so mediating for it. Those who are committed to this mediating reason belong to the same corpse: there is no reason to make a difference between YouTube and Google, they are both equal in hunting down our mind. However, if we are looking for a more precise definition, then we should notice that the media corpse is the archenemy of individualism, including capitalism. Media body-corpse is the antithesis of individual thinking following intentions, as it would like to mediate between them, without giving an account, responsibility or opinion. Instead, the media owns and controls every segment of the public, without any respect for or interest in individual peculiarities. Consequently, the media corpse is a single individual body, as the Body of Christ (Corpus Christi) was in the Middle Ages, where all Christianity was held together, for a long time, by a desire for such union, as the bride in fertile maternity, who does not cease to be productive, to whom every individual belongs, even when dies, as reborn.
Private property is still being owned, but there is less and less direct management of it; gender roles and families are similarly on the way to extinction, the rule rather is the propagation of the androgyne who is standing solitarily alone, like the falling leaves of a tree, without organic growth (see Hyde 1983: 27, 35-8). Feudalism had no word for the individual – God was the ground and destiny of all living –, but the mentality of modern vassalage is even more depressive: people have lost not only the world, but the afterlife as well, offering their mind, which otherwise holds ‘the nature of all things’ (as in Plato ‘that it is mind or soul which orders and holds the nature of all things),[3] drained of morality and ordering. The media corpse requires an organic unity between itself and the rest of the world. Sidelining and marginalizing individual and household initiatives, feudal mercantilism prefers to pick and choose stand-alone “autonomous” segments to destroy any connectedness, while favoring highly efficient corpse with a low margin of error – better to use the automatisms of a pulsating feeling machine.
The last vestiges of the ‘individualist’ aspects of the state had been purged by the removal of educational, health- and social-care supports, which left people alone to suffer from low income and high indebtedness. Individuals have no legitimate existence anymore outside the imposed order. Universities that promoted individual thinking became perilous, as thinking does not offer a fair and equal representation of the media corpse. The media corpse claims to possess unique credentials concerning any social cause, its right to authority is given by a unified consensus (though its granting was never actually discussed, just grew into a ‘fact’ of life), which is giving evidence to its competence in a roundabout and tautological, thus nonsensical way. Of course, this is a weak proof of its competence, as competence can only be based on explicit consensus. But algorithms, AI and RNA testing favoured it from the beginning, furnishing it with proper credentials for pleasing the people or making them glad, given that the media corpse – as every tyranny – works (at least in its declared intentions) for the benefit of its people. This is one of the core questions, as the media corpse protects and promotes first of all its own organization, rather than the people and causes they claim to champion. It simply defies belief that in a world otherwise dominated by an economic-rationalistic ideology, according to which everything anybody ever does it motivated by pecuniary interests, the media got away with presenting itself in the image of a neutral and genuine servant of the public good. However, it only works for itself, and within any media organization a concrete individual has no space or authority. The media corpse is based on the functional representation of itself, with group spirit, cohesion and group intentions that absorb the individual. Thus, selling health is dwarfed when confronted with the aim of preventing individual decisions, even the possibility of holding differentiated opinions within its body.
The inevitable result is that media corpse is currying on personal favours, favouring tribalism, selling absurdities, hacking individual enterprises in order to enchant itself in preserving itself, where every private member is already inside the corpse, assisting its future progress by suffocating the world. And so, a future dyspneal world stretches out ahead of us: wired isolation, flu-like radiation illnesses and million other symptoms of artificially fluxing waves[4]. By its nature, the media body is restless and distrustful, just as every feudal corpse is a trespass between persons for some identifiable purpose. It is personal in finding alliances, yet impersonal in order to keep the big idea moving to its final solution. As examples, we can mention salvation in Christianity, classless society in communism, or post-humanism in gnostic Davos. In either cases the tradition was broken, the political authority of the Romanitas or later Borghese democracy was passed into hands that are liberated from, yet still mime the ethos of politics. The term ‘mercantile feudalism’ focuses on the role of merchants in this vassal ruling system, whose pursuit of gain is considered against the law, against nature and man within, who are evoking and selling goods only for gaining income, manipulating and not contributing to life. Media body’s ‘soul selling’ fief is unique in its viscous type, without precedents, as it is manipulating the mind and selling its desire effluences for reuse.
In contemporary merchant feudalism the media corpse is distributing and obtaining sensual images, by the nature of things delirious ones, so it is only parasites (Serres, 2007), or tricksters. Not surprisingly, given their favours and the effect of their self-publicity, their standing in society is overwhelming as it backed up by politics, with bureaucratic and personal connections being well figured in the background. But among the most impressive easiness which the media conglomerates encounter is that there is no education, politics, or culture that can resist their ever-intensifying effect-mongering. This is out of necessity, because the nature of images is their intensification: without bodily frames they are fluctuating exaltations, which is affecting the whole society, especially in critical situations. The intensification of sensual images was a major concern for the art historian Aby Warburg[5] and his close associate Edgar Wind, whose works focused on the enduring intensity of emotions, which showed through art objects and their historical impact that what began in symbolical fictions terminated in reality. These authors focused on the effective, thus magical impact of images. Hence miming/copying/imitation is a most perilous exercise, as it has an evil character of transforming, alternating reality. They approached images by recognising the density of images, of their expressive power that is capable of destabilizing the epistemological patterns of things, moving their presuppositions and foundations into the void, and their extent and validity into queasiness.
This approach is very similar to Plato’s recognition that man can be transformed by the things he imagined. Appearances and the real has a slight, narrow bridge in between them, as objects can be transformed by miming or imitation, while the diffusion of images has an invasive character, evoking the void. In this way we can turn to the next key term in this article, magic,[6] as magic is inseparable from imitation. Magic strives to form bonds between reality and a sub-real transcendence, witchcraft is shaping from a distance, shamans are androgyne, and the demonic world they release takes revenge on forms, is cruel and malicious. Should it be different? Any quasi-body imitates the real one, the otherworld the inner world, the media corpse has a desire to be real. Media conglomerates have become a machine for thinking, having the power of imagination to challenge and mould society and the individual, imitating relationships and associations between ideas and texts, images and people, fashioning society on their view, which is simplistic, barbaric, equalising without faces, a repulsive monstrosity, with a hypnotic power for invoking souls.
If we take the mathematical method of the “rule of three”, in order to find the fourth term of a proportion when three terms are known, we can take the media conglomerates with their aim for a unity of beings, the imitation/images[7] as their specificity in order to release the soul from the body, the third term being political, then we might find a fourth term for their identification, and this is their malicious motivation for taking revenge on forms. But what is the right way to follow, what is the pattern here for their ‘one tower’ formation? According to Heidegger, the battle for the dominion of the earth has entered its decisive phase, as one of the consequences of the absence of distance, everything becoming equal and indifferent (Heidegger 1971: 105-106).[8] The consequence is that this one will, intent upon a uniformly calculated viability of the whole earth, is the making a desert out of the earth, eliminating concrete identities in the concentration of power into one transcendental, self-moving, self-existing amplification tower.
But we not only need to recognise the pattern, but also see one step before and after it. With Durkheim’s claim concerning the superiority of God-Society over the individual, or the idea that legal rules should be respected merely because they exist and because they play a part in centralizing the organization of society, a step was made towards excessive normativity. It rejects the traditional conviction that a diseased mind does not offer any useful contribution to normativity, rather considers the deformations it produces as progressive amendments of the normal. But at the same time, in the early 20th century, in the approach to the mass psyche by Mosca, Pareto and the sociology on crowds there were elements in the identification of social alteration as a new problem (Horvath 2013, Ch.5). In addition, anthropology called attention to magic as a permanent normality alteration device, especially through the works of Evans-Pritchard, Mauss and Hubert. They identified the obvious interest of a certain class of men that is present in every community to resist any change which may hazard a diminution of their power, leading them to establish illegitimate modes of magic or – stating it in different words – by inciting the growing flux of sensual images, but it was never clear who could turn the separation of matter from energy into a prosperous enterprise, and even less what purpose this could serve.
Traditionally, the fluxed incommensurable was the indication of a divine presence, this invisible force that manifests the divine passion. Divinisation discovered the incommensurable with which rapid transformation, without involving a quantity of energy, being just one step ahead it, became realised the void, without any divine presence at all. The radiometer developed in the 19th century was to measure the “invisible forces” the medium appeared to be tapping into. Darkened seances with table tilting, extrasensory perceptions, astral bodies, paranormal activities, and spirit energies marked the way of the slow recognition of the possibility of effectively separating the matter from its substance.[9] Whether by putting matter into spell or debilitating its force in a flux escape of effluences out of it, the idea that you can get something for nothing is as old as the merchant mind.
Similarly, Marconi’s radio was nothing more than a coherent box trap for radio waves with a transmitter at the centre and a pole above supporting wire antenna, offering just a little bit more than the oldest trick of catching effluences in them, still visible in the massive tower of Jericho, which had like every receiver and transmitter a hollow and circular form for amplification. Applied scientists are naturally great mimics of nature’s actions, they showed themselves most apt pupils in transmitting and receiving effluences and changing their resistance, and when arrayed in their rich equipment, they diligently served the case of mercantile progress. Thus, in the 19th they developed a big array of portable and non-portable transmitters and receiver systems that could work over long distances, turning what was essentially a paranormal activity into a wide-ranging communication system based on a simple mimicking of transcendental experience. Nevertheless, the technological foundations never changed in summoning up the effluences of the incommensurable accidental souls, whether it implies spiritual seances or telecommunication, since Neolithic Jericho. Effluences and electric current create magnetic fields, traveling alongside conducting objects and the magnetic flux through wire-induced voltage. Higher voltage is produced by connecting a series of sets of batteries. Through Thales, Pliny, Pelegrinus, Gilbert and Gauss, Boyle and Franklin, we arrived at a new science that was born out of using refined devices to increase sensitivity and reliability until the saturation point was reached with the idea that instead of wiring up boxes from the outside, it is most efficient to wiring them from inside, in human bodies. The project was thus born, though its technical perfection only came after about another century.
Even more, every new communication technology invented between 1860 and 1930 was[10] promoted as a means of reaching the incommensurable by the inventors themselves. This intention reached its climax just now, a hundred years later, with biotechnology that gave the opportunity of wiring the molecule of the body itself. It has the advantage of transmitting and receiving signals without an obstacle to anywhere/from anywhere, to leap over the borders of mind, promoting mind control and searching for the fundamental unity of biotechnology and communication technology, through which effluences of intensive emotions can be transformed from mind to mind. Controlling the mind of others was the aim of every wicked authority for thousands of years, but it remained an unsolved problem until present times. But now, however, our rulers are capable using a power that resolved for ever this problem: mind control is becoming a fact of life, through the altering of DNA becoming inheritable and thus forever efficient. That mankind is now becoming a pure switch it off/on question is a clear consequence of technologized witchcraft, where the occult is used in the precise manner of methodical divinisation. At that moment, in the 19th century, when scientists set their eyes on creating an electronic structure based on communication with the incommensurable, it was just a question of time when the idea came up that it can be turned into a genetically transmitted mechanism, where human bodies can inherit the results of alterations. Just to avoid confusion, what we claim is that even before electronic technology, certain features of electricity were used, exclusively by magic, and that this usage was considered as witchcraft, shamanism, or alchemy, anyway banned, as dangerously asocial. Not that such knowledge and techniques did not exist, but automatism, machines, alchemical multiplication, and new species creation were considered illegitimate or barbaric.
The recent imagery conglomerates, especially the media industry lead by Google and similar image technologies like YouTube and Amazon are completely on board with the image mechanisation project, being themselves a practicing medium and oscillator that furthermore approached electricity since the birth of biotechnology, hence gaining power and influence through the intensification of sensuals. Yet, a proper vehicle was still missing that could justify the biotechnological inventions; a desire for perfection and well-functioning that could open new and boundless possibilities through the new avenues that were opened up by the biotechnological innovations that were already challenging the limits of what could be accepted through elementary decency. Strange enough, already in the late 19th century the appearance of the fearsome feeling that the universe is filled with unseen forces coincided with the discovery of electromagnetic radiation. Could it be that the two unknown forces are the same? And if the answer is yes, then, is it possible that many decades later, in our times, it was just the industrialised activity of soul factories that launched the germs/virus/accidental souls on us? I call these in Political Alchemy as repetitors, small beings without proper bodies, nevertheless capable to move, feel and to move others. They can only survive reproduce themselves in the host’s body, this is why their other name, the parasite. Anyhow, the result of the current, much-induced germaphobia is that people themselves are eager to accept changes in their bodies, further working on the termination of their soul-body-self entity, developing an eager desire toward the status of living dead, subjecting themselves to the Durkheimian God-Society. They are mere bodies that are being programmed by the One Tower, being owned and used by it, and it is harvesting the effluences of sensuals from them.
One might consider that this is just a fiction, but if we take a closer look on the recent virus immunisation program, a surprisingly similar methodological logic is put in place by diverting from its normal mechanism the mRNA[11]. How is it possible to allow electricity, the high and low sensuals to flow through DNA? The key to using DNA[12] for electrical devices is the ability to turn electricity (the flux of incommensurable accidental souls) on and off: raising the energetic vibrations of substances by central order, from One Tower. And this happens not just in the edited strands—the wire information they contain could conceivably be passed on to the offspring. The DNA was thus transformed into a self-assembling conducting wire that is forming a conducting pathway for electricity. The only thing which is required for the successful operation is cementing the DNA, to prevent it from its normal (storage) functioning, and for such hacking purposes the novel mRNA vaccination serves as a perfect example.
Bibliography
Cardin, Matt (2015) Ghosts, Spirits, and Psychics: The Paranormal from Alchemy to Zombies, ABC-CLIO.
Heidegger, Martin (1971) “The Way to Language,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter Hertz, New York: Harper & Row.
Horvath, Agnes (2013) Modernism and Charisma, London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Horvath, Agnes (<YR>2021) Political Alchemy: Technology unbounded, London: Routledge
Materer, Timothy (2018) Modernist Alchemy: Poetry and the Occult, Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Morrisson, Mark (2007) Modern Alchemy: Occultism and the Emergence of Atomic Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rabinow, Paul (1996) Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Sclove, R. E. (1989) From Alchemy to Atomic War: Frederick Soddy’s “Technology Assessment” of Atomic Energy, 1900–1915 in Science, Technology, & Human Values 14 (2): 163–194.
Serres, Michel (2007) The Parasite, University of Minnesota Press.
Warburg, Aby (1999) The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity, Los Angeles: Getty Publications.
Yates, Frances (1992) The Art of Memory, London: Pimlico.
NOTES:
[1] Fief or feoff, historical terms in feudal Europe the property or fee granted to a vassal for his maintenance by his lord in return for service. Here it is used as a tenure for obligations of offering one’s sensuals to the merchant lord corporation, in return for wellbeing.
[2] Vassalage is an abuse system, commanding yourself to the service of others (royal or war leaders), who provide live hood, to grant a land for your disposal.
[3] Plato, Cratylus, 400a-b. Caring and holding nature should not be without desire, but here desire is aiskron, the things brute and harmful which castrates soul from its will for bodily form. The soul desires of the body is binding to the body by the desire of virtue, but that so long as they are infected with the unrest and madness of the body, the result is that instead of refinement the absurd pseudos of wave fluxing happens.
[4] The difference between fluxing waves in nature and those artificially oscillated is the harmfulness of the second. Such harmfulness lies in the oxidative damage of the artificial rays because their oscillation is higher than normal, therefore due their artificiality they became parasitic. This means that artificial rays are deliberately looking for a host organism for reproduction. This can be illustrated by the distinction between worms and parasitic worms: one is normal in its habitat, while the other has a determination to occupy the host, with dramatic effects in terms of tormenting the living.
[5] Aby Warburg held the position that image memory is a bodily sensation. See also Yates (1992).
[6] Magic is eliminating the difference between lifeless matter and living creatures, able to eradicate man’s uniqueness, making him nameless, banishing his memory, excluding him from life, thus able to doom man into disgrace or disfigure him, voiding his properties, and so is rightly named demoniac.
[7] The etymology of image and imitation is identical.
[8] Aby Warburg, in the conclusion of his famous ‘Ritual of the serpent’ lecture, offered the same diagnosis in April 1923, though it was not published for a long time.
[9] Not that separation was not practiced before, the Neolithic is full of remains about canalising the effluences, like the long irregular course of outfield sides, concentrated (but unrelated) ditches in England in Cambridgeshire, Hertfordshire, Sussex, or in the Tisza region in Hungary. These are many km-s long, called the Devil’s Dykes or Ördögárok, ditches without any military or political value, though ‘modern’ social scientists desperately try to identify a military value behind them., just as the underground ‘cities’ of Cappadocia.
[10] Both Soddy and Rutherford, but also Max Plank emphasised the association of Magic with EMR. According to Oliver Lodge ghost communicate with us through EMR from the otherworld. So, the question was how to maintain relations with the spirits, how to possess them. See Cardin (2015), Materer (2018), Morrisson (2007), and Sclove (1989).
[11] A weakened body does not significate a necessary death, but significate a delirious one which is constantly evoking energetic vibrations substances in growing intensity. The main consequence of hacking life is the accumulation of accidental souls who are looking for unattended bodies to be possessed in the stage of liminality. A well-known technological phrase in alchemy before the transformation of the matter into another entity. In the alchemical process after separation the elements are undergoing liminality, when their souls are leaving and giving place to others, with different characters.
[12] About the first DNA editing experiences, which pioneered the transferring of DNA from one species to another, using a knowledge that the DNA is no longer embedded in a living system, which started to hijack universities from the late 1970-s and make them appendices of a bioindustry, see the American anthropologist Paul Rabinow’s 2006 book, Making PCR, focusing on the first banned, then permitted and finally vehemently propagated DNA editing.
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