NOTES TOWARDS A SPREADSHEET NOVEL

‘to be an accountant in the age of spreadsheet program is – well, almost sexy’

We work in rows and columns.

The rows are numbered and designate things.

The columns have letters and mostly designate amounts.

Credit, debit, prices, hours, budgeted and realized, etcetera. However, that’s not so interesting.

The spreadsheet tells a story, a saga, a bureaucratic epic. We can assemble a morphology of the bureaucratic epic; it would be more simple than the morphology of the fairytale.

Preamble: the word, the numbers

Let’s start at the beginning. The word.

spreadsheet (n.)

1965, from spread (n.) + sheet (n.).

The birth of the spreadsheet dates back to 1965, but surely that is not the beginning. We need to go back further. I mean, what is a spread? And what is a sheet? I see before me a broad paper leaf, a folio unfolded, and indeed that is the way it is. The very first spreadsheets were made using paper. Endless paper sheets, white as a ghost and just as thin. Secretaries and office apprentices called ‘calculators’ drew meticulous graphite lines across the sheets, crawling on the floor with a pencil and ruler, careful not to crease the paper. They mark the numbers in the cells extremely lightly; ready to be erased again at once. The boss sits at his desk and calls out the numbers, all the while rattling away on his electronic calculating machine. When four hours have passed, or four days for that matter, the magic number appears – a number that has been shuffling along the lines on the paper just as slowly as the calculators themselves – all the way to the end, to the last cell of them all. Now it’s time to take out the pens. A green pen when something has to be sold at a good price; a red one when the customer needs to be frightened.

Already back then the spreadsheet was a powerful tool, although the impact of its strike remained limited.

spreadsheet
spread·sheet \ ‘spred-,shēt \ Popularity: Bottom 30% of words
: an accounting program for a computer; also : the ledger layout modeled by such a program

It won’t take long, just some fifteen years

– admittedly, that’s eternity in computer history

– before the spreadsheet goes digital and transforms into the thing we know now,

the thing that all office workers are doomed to learn to use, love and put to work,

that which we all need to excel at, as excelling accountants,

the thing we hate and that secretly gives us pleasure,

which gives us power and the ones above us extreme power:

the spreadsheet,

the‘accounting program for a computer’, better known for its metonymical, eponymous, symbolist name:

Excel.

Let’s start at the end. Consider the numbers:

‘95% of U.S. firms use spreadsheets for financial reporting.’

‘9 experienced spreadsheet developers each built 3 SSs.

Each developer made at least one error.’

‘There is even an emerging theory for why we make so many errors. Reason (Reason, 1990) has presented the most complete framework for understanding why human beings err.’

‘A taxonomy of error types… three types of quantitative errors.’

‘They compared spreadsheets errors to multiple poisons, each of which is 100% lethal.’

‘Mahalo (Thank you).’

Scripture

Often the first chroniclers of a certain period are also the best. The closer the historian is to the events he tries to describe, the more blinded he will be by these very same events. Blindness is good, just think about what the blind prophets are able to see. The more blinded he is, the less objectively and thus the more truly will the chronicler write history.

Also, the further the events recede into the past, the more the historian is blinded by methodology, objectivity, colleagues. He is blind to everything that doesn’t fit the spectacle he wishes to see, which means that he is blind to anything that contradicts the methods used, the objectivity presumed and the colleagues contended, in short, to all the interesting stuff.

The first epic of the spreadsheet was written by its bard Steven Levy. It is called: ‘A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge’. It came out in 1984 and in October 2014 it was rereleased in honor of Spreadsheet Day.

October 17th, 1979 is the day the digital spreadsheet is born.

Every year the birthday is celebrated on Spreadsheet Day, you can check the date with your own documents.

That day meant Liberation Day for all secretaries, calculators, bookkeepers and accountants, and was the moment when numbers got imprisoned.

The freedom gained turned out to be unmanageable, just as it’s supposed to be, it was freedom in the same way that a sea in a storm is freedom, or a desert without water, or a galaxy without stars, where humans – the secretary, the calculator, the bookkeeper and the accountant, joined later on by project managers, controllers, treasurers of boards, of committees, of societies, unions and associations, yes, you might say everyone – so, where everyone whirls and swirls, worn-out, run-down and hyped-up, weightless and spinning away from the mother station.

Freedom unto death.

It wasn’t like that when Levy wrote his epic. Excel was only to be launched one year later, in September 1985. The early adopters used Apple. Their spreadsheet program was called VisiCalc – a mishap obviously. And while work that used to take days to complete could now be done in three winks, the VisiCalc-ees had to preach, pray, beg to be heard. No one believed the Cassandra’s. It is said of one of the more shrewd accountants of those early days that he got ‘a rush task, sat down with his micro and his spreadsheet, finished it in an hour or two, and left it on his desk for two days. Then he Fed Ex-ed it to the client and got all sorts of accolades for working overtime.’

Characters

Besides the accountant (shrewd, sly) there are others.

None of them works with the spreadsheet primarily, but over the course of the years the spreadsheet has crawled closer (shrewdly, slyly),

and then, without anyone really noticing, it has nestled itself into computers,

started to appear in printed form on desks,

became stapled to the backs of memos and project plans,

attached to emails and evaluation forms,

an obligatory deliverable,

a source of frustration,

damned nemesis, a gift from above.

Not that it was secret. Things like that don’t need to be. They creep under the radar by being boring.

Characteristic of the spreadsheet

– its power, possibly

– is that it doesn’t tolerate persons in its vicinity,

just types; flat, formulaic, formulistic figures.

Liberation Day for the office employee without hesitation turned into a new confinement. The easy measures of a cell.

Of course, it works in your honor and glory, because who wouldn’t want to be transparent and decent, upright like a formula?

Still, one day that formula will break out of its cell and drunk with freedom it will call fate upon itself.

Fate comes, everyone knows that, but what it looks like when it comes, is unknown to all.

That someone will be the last branch on an epic family tree.

A family tree in a few generations.

The administrator
The administrator is great-grandfather to the accountant. He was born in Russia, just before the Crimean war. With administrative fervor he works an office far away from the city. What he does, no one knows. Same goes for all the others in the bureau; it is rife with clerks and pencil pushers who are indistinguishable from one another until they cross the magical line, turn forty and accordingly turn into characters. What happens? They break out of their cell. Temporarily, at least.

The girls
They who work. Arms linked they march the streets. The army of the working girls. Precisely on schedule with their brisk legs they leave, uniformly dressed in light trenchcoats. Some walk alone, bent forward, with tight shoulders and soldierly steps in heavy crinkled Cossack’s boots, hands in pockets. Others move in troops, their eyes small from continuous giggling; arm in arm they block the road for passing boys, stopping from time to time to shake a hand, energetically, they want to be firm and manly in everything they do.

There they are, sitting in the offices; the crossfire of the typewriters crackling. The girls jerk the handles to make the lines move as if they’re working machine guns. With smooth, superficially attentive serving faces they read over the papers that shoot up swiveling; their mechanical movements become circular.

The bureaucrat

You’re being called upon by the state, so you can’t really be innocent, you know that much, but still no one will let you in on the details whatsoever, basically you’re a witness turning up late at your own crime scene. Five or six men in plain clothes, stooped over heavy desks stained by dripping rainwater, a neon light flashing above their heads like a halo, shroud themselves in the grey shadow of non- speaking, in the far corners of the room darkness is hiding, grown silently over the years, and even the rays of light that manage to peep through the closed shutters immediately dissolve into nothing, as if they’re being gulped up by the damp air that rises from below.

Chop chop, back to your cell!

In the little room you’re down on your knees, fumbling around with your bare arms, fidgeting around, looking for something under the small dark brown table,

something that will save you from the quicksand of bureaucracy and bring you back to the origin,

back to your birth place of mud and gray matter mush,

smelling of swamp and rotting,

you are being sucked up by a spongy, thick noise, as if you are being swallowed down by a gullet from hell.

Who to file your report to? Where to send the bill?

The guru

Now we’re on the threshold of a new time.

The guru is the spokesperson of a cult that likes to consider itself a cult,

an exclusive cult of the future,

a future that holds enough space for everyone.

Aren’t rows and columns endless?

Do cross-references not enable exponential growth?

Can we not dissect the workings of the world and identify the different cogs that make the world go round, one for all and all for one; and can we then not place each cog in its own row or column?

If you don’t believe we can, you’re not allowed to join and the future will remain closed for you.

If you do believe then you are allowed to step inside.

It doesn’t cost much to be initiated, the threshold is far from high.

Just listen to the guru and learn to think like a spreadsheet.

Life will become easier.

The project manager

It’s her again. For a brief but glorious moment in time she reigned while calculating, secretaring, marching, but then she disappeared again, pushed out of sight by men as soon as their number was up again after two world wars, written up in marriage registers and so away from the office, until all of a sudden, with the birth of a position that seemed to be invented especially for her, she could be made of use once more. Project manager. A project, one might say, is like a spreadsheet, only bigger. They share the same characteristics, which we can summarize in two words: boring and inscrutable. In other words, befitting her.

The invisible one

He who decides and yet isn’t held responsible.

He who thinks in bush structures. Bushes, you know, offer a very pleasant way to think about the world. A memo containing a few pointers? A bush. Your email client that has a subject line and an address line? Bush. Your accounting application operating a main menu and a sub menu? Bush.

Bush. Bush. Bush.

Motives

Sex

Being an accountant in the age of the spreadsheet program is almost sexy.

Almost.

The problem is, there are so little women around to notice.

This is how it works: you are able to do something others can’t. You get something others miss. It brings in a lot of money. You are a front runner. Anyone can see that, even those who live in the age of the spreadsheet without knowing. Knowledge is power. Still, the ‘almost’ is an abyss you are unable to jump over. You have no idea how to exploit your power, how to substantialize sexiness into sex. Yeah sure, by paying for it, but that was not what the guru had promised.

The dream

There’s more.

It’s as easy as that: ‘more’.

What you see is not what you get.

The genius of the spreadsheet lies in its mask of transparency, which hides the more (otherwise it wouldn’t be a mask, would it).

Isn’t that something: a mask of transparency.

You’d almost think that it would be physically impossible, but no, it’s possible.

In no sense can the spreadsheet be identified with itself, everything refers to something else, every number is based on other numbers, which are multiplied, added up, subtracted or divided.

But the most important thing to keep in mind is that all these conveniently ordered rows and columns filled with conveniently disordered references and formulas mean nothing if not for the very last step: the mutation.

Mutation offers a glimpse of the ‘more’.

The first description of a mutation is found in the scripture: ‘Gottheil turned to the keyboard of the IBM- PC on a table beside his desk and booted a spreadsheet. The screen lit up with the familiar grid, and Gottheil’s hands arched over the keys as gracefully as the hands of a pianist. He pressed the keys that make the blinking cursor hopscotch across the cells and as he changed an item in one cell, there was a ripple-like movement in the other cells; the spreadsheet program was recalculating. His eyebrows rose as he saw the result. Then he punched in another variable, and another ripple of figures washed across the screen.’

The ripple: that’s the more. As in a dream, a dream dreaming of sex.

Spirit animal

Bureaucracy has been described as a cephalopod (a cuttlefish), the spreadsheet in that sense could be a tentacle, or a subspecies. The cephalopod is exotic, living in deep waters and oceans far away; at best, we meet him on a plate in a restaurant or figured in a mural in a Greek seaside hotel. And while the molluscan quality makes the cephalopod the ideal spirit animal of bureaucracy, it’s not homely enough for the spreadsheet.

In the scripture we read: ‘I can’t begin to tell you how many hours I spend at this. This is my pet, in a way. Scratching its ears and brushing its code… it’s almost an obsession.’ The spreadsheet is a pet. An animal with ears and fur made of code. No cuttlefish but a cuddly bear, or a cat: shrewd, sly.

Weaponry

• The report: The report has been known for centuries, perhaps even millennia.
  
  The report is always a means and never an end in itself, and it should be treated accordingly.
  
  It trades in information retrieval and transfer, interpretation of information or embezzlement thereof.
  
  The ends don’t have to be clear beforehand; sometimes the ends of the report are the discovery of the goal itself.




• The sheet: The sheet is the reincarnation of a report, and finally allows for the connection between reports, which used to be only implicit – through stacking, referencing, stapling – to become fundamental and systematic.
  
  Sheets are like branches on a trunk, like the offspring of a god, separable only at risk of death, the death entailed by a mutated gene.




• The formula: The formula is a wordless narrative.
  
  It’s common knowledge that not everything can be formulated with words.
  
  We shouldn’t let the sophists bully us, says the guru.
  
  Behold, the formula.
  
  Simple, transparent, unconnoted, mathematical – the pure language of numbers that doesn’t tell but shows.
  
  Take up the formula as a weapon and you’ll not only feel the weight it holds, but also its stickiness; despite the weight, you cannot hold on to it, it slips through your fingers like oil.




• KPIs: KPIs are like the parts of a mechanical elephant.




• Like the most important character, the most important weapon is invisible.
  
  Usually, it consists of an abstract combination of words, set in title case.
  
  The Plan; The Great Report.
  
  As the names gain in specificity, the abstraction level increases.
  
  Aggregate Progress Report, Quarter Evaluation Prognosis, Hours Registration Top, Philosophical Reflections on Urine Therapy.

Perspective

Who lends the spreadsheet a voice? No one, because a formula doesn’t tell but shows. That’s why the point of view will lie outside of the true protagonist, like a montage of CCTV shots that shows something without anyone knowing whether and why it’s important.

Only when there’s a fight and the victim is left for dead do the moving images gain meaning.

But then hours, days, months, years will have passed and we will have changed into statues.

One perspective lies with the chair. The chair could also be seen as a weapon, persona, or theme.

The chair carries the spreadsheet worker.

No more crawling on the floor or marching the streets.

Everyone knows that the one who remains seated is the one in power.

Standing desks are thus a way to subtract power from the office clerk.

Who could perform a mutation while standing up?

As one of the poets has said, the chair ‘is like a vast vortex, or an enormous magnetic field, into which people of all shapes and sizes are sucked’.

The chair is just the first step upwards in a life that moves upwards, that requires climbing upwards, with only one goal in mind, a goal that’s hidden somewhere high above you.

Always climbing, always upwards, like a snake on the wall.

Ask the accountant why he feels like a snake that climbs upwards on the wall and the poet answers:

‘Because I feel that I’m being seared in the fire pots of purgatory, and only by climbing upwards do I have a hope of life.’

Ask the civil servant what hope is and he answers that there is no hope, that he’s just a civil servant and civil servants are a kind of statue. Statues can’t move, let alone move upwards, no matter what people claim about what it’s able to do, all it can do is look upwards.

The accountant knows that the spreadsheet, with its grid of rows and columns, is the ladder that will allow him to climb upwards no matter what.

Themes

History has been told. Ancestors have been named. By now we’ve lived a lifetime along the line, it’s not even the beginning of the 21st century anymore, this year of 2016. It has been long since the gurus led us into the brave new world, but they make us believe that it is a world that becomes brave and new again and again and that we need them for that to keep on happening.

Evil

Supposedly, 95% of all companies use Microsoft Excel.

1.2 billion people would have Office installed.

The battle against evil is fought within the context of evil.

To say the least, a spreadsheet is a ‘gray medium’.

A seemingly trivial outfit for an office clerk, the power of which nonetheless should not be underestimated.

As if hypnotized, the clerks follow the orders of their master whom no one recognizes as such.

Being gray doesn’t make it less evil.

It claims to bring peace where there was chaos, but it brings chaos disguised as peace.

Mutation wearing the mask of transparency.

We’ve brought in evil without recognizing it – not because it looked like a gift, a most beautiful horse, but because we didn’t see it whatsoever.

Who could’ve thought that something as boring and inscrutable as a spreadsheet would offer recourse to evil?

The power of the spreadsheet lies in magic, and he who excels in Excel is a wizard spreading the totality of the gray shadow. Either you let the magic spell be cast on you or you put on the cloak of wisdom yourself.
Arise from the sleep of ignorance and lift the sword! Combat evil with evil, in the context of evil! Expel the shadow and let in the light! The gray shadows should be chased away, ousted with rays of the most gleaming light. Bring peace where chaos reigned! Peace that slowly sinks in shadows, eyes drowsily closing in a state of soft hypnosis.

The sublime

Why do we like to be lulled to sleep by such masters, who tell us what to do, how to do it, and when (but never why)?

Why do we let ourselves be carried away on a stream, the stream of data that is being sucked out of us, like the blood from our veins?

Well, we do it so we can be a part of history, the master plan of the final masters that are here.

We enter the story.

The story has twenty sheets, dozens of columns and hundreds of rows. On average a row contains fifteen numerical cells, of which ten contain a formula. About half of the formulas use the results of formulas in other cells; one in ten refers to another sheet altogether.

Looking through your eyelashes, a gray shadow can be seen rising up from the orderly patterns:

it’s a labyrinth made of perfect rectangles.

As soon as you enter it, you see nothing, you just feel:

first fear, then admiration, and finally sleep.

Welcome to the 21st century sublime, Luna Park of evil, which you’ve entered without knowing and that has you lost.

TECHNOLOGY IS A MORE POWERFUL SOCIAL FORCE THAN THE ASPIRATION FOR FREEDOOM

125. It is not possible to make a lasting compromise between technology and freedom, because technology is by far the more powerful social force and continually encroaches on freedom through repeated compromises.

Imagine the case of two neighbors, each of whom at the outset owns the same amount of land, but one of whom is more powerful than the other.

The powerful one demands a piece of the other’s land.

The weak one refuses.

The powerful one says, “OK, let’s compromise. Give me half of what I asked.”

The weak one has little choice but to give in.

Some time later the powerful neighbor demands another piece of land, again there is a compromise, and so forth.

By forcing a long series of compromises on the weaker man, the powerful one eventually gets all of his land.

So it goes in the conflict between technology and freedom.

126. Let us explain why technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom.

127. A technological advance that appears not to threaten freedom often turns out to threaten it very seriously later on.

For example, consider motorized transport. A walking man formerly could go where he pleased, go at his own pace without observing any traffic regulations, and was independent of technological support-systems.

When motor vehicles were introduced they appeared to increase man’s freedom.

They took no freedom away from the walking man, no one had to have an automobile if he didn’t want one, and anyone who did choose to buy an automobile could travel much faster and farther than a walking man.

But the introduction of motorized transport soon changed society in such a way as to restrict greatly man’s freedom of locomotion.

When automobiles became numerous, it became necessary to regulate their use extensively.

In a car, especially in densely populated areas, one cannot just go where one likes at one’s own pace; one’s movement is governed by the flow of traffic and by various traffic laws.

One is tied down by various obligations: license requirements, driver test, renewing registration, insurance, maintenance required for safety, monthly payments on purchase price.

Moreover, the use of motorized transport is no longer optional.

Since the introduction of motorized transport the arrangement of our cities has changed in such a way that the majority of people no longer live within walking distance of their place of employment, shopping areas and recreational opportunities, so that they have to depend on the automobile for transportation.

Or else they must use public transportation, in which case they have even less control over their own movement than when driving a car.

Even the walker’s freedom is now greatly restricted.

In the city he continually has to stop to wait for traffic lights that are designed mainly to serve auto traffic.

In the country, motor traffic makes it dangerous and unpleasant to walk along the highway.

(Note this important point that we have just illustrated with the case of motorized transport:

When a new item of technology is introduced as an option that an individual can accept or not as he chooses, it does not necessarily remain optional.

In many cases the new technology changes society in such a way that people eventually find themselves forced to use it.)

128. While technological progress as a whole continually narrows our sphere of freedom, each new technical advance considered by itself appears to be desirable.

Electricity, indoor plumbing, rapid long-distance communications…

how could one argue against any of these things, or against any other of the innumerable technical advances that have made modern society?

It would have been absurd to resist the introduction of the telephone, for example.

It offered many advantages and no disadvantages.

Yet, as we explained in paragraphs 59-76, all these technical advances taken together have created a world in which the average man’s fate is no longer in his own hands or in the hands of his neighbors and friends, but in those of politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats whom he as an individual has no power to influence.

The same process will continue in the future.

Take genetic engineering, for example. Few people will resist the introduction of a genetic technique that eliminates a hereditary disease. It does no apparent harm and prevents much suffering. Yet a large number of genetic improvements taken together will make the human being into an engineered product rather than a free creation of chance (or of God, or whatever, depending on your religious beliefs).

129. Another reason why technology is such a powerful social force is that, within the context of a given society, technological progress marches in only one direction; it can never be reversed.

Once a technical innovation has been introduced, people usually become dependent on it, so that they can never again do without it, unless it is replaced by some still more advanced innovation.

Not only do people become dependent as individuals on a new item of technology, but, even more, the system as a whole becomes dependent on it.

(Imagine what would happen to the system today if computers, for example, were eliminated.)

Thus the system can move in only one direction, toward greater technologization.

Technology repeatedly forces freedom to take a step back, but technology can never take a step back—short of the overthrow of the whole technological system.

130. Technology advances with great rapidity and threatens freedom at many different points at the same time (crowding, rules and regulations, increasing dependence of individuals on large organizations, propaganda and other psychological techniques, genetic engineering, invasion of privacy through surveillance devices and computers, etc.).

To hold back any one of the threats to freedom would require a long and difficult social struggle.

Those who want to protect freedom are overwhelmed by the sheer number of new attacks and the rapidity with which they develop, hence they become apathetic and no longer resist.

To fight each of the threats separately would be futile.

Success can be hoped for only by fighting the technological system as a whole; but that is revolution, not reform.

131. Technicians (we use this term in its broad sense to describe all those who perform a specialized task that requires training) tend to be so involved in their work (their surrogate activity) that when a conflict arises between their technical work and freedom, they almost always decide in favor of their technical work. This is obvious in the case of scientists, but it also appears elsewhere: educators, humanitarian groups, conservation organizations do not hesitate to use propaganda or other psychological techniques to help them achieve their laudable ends. Corporations and government agencies, when they find it useful, do not hesitate to collect information about individuals without regard to their privacy. Law enforcement agencies are frequently inconvenienced by the constitutional rights of suspects and often of completely innocent persons, and they do whatever they can do legally (or sometimes illegally) to restrict or circumvent those rights. Most of these educators, government officials and law officers believe in freedom, privacy and constitutional rights, but when these conflict with their work, they usually feel that their work is more important.

132. It is well known that people generally work better and more persistently when striving for a reward than when attempting to avoid a punishment or negative outcome. Scientists and other technicians are motivated mainly by the rewards they get through their work.

But those who oppose technological invasions of freedom are working to avoid a negative outcome, consequently there are few who work persistently and well at this discouraging task.

If reformers ever achieved a single victory that seemed to set up a solid barrier against further erosion of freedom through technical progress, most would tend to relax and turn their attention to more agreeable pursuits.

But the scientists would remain busy in their laboratories, and technology as it progresses would find ways, in spite of any barriers, to exert more and more control over individuals and make them always more dependent on the system.

133. No social arrangements, whether laws, institutions, customs or ethical codes, can provide permanent protection against technology.

History shows that all social arrangements are transitory; they all change or break down eventually.

But technological advances are permanent within the context of a given civilization.

Suppose for example that it were possible to arrive at some social arrangements that would prevent genetic engineering from being applied to human beings, or prevent it from being applied in such a way as to threaten freedom and dignity. Still, the technology would remain waiting. Sooner or later the social arrangement would break down. Probably sooner, given the pace of change in our society. Then genetic engineering would begin to invade our sphere of freedom, and this invasion would be irreversible (short of a breakdown of technological civilization itself).

Any illusions about achieving anything permanent through social arrangements should be dispelled by what is currently happening with environmental legislation.

A few years ago its seemed that there were secure legal barriers preventing at least some of the worst forms of environmental degradation.

A change in the political wind, and those barriers begin to crumble.

134. For all of the foregoing reasons, technology is a more powerful social force than the aspiration for freedom. But this statement requires an important qualification.

It appears that during the next several decades the industrial-technological system will be undergoing severe stresses due to economic and environmental problems, and especially due to problems of human behavior (alienation, rebellion, hostility, a variety of social and psychological difficulties).

We hope that the stresses through which the system is likely to pass will cause it to break down, or at least will weaken it sufficiently so that a revolution against it becomes possible.

If such a revolution occurs and is successful, then at that particular moment the aspiration for freedom will have proved more powerful than technology.

135. In paragraph 125 we used an analogy of a weak neighbor who is left destitute by a strong neighbor who takes all his land by forcing on him a series of compromises.

But suppose now that the strong neighbor gets sick, so that he is unable to defend himself.

The weak neighbor can force the strong one to give him his land back, or he can kill him.

If he lets the strong man survive and only forces him to give the land back, he is a fool, because when the strong man gets well he will again take all the land for himself.

The only sensible alternative for the weaker man is to kill the strong one while he has the chance.

In the same way, while the industrial system is sick we must destroy it.

If we compromise with it and let it recover from its sickness, it will eventually wipe out all of our freedom.

ON NIHILISM

Nihilism no longer wears the dark, Wagnerian, Spenglerian, fuliginous colors of the end of the century. It no longer comes from a Weltanschauung of decadence nor from a metaphysical radicality born of the death of God and of all the consequences that must be taken from this death.

Today's nihilism is one of transparency, and it is in some sense more radical, more crucial than in its prior and historical forms, because this transparency, this irresolution is indissolubly that of the system, and that of all the theory that still pretends to analyze it.

When God died, there was still Nietzsche to say so - the great nihilist before the Eternal and the cadaver of the Eternal.

But before the simulated transparency of all things, before the simulacrum of the materialist or idealist realization of the world in hyperreality (God is not dead, he has become hyper-real), there is no longer a theoretical or critical God to recognize his own.

The universe, and all of us, have entered live into simulation, into the malefic, not even malefic, indifferent, sphere of deterrence: in a bizarre fashion, nihilism has been entirely realized no longer through destruction, but through simulation and deterrence. From the active, violent phantasm, from the phantasm of the myth and the stage that it also was, historically, it has passed into the transparent, falsely transparent, operation of things. What then remains of a possible nihilism in theory? What new scene can unfold, where nothing and death could be replayed as a challenge, as a stake?

We are in a new, and without a doubt insoluble, position in relation to prior forms of nihilism:

Romanticism is its first great manifestation: it, along with the Enlightenment's Revolution, corresponds to the destruction of the order of appearances.

Surrealism, dada, the absurd, and political nihilism are the second great manifestation, which corresponds to the destruction of the order of meaning.

The first is still an aesthetic form of nihilism (dandyism), the second, a political, historical, and metaphysical form (terrorism).

These two forms no longer concern us except in part, or not at all. The nihilism of transparency is no longer either aesthetic or political, no longer borrows from either the extermination of appearances, nor from extinguishing the embers of meaning, nor from the last nuances of an apocalypse.

There is no longer an apocalypse (only aleatory terrorism still tries to reflect it, but it is certainly no longer political, and it only has one mode of manifestation left that is at the same time a mode of disappearance:

the media - now the media are not a stage where something is played, they are a strip, a track, a perforated map of which we are no longer even spectators: receivers).

The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference. I will leave it to be considered whether there can be a romanticism, an aesthetic of the neutral therein. I don't think so -

all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us.

Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance.

We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance.

Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.

I am a nihilist.

I observe, I accept, I assume the immense process of the destruction of appearances (and of the seduction of appearances) in the service of meaning (representation, history, criticism, etc.) that is the fundamental fact of the nineteenth century.

The true revolution of the nineteenth century, of modernity, is the radical destruction of appearances, the disenchantment of the world and its abandonment to the violence of interpretation and of history.

I observe, I accept, I assume, I analyze the second revolution, that of the twentieth century, that of postmodernity, which is the immense process of the destruction of meaning, equal to the earlier destruction of appearances.

He who strikes with meaning is killed by meaning.

The dialectic stage, the critical stage is empty.

There is no more stage.

There is no therapy of meaning or therapy through meaning: therapy itself is part of the generalized process of indifferentiation.

The stage of analysis itself has become uncertain, aleatory: theories float (in fact, nihilism is impossible, because it is still a desperate but determined theory, an imaginary of the end, a weltanschauung of catastrophe).

Analysis is itself perhaps the decisive element of the immense process of the freezing over of meaning. The surplus of meaning that theories bring, their competition at the level of meaning is completely secondary in relation to their coalition in the glacial and four-tiered operation of dissection and transparency. One must be conscious that, no matter how the analysis proceeds, it proceeds toward the freezing over of meaning, it assists in the precession of simulacra and of indifferent forms. The desert grows.

Implosion of meaning in the media.

Implosion of the social in the masses.

Infinite growth of the masses as a function of the acceleration of the system.

Energetic impasse.

Point of inertia.

A destiny of inertia for a saturated world. The phenomena of inertia are accelerating (if one can say that). The arrested forms proliferate, and growth is immobilized in excrescence. Such is also the secret of the hypertelie, of what goes further than its own end.

It would be our own mode of destroying finalities: going further, too far in the same direction - destruction of meaning through simulation, hypersimulation, hypertelie.

Denying its own end through hyperfinality (the crustacean, the statues of Easter Island) - is this not also the obscene secret of cancer? Revenge of excrescence on growth, revenge of speed on inertia.

The masses themselves are caught up in a gigantic process of inertia through acceleration. They are this excrescent, devouring, process that annihilates all growth and all surplus meaning. They are this circuit short-circuited by a monstrous finality.

It is this point of inertia and what happens outside this point of inertia that today is fascinating, enthralling (gone, therefore, the discreet charm of the dialectic). If it is nihilistic to privilege this point of inertia and the analysis of this irreversibility of systems up to the point of no return, then I am a nihilist.

If it is nihilistic to be obsessed by the mode of disappearance, and no longer by the mode of production, then I am a nihilist.

Disappearance, aphanisis, implosion, Fury of Verschwindens. Transpolitics is the elective sphere of the mode of disappearance (of the real, of meaning, of the stage, of history, of the social, of the individual). To tell the truth, it is no longer so much a question of nihilism: in disappearance, in the desertlike, aleatory, and indifferent form, there is no longer even pathos, the pathetic of nihilism - that mythical energy that is still the force of nihilism, of radicality, mythic denial, dramatic anticipation. It is no longer even disenchantment, with the seductive and nostalgic, itself enchanted, tonality of disenchantment. It is simply disappearance.

The trace of this radicality of the mode of disappearance is already found in Adorno and Benjamin, parallel to a nostalgic exercise of the dialectic. Because there is a nostalgia of the dialectic, and without a doubt the most subtle dialectic is nostalgic to begin with. But more deeply, there is in Benjamin and Adorno another tonality, that of a melancholy attached to the system itself, one that is incurable and beyond any dialectic.

It is this melancholia of systems that today takes the upper hand through the ironically transparent forms that surround us.

It is this melancholia that is becoming our fundamental passion.

It is no longer the spleen or the vague yearnings of the fin-de-siecle soul. It is no longer nihilism either, which in some sense aims at normalizing everything through destruction, the passion of resentment (ressentiment).

No, melancholia is the fundamental tonality of functional systems, of current systems of simulation, of programming and information.

Melancholia is the inherent quality of the mode of the disappearance of meaning, of the mode of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melancholic.

Melancholia is the brutal disaffection that characterizes our saturated systems. Once the hope of balancing good and evil, true and false, indeed of confronting some values of the same order, once the more general hope of a relation of forces and a stake has vanished.

Everywhere, always, the system is too strong: hegemonic.

Against this hegemony of the system, one can exalt the ruses of desire, practice revolutionary micrology of the quotidian, exalt the molecular drift or even defend cooking.

This does not resolve the imperious necessity of checking the system in broad daylight.

This, only terrorism can do.

It is the trait of reversion that effaces the remainder, just as a single ironic smile effaces a whole discourse, just as a single flash of denial in a slave effaces all the power and pleasure of the master.

The more hegemonic the system, the more the imagination is struck by the smallest of its reversals. The challenge, even infinitesimal, is the image of a chain failure. Only this reversibility without a counterpart is an event today, on the nihilistic and disaffected stage of the political. Only it mobilizes the imaginary.

If being a nihilist, is carrying, to the unbearable limit of hegemonic systems, this radical trait of derision and of violence, this challenge that the system is summoned to answer through its own death, then I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons.

Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us.

But such a sentiment is Utopian.

Because it would be beautiful to be a nihilist, if there were still a radicality - as it would be nice to be a terrorist, if death, including that of the terrorist, still had meaning.

But it is at this point that things become insoluble. Because to this active nihilism of radicality, the system opposes its own, the nihilism of neutralization.

The system is itself also nihilistic, in the sense that it has the power to pour everything, including what denies it, into indifference.

In this system, death itself shines by virtue of its absence.

(The Bologna train station, the Oktoberfest in Munich: the dead are annulled by indifference, that is where terrorism is the involuntary accomplice of the whole system, not politically, but in the accelerated form of indifference that it contributes to imposing.)

Death no longer has a stage, neither phantasmatic nor political, on which to represent itself, to play itself out, either a ceremonial or a violent one.

And this is the victory of the other nihilism, of the other terrorism, that of the system.

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality-no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen.

We are in the era of events without consequences (and of theories without consequences).

There is no more hope for meaning.

And without a doubt this is a good thing: meaning is mortal.

But that on which it has imposed its ephemeral reign, what it hoped to liquidate in order to impose the reign of the Enlightenment, that is, appearances, they, are immortal, invulnerable to the nihilism of meaning or of non-meaning itself.

This is where seduction begins.