M68

For too too long we have let business plans determine the language. THAT ENDS HERE! NOW THE LANGUAGE SHALL DETERMINE THE BUSINESS PLAN.

M68 is your older brothers; your older cousins. The one who convinced you Journey was good. (Parenthetically, we do not believe Journey was good. We were listening to Bill Laswell and Tricky in high school).

M68 has several goals:

• Deleuziate and batesonize the university and the corporation.
• The recognition of baseball as the eighth sacrament.
• Global Thermonuclear War is the only spectator sport worthy of the name.
• The promulgation of writing as machinic.
• The resolution of the 70+ year long Sino-Japanese War.
• Sex with Franco-Vietnamese women.
• Among others.

M68 has developed the notions of mental ecologies, of the hand–mind interaction, of pack animality, evolutionary psychological influences on high finance, and the Automaticity of the Dao.

M68 realizes we live in a period of epochal upheaval. We locate the source of that upheaval in the fourth information processing change in Homo sapiens. Our points of departure are Walter Ong, Manuel Castells, Philip Lieberman, John Maynard Smith and the work of Richard Dawkins (when he was an actual biologist).

文武雙全. Listening is their mother. Speech is their father. Writing and accounting are brothers. M68 does not give a flying fuck about Crit Theory, Queer Theory, or wave-y feminism. Come join us in the delivery room of the 22nd Century. Holding the baby of the two cultures. The union of the humanities and the sciences.

Writing becomes typing becomes coding.

M68 slowly illumined these concepts in a state of tire-burning panic across four nation states. Pieces of this were composed on Bourbon Street while walking to work in a strip club.

M68 is in solidarity with Catholic nuns, garbage workers who use computers, the People’s Front of Judea (not the Judean People’s Front), The Nation of Gods and Earths, EZLN, and disgruntled former members of the IRA. M68 is opposed to boojie women, potpourri, small dogs, and the extravagant use of Air Conditioning.

For Gen X, their story is the fall of Russia. For the Millennials, it is the rise of China. For the Baby Boomers, their story is one of cowardice.

M68 is a dual use technology. We turn on the lights and provide clean drinking water. We can also level city blocks and burn flesh from bone.

The Situationist Psychogeography, with its attacks on the Linear Modernist Grid for Living and Controlling, inspires us. As does the OULIPO’s desire to stop writing plots in the neat triangles of Freytag. Both groups want to curve through space. This vision of the curve is part of the Great Green Vision. There are no straight lines in the natural world. (How amazing is it that the only way dynamics can take into account curvilinear complexity is by way of that universal machine, the computer, Grid of Grids. Irony and hypocrisy are merely the same face at vespers and matins).

M68 is a Franciscan vision. Perhaps it is a Baroque vision. We are not sure. But the curve of the city, or the city as network, is not far enough. We advocate and work towards the destruction of the city/country split. The hinterland must grow grapes and tomatoes right in the zócalos of our cities.

Cul-de-sac cities of America are evil because of the lack of awareness of the environmental consequences of the cities. They have not paid attention. They have not stayed alert. They have gone blind and slack.

We propose Cobra-La, a city of living buildings, where the line between animal, vegetable, and machine is not only curved, but blurred. We are fans of urban farming, vertical farming, local eating, of learning to butcher your own meat. We are foodies beyond foodies. We know the price of oil will affect our corn tortillas and tacos al pastor, so we hedge with futures. We have Series 3 licenses. We are horticulturalists. We seek Deep Green Urbanism. It was once called Viridian Design. We do not know what happened to them. Clearly they went to Croatan.

M68、We are for the pointless hell of the Green Martyrdom of the 21st century: to leave your mother, your close friends, a smiling could-be-wife girlfriend and move to a rock in the Pacific Ocean, just to go through the adjusting nomadic hell of learning Chinese 世界觀. Just for the fuck and experience of it. For nothing but the Green Martyrdom.

And to close the loop, come back an alcoholic, drunk, broke and shaking, with friends with SUVs, coming home, wiser, a beggar, and resetting yourself again in the six-months-new-town phase. Only to reset yourself on a new cell in the Green Martyrdom. For nothing but the Green Martyrdom.

M68 is a big fat intellectual mountain which must be climbed; not like Everest, but K2 or Denali — which leave more bodies than storytellers. Mt. Conulaidh.

M68 has observed American “intellectuals” and we have judged you wanting, cowardly, pseudo, and passive-aggressive. We are tired of talking with you in Brooklyn, in New Orleans, in Austin, in Buenos Aires, in Taipei, in Portland, in Shanghai, in Mexico City, in Amsterdam. We are tired of the know-nothing pretending.

M68 has the balls to judge. You think that perhaps we have made bad decisions and are not sufficiently cognizant of awareness. We buy another round. You drink it. We make fun and lager up your complete lack of “meta” while acting “meta”’s meta. And you looked up Greek yesterday.

Ride the bear. Get high on caffeine, nicotine, alcohol, and THC. Reflect on the results. Try not to kill yourself or anything else while riding. Thank you for playing.

M68 might be high as fuck as we write this. We might be so high that if we were royalty they would bow to us and call us “Your Highness”. Here’s the thing. If what you produce when you’re stoned is good art, who gives a fuck if you were high when you wrote it? How many words have been inked with fingers still wet from the sweat of ice and whiskey in the jacket of their glass?

Let the Gnostics believe in their silly codex from Byblos, Yaldabaoth’s creation lies there. Abba’s dominion is the Chaosmos. One must climb Mt. Conulaidh.

The Shavian Idea of Artist as incompetent sucks. The Byronian notion of the Artist as Wild Romantic Doomed Disorganized Genius is worse and has probably killed more people than Pitbulls. Or Pitbull. Or both together. But definitely more than sharks.

M68 suffered through the Agony of the Great Green Vision, beginning January 2013 until The Torment in the Panopticon of September 2015. This revealed the Seamless Garment of Information, the Dawn of the Viridian.

This Manifesto was brought to you by the number i and the letter 丁.