lateness, late capitalism and deep shit

[Joseph Tracy]

Here are a couple three sentences from the newest week of the Reddit study of ATD. They are about the reptilian ice creature uncovered in the Vormance expedition but seem to me to have a curious refraction toward discussions on the p-list of ‘late capitalism’ as used in BE.

“   Fleetwood notes that the thing began to speak as it escaped, stating: "The man-shaped light shall not deliver you," and "Flames were always your destiny, my children." Later, trying to escape the chaos that had befallen the city by train, Fleetwood notes "how late, increasingly late," they would all be.
The section ends with a kind of epilogue for Fleetwood, where he is at an Explorer's Club, whose chairman expresses surprise at his appearance: "Thought you were in Africa.”  "So did I," says Vibe.  “
There is also in this passage in ATD a reference to the Eddas. I recently read Robert Macfarlane's  Underland, which ends with a chapter about an underground  repository in Finland being built to hold nuclear waste for 100,000 years. Early post-human architecture with elaborate attempts to warn future generations. While there Macfarlane reads from the Kalevala about a terrible being/force held inside a mountain or sealed cave with a warning not to unearth it. A warning that it will yield addictive power followed by death.  I recall the ancient description as utterly eerie in the details of how precisely it maps on to nuclear power.
In ATD, late enlightenment science wedded to colonialist capitalism, here embodied in the Vormance expedition, always looking for a new frontier, goes deep into the earth, through the vortex, past all the warning signs, and releases  a power more threatening than anything before it. As they go down they reach up and out, looking to get us some athem quaternion rayguns as they make their appearance on the ray market. What the  mythology of this ice monster who becomes a radiant fire monster mirrors in the historic part of the novel is not hard to see.  In Bleeding Edge humans are going  deep into the power of code as the new frontier of colonialist adventurism, leveraging our cleverness against the limits of growth, feeding a process that looks less and less lke growth and more and more like cancer. In both cases the means have much determinative effect on the result.  
One second we were in Africa with hundreds of ways of being human, next second we are the children of a bad Vibe standing in the Explorer’s club, where humans consist of the explorer’s, well equipped with lawyers guns and money, and the explored with none of the above,  but not much else to choose from.  We feel, both intenally and externally, “stuck” as David Graeber puts it. Still, if people know they are stuck it seems like it should make a difference if they see themselves as having options. He argues that we do. Occupying human history with the non-nihilist branch of anarchy theory.
later p-list