The Hidden Way

A fragment of a manifesto

The Hidden Way, By Jeffrey OIsen Bell

A few years ago, when I left my lucrative career in Silicon Valley behind and retreated from public life, most of my former colleagues thought that I had lost my mind. In reality, I had started a journey to reclaim it. My erstwhile business partners were perplexed more than anything. They did not show hostility toward my decision. In return, I will attempt to repay the favor, although doing so will prove difficult in this philosophical undertaking, which is as much critique as meditation. To my friends Brett Ryan, Sam Kaplan and Yuri Ivanov, this collection of writings is an invitation for dialogue, although it may be difficult to find me in order to make your rebuttal. This is not cold-hearted invective. I’ve written these reflections with only love in my heart.

The following is a manifesto in that it declares motive. Yet, it is also my own internal conversation, an attempt to work through my thoughts on a variety of topics. I’ve rarely been one for bold pronouncements. This is a statement of intent toward Minimalism. It moves in search of an idea in the hope to find it worthy. The struggle to define must come first. Only then can effortless observance follow.

What is Minimalism? I can tell you what it is not. Minimalism is not Futurism. In fact, as a starting point, Minimalism is, in a sense but not entirely, a critique of Futurism and its failures. The entire thrust is not contained there alone. This is not a case like Communism which exists in all its fullness as a critique of Capitalism and even bolsters, further defines, reifies and expands its ideological enemy while searching for itself in opposition. The critique of Futurism here is only a jumping off point.

To grasp Futurism, we must turn to its origins within modernity and listen to what the earliest proponents said about their own movement. In The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, published in 1909, Marinetti laid out the ideals of his philosophy in a feverish poetics. In the most simplified terms, he wrote about the rejection of the old mythos and a necessary embrace of the new and cutting edge with reckless abandon. Speed was the language of the new age, and the Futurists determined to ride break-neck into a dazzling and adventurous world. This charge into the event horizon came at the wheel of the automobile. He wrote: “Let’s break out of the horrible shell of wisdom and throw ourselves like pride-ripened fruit into the wide, contorted mouth of the wind! Let’s give ourselves utterly to the Unknown, not in desperation but only to replenish the deep wells of the Absurd!”

In the list of Futurism’s desires given at the midpoint of the manifesto, there is plenty to admire. The youthful demand for risk-taking and courage drives each new and innovative reach of a generation forward. New creations are impossible without leaps of faith into the unknown. The problems arise at the end of the list. Marinetti and his compatriots can be forgiven to some degree, since the manifesto was written before the two colossally destructive world wars, in believing that the destruction of the old, the purifying power of conflict, and refining influence of heavy industry would lead to a more daring and masculine future. But they were wrong. Although the youthful desire can be understood and forgiven, the wrongness of the predicted result must be acknowledged fully.

The great flaw of Futurism’s desire came from its subordination to the exploitative forces of civilization emerging in the early modern era as industrial society reached its zenith. In the desire for speed there emerges a blindness as the landscape blurs at the edges of technological development. In that blurry world just beyond his seeing, even Martinetti’s love for the absurd can be tamed, curated and marketed as a product. In the whirling of acceleration, the thrill seeker cannot take the time to observe the evolutionary metamorphoses approaching at the outermost edges of technical development. Ironically, Martinetti captures this danger to his own masculinity in the manifesto, writing: “I stretched out on my car like a corpse on its bier, but revived at once under the steering wheel, a guillotine blade that threatened my stomach.” The guillotine blade positioned above his stomach, in fact, threatens castration. I do not think Martinetti would disagree that he is describing the death-drive, a concept which deserves deeper examination and dissection.

The death-drive is fundamentally anti-human. I do not say this as a chastising scold of youthful exuberance. Life in its most vigorous and transcendent form is impossible to attain without such energy. But the death-drive is a disordered and even— a rare bold claim on my part— a destructive and fundamentally homosexual urge. Man giving himself over to machine as a conduit of speed for its own sake can only lead to an uncannily un-human motive of action. If he does achieve a form of apotheosis, it will be a mutilated and ugly version. The “future” of Futurism combusts into a void, one that cannot be filled by vital and masculine youth but rather the shadow of what’s left in its absence.

The choice of the automobile as the vessel of speed is rather fitting in its shortsightedness. The motor car moves on predetermined highways developed by the inglorious systems of gradual construction and maintenance. To drive on the road is to stand on the shoulders of giants. One cannot burn the museums and leave the roads intact. They are a collected history of countless men’s travels. The Futurist’s movement along these predetermined avenues marks an acceptance of the territory, a violent resignation, avant garde as illusion controlled entirely by the hated banal architecture. In this sense, technology cannot be the sole medium of the vital new. In moving along this already formed habitat, the Futurist death-drive turns to an impotent hysteria, hermaphroditic in its demands for disordered ecstasies within the confines of an encompassing network of control. The male urge to occupy new territory is forgotten. Futurism can only manifest the excesses of those who control the territory of its domain of action.

Now let’s examine the difficulties encountered by youth in our own time, the people my age who, like the Futurists, wanted something new, a horizon beckoning for speed provided by the changing technological landscape. Y2K is largely forgotten in our time. When it is remembered, it’s as an amusing historical artifact, a comical pseudo-crisis expanded far beyond its real significance by media hysteria and public mythology about computers. I was too young to confront Y2K as an adult in the tech industry, but it still lingers in the back of my mind and pulses with meaning. Not long ago, it occurred to me that Y2K was the last event of the pre-digitalized age, the final notable occurrence in the world of computers as other and capable of experiencing a crisis apart from humanity as a separate and distinct entity. By 1999, many people had personal computers, but digital literacy as a commonplace means of communication was by no means ubiquitous. The computer lived in a room of the home. There it stayed. Connecting to the internet was an event, a process that took time and caused inconveniences. The digital as a component of society was still compartmentalized. Leading up to the new millennium, the public held their breaths, wondering if chaos would greet them in the hours after midnight. It did not. The world kept on spinning. The old black-and-white television vision of the computer as a distinct box capable of comedically catastrophic errors died, and a new concept of the digital stretched over like an invisible film of ubiquity. The new image was struck through culture all at once, a resounding hammer blow disguised as a sigh of relief. Hardly anyone noticed.

The next great event in the process of making a coherent and vital Futurism impossible in our time was the terror attack of September 11th. Apart from the physical destruction that occurred, the effect on society and culture cannot be overstated. The geopolitical results of the attack contained an uncanny unreality where cause and effect untethered, and the Western World’s systems of action turned toward the absurd. It was plain to see for many that the invasion of Iraq did not logically follow from the events of 9/11. Many of us felt deeply alienated by the obvious fractures in public consciousness. In escaping the absurdity of the unfolding world, my generation retreated into the waiting arms of the expanding digital, echoing the speedy retreat of the Futurists to the outer boundaries of the territory laid for us. And it felt altogether new and refreshing at the time. Between Y2K and 9/11 our consciousness was struck through by the digital and shot into its void.

The futility of our escape from the real into a better world became obvious with the development of the algorithm, the centralization of social media platforms, and the rise of the smartphone. By the time I reached my twenties, the modern West had gladly undertaken a voluntary surveillance culture, one where average people enthusiastically provided lenses for the omnidirectional and never-blinking eye. The original spirit of Futurism lingered only with the developers of the new digital platforms. Consider the motto: “Move fast and break things.” These words are an apt distillation of Martinetti’s 1909 manifesto. Yet, they were crystallized into a system of control, not one of youthful anarchy. Just as the Futurists were unable to foresee how their love of industry and speed’s chaotic effects would result in the near obliteration of humanity in the Great War, the early adopters of the digital, that new and adventurous frontier, did not foresee the ways in which the emergent superhighways of light speed communication would mangle and churn the human psyche.

It’s no coincidence that the search for authenticity renewed with growing urgency as the voluntary surveillance culture expanded to envelop the known world. Young people understood subconsciously that in such a society all action becomes performance. Some degree of observation is suspected at every given moment. As we’ve approached total ubiquity of the unblinking eye, the moment of artistic conception, when shared with a world of interconnected viewers in a two-directional exchange of influence, is undermined making authenticity impossible. Authenticity has taken on an expanded meaning in the mass digital world. Not only does the mass digital shred and dissolve creative projects into a nauseating sameness with its oppressive and algorithmically controlled influence, but the introduction of artificial intelligence automates and accelerates that process so that man is replaced at the outermost edge by a false, unimaginative, and inhuman avant garde. It follows that the most beautiful and honest thing one can do in the age of total performance is to be voluntarily forgotten by mass consciousness. I will make few straightforward declarations in this document, but here is one: In our age, all great art must be gnostic in some sense. The Futurists spoke of the violent struggle and exhaustive effort necessary for great art, but now that effort must manifest in the self-discipline to abstain from what has been dubbed The Attention Economy. It is a selective force, arcing toward an unbearable sameness, a pathway with a predetermined destination directed by an algorithmic conspiracy.

But what of the death-drive? Did this unfortunate and self-destructive force die out in the digital age? I believe it did not. Like any form of human design, it cannot be created or destroyed, only transmuted along new cultural or techno-cultural lines. I will fully expand on my thoughts in the later segment titled, Technology and the Obliteration of Gender, but, during my time in Silicon Valley, I observed a forking into two main forms of death-drive and what I previously called the underlying homosexual urge. The first of these archetypes I dub the Vampire Sadist Faggot. I understand that this may be deemed offensive language, but it is accurate in its evocativeness. The second archetype is the Feminized Masochist Castrato. Each form is clearly visible at the outermost fringes and has developed out of the powerful and abstracting selection mechanisms of the digital. One seeks methods of perverse and motherly control, and the other seeks escape. The tech sector’s ongoing obsession with rocketry offers an obvious and phallic example of the latter’s preoccupation. These two represent the dialectic of transhumanism in its purest form, the new men of Futurism approaching the event horizon and breaking off into extremes. In my paranoid moments, I wonder if they are representations of powers beyond our current ways of seeing, echoes of beings we are yet to meet. While my initial introduction of this concept may sound bizarre, I will expand on it at length in due course.

But what is Minimalism? What do I propose as an antidote to our off-the-rails predicament in a voluntary surveillance age brought on by a blind Futurist death-drive into new and dangerous technological territory? The answer has already been provided by the philosophies of the Tao and the Epicureans. We must seek what the Epicureans called Ataraxia, a state free from the mental anguish brought on by the world of total performance. In order to accomplish this, we must reject the dazzling offerings of the connected world. It is a lattice of transmission for all the world’s anxieties, an inhuman and synthetic extension of our nervous system onto alien ground. What I propose is not ‘hiding’ in the active sense, but an effortless descent into the real, a rediscovery of what the masters of the Tao called “A state which is neither speech nor silence.” The first step of any authentic action must be not a step, but as Chuang Tzu said:

If man, born in Tao,

Sinks into the deep shadow

Of non-action

To forget aggression and concern,

He lacks nothing

His life is secure.

Zero is the ultimate state, one with no movement to either direction, positive or negative. Even the term ‘Zero’ itself, linguistically, is too much. To utter the word implies a counting down from something. The true meaning of ‘zero’ lies beyond even language. The hidden path is hiding without hiding, peace beyond the unblinking eye, not seeking adherents or proselytizing because such is an operation of addition up from zero. The hidden path is not rejection but an existence without. It is first and foremost what the Taoists call “A fasting of the heart” in an age when we are forced into a predetermined selection of objects to consume. The river’s flow, the algorithm directing with relentless speed toward others’ aims is of no concern. To be authentic is to be apart.