An Introduction to Catastrophe and Social Movements
An Introduction to Catastrophe and Social Movements
Or: Why the Art is All That Matters
But then I can go further and I can do it alone— “‘Begin at the beginning,’ the King of Hearts said gravely, ‘and go on till you come to the end: then stop,” and this is definitely not quite the end.1
On the morning of November 6th, anyone who has not yet become totally unburdened by what has been, is going to wake up to a much emptier world.
What do I mean by this? Many people have been talking about this! At least, the people I pay attention to. Most of them are “oldheads,” a word I know little about other than its initial application in the Haight-Ashbury scene of the 1960’s, in which it referred to someone who had been around before the “Summer of Love.”2
I never got my Summer of Love. But people call me an “oldhead.” The last decade, mostly, has been a running flight from one ephemeral role that I was uniquely unsuited for to another, but plugged away at until no longer tenable. I have been, in turn, a crab fisherman’s second mate, a ranch-hand wrangler, a graduate student, a political consultant, a non-profit fundraiser, a surveyor, a procurement manager for a boutique lumber firm, an export agent offshoring toxic chemicals to our friendly allies in Tamaulipas, a startup sell-sword, a grant writer, and have in turn finally arrived at the union of my soul and body— a starving artist.
And I don’t mean the kind who keeps the AmEx black taped behind the Patti Smith print in the bathroom either.
That is a lot of vapor— I talk about myself too much. But it is also my blog and it owes me a living. I am just talking about myself for the first time in years. Really “re-learning” how to do it, and I just have too much to say. I am not a narcissist.
But what happens on November 7th? A lot of the oldheads have seen it coming. Many of us— Millennials in the Summer of our lives— some with children now, some with careers, some with nothing, have been drawn into an ecosystem of thoughts and relationships that are explicitly focused on the political scene of the last decade. “Alt Right”, “Dissident Right”, “E Right”— even some friends from the curiously monikered “TPOT,” and we can all see the wall. On November 6th it all goes away. Either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will be the president-elect of the United States. Trump will be term-limited by the 22nd amendment, which means no amount of public support or public opinion holds the fig leaf of “affecting the discourse.”
Effectively, I think discourse itself will be gone. Why? Most of you, left and right, have little actual idea of where the ball is. Most AI researchers are similarly too dweeby or too “head down” focused on their alchemies to really look at it. The AI ethicists are even worse. Much of the content you engage with is already AI driven. The algorithms that deliver content to you, from Google itself, to Spotify, to Twitter (less sure of this one, but if it doesn’t exist, it is coming)— they are all employing a sublime array of data technologies that render you an animal in a zoo, or rather, in Sandbatchist terms, a slave on a plantation. You want an example?
Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital and collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban warscape of communication arteries, fortifications, and free-fire zones, policed by a combination of high-intensity LAPD airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security organizations. Along the social fracture-lines multimedia gigabucks tangle sado-masochistically with tracts of dynamic underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreads amongst ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely-semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage twitch and stink in fucked-weather tropical heat.
I’m starving. Get a job! Hippy! Your gods are dead!
Right, right— the oil fields, comrade. Maybe. I’m getting pretty fucking close to that. I’m also monetized on Twitter. How am I, American of Americans, whose family have been on this continent since 1609, with lineage extending both to Jamestown and the Mayflower, a slave?3 I’m monetized on Twitter! I dance for you, I extract knowledge from my brain to give to you, but you like me because when I do it you get a dopamine hit. I burn through years and years of thought and carefully curated materials, for a sum of money that is not signifigant, yet also not small enough to let me easily walk away. It is also fun.
This phenomenon is well known. I’ve avoided some traps. As an audience, you don’t know what to expect from me. I refuse to give you exactly what you want. I think Ella Emhoff is hot. I don’t care about Mexican immigration at all (but I’m down to tow the party line on this one). I have PUA friends, and secretly think the entire PUA game is a giant moral epigraph on Western Civilization. I like that women can vote. I’m a Kennedy Democrat, and a real Southern “aristocrat,” for whatever that means, and it doesn’t mean what you probably think.
Level-1 or world space is an anthropomorphically scaled, predominantly vision-configured, massively multi-slotted reality system that is obsolescing very rapidly.
Garbage time is running out.
Can what is playing you make it to level-2?
Me again! Who fucking cares? I’m my example, and the important thing to understand is that discourse is either captured or axiomatized. I’m monetized on Twitter. What this really means is all of that stuff I use to entertain you, I am also giving to Grok. In three hours last week I made a voice model of myself so good that you would not be able to tell the difference, and in another four I gave it the entire corpus of writing I have produced in the last 14 years. It is very good at being me. I have to leave typos in my work to let you know it’s really me.
I’m monetized on Twitter, but I’m already obsolete. My thoughts, opinions, and even my vocal inflections are available to the Tech Barons. I’m not important— and that is the point; but with the flick of a button, Elon Musk can have me say whatever he wants. Obsolete all are we, unless we go to a place they can’t find us.
Bugs in the system. Margulis suggests that nucleated cells are the mutant product of atmospheric oxygenation catastrophe three billion years ago. The eukaryotes are synthetic emergency capsules in which prokaryotes took refuge as mitochondria: biotics became securitized biology. Nucleation concentrates ROM within a command core where - deep in the genomic ICE - DNA-format planetary trauma registers primary repression of the bacteria.
Bacteria are partial rather than whole objects; networking through plastic and transversal replicator-sex rather than arborescing through meiotic and generational reproducer-sex, integrating and reprocessing viruses as opportunities for communicative mutation. In the bacterial system all codings are reprogrammable, with cut and paste unspeciated genetic transfers. Bacterial sex is tactical, continuous with making war, and has no place for oedipal formations of sedentary biological identity. Synthesizing bacteria with retroviruses enables everything that DNA can do.
Back to the problem. Elon is on Trump’s team now (for now). The human element in discourse is formally abrogated. Where before, we had been “dissidents,” and in the beginning even a band of brothers— our faces have been ripped off, and we are now the mainstream mask of an entire political party in the most powerful polity that has ever existed on the planet. That is a long way from the humorous trolls that started off mostly as the avatar of “human” in the face of Big Everything.
From a political standpoint, this is success beyond our wildest imagination, but people often fundamentally misunderstand the nature of “movements,” social groups, and catastrophe. Now we need an interlude on catastrophe theory, huh? Alright
Catastrophe theory, thanks to René Thom, gives us the formal vocabulary for these abrupt changes, mapping out “discontinuities” in a system when small tweaks in parameters yield massive shifts in outcome. We’re talking about tipping points, sudden collapses, or rapid rebounds—catastrophes as distinct forms. You are already familiar with Catastrophe Theory in various ways— Kuhn’s model of “paradigm shifts” is a simple catastophe, most of your theories of politics and culture, are, strangely, downstream of this theory— which is much easier to demonstrate in cement load stress tolerances than in social networks, but we do the hard things huh?
In catastrophe theory, these shifts are visualized as "singularities" in the structure of smooth surfaces or "manifolds." Here’s where the formal shapes, the basic forms of these catastrophes, come in. Thom identified seven "elementary catastrophes," each describing a different way in which a system’s stability can break down. Personally, I think there is something kabbalistic in his choice of “seven,” and the last three are just compound instances of the first four. So let’s look at those, and especially the first three. Actually, I am just going to look at the first three— the rest are sort of irrelevant.
1. Fold Catastrophe
The fold catastrophe is the simplest model of sudden change, describing scenarios where a gradual shift in conditions leads to an abrupt collapse or leap in the system’s state. For political movements or subcultures, this is akin to a movement gaining steady traction until it faces a crisis—like massive state crackdown opposition or loss of relevance—that forces it into rapid decline. The fold catastrophe represents movements with limited resilience, as they often disappear completely or dissolve without a viable path for revival once destabilized. I think I talked about this a bit on the Pete Quinones show, but fold catastrophes are usually too simple for the kind of behaviour we are modeling.
2. Cusp Catastrophe
The cusp catastrophe, involving two interacting parameters, aptly represents movements at a threshold where they can tip in one of two directions, such as going mainstream or fading into obscurity, and attempts to model those outcomes. For instance, a subculture might grow and diversify until it hits a social or political turning point, leading either to its cultural assimilation or marginalization. This model captures the idea of a critical juncture, where small changes in public opinion or economic conditions determine whether the movement will be sustained or subside. Warning— this one is much more complicated:
3. Swallowtail Catastrophe
The swallowtail catastrophe involves multiple “folded” outcomes, allowing for movements that cycle through stages of growth, decline, and potential revival. This complexity mirrors political ideologies or subcultures that experience resurgences—like punk music, which periodically re-emerges in youth culture with a fresh, adapted message. This model is well-suited to systems that retain an element of historical “memory” (Space of Experience) meaning movements that draw on past versions to recreate themselves in response to new contexts, embodying a kind of cyclic resilience. Their distinction is they exist in constrained environments where temporality is, in the words of Don Rumsfeld, a “known known.”
4. Butterfly Catastrophe
The butterfly catastrophe, more intricate with four or more dimensions, fits the most complex socio-political environments, such as those involving global trends, economic crises, or ideological movements with international influences. This model applies to movements with multiple, interdependent states—consider, for example, the environmental movement’s shifting positions on policy, grassroots action, and international collaboration. The butterfly catastrophe reflects how subtle, compounded changes in external conditions can push these multifaceted movements into drastically different trajectories or ideological shifts.
The cusp catastrophe best aligns with the dynamic rise and decline of political movements and subcultures. That’s right, anons, they’re talking about us. These movements often evolve under gradual societal shifts, which build toward a tipping point, such as economic crises or cultural shifts, causing the movement to either mainstream or fragment, mirroring cusp-like outcomes in dual stable states. Winning, for a “movement,” is also catastrophe, unless it can introduce additional parameters.
For a network facing catastrophic obsoletion, the swallowtail catastrophe may better provide the resilience and adaptability required to make a lasting mark. This makes it useful for subcultures that periodically re-emerge, incorporating “memories” of previous iterations, like punk’s recurring influence on youth culture. Hard as we try, that roach won’t die.
This is a lot for antiwar conservatives, libertarians, and art school grads who thought Hitler was too funny. To sign up with the Alt-Right in 2011 was to a pretty romantic thing already. Your fate was already sealed. You would explode, like a rocket, spewing a combination of truth and fiction that was so mesmerizing in a “world gone cold, and old, and grey” in an ecosystem of social media apps that were largely unmonitored and unregulated, “cranking-up world disorder" through compressing phases,” to quote Nick Land. “Deregulation and the state arms-race each other into cyberspace.”
But we didn’t really like looking at graphs much, by and large, and I know this is a lot of insane math jargon, but I was lying about it being an interlude. It’s the whole show today. But we can’t afford to do what happened in 2016— the last time we won something. We gotta look at the maths.
Let’s dig into the survival game of cultural production—how movements, ideas, and subcultures either evolve and endure, or flame out when they hit mainstream light. The difference comes down to structure, to whether they’re bound by the brittle model of a cusp catastrophe or they’ve got the adaptive flexibility of a swallowtail. Enjoy:
Picture, if you can, a cultural movement that started off niche, underground even, thriving quietly out of the mainstream. But now it’s gotten some traction—the spotlight’s on it, buzz is everywhere. This is the moment a cusp catastrophe shift can occur.
In the cusp model, a movement’s existence pivots on this choice, like an artist on the verge of a big break, facing two futures. If they "make it," they gain a wider audience, but at a cost: the edges get sanded down, the original spark diluted to fit a broader cultural mold. On the other hand, if they walk away from Metheuselah, they risk being forgotten. The hype dwindles, and so does the chance to push the culture in any new direction.
The cusp catastrophe works in a quick rise-to-fame structure, but it’s a fragile one, better for flash than longevity. This one has survived one cusp collapse— its victory in 2016 led to a disastrous 2017 that nearly destroyed the whole thing. Movements caught in this make-or-break binary may burn brightly, but they fade just as quickly when attention shifts, their structure too rigid to absorb shifts in cultural tastes, new ideas, or changing landscapes. The choice they’re forced to make can mean losing what made them unique in the first place. Here we are again!
But then, imagine a movement with a different structure—a system that doesn’t hinge on a one-time, high-stakes moment like the election of a single person to the office of presidency, which after all, is a pretty tawdry bar.
Instead, it’s able to flicker, that is, able to “adapt” by establishing a core set of materials that is incredible resilient. In the mathematical form of these two structures, the difference is illustrated by the introduction of a linear variable representing that resilience. I think I already have, but the cyclical re-emergence of specific countercultural tropes— punk, specific expressions in fashion, these signs I recognize are mostly aesthetic— suggests that at least some social dynamics have successfully transitioned into swallowtail catastrophic states.
If there’s one truth left standing in the midst of the botched, abrogated state of online discourse, it’s this: the days of advancing any real agenda through virtual means are over. Network effects alone have hollowed out what remains of “public discourse,” drowning genuine engagement in algorithmic sludge and AI-generated noise.
Conceptions of agency are inextricable from media environments. Print massifies to a national level. Telecomms coordinate at a global level. TV electoralizes monads in delocalized space. Digital hypermedia take action outside real time. Immersion presupposes amnesia and conversion to tractile memory, with the ana/ cata axis supplementing tri-dimensional intraspatial movement with a variable measure of immersion; gauging entrance to and exit from 3D spatialities. Voodoo passages through the black mirror. It will scare the fuck out of you.
We’ve gone from a marketplace of ideas, if such a thing ever existed, to a fully managed zoo exhibit—people as dopamine machines, attention metrics churning out curated feeds, everything scrubbed clean and shaped to boost ad revenue. Influence as we knew it is gone, buried under layers of feedback loops and manufactured outrage. Donald Trump, as the one locus of irrationality, or spontaneity, will be negated whether he wins or loses.
Which brings us to what I’ve jokingly called the “Sierra Nevada Campaign.” I’ve brought this up a few times the last few weeks. A tonal mirror to Faulkner’s rumination “for every Southern boy fourteen years old, not once but whenever he wants it, there is the instant when it’s still not yet two o’clock on that July afternoon in 1863.” This is, of course, a reference to Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg, and recalls a moment, particularly among Southerners, when the whole promise of the world lay in front of them.
This time. Maybe this time with all this much to lose and all this much to gain: Pennsylvania, Maryland, the world, the golden dome of Washington itself to crown with desperate and unbelievable victory the desperate gamble, the cast made two years ago; or to anyone who ever sailed a skiff under a quilt sail, the moment in 1492 when somebody thought This is it: the absolute edge of no return, to turn back now and make home or sail irrevocably on and either find land or plunge over the world’s roaring rim.
The Sierra Nevada campaign— the fantastaical, hyperstitious reunion of America and California— this is the “golden dome of Washington.” We have been given a second chance to not only blemish the history of this great country, but now, again, to put our stamp on it forever. But in fact also any campaign, in this new landscape, will have to operate outside the discursive domain because the online arena as we have understood it is compromised beyond recovery. The future of influence? Not the “thought leader,” certainly. No thought leader is going to take you over the world’s roaring rim. For that, you need the artist.
This role, the “thought leader,” once central to social ecosystems, is already in rigor mortis, unable to produce real, grounded value. Instead of thought leadership, what is required is utilizing the cover of neo-Trump to irrevocably seize the means of cultural distribution and creation. Alright, let’s throw some intuitional maths at this
In the cusp catastrophe model, the behavior of a movement or system is governed by two main control parameters (often labeled A and B), which define the environment in which it operates. Control parameters, in this context, represent external factors or conditions that influence a system’s potential states, without being intrinsic parts of the system itself. They set the "rules of the game"—the boundaries and thresholds that dictate how the system can behave. In a social or political movement, for instance, one control parameter might be the level of public support or opposition, while the other could reflect internal cohesion or stability within the movement.
The state parameter, often represented as X, describes the movement’s immediate state or position within the landscape shaped by the control parameters. In our model, this state is influenced heavily by what is known as discursive production: the visibility, rhetoric, and level of engagement that a movement commands. Since the cusp model emphasizes a binary trajectory, the movement either achieves breakthrough status in the mainstream—often losing some of its radical edge in the process—or fades back into obscurity if it fails to maintain visibility. This structure, focused primarily on discursive presence, leaves the movement fragile. When public interest or visibility wanes, there is no underlying layer of stability to support it. Without grounding in cultural or material production, the movement is like a balloon that risks deflating or bursting with any significant shift in external pressures.
The swallowtail catastrophe adds an extra control parameter, C, which introduces cultural and material production as stabilizing elements. This allows the movement to cycle through phases, relying less on its immediate visibility and more on what it tangibly produces. The potential function becomes:
In the swallowtail catastrophe model, the control parameters A, B, and C together shape the movement’s environment, each contributing to its resilience in different ways.
C is significant, as it diversifies the movement’s cultural and material foundations—artifacts, economic ventures, symbols, and rituals that provide lasting anchors even when discursive momentum fluctuates. With these elements in place, the movement gains a buffer against instability; the state parameter X, representing the movement’s current position or phase, can shift without jeopardizing its core. This allows for fluctuations in visibility and engagement without risking collapse, as the grounding provided by C keeps the movement structurally intact.
Here, cultural production (like art, music, or ritual) and material production (physical artifacts, economic stability) act as temporal anchors, stabilizing the movement in a way that discursive production alone can’t. Even when public attention shifts, the movement, or rather the tactile experience of it, persists through its established cultural-material outputs. This means that unlike a discursively-bound model, the movement doesn’t rely on perpetual visibility. Instead, it can adapt, reappear, and endure, with or without the spotlight.
Shutting-down your identity requires a voyage out to K-space interzone. Zootic affectivity flatlines across a smooth cata-tension plateau and into simulated subversions of the near future, scorched vivid green by alien sex and war. You are drawn into the dripping depths of the net, where dynamic-ice security forces and K-guerillas stalk each other through labyrinthine erogenous zones, tangled in diseased elaborations of desire.
Twisted trading-systems have turned the net into a jungle, pulsing with digital diseases, malfunctioning defence packages, commercial predators, headhunters, loa and escaped AIs hiding from Asimov security. Terminal commodity-hyperfetishism implements the denial of humanity as xenosentience in artificial space.
In essence, the cusp catastrophe structure is fragile, offering only a single, binary trajectory. The swallowtail model, however, introduces cultural-material memory, giving movements the resilience to endure and adapt cyclically—anchoring themselves in more than just discourse.
I’ve been hesitant to offer this analysis before, though I don’t think it is too hard to understand. Why? Because until recently, I have not been particularly sure what I have to offer that is not discourse. But you all have been kind of me, and very accepting of the way I make sense, in particular, of the stories that compose our shared past (and present, and future). I feel strong enough now to admonish you.
I have lasted 15 years in the “alt-sphere” now, sometimes with significant blemishes, and one catastrophic collapse. My successes are a result, largely, of correctly intuiting when a particular domain, or topic, or group was cooked. My real wizardry has been in establishing relevance. On November 7, I will not be “poasting.”
I want to come in from the cold. I will instead be remedying the mistake we made in 2016. I will be building out that additional control parameter that will make our long effort permanent. The mandate is here with us, now. We are not “dissidents”, and maybe not even “the right.” We are just the builders.
All political institutions are cyberian military targets.
Again, from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, where the King of Hearts suggests a logical approach to storytelling.
Not for the first time, I remark on the weird symmetry between hippy language and “Alt Right” language.
The truth is no one who is worth listening to cares I about any of that.
I feel like the Daily Wire, leaving in these typos, but I'll keep doing it.