We’ve seen history sucked into a pandemic vortex, and consensus reality dissolved into the splintered psychosis of the Internet.
Yet it feels as though experimental filmmaking has weathered it all with barely a scratch. Mainstream culture has delivered us TikTok and VR and doomscrolls and k-holes, but filmmakers are hauled up at the Overlook Hotel waltzing with small gauge formats and essayistic film poems. And now as the threat of Al looms, we can already feel a mood of disengagement and disavowal beginning to take hold. But that cope is not going to work this time, the adversary is too jacked and the stakes are too high. We can’t lie back and think of Jonas Mekas. Experimental film needs to wake up and smell the Internet. We can no longer afford to ignore the dank contours of these times.
We think of 2016 as the year that the meat world finally collapsed into the image matrix. Up until this point the crushing pressure that the Internet was exerting on IRL had been relatively incremental, but in 2016 it assumed the form of a no longer containable catastrophe. We’re thinking here of Franco Berardi, and how he speaks about 1977 as the point at which the future was erased from our psychic horizon. For us 2016 feels monumental like that, a historical vibe shift, a precipice over which we tumbled into a new memetic regime. It was as though all the soberness had been sucked from reality and we had emerged into a stoned new world. This psychotropic reality shift has been referred to as The Great Weirding, but we prefer The Dankening because of weed and memes and also Mark Wahlberg.

Considering the dumpster of history that followed, it’s easy to forget the already WTF feels of that pre-pandemic time. There were Democrats eating babies, presidential pee-pee tapes and pedophiles communing in pizza codes. Conspiracies like these have always existed in the dark corners of the derp web, but now they were circulating on boomer media sites like Facebook, Fox News and CNN. Of course everyone has their own take on why unreality seeped so deep into everyday life at this time. Our personal wager is that it was not ultimately about a particular cast of political characters, but rather the cumulative effect of the Internet on the reordering of everything. Trump is not a cause but a casualty. He’s a memetic contagion that is uniquely calibrated to propagate in the viral logic of this perfect shitstorm.
Trump is the first meme to hold office in the White House.

We confess to feeling shook by how this has all played out. We are children of Burroughs. We have relentlessly dedicated ourselves to the construction of strategic fictions to destabilize official orthodoxies. We vowed to cut the control lines, scramble the transmissions and seize back the production of truth and consensus. Well damn! Isn’t that precisely what’s come to pass?
We are right now witnessing the emergence of everything we wished for and it is uncomfortable as fuck. When we imagined storming the Reality Studio we never suspected we’d be beaten to the gate by conspiracy nut jobs, online grifters, moms&pops, state actors, tech tycoons, proto-fascists and teenage trolls. Well that’s embarrassing. FML.

But hey, there’s no crying in baseball. What matters now is where we go from here. When the Overton window blew open, lots of heinous and ugly things blew in. But the line must be drawn here. This far, no further! We’ve had it with these motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking platform. Our moral responsibility is not just to stop a future, but to shape it. We must not waiver in our commitment to the construction of alternate realities. It matters what matters we use to think other matters with, it matters what stories make worlds and what worlds make stories. We can’t risk leaving the libidinal engineering of the future to our enemies. As image-makers, it’s on us to develop our own insurgent counter-mythologies worthy of dank times.

And if not us, then who? History is only now catching up to something that sampling has always known. Images are not just representations of a pre-existing condition; they’re wildly complex semiotic terrains that condition perpetual, affective and behavioral responses. This means that when you act on an image you act on the world. Cinema should be understood not aesthetically, but functionally-that is to say magically, with magic defined as the use of signs to produce changes in reality. Archival filmmakers know this better than most. We are the high priests of the high priests, of chaos magick in the image arts. Sampling is a transhistorical branch of memetics. It’s Kek before Shadilay. It’s hyperstition before the CCRU. Found footage is meme magic and it has always existed.

It is true what many of you have heard, there is mutiny within our ranks. A thickening enthusiasm for authenticity, directness and non-mediation. These stooges would have us believe that the solution to the post-truth problem is that we need more truth. That logic is oxymoronic, and we must resist it. We’re moving into an era of peak mood-a memetic sensibility ruled by affects, vibes and image contagions. Holding on too tight to meaning is like bringing a pencil to a gun fight. It is like fending off a flood with a broom. It will end in nothing but more cups of libs’ tears drunk by thirsty adversaries. The reign of overt political signaling is over—we had a good run, but that gig is washed up. It’s been in a coffin since at least 2017, when Kendall Jenner handed that Pepsi to a cop. Woke capitalism not only stole our wallet but also our language of politics and protest.

We need to go deeper. It’s time to see what good trouble can be brought through the construction of more stealth modes of cultural transmission. When Chelsea Manning ransacked secrets from the NSA, she burned them onto a CD labeled
“Lady Gaga.” Hiding in plain site we too can smuggle encrypted missives through cultural artifacts. We should be approaching our cinematic gambits as though they were handkerchief code, hobo signals or Polari. This will ensure that our communiqués are only received by those for whom they’re intended. Encryption can be both a secret handshake and a smokescreen against surveillance, censorship and recuperation. Memes are the dank protégé of cryptography-they are cypherpunk reimagined as a fusion of swarm technology, image ciphers and emo virology. Filmmakers have much to learn from such covert networking of feels and context-specific meaning. When we go linear, memes go quantum. We’re the Drake to their Lamar.

But who are we to evangelize about memes! We’re boomer dressed in lambs’ clothing. We’re mutton dressed as Snapchat. We are Steve Buscemi, cap backwards, skateboard slung over one shoulder: “How do you do, fellow kids?” But we have known friendship before Patreon. We have planted seeds at the dawn of Napster and swum the early torrents of Pirate Bay. If only you could see what we’ve seen with your eyes. New concepts only arise when one achieves a measure of disengagement from enemy conditions. But it’s hard to get any perspective when you’re shrieking “like and follow” and “ice cream so good!” while getting rimmed by a webcam. This is not an accusation, it’s a confession. We are all simps to the algorithm now. Meta has gone where the CIA could never penetrate, it has achieved a mind meld of control and collective dreaming. Like it or not we are all tethered to the teat of Sweet Baby Zuck’s BBQ sauce. The Internet: the hate machine, the love machine, the machine powered by many machines. We are all part of it, helping it grow, and helping it grow on us.

Right now, memetic research that could be used to free the human spirit is being monopolized by paltry intellects, while experimental film remains fixated on its own aesthetic past. But the avant-garde is not an aesthetic-it’s an orientation to the present, a frontier, a vanguard. Each successive wave of filmmakers must answer the questions of their time, and in doing so they bring forth their own idiosyncratic language. The bottom line is this. The historical pendulum has struck 4:20, and it’s asking you a question. Wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. But we intend to see how dank this rabbit hole goes.

Yes, we have lost some rounds. But it ain’t about how hard you hit. I’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward. After all, why did I bother to come out here tonight-and why did you? i mean, it’s time, It is time to fright the souls of fearful adversaries. To reclaim the narrative from the Bronze Age perverts, the alpha dogs, the trad wives, the anti-social social clubs, the apolitical political commentators, the unhinged evangelists, the unforgiving moralists, the big daddy mainframes, the climate deniers, the audience captured, the cop inside your head, and the cultural institutions that shudder with risk adversity and existential dread.

In the Internet life goes on. Hope rises and dreams flicker and die. Love plans for tomorrow and loneliness thinks of Doritos. Life is beautiful and living is pain. The sound of 4chan floats down a dank street. A young girl looks out a window and wishes she was on TikTok. A troll sleeps under a bridge. It is tomorrow.
I hope to meet you there.

Samples

30 Rock (Tina Fey, 2006-2013), A League of their Own (Penny Marshall,
1992), Allen Ginsberg ‘Howl’ (1956), Blade Runner (Ridley Scott,
1982), CCRU ‘Lemurian Time War’ (1997-2003), Daniel Odier ‘The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs’ (1969), Dena Yago ‘Blurred Vibrations: On Billie Bilish & Affect (2021), Donna J. Haraway ‘Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016), Franco Berardi ‘After the Future’ 2011), Genesis Breyer P-Orridge The Splinter Test’ (2010), Grandmaster Caz Written! The Lyrics of Grandmaster Caz (2012), Hito Steyerl ‘Too Much World: Is the Internet Dead?”
(2013), Hunter S. Thompson The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman, 1955-67 (1998), Inception (Christopher Nolan,
2010), Live for Now (Michael Bernard, 2017), Live grilling in my backyard (Mark Zuckerberg, 2016), LulzSec ’50 Days of Lulz’ (2011), Pump Up the Volume (Allan Moyle, 1990), Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone,
2006), Snakes on a Plane (David R. Ellis, 2006), Star Trek: First Contact (Jonathan Frakes, 1996), The Matrix (Lana and Lilly Wachowski, 1999), The Matrix Reloaded (L. and L. Wachowski, 2003), The Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980), Venkatesh Rao ‘Into the Weirding’ (2020), VNS Matrix
‘A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century’ (1991), William S.
Burroughs ‘Nova Express’ (1964), William S. Burroughs ‘The Place of Dead Roads’ (1983).