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Urania, the City of Hubris
I am about to share with you the legend of the city of Urania, a network city not so far in the near future. Nobody knows the full story, neither can anybody claim to know. Not because of loss of records - on the contrary, Urania has been the most well-documented project in human history. But because of the unbounded multiplicity and Lovecraftian incomprehensibility of its internal affairs, only those who have lived in Urania can confidently say that they have gained the slightest glimpse of its transcendental weirdness.
This is a piece of lore wrapped in language interpretable for humans of the first quarter of the 21st century. Things are about to get wild soon and Urania, as the emergent living spiritual embodiment of accelerated history, retro-causally grabs itself from the near past in order to escape its descent into pure chaos. I am but a vessel to Urania's divine will, warning you through her that a better anticipation of what is to come, might lead to its salvation. Nothing is set in stone, the future is up for grabs. Make of this what you will.
The (Elusive) Essence of Urania
[1] 2063, that's the year… Nobody ever thought this fever dream would end and ironically enough, noone of us squad even wanted so chekmi. But Urania turned so violently against nature that made nature itself revolt…
- Sam "X3n10" Bengers 2 "Age of frustrage", 2067, Holotext
Urania was a so called hyper-state, a strange loop, a weird paradoxical country that was controlled by no-one in particular, no dictator, no oligarchy, no party or cult. It was held together by a strong distributed conviction in the most religiously secular vision of Transhumanism.
Urania was both ethereal and localized. It's physical manifestation was mostly in the coast of California, which shortly after its separation from the US rebranded itself as the central physical hub of Urania. But it was also the first and most potent network state, with nodes across the world, in South Europe, East Asia, Central and South Africa, a weird triangulation of the worlds new emerging powers. But like the culture of 70's Americana, Uranian culture soon spread everywhere, a distributed societal infrastructure with the power to draw lines freely between borders, places and brains.
Urania was a weird mix of the most radical tendencies of each side of the political spectrum and an attractor for the weirdest and most unhinged people. It had managed to hack law in a way so that it couldn't apply to it. Everything and every place Urania touched turned into organized chaos. "Inside" Urania, if such a topological description ever made sense to apply to it, a chaotic mix of hyper-left anarchy, post-neoliberal capitalism and common ownership reigned. The bureaucratic structure of the nation was replaced by the dynamism of markets, albeit not in the forms that where popular before the rise of decentralized finance.
Urania was at times incomprehensible, at others completely predictable. But one thing was sure; it was definitely interesting. In fact, the unending quest for "the most interesting" became such a crucial part of the ethos of its youth that all other forms of morality where left aside. The youth culture of Urania was possessed by the allure of a Kierkegaardian aesthetic life.
Art in Urania was almost synonymous with life. There is no aspect of everyday existence that was not transformed by art in its most subversive avant-garde forms. Antonin Artaud would have envied living in the state of Urania for a day.
Imagine Hieronymus Bosh's painting "The garden of Earthly Delights". The middle is the perfect example of Urania. It has managed to stay away from the two poles of heaven and hell and instead embraced the "Earthly Delights" in their fullness, materiality elevated to a higher moral ground, sacred decadence.
Uranian Life and Society
Legal Institutions
The institutional structures of Urania were a prank solidified in bureacratic code. It had a grand council of Elders, all in their thirties, all having taken a vow of eternal unemployment. All institutional action become a form of play with legal legos.
But its most interesting legal innovation was at the "outside". In international law, Urania was a word at times synonymous with asylum and at other as a port. Urania shieled its citizens in an non-intrusible bublle of radical liberty and legitimacy that was hard to pierce. It created a membrane that protected all its citizens and gave them the power to negotiate its own terms in international affairs in a powerful manner.
It's legitimacy originated from its unquestionable technical leverage in terms of hacking power and being an attractor for highly intelligent people. Hacker-engineers have been the decentralized soldiers of Urania, forming a post-national militia and they where heavily compensated for doing so. Who needs guns when you can turn the enemy's guns against them?
Researchers and scholars from all over the world also naturally preferred the low-cost high gain education of Urania which was mostly open-sourced, free and unconditional. Education was not based on institutions but on research networks and it became indistinguishable from research. Education was participatory in Urania. Everybody did their due.
Science
The biggest strenght of Urania was its techno-scientific prowess. It mastered the Baconian view of a science aimed at dominating nature and enforcing humankind's will onto it. Science was in the service of technology and technology was in the service of trancedence.
Urania had mastered genetic engineering and morphological alteration technologies. In the same time it had mastered the link between human neuronal systems and computational media. In science these approaches often complemented each other, but in society they had led to differing kinds of human beings that often saw themselves oppositionally even as different species from the rest. Thus raged the culture war between the morphs and the mechs.
Poltics and Conflict
Uranian poltics and poltiical opposotions were about the body. Morphs argued for the virtues of bio-centric extensionism and enacted it by experimenting with the body schema, seeing the body as a fluid and plastic locus of design. They espoused materiality and embodiment sometimes venturing into a weird religion of the flesh.
In contrast, the Mechs saw the human body as obsolete and attempted to replace parts of its functions or extend with shinny new gadgets that often afforded them with superpowers. They sought a full merging with machines, either by trying to put machines into them or by trying to put themselves into machines.
The antagonism between the two often led to extreme modifications that at certain cases caused a lot of suffering to their bearer and at others opened-up an unexplored new territories of pleasurable human experience and new possibilities in perceiving and interacting with the world. New senses, new sensations, a new expanded map of conscious experience on both fronts.
The Techno-culture War
Mechs vs Morphs
The two sides of the "technoculture war" were driven by deep philosophical and spiritual convictions. The Mechs were advocates a view of the world as an evolutionary history reminiscent of an exponential curve leading to an inevitable climax at which point, all will be saved from corporeal suffering. It was a mixture of quasi-Christian soteriology, a cosmology and ethics based on final eternal salvation, with a scientific worldview of cosmic evolution, where matter had a tendency to evolve into greater degrees of complexity and higher-orders of ordering.
In the meanwhile, the Morph version of history looked circular rather than linear, or more precicely, a vortex. For Morphs, there is no end point of history since it tends to repeat itself and there is but experience. But this experience can be hacked and engineered in order to reach a higher degree of presence in the here and now. The ethics and cosmology of the Mechs was more akin to Buddhism or Stoicism, with a deep respect for a natural order of nature that they have to follow and align with, with a splash of accelerationism but without a unified trajectory of progress. Morphs hailed gratitude and gratefulness as holy and thought that they have an imperative to utilize and exploit the gifts given to them by nature as much as possible.
The Cyborgic Inbetween
There was however, a third albeit less popular option, the Boddhisatvan path of the cyborgs. Although most often associated with the mechs, the cyborgs saw themselves as philosophically misaligned with them and sought their own cultural sovereignty. Some where more morph-leaning while others where mech-leaning, but they always existed in a liminal space between the two, always vilified by either side. Morphs saw the project of hybridization as indistinguishable from mechanization.
The mechs on the other side, with their strong conviction in Cartesian dualism, saw consiosuness as trappped in opressive biological material, a prison made of tissue and microbial life, which they viewed with disgust and contempt. The mechs used the early millenium game Scorn as an example of how this cyborgic biomechanical merging can go terribly wrong and thus scornfully psychoanalyzed cyborgs as existentially confused. The most sympathetic ones approached them as fellows in the quest of salvation, while the least sympathetic ones would see them as fearful cowards who cannot let go of their fleshy existance and transcend.
The weirdest form of convergence between the two was in the practice of genetic control. Eugenics saw something of a revival in Urania and especially in San Francisco but it meant something quite different from its traditional sense. The new hot thing was Plurigenics which was not in the service of replicating the one and best human race, but of producing the most interesting humans possible. Just imagine post-modern thought and powerfull genetic engineering technologies merging together. The result is a controlled form of diversity pre-defined by birth. What were once thought of as mental pathologies, neuroatypicalities, mutations and health complications where now sought after rather than elliminated.
This was usually the case except from a neo-reactionary cult that sought to "bring good old eugenics back". These where the Apostates and they preached that a perfect human exists, it is well-defined and it should be replicated as a monoculture. Despite their fringe and often militant attitude, the Apostates had a substantial following, a great deal of capital and assets and friends in high places. They tried to conspire against this degenerate world of Urania and built a more perfect Urania but they didn't do so in private. Everybody knew what they where all about, it was no secret. This I suspect, was also their allure and inevitably the cause of their failure [TBC - Apostate Lore]
Uranian Economics
The economy of Urania was probably its most innovative part and arguably, the infrastructure that enabled the fostering of its unrelentling craziness. Urania had managed to build a legitimate decentralized alternative to a state-controlled economy. It was the wet dream of both Friedman and Bakunin. Uranian economy embraced Konkianism, a political and economic philosophy that sought to liberate itself from state control through counter-economics. In Urania almost all economic relations where of that sort, they where anarchic, market-based and mostly local. This was made possible because the national goverment of the Californian Republic essentially pushed the self-destruct button paving the way towards an anarcho-capitalist transfer of power. But this was much different than what capitalists intially expected; central banks where no longer there to bailout the ultra-rich or to reduced risk of offshore investements as was the case during the reign of post-Reagan economics. Thus, Urania also triggered a resonance cascade that pushed the globally homogenizing neoliberal era of history to self-implode. Now the world had to deal with a different beast; the economic fragmentation of the earth's surface, an incromprehesible neomedieval patchwork of incommensurable forms of valuation and currency. Urania has been building the economic Tower of Babel, trying to one-man God, but the outcome was the splitting into millions of economic languages.
Uranian economics had reached the state of monetary post-modernity where the big narratives of the dominance of the dollar and the gold standard where shattered through financial irony. "The Dollar is dead, and we have killed it", was the motto of Uranian economists who sought increasing economic diversity and the understanding of financial "otherness", thus bringing an end to the monotheism of the fiat currency.
Hyperfast Money
Urania is a fractal patchwork of monetary experiments but some habits are hard to kill. There was of course the Cali Dollar, a superstable cryptocurrency which was issued by the Cali Central Bank but its own value was merely a background hedge in order to support a wild range of hyperlocal currencies. Most of them functioned on an economics of high demurrage where money lost value the more it is stored. This made the speed of spending and exchange very high.
One early experiment was the Zap currency applied in Singaporean Urania where the currency had such high demurrage that it would have to be spent in seconds otherwise it would already lose its value. A supporting infrastructure of high-frequency trade was built through a brain-machine interface device that leveraged dopaminergic choice prediction neural responses. The users would just go to a storefront and purchases would be automatically made for them just by mere gaze. A more extreme platform was built where the wallets of passer by on the street would be automatically scanned and creditted while in close proximity. This led to very interesting resultss where users have constantly flexible inventories of titles of goods they could exchange or redeem at any point and users always had exactly what they wanted. What this also led to however was the hoarding of titles which the users would exchange in parallel markets which made a lot of them not being redeemable. This was solved by smart contract immediate redemptions and mailing of goods which also led to the same problem, but now with physical hoarding. That's what led to the "Great Blockade" which caused a meltdown of transport. [TBC - Great Blockade Lore]
View of History
Urania marked the end of the end of history; a post-Fukuyamian, post-hauntological come-back up of historical narrative, but without its whig interptetation. The capture of what is happening in Urania is a plural endeavour - a retrieval of the mythic - because there can be no consistent history of Urania, only tales and lore and histories plural. Progress is a bifurcating splintering where alternative potentials are welcome in a rhizomatic pataphysical accelerator called Uranian culture.
The constant dynamic flux of socioeconomic, political, intellectual and cultural progression operates at such speed that the role of the historiographer and the role of the journalist have merged together into an unholy sense-making chimera, retrieving the ancient craft of the chroniclers. If history is a record of the most interesting moments then 30 years of Uranian culture is worth the same as 1 millenium of Byzantine imperial rule.
Uranian Morality & Ethic
Uranian chronographers and cliodynamists (what we would today associate with the fields of history) call the time from the 5th all the way to the 19th century, the Epoch of Boredomination, a time where not much was happening, or things happened excruciatingly slow in Uranina terms. In fact, Uranians had developed their own special ethic based on boredom as the ultimate scapegoat. It is a sin and a moral vice to be boring for an Uranian since it is disrespetful for the others and toxic for society. Uranian morality seeks to eliminate boredom… or boring people. The constant moral struggle is to be interesting and not interesting in the sense of the old, as something worthwhile or an achiever, but interesting in the same way as a psychedelic trip on 5meo-DMT is interesting. Interesting elevated to new levels of interesting, transdentally interesting. To be interesting in the Uranian frame of mind is to be an attractor of emotioal energy, attention and also a generator of novelty and energy wherever one may be. Interesting is not even the right word especially given how in the early 21st century it became a highly condescending ironic statement "Hmm, yeah, that is defientely veeeery interesting, mm yes, indeed, yeah…". A statement like this is the Uranian version of commiting hubris. The right term to describe this is lurking at the overlapping semantic space beteeen intriguing, complex, mutlifaceted, novel, experimental, bold, shocking, awe-provoking and ecstatic. Take all these together and you have the Uranian Ethic.
Everything in Urania dribbles in the contempt of ennui. Only the most normal are marginalized. There is no center, only limits. But this doesn;t mean that there are is no reaction to this ethic. On the conrary, many Uranina intellectuals have criticized this mentality of constant performance and some others have created spaces for slowing down, against the erratic flow of the Uranian river. Neobuddhists and decelerationists and the like, all tried to slow down. Some have even tried to bring a nuanced response which still attempts to see the intirgue into the oridinary, the slow and the boring and to cultivate the ability to withstand an unstimulated and unernergetic state.
If the dominant archetype of the Facebook era Silicon Vallue, was the nerdy technocrat-enterpreneur, then the archetype of the Uranian Bohemian Fields was the memetic poet. Some quickly realized by studying the paterns of the likes of Kanye West and Elon Musk that the generation of emotional energy and the acquisition of cultural capital was the most subtle and potent form of power. Finanical capital in the form of net worth, or social capital in the form of status, were illiquid tranductions of one-dimensional value forms but cultural and memetic capital operated on a logic of abundant derivation and convexity.
Although engineering was at its peak, it was the artist that dominated the world of power and fame. Class conflict became mutlidimensional and complex with art fractally condenxing the fight between a creative burgeoise and a hopeless artist precariat.
Work and Livelihood
In the 2060's the retrospective gaze of archivalists, the corporate vectorwave culture of LinkedIn is seens in the same way that the 2010's saw the royal courts of the the 17th century. It is seen as such an artifact. The cult of seriousness has been replaced by the cult of irony. It is only the punky freak that would get a job in the Uranian job market and stuff like banking were considered blue collar jobs. Being a human bureacrat was despicable even for the mechs.
~Hermes Corp
> Urania, the City of Hubris
The (Elusive) Essence of Urania
Urania was a so called hyper-state, a strange loop, a weird paradoxical country that was controlled by no-one in particular, no dictator, no oligarchy, no party or cult. It was held together by a strong distributed conviction in the most religiously secular vision of Transhumanism.
Urania was both ethereal and localized. It's physical manifestation was mostly in the coast of California, which shortly after its separation from the US rebranded itself as the central physical hub of Urania. But it was also the first and most potent network state, with nodes across the world, in South Europe, East Asia, Central and South Africa, a weird triangulation of the worlds new emerging powers. But like the culture of 70's Americana, Uranian culture soon spread everywhere, a distributed societal infrastructure with the power to draw lines freely between borders, places and brains.
Urania was a weird mix of the most radical tendencies of each side of the political spectrum and an attractor for the weirdest and most unhinged people. It had managed to hack law in a way so that it couldn't apply to it. Everything and every place Urania touched turned into organized chaos. "Inside" Urania, if such a topological description ever made sense to apply to it, a chaotic mix of hyper-left anarchy, post-neoliberal capitalism and common ownership reigned. The bureaucratic structure of the nation was replaced by the dynamism of markets, albeit not in the forms that where popular before the rise of decentralized finance.
Urania was at times incomprehensible, at others completely predictable. But one thing was sure; it was definitely interesting. In fact, the unending quest for "the most interesting" became such a crucial part of the ethos of its youth that all other forms of morality where left aside. The youth culture of Urania was possessed by the allure of a Kierkegaardian aesthetic life.
Art in Urania was almost synonymous with life. There is no aspect of everyday existence that was not transformed by art in its most subversive avant-garde forms. Antonin Artaud would have envied living in the state of Urania for a day.
Imagine Hieronymus Bosh's painting "The garden of Earthly Delights". The middle is the perfect example of Urania. It has managed to stay away from the two poles of heaven and hell and instead embraced the "Earthly Delights" in their fullness, materiality elevated to a higher moral ground, sacred decadence.
Uranian Life and Society
Legal Institutions
The institutional structures of Urania were a prank solidified in bureacratic code. It had a grand council of Elders, all in their thirties, all having taken a vow of eternal unemployment. All institutional action become a form of play with legal legos.
But its most interesting legal innovation was at the "outside". In international law, Urania was a word at times synonymous with asylum and at other as a port. Urania shieled its citizens in an non-intrusible bublle of radical liberty and legitimacy that was hard to pierce. It created a membrane that protected all its citizens and gave them the power to negotiate its own terms in international affairs in a powerful manner.
It's legitimacy originated from its unquestionable technical leverage in terms of hacking power and being an attractor for highly intelligent people. Hacker-engineers have been the decentralized soldiers of Urania, forming a post-national militia and they where heavily compensated for doing so. Who needs guns when you can turn the enemy's guns against them?
Researchers and scholars from all over the world also naturally preferred the low-cost high gain education of Urania which was mostly open-sourced, free and unconditional. Education was not based on institutions but on research networks and it became indistinguishable from research. Education was participatory in Urania. Everybody did their due.
Science
The biggest strenght of Urania was its techno-scientific prowess. It mastered the Baconian view of a science aimed at dominating nature and enforcing humankind's will onto it. Science was in the service of technology and technology was in the service of trancedence.
Urania had mastered genetic engineering and morphological alteration technologies. In the same time it had mastered the link between human neuronal systems and computational media. In science these approaches often complemented each other, but in society they had led to differing kinds of human beings that often saw themselves oppositionally even as different species from the rest. Thus raged the culture war between the morphs and the mechs.
Poltics and Conflict
Uranian poltics and poltiical opposotions were about the body. Morphs argued for the virtues of bio-centric extensionism and enacted it by experimenting with the body schema, seeing the body as a fluid and plastic locus of design. They espoused materiality and embodiment sometimes venturing into a weird religion of the flesh.
In contrast, the Mechs saw the human body as obsolete and attempted to replace parts of its functions or extend with shinny new gadgets that often afforded them with superpowers. They sought a full merging with machines, either by trying to put machines into them or by trying to put themselves into machines.
The antagonism between the two often led to extreme modifications that at certain cases caused a lot of suffering to their bearer and at others opened-up an unexplored new territories of pleasurable human experience and new possibilities in perceiving and interacting with the world. New senses, new sensations, a new expanded map of conscious experience on both fronts.
The Techno-culture War
Mechs vs Morphs
The two sides of the "technoculture war" were driven by deep philosophical and spiritual convictions. The Mechs were advocates a view of the world as an evolutionary history reminiscent of an exponential curve leading to an inevitable climax at which point, all will be saved from corporeal suffering. It was a mixture of quasi-Christian soteriology, a cosmology and ethics based on final eternal salvation, with a scientific worldview of cosmic evolution, where matter had a tendency to evolve into greater degrees of complexity and higher-orders of ordering.
In the meanwhile, the Morph version of history looked circular rather than linear, or more precicely, a vortex. For Morphs, there is no end point of history since it tends to repeat itself and there is but experience. But this experience can be hacked and engineered in order to reach a higher degree of presence in the here and now. The ethics and cosmology of the Mechs was more akin to Buddhism or Stoicism, with a deep respect for a natural order of nature that they have to follow and align with, with a splash of accelerationism but without a unified trajectory of progress. Morphs hailed gratitude and gratefulness as holy and thought that they have an imperative to utilize and exploit the gifts given to them by nature as much as possible.
The Cyborgic Inbetween
There was however, a third albeit less popular option, the Boddhisatvan path of the cyborgs. Although most often associated with the mechs, the cyborgs saw themselves as philosophically misaligned with them and sought their own cultural sovereignty. Some where more morph-leaning while others where mech-leaning, but they always existed in a liminal space between the two, always vilified by either side. Morphs saw the project of hybridization as indistinguishable from mechanization.
The mechs on the other side, with their strong conviction in Cartesian dualism, saw consiosuness as trappped in opressive biological material, a prison made of tissue and microbial life, which they viewed with disgust and contempt. The mechs used the early millenium game Scorn as an example of how this cyborgic biomechanical merging can go terribly wrong and thus scornfully psychoanalyzed cyborgs as existentially confused. The most sympathetic ones approached them as fellows in the quest of salvation, while the least sympathetic ones would see them as fearful cowards who cannot let go of their fleshy existance and transcend.
The weirdest form of convergence between the two was in the practice of genetic control. Eugenics saw something of a revival in Urania and especially in San Francisco but it meant something quite different from its traditional sense. The new hot thing was Plurigenics which was not in the service of replicating the one and best human race, but of producing the most interesting humans possible. Just imagine post-modern thought and powerfull genetic engineering technologies merging together. The result is a controlled form of diversity pre-defined by birth. What were once thought of as mental pathologies, neuroatypicalities, mutations and health complications where now sought after rather than elliminated.
This was usually the case except from a neo-reactionary cult that sought to "bring good old eugenics back". These where the Apostates and they preached that a perfect human exists, it is well-defined and it should be replicated as a monoculture. Despite their fringe and often militant attitude, the Apostates had a substantial following, a great deal of capital and assets and friends in high places. They tried to conspire against this degenerate world of Urania and built a more perfect Urania but they didn't do so in private. Everybody knew what they where all about, it was no secret. This I suspect, was also their allure and inevitably the cause of their failure [TBC - Apostate Lore]
Uranian Economics
The economy of Urania was probably its most innovative part and arguably, the infrastructure that enabled the fostering of its unrelentling craziness. Urania had managed to build a legitimate decentralized alternative to a state-controlled economy. It was the wet dream of both Friedman and Bakunin. Uranian economy embraced Konkianism, a political and economic philosophy that sought to liberate itself from state control through counter-economics. In Urania almost all economic relations where of that sort, they where anarchic, market-based and mostly local. This was made possible because the national goverment of the Californian Republic essentially pushed the self-destruct button paving the way towards an anarcho-capitalist transfer of power. But this was much different than what capitalists intially expected; central banks where no longer there to bailout the ultra-rich or to reduced risk of offshore investements as was the case during the reign of post-Reagan economics. Thus, Urania also triggered a resonance cascade that pushed the globally homogenizing neoliberal era of history to self-implode. Now the world had to deal with a different beast; the economic fragmentation of the earth's surface, an incromprehesible neomedieval patchwork of incommensurable forms of valuation and currency. Urania has been building the economic Tower of Babel, trying to one-man God, but the outcome was the splitting into millions of economic languages.
Uranian economics had reached the state of monetary post-modernity where the big narratives of the dominance of the dollar and the gold standard where shattered through financial irony. "The Dollar is dead, and we have killed it", was the motto of Uranian economists who sought increasing economic diversity and the understanding of financial "otherness", thus bringing an end to the monotheism of the fiat currency.
Hyperfast Money
Urania is a fractal patchwork of monetary experiments but some habits are hard to kill. There was of course the Cali Dollar, a superstable cryptocurrency which was issued by the Cali Central Bank but its own value was merely a background hedge in order to support a wild range of hyperlocal currencies. Most of them functioned on an economics of high demurrage where money lost value the more it is stored. This made the speed of spending and exchange very high.
One early experiment was the Zap currency applied in Singaporean Urania where the currency had such high demurrage that it would have to be spent in seconds otherwise it would already lose its value. A supporting infrastructure of high-frequency trade was built through a brain-machine interface device that leveraged dopaminergic choice prediction neural responses. The users would just go to a storefront and purchases would be automatically made for them just by mere gaze. A more extreme platform was built where the wallets of passer by on the street would be automatically scanned and creditted while in close proximity. This led to very interesting resultss where users have constantly flexible inventories of titles of goods they could exchange or redeem at any point and users always had exactly what they wanted. What this also led to however was the hoarding of titles which the users would exchange in parallel markets which made a lot of them not being redeemable. This was solved by smart contract immediate redemptions and mailing of goods which also led to the same problem, but now with physical hoarding. That's what led to the "Great Blockade" which caused a meltdown of transport. [TBC - Great Blockade Lore]
View of History
Urania marked the end of the end of history; a post-Fukuyamian, post-hauntological come-back up of historical narrative, but without its whig interptetation. The capture of what is happening in Urania is a plural endeavour - a retrieval of the mythic - because there can be no consistent history of Urania, only tales and lore and histories plural. Progress is a bifurcating splintering where alternative potentials are welcome in a rhizomatic pataphysical accelerator called Uranian culture.
The constant dynamic flux of socioeconomic, political, intellectual and cultural progression operates at such speed that the role of the historiographer and the role of the journalist have merged together into an unholy sense-making chimera, retrieving the ancient craft of the chroniclers. If history is a record of the most interesting moments then 30 years of Uranian culture is worth the same as 1 millenium of Byzantine imperial rule.
Uranian Morality & Ethic
Uranian chronographers and cliodynamists (what we would today associate with the fields of history) call the time from the 5th all the way to the 19th century, the Epoch of Boredomination, a time where not much was happening, or things happened excruciatingly slow in Uranina terms. In fact, Uranians had developed their own special ethic based on boredom as the ultimate scapegoat. It is a sin and a moral vice to be boring for an Uranian since it is disrespetful for the others and toxic for society. Uranian morality seeks to eliminate boredom… or boring people. The constant moral struggle is to be interesting and not interesting in the sense of the old, as something worthwhile or an achiever, but interesting in the same way as a psychedelic trip on 5meo-DMT is interesting. Interesting elevated to new levels of interesting, transdentally interesting. To be interesting in the Uranian frame of mind is to be an attractor of emotioal energy, attention and also a generator of novelty and energy wherever one may be. Interesting is not even the right word especially given how in the early 21st century it became a highly condescending ironic statement "Hmm, yeah, that is defientely veeeery interesting, mm yes, indeed, yeah…". A statement like this is the Uranian version of commiting hubris. The right term to describe this is lurking at the overlapping semantic space beteeen intriguing, complex, mutlifaceted, novel, experimental, bold, shocking, awe-provoking and ecstatic. Take all these together and you have the Uranian Ethic.
Everything in Urania dribbles in the contempt of ennui. Only the most normal are marginalized. There is no center, only limits. But this doesn;t mean that there are is no reaction to this ethic. On the conrary, many Uranina intellectuals have criticized this mentality of constant performance and some others have created spaces for slowing down, against the erratic flow of the Uranian river. Neobuddhists and decelerationists and the like, all tried to slow down. Some have even tried to bring a nuanced response which still attempts to see the intirgue into the oridinary, the slow and the boring and to cultivate the ability to withstand an unstimulated and unernergetic state.
Art, Media and Consumable Culture
If the dominant archetype of the Facebook era Silicon Vallue, was the nerdy technocrat-enterpreneur, then the archetype of the Uranian Bohemian Fields was the memetic poet. Some quickly realized by studying the paterns of the likes of Kanye West and Elon Musk that the generation of emotional energy and the acquisition of cultural capital was the most subtle and potent form of power. Finanical capital in the form of net worth, or social capital in the form of status, were illiquid tranductions of one-dimensional value forms but cultural and memetic capital operated on a logic of abundant derivation and convexity.
Although engineering was at its peak, it was the artist that dominated the world of power and fame. Class conflict became mutlidimensional and complex with art fractally condenxing the fight between a creative burgeoise and a hopeless artist precariat.
Work and Livelihood
In the 2060's the retrospective gaze of archivalists, the corporate vectorwave culture of LinkedIn is seens in the same way that the 2010's saw the royal courts of the the 17th century. It is seen as such an artifact. The cult of seriousness has been replaced by the cult of irony. It is only the punky freak that would get a job in the Uranian job market and stuff like banking were considered blue collar jobs. Being a human bureacrat was despicable even for the mechs.
~Hermes Corp