The Ccru and Zii-Catcherism and "UNORIGINAL," the word-concept
SO my plan was to write about the stock market today, or more accurately complain about the stock market, but I think I don’t actually want to do that today.
Wait, except a little bit, which is just to repeat a thing I’ve already said: stock market money is fake ghost money that doesn’t really exist.
There is much, much much much more to write/complain about it than that, but that’s a starting point for complaining about quote-unquote “capitalism,” which is of course much more complex than just “fake ghost stock market money.”
INSTEAD I’m going to write a bit about the fake religion my friends were trying to make up when we were in high school, and also about the Ccru or CCRU, whichever.
I wrote a lot about the fake-religion thing over the course of the last year, but I was mostly writing about it from a very “memoir-ish” standpoint, and also I was writing about it from a sort of armchair-psychology standpoint.
(I don’t know what else to call it other than armchair-psychology. I only know a veritable teaspoonful of “facts” about psychology from a cognitive or neuroscience perspective, but I tried to make every bit of that teaspoonful of knowledge count toward all the shit I was writing/complaining about in that fake-religion memoir-writing.)
The fake religion was called The Zii Catcherists Peoples Temple. In my memoir-writing, I explained exactly where that name came from, who made it up and why he used those words specifically, I explained about how the nickname of the religion was “Zia” and why that was the nickname and what the symbols of the fake religion looked like, and who made up the symbols and why.
There were many facets of Zii-Catcherism, which is because there were a bunch of people who sort of went their separate ways right after high school and then had different ideas about what they were going to “do” with it.
Some of the people involved were interested in political conspiracies. In fact, the very earliest and most prominent members were interested in political conspiracies—which is where the first seeds of the idea for Zii-Catcherism even came from. I was not “hanging out” with them at that time, but I know extensively about those “early days” because one of those guys was Jeff, who is the life-partner who lives in my house and also usually cooks dinner around here due to how I hate cooking.
The “armchair psychology” stuff in the memoir-writing was about how everyone who was “seriously” involved in the endeavor met certain criteria that’s kind of difficult to explain or nail down without going into a bunch of possibly boring-seeming theories about behavior or “mental illness” -type stuff and do I even believe in mental illness, and also, is there a clinical style definition of “creativity” and if so, what is it?
I really “got into” all that stuff in the writing. Some of it was good and I might recycle it here in this here blog-thing. Some of it was bad, because I wanted to delve very deeply and meticulously into things that “happened to me” or things that people “said to me” and how and why they created this problem/mood/situation or whatever.
So, I kept getting into these kind of “gossipy” scenes, in the writing, which I maintain I was doing in order to create these kinds of “case studies” that were based on weird shit my friends were doing and saying way back when we were in high school. Some of that stuff was sort-of useful or good examples of the thing I was trying to explain, and some of it probably wasn’t, but ultimately it made me feel bad to write it.
I let a particular one of my friends read it, and it made me feel bad to know he was reading it, because it made me feel bad to think about him reading this stuff I had written about him that was a little bit…petty-seeming, once any context was removed. And here’s the thing—
His comments to me about the writing largely seemed to indicate that he had nothing to say about any of the context. Like, either it went completely over his head, or he didn’t care about it, or else the petty-seeming stuff just largely overshadowed it.
Well, whatever the reason, I thought to myself—I don’t want to publicly share something that is just going to hurt or annoy my friends. Granted, that writing is “public,” but it’s currently difficult to find unless I send you the link. And pretty soon, I’m going to make it un-public.
But then, I thought, it’s not entirely because I don’t want to hurt or annoy my friends. It is partly but…there’s a lot more.
Now, I’m going to do something that will seem like I’m “badmouthing” Zii-Catcherism, because I’m going to call it—or at least some of it—sort of unoriginal.
I’m doing that because the word “unoriginal” descended upon my psyche this morning and even though that’s not like a super-complicated or esoteric word-concept, it was like I had been looking through my brain for that word for years and years.
“Unoriginal” is at least one of the reasons why I eventually became semi-disenchanted with Zii-Catcherism; I realized that it was the argument I was trying to make against it since I was in my very-early 20’s and learned about stuff like—the church of the Subgenius, or later, the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or even just the plot of Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle,” and I eventually realized that it wasn’t entirely extra-super original to want to make up a fake religion, and that my friends weren’t that cool or unique after all.
There were many pieces and parts of how I came to realize this. I would say that first, I did realize that my friends were kind of unique and original. That’s the part that was very relevant to all that armchair-psychology thing I keep trying to illustrate; there are certain features/attributes of very creative or very gifted or very talented people which can make them fairly unique and can make them produce fairly original stuff.
But the keyword there is “fairly.” These guys were pretty unique. They were coming up with fairly original shit. But then, here’s the thing—I went on to meet more and more people who were also unique and who were also coming up with fairly original shit, and some of them were quote-unquote “successful,” and more and most and many of them were not successful.
When I say “successful” that can mean several things, of course, especially when we’re talkin about it within quote-unquote “capitalism,” but it should be at least partly obvious that these were not the sorts of people who care about that, entirely. I mean, they care about it only insomuch that they can sometimes eat food and sometimes sleep in a bed that is inside a secure enclosure that also has electricity and plumbing.
(SO there, I could elaborate on capitalism, but I’m not going to. I’m holding off. One of the main things that is “wrong” with my writing is that I do not always resist the urge to hold off on elaborating. )
Another thing I recognized was that the different groups of my friends had very different ideas about why they were making up a “fake religion,” and I recognized that I identified a lot better with the first group, who genuinely wanted to make up nonsense as a kind of joke/art project. They were not taking it very seriously.
Another group of these friends was eventually taking it quite seriously.
So, I do think the very first parts of Zii-Catcherism were sort of original, but it was a thin and flimsy archive of original stuff. Then, it just got kind of…I don’t know. Well, unoriginal. Like, trying to come up with actual doctrines or an actual storyline for a fake religion is like, well… unoriginal.
Here’s just one reason why I think that: because I grew up Mormon, and Mormonism is a fake religion. It was, in fact, completely made-up by this guy named Joseph Smith, who made up a book that he claimed was shown to him by an angel, but in fact he definitely made it up, a book that could be said to have been the first science fiction books ever written, and it was kind of a crazy book in a lot of ways, but it was mostly wacky and not very interesting to read, which I know because I was forced to read it as a child.
In fact, from an “interesting and full of actual useful object lessons” standpoint, compared to the Old Testament, the Book of Mormon fucking sucks.
So, now I’m going to write about the CCRU which is sometimes expressed as Ccru, which was an organization of smart college guys (and ladies okay I am using “guys” as a gender neutral term Again sheesh) and these guys were English and they attended or else taught at Warwick University and they formed this organization to talk about technology and global economics and philosophy and stuff, and then the organization went off the fucking rails.
In essence, it went off the rails at first because they started doing these bizarre things like, sponsoring events that were supposed to have speakers and discussions, and the events turned into crazy poetry-reading-esque people-lying-on-the-floor and rambling about disjointed weirdness subjects which alienated a lot of the “Marxists” in attendance who thought they were coming to have “real” academic-style discussions about issues or whatever.
Then it seems to have gone off the rails even more.
Wait but before I elaborate on how/when it “went off the rails,” I just want to point out that this organization included this one guy named Nick Land, who I might have already written about a little bit. The main thing I’m going to say about Nick Land is that he is divisive and famously alienating.
Those descriptors would also describe a couple of guys who were involved in the Zii-Catcherists Peoples Temple, who never got in any way “famous” or even “known” in any way, which is a very good thing.
Part of why I don’t want to write too publicly about the Zii-Catcherists Peoples Temple is in fact because I do have this tiny little grain of fear that one of these gentlemen could achieve some kind of notoriety in any way, and…he does not want that. He is a loaf of shit, in many ways, sometimes I hate his fucking guts, but he is my friend.
Sorry. True. Sorry.
Like, part of me would be perfectly eager to talk about Zia all day long, if only for vindictive reasons, but then I think…I guess I don’t want to “ruin” or “piss off” my friends. I guess. And because of so-called “Call out” culture or “Cancel” culture, in my mind, there is no way to talk about Zii-Catcherism in any way that doesn’t veer into potentially “dangerous” territory.
Well when I wrote about the Zii-Catcherists Peoples Temple, I wrote srsly like a boatload of badmouth crap about my loaf-of-shit friend and his character, because he’s…well…he’s one of those “friends” that you actually kind of hate.
You know, he’s a frenemy.
I don’t want to “take him down.” I do, however, want to complain about him a lot.
So, it turns out, based on the writing I did, I want to complain about all my friends a lot—or at least, I want to complain about some of the stuff they did/said in high school.
But that’s just catharsis writing. It’s not helpful to anyone; in many cases it’s not interesting to anyone, (in other cases, it is interesting, because a lot of people are interested in hearing all about other peoples’ drama-business, but—)
…in essence, I thought what is the purpose of writing this kind of writing?
I do happen to know that some writers kinda look down their noses at some memoirists because of exactly what I just said—this notion that memoir is really just a lot of airing-of-grievances and/or talking a bunch of shit about your friends and family, and where’s the integrity in that?
Well, here’s the potential “integrity” — if the memoir-writing is full of relatable shit that makes people go “aha I’m not the only one like this!” or also if it’s full of unrelatable shit that makes people go “aha other people have had different experiences than me!” or if it’s just full of a mix of relatable/unrelatable shit that makes people go “aha what an interesting take on subjects I actually didn’t know anything about, I now feel more informed about stuff and people and situations.”
So, I guess that last thing was what I was hoping to do.
Oh but I was writing about the CCRU, or Ccru.
SO, they kind of went off the fucking rails, as I was saying. They did this in a number of ways.
Wait but I was also saying that Nick Land was kind of a famously alienating figure. Another thing about Nick Land is that he was heavily involved in this theoretical/maybe real thing called “Accelerationism,” which is kind of this idea that “The only way out of Capitalism is through it;” which they believe because Capitalism has become so pervasive and so thoroughly ever-present in every single aspect of human life in this day and age that the only way to actually destroy Capitalism is to encourage it to grow and flourish to the point where it kind of blows up and/or wears itself out.
To a certain extent, I sort of believe this, too. Kind of. Sometimes. In a way.
Nick Land believed/believes that Capitalism has never really reached its full potential, because politics/governments are always holding it back with all this pesky regulation. This is part of where he gets alienating, (there are many places where he gets alienating), because Nick Land essentially seemed/seems to feel like Capitalism should be allowed to be so totally unregulated that it becomes an insane kind of behomith-ish monstrosity thing where governments are totally run by corporations, and also, he believed/believes that we are headed for a kind of singularity, which has already sort of happened anyway, where everything is controlled by/related to/heavily enmeshed within technology and stuff.
And I guess (?) he feels that this is good.
Or maybe more accurately, he feels that this is beyond our control, so we might as well just kinda live with it and figure out how to work with it.
SO here’s yet another thing about Nick Land, which I figured out from the Ccru’s website, which looks like it was probably made in like 2003 or something, and probably was made thereabouts: he seems to have been into writing this like, not-very-good science fiction/sort of cyberpunk-fiction, that was very William Gibson-ish, if William Gibson had not had any talent as an engaging writer.
I mean—look, it was competent writing, but it was, ahem, not at all engaging, from a “story” standpoint. And, admittedly I guess I say that as a person who used to write shitty science fiction for a living; I mean, it used to be my actual job. I wrote science fiction within established universes that had been invented by someone else; I mean—universes that came from TV shows or Comic Books. It’s a real genre, and it’s called “media tie-in fiction,” and it’s largely dead now because of the internet, which enabled this stuff called “fan fiction” to flourish and then that made media tie-in novels go almost extinct, because less and less people were likely to buy them.
I wrote that shit when it was on its last gasp, and then I lost that job because Simon and Schuster absolutely gutted its media tie-in fiction department at the end of 2008, and my editor got laid off, which happened just a few months before my then-husband declared that he did not want to be married to me anymore, but that’s a whole other story, isn’t it?
So, my shitty science fiction was really shitty, but it was readable. I wrote books that were featured on grocery store displays and in airport giftshops; I only had a medium-amount of creative control over most of it, and there were other reasons why it was not really very “good.” BUT the number one rule, according to my editor, was that it had to be engaging to a broad audience. I mean, I might spend three or four or seven entire whole days writing a poignant scene that I thought came out beautifully, and then I was told I had to cut the whole thing out because it just wasn’t exciting or interesting enough.
(That’s what content editors are supposed to do. I know that. I wasn’t ever mad about it, I’m just sayin’ —it absolutely didn’t matter if the writing was “beautiful” or not. “Nice” writing was not the point.)
(Anyway, my editor got laid off in the aforementioned Simon and Schuster gutting of 2008, and I felt really bad because he was super nice, and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of all these established sci-fi universes, but it’s okay because he now works for a slightly better-reputationed sci-fi publisher and I’m very glad for him. But that ain’t anything that can help me, because here’s the deal—I don’t want to write sci-fi. I never wanted to write it, I didn’t really enjoy writing it, it was just a paycheck to me.)
(I want to write essays and rants. I wish I could somehow get a paycheck for that. Fuckin’ Fran Lebowitz, a high school dropout, better appreciate how goddamn lucky she was to get to do that for her job, probably just because she hung out with fuckin’ Andy Warhol who seemed to have some weird ability to make all of his friends either famous, or dead of drug overdoses.)
Okay, but back to Nick Land and the Ccru. Enough about me. What is this, a memoir?
RIGHT so, according to this incredibly excruciatingly long Guardian article about Accelerationism and the Ccru (or CCRU),
“There they drifted from accelerationism into a vortex of more old-fashioned esoteric ideas, drawn from the occult, numerology, the fathomless novels of the American horror writer HP Lovecraft, and the life of the English mystic Aleister Crowley, who had been born in Leamington, in a cavernous terraced house which several CCRU members moved into.
“The CCRU became quasi-cultish, quasi-religious,” says Mackay. “I left before it descended into sheer madness.” Two of the unit’s key texts had always been the Joseph Conrad novel Heart of Darkness and its film adaptation, Apocalypse Now, which made collecting followers and withdrawing from the world and from conventional sanity seem lethally glamorous. In their top-floor room, Land and his students drew occult diagrams on the walls.”
So, it was that passage in that Guardian article that made me go, “Oh my god, the Ccru was essentially an overeducated upper-crusty semi-respectable version of The Zii-Catcherists Peoples Temple.”
I guess a huge part of what caused me to feel that way was…(well there were several huge parts) but…certain pages on their website.
Their website looks like something Zii-Catcherists would have put together if they’d been just a little bit more motivated to…put things together.
I mean, the Ccru came up with completely different stuff as compared to Zii-Catcherists, in no small part because the Ccru were actually educated, and most Zii-Catcherists were these kind of hyper-smart but hyper-unmotivated emotionally damaged dumbfucks who mostly did very poorly in traditional school settings. Many of us (including me!) dropped out of high school, and either got their GED certificates or else…just never got a diploma of any kind.
So, my point is—there are little pockets of people like this all over the world, at any given time. Some of them will go on to do interesting shit that somehow accidentally becomes influential; some of them will have some kind of “success” (depending on what that word means) and some of them will just fade out and start to feel kind of resentful and regretful and depressed in their mid-forties, feeling like they “wasted” their “potential” but they don’t exactly know what they should have done differently— (guess how I know that might happen?)
BUT THEY SHOULDN’T FEEL THAT WAY!
I have nothing to back that up, sorry. I just think they shouldn’t feel that way, because I think I shouldn’t feel that way, and
I don’t know what else to say about it.
I guess this still taps into my recent accidental “discovery” of the writings of Mark Fisher, who was a member of the Ccru, and who committed suicide in 2017, and as I was investigating some stuff about Mark Fisher I realized with this push of horror “Oh, he would have been a Zii-Catcherist if he had only met us at the right time,” (I mean aside from the fact that we would have been too dirtbaggy for him to have anything to do with),
…but Zii-Catcherism was never helpful to any of us, so he was a lot better off being what he was, instead of being a Zii-Catcherist, and he still committed suicide. In other words, the Ccru wasn’t helpful to him, either.
That’s a part of what I wanted to write about, as I got going with the memoir-thing. I didn’t do a good job of expressing that anywhere in my memoir-writing, and I’m still not expressing it well now.
WAIT that sounds bad. I mean, that sounds worse than I meant it to sound. I think the main thing I meant about it was that Zii-Catcherism, or something like it, was inevitable to my group of high school friends because we felt some kind of bond that we didn’t know how to explain or express other than make ourselves into some kind of “club,” some kind of group or “fake religion” that we needed in order to try to establish ourselves as somehow independent from everyone else around. It did do us some good, at the time, (I do believe it was good! At the time!)
But in the long run, it didn’t really help us at all.
Like, look. Here’s a piece of largely uninteresting writing from the Ccru website, which was by Mark Fisher and Suzanne Livingstone, who I presume were both Ccru people, and the writing is a book review/rant including musings about economics and philosophy that quotes a Velvet Underground Song within the guts of the piece.
I only point this out because…oh I don’t know if I can explain it. Because it’s not a very good piece of writing, honest-to-god it’s not, because it’s boring and doesn’t seem to have anything useful to say, (who needs to read a book review that is this long??) and most Zii-Catcherist writing, including my own, was not very good, because it was boring and didn’t have anything useful to say, and that’s okay.
It’s okay that we were just churning out weird stuff that was useless to anyone else, because we felt semi-fulfilled while doing it.
That was the point of it.
That’s the point of me blog-writing, or writing in general. I like the act of doing it. I feel semi-fulfilled while I am doing it.
I just watched part of a bio-series about writer/humorist/accidental famous person Fran Lebowitz, and she happened to say that most people who really like writing are pretty bad at it. And I think she’s right! But I don’t think that means that they should stop writing, necessarily!
Conversely, I think, Zii-Catcherism should have stopped, probably. Like, I think it just went on too long. The only thing Zii-Catcherism is useful for anymore is as a reason for us to get together and talk about things we “used to do.”
Like, aside from it being okay that we churned out potentially bad writing or potentially alienating art because we felt fulfilled while doing it, is that it also made us feel like we were part of something, which is hugely and enormously important for human beings to be able to feel.
But I guess part of why I wrote my memoir was because I think it’s kind of problematic that any one lone Zii-Catcherist was/is still trying to create things within the realm or name Zii-Catcherism. I mean, if he wants to create things, then great! But if he wants to call those things Zii-Catcherist, then no! They are not Zii-Catcherist things!
That’s because in my interpretation, the later versions of Zii-Catcherism became so bastardized and adulterated that the original-original Zii-Catcherists, who were in no way involved with this later “late stage” Zii-Catcherism, didn’t recognize anything about it.
I mean…you know how I said that I used to be a bullshit sci-fi writer, and I wrote in other peoples’ universes, and I had medium-to-no creative control, etc.? And it was called “media tie-in” writing? And that it has been largely supplanted by the internet, because of this thing called “fan fiction” where goddamn anyone with a keyboard can just write little stories that happen in any universe they want their little stories to appear in?
OKAY, so that’s what late-stage Zii-Catcherism was/is doing.
It was media tie-in art and writing; it was fan fiction, within a universe that had been created by their friends.
There is a whole lot of nothing wrong with doing that, unless it irritates someone who was the original creator of the idea and who doesn’t like seeing their original ideas get all bastardized and distorted, which does kind of happen with actual real fan fiction sometimes, and I had to be careful when I wrote that kind of stuff “officially” because I had to adhere to certain “rules” in the “series bibles,” but thankfully my editor had an encyclopedic knowledge and would tell me anytime I nearly crossed those lines, and
within Zii-Catcherism, my original ideas were not really bastardized and distorted, but I was pissed off on behalf of my other friends, whose ideas were getting bastardized and distorted.
But I don’t know why I felt that way, since I pretty much hate all my friends, on some level.
I hate all my friends, except they’re my friends and I like them.
You know, they’re my frenemies.
Also, I’m 47 years old and pretty much my only friends are Zii-Catcherists. I don’t want to be friends with anyone else, even though I hate my friends. I mean, they’re my friends, and I like them, aside from my hatred of them, so what else am I going to do except only be friends with people I hate?
But srsly they should all just go to hell anyway, but they should also stay friends with me, because they are my only friends, after all.
And you know, the Mark Fisher/Ccru thing doesn’t really tie into any of this, except in my mind it totally somehow does even though it doesn’t, and I don’t know how to explain that, because I’m still kind of musing over it in a variety of ways, so I guess I won’t try to explain it anymore. At least, not today.
Well, I guess except—that the people in the Ccru all started fighting about Accelerationism, and that’s a large part of what split them up. And then Mark Fisher killed himself for some reason. And to my knowledge, none of them use or identify as “Ccru” anymore, and that’s good, because they shouldn’t.
Okay well bye now!