2/12/2021 COLD_FUTURES.

exe and the Virtual Exodus™ – michael uhall

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S

COLD_FUTURES.EXE
AND THE VIRTUAL
EXODUS™

1. Humor me. Let’s explore further the possibility of

vaporwave as an organic, highly speculative mode of political
theory. I say “further” because a number of people already
noticed that vaporwave seems to be doing something
political. Exactly what that something is still remains to be
seen. Perhaps it will never be fully visible. In a few in uential

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articles for Dummy magazine, music critic Adam Harper

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
kicked o critical commentary on the aesthetic, arguing that
vaporwave is marked primarily by its (“potentially”)
accelerationist, anti-capitalist thrust. He later came to
acknowledge that, probably like most aesthetic modes of
production, vaporwave can do lots of di erent things – the
hazy optimism preferred by INTERNET CLUB, for example.
Pursuing some of these ideas di erently, fredricjameson420
pursues the idea of vaporwave as a form of “Marxist
plunderphonics” more directly, writing: “Vaporwave is a lie
put into musical form. It is the sound of the evaporated
American Dream, manifest destiny, corporate identity, the
sound of the future as described by a venture capitalist in
1989. It is an emphatic nothing, or a pointedly meaningless
something, a reclamation of the corporate and the soulless
into a compelling audible satire.” In the rst monograph on
vaporwave of which I’m aware, Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave
and the Commodi cation of Ghosts, Grafton Tanner
emphasizes the fundamental ambiguity animating
vaporwave. On the one hand, yes, the vaporwave aesthetic
drags the ambient conditions of late capitalism into the
foreground, forcing the consumer subject to confront the
blandly terrifying promises of neoliberal ideology. On the
other hand, Tanner spends too much time ventriloquizing
Neil Postman, comparing the anonymous, hypermediated
spaces of vaporwave’s self-articulation to immunitarian
screens intended to ward o the real (“We are all becoming
cultural hikikomori, more concerned with staying within the
cocoon of our media fortresses and terri ed of the larger
world and its exploits” [69]).

“HOME” - Resonance

2. Let’s turn to methodology. Imagine this: rather than taking

shape as a mere con uence of accidental features, a given
mode of aesthetic production organizes itself around a
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speci c, purely immanent problem. If this is true, then the

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
repetitive production that characterizes each mode is
necessarily generative. Why? In generating token instances,
the production process introduces di erences that de ne
and manifest the underlying problem. Each token instance is
like a key that gets crafted – but, signi cantly, before the lock
it opens is even designed. As a mode matures, the problem it
poses becomes relatively accessible. Considered in this way,
every mode of aesthetic production poses a problem, and
each token instance of a given mode constitutes an attempt
to solve that problem. The twist is that the problem posed
only becomes visible after numerous solutions get
formulated. Indeed, it’s by means of the heuristic provided
by numerous solution attempts that the problem posed even
appears in the rst place. No token instance can “solve” an
aesthetic mode of production, but the problem each mode
poses exists at an entirely di erent scale than any of its
token instances. The meaning of token instances is always
only referential.

“不協和音 Dissonance” - iacon

3. Vaporwave refers to a speci c mode of aesthetic

production originating in the early 2010s. And it was three
years late: usually it takes only seven years before a missing
person is declared dead. Aural tropes include extreme
reliance upon distorted samples of popular ballads,
incidental music, and repetitious looping, as well as
incursions of commercials and various forms of sonic
entropy, while visual motifs include classical statuary,
idealized commercial or tropical locales, neon or pastel
planar backgrounds, and paratextual deployments of
advertisements, Asian logograms, and vintage operating
system iconographies. Tone varies from the delirious to the
narcotic, sometimes resembling the “chopped and screwed”
style, while mood shifts from the dreamily optimistic to the
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nightmarishly fractal – like “a weird allegory of the consumer

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
mind lost in a world of in nite excess” (James Ferraro), or an
aimless pilgrim’s progress through the city of digital
destruction.

“リサフランク420 / 現代のコン
ピュー” - MACINTOSH PLUS

4. Vaporwave politics are hauntologies of the future –

particularly, that hazy future of plenty and satisfaction
promised by all the media ephemera of late capitalism at the
end of the twentieth century. Those promises are dead now,
but they lay dreaming, and all our utopias lie fallow in the
virtual plazas of their dreams. Bespoke consumerisms and
frictionless globalization execute a slow motion tango there,
like narcotized dancers on Morel’s island. Vaporwave is an
aesthetic endeavoring to transcend any particular time, and,
therefore, it returns us again and again to a singular moment
in the posthistoire, replaying again and again in numerous
disguises that nouveau Zapruder lm called 1999. It’s no
secret that time itself broke around the year 2000. Y2K really
happened. It just didn’t mean what everyone expected. The
computers are alright. It’s everything else that’s glitching out.

ENDLESSHELL

5. Vaporwave now widely considered to be dead, but we all

know that the dead live on in media – and even return at
times. Zombies from the sixteen-millimeter shrine are
coming to get you, Barbara. It’s particularly ironic to call
vaporwave dead given the extent to which the aesthetic
always has been driven forward by its propensity for
macabre and sorcerous reanimations – imagine Chris

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Crocker: “Leave Diana Ross alone!” You could say that

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
vaporwave is a form of artjacking or political necromancy.
There’s a (Jean-Galbert) salvage component to it, like
everything else in remix culture. Neon tugboats shing seas
for media trash, bobbing on virtual waves, slick with oil.
Welcome to Satin Island: “There’s always an oil spill
happening, I’d say. Which is why. That’s the reason,
gentlemen. Which, gentlemen, is the reason we can name it
in the singular: the Oil Spill – an ongoing event whose
discrete parts and moments, whatever their particular
shapes and vicissitudes (vicissitudes! I’d susurrate the word
time and again), have run together, merged into a continuum
in which all plurals drown. Click. Here, gentlemen, you see a
tanker trailing its long, black tail. Click. Here, vinyl-coated
rocks; and here – click – a PVC-hemmed coastline. Nature got
up in her fetish gear…” It’s a bitter joke, of course – a forensic
dissection of the TED Talk from within. Nevertheless. What if
each event were only part of a continuum? The Oil Spill (the
Kuwaiti oil res, Deepwater Horizon, the Dakota Access
Pipeline spills), the War (the rst Gulf War, the second Gulf
War, the Syrian Civil War – a material and media artifact
that’s even outlived the state of Syria itself – even the War on
Terror itself) – underlying continua that only occasionally
break into collective consciousness because they form the
very conditions of possibility for the virtual plaza we occupy.
“The cybercapital singularity is near. Soon, all wealth will
trickle up and condense into a point of in nite density, the
center of our new universe. The rich will be in nitely rich,
and the poor in nitely poor. Then the false dichotomy
between rich and poor will fade in a glorious sweeping wave
of pleasure, the Vaporwave. We need you to help us realize
that nal cybercapital bliss. Consume. Spend. Sacri ce your
labor to the altar of the machine, and build the ＶＩＲＴＵＡ
Ｌ ＰＬＡＺＡ.” PKD’s A Maze of Death: “Time, he thought, is
shutting down around us.” Instead of calling ourselves a
“culture” (much less, “the people,” or “the tribe”), let’s just call
ourselves “the ongoing Oil Spill.” New materialist geopolitical

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analysis: “The cartography of oil as an omnipresent entity

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
narrates the dynamics of planetary events.” Alternatively,
let’s say: “Two gures are approaching an oil well. One of
them holds a lighted torch. What are they up to? Are they
going to rekindle the blaze? Is life without re become
unbearable for them? Others, seized by madness, follow suit.
Now they are content. Now there is something for us to
extinguish again.” There’s a formal structure here, lurking
outside the window like the killer in the slasher lm they’re
editing at the start of Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (blackly
funny how they need a real scream dubbed into their Z-
grade horror lm in order to achieve just the right e ect…).
It’s there at the end of The Woman in the Dunes, too (“There
was no particular need to hurry about escaping,” after all…);
just like it’s present in the irresolution of Robert Maitland’s
journey of self-avoidance that ironically culminates in the
new, interstitial form of life he becomes in between the
impersonal highways of west London.

A R R A Y 1 / “너 땜에 맘이 맘
이 맘이 맘이 괴로워요” -
death's dynamic
shroud.wmv

6. Antarctica is green now. This future doesn’t seem very cold

at all. Indeed: Greetings from Shell Beach. Where is Shell
Beach? It’s where you were born. You wake up in a bathtub
next to a dead body. The phone rings. It’s Dr. Schreber. He
tells you to ee. There’s been a whole series of murders, and
you’re the prime suspect. The city is a labyrinth, and you’re
being chased and chased through endless alleyways by pale
men with dark intentions. The detective chasing after you
nally catches up, but he shares your doubts about the
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world. After all, the night is interminable. You discover the

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
pale men chasing you are aliens or ghosts, who drive human
corpses like cars. They’ve been feeding on everyone, and
you’ve been trapped in their domain for your whole life. The
city oats in a void, circling a cold star. Shell Beach is
nowhere – but this realization lets you destroy the pale men
once and for all. Their sovereignty is an illusion. Because
Shell Beach is nowhere, you’re free to go there now.

H E L L B E A C H / “She Is
Young, She Is Beautiful...” -
Perturbator

7. Back in the virtual plaza – town square of the dark city –

everything remains a ickering shadow, its position sliding
along X, Y, and Z axes. Sometimes strange artifacts intrude,
fracturing the plane of immanence into Zones (servers?).
Maybe something is building itself out there, in the cold, in
the dark, in the desert. We’re back to the world before its
creation – Abgrund – databending with Schelling’s God. You’re
surrounded by statues of the dead, colder than Galatea
locked in marble. She won’t return any calls. It’s all on display
in this in nite dimension, a shrink-wrapped heaven for all
possible commodities, where all animal forms are digital
ivory and all bodies speak Muybridge exclusively.

“iPod Touch” - Eyeliner / A R

R A Y 2 / Devil Daggers

8. So what can vaporwave salvage? It sleepwalks through

broken temples of the ideological unconscious, showing us

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which libidinal vistas are really nightmare landscapes so as

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
to retrieve the latent utopian potential of every broken
promise. This is one reason why nobody can decide whether
or not vaporwave is genuinely political media or not. Does it
perform a ruthless critique, or does it celebrate capitalism’s
ephemera and excess? Literally nobody wanted these
futures until they were relentlessly projected onto every
unconscious screen, infecting you with whole hosts of
memetic viruses while you slept, like creeping blood ukes,
or blipverts, buy-bombs (“compressed advertising that plays
out in your dreams”) going o in everyone’s heads like
Cambodia in 1970, a Beijing cocktail wired to every human
heartbeat, all beating in unison like a big clock ticking down
to the New American Century. Temporal momentum
quickens and slurs as time itself becomes an OutDrive dream:
LINK THE CAR ENGINE AND HER HEART OR SHE WILL DIE. In
other words, function and velocity become causally linked. If
the car slows down, then everything else bleeds out to gray,
life fades. Where is it going? Always toward the setting sun,
tentacular black MIDIs just hiding out on the other side of
the horizon of Western decline. Think of world history as a
terrible remake of Crank (2006): “The only thing you can do at
all is to keep the ow of adrenaline constant… meaning: You
stop, you die!” – Dwight Yoakum. It’s not my fault; blame
capitalism, blame DOLDRUM, blame Sunset Corp, blame the
Tyrells, among others. There’s nobody here. What were we
promised? “More of anything?” / “More of everything!” You’re
stuck with one of many possible COLD_FUTURES, a spiraling
.exe that extracts empty promise after empty promise onto
the hard drive of your mind until the goddamn thing’s so
bogged down it can’t even process simple keystrokes, much
less complex algorithms. Here’s Malcolm Tucker: “Yes? You
do fucking want this job? Then you’re going to have to
fucking swallow this whole fucking life and let it grow inside
you like a parasite, getting bigger and bigger and bigger until
it fucking eats your insides alive and it stares out of your
eyes and tells you what to do.” Likewise, the future.

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MICHAEL UHALL
“Complete
C .V.
Domination”
RESEARCH TEACHING
-
BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S

Perturbator / RUIN 漢字 /
Gunship

9. Time for a vacation, she says in ASMR tones. This is a

digital hypnotism. You begin with an aerial descent into a
digital oasis. The in nite teal horizon beckons, and you hear
a rich mixture of canned tropical sounds and water trickling
down pixelated green leaves. In the bottom left corner, a
compact disc icon spins relentlessly, informing you that
you’re inside of a running program. You’re submerged within
the ocean smoothly, announced by panpipes (an ethereal
Muzak rendition of “Aquatic Ambience” from the 1994 video
game Donkey Kong Country). Take the plunge into a virtual
ocean. Homogeneous sand extends forever, textures looping
and replicated. This is the atland. There are sh in the
distance, each bearing a texture error. You swoop through
the school. Motionless sea creatures drift around you as you
approach a giant squid, its lidless eye a security camera. Its
interior is a plane of abstraction. Your attention roams
across the marine desert, jerked from one point of fading
interest to another. Here you see another school of sh,
represented on glitching, synchronized tablets. They icker
colorfully. The battery is dying. Sand, sand, and skeletal
shoals of dead smartphones. You approach lost cargo
marked as property of DOLDRUM. Inside, more digital sh
occupy the digital ruins. An un nished mesh corpse rests on
the ocean oor. Broken frames, static dolphins, barrels of
toxic waste leaking cryptocurrency. Suddenly, you break the
surface, rushing toward the simulacrum of a cargo ship,
bearing simulacral cargo. This cargo, each container
stamped DOLDRUM, ickers in and out of existence
uncertainly. On the empty bridge of the ship, there’s only an
hourglass, but time is meaningless here. You see a door in
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the distance. Can you exit? A new program appears to be

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
loading, new connections forming. Palm trees beckon. Are
we starting the same loop again? Blackness. Throughout
your journey, Korean subtitles ick by, which read:

“Eco Zones” - Blank Banshee

10. There were attacks by cyberpirates.

We couldn’t stop what happened.
They hacked Main Control.
We lost most of our equipment.
Trillions of dollars were lost.
So much damage was done to the sea.
Beyond our dreams, something has changed.
Electronics and ocean wildlife have combined.
They’ve taken on new forms.
As a result, I’ve decided to end my life.
Goodbye, forever…

– President and CEO of Doldrum Corporation

SUPERHOT

11. An exchange of corporate legal letters sent via paper

airplanes scooting through a gray, hot sky. Imagine a Ned
Racine monologue in a humid Florida summer, the camera
moving rapidly through cypress and soggy pampas as it
approaches the electric noir city, his voice broken and
rasping like a cockroach dying from exhaustion: “The
company that employed me strived only to serve up the
cheapest fare that its customers would tolerate, churn it out
as fast as possible, and charge as much as they could get
away with. If it were possible to do so, the company would
sell what all businesses of its kind dream about selling,
creating that which all our e orts were tacitly supposed to
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achieve: the ultimate product – Nothing. And for this product

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
they would command the ultimate price – Everything. This
market strategy would then go on until one day, among the
world-wide ruins of derelict factories and warehouses and
o ce buildings, there stood only a single, shining,
windowless structure with no entrance and no exit. Inside
would be only a dense network of computers, calculating
pro ts. Outside will be tribes of savage vagrants with no
comprehension of the nature or purpose of the shining,
windowless structure. Perhaps they will worship it as a god.
Perhaps they will try to destroy it, their primitive armory
proving wholly ine ectual against the smooth and
impervious walls of the structure, upon which not even a
scratch can be in icted.”

“Oh time thy pyramids”

12. Welcome to the Long 2017. This phrase refers to the fact
that every year from now on will, in fact, be the year 2017,
repeated over and over and over again with only super cial
variations. This eternal recurrence of the year 2017 will
continue until time decays (maximum entropy,
thermodynamic equilibrium). That we nd ourselves
consigned to this predicament necessitates a unique form of
analysis, such that we can identify the structural invariants
underlying the apparent heterogeneity we believe we
observe in our lives. Historically, each New Year begins on
January 1st. However, this condition no longer applies to us.
Operations at all temporal factories will be discontinued
pending immediately. All employees are terminated
forthwith; there will be no new positions – ever. In brief, this
means that all apparent new years from this point on will be
exact mechanical repetitions of the current year. There will
be no events, only occurrences; no deaths, only
reassignments; no intensi cations, only adjustments; no
recoveries, only stases. There are various bene ts and
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disbene ts to this new arrangement. For example: Between

MICHAEL UHALL C .V. RESEARCH TEACHING BLOG T R A N S L AT I O N S
shifts, when you nd yourself wondering what time it is,
please recollect the following maxim, which will serve well as
our categorical imperative from this point onward: Time is a
painting of a stopped clock.

“W i n d o w s” - Clinton A air

13. In recompense, here’s an e-mail attachment of a mint

condition set of the complete Clinton a airs from 1991 to
1997. Exclusive, very rare, from a nonsmoking home.
Shipping included. It’s the real megillah, close-ups, slow
motion, everything exactly as advertised in our special series
of compulsory online banner ads and mandatory but
exclusive pop-ups. But you can have it all for free. You can
have it all. All you need to do is sign right here, right on the
dotted line:

‫ ְבּכ ָֹרה‬,‫זֶּ ה ִלי‬-‫ ִהנֵּה אָ נֹכִ י הוֹלֵ לָ מוּת; וְלָ ָמּה‬,‫ֹאמר ﬠֵ ָשׂו‬
ֶ ‫וַיּ‬.

120. The end / “Frozen

Flame” - Blank Banshee

 Consider the Cold new world:

Retronomicon Borgman as a politics of
exit 

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©MICHAEL UHALL
MICHAEL .UHALL@GMAIL .COM

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