1. The Ontological Eschaton of Pure Crap: A Fable

Let’s face it: We’re swimming in crap. We breathe it, we eat it, we drink it. We watch crap, we listen to crap. We even talk it. We negotiate our lives around it. And we know it.

Yet we don’t really consider our relationship with the protean power of this mysterious substance. We often look around us and wonder, how did this piece of shit come to be? How and why was this crappy place built around us? Was it a historical inevitability? Or did we just blunder into crap somehow, as if it all came from a planning committee of methhead five-year old civic designers?

We think it was no accident…Yet neither was it the result of some initial crap-from-on-high decision.

Listen:

The chances of our immediate descendants ever tasting non-crap foods and drinks, or experiencing non-crap “entertainment”, or experiencing non-crap mediated epiphany, dwindle by the day.

The situation is dire.

 Now don’t get us wrong—crap has always existed, and humankind has always had to wrestle with its crap. It has taken many forms over the centuries.[1] At one time only the “Elites” could buy and trade it. And, scaled to the economies of the time, their crap wasn’t cheap; in fact, it was the opposite of cheap. Their crap was a mocking display of wealth by which they tried to impress and outdo one another’s fabulousness with how perversely they could trivialize their own riches—to turn it into crap. Although their commodities may have been “one of a kind” in design and execution—over-encrusted with gold and emeralds and diamonds and such—they were still utilitarian objects that became, by that very mocking vulgarity of their construction, plain old crap.

Thus crap moved downhill, you might say. As the Age of Industry & Reason “progressed” through the 19th and early 20th centuries there appeared commemorative “Patriotic” items and bogus stock certificates and counterfeit currencies and patent medicines and penny dreadful/tabloid crap. With the “democratization of taste,” and the means to satisfy that taste, did the crap multiply around us.

But the powerful substance was just lying in wait to make its big move. Thanks to the 1940s wartime advances in the chemistry of plastics, billions of dollars went into making crap over the next six decades, and matching billions invested into Madison Avenue to make the stuff palatable to everyone. As noted above, American culture had always been riven with fraud, but this new Madison Avenue breakthrough offered whole new levels of chicanery. The trick was to get people to forget it was crap—then, further, forget they had forgotten. This could only be done through total shock and awe blitz crap inundation, on every front. Legitimized by the consensus of not knowing any better, it would thus look like a natural development.

Here’s the gist: Crap became the medium through which desire materialized itself, and those Madison Avenue boys made visual and aural desire-stoking crap that dazzled the eyes and ears. Using television, radio, and print, they amped up the desire for pure crap exponentially. Those who might never have known of the existence and power of the turd were baptized and realized there was something missing in their lives.

In short, people came to agreement with the presence of crap. A people so acclimatized began to yearn for the shit. Children were taught to love then yearn for crap in its purest forms. They begged their parents for shit, and more shit. By the time they grew up they’d been entirely conditioned to feel that something was wrong if they weren’t offered entirely new crap every month, every week, every day.

Many of these kids grew up to want in on the game themselves. They saw the good returns on crap, and who could resist, right?

They came to believe crap was their birthright.

Excrement became the driving business engine of American culture and by 1973 the amount of it reached alarming levels. You might say American culture had become wholesale a useless turd-making machine. Think of the quintessential “pet rock” (but without the implied Zen koan quality of such an absurdity which, under other circumstances, might have given it an actual purpose).

People bought the pet rock simply because other people did, to keep up with the crap, and for no other reason.

Social relations had come to be negotiated through crap. Rubbish had never seen better days. You must understand: hundreds of billions of dollars had been spent making it since the post-war years’ acceleration. The worlds of music and film too, were unable to resist the allure of pure excrement. Crap-attuned minds bought a multitude of tickets, and at some point so many shitty movies were wildly successful that crap became cinema’s driving raison d’etre. An overarching crap ethic. Movies were made about society’s crap and the society’s purveyors of dung—a fecal feedback loop. And the endless parade by now surrounding them in their houses and in movies and on television and on the radio and in their cars and on the highway and the public spaces created such emptiness in people that the only thing that could alleviate the crushing boredom was…more crap.

Naturally.

Because, let’s face it, crap is painful. Mostly because it gets old. An old piece of shit has diminishing returns to fill the exposed void it itself had created—the void of not possessing the newer, shinier crap. Thus, that new piece of shit must be had.

This trend accelerated even further throughout the following two decades until computers took over the load of manure-making and shite-selling. Crap had already filled the void of a human psychology stripped of active hunter-gatherer imperatives; for a time, these motives had simply been shittified into the activity of the consumer prowling the aisles in search of a bargain on pure shit.

Now it became the “digital hunter-gathering” on the Internet.

This time it was ethereal crap—shiny, even sleeker excrement. Dung by a hundred new catchy and exotic names, requiring a hip vocabulary. New technologies allowed the creation and delivery of garbage at ever-faster speeds. Crap was truly democratized. Anyone could make it, from the already existing crap. This new digital dung was dung you couldn’t touch, but it had a definite “taste” in the mind experiencing it. Although this digital waste has been ephemeralized to an even greater degree than the physical crap, it had no less an effect on the mind—in fact, it has greater excrement-making power: self-generating and self-replicating crap. Ten times the amount of excrement could be consumed in a short amount of time. Each web page had a space for crap, to be said about crap.

You could trawl for more of it for hours, days, even and never even leave your crappily-made chair.

And many didn’t. By the turn of the 21st Century, the world was deep into the process of being turned into shit by this time; by this we mean the arrow of signification had been reversed. For instance, the Universe and the human brain came to be conceived only as types of computers; trees and minerals and oil were viewed as simply as pre-crap states of being for those entities.

It takes turning the world into crap to make crap, after all. [2]

Due to its exponentiation within the internet, even knowledge metastasized with excremental overload, becoming more akin to a smoldering raging crap-smog cloud wherein the epistemologically sound bits of truth, whose veracity could be backed with empirical evidence, were harder and harder to come by. You could thus twist anything into meaning anything else with the dross-fueled power of the web: Add link to ten websites repeating the same crap statement in different ways, and voila—a true statement!

Yet the disembodied turd-making power of computers made the material swill business even easier to manage. Americans called out for even cheaper excrement. And they got it, big time. The masters of Communist China (who had long railed against the crap-making factories of the “West”) realized that if they unleashed the labor power of their population to make the “West’s” offal they could make hundreds of billions doing so every year. The Chinese could save the crap-made money, and with it and do things like buy American bonds (which have not yet become crap, but are getting pretty close).

Thus China became the crapmaster. With a half-billion workers making it, material dreck flooded the whole world like never before.  The globe had crap on its face…But this time, the Chinese-made crap was crappily-made crap, shit that would blow up in your face, or catch fire, or give you an exotic lung disease. It was perilous crap.

But did the “Western” people care?

Hell no!

Why should the Chinese care about “Western” standards?

"Lighten up, you capitalist imperialist stooge! We’re making crap here!"

Round about this same time as the Chinese leaders decided to relax, kick back, and laugh at the results of their masterly move in the game, our society’s financial wizards brought the excrement game to entirely new levels. There was lofty talk of the power of markets to bring crap to the as-yet uncontaminated corners of the world. Open up those markets, and bring the dung-purchasing power to all the peoples of the globe! they said. Eyes shined with tears at the bright future:

Crap had the power to lift everyone’s boat.

But what many of these globalist turdmasters don’t know about shit is that without a specific kind of attitude or practice to ward off its effects, anything crap touches can turn to crap. It has transformational powers.

Thus while they were busy making, buying, and selling it to the world on grand transnational scales, their own bank accounts became garbage under their noses, because they did not know that crap could also have its counterpart in the world of high-finance.

Financiers had invented schemes that mimicked physical crap’s alluring effect on the mind. Shit could come easy and cheap in the financial world too, they said. So they invented a thing called a “derivatives” market, which, like a parasite, could make money betting on the crap/non-crap condition of other people’s stocks at the stroke of a computer key and get paid either way! It was like making gold out of piss. Brilliant! And they were allowed to bet on the value of other institutions’ bank-owned contracts—i.e., securities—that, through the generous help of a risk-ratings agency, assured everyone that all these homeowners’ houses could be paid for…In “reality,” these contracts’ value, which was based upon the people’s ability to pay for their houses, was almost shit from the start—because people had already spent their money filling their homes with crap rather than saving it for a proper down-payment.

The whole scenario was a crap merry-go-round and the derivatives players knew it. They saw the coming turd-storm, placed their bets likewise, and ka-ching! Instant worldwide collapse. And they got paid for it!

The global masters of material crapmaking were left holding turds in their hands. This was not good for them. The banks, too, were spooked by their own destabilized ability to lend their money so people could buy more slop.

So, using their own personal messenger service known as the US Congress, they passed the crap on to the rest of us.

Wow. Crap had made incredible inroads, into every space. By a certain time, the tyrannous order of dross had transformed society: We’ve got crap Presidents, a crap Congress, crap journalists, crap writers, crap musicians.

So by this time, no one knew the taste of crap from manna from heaven.

And they loved it that way. 

They would fight wars over the right to consume crap.

They would kill millions of people to have one more shitty day.

They would even trade away their own freedom to not consume crap, for crap.

Such is the dire state of today.

2. The Crappiness of Crap: Is there a Solution?

We realize that there is a value-judgment about dung lurking throughout this essay. But it is not a subjective thing; we all vaguely know crap when we see it, yet everyone, they say, has a different standard as to what crap actually is.

To each his own, they say; it’s all relative.

Muck has come to colonize minds and subvert standards, to a larger or smaller degree, in us all—so get used to it.

We beg to differ.

We also realize that in this essay we have “anthropomorphized” crap to a certain extent by ascribing to it agency in its many assaults upon human being listed above.

This is with deliberate intent, because it is something we actually believe: that at some point, shit became imbued with an independent life and it now seeks to replicate itself, like a virus.

This is the primary aspect of crap: It is simulation and objectification.

Many things simulate, but to objectify the process of simulation and multiply the cause-and-effect nexus of that simulation is the hallmark of crap.

It’s one thing to simulate the fripperies of the Elite (like copying their gold and bejeweled artifacts using lesser materials, in some magical osmosis of self-flattery) and another altogether to simulate the nutrients in food, or sexual communion, or the activity of thinking.

This procession of simulation usually involves the implementation of a time-and-production cost saving regime (“efficiencies”). This way, crap can be made in staggering amounts with minimal deviation outside a “range of choices” which the crap-attuned consumer will clamor for.

By the present time, this regime has been imposed upon every single aspect of human material existence. The production of simulated material crap is supposed to save us all time and energy and money—the long, excruciating amount of time, for instance, it would take to hand-make make a piece of furniture, and the money a sturdy piece of wood would cost us.  

An example: a person could purchase a set of maple chairs, sturdily made, artfully embellished, and lasting, with good upkeep, for two decades.

Or, they could buy four sets of crappy, cheaper chairs in that same 20-year period.

Being turd-attuned, they opt for the latter. In doing so, the purchase has, on the face of it, been a vote with their dollars towards the production of more crappy chairs.

They will also have to dispose of three times the amount of garbage over time—the three extra sets of chairs—and this garbage is made of plastics that take decades to degrade in the environment.

Such is the algebra of crap.

This conservation of energy to produce a utilitarian object would normally be a good thing. The supposed utilitarian purpose of crap—that it costs less money, energy, and time to make weaker simulations/surrogates than sturdier artifacts—had a consequence, in that it required even more time, in aggregate, to move, store, arrange, sell, destroy, and landfill the incredibly astronomical amounts of shit which its “efficient” way of production achieved.

Now, there have always been holdouts against the onslaught of crap: people who were artisans. People who studied glass-blowing or music composition or basket-making or draftsmanship or furniture making. The problem was that these disciplines took decades to master, and their practitioners viewed what they were doing not only as a means to livelihood but as a duty to posterity and a striving for excellence. Their very existence of artisans was a direct challenge to the crap order of things. As the mass media created the phenomena we call “mass taste” around the turn of the 20th Century, there still existed craftspeople who tried to realize the standards set by the masters of their arts, and also sought to embody an ethereal quality which, apart from the utilitarianism of the objects they produced, was a useless yet indispensible quality you might call beauty.[3]

But “progress” marches on, as they say!

You may retort that crap’s just a risk we take with having an “open society,” with having “freedom.”

But the truth is that the age of “risking crap for the gold” is long gone.

We challenge you at this late date to go even one day without buying, watching, reading, any crap, without sequestering yourself within a windowless room. It simply cannot be done, without lamming it to the nearest patch of nature, where you might sit yourself down on the cool earth and listen to the woods and even then hear crap in the distance, or find a piece of crap, like a wrapper, which once enclosed another.

We live in a 360-degree bestiary of crap.

You have to find your way out of this turd forest. No-one can do it for you.

The first step is to realize that your choice to consume crap at this late date has already been made for you.

Note that we said, for you.

It is now no longer a matter that you desire to consume crap, but of which crap you will desire to consume.

Your free agency to choose non-crap has already been compromised to a more or less degree.

This may also be called: coming to terms with one’s own crapitude.

To remember a time when things weren’t all shit: this is crucial. Simple memory is crucial, because the crapmasters want you to forget the time in the past when things weren’t all crap. They want you to forget about last year’s crap, last month’s, or even last week’s crap, and remain in some cocoon-like eternal present moment of new crap-desiring and crap-consuming.

Crap and its Madison Avenue boosters know that crap mesmerizes us by surrogating relationships to the Natural World and concealing its own revelation, qua crap. It is sneaky.

And for those of us born knowing nothing but crap’s desire-mediating power, an

organically-grown tomato,

or a clear sight of the Milky Way at night above,

or a maturing sunset,

or an a cappella choral work,

or the cleansing fire of hot sex

has the power to literally destroy in five seconds the hold crap has on us, if but for minutes at a time.

This is a start.[4]

The future belongs to those who will resist the crap given to them on a daily basis.

But the paradox, God willing, will not be lost upon you.

-The Lovers

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[1] The Greek philosopher Plato once defined the opposite of crap: something designed well to do what it is meant to do, fulfilling its telos, no more and no less. Plato also gave us an actual allegory of crap, way back in the 5th Century BCE, called the Myth of the Cave. In it, a group of people in a cave face a wall full of shadows cast by firelight. They think these shimmering forms are all there is and all that ever will be. They are tricked by the situation, never knowing that if they but turned around they would see the fire, and eventually postulate that they live inside a cave, and for Gods sake try to get out of the cave into the sunlight. The shadows in the allegory, of course, were pure crap: simulation. Illusion.

[2] We are speaking of the accelerated crapification of science. For the past 300 years, the labor of scientists has been almost continuously sponsored, more or less, by the “owners of capital” to produce results that helped make the latters’ fortunes. To give a single concrete example, the discovery in 1957 of the protein sequence that constitute the basis of all biology has allowed for the crapification of living processes themselves. Genetic information technologies have finally matured, as the crapmasters say. Now, simply by moving a few molecules in a Natural compound, scientists (or, more truthfully, their corporate sponsor-owners) can claim to have created an “artificial” compound that can thus be patented, and all instances of its subsequent existence owned by a multinational company. Billions of dollars have been made this way already, and many hundreds of billions more to come. But does any ethical consideration pause our corporate scientist crapmasters from turning the natural creations of this Universe into crap? Not at all. Why should it, when they now conceive of the Cosmos and all the living entities within it as forms of digital machines? Only a mad infernal parade of crap-attuned philosophers, scientists, lawyers, lobbyists and dung-addled citizens could make this astounding event not just a possibility, but the reality.

[3] These mysterious “purveyors of quality and excellence” continue to exist, albeit in dwindling numbers, even to this day. They are mostly joked about, or goaded in one form or another to “get that product out there while the opportunity’s ripe” because “time’s a tickin’ and time is money, you bastard” and heed the crap market’s dictates or else suffer the consequence of obscurity and poverty (which, given the crap trajectory of our society, is not necessarily a bad thing anymore.)

[4] We could fully develop a theory of crap ontology, but it has been explicated elsewhere at great length in the analyses of Rousseau, Marx, Benjamin, Ellul, Adorno, Marcuse, Debord, Baudrillard, etc. And of course there have always been dissenters to the processes of crapification throughout human history: a short list could include the Taoists, the Confucians, the Zoroastrian and Magian priests, the Theravadin Buddhist monks and Hindu sadhus, the Platonic Academics, the Athenian Cynics, the Friends of Epicurus, the Athenian Stoics, the Essenes, the early Christians, the earliest Franciscan and Dominican orders, the Orthodox Jews, the Anabaptists, the English Puritans, the German and English Romantics, the Luddites, the Transcendentalists, the Shakers, the Arts and Crafts advocates, the anarchists green and black, the so-called Beat writers, the Diggers, the Frankfurt School, etc. And this pamphlet itself may in fact be not uncontaminated with crap; unfortunately this is something we cannot even know with certainty at this late date. But it is not up to us to decide.