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Ccru Datastream 2 - Y2K as Death of Pomo
"Ccru Datastream 2 - Y2K as Death of Pomo" treats capital as an abstract process of mutation and escape rather than as a merely managerial or institutional system.
Archive condition
The page uses the canonical extracted text as its reading layer while preserving the original file paths as the archival source of record.
Core idea
The central claim is that capital should be understood as an inhuman process of abstraction rather than a humanly steerable institution. Meltdown names the way this process outpaces moral or political containment.
These texts work by describing markets, media systems, and social life as channels for accelerating abstraction. Capital behaves less like a policy object than like a self-intensifying circuit.
That matters because the section is trying to show how deterritorialization becomes historically real rather than remaining a philosophical slogan. The page belongs here when abstraction is presented as an operative force.
How to read this text
Read for the vocabulary of abstraction, escape, and process first. The page usually becomes clearer once capital is treated as a circuit rather than a classically economic object.
Notice where the argument leaves institutional critique and starts describing systems that exceed human command. That turn is the hinge of the section.
Representative extracts
Definition · paragraph 3
Ccru learned from cybernetics the lesson that there is nothing 'merely' technical, and sees Y2K as an event exemplifying a whole complex of intermeshing themes, including: the crash of Science Fiction (and the emergence of cyberpunk), the death of postmodernity, and the restart of chronopolitical conflict.
Definition · paragraph 4
Which is bad news for us, who are symbiotically intertwined with them. Y2K is just one more example of the way in which capitalist reality is indistinguishable from fiction: in capital's world of simulation and cybernetic anticipation, all that is solid has melted into the abstract and virtual.
Definition · paragraph 4
In the popular unconscious, the year 2000 and beyond belong to the far distant time of Science Fiction with the ironic effect that SF's longterm has suddenly collapsed into cyberpunk's near future. Y2K is not only everywhere computers are, it is everywhere silicon chips are: it is a molecular bug, infecting even the tiniest interstices of the technical environment, an invisible invader into technical systems that have themselves tended to shrink out of human sight.
Definition · paragraph 5
This string of noughts should give pause to PoMo relativists who insists that any sign will do; it is the very precise function of zero that allows Y2K to happen as (and when) it does, effectuating a collision of the HinduArab numeric system with Roman numerals.
History · paragraph 4
1950s, when programmers agreed upon the twodigit date protocol. In the popular unconscious, the year 2000 and beyond belong to the far distant time of Science Fiction with the ironic effect that SF's longterm has suddenly collapsed into cyberpunk's near future.
Appears in sections
Capital, Meltdown, and Cybernetic Modernity Primary section
Capitalist abstraction, deterritorialization, cybernetics, and the archive's account of runaway modernity.