Let's talk about Milady, Cute Accelerationism, and Network Spirituality

Welcome to what is possibly the most "online" post I'll ever make.

If you’re anywhere near as terminally online as I am, you might have encountered content posted by the Based Retard Gang and assorted associated pages with similar names and aesthetics, and if you’re anywhere near as terminally curious as I am, you might have wondered what on earth they are on about.

What appears as just another memepage or weird art project is, I have come to discover, the outward communication station for a bunch of 2023 Landians gathering under the collective Remilia: rejection of the human subject in favour of blending with technology, celebrating the accelerated downfall of the existing order in favour of “the Afterlife Online”, and an embrace of chaos, unpredictability, and non-linear dynamics. The public face of a cute accelerationist philosophy addressing increasingly important issues of our time. The exponential development in AI and associated technologies have made existential questions a reasonable topic of discussion that used to seem completely sci-fi to consider even a few years ago. Questions involving the future of the human body, the human soul, and life itself. 

Where are we now, and where do we want to go? 

For the first time in a long time, we are no longer in maintenance mode. In overcoming postmodernity, grand narratives are once again making an appearance. The end of history has ended, we need to get back to writing the future. But what is not yet decided is who will be the author of the book of our fates. Polarising camps of techno-optimists and techno-skeptics have contradictory visions for what we should do about the machines, and how we should answer questions of humanity, humanism, and transhumanism overall, and it is now time to hash them out, with one side achieving hegemony and dominance eventually. What is a human? What is gender? Nature, nurture, or machinery? Is technology a blessing or a curse? Regulation or move fast and break things? Are we all going to live in the metaverse? Should we? Embracing technological progress in the way that radical optimists suggest we do could be liberating, but it could also be one of the greatest oppressions in history in how fundamentally opposed it is to what some people would consider “human nature”, and to nature as a whole.

On the other side of #BRG’s hyper-digitised imaginaries of a machine-driven future, we see a growing resistance to not only AI, but industrialised civilisation itself. The most popular take in this regard is “phones bad”, along with it “social media and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race”, along similar lines memes are proclaiming that it is unreasonable and downright insane to expect one to write emails and look at screens for 8 hours a day “with a brain that’s made to pick berries and chill in the forest” - carrying the implication that anything related to modern civilisation is a foreign, unnatural imposition that we ought to be resisting. But resistance may be futile - I would assume it to be hard to put the technological cat back in the bag, especially with it being in the hands of tech-oligarchs who have more money and power than any of us can dream of. Me, personally, I would like to gain control over the technological means of production and interaction, and steer it into something that isn’t going to eradicate humanity, something that works for us instead of against us, but that would require heavy political struggle and potentially even a socialist revolution.

So on the techno-skeptic side there could be communism with machines working for people, there could be some form of modern-ish primitivism with people returning to small communities exchanging backyard tomatoes, but both of these would require a slow-down of progress as it runs currently, which would mean active intervention and prevention. But there is also a third option, which is full acceleration: Welcome to Remilia.

Full, total, high-speed acceleration, the path of least resistance, as it only requires us to embrace what’s coming and support it unconditionally, maybe even put it on steroids - with techno-optimists such as Marc Andreessen defending this by proclaiming that machines and their consequences have been an overall force for good in the history of the human race - is what is supported by Remilia, “God’s little warriors” in the battle for “the serenity, love and simplicity of CUTE/ACC”.

Now why do I care about the #BRG specifically? Why am I analysing a meme-phenomenon created and propagated by self-proclaimed art school dropouts?

I took note of the #BRG for a few reasons. Gen Z is terminally online, and Alphas (lol) will be even more so. Cultural phenomena and the societal attitudes they foster no longer emerge on theatre stages, or in town squares, or on TV. It happens online. Whatever is hip on 4chan bleeds into meatspace, the raiding of the Capitol being a prime example of MAGA-memers going wild in the real world. If the techno-optimists win, the #BRG is not only contributing to their success, but laying the groundwork for culture in the hyper-online universe. Their postings could also be considered to be manufacturing consent for full acceleration to the tens of thousands of people following their accounts. It is possible that in seeing #BRG, we are facing the window to our future. The memes, being the public face of the philosophy, the accessible gateway to cute-Landianism, are just the tip of the based iceberg of based retardation, however, as I’ve discovered in my research through various Remilia rabbit holes. 

An entire blogosphere is busy hashing out the details of cute-Landian philosophy, while art shows and projects serve as a way of sharing religious revelations and futuristic dreams. 

People have been left “homeless” in a variety of important spheres - politics, philosophy, spirituality - and Remilia has answers to all of it, responding in the easiest of ways, with the lowest of effort - acceptance of all that is and is to come. We do not need new-age spirituality rituals, according to Remilia, we are already embedded in a great spiritual network. We do not need politics, either, we can simply be cute and accelerate, which should appeal to those of us who have given up.

Thoughts on questions of potential relevance are being developed today, in a time in which we had assumed that philosophy was dead and there were no interesting fresh theories, and they are being shared under the noses of people who are under the impression that they are simply consuming a meme. Turns out memes can be ways of converting people to the religion of techno-optimistic futurism. Or maybe they’re just memes. Maybe Milady really is “just kawaii” and nothing else. Either way, Remilia’s existence is worth examining for reasons that should by now not look as random.

How should we read the #BRG?

We cannot understand #BRG without keeping in mind Nick Land, the “godfather of acceleration”, celebrated by Remilia and cute accelerationists everywhere.

Nick Land's conceptualization of Capitalism:

“an autonomous, self-reinforcing, feedback loop that accelerates at a greater rate than the subjects it produces as a byproduct, thereby rendering the byproduct - i.e. the human - obsolete.”

This is not unlike Deleuze and Guattari's application of Samuel Butler's thesis - that machines use humans as nodes in the reproduction process of machines - in that Capitalism uses humans as nodes in its own growth process. In both cases, the future may do away with the human once it becomes an obsolete form of reproduction.

When it comes to the #BRG, we can clearly witness posthuman ambitions in every piece of content. The uncanny-valley artificiality of the “faces” of the movement and the surroundings they are presented in, the incredible online-ness of it all, the hyper-digitised vibe that unmistakably embraces, even encourages the complete blend of human and machine. Accelerationism in its purest, and cutest, form. 

The blogpost “Based Retard Gang: HyperProduction and the GC Becoming of New Cultures” by Quirked Whiteboy especially feels influenced by Nick Land’s “Meltdown” in its fragmented and disjointed nature, a post-human sense of communication that appears somewhat as if a robot-alien-machine had generated it all of its own artificial intelligence, frenetic and somewhat hypnotic when read out loud, combined with absurdity and randomness reminiscent of Dadaism, a movement that sought to dismantle conventional thinking and creativity in order to provoke thought and reflection on the state of the world and common social values, which the BRG itself seems to be referring to:

The BRG, much like Land himself, points to a chaotic disruption of order followed by a technologically dominated afterlife:

“run hide panicked throw blood on ur door when we pass”

“Death is not Real and we will SEE U

in the Afterlife Online.”

“u will not be 🤍the same🤍

#BRG will not assume any damages whatsoever from the effects of this 💕Attack💕”

“Don't get into a false sense of security.”

There will be an attack, it will be transformative, and we will meet again on the other side. Up into the cloud we go? What exactly happens to us and our meatbags is not clearly articulated. What we do know for sure is that we will not be boys. And in the world of Remilia, this is essential.

One defining feature of anything shared by Remilia is that their protagonist, their ideal type of being, whether fully or only partially human or entirely machine, is unmistakably feminine. We’re all going to live in the Afterlife Online, or as technologically optimised humanoids, and we’re all going to be GIRLS. Heavenly ones. With it/its pronouns, because if everyone is girl, there is no need for distinction. Pronouns are for humans, anyway. We’re leaving all that outdated stuff behind us.

Hyper-Feminine Futurist Warfare

Milady, the protagonist of the #BRG-verse and the alleged revolutionary subject of the future, threatens us with heart emojis and “love attacks” instead of machine guns. There is no intention of causing physical harm, although there “will be victims”. Love attacks are a means of getting people to comply, to bring them to the side of Landian posthumanists so that we can all peacefully live in cyberspace - the “afterlife online”. Jet fuel can’t melt steel beams - but love can. The way I read this, in the greater context of love attacks, is that it is unneeded and unpreferable to blow a whole building up if one can work with “glass shards in the organs” and “love bombs” to achieve the same goal - the reference to the feeling of emotional damage alludes to manipulation and attacks on people’s inner world, their feelings, which is considered the traditionally feminine form of engaging in conflict.

Why are we all girls? Because BRG, being proudly cute/acc, carries cuteness at the core of its philosophy. Acceleration, in the eyes of Remilia and its followers, will be cute, it must be. Anything that isn’t cute would slow down the high-speed accelerationist progress train we’re already sitting in, but we will get to this at a later point.

To further explain the hyperfemininity aspect, let me introduce you to “Milady”, the love attack bombing front line fighter in the battle for Landian accelerationism.

Evolution Favours the Cute

“cuteness is the libidinal excrement of cold, horror; the product of random acts of bioviolence”

Milady, existing both as a philosophical concept and as cute bot-generated NFT avatar images, is the living subject of the future, a stage of evolution we can barely imagine today and should be embracing at all costs, if we want to allow ourselves to be infected by the fervour of the #BRG and open ourselves to the possibility of the Afterlife Online. 

Now, let’s talk about the power of cuteness. Humans and animals are evolutionarily favoured when they’re cute. Babies are cute. The babies of infinitely threatening scary animals are.. also cute while they’re still vulnerable. The femininity of Milady is not only an aesthetic appeal, it is a requirement for its dominance.

“Wherever anything is cute, there is surely a trail of bodies not far behind. Perhaps this is part of the misogynistic narratives of the seductive evil woman - Lilith, Medusa, the archetypes of the seductive spider-woman or the witch, etc., - found among all cultures throughout all times.” (x)

“This is because rebellion is not considered a threat from a subject characterized as emotionally unstable, irresponsible, unintelligent, and of value only as a purely material commodity.” (x)

Milady is precisely the revolutionary subject of the future because it appears nonthreatening. Where women were able to access power through masculinisation, a development that people like Quirked Whiteboy characterise as being doomed to a depressing life as a masculine worker drone, Milady embraces, even accelerates, all feminine traits, since living a hyper-feminine life (passive, sweet, loving, bright, happy, unbothered, carefree) is their path of true happiness, while being their path to power at the same time. While femininity conventionally implies repression due to the inability to affect change or make decisions or even be a full subject by being subjugated under patriarchy, in the eyes of those that would love nothing more than to unconditionally support what is already on its way, being passive can only mean cute bliss. Cute/acc gains dominance by increasing the numbers of people embracing hyper-feminine passivity.

Girliness has a lightness, a naive happiness to it, one that the masculine auras behind non-cute accelerationism and techno-optimism do not. Masculinity represents rationality, order, and agency, and cute/acc is explicitly not that. It is a radical embrace of disorder, a radical rejection of all that is masculine. Milady is all about living one’s best life, being cute, not worrying or thinking about anything at all. Hyperfemininity implies a passive role that allows the Miladies of the world to do nothing but bask in their cuteness and scroll through memes.

The belief in Network Spirituality constitutes a belief that whatever is coming for us – in the case of Remilia, the claim is that it will be the Afterlife Online – is coming without anyone needing to make an effort, we are constantly establishing it simply by living how we do, which at this moment in time is a type of lifestyle that makes hyper-capitalist singularity unavoidable, given our dependence on screens combined with an increasing doomerism when it comes to a brighter future, which leads us towards depressive hedonia, which fosters exactly the kind of habits that manifest us as the perfect future Metaverse drones. If one decides to simply embrace this, there is no need for masculine-coded active participation in political decision-making.

(I Long for) Network Spirituality

Looking at the spiritual aspects of Remilia, an artist collective that certainly does not make visual decisions without any intention behind it, I found it notable that there are two types of human representation in the Based Retardverse. 

On the one hand, we have the e-Girls that appear in every piece of animated content. Cute, sparkly, filtered, only existing within our screens, but still somewhat real. They are based on actual people, they run on human bodies, despite their otherworldly aura. We can imagine them being human, and we can imagine ourselves being them.

The ultimate goal, of course, is supposed to be transcending our physical body completely and become actual Miladies that are unbothered by profanities like a pebble in a shoe, or hunger, or global warming. The e-Girl wants to “talk to your manager, then their manager, then their manager, then their manager, until (she is) facing God himself”. Ambitions far beyond taking over the economic order - they intend to revolutionise our lifeform entirely, or are rather convinced that this will effortlessly take place anyway.

“#BRG is the abstract diagram of 💕heavenly💕 inhuman becoming.”

It takes a worldly representative to help people be comfortable with the idea of achieving the eternal blend with the cloud, which would lead us to strengthen our techno-optimist values and habits and in turn speed up acceleration. Someone we can relate and aspire to, that we are willing to listen to as it teaches us the gospel of Milady. Just like Jesus was sent down to Earth in order to help people connect with God, the e-Girl is sent down to Earth from the Cloudverse to help people connect with the idea of a posthuman future through memes.

One could interpret it as there being some kind of phase model in place, even - a two-step process in our transition from regular normies to Miladies. 

“Her spirit, as manifestation of a singularity and focal point instantiation of the egregore, the Milady spirit, reminiscent of a tribal God, a early Yahweh.” (x)

Where Milady is God, the e-girl is Jesus: people should aspire to live as Jesus does, so that at the end of life (referring to the lifecycle of our physical bodies - the “phasing out” of the current product we inhabit) we can, and will allow ourselves to, be embraced by, and melt into, God – Milady. While most religions do not allow regular human followers to become God at any point in time, this is different for Milady - as Remilia and its followers “long for network spirituality”. Network meaning God exists within, through, and by all of us, if we let it. It is a shared consciousness, a self-reinforcing feedback loop.

“Network spirituality and schizo-autist posting primary goal is to destroy the normie within which will open the pathways for the nu-gods of the network to possess you, its a revival of tradition.. the gods are with you in this holy jihad.” (x)

Or in less spiritually-tinted words: Milady is hyperstitious as a phenomenon that manifests itself through people thinking and acting in accordance with its existence.

“Remilia didn’t invent network spirituality & it’s descriptive not prescriptive. Transcendental posting, performative identity & post-authorship are a distinct archetype of engagement you’ll find power users independently arrive on in any of the deep wells of internet culture. The reason its hard to concretely define terms like schizo-autist posting and network spirituality is because they were grown from the soil of the Wired, the only thing Remilia did was water the soil. The best definition is whatever vibes contextually.” (x)

Instead of a movement fighting to make real change, cute accelerationism is the ultimate form of non-resistance, seeing as the technological takeover of all that exists is the most likely outcome of things continuing as they are.

“We do not even need a theory of acceleration anymore. The time of theories is over. The time of thinking is over. It’s time to stop thinking. It’s time to start affirming, literally right now, and forever and ever from now on.

Milady exemplifies the serenity, love and simplicity of CUTE/ACC. The truth of what is yet to come is palpable in Milady’s gaze alone, sheltered in twinkling irises like a prophecy.” - cute/acc manifesto

So maybe this is Milady’s world already, and we’re just living in it.

Or maybe there’s still something to be done.

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(Reading list to be added later, for those who want to get into the strange Internet rabbit holes I ended up finding myself in)

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