Trying to work magic on others is a waste of time

Hit them where they live, instead

The free flow of information within and between nation states is essential to business, international relations and social cohesion, as much as information is essential to a military force’s ability to fight. Communications today lean heavily on the internet, or via communications using various parts of the electromagnetic spectrum (such as radio or microwaves) through terrestrial communications networks or satellite networks in space. We live in a highly connected world, but it doesn’t take much to tip over into instability or even chaos.

- David Stupples, The Next War Will Be An Information War and We’re Not Ready For It

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And so it goes, people argued ferociously on the internet. Is it possible to curse another person? I say yes. I’ve done it and it sucks. It’s the one time that I wish I hadn’t used magic to do a thing. But here’s the rub: I hated that person with a venom borne of the blackest parts of my spirit. That is why it worked. The anger and hostility I carried inside me for all these years was the fury that charged the magical battery. It was a curse the likes of which you see in horror movies. It was Jacques de Molay dying on the fire, cursing the King of France as the smoke filled his lungs and the flames charred his flesh. That kind of curse works and it is not a terribly effective way to work magic if you want to reach large groups of people, some of whom you may not even know. In order to magically reach out and touch someone’s life you have to have potent feelings one way or the other for that person and let’s face it. That’s a rare quantity.

Blood Rose Agents are hackers, of a sort. Instead of writing scripts and exploiting weaknesses in computer network security, we find the weaknesses in the fabric of reality and tug on the loose threads. And just like computer networks, the fabric of reality is wrapped up pretty tight. Networks nowadays have very sophisticated means of locking people out and putting the kibosh on attempts to break in with brute force or overwhelm the server with requests. So you have to find another way in.

Check this out. In October of 2016 a massive botnet attacked a domain name service provider called Dyn. DNS providers are the systems that take the abstract numeric identity of a web server and turn it into something human readable. For example, 192.168.0.1 (relax, it’s just an example) ends up transformed into bloodrose.substack.com. Dyn is one of the largest DNS providers in the world. The botnet was likely leased by an individual or group with their focus on a single website that was simply too hard to hit directly. It very likely had DDoS countermeasures in place to make it harder to cause an outage. So the hackers thought about it differently. They attacked a far less secure service upstream — in this case Dyn — and ended up dropping the site they wanted but also 30% of the world’s websites since all of Dyn was knocked out. To do this, they engaged Dyn’s servers in a strange way that no one had seen before. 

DDoS, meaning Distributed Denial of Service, happens when a swarm of computers send more requests than a server can handle causing an outage at the site. The server is overwhelmed and legitimate requests to send the site data to the client computer are unable to be fulfilled. The way this happens is that thousands upon thousands of computers infected with a piece of viral software log in to a private IRC server and then sort of hang out, waiting for the virus owner to issue a command which directs all of the infected computers to attack at once. Most people infected have no idea that their gaming PC, loaded as it is with downloaded and cracked video games are opting into the botnet when they crack the software and the next thing you know, Twitter is down for the afternoon. But people are getting wise to this and firewall software is getting smart. So whoever made the Dyn botnet got smart about it, too, and again, struck at a vulnerable internet-connected infrastructure, IoT, the Internet of Things. This means internet-enabled TVs, refrigerators, vibrators, and more were struck with a new virus that did the same thing as your average DDoS botnet but on a much larger scale. Somewhere, out there in the world, someone’s IoT-enabled dildo was ruthlessly waging war against a DNS server in order to drop a website and deny them whatever monetization that site engages in. This was very likely happening as its owner was pleasuring themselves with it, rapturously unaware of its nefarious dual purpose.

Blood Rose operators need to think like this. Exploit systemic weaknesses while providing pleasure to that same system. All structures have critical points of failure. There are simply too many variables to track for anything at any given time and many of these failure variables occur in places that you’ll never even think to look for. You can plan the most secure computer network that the world has ever known, carry it out exactly to plan and then execute it and somewhere, someone will still find a gap in the security to exploit. What do you know about computer network security hacking? Movies have us convinced that pale nerds in basement mausoleums, surrounded by chattering computers and industrial music are constantly typing away feverishly to break through layers upon layers of security software but that’s simply not how it works. It looks great in movies but most of the time hackers that want in to a network are simply picking up the phone, calling someone at the network’s host company and asking for a username and password. They’ve done this since the earliest days of what we know as “computer hacking” and not much has changed because the one constant flaw in any security system is the human factor. 

Consciousness is every bit the information network that the internet is and the connective tissue is the dirt under your feet. The places that we live in are the things which connect us. Your house, your apartment, the place you work in, your city or town, your state, and so on, these places join us together in such a way that each of us, from the smallest to largest details, is a single digit in a larger matrix. If you change a digit, or even a characteristic of a digit in that matrix, there is a cascading effect which effects the other digits in the matrix. It washes outward until the entire matrix is a different system than the one it was before. From the small scale to the large scale, the places that you live in, work in, or simply go to, are the common factor that links us up. If you live in an apartment with a couple of people, even if you don’t happen to like them, you’re connected by the communal space. Your understanding of that apartment is significantly different from people who don’t share this space with you on the regular and as a result, it represents a network node in reality that you have greater ontological control over than even your neighbor in an adjacent and very likely similar apartment. Performing magic in that space and on those people is far easier than it would be for you to go across the hall and attempt to work magic on that space and your neighbor. This even works in spaces of temporary autonomy. For a week in the summer the Black Rock Desert is transformed from a dead, inhospitable flatland into a bustling freak-city of nude yoga and Thunderdome gladiators. The people there assume new identities and sure, some of them are insufferable Silicon Valley CEOs and Venture Capitalists, but the theorem remains. In the absence of formally organized society, a new version of their self emerges and inhabits this temporary matrix and due to its very mercurial nature, mystical energies hold sway, helped along by tremendous volumes of freely available psychedelic drugs. 

In every city, on any given night, strangers gather in rock clubs and align themselves for a few hours along a shared power grid to celebrate their enthusiasm for any-given band. The musician Andrew WK wrote a song called Babalon for his record, God Is Partying, and the lyrics of this song are very much a hymn to the Thelemic godform, Babalon. Throughout the history of Thelema, magicians have bent over backwards to invoke The Scarlet Woman. Jack Parsons’ notorious Babalon Working is an example of this and while Andrew has never copped to it, I have long held the opinion that Babalon, if not all of God Is Partying, is a piece of ritual equipment intended for his own Babalon Working. Consider what you’re doing when you play the song, when you pick up a guitar and play along with it, when you sing the words while in the car. You’re performing the invocation. You’re playing an active role in the invocation of this spirit. Like most musicians who released a new record, Andrew took it on the road and toured it around the world. Night after night, Andrew, whose shows are already exceptionally ritualistic, performed this song, singing the words in front of a crowd driven to feral madness by the unstoppable roar of his party current. Each person in that crowd responded by pouring energy into the working. They sang along with him, like a chant. They danced and slammed in a writhing mass of bodies before the stage. Andrew becomes Pan in the classical Aleister Crowley obsession and across dozens of tour stops he invoked Babalon before ending the tour and withdrawing from the world, entirely. For the hour-or-so that Andrew and his band occupied those stages, the performance of his songs and this particular invocation turned whatever club they were playing into an extremely magical place that left people with a lasting impression. Having attended just such a show, myself, and knowing what to look for when magic is being performed, I can confirm this notion. Partaking of live music is already an electric experience when the band is committed to showing you a good time but the Andrew WK experience is something else. It’s a distinctly magical experience wherein the club becomes a temple and everything feels alive and infinitely possible.

On top of magical musicians giving direction and power to the audience through performance, the spirit of that club is already a perfect example of the fluid nature of reality. By day, nightclubs are cavernous spaces where the silence and flatness of energy is terribly unnerving. Being in such a place where the topography of its reality churns like angry seas can be intimidating. There’s an incessant buzz to it that reminds you that all is not right here when empty. The club seems to squirm under your feet until showtime and the crowd begins to trickle in. Every night the club packs with a mass of different bodies and different performances. There are new faces in the club every night. New people come in from the street to see the show and no night is the same. On Monday night the club hosts Godspeed You Black Emperor. On Tuesday, they book Insane Clown Posse. The likelihood of crossover between those two audiences is extremely low. This gives the space a kaleidoscopic quality to it. The genius loci has no face of its own. It’s mercurial and fleeting, like the details of a dream. It wears a mask for every night of entertainment and as a result it becomes a magical place that leaves a lasting impression on people. Whether the show, itself, is good or bad, people will remember it. This is the ideal state of reality for Current 128. All of reality should be as fluid. Because of this we look for the cracks in reality, the thin places where we can get our fingers in and pull. We have no stated theater of warfare. All of reality is our theater. But at this time, where the enemy has the lead, we need to pick our battle carefully and start in the places where we have the advantage.

Just like the DDoS botnets, we need to seize control of the genius loci in order to strike at the broadest number of people possible. In small locations, the aforementioned apartment or a rock club, for instance, this is easily done for solo magicians or small cells to manipulate by ritual but we need to hit harder and wider than that. We need to strike at entire towns and cities, or even just small neighborhoods among cities and to do that we need to think big if we’re going to make the foundation of communities too slippery to accommodate neo-reaction.