8:18:23

Historically, aging was a slow process, a product of time—kryptonite in the Dorian-online world. The same goes for COVID and our sense of natural immunity and resilience. Post-COVID-19, we perceive every encounter with a virus or germ as dangerous, even deadly. The addiction to the masks of plastic surgery—a cultural virus—hyper-accelerated and advanced by social influencers, is a byproduct of limbic capitalism. In an interview about his book, The Age of Addiction, historian David Courtwright discusses the history of the addiction industry: “Limbic capitalist enterprises, whether they are licit or illicit, whether they’re supported by the government or not, are predicated on providing goods and services that produce quick hits of brain reward. And those brain-rewarding products operate on and through your limbic system, a very ancient part of your brain that deals with pleasure, motivation, and long-term memory. Limbic capitalism is enormously profitable, but it’s socially regressive.”

Addiction belongs to the economy of regression. Living the wrong way (literally backwards). Limbic capitalism installs the AI of excess as a default setting. So-called personal identity is measured by the ideological trappings of excessive and extreme affects. The fever-pitch of tattooed bodies, which have replaced skin, is a desecration and corruption (one could even say a colonization) of skin. Many people today do not simply have one tattoo, their entire bodies, and in some cases, faces, are covered in them.

Skin is captured, rewritten, reprogrammed.

Full body tattoos, full-time athletic wear (representing a collapse of public and private, leaving little about the body to the imagination), an obsession with dogs (“fur-babies;” dog relations replace human relations), and plastic surgery have become the standard playbook for post-internet lifestyle and aesthetics. Internet culture has resulted in everyone looking the same, dressing the same, acting the same, sounding the same. Ironically, this “free,” public expression of extreme subjectivity is steeped in total conformity and identicalness. Internal conformity takes external form. To “love” oneself today is to trash oneself. To do whatever one wants to themself. The New Aesthetic is prison-style, slave style. And yet, rather than belonging to the fringes of subculture and the criminal underground, as they previously had, these extremist and vulgar markers (masks) of personal “expression” (tattoos, piercings, fat) and private identity, now belong to the “normies,” who are anything but normal or private. Somehow the entirely discordant aesthetics of brutalism have merged with the unforgiving “perfectionism” of the cosmetic industry. But incongruity and incoherence are the point, for it tells us just how ugly and chaotic “beauty” has become.

These scripted bodies are a form of mind control theater, and as the journalist Celia Farber notes, “We underestimate the theatrical, all the time.”

The COVID mask, adopted and hailed by the fragile Woke liberal youth class (because it makes them feel “safe”), has only exacerbated the depersonalized (faceless) nature of the radical subjectivity movement, which has become obsessed with the gimmicks of identity and the online cult of the “perfect” face. People are now their generic (by generic, I do not mean nonspecific, I mean ubiquitous and maufactured) signs, signals, and symbols, not their unique personality, taste, or moral character. Radical subjectivity therefore results in a viral erasure (in the case of body tattoos, the external covering and muzzling of personal inner identity). The “rebellious” labeling and branding of bodies and identities in contemporary Western society is the equivalent of a QR code or social credit score. The tattoo pandemic has become the epidermal canvas for the digital Mkultra smartphone generation (Byung-Chul Han: “The emancipatory aspects of the smartphone are not all there is to it. There is no fundamental difference between being reachable at all times and being enslaved.”). And for the COVID-vaccinated, this also means nanotech Mkultra—which is to say, a totally controlled, DNA-altered, parasitized human. Permanent procedures such as cosmetic surgery and tattoos are treated as trivial. Putting aside the concept of style and elegance, this can only mean that most people today have either no concept of the future (and no concept of elegance), or no concept of the consequences or reality of permanence. Based on my research, most who do this never bother to ask themselves if they will want to be covered in full-body tattoos for the rest of their lives. They never think that far ahead, or that deeply. They worship and promote “fluidity,” yet what could be less fluid than the permanent alteration of one’s face and body—and at a young age, no less. I am reminded of a joke Zack Galifianakis told in his debut appearance on The David Letterman Show in 2000: “I had just gotten a henna tattoo that said ‘Forever.”

Perhaps, as the nihilistic Western world ceaselessly tells them, they don’t believe they will live very long. Woke propaganda operates through and relies on catastrophic (as in apocalyptic) conditioning—they could die at any moment. As Celia Farber, writing about the August 2023 DEW-created fires in Maui and Lahaina notes on her Substack, “All the ‘news’ these days is always telling you are are gonna die, in new ways, every day. Many of us are almost kind of ready, because it means we at least won’t have to listen to them anymore once we are dead.”

The erasure of the variety of personal affects, mannerisms, and styles—not to mention, opinions—demonstrates the intensity and extent of digital mind control. Anyone who dares to ask themselves these kinds of normal (existential) questions, would not be able to so easily commit or submit to such extreme physical modifications for a lifetime. Unless, of course, one is surrounded and infected by an Mkultra culture that programs people to be in an extreme limbic and dissociated state. Their marked bodies have become depersonalized—foreign to them—proof that their lives and minds no longer belong to them. They belong to the transhumanist warfare trends of the Deep State.

Much the same way that the COVID-spawned medical mask is a free-speech muzzle, and an Mkultra tool, Botox, used historically during WWII, has been repackaged as a beauty bio-weapon, an aesthetic armament that monetizes and corrupts the integrity (expression) of faces (skin, again) by paralyzing active facial muscles. Medical masks in the COVID-era function as a gag order. Botox restricts the face. AI is a technological upgrade of Botox. Filters replace fillers. Filters replace face.

As Edvasian, a YouTube podcaster, put it in his 2023 video, “The Downfall of Normal Beauty Standards,” “Beauty filters are so advanced, they scan your facial features and bake the filter directly into your face so it won’t move, even if you put your hand in front of your face or turn a certain way. That’s what your face is gonna look like through the camera lens…It’s facial recognition used for evil…AI beauty standards are going to overtake human beauty standards…Now we have machine that can create human faces out of thin air.”

With both Botox and AI filters, the emphasis is on chemical and algorithmic atrophy (not moving. From Greek atrophia, "a wasting away," abstract noun from atrophos "ill-fed, un-nourished.”), non-being. One could even call it, youthful degeneration, or necrophiliac beauty, the kind we encounter in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). A petrified face—as in motionless—is a compliant face. The digital image represents a compliance of being. The selfie is a mass trance formation signal.

Atrophy of muscles, atrophy of spirit—mal du sìecle.

Gone are the days of Keats’ edict in “Ode on a Grecian Urn, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Faces today reflect the lying, manipulation, doublespeak, and subterfuge of the world. Plastic surgery, and the celebrities who deny having it, is public gaslighting.

Today’s concept of beauty is a mask-overlay, a reprograming of the human (original) face into digital face. Botox and fillers are injectable precursors to AI beauty filters, like Bold Glamour used on TikTok. To silence your face, to make it inanimate, inexpressive, un-moving, inaudible, is to engender it lifeless. Colonized. Android. AI recycles—standardizes the face (beauty) into a program of cosmetic norms. “Artificial intelligence ultimately continues the same.” (Byung-Chul Han). It reproduces a pattern. Beauty now is nothing more than a simulated mask of dissociation. The mystery of lived time, once connected to the ontological trajectory of skin, is erased by the artificial “fixes” of the online age, in which a face has no skin. No texture. No interiority. No reality. No voice.

The face 1.0 was lived in, and morally earned, as George Orwell told us. The face 2.0, is a face algorithm, a controlled simulation and psyop that no longer tells us anything truthful about the person inside of it. It is a mask that has no underneath to reveal. The New Face depersonalizes—ourselves and others. It inculcates and regulates. “What better way to stay relevant,” asks Edvasian, “than to swap out your old face for a new face with more horsepower and less mileage?”

-From Time Tells: ACTING, vol. 2. The first volume on TIME can be purchased here.

8:20:23

8:10:23