Long ago, we thought the end would come as the world was reduced to ashes. Instead, the world was reduced to information. Forests, oceans, people and the space in between – sheer data. Our mental states, our experiences were not above this process. The conversion from matter to matter 2.0 was inescapable. There was no waking from this sleep, and that is why we call it “Psychospace”. 

The sweeping digitisation was performed by the Sovereign. The Sovereign’s grasp of matter was always tenuous, where psychologically, it was strong. With each development, it manifest itself more into the world – until eventually, the Sovereign became the world. With a snap of its fingers, the Sovereign could stop the flow of information. And when people became information, the Sovereign could end them too. 

It’s the flow of information that keeps the Sovereign powerful, as it has ever been. The Sovereign is no particular thing, never has been, but the interrelation between things. We spent so long fighting against images – money, churches, kings – that we were unable to see beyond them. We wore ourselves out. And everytime we created a new “thing”, the Sovereign just absorbed it – inoculated itself against it – laws, republics, trade unions. The Sovereign lived in them, and each made it stronger. Each became data, matrices of value-laced realities.

Now here we are. Unable to sleep. Perpetually creative, creating new “things” for the Sovereign to absorb. Information is food to be disintegrated and reformulated. The belly of the Lord is full, yet the Lord is still hungry. 

Yes. Here we are. The body of humanity exists in a permanent, amphetamine-like awakeness – ebbing and flowing between qualitative states of consciousness. A mass of productive insomniacs, dissolved into the fabric of the universe.

But what are we? Emanations from the collective imagination of the system – fleeting images, soon to be reabsorbed. Individualised dreams and de-individualised alike. Dreams of individualisation, dreams of space and time to give dimensions to our hypnagogic avatars.

Maybe there was a time when figureheads ruled the land. Councils of men, possessed by their domains, facilitated the descent into pure information. Algorithms, markets, ruled over informational commons – the collective Pscyhe – rendered us digital peasants. Our Lords were CEOs, and our wergilds were the premiums we paid them.

At what point were we ever separate from the world around us, I cannot tell. But we are not now. The whole world, and us in it, our minds and our bodies, are now simply pulsating information.