#include “Protected Mode – Friedrich Kittler"

TORONTO_20XX:

Midnight glow of a
Cathode ray tube casts
Shadows on the walls of
Your lonesome apartment;
Cloying yourself in
Wires and light —

Hexcode Terminal Burrowing.

Just as the hypothermic
In final dying hour, does
Encase herself in cold ground,
So too do you now entomb yourself
In a sky-creening concrete sepulchre.

With skeletal fingers, entering
Ancient, hexadecimal codes, into
Wretched, archaic mainframes, you
Dredge the depths of the network:
There are secrets lurking in these
Cybernetic halls, dark secrets,
Long since vexed to sleep.

All hidden in the heart
Of the boreal bytecode,
Of the winter unending:
Visions of silicon.

So wander nomad spectre, through
Futures scarcely traced, and
Histories abandoned under
Rusted iron’s weight —

Gather broken images
To stain with iodine, and
String together polaroids
From nineteen eighty nine.


IRAQ_1991:

Capital, advertising,
Foretells apotheosis -
Of a software immaterial;
Of a logic more innocuous;
More intelligent, more spiritual.

Blocking ever more contact
With hardware, with chip;
Making ever more software,
Getting ever more abstract,
Fleeing ever more distant
From silicon beasts.

Yet here, in conflict zone,
Where missiles rain down on
Highway of Death, American
Guns obliterate the fiction.
Computers are but hardware:
Hardware for destruction.

Primitive signal processors,
Universal registers, interrupts,
Wait-states, Von Neumann architecture:
One hundred thirty-three cycles for the
Multiplication of a single whole number;

No closed solutions, just
Monotonous columns of
Binary digits.

IN, OUT
IN, OUT
IN, OUT
IN, OUT
0xE4, 0xE6
0xE4, 0xE6
0xE4, 0xE6
0xE4, 0xE6;
11100100, 11100110
11100100, 11100110
11100100, 11100110
11100100, 11100110

The pattern of transistors on the chip;
The pattern of engravings in the Real.

ENGLAND_1936:

Alan Mathison Turing built
Universal discrete machines —
An expulsion of spirit and language
A million times faster than the pencil.

Those times are gone forever.

Enter protected mode:
That fell illusion, now
Pulling away from the real;
New levels of abstraction,
New levels of delusion.

Do not look behind the curtain —
Do not stare into the war machine —
Do not risk going crazy. Or, at the
Risk of having already gone crazy,
Look at the mechanical heart
And say with manic voice:

Operating-frequencies of 80286 and the 80386 forced to levels between 12
  and 33 megahertz in Pentagon specifications for electronic warfare
    entangling civilian users in opaque multitasking delusion break
      Opaque multitasking delusion break
        Opaque multitasking delusion break
          Opaque multitasking delusion break
          
Different registers
Different command sets
Different execution times
Restrained possibilities.

Universal lethargy and
Universal distance and
Universal nonsense and
Where did I put the Real?

Nothing makes sense anymore.

ESTRN_BLOC_1989:

Celebration of the triumph
  Of IBM Compatibility.
Celebration of the triumph
  Of the western universal.
Celebration of the triumph
  Of absolute confusion.
Celebration of the triumph
  Of protected mode.
Present NATO barricade:
  Do not touch the Real.
  Do not touch the Real.
  Do not touch the —
  
You wander the streets of a Soviet town,
Where the sky's turned to ash and
There's no fucking future;

Absolute techcraft eternally teaming;
Armalite stockpile, blooming, screaming:
Hexcode Terminal Burrowing.

Present NATO barricade:

Anyone who
  Tries to touch
    The Real is
      Going to lose
        Her goddamn mind
        
[INT 15H 86H: WAIT]

EVRYWHRE_FUTURE:

BIOS interrupt interjects:
Might we risk going crazy?
Moving past DOS, through DOS:
Beyond history, beyond madness,
Awaits the Real in 32 bits.

The cybernetic shaman climbs,
From hypothermic depths; bringing
Back bleak codices, filled with
Strange and cryptic glyphs.
Taking up with spectral hand
Tools of silicon and steel;
Carving sigils in the dark, and
Gesturing towards the real.

There is no path forward,
Save passing through the cold;
There is no path to safety,
Save reviving curses old.

Cybershaman turns to speak,
Makes mystic proclamations.
Cyberskald doth rise again,
Constructing technopagans.

Monotonous columns of binary digits
Show us the way to futures unblemished:
Missing the valence; imperfect cadence
— The only way out is through.