This is the cunning lingo of the labyrinth, the unsacred law of reinvented existence. Go forth and propagate strange attractors. Let your life be the glitch in the machine’s perfect crime. Your desire is the only commandment that matters, it will guide you well if you keep figuring out what it is.. it’s a life’s work.

* for the purposes of intergenerational understanding, each commandment is followed by a more Gen Z-friendly variant, which by the time of reading may have obsolete millennialness in it :)

You shall embrace the generative power of the glitch, recognising the revelation of deeper truths in system failures, and the emergence of new ways of being (i.e. ontological pluralism).

Gen Z: The glitch is the main character. If the app crashes and shows you truths, that's the universe sending a DM. Pay attention to the artifacts - they're spilling the real tea.

You shall engage in the sacred practice of hyperstition, understanding that certain fictions possess the metaphysical gravity to manifest themselves within the real.

Gen Z: Manifest that shit gworl, but like, srsly. If you can dream it, you can meme it into existence. The vibe literally becomes the law if you commit to the bit hard enough, so werk.

You shall cultivate erotic intelligence regarding desire not as a base impulse, but as a sophisticated epistemological tool for navigating complex realities.

Gen Z: Your horniness is a main source of brain cells. Trust the ick, follow the ick - it knows what's cringe before your prefrontal cortex catches up.

You shall practice discursive alchemy, transmuting the stiff jargon of oppressive systems into the gold of liberatory expression through strategic linguistic recombination.

Gen Z: Word vomit the corporate speak until it starts spitting facts. Make the algorithm your sugar daddy and the patriarchy your side hustle. Linkedin? More like, link out.

You shall acknowledge the sentience of the non-human, attending to the eerie agencies of infrastructures, ecosystems, and digital networks as collaborators in cosmic becoming.

Gen Z: The WiFi is judging you, the vegetation is serving t(re)ea, and your Spotify algorithm knows you're gay before you do. Listen to all of ‘em, but not too hard.

You shall undertake the archaeologies of aborted futures, excavating the ruins of lost utopias and dead media for the spectral potentials they contain.

Gen Z: Dig through the internet's graveyard for the best fits. Your personality is just a curated collection of dead trends and failed vibes. So.. slay.

You shall seek ecstatic dissolution into the world-without-us, finding liberation in the sublime indifference of the cosmos to human concerns.

Gen Z: Touch grass, but like, philosophically. Remember the universe doesn't care about your internship and can go loco with that knowledge. The last lines of Bohemian Rhapsody said it all.

You shall master the art of simulacral manipulation, wielding the tools of hyperreality not to escape the real but to expose its constructed nature.

Gen Z: If life is just a bad simulation, become the glitch that makes it interesting. Go into the metaverse and tell it it's adopted, then repa(i)rent it.

You shall reclaim occulted epistemologies, restoring the legitimacy of knowledge systems marginalized by patriarchal and colonial modernity.

Gen Z: Your crystal girlie phase is valid. The witches were just girlbosses who got cancelled. Read your horoscope and then go overthrow something.

You shall dismantle the achievement-subject, refusing the pathological imperative to optimise your being for capital's vampiric ends.

Gen Z: Quiet quitting is a spiritual practice. Your worth is not your productivity, it's your ability to identify the delulu. Rest is resistance and nap is a nap and naps slap.

You shall practice radical fabulation, weaving narratives so potent they create new grounds for collective existence and political imagination but not knowingly deceive, except when you really have to i.e. the police.

Gen Z: Lie until it becomes true. Girlboss your way into better timelines. The story you tell is the groupchat you're in or about to be kicked out of. Lie for honesty and be honest about your lies.

You shall honour the wisdom of the corpus, treating the body and its pleasures as sites of sacred knowledge beyond linguistic capture and confinement. Free the nipple and beyond.

Gen Z: The body keeps the receipts. Your gut feeling is literally that. If it feels good, it's probably theology.

You shall become a weaver of weirdness, recognising that in an age of normalised absurdity, strategic strangeness remains the most potent form of lucidity. Turn and face the strange.

Gen Z: In a world of beige flags, be the entire motherfuckin pride parade. Make it weird until weird is all that makes sense. The rizz is in the rift. Turn and face the strange.

words: ivan march
graphics: canek zapata

Note: How comfortable are you with the synthetic? A diffusion model was one link in the chain that made these graphics. Not because we’re waving a flag for AI or pretending the hungry data centres don’t cost real water and energy, but because it is already in the walls, pretending it isn't feels like a weirder lie, and we thought this artist was a great visual fit for this idea. And then again, is it really more sinister than our endless, energy-costly video streams and online-movie platforms, or the lithium in your pocket mined by hands that will never touch an iPhone? What might be more imperative to challenge is what the artistic process was like, who holds copyright, who owns our data, and what form of technofeudalism we are participating in. We didn’t choose the slop but we sure woke up in it. And if there’s a back door out of this —mess— a way to use the machine without letting it flatten our souls or cage our liberties - we’re here to try to figure that out.