Building Elsewhere

Abstract

Certain myths function as infrastructure for cognition: they install an inaccessible elsewhere in which meaning can be lodged, and to which the unseen and the uncertain are referred for significance. Under conditions of informational fragmentation, such myths perform the orienting work that established institutions of knowledge no longer reliably carry, as can be seen in the rise of conspiracies and alternative histories as well as their cultural processing online. This article examines two elsewheres that shape a broad band of contemporary online cosmologies and form a topological pair: Agartha, the kingdom of an interior earth, and Ashtar, the channeled commander of a celestial fleet. Placed together, they disclose one operation distributed across the inner and the outer, folding into a common form wherever hidden authority is located past the horizon of perception. Both descend from the Theosophical matrix of concealed masters and hierarchized humanity, a matrix whose doctrine of root races encoded a racial cosmology as an apparatus for ordering time, descent, and destiny. Read as a comparative pair, Agartha and Ashtar perform closely analogous moves, racializing the elsewhere from opposite ends of a single vertical axis. Alongside this pairing, the article follows a separate mytheme, Lemuria, to show how portable the same infrastructure proves across registers. One continent passes from a nineteenth-century zoogeographic hypothesis (Sclater), to the esoteric homeland of a root race (Blavatsky), into the hyperstitional vector deterritorialized by the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, and onward into the reterritorialized neo-reactionary racism of Nick Land's later authorship. Held apart from Agartha, Lemuria carries the reflexive and temporal dimension of the argument: it demonstrates that the elsewhere holds no fixed politics of its own, so that the reactionary turn registers as a specific authorial move performed upon a durable apparatus. This operation is framed through Blumenberg's account of myth as labor upon the unseen and draws its analytical force from the schizoanalytic vocabulary of deterritorialization. The digital reactivation of these myths, especially present in right-wing online and ironic subcultures producing Tartaria and Hyperborea edits on TikTok, channeling the Galactic Federation on image boards, creating AI-generated contact imagery featuring right-wing politicians across platforms as well as invoking Antarctic Hyperborea as the site where inner and outer meet, acts as evidence that the elsewhere operates as epistemic architecture whose racial substratum persists as a condition of its circulation.

Title of Event

Occultural Accelerationism, AI, and the Destruction of Everything

Organisers/Management