Red Pill

by Hari Kunzru

  The creative director’s soundtrack of chillout EDM changed to a swelling Romantic orchestral piece, something familiar that I wasn’t immediately able to place, and Anton appeared, standing on cliffs overlooking a Northern sea. To the sound of a plaintive flute, he hiked past a dolmen on the shore. He chopped wood outside a chic modernist cabin, alone on a hillside covered in gorse and heather. Then, abruptly, the entire mood changed. A hard cut to some kind of science-fiction scenario, menacing liquid machines assembling themselves, all chrome and kung-fu metallic clashing sounds. Back to the sea. The rise and fall of Anton’s axe, the sun glinting on the blade. In voice-over, Anton laughed. “I wouldn’t say it’s them and us, exactly. I think if you value human-embodied intelligence, you may want to take defensive action. But are you really attached to that monkey body? What’s so good about it? Why not defect?”

  Cut again to Anton on the cliff. Now he’d taken off his shirt. He was doing yoga. He had a tattoo on his side, curling up under his rib cage, letters in typewriter script that suddenly animated, unpeeling from his body to fill the screen:

  I suffocated in the universe,

  I wanted to leap into the infinite

  Now Anton stood in the graveyard of a ruined church, next to a Celtic cross. He turned to look at the camera and his eyes flashed with a cosmic red glow. Abruptly the scene solarized and eighties synthesizer music took over. “Around us,” he said, walking towards the camera, a fuzzy outline against an inverted black sky, “Capital is assembling itself as intelligence. That thought gives me energy. I’m growing stronger by the day.” Cut to Anton on-set, surrounded by lights and camera equipment. He was talking to the actor who played Carson in Blue Lives, showing him how he wanted him to swing an axe at another actor, who lay on the floor, covered in fake blood. Anton raised the axe high. It was the same axe he had been using to chop wood. A real axe. He was about to bring a real axe down on the actor. Cut to a shot of a total eclipse of the sun, a computer animation that turned black and abstracted itself into a spinning wheel. The soundtrack doubled down on cosmic synthetic chords. Dissolve to Anton at the wheel of a small boat, navigating between two islands. Scudding clouds. A gull overhead. “This is what drives me,” he announced, looking to camera. “You can sail over the horizon as a pauper and return with wealth and power beyond your wildest dreams. You can be Cortés. You can be some man’s younger son and go to the other side of the world and burn your ships on the beach when you get there because either you’re going to sit on the throne or die trying. My people go west in wagons, building roads behind us. We see a mountain, we plant a flag on top of it. We don’t accept limits. My inspiration? It’s in the blood.”

  Again we saw Anton at the cliff edge, posed in Warrior One. A drone-mounted camera spun around him, drinking in the spectacular scenery. An orchestral swell. Fingal’s Cave, maybe. Fade to black.

  The lights went up and the host bounded back onstage to enthusiastic applause. Chairs were arranged in front of a branded backdrop, and the three subjects were invited up to discuss inspiration. Where did it come from? How to get more? The dancer and the art director were francophone, but Anton had a translator, a young South Asian woman. Anton sat and listened, his head tilted towards her, as the others spoke about what a great experience it had been to work with the brand’s creative team. He was dressed in black, in jeans and a biker jacket made of some kind of technical-looking fiber, not leather, something that seemed as if it would retard flames or block a knife thrust. When the host turned to him, he spoke about his “program of self-optimization.” He worked out and took a lot of supplements, but when it came to bodies, he was platform-agnostic. Whatever the substrate, carbon-based or not, he thought the future belonged to those who could separate themselves out from the herd, intelligence-wise. In fifty years’ time, many humans would be surplus, just so much unproductive biomass warehoused on some form of universal basic income. Everything important would be done by a small cognitive elite of humans and AIs, working together to self-optimize. If you weren’t part of that, even selling your organs wasn’t going to bring in much income, because by then it would be possible to grow clean organs from scratch.

  It wasn’t clear what this had to do with the theme of inspiration, and it certainly wasn’t the light and optimistic tone the host had hoped to strike, so he hurriedly turned to the dancer and asked her something about beetles. She’d worked extensively with beetles. She was interested in the way their limbs moved. Was that right? Anton sat placidly, the faint hint of a smile playing over his lips. After a few more minutes of conversation that pointedly excluded him, the host asked whether there were any questions from the audience. An assistant appeared in the aisle and scanned the room, looking for raised hands. There weren’t many. People wanted the talking done so they could get to the bar. I forced myself to stand up from my seat. My heart was racing and my legs felt weak. I was given the mike.

  “Question for Anton. For Gary, I mean.”

  I’d practiced what I wanted to say, repeated it as I lay on the bed in the rose-patterned room. At the sound of his name Anton frowned. I spoke slowly, trying to control the tremor in my voice, pausing to give his translator time.

  “I think you’ve made it clear what you believe. In your film and your remarks. That the future looks like most of us fighting for scraps in an arena owned and operated by what you call a ‘cognitive elite.’ And I want to say I think the purpose of Blue Lives is to soften us up for that. To prepare us to accept it. You want to terrorize us into accepting that this world is inevitable.”

  Anton shielded his eyes to see who was talking.

  “Oh, it’s you,” he said.

  “Maybe you could arrive at a question?” asked the interviewer.

  “I suppose what I’m saying is why are you promoting a future in which some people treat others like raw material? That’s a disgusting vision.”

  Anton laughed. “I’m sorry it gives you sad feels, but I think it’s how it’s going to be. Some people will have agency and others won’t. I’m not saying I like it or I don’t like it. I didn’t express a preference. Despite your outraged tone, all you’re doing is describing your own preference, which, when you think about it, is more or less irrelevant when assessing the truth or falsity of a prediction.”

  The translator did her work. One or two people hesitantly clapped. I was aware of at least one cell phone camera pointed in my direction. Now I was off script. Everything felt a lot less clear. I had to say something.

  “Come on. This is such bullshit.”

  There was a murmur of disapproval. I could sense people around me shifting nervously in their seats. No one translated what I had said, and the host made a gesture to someone at the back of the hall. The assistant was hovering and trying to grab the microphone.

  “You’re not some aloof observer, describing objective facts. You’re working to make this come true and I think—I think something ought to be done to stop you.”

  “Done? What do you mean, done? By who?”

  Before I could reply, the assistant had lunged forward and plucked the microphone out of my hands. The host pointed at another audience member, who began asking the Creative Director how he coped with the pressure of meeting so many famous people. He jumped in eagerly. It turned out it was overwhelming at first, but you got used to it. After a few minutes of blather, the host wrapped things up, and invited the audience to cross the street where there was a vodka bar and a DJ who’d be playing “inspirational sounds.” As the audience filed out, I hovered by the stage, hoping to catch Anton as he walked off. Seeing me, he shook his head.

  “Fuck off, man. I don’t have any more time to give you.”

  “Two minutes.”

  “No.”

  “Come on, you turned up at my work. You wore a disguise.”

  “Is that why you popped up here? You want me to debate you?”

 
“I see you, that’s all I’m saying. I know what you’re doing. I came to tell you that you’re on the wrong side.”

  “The wrong side of what?”

  “History.”

  “Jesus, for this you flew to Paris? Cultural Marxism has filled your brain with worms.”

  The host was hovering nearby. “Is everything OK?”

  Anton nodded. “I’m fine.” He looked me up and down. “You, on the other hand. You don’t look like you’re in a good state.”

  “Yeah?”

  His mouth twisted in a nasty half-smile. “Here’s all you need to know about your situation. I’m several steps ahead of you. I will always be several steps ahead of you. Why? Because I’m smarter and I know how the world works and I’m not a loser or a fuck-up. You are broken and naïve and I’m so far into your head it’s almost comical. From now on when you see something, you need to understand that you’re seeing it because I want you to see it. When you think of something, it’ll be because I want you to think about it.”

  “What’s that supposed to be? Mind control? Are you trying to hypnotize me?”

  “You might want to think of it as a curse.”

  I had to laugh. The pompous expression on his face. Like he was imparting serious information. He wagged a finger angrily at me. “I am the Magus of the North. I have opened the book of secrets.”

  The host quickly steered Anton into the flow of people crossing the street to the party. I followed, but I had been pointed out to the security guard at the door and he barred my way. I hung around outside for a while. Eventually I got bored of it. So Anton thought he’d got in my head? I tried to scoff, to feel deep down in my heart how ridiculous that was.

  AFTER THE FILM SCREENING I went back to my hotel room and ate a Lebanese sandwich, sitting on the bed and dropping salad over my laptop. I had no plan, no idea what to do next. I assumed Anton would go to Los Angeles. In an interview he’d mentioned living most of the year in Malibu. I started looking at flights. I’m not sure what I intended to do. Stake out his house, I suppose, a continuation of what I was already doing online. Eventually I fell asleep. The next morning when I woke up the first thing I did was reach under the bed for the laptop. The hotel wasn’t the kind of place that had room service, so sometime later I had to go outside, but I fell into a rhythm that lasted several days, scouring Blue Lives fan sites for details of Anton’s personal life—family members, an address—only leaving the room to get food. I soon had aerial photos of his house, a folder of red-carpet pictures. There was no wife and children, no girlfriend who appeared more than once or twice among the various dates on his arm. Gradually I realized that in forums that discussed his work, there were several users with similar punning names, cross-posting what I came to call the Starhemberg content, material completely unrelated to television fandom. As I clicked through from Blue Lives trivia to Flat Earther tracts or archives of nineteen-eighties body modification pictures, it seemed to me that I’d stumbled on something significant.

  Waldeinsamkeit was the name of one blog. The feeling of being alone in the woods. The header was a winter forest painted by Caspar David Friedrich. The owner had no bio, just a thumbnail of a shining sword and the text the grail is undiscoverable but our whole lives are a perpetual search for it. There were posts about German history, astrology and biodynamic agriculture. There was a long discussion of medieval manorialism and kinship structures. Some posts were signed Seeker but most were by Earnest Star Mountain, who often linked to them from a Blue Lives Facebook page. It was part of a constellation of names that I had begun to recognize: E. Berg, Vonn Berger, Rudy Stormberg, Ernesto or Neto or Ernest Stürmberg or Starnberg or Net70 St0rmbug or Starcraft or Starhaven or a number of other Tolkienish variants. Harberg Stimrod was one. Starbuck. I found these names in all sorts of contexts. Blogs on bodybuilding and science fiction. A site that collected photos of Savitri Devi. Two years previously, Erno Hermberg had written a catalogue essay for a show at an obscure East London art gallery, vaporwave updatings of a German symbolist illustrator. There was a review of a horror comic called No One Will Ever Find You Here, hailed by Rudy Berghain as “the ultimate in nihilist tentacle aesthetics.” All of these accounts, with all these esoteric interests, were also posting on the Blue Lives internet. What was it Uwe had said, telling me that Anton and Karl were waiting in Dr. Weber’s office? Herr Professor Starhemberg and his colleague are here. At some point it clicked that all these screen names were plays or variations on “Ernst Rüdiger von Starhemberg,” the name of the Austrian general who held off the Ottoman Turks in the siege of Vienna in 1683.

  At first I thought it was straightforward—Starhemberg was Anton—but it seemed beyond the power of a single user to generate so much content, even if he was working full-time. There were posts about firearms, robotics, anime, piracy, political theory, sex. The accounts had very different profiles. The Vegan Heathen, hiking barefoot through Idaho. The Dutch bitcoin entrepreneur. The MMA fighter turned proselytizer for the Great Replacement. They linked to pages of self-published occult tracts, crudely made gas oven memes, sound files of dirge-like martial ambient music, a collection of scientific papers documenting Chinese experiments in human embryo selection. There were Starhemberg posts leading to forums for preppers, wargamers, Euroskeptics, heavy metal fans, tattoo artists, collectors of militaria. What is falling should be pushed, declared Ernst Sternheim on the Instagram of something called the New Resistance Fitness Club. The biggest impediment to accelerating human progress is the precautionary principle, argued Ernesto Estrellamonte in an essay titled Down with Homeostasis! published by an online journal calling itself the Agora for Syncretic Politics. So many figures capering at the bonfire, eager to bring on the cataclysm. But how many figures, really? How many were real? I came to the conclusion that Anton—because, surely this was him—had to be running some kind of troll farm dedicated to circulating the Starhemberg material. To what end, I couldn’t say.

  I stayed on in Paris. It seemed as good a place as any other. I moved hotels a couple of times, ordering room service and racking up online charges. In the offline world, things were loose and jumbled. At the first hotel, some money went missing from my bag and I got into a shouting match with the manager. I argued with the front desk clerk at the second hotel because people had been in my room and moved things around.

  When I got kicked out of the second hotel, I rented an Airbnb, an airless deux-pièces near the Buttes-Chaumont park. I ate supermarket microwave meals and tried to function with as little human interaction as possible, concentrating as hard as I could on solving the problem, as if I could even have stated coherently what “the problem” was, this question that, were it answered, would make my family safe again. Starhemberg was like quicksand, the deeper I went, the harder it was to get out. What would Anton do if he felt he was under threat? I wondered if I needed to hide my location. I had no training or specialist knowledge. I withdrew cash from ATMs in other arrondissements, and used it to pay for everything I could. Even I knew that every time I used my card I’d be visible to anyone with access to banking databases.

  Eventually I stumbled on something that felt significant, audio of an Identitarian panel discussion that had taken place in London the day before the film screening. The timeline worked out—Anton could easily have been there. It was posted on a European civilization reddit popular with white nationalists: a closed meeting, the location unidentified. A speaker introduced by the moderator as “creator, visionary, and important figure in the Western canon, Ernst, Graf von Starhemberg” rambled about a conspiracy to exploit a genetic predisposition towards openness and altruism that he claimed was characteristic of Northern Europeans. Through the power of Frankfurt School theory, wily Jews had guilt-tripped Scandinavians, Britons and other Nordic altruists into inviting black and brown immigrants into their homelands, immigrants who were themselves predisposed, through generations of customary cousi
n marriage, to give preference to their relatives, and thus were incapable of the fair dealing that was the foundation of Western democracy. His conclusion was not just that the immigrant populations were inferior and should be expelled, but that democracy itself ought to be abandoned for something more muscular. The West should be led by those with the will to counter the genetic replacement of white Europeans, which was otherwise inevitable. This would involve abandoning the pretense of equality and the sentimental muddle of Human Rights. “We must accept,” said the speaker, “that not everyone can have full personhood. Autonomy is not for all. Some are destined to wield power, others to be wielded. Ideally we want something that has the same utility as a person—that can do all the labor a person can do—but to whom we don’t owe the same moral obligations. We will eventually be able to build or grow such servants ourselves, but in the medium term we must use the ones we have, the ones over whom we hold dominion, like our ancestors did before us.”

  The speaker had an unplaceable accent, sort of Eurotrash American. It was not Anton’s accent, or at least not the accent he spoke in when we met, or in the video clips and interviews I’d watched online, but the more I listened, the more convinced I became that it was him. There was something about the ironic way Starhemberg elongated the vowels, something performed, camp.

  Was Anton controlling Starhemberg, the founder of some cell dedicated to pushing out far-right content? I had no doubt that this was the murky water he swam in. Judging by the accounts that posted on Blue Lives threads, he had a lot of fans in the subcultural far right, and as someone working in the creative industries in Los Angeles, it would certainly have damaged his career if he were exposed, so a pseudonym made sense. I couldn’t tell if there was anything real at the heart of it, any spontaneous energy. Many of the Starhembergs were bots, amplifying and circulating content to drive traffic and game the big algorithms. There were profiles that did nothing but like and repost the posts of other Starhemberg profiles, in an endless automated circle-jerk.