Prophet Motives & Knightwork States

Originally published by Folklore in Summer'22 and mirrored here with kind permission. {#originally-published-by-folklore-in-summer22-and-mirrored-here-with-kind-permission}

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Author's Note: This text is a heavily abridged version of a longer
text in preparation on this topic, and as such is broad in scope but
light on exposition. Causa latet, vis est notissima.

{#n1rs530vrwi}

Technology, Capital, Spirituality: An Unholy Trinity?

"From the beginning men used God to justify the unjustifiable. He
moves in mysterious ways: men say."

Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, 1989, p. 95.

The phenomenon of  'disenchantment of the world' invoked by Max Weber
by way of Friedrich Schiller\'s 'Entzauberung', emerged as a result of
the gradual exfiltration of magic, sorcery, gods, and demons from the
arena of divinity by the Abrahamic religions, in their place invoking
human prophets, apostles, disciples, and other forms of modernist
cultural rationalisations.

![](https://assets.pubpub.org/97l0upky/Screenshot 2025-01-14 125629-21736855891406.png){#nt8r7dhcyzz}

Magic The Gathering: Disenchantment Card

"All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are
secularized theological concepts"

Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of
Sovereignty, 1922, p. 36.

Since time immemorial, the calendar and clock have been used as organs
for the mediation of ecumenical, imperial, capital, and now
technological forms of 'chronic' domination. In Weber's later The
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, the equivocation is made
between time and money. Today, it's more apparent than ever that
modern capitalism has replaced God with quantised
time.

Contemporary luxury
beliefs
such as those under the
'TESCREAL'
banner--transhumanism, extropianism, singularitarianism, cosmism,
rationalism, effective altruism, and longtermism--amongst others
associated with the 'quantified self', and 'longevity' movements,
intimate that the disenchanting of earnest spirituality into synthetic
replicas reified through capital and technology continues unabated in
the present moment.

A Chance To Cult Is A Chance To Cure

"For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting
life."

John 3:16

Cults--of personality, of belief, of community--are nothing new. Indeed,
the Romans and Greeks thought of affiliations to untraditional
deities
within their respective constellations as cults. Similarly, so-called
'conspiracy theories', i.e. legends of clandestine skullduggery
associated with organisations such as the Knights Templar, Freemasonry,
and the Bavarian Illuminati have persisted for centuries. There is an
epistemic issue at the heart of any discussion around these topics,
which is where the distinction--if such a delineation is even
possible--at which point a new religious movement transcends its
status as a conspiratorial plot into that of a social cult, a cult into
that of a bona fide religion, or the reverse via schisms and
factional divergences.

"The Church and The Network, Zeal and Time, Death and Money. All
sides of the same Coin."

0x Salon, The Black Hole of Money, 2022.

{#nq45b87lobo}

\'Whose Skin In the Game?\' custom Magic: The Gathering Card, 0x Salon,
2020.

It seems important to ask, why are all these new technology-mediated
new religious movements emerging now?  Looking at the world around
us, post-COVID, post-Brexit, post-Trump, in the midst of rampant price
inflation, it would appear that a new wave of Weltentzauberung (world
disenchantment) is upon us. We live in an age of weak ties between kin,
clan, and townsfolk, with trust in institutions--from churches and
universities, to governments--seemingly at all-time lows. Concomitantly,
the atomisation of the heteronormative 'nuclear' family continues apace.
With increasing numbers of people living alone and working remotely,
civic hubs such as pubs, cafes, and post-offices slide out of commercial
viability. As real estate prices soar globally, community spaces such as
town squares and parks are increasingly turned over to private
developers for luxury apartments, gated communities, and other enforcers
of social hierarchy operating through the demarcation of territory.

Founders. CEOs. Type A personalities. Leaders. Captains of industry.
Professors. Inventors. Investors.
Patreon-Podcast-Substack-growth-hackers ('Roganauts'). We all know
them, and love or hate them, they will never go away. The
incentives--economic, social, and otherwise--provided by capital; in all
its hard and soft, explicit and implicit forms, are so powerful that,
like moths to a light (positive phototaxis), or flies to a heap of
dung, they will keep coming. But where do these unnatural-seeming
people-cum-archetype-facsimiles spawn from?

"Like liberalism, or democracy, or capitalism, protocol is a
successful technology precisely because its participants are
evangelists, not servants."

A.R. Galloway, Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization,
2004, p. 245.

It may be helpful to orient this anthropological exploration though a
concept which arguably started it all: code-as-law. Originally
spoken of in the 1990s separately by Bill
Mitchell
and Larry
Lessig,
code-as-law appears to have fairly benign conceptual origins in the
early days of the world wide web. Code-as-law supposes that there could
be a type of self-regulation where private actors--institutions,
companies, individuals etc.--could embed their values and customs into
the technological substrates and artifacts that they create and use.
The trouble is, with blockchains that never forget a thing we now have
long-lasting
mnemotechnics,
and therefore code-being-law means not just some text files in a Git
repository, but rather a technoeconomic substrate which can execute
and enact the predetermined logics of a piece of code both within and
without (via proxies) the network itself. Neohistoricisation. In so
doing, code-as-law becomes something we are subjected to
unwillingly, unwittingly, and unconsensually, from the moment of
execution/deployment until the end of time/the network. These may or may
not be the same event, depending on your preferred network
eschatology.

"Rather than savage anomaly, blockchain is better understood as
normalisation and naturalisation, the regime of nature-as-technics
presented as a work of trustless salvation. Blockchain technics is
what mediates here between formalised Idea (that of 'ordinality') and
everyday life ('late capitalism'): it is Platonic Idea incarnated as
Capitalist Theocracy."

Justin Clemens, In The State of Nature, Nothing Will Be Lost, 2020,
p. 171.

Imaginary Countries: Control-AltRight-Citadelete

Perhaps this New Age of Disenchantment, together with the
aforementioned nascent mnemotechnic capabilities, can go some way to
explain the fervour and zeal of today's technocapitalist
empire-builders. The desire for new forms of distributed community, from
benign online gaming cliques, unidimensional fandoms, speculator-tribes,
and 'intentional communities', to Bitcoin citadels, network states,
special economic zones, and charter cities, might be interpreted
initially as exit fantasies for the disempowered and dispossessed. Can
this **secessionary turn be thought of as a colonialism of
the map, now that is no longer a faithful reproduction of the
territory?**

{#nkzj2o0ch7h}

\'Bitcoin Ascended\' meme, via
Citadel21

It seems somewhat self-evident why these neo-egressive movements might
grasp for a form of network animism, dressing themselves up with
the accoutrements of religions and other belief systems, to garner a
veneer of legitimacy. Such ceremonialisms may also serve to distract
from these nascent movements' fragility and ephemerality, and of course
to beatify, and beautify--typically in traditional senses of the
word--the people at the centre of the associated social formations:
foregrounding their **prophet motives, whilst obscuring their
profit motives.**

This is ostensibly a zealotry-without-faith, where unapologetic
ultra-capitalists use the pretence of spirituality as a convenient ruse
to manipulate and radicalise the dispossessed, the outsiders, the
forgotten, in whatever way they deem to be necessary and expedient, by
manipulating their fantasies and curiosities. Indeed, this is anything
but new: the idea of the outside, or more specifically a 'frontier
imaginary' has existed since humans kept oral and written records
e.g. Exodus, Adam and Eve's fall from grace, and Muhammad's expulsion
from Mecca. The idea of the radical outsider as prophet appears to
be hardcoded in our post-Abrahamic cultural blueprints.

"The discovery of the New World induced an impatience with the Old.
In vastly extending the range of the Renaissance imagination, it made
Europe appear ever more despoiled, damned, and doomed, and prompted
millenarian dreams of taking flight from this waning world in quest of
new beginnings. In the New World, eschatalogical expectations of
renewed perfection came into earthly focus. After Columbus, paradise
became more than just a vision; it became a place."

David F. Noble, The Religion of Technology, 1997, p. 38.

Indeed, David F. Noble's landmark 1997 book The Religion of Technology
rests upon a thesis that can be interpreted as such: that mankind's
contemporary techno-solutionism, the Promethean will to channel divine
fire--power, wisdom, knowledge--derives from the Christian move to
interpret Jesus as a human representative of God, sent to Earth to
facilitate the recapture of the God-likeness of Man's image after the
fall from Eden. Might we extrapolate Noble's hypothesis into the 21st
century, insofar as the networked eschatologies and frontier spirit of
the various tangled (ww)webs we have woven since then, being similarly
driven by this unwitting--or depending on one's opinion, misguided,
even--desire to explore uncharted territory, *terra nullius***, the
W(i|or)ld Wi(l)d(e) We(st|**b) ?

{#n7uyh1apkyz}

Announcement: \'Ethereum Frontier\' software client 2015

In the present moment, fantasies of exit exist which entail a retreat
from the public, from wider society which casts the (naïve?
optimistic? cynical?) techno-solutionist as outsider, as pariah, in
order to provide the necessary 'push' to seek alternatives. Precisely
what escape routes and options are available, depend on how **well
capitalised the outsider is, in every sense of those italicised
words.* This idea carries more than an echo of colonialism; it is in
reality another form of it. Abstracted now into cyberspatial territory,
a simulacramap, cartographics without an underlying territory, or
'colonialism of the map' as discussed earlier. In some ways, this notion
is reminiscent of the [Second
Realm](https://archive.org/details/second-realm-digital "null") as
espoused by 'crypto-anarchist philosophers' Smuggler and XYZ. Their
argument proceeds as follows: the asymmetry of power that the state
enjoys in the material world ('first realm') over its subjects is such
that its hegemony cannot be overcome using symmetric tactics to create
persistent real-world resistances, and therefore efforts should be
focused upon actions reminiscent of Hakim Bey's Temporary Autonomous
Zones (TAZs)*, and persistent digital environs which state apparatuses
can be excluded from on a permanent basis.

As the universality of the nation-state model is increasingly called
into question, and new technological scaffolds for the amassment and
distribution of cultural, social, and economic capital rise, novel and
audacious forms of empire-building are emerging, chiefly from political
philosophies traditionally associated with the right. What was just a
few years ago a purely hypothetical fantasy seeded in the minds of the
faithful Bitcoiners by a speculative (now-edited) post on reddit by a
'time-traveller',
the notion of Bitcoin Citadels has taken root in the collective
imaginations of the more ardent, fervent, faithful, and
otherwise-disaffected members of the Bitcoin community.
'Citadeletion' is one of the key pillars of the emerging Bitcoin
eschatology, alongside so-called
hyperbitcoinisation:
the economic singularity moment of Bitcoin as it outcompetes (to
destruction) every other 'monetary' / 'value' system, including
commodity-money systems such as gold and silver, as well as fiat-money
systems such as the US Dollar and the Euro.

Seething Like A State

Decentralisation has a cost: the price of anarchy.[^1] The price is
always due, but the rewards weren't cheap to reap. Sew Solid CCRU.[^2]
What most did not expect was that payment would become due at the
grandest scales of governance. The Westfailure State, forged under the
fire of Peer Prussia, was ambushed by upstart modes of power, opening
new vistas of communication, commodification, and communion.

The orientations that nation-states had used to enshrine their power,
only made it easier to undermine them. The bigger they were, the
harder they fell. Brextopia, The Neuropean Union, NATO's Cave, the
United State-Machine. All returned to dust. The decline of the
nation-state in the roaring twenties became a cannon of canonicity for
an entire generation of soul traders. It wasn't even just the
Bitlievers,[^3] in those days there were many networks, many messiahs,
many ideologics, all with their own Prophet Motives. 

From Governance Fictions: Every Prophet is a
Loss

These imaginaries carry more than an echo of the patchwork philosophy
of Mencius Moldbug, an alias of Urbit creator Curtis Yarvin. Moldbug's
'neocameral' governance concept is in reality little more than a
feudal, quasi-monarchic system with 'philosopher-developers' at the apex
of the power structure, just as Aristotle put a
philosopher-king
at the head of his most preferred governance system. What is more
concerning is that most of the people willing this apocalypse on haven't
deeply engaged with Yarvin's work, and indeed most seem to not even be
aware of him. In the words of 0x Salon
Fellow Habib William Kherbek,
technofeudalism is indeed
rising
once again. In a perhaps unsurprising short circuit of neocolonial
logics, Yarvin wrote in 2020 on 'Bitzion: how Bitcoin becomes a
state'.

"Finesse and Finitude. \
In the ashes of the present \
We shall build a New World \
The Blinding Light of Coin\
Cleansing, educating, enriching \
Scarcity as Purity Capital as Mana Property as Virtue \
A Discretionary Utopia \
Enter DOME."

Cryptographic Poetics Researchers' Union, Versus In
Numinis,
0x Salon, 2022.

So, why is all this happening in the here and now?

Well, this is perhaps an appropriate juncture to reacquaint ourselves
with the technical architecture which undergirds Bitcoin, and has since
given rise to a panoply--or should that be panopticon?--of descendants,
rivals, or pretenders (according to your individual worldview), namely
blockchain technology. Blockchains can be thought of as
jurisdictionless
freeports,
and as such lend themselves extremely well to the application of
so-called special economic
zones,
which as Wikipedia summarises are "located within...national
borders...a special economic zone (SEZ) is an area in which the business
and trade laws are different from the rest of the country."

These distributed economic architectures afforded by blockchain
technology can be used to implement so-called network states:

"A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense
of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for
collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated
cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart
contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a
virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough
population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of
diplomatic recognition."

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 2022,  p. 9.

Connected to network states and SEZs are charter
cities,
apparently the successor organisational concept to city-states. Charter
cities would enjoy an increased--or even total--level of autonomy
compared to the partial autonomy afforded by SEZs. Quasi-city-states
such as Qatar, Singapore, and Hong Kong might be thought of as
exemplifying Paul Romer's proposed model:

"A charter city is a type of city in which a guarantor from a
developed country would create a city within a developing host
country. The guarantor would administer the region, with the power to
create their own laws, judiciary, and immigration policy outside of
the control of the host country."

Charter city (economic development),
Wikipedia

Critics of the charter city model argue that the initiators of such
projects--typically white, male, western captains of industry and
finance--are engaging in neocolonial statecraft by taking advantage of
weak nations, promising jobs and other trappings of economic development
such as GDP
uplift
whilst in reality creating new conditions for the exploitation of
natural resources, local labour pools and facilitating regulatory
arbitrage and/or tax avoidance on grand scales.

Might charter cities be the new banana
republics?

{#n4vurpc61c7}

Figure: 'Seeing Like A Network State' schematic: an attempt to map the
reification of state-like organisations under the action of capital,
technology, and legitimacy.

Knightwork States? Crusader Orders as the Original Network States

Can we look into the past and see in days gone by, a hint of what
might be at hand in our present moment? With technology organisations
such as Anduril and Palantir, and private international mercenary armies
like Blackwater and Wagner Group seemingly in the ascendancy, some prior
premonitions might be helpful as we cast our gaze forwards.

{#nh8on9icgr7}

The \'Outremer\' Crusader States in 1135 AC, via Wikimedia user
Amitchell125

Following the disintegration of the Roman Empire, over the Middle Ages
European and Byzantine territories were lost to invading Turkic and Arab
peoples from the South and East. Plans were hatched in Northern Europe,
in the name of the Roman Catholic Church, to fight wars in the name of
Christendom against unbelievers instead of rivalrous local fiefdoms
and regional powers squabbling amongst themselves. The Muslim occupation
of the 'holy land'--compounded arguably by the decline in power and
legitimacy of the leaders of the rump states formed as the Roman empire
collapsed --led Pope Urban II to give 'divine sanction' to Christian
military efforts to retake Jerusalem in the late 11th century. Middle
Eastern perspectives typically foreground an added pretext of looting
the intellectual and material wealth of the region. The s(u|e)ccessive
waves of conflicts which resulted came to be known as the Crusades,
which resulted in the capture of Jerusalem and other Levantine lands.

Etymologically, the 'Crusader' term appears to have derived from the
latin expression crucesignatus (one signed by the cross) in the 12th
century. A number of chivalric 'Crusader orders', which were
constituted of a network of local associations, sprouted up to answer
these calls to alms, arms, and psalms, which themselves had
fascinating
concrescences
of technology, capital, networking, divinity, and
sovereignty. Following initial victories, four Crusader states came
to exist: the County of Edessa; the Principality of Antioch; the Kingdom
of Jerusalem; and the County of Tripoli, collectively known as
'Outremer'. Crusader armies occupied various configurations of these
lands for around a century, and spent another century attempting to
wrest them back.

"Corporate Sovereignty was also exercised by religious corporations
like the Knights Templar, the Knights of St. John, and the Teutonic
Knights. These hybrid institutions have no modern counterparts. They
combined religious, social, judicial, and financial activities with
sovereignty over localities. While they exercised territorial
jurisdiction, they were almost the opposite of today\'s governments in
that nationality played no role in the mobilization of their support
or their scheme of governance. The members and officers of these
religious orders were drawn from all parts of Christian Europe, or
\"Christendom,\" as it was known."

William Rees-Mogg and James Dale Davidson, The Sovereign Individual:
Mastering the Transition to the Information Age, 1997.

Perhaps the Crusades can be seen as a reaction by the papacy and other
organs of power within the Catholic Church to a disenchantment within
Christendom, prior to the New World excitement that accompanied the
first European voyages to the Americas. Then, just as now, imaginaries
of conquest, domination, usurpation, and extraction accompanied them.
The Vatican gave divine licence in papal bulls, encouragement in the
form of
indulgences,
and resources to Crusader orders to perform various functions including:
theological training (education) at home and in the 'holy land';
providing medical treatment pilgrims venturing to and within the Levant
(healthcare); protection of travellers (security); logistical,
distribution, and transportation support (communication); taxes and
levies, as well as financial instruments such as letters of credit
(economic); and direct offensive capabilities (military). Though
these sound like the basic provisions of any city- or nation-state,
these orders of faith were distributed all over (mostly) North and West
Europe, with chapters (or nodes) of various sizes on mainland and
offshore territories.

It is this article's contention, that these Crusader orders, most
notably The Knights
Templar, The
Knights
Hospitaller--more
commonly known as 'the Knights of Rhodes' in the 14th-16th centuries
and 'the Knights of Malta' in the 16th-18th centuries--were the
first network states, notwithstanding the limited communication and
economic tools at their disposal. Unlike the aristocratic and mercantile
city-states which preceded them such as Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, and
unlike mainland powers with ancestral connections to the lands they
dwelled upon, without a strong territorial claim--ethnic, historic,
religious--to the outposts they attempted to occupy, these orders
flourished or expired depending on their management of resources,
conquests, and alliances. Crusader orders were given the lease or
ownership of numerous territories by or at the behest of the Church. In
recent history, perhaps the closest analog--a mirror, perhaps-is the
Salafist Daesh
movement, more commonly known in the west as Islamic State, ISIL, or
ISIS. The notion of Islamic Jihad, previously espoused by many groups
including the insurgent-cum-resurgent Afghan
Taliban, is
unsurprisingly not that far from the sentiments which motivated the
Crusades. Today, the descendant organisation that has the most similar
structure and purpose to the Mediaeval Crusader orders is the
Sovereign Military Order of
Malta,
which considers itself a continuation of the Knights Hospitaller
tradition. The order maintains diplomatic relations with over a hundred
countries, and retains extraterritorial rights in a Maltese military
complex, in addition to two palatial buildings in Rome.

Like so many successful institutions throughout history, the prominent
Crusader orders grew rich feasting upon their spoils of war, tithing
passing traders and their territories\' subjects, and merchant ventures,
becoming more inward-looking and self-serving in the process. Capital
was misallocated, Papal orders and priorities overlooked in the service
of looting, corruption, piracy (corsairing), and most strikingly,
capture of the seat of the Orthodox Christian Byzantine Empire in
Constantinople to create the short-lived Latin
Empire alongside
the Venetians. The papacy withdrew support from the Knights Templar and
confiscated their assets as they were abolished in the early fourteenth
century, at the initiative of a French King unable to pay his debts to
the order. Many of the territories were redistributed to other orders
including Hospitallers, and Teutonic knights from Utrecht, Brandenburg,
and elsewhere. Much land was also 'reclaimed' by local crowns. *In other
words, the knightwork state became a corrupt and self-serving
empire, and was overthrown.*

A cautionary tale on unintended consequences, and second-order effects
of zero-sum games:

"The Greeks were convinced that even the Turks, had they taken the
city, would not have been as cruel as the Latin Christians. The defeat
of Byzantium, already in a state of decline, accelerated political
degeneration so that the Byzantines eventually became easy prey to the
Turks. The Fourth Crusade and the crusading movement generally thus
resulted, ultimately, in the victory of Islam, a result which was of
course the exact opposite of its original intention."

Speros Vryonis, Byzantium and Europe, Harcourt, Brace & World,
1967,  p. 152.

Returning to the present day, it is tempting to draw parallels between
the present nation-state occupier of the 'holy lands' and their zealous
antecedents. Amin Maalouf, in his crucial Crusades Through Arab Eyes,
comments on the resonance between Middle Ages and twentieth-century
events. Adina Glickstein describes Israel as a network state and has
written about the role of startup culture and speculative
capital
in the nonconsensual remaking of Palestinian territories. Indeed,
Srinivasan also gestures towards this in The Network State:

"God/State/Network: this is something like the Jewish diaspora after
Israel. Our One Commandment model also draws on this, as a startup
society can be based on a traditional religion or on a moral
imperative that's on par with many religious practices, like
veganism."

Balaji Srinivasan, The Network State, 2022, p. 58.

Crusader orders' insignia are used as dog-whistles for white supremacy
by fascist groups in the US, as an ostensible continuation of the logics
which gave rise to the Ku Klux Klan in the last century. Heinrich
Himmler modelled the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS) upon the structure and
iconography of Crusader orders.  Despite its near-complete
deterritorialisation by popular mobilisations in Syria and Iraq, Daesh
continues to operate in the backwaters of the 'holy lands'. Wagner Group
is still running amok in Ukraine at time of writing. Praxis, Zuzalu,
Liberland, Urbit, Prospera, The Seasteading Institute, Bitcoin City El
Salvador.

What horrors will be committed by future 'knightwork states' in the name of what their prophets--and profits--deem to be right, good, and true?

Can the laws of nations stop today's arbitrageurs from becoming tomorrow's arbitra(i)tors?

Thanks to Christopher Dake-Outhet, Martina Cavalot, and rafathebuilder
for helpful comments during the preparation of this article.

Endless gratitude goes to the wonderful 0x Salon community for whom
this topic was developed in the first place, and in particular to the
attendees of Salon#38 'Prophet Motives', held May'23 in Berlin, for an
incredibly 'enlightening' discussion.

Postscript: 'Prophet Motives' Project Note

The aim of this text--and other works currently being undertaken under
the aegis of the Prophet
Motives
banner--is to render explicit the spiritual, libidinal, and mytho-poetic
underpinnings of human relationships to the technological artefacts they
create, to critique and explore nascent but incipient machinic faith
communities, powered by economic incentives, eschatalogical imperatives,
and teleological drives.

For as long as there has been financial capital, risk and speculation
have orbited, manipulated, and harnessed it. As narrative feedback
machines, simultaneously reading and rewriting realities, markets exist
as a distributed conversation amongst speculators driven by profit
motives and an appetite for divination and prophecy. Despite the
ostensible 'neutrality' afforded by novel technology architectures,
recognisable human characteristics and archetypes continue to appear in
positions of explicit power and implicit influence.

Work on this theme is undertaken in an effort to explore the role of
zealotry in narrative synthesis, incentivisation mechanisms, and the
ethics of technology in ostensibly egalitarian communities. While
architecturally distributed--or even \"decentralised\"--domains may
initially appear to offer new organisational possibilities, in reality
the familiar schema of humans appointing themselves as arbiters of
taste, morality, and correctness is typically borne out, thus
reinforcing,  or indeed exacerbating, existing power imbalances.

Prophet Motives seeks to foreground the deeply human impulses guiding
our relationship with technology and critically examine the speculative
frenzy of capitalist markets, with cryptocurrency as its most gratuitous
and grotesque manifestation to date. Through a transdisciplinary and
transmedia approach, the Prophet Motives
project
currently being undertaken by the 0x
Salon collective aims to offer
novel insights and perspectives on the ecumenical, emotional, and
ethical dimensions of our technological interactions. This is being
approached through the creation of speculative and critical liturgies,
scriptures, ceremonies, and reliquaries populated by sacred objects in
an attempt to bridge the material and psychic realms.

References & Further Reading

Editorial Note: Editorial note: a decision was taken to capitalise
all instances of the term 'Crusade' and 'Crusader', firstly for
stylistic consistency, and secondly to pay heed to the fact that
capital was arguably one of the prime motivations for the initial
declaration of hostilities, and less arguably the primary motivation for
the persistence of the Crusader orders as institutions and ultimately
what we might think of today as the first knightwork states.

[^1]: Originally a concept formulated in the context of behavioural
economics for technical systems such as data packet-routing, it took
on a new meaning when applied to the tensions between the expediency
of hierarchical organisation versus the egality of peer consensus.

[^2]: Cybernetic Culture Research Unit: a somewhat clandestine,
amorphous, and notorious theory collective which was active at the
University of Warwick, UK in the 90s and 00s. Notable members
included Anna Greenspan, Nick Land, Sadie Plant, and Mark Fisher.
Speculations upon the nature of--and technological synthesis
of--time is one of the central crucial pillars of the CCRU
theoretical fabric, later referred to as 'accelerationism.' 

\

[^3]: Bitlievers: adherents to the thermoeconomic I/Odeology of
Bitcoin's proof-of-work. Also known as Necroprimitivists.