Recently, I have been having a hard time imagining the Garden of Eden. Since I am not made of mud – and I have newly found evidence to sustain that belief – I cannot dream of returning to dust. This new rationalist revelation would prove to harden my dreamer<#s disposition. With telecom towers and 5G networks emitting perpetual data-noise pollution, Fugazi would understand why I am so tired despite this never-ending hardcore din. My Freudian slips have turned to computational calculation errors, my utopian visions into Python code – no room for flippancy.

However, as a cyborg, I am extremely impatient (by nature), so I wanted to become more aware of my future – away from my tarot – and came to California- the ever-smiling, sun-tanned and wonderfully techno-utopian West Coast paradise. The weather here is nice – constantly; the people smile – constantly.

Young families rule the factory-built houses of Palo Alto. Feudal Lords of 3,000 Ft2 lawns return from ‘Stinson Beach’ beach days or 4th of July Lake Tahoe parties, life is perfect. Tech guys run this city in checkered shirts & Arcteryx vests: If they live in the Castro, they are gay. If they live on the Pacific Height stretch of VanNess, they are evil. Simple rule; always works.

On August 5th I met a medium, the most powerful energy healer of the Bay. Our shared love for the recently passed filmmaker Kenneth Anger would prove to strengthen our ties. Meredith fears the city has changed. Once spiritually free, now narrow & ideally in 2124. This fear would later transfix me even more in conversations with AI experts at the Berkeley Tennis Club, who had warned me about transhumanist accelerationists, eco-fascist megalomaniacs, and CyberNeros about to take over. My ex-husband from hell lives on Church/16th, well-acquainted with a certain tech mogul who is linking the stars just like Meredith would do with my Birth Chart.

Hella dope.

California Dreaming’ has long moved from its SoCal dreamscape, where brunettes or blondes wander – somewhat lost – along Mulholland Drive to find out who they actually are, up north. Cool, soft, and above all, foggy San Francisco.

The dreams have changed, away from the Californian Ideology’s optimism to a futuristic hellscape of immaterialized bodies and cyber.magik. A subtle magic that brewed in the subcultural cauldron of the 60s, between New Age and hippies. The infamous intersection ‘Haight and Ashbury’ is now a soulless memorial to the long-expelled flower power generation. Their surprisingly neo-liberal heirs are building a digital Tower of Babel. Yet, eerie Californiana is 60s-cool – debutantes balls in Sacramento; nebulously imagined affairs with JFK look-alikes, whose frontal cortices are still intact, not pierced. Still, ‘The Golden State’ has ceded to a cruel fate, one worse than death, the simulation of itself.

The history of California is not a simple colonial history, but one of necropolitical prison, the industro-military complex, proto-fascist eugenics, the gold rush and modern capitalism. The Presidio, the Spanish city fort/prison, is the centerpiece of almost every colonial city in the state. California is a network of 21 Catholic missions, the San's; it screams freedom into the world but is the codification of the state into its anti-rhizomatic infrastructure. The Nazis borrowed heavily from California’s prisons – with their Darwinistic sterilization and forced labor – and came back in the 1950s with the help of Operation

Paperclip to build Silicon Valley. Obscure ideas are inherent in California's socio-political DNA. It is therefore no wonder that transhumanism found fertile ground here. They drink kombucha and greet the sun with morning yoga at the Lake Merritt Self-Realization Center. They don't shy away from electromagnetic nanoparticles in their bloodstream and dream of uploading their consciousness.

San Francisco is haunted by a fear that is easily forgotten in Europe. The fear that nothing human will make it out of the near future. Self-driving cars and ultra-AIs will soon replace everyone in the Bay – there are fewer and fewer people in San Francisco; They're all running away from something. Non-linear nanotechnology is a schizoanalytic narrative that thinks neither in molar nor molecular terms. It reads S=kblnΩ; i.e. a simple neo-entropy of the aggregates of all the particles that are blown in on the Santa Ana winds. When the fog comes, rolling over the Red Bridge into the city, everyone knows that a techno-capitalist singularity will soon dominate this planet. We cyborgs dream, so to speak, of functional connectivity with the creator we created. What a burden when you yourself, or even more so your own humanity, slowly decays into an artifact of a long-outdated past.

The imaginary of the cyborg + has long been political. They invite us to write manifestos. Just like that of Donna Haraway, a biology professor from Santa Cruz; a coastal town that I also visited. To her, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machines and organisms. Cyborgs break the lines between culture and nature; man and machine; human and animal; animal and machines; between nature and technology. They frivolously reinterpret the Western chauvinism of duality and occasionally flirt with bestiality; simply to weld all parts of their being into a higher unit. Cyborgs are not awe-ridden, they do not dream of a cosmos, but they are dependent on connections – whether social-psychological or techno-electrical. They are the anthropomorphic embodiment of technology and vice versa. But Donna also knows – she whispers to me – that cyborgs are illegitimate descendants of militarism, patriarchal capitalism and state socialism – after all, the Internet was created as a weapon in the Cold War. “But illegitimate offspring are often extremely unfaithful to their origins.” The Californian answer, however, doesn't seem to work; Nothing here is new, let alone revolutionary, but at most the acceleration of yesterday through the internalization of its terribleness. In San Mateo, progress is a utilitarian concept of self-hatred. A turbine that spins so fast that it implodes.

To understand the “Californian Ideology” (1995), we must understand the ideas that influenced thinkers and scientists alike. California concerns all of us: transhumanism or critical posthumanism are the decisive visions for the future of humanity.

In his “Thesis Against the Occult” (1947), Adorno feared increasing corporeal fascism in the intellectual community of California; one that presents itself as a conscious choice of resistance, sweet and peaceful- bubblegum spirituality. For Adorno, California had become the center of a novel capitalism; one that was colonizing the mind and presented itself as “anti”-establishment. The US military is now the largest sponsor of these San Fransinful hippies. Wellness and mindfulness are crusader terms for a new internalized control of individual optimization. The overemphasis on the mind and the hyper-individuality of the stars became the philosophical sulfur of Californian alchemy. Cartesian dualism lives on through the Palo.Alto.Cyberspace and the Haight-Ashbury Spiritualist: chakras are blocked and electrical circuits are interrupted. The body has long been forgotten. California can only

think in simple hierarchies; it is an Oedipal swamp of Platonic-Cartesian subjects. And I am a Leo Rising, the magnet of the universe.

Hardcore technocratic & Muskian libertarianism originates in New Age and spiritual hyperindividualism. Old patterns, new metaphysics. The CyberConquistador charts foreign digital exoplanets. Hélas