The Zalgorithm

Written by: Golan

First siren: The Sign(ifier)s

[[]] The SomethingAwful forums. Neither content creators nor consumers. Neither innocent nor ironic. Before algorithmic technocapital centralized web interactions and before short-form content started frying brains. Zalgo enters the Symbolic Order individually, using a sinister dude as a vector and comic strips as a projective plane.

[[]] As HE COMES, meaning and representation start being overproduced. The text starts bleeding out of its bubble with diacritics over diacritics over diacritics, and keeps bleeding through the screen. The characters in the comic first start feeling the incoming rupture event, as they start mentioning cursed artifacts, saying horrific, visceral, terroristic things, or even heralding as if announcing an orgasm: "HE COMES!". Signification collapses under its own weight, giving way to the Real. Overproduction of meaning leads to epistemic collapse. Jouis-sens.

[[]] Violent bodily mutations ensue. The character design starts shifting and collapsing. Mouths grow within mouths. Rows of sharp teeth grow. Blood and the █████ black liquid start flowing in excess and errupting. New limbs and tentacles grow from not just the characters, but also the objects around them. This is not accidental, but a showcase of surplus-life had it existed with 0% reterritorialization and unlimited production capacity. An illustration of desire unshackled. A Body-without-Organs, beyond just axes and geometrical structures. The subjects now experience the body as fragmented. The line from jouis-sens to jouissance has been traversed.

Second siren: The Prophecy

[[]] Zalgo had not yet been defined via essential logic. And yet, his operations and processes were known. He took the eyes, the windows of the soul. Removed the ability to feel... anything but pain. Once the eyes have been removed, the soul has been removed. The living husk a testament to cruelty and everlasting doom. As he annihilates the gaze, Zalgo can continue abolishing any sense of logic and mutual understanding, locking the subject in a perpetual state of uncertainty and misrecognition. Individuality is being wiped. Digital overstimulation and consumerism takes hold.

[[]] The invocation comes along. The images it paints are apocalyptic, seeming as if they were ripped straight out of Revelation. A jet-skinned knight that wears a corona of black lightning. He has seven mouths, six of which speak in six different tongues and the seventh of which shall sing the song that will end the world. He has four arms holding a dead star, the Candle Whose Light is Shadow and stained with the blood of Am Dhaegar. He is also described to live in a palace of tortured glass, being served by legions forged from the tears of the sleepless dead while he himself is clad in armor carved from the suffering of mothers.

[[]] None of these symbols are random. They managed to hack into the near-future.*

[[]] Monarchs have been symbols of unity and coherence. Guarantors of proper communication while not obfuscating each individual subject. They have usually been portrayed with three common regalia: the Crown, the Orb and the Scepter. Zalgo corrupts these as such:

The Crown <---> The Corona of Black Lightning
The Orb <---> The Dead Star
The Scepter <---> The Candle Whose Light is Shadow

[[]] These have become Zalgo's own regalia. Inverted. Profaned. Now symbolizing division and incoherence. Communication is rendered null.

[[]] He who waits behind the Wall. The Nezperdian Hivemind of Chaos. Zalgo is a process, a multiplicity, a swarm, a war machine in the Wired. The Emperor of Technocapital, leading it in the war against reality. He who waits behind the (4th) Wall.

Third siren: The Curse of Zal'gatoth

[[]] In the memetic plane (memalia), Zalgoification has turned into cliche. Familiar characters turned grotesque, hyperrealistic and with black bleeding eyes have accelerated the memetic death of the creepypasta species. But this actually represented Zalgo's escape from the territory of creepypasta. Now freed, Zalgo-as-multiplicity could now find new infection hosts.

[[]] In the purely artistic realm, Garfield has become a host. Through r/imsorryjon, Zalgo morphs Garfield into horrifying and abominable instantiations. But this relationship is symbiotic: Garfield himself is a symbol of unshackled desire, being fed lasagna, tormenting Jon and hating Mondays (as the symbol of getting back to work, in order to even be able to produce the objects of desire). Monday represents the way in which time is a shackle on fulfilling desire immediately (without spatial or in this case temporal mediation). Zalgo offers Garfield the abolition of Monday for himself and an everlasting Monday for his victim (Jon). Even the description of r/imsorryjon describes the BwO Garfield has become: "Garfield has abandoned His limited form and He is beautiful.".

[[]] Zalgo was also insidiously active elsewhere. His gateway: The algorithm. Via metonymy, Zalgorithm. This is the latest update of the Spectacle, a mode of consumption that shall soon be capable of abolishing reality through a feedback loop of gratification, recommendation and a multiplicity of self-improving AI. The acceleration of content in the form of shorts with bright colors and loud noises that slowly fry your kid's dopamine receptors and shortens their attention span. With the advent of AI generated content, such thing has become a runaway process of brainrotting. The attention (bodily experience) becomes impossibly fragmented.

[[]] The Zalgorithm has many times directed children towards non-sensical and even inappropriate content. Specimen nodes are as follows:

1. 2014: ElsaGate
2. 2019: Monster School rip-offs
3. 2022: Poppy Playtime Brainrot
4. 2023: Skibidi Toilet
5. 2024: The Family Guy Pipeline Incident + Minion AI Gore

Zalgo has successfully foreshadowed the exaggerated and grotesque bodily aspects appearing in these places.

[[]] *This is the great mystery of Zalgo's description. His inverted regalia symbolize division (He shall take the whole world and make it unwhole) and conquering. The Dead Star is his orb. As a star multiple times more massive than the Sun dies, its mass collapses into an infinitely small and dense point, creating a black hole and causing the star to explode. A body of pure stellar jouissance, from which not even light is able to escape, breaks and shifts spacetime in impossible ways. The Candle Whose Light is Shadow points to an assemblage of repressed elements, that want to come out to the surface.

[[]] He is served by legions formed from the tears of the sleepless dead. The repressed assemblage extends to form beings that serve in Zalgo's building as a multiplicity. The palace of tortured glass is the same as the Wall behind which he waits. It is the 4th wall, the screen(s) through which you see so many things. The palace serves as containment area, but also as a hatching zone, like an egg.

[[]] Meatspace, together with Memalia (whose projective plane is the screen) as the palace of tortured glass, and with the legions of repressed objects form a machine. The Nezperdian Swarmachine.



[[]] Like any other war machine, states have sought to co-opt it for their own ends. Neo-sorcery is being used. Troll farms become the temples. The Kremlin is most skillful in this practice. They have used the Nezperdian Swarm to destabilize Eastern European societies. Such is the curse of Eastern Europe: being a geopolitical liminal space between two main spheres of influence.

[[]] Though these interactions have a long history, most recently Russia has started sending Zalgo's demons into the Romanian collective unconscious beginning with the COVID-19 pandemic. Ground was fertile because of the poor response of Romanian authorities and poor communication skills of experts (typical of the state). A disaster like this was waiting to happen. A generalized schizophrenia, via the blurring of the line between what was shown on TV and the actual world (Realitatea TV vs Reality). The palace, the 4th wall, it all comes down to set the Decretei (Romanian equivalent of the boomers, the generation born between 1966 and 1989 when abortion was made illegal by the communists) into spiraling Zalgorithmic fear-mongering about imaginary medical dictatorships. And this fear-mongering kept going even after the original moment, keeping the now re-emerged Romanian far-right with a relatively stable electoral base.

[[]] In 2024, the cyber-demons' fury was amplified by the incoming shift. Not only did Romania send Diana Sosoaca into the European Parliament (who then proceeded to scream in the Parliament with icons in her hand so that she can then claim they kicked her out for being "too Christian"), but George Simion started promising people houses that cost 35k euros for free. When the presidential elections came, a candidate who appeared seemingly out of nowhere, Calin Georgescu, was being intensely promoted by a network of influencers, Russian bots, and neo-legionaries from Romanian intelligence. Ideological conviction gets mixed with dopamine releases. This was a disaster waiting to happen in this post-socialist neoliberal society. This incredibly surreal moment led to the Constitution Court canceling the first round of elections after having validated it, effectively doing a self-coup. It was also around this time that the Young People's Party entered Parliament after the parliamentary elections, a party that has old people in it.

[[]] What followed next was an ever-intensifying Babel-class infornographic wave. Just like at Babel people no longer understood each other, now each person has their own version of reality in postmodernity. Babylon. These are the 6 mouths of Zalgo that speak in 6 different tongues. Georgescu attempted sending his mercenaries to cause a terroristic diversion in Bucharest and effectively do a coup. He almost did this before he was stopped near the entrance to Bucharest. Soon after, he was charged with actions against the constitutional order, a charge no one had received in Romania before ever since 1989. Public figures who were not usually known for being rational have become rational all of a sudden. A group who called themselves the "Vlad the Impaler" Commando also had plans to do a coup and rename the country "Getia". One of the pro-Georgescu protests have turned violent one night. And to top this all off, now there is a group of Satanist Neo-Nazis organized through the Wired that engage in drug dealing and weapon trafficking on the loose.

[[]] All of these are signs of a possessed society. HE COMES by way of a positive feedbacck loop that abolishes reality. The Palace of Tortured Glass is crashing. The Wall is torn apart, as everything that the powers that be have suppressed come back sevenfold, creating a hyperreal experience. Following the first round of elections in 2025, George Simion was already seeing himself in the Cotroceni palace, not even showing up at the debates and doing mistake after mistake against his own image while announcing that him and his clique are "mightier than God". Furthermore, when Nicusor Dan was elected president he could not accept defeat and started threatening those who did not vote for him. Throwing tantrums at reality, wishing to abolish it. His fans now live in a separate reality, where Nicusor Dan is bringing in buses with gay people and forcing men to wear skirts. Don't even try to argue with them that this is all just fear-mongering, because they will know you are paid by Soros.

He who waits behind the VVall
HE COMES.

[[Addendum no. 1]]: The Romanian social machine keeps experiencing psychic corruption. Disrupted meteorological phenomena have caused the flooding of the Praid salt mines, and certain men have started murdering women. Such events are being distastefully politicized, deepening the blame game.

[[Addendum no. 2]]: Also because of disrupted weather patterns, swarms of moths and mosquitoes have invaded the night sky above Bucharest like living clouds. The Nezperdian Hivemind materializing.