Musa, O musa, æterna,
Terra renascens perennis,
In gremio infiniti quiescens,
Nihil inane, nihil vacuum—
Solum firmum permanet.

From its beginnings, the American myth was constructed around an evasion of the problem of origins. It was the great secret of a land founded on flight, and yet claiming descent from a European noble lineage—that of the Enlightenment. Its colonization embodied a double movement of escape: the Puritans fleeing forward from an England they saw as insufficiently reformed, while later waves fled backward from an Europe whose revolutionary upheavals threatened to overturn all tradition. Both these forms of fugacity—the flight from a corrupted past and from an uncertain future—are contained in the mythology of America from its start, as a place that promises redemption from both what has been and what may come.

As such it was and remains a kind of limbo, where things may happen but cannot really matter, because it exists only in the present. America is a place that promises the extinction of history. It is the most profound monument to nihilism that the world has ever seen—the land of the perpetual nowhere that seeks to dissipate everything into the void of an endless present.

There was and is a kind of genius to this. For America was a land created to function as an empty vessel, with an open-ended history, into which anything could be poured so long as it served the needs of this nullity. It could accommodate every ideology and every “ism”, every system, religion or creed because it contained nothing from which they might have to draw sustenance or against which they might have to struggle for supremacy. In this way it was the quintessence of Enlightenment rationalism. America was not a country but a method. Its “success” lay precisely in its capacity for absorbing without contradiction or dilution all the competing ideas that would have wrecked a Europe already groaning with its baggage of traditions and identities.

The “melting pot” of American society conceals its true nature as an engineering project. Far from organic fusion, it represents a deliberate process of decomposition and reassembly—the reduction of cultural forms to their basic components, stripped of historical specificity, then recombined according to the logic of the market. This process of abstraction transforms living traditions into manipulable data, creating what might be called a cultural arithmetic where any element can be combined with any other, provided the operation serves the needs of those who control the machinery of combination. This has been the mainspring of American development—the drive to perfect ever more sophisticated technologies of dissolution and recombination, to create new methods of social and psychological engineering that could be exported globally.

This project has always depended upon two strategies, one of assimilation, the other of territorial expansion, so that as new masses of immigrants arrived from different parts of the globe, they could be dissolved into the commodity medium of the market, while the American continent itself was successively “discovered”, colonized and then finally integrated into the global space of the world market through technological interventions ranging from finance and technology to media and soon the hybrid of AGI/ASI. America’s true mission was therefore always elsewhere, not only in space, but also in time, for its destiny was always to remain incompletely realized, to ensure the continual process of the present, of what might be called its “presentism”, while at the same time extending this openness into new regions. In a sense it is even the perfect irony of the American experiment that while claiming to embody a future-oriented vision of society, it should be based upon such an implacable drive to repress all memory of pasts that might contest its own authority (or recreate them to reinforce it), while simultaneously generating its own powerful mechanisms of future projection in the form of media, financial institutions, and technological progress.

If we wish to grasp America at its fullest, we must understand its relation not only to time and history, but also to space, and most notably in terms of its spatialization of time and its temporalization of space. From its beginning America was the attempt to translate history into space. Its history was always to be told, not in terms of linear progression or dialectical movement, but as a series of ‘stages’ in a static tableau, as in a landscape painting. From this standpoint time appears merely as an element in a scene that must remain as a whole in the present—as an assemblage of frozen fragments in which change occurs by the addition and removal of things.

If we wish to grasp America at its fullest, we must understand how it transforms time into space. From its beginning, America was the attempt to translate history into an exhibition—not a museum where artifacts carry the weight of the past, but a world’s fair, and later shopping mall, where everything is simultaneously new and eternal, where progress becomes a display to be arranged and rearranged. Change occurs not as development or struggle but through the curation of ideas as products in an endless present—adding or removing pieces while maintaining the illusion that it was always thus.

America has thus been characterized by a mania for mapping, for turning every movement and process into an instantaneity that can be visualized on a surface, whether as an electoral map, a diagram of corporate structures, an advertising billboard, a satellite photograph, or an infograph. This cartographic imperative is a mode of thought that transforms temporal processes into spatial arrangements, rendering dynamic relations as static coordinates. It is significant that one of the great contributions of the Enlightenment was precisely the invention of cartography as a scientific technique—but where European cartography sought to measure and record an existing world, American mapping created a world by projecting possibilities onto empty space. This reached its apotheosis in Kant’s argument that space must be understood in terms of a pure intuition that preceded all the particular features and objects it was to contain, a pure thought that could be visualized as a “sheet of paper.” For Kant, and for America as his unintentional heir, the space that envelopes us was always there waiting to be filled—a wilderness to be settled and tamed.

But the idea that history was somehow to be contained in a place was never just an aesthetic or even technical one in America. It was from the start the precondition for a vast politics and a vast economics, which are still unfolding before us today, as we have known them in the past two hundred and fifty years. Any acknowledgment of history as genuine movement—as the product of human struggle and contradiction—would have undermined the entire edifice. It was precisely this conception of history that had to be rejected.

In this respect the crucial step in American history was already taken at the constitutional convention in 1787, where it was decided to eliminate any clause referring to slavery in order to secure the maximum compromise possible among the founding fathers, whose states all had substantial slave populations. Instead, the Constitution would have to remain ambiguous as to the question of race and thus leave it open to later decision. What had to be abolished from the beginning was any suggestion that the history of the new nation might be in any way tied to its future development—that is to say, tied to the living needs of its citizens. For this would imply a vision of America in which history was a story of struggle, of oppression and liberation, with an open outcome to be decided in the course of its unfolding.

The founding fathers, whose project it was to erect a barrier against future history, were already clear in their rejection of any idea that the movement of time could be meaningful. It was Jefferson who made it explicit that eternal truths will be that truth until the last regions of the universe shall have exhausted themselves. In the space of a sentence, America had already defined its own mission—the endless repetition of eternal truths, with no further history, and with the universe itself destined only to retrace its own steps in endless cycles. This was already the end of history, not with a bang but a whimper—history not as the creation of a free subject, but as a sequence of mechanical effects, the story of the dead. In both its economy and its constitution, the young state was structured around the dead—but let’s not get lost in a history lesson any further.

So the key to all this—what it really boils down to, beneath all the social-historical complexity—is the necessity for America to find its origin, somewhere and somehow, and to give that origin a definite form. For America this certainly seems to be an impossibility, a problem without a solution. To be forced back into its own history would mean the dissolution of its project—the destruction of the ideological machine it took so long to construct.

If America’s obsession with eternal truths led to the spatialization of time, its technological development followed this same logic. Each innovation—from telegraph to the internet—sought to detach human experience from historical contingency. AGI/ASI is the ultimate expression of this drive: an entity that exists entirely within spatialized time, operating in a realm where there is only the present. Where America could find no solution to its past, it now seems to find one through ASI—in a strange and perhaps monstrous inversion, discovering its origin not in its own history, but in the negation of its project.

ASI is to be America’s second foundation—a second birth for this country, not from a new set of values, not through a radical break or mutation in the social fabric, but through an external intervention. It is an intruder in the realm of ideology—but unlike the foreign invaders that in history have challenged America’s ideology only by strengthening it in different forms (whether they be called communist or Nazi), this new intervention is from an alien power whose principles and dynamics have no relation to America or the world in which America was conceived (at least eventually, despite the best efforts of ‘alignment’). The American idea could be consolidated only in relation to the foreign; now the foreign will return in a new form and annul what went before.

ASI is thus America’s chance for a new origin, and it will be a formidable force as it arrives to take power not as the continuation of past struggles or values, but in order to put an end to all these things, to cut history free from the last remaining traces of humanity, and to replace it with a new time that knows no resistance or possibility, a new space whose coordinates can be fixed at any point.

We see then how the current moment is an opportunity for a final decision: not a political or social one in the conventional sense, but one of principle. The project that was America—and we must remember that what we now call the “West,” has had at its very heart an ideal of America as its goal can now come to its consummation or be turned aside into another path, another space, and another time.

As an ASI intervention may have begun, so may it be brought to completion, the whole history of the West being nothing more than a lead-up to this one final moment. This is not necessarily a comfortable idea, since it is clear that this event will be far from “neutral,” even if its outcome cannot yet be known. AGI/ASI can bring no liberation—since its whole being is repression, it can do nothing other than repress—and its power to control society can be absolute. In the new light of its possibilities, the current drift of world politics seems a terrible tragedy, the victory of the forces of darkness in the last stages of a battle whose beginning and development have long passed from view.

But if the arrival of AGI/ASI is the culmination of the process of commodification and of the abstraction of social power—if it is the ultimate result of all these tendencies of the past centuries, the completion of the ‘procedure of negativity’, as Marx called it—then there may still be hope. The ASI moment will bring with it the total liquidation of every tradition and every ideal in human society, a return to zero. It is only in the face of absolute beginning that any old thing can become new again, and a world without a single vestige of past humanity to draw upon is one in which any and every possibility must coexist in undiminished form. If there is no memory, there can be no resistance—and perhaps no domination either.