Three Moments of an Explosion Read Online Free PDF

Death.
    ii) New Death is objective .
Physical interventions have verified that these subjective impressions are not illusory . The New Dead have mass. They can be interacted with. The basic positional predicates of New Death, however, cannot be overcome. As the notorious Bannif-Murchau experiment showed, multiple observers of a single New Dead, all perceiving the body’s feet to be toward them, all instructed to take hold of the cadaver at the same instant, all coming from different directions, will all grasp the feet at the same time . This sometimes shocking and occasionally dangerous vectoral/locational slippage would of course have been impossible in the pre-ND era. It is not just biology, but physics, that have changed.
    New Death has had no impact on death rates or causes. Nor has the agential status of the dead vis-à-vis the living changed—they remain as quiet as their Old Dead precursors. New Death is a phenomenon not of dying, nor of death, but of the quiddity of deadness .
    Philosophies of its causes, effects, and meanings (if any) are, of course, in their infancy. But they have, very recently, taken an exciting turn.
    At the 2024 Mumbai Conference “The New Dead and Their Critics,” PJ Mukhopadhyay, a graduate student of digital design, gave a paper on “New Death as a Game.” In the course of her presentation she pointed out, almost in passing, that a locus classicus of a foot-to-viewpoint orientation of the dead was the earliest generation of First-Person Shooters.
    In such games, no matter where “you” stood, your defeated enemies would lie with their feet toward you, shifting as you shifted. This would be the case until, finally, after a programmed time, their bodies winked out of play.
    With this insight, we have entered a new era of New Death Studies. In the words of the most recent issue of the Cambridge Journal of Philosophy, “no one is yet clear on why Mukhopadhyay’s observation is important. That it is important—that it changes everything—no doubt remains.”
    Understanding remains evasive, but culture is pragmatic and quick. Those for whom showing the soles of feet has been an insult adapt no less than do those who delight in insulting them. A plethora of ceremonies are emerging around the interment and veneration of New Dead. Theologies of all traditions are, mostly, smoothly accommodating them, with new interpretations of old texts and ways. The New Dead are already completely banalized representationally in movies, television dramas, and other commodities—including, of course, video games. The point is not that rotating sugar skeletons with windup handles are sold by Mexican vendors: the point is that they sell in similar numbers to any other Día de los Muertos items.
    This insouciance is admirable. But it is also somehow inadequate. We have tweaked our various bells and smells, but we still die as we always died, and live as we did before we died.
    We are not ready. What would being ready constitute? What might the endgame of New Death be?
    This is not a manifesto. It is not even a prequel to such. We don’t know what to call for, to live up to the potentiality of New Death. This is a call for a manifesto to be written. An exhortation for an exhortation, a plea to have it demanded of us to live as we must and New Die well.
    We must proceed according to a presumption that we might have something up to which to live, that there might be a telos to all our upgraded dead, that we might eventually succeed in something, that we might unlock achievements, if we die correctly. And, conversely, that if we do not, we will continue to fail.
    What the stakes of that success and that failure might be, none of us yet know.
    We will all learn.

THE DOWAGER OF BEES
    I was inducted twenty-two years ago in the windowless basement room of a chic Montreal hotel. The door was small and said JANITOR outside. Inside, the room was gorgeous, full of lush gaming-related paintings and shelves of hardbound