Black Tears of the Fossil World: How Oil, Power and Aesthetic Violence Shape Our Biopolitical Future

The Negative Charm of Black Energy

Evil is charming. Evil is energetic. The energy of darkness appears mysterious enough to humanity to intrigue and awaken behavioral impulses of aggression, rage, and rebellion — impulses long buried beneath social norms.

Dark energy is a concept both elusive and uncontrollable in its definition (Katia Moskvitch, What if everything we know about dark matter is totally wrong?, 2018) — whether viewed through the lens of science or applied theory. A form of antimatter, it is said to make up more than two-thirds of the universe — and perhaps of ourselves. Its uncertain nature, this darkness of unknowing, gives dark energy an elevated, even demonic significance.

The immense power of dark energy lies in its anti-gravitational core — capable of repelling and simultaneously attracting (as in the case of stars in galactic orbit). It’s an image both repelling and magnetic — strict rejection and mystical allure in one breath.

Dark energy is so metaphorical that it opens an infinite field for spiritual experimentation — with the laws of social logic, with morality, religion, and the architecture of local and global politics. It’s the discovery of the century for constructing a new world order. And yet, dark energy is so cosmic, so abstract, that civilization craves something more tangible, more visually familiar. Something like the black energy of the planet’s main resource: oil.

Black Idols

If oil had never existed, it would have been worth inventing.
But its genius lies in its simplicity — it required no imagination. It was already there, quite literally beneath our feet, hidden in the depths of the Earth. Oil — “a rotting sun, seeping black flame” (Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia) — is not merely a powerful source of energy. It is the idol of all things: from heating megacities of millions to manufacturing the luxuries of life — fine perfumes, handbags, plump breast implants — the discreet tokens of a life made beautiful by capital.

The aesthetics of oil are a synthesis of modernity and archaism. Its viscous slowness recalls the ritual movements of ancient priestesses and deities at the dawn of time, swaying around tongues of flickering gas flames. Bonfires silhouetting pale witches in black garments stir unconscious associations with the fire of the Inquisition — not as punishment, but as a symbolic reckoning for the heretical chase after comfort and beauty, paid for in petro-dollars. Flames are everywhere. Within them burn the lives and souls of those who reach toward black energy in pursuit of enrichment. The witches carry their torches without fear, solemnly conducting a biopolitical rite in the blood-soaked soil, whispering silent incantations in praise of the petroleum Reich.

The funereal glamour of the witches’ stylized attire evokes ritualized death, exposing primitive fears and laying bare the occult essence of black energy. Oil attracts and repels simultaneously. It plays upon our deepest collective superstitions. The black sun, the buried god, lies concealed beneath the Earth’s crust like the final circle of Dante’s Inferno, sinking into the icy river Cocytus — a realm of sorrow reserved for those betrayed by misplaced faith.

Worshipping oil is not deception — it is voluntary self-deception.
Once humanity glimpsed the gleam and hypnotic depth of crude’s blackness, it discovered the perfect god: a spiritual river, in which only the chosen — powerful elites, wealthy magnates, and fortunate hedonists — are permitted to bathe.

And so civilization drowns, day after day, in that river of mourning. A conveyor of sacrifice, it carries new bodies and souls, generation after generation. We pray to oil. We drink and eat oil, as though partaking in the flesh and blood of a god humanity invented for itself. We worship this subterranean black force, drawing ever closer to a return to the Earth’s womb — to a physical death that fertilizes soil and feeds the cycle.

Oil nourishes us — and we nourish it.
The interaction is irreversible.
Just like life itself.

Barrels of youth

The anthracite sheen of crude oil is a source of inspiration for power.

Black energy provides an ideal environment for cultivating societies ideologically loyal to biopolitical regimes.

Oil is a simple, ancient fossil — no longer feared by humanity. A hardened, structured substance drawn from the Earth, whose resource density enables the creation of a similarly fossilized society: rigid in its convictions, intellectually inert, politically weak-willed, and pliable. A fossil society is one defined by its mental stagnation and its willingness to submit.

Dictators and political narcissists — the kind who betray the hopes of those who once trusted them — make oil an obligatory part of their political programs. Their safety is guarded by endless rows of robotized soldiers encased in sleek, impenetrable armor. Cities become more alluring under the gaze of their tireless patrols. The allure of militarism coils through the streets, fogging the minds of the public with dreams of belonging to an elite world of wealth, passion, and power. Futuristic vehicles and boutique displays are nothing more than conceptual packaging — masking a society whose ambitions have been intellectually dulled and reduced to primitive appetites for material indulgence.

The fossil gold of the depths is no longer a conditional material good — it has become an unconditional force of mass control. The powerful smother free thought in an impermeable oil film, restricting civil liberties through tactics of climate radicalization (Andreas Malm – Fossil Capital, White Skin, Black Fuel), psychological manipulation, and physical exploitation.

Sincerity suffocates under an anaerobic oil veil. Black crude creeps across the delicate porcelain face of youth, severing it from freedom and love. This is how fossil capitalism — aged and decrepit — exploits innocence, converting petroleum superprofits into the sexual energy of youth, shamelessly consuming its vitality as a resource.

Day by day, the air thins. The oxygen-starved atmosphere gives rise to asphyxiation — a sense of hopelessness and doom that leads to inertia and submission. It seems we have begun to accept, almost by reflex, the truths imposed from above: the inevitability of wealth-seeking, the sanctity of purchasing power, and the necessity of tolerating the toxicity of political systems.

Fossil Society

The distribution of oil and its derivatives stratifies society — granting some exhausting, low-paid labor and the dehydrating routine of conservative family life, while offering others near-unlimited access to the industries of high fashion and endless entertainment. The former barely afford primitive synthetic food; the latter have grown weary of overly refined Michelin pairings and the complex tailoring of haute couture (Fr. “high fashion” — custom clothing for a select elite).

The phenomenon of Black Energy also presupposes a moderate-consuming middle class, repressed by its own moderation. Those trapped in the center send up prayerful requests to the deity of Black Energy for multiplying their capital and expanding their consumer basket. Oh, if only their children could cry black, oily tears of oil, they would lovingly collect each one — to distill into a vial of eternal prosperity.

What unifies the strata is a shared dependency on the source of black energy — without which, survival itself is in question. Mass consciousness, broken by this addiction, craves structure more than ever. Political dogma and moral norms become carriers of black energy, capable of ordering a chaotic society.

“I’m a train on a track in your head…”

Black Energy is both the foundation and the superstructure of a totalitarian ideology, confidently moving through the mental and emotional circuits of humanity like a high-speed technological train: “I’m a train on a track in your head” (Hybrid Collapse – “Black Energy”, 2025). Fossil logic captures the collective psyche by skillfully manipulating the instinctual core of identity.

Black energy transforms the world. Power becomes sexualized through feminine figures dressed in garments as expensive as oil. In their elegant hands — totemic fossil flames and blades of vengeance for worshipping the demonic spirit of black energy.

These feminine entities are at once seductive and otherworldly. Their refined gestures, wrapped in black lace, escape the surface gaze. A six-fingered hand tightly clutching a ritual dagger is not a visual glitch. In the Bible (2 Samuel 21:20), polydactyly is described as a trait of giants — beings of strength, yet alien. In ancient cultures, an extra finger often symbolized chosenness or superhuman essence. In this context, the six-fingered hand is not an anomaly but a marker of higher will, an emissary of another reality. The dagger is not just a weapon — it is an instrument of divine intervention. Its double-edged blade symbolizes the inseparability of beauty and aggression, desire and power.
Black energy is cold in its magnetism. It does not seduce or invite; rather, it warns of danger through sword and song: “And I'm scared to death but you lost your power...” (Hybrid Collapse – “Black Energy”, 2025). And yet, in pursuit of its blessings, people come willingly to the altar.

The priestesses of black energy fulfill their purpose — enacting justice and returning to the Earth the warmth of the buried black sun.

Black energy does not require conscious sacrifice. Its core mechanism is an appeal to the unconscious in all of us — to the growing urge to consume, to stop thinking, to refuse anti-systemic choices. The biopolitical algorithm of black energy is attuned to the natural human drive toward ease, toward shifting responsibility to some stronger, wiser Other.

The fossil tyranny of black energy is shockingly transparent. Militarism and aggression, exploitation and indulgence — all are made attractive through the style of the regime’s enforcers, the sleekness of its architecture, the hypnotic pull of digitized witches.
“You destroy yourself, but it's your freedom...” (Hybrid Collapse – “Black Energy”, 2025)
The world of small, privately suffering individuals — each within their own social tier — is powerless before the allure of dead beauty. And so, one by one, they arrive with a look of grim understanding, bringing their lives to the altar like superstitious ancestors once cast living offerings into the sacred fires of ancient gods.

Further Reading & Concepts

1. Katia Moskvitch — What if everything we know about dark matter is totally wrong? (2018)
   A speculative article questioning scientific assumptions about dark matter — a metaphorical backdrop for the elusive and powerful nature of "black energy."

2. Reza Negarestani — Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
   A seminal theoretical horror-philosophy novel exploring oil as a living, malevolent force — the "rotting sun" that drives modern civilization.

3. Dante Alighieri — La Commedia (later La Divina Commedia), 14th century
   Cocytus, one of the five rivers of the underworld, is the river of weeping and sorrow. In the Inferno, it symbolizes ultimate betrayal and spiritual freezing — invoked here as a metaphor for the terminal depths of the oil-obsessed world.

4. Fossil Society
   A term describing a social order defined by intellectual stagnation, political docility, and cultural rigidity — a population preserved in the ideological resin of fossil capitalism.

5. Andreas Malm — Fossil Capital, White Skin, Black Fuel
   Key texts linking the use of fossil fuels to racism, authoritarianism, and the rise of climate denial as political strategy — grounding the aesthetics of "black energy" in historical materialism.