[A Pleasurable Headache] Modernist Horror; Dead Plots; David Graeber
This week’s links:
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Alan Moore on Modernist Horror
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GQ profiles tech-oracle Jaron Lanier
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The Baffler on alleged militant, and first U.S citizen to be assassinated by a drone, Anwar al-Awlaki
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Charlie Stross on the literary tropes our fun-house world have made redundant
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Real Life Mag on the interconnectedness of the modern home
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Patrick Wyman on Bidenism
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Doom 2016 and hegemonic masculinity
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The Atlantic goes deep on the QAnon movement
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Douglas Rushkoff delivers a sequel to his ‘the rich are looking for an escape plan’ article
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Steve Keen delivers an eulogy to the recently departed David Graeber
Modernist Horror
First up, a short video featuring the words of Alan Moore to explain how modernist horror can be a ‘call to action’.
The Conscience of Silicon Valley
https://www.gq.com/story/jaron-lanier-tech-oracle-profile
GQ profile Jaron Lanier, one of the harsher and more vocal critics (with good reason) of how modern tech is utilised, especially social media.
“In [his] book, he suggests that the very same media used to organize and connect people with a shared viewpoint—this powerful resource for activists looking to foment change—can end up emboldening their opponents. The way it works, according to Lanier, is that the algorithm takes a positive social movement, such as Black Lives Matter, and shows it to a bunch of people who are inclined to be enraged by it, introduces them to one another, and then continues to rile them up for profit, until they’re even more fearsome and effective than the movement to which they were reacting.”
The Discreet Charm of White-Collar Jihad
https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-discreet-charm-of-white-collar-jihad-allchin
The Baffler cover Anwar al-Awlaki, the first American citizen, to be assassinated via the U.S drone program. Anwar was an imam and alleged militant with an increasing influence in jihadist circles at the time of his death. The strike was carried out under the Obama administration and formed part of the huge step up in the program’s reach, scope and frequency during that period. His son, 16 year old, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, was killed in Yemen, during a CIA initiated drone strike, a month later.
Dead Plots
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2020/08/dead-plots.html
Over at his blog, Charlie Stross, details all the ways in which our present funhouse of a world has impacted on traditional plot devices in fiction.
“[M]eanwhile the eminent mainstream literary faculty are still turning out deeply sensitive realist-mode explorations of the human condition that totally neglect the tech dimension. We live in a world with killer drones, state level actors gaslighting each others’ electorates with bots and sock puppets and AI generated user icons, where the average TV viewer is ageing by more than 12 months per year as demographic shift kills the video star and moves everything online, where private space launch companies are listed on the stock market and cars park themselves.”
Home Body
https://reallifemag.com/home-body/
Kelly Pendergrast at Real Life Mag on the modern home. Here the home is presented as a node within a global system, connected to aspects of the hidden labour in the global supply chain.
“In the real world of the cyborg collective and its composite parts, the horrors of the house are entirely non-metaphoric. Turn a tap in some parts of Flint, Michigan, and poisoned water still flows out, years after the city’s water crisis became a national disgrace. Plug in a power cord anywhere, and the electricity that flows your way might be fed by atrocities carried out in your name at the other end of the tubes: black lung, denuded environments, death. Unlike the privatized horrors of storybook hauntings, the spirits that animate my house exist on the same timeline, as part of the same networked system as I do (hello sanitation engineer, hello bird flying splat into the wind turbine, hello coal miner), at the other end of the tubes, feeding my housebody or failing it.”
What is Bidenism?
https://patrickwyman.substack.com/p/what-is-bidenism
The always interesting Patrick Wyman on the Democrat nominee and the notion of ‘Bidenism’:
“So what is Bidenism? From my perspective, it has three main components, each of which reinforces the others:
1) Donald Trump is an aberration, an exception to the normal course of American history and governance.
2) Removing Donald Trump from office via election would essentially solve the problem by returning governance to a responsible leader.
3) No major changes to our current political structures, much less the deeper organization of society, are necessary.
Bidenism is, therefore, an ideology focused around maintaining the status quo. Things are pretty much fine.”
But things aren’t, in fact, fine. Maybe some things need to fundamentally change. While those notes are similar to what we’ve heard before, particularly in 2008, they hit a lot differently in 2020. It’s a harder sell to an audience that is, or at least ought to be, more cynical after a global recession, the Donald Trump Experience in all its varied manifestations, and now the pandemic. It’s harder to believe that Trump is the aberration, rather than an expression of more fundamental problems in the fabric of American and global life in the twenty-first century.”
It’s just a manly man thing: Doom (2016), sound and hegemonic masculinity
Having just played through the sequel to the above, Doom: Eternal, there was a lot to dig into here. The game absolutely revels in its displays of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. That much is evident. But the blog post here also analyses the soundtrack/sound design choices to further support that theory.
“When moving from the Mars-based levels to the first one set in Hell, I’d expected to hear a significant musical difference. This anticipated change doesn’t occur. I interpret this musical consistency as the game communicating to players that they should not treat the new levels set in Hell any differently to the ones set on Mars. You still need to kill everything in sight to succeed, it’s just the walls are painted a different shade of red.”
Shadowland
https://www.theatlantic.com/shadowland/
The Atlantic have done a series of articles on the modern day conspiracy movement, including QAnon, Instragram influencers, and the human boil that is Nigel Farage.
The Privileged Have Entered Their Escape Pods
https://onezero.medium.com/the-privileged-have-entered-their-escape-pods-4706b4893af7
If you’re a long time reader of this newsletter you’ll have seen Douglas Rushkoff’s name pop up a lot. I’ve read a huge amount of his work and his thoughts on ‘Present Shock’ were highly influential when putting together the Disconnect comic. Two years ago he wrote an article entitled Survival of the Richest about the efforts of the rich to avoid or cocoon themselves from the coming ‘collapse’. This latest article is a sequel of sorts, this time covering the impact of Covid-19 on the same crowd.
“Many of us once swore off Amazon after learning of the way it evades taxes, engages in anti-competitive practices, or abuses labor. But here we are, reluctantly re-upping our Prime delivery memberships to get the cables, webcams, and Bluetooth headsets we need to attend the Zoom meetings that now constitute our own work. Others are reactivating their long-forgotten Facebook accounts to connect with friends, all sharing highly curated depictions of their newfound appreciation for nature, sunsets, and family. And as we do, many of us are lulled further into digital isolation — being rewarded the more we accept the logic of the fully wired home, cut off from the rest of the world.
And so the New York Times is busy running photo spreads of wealthy families “retreating” to their summer homes — second residences worth well more than most of our primary ones — and stories about their successes working remotely from the beach or retrofitting extra bedrooms as offices. “It’s been great here,” one venture fund founder explained. “If I didn’t know there was absolute chaos in the world … I could do this forever.””
Eulogy to David Graeber
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/09/steve-keen-eulogy-to-david-graeber.html
In the last full edition of this newsletter I linked to an article on Anarchism by David Graeber. Graeber died this week in Venice. He was 59. If you read the piece you’ll see Graeber explains the underlying principles of Anarchism in a clear-headed, succinct and friendly manner. This is Graeber in a nutshell. A better world is always a possibility if the systems that imprison us can be cast away. He will be missed. I urge you to read Keen’s piece above and then seek out Graeber’s work wherever you can.
A bit of a new format this week as it looks a lot nicer when I’m laying all of this out pre-markdown rendering.
See you in two!