CJW: Welcome! This time around we’ve got another special guest - Dan Grace. Dan has already graced (ugh, pun [surprisingly] not intended) these pages before, thanks to a couple of replies he’s sent in that were so insightful I included them in the next issue verbatim.
Our last bonus letter was from Austin - detailing some of his thinking behind the next issue of Creeper magazine, as well as some experiments in visual narrative and sleep-drone music (both of which really interest me). If you want to check it out, as well as the full archive of bonus letters (and all the fresh ones to come), you can become a supporter.
We’ve noticed a lot more people open these emails when they’re a little shorter. Now, you won’t know how long an email is until you’ve opened it, so I have to assume that it’s gmail (or whoever) hiding the longer ones. So, if you want to make sure you don’t miss anything from us, you might need to whitelist this email address or otherwise train your algorithms that this particular mass of links is one you want to receive. We try to keep them shorter where we can, but sometimes we can’t help ourselves...
Dan Grace (DG) - sometime writer / slacker worker / permanent PhD student / disorganised union organiser / Marxish / Sheffield, UK
Corey J. White (CJW) - Sci-fi author. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author & podcaster. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings
AA: Politigram & the Post-left (via Aaron Z Lewis)
DG: Wow. I got a bit lost among the memes for a while there, but the central tale of individuation and nihilist drift is familiar to me, albeit not in the very online context presented here. The thing that ties both types of experience seems to be a lack of formal structures (thinking in terms of Jo Freeman’s classic analysis The Tyranny of Structurelessness) that might prevent the whole thing descending to “logical” endpoint of taking Nick Land seriously. Not entirely sure what I mean by that and what it would look like. Probably something hideously dystopian now I think about it…
AA: Looking at the “political journey” memes posted by these politgram kids is bizarre - it’s funny to me that their beliefs shifted so radically in such a short period of time…
The cynic in me wants to say it’s all performative, kids collecting ideologies like Funko Pops, chasing that sweet “politigram clout”, but who am I to judge the sincerity of these young peoples’ convictions? They’re living in a world much much more information dense than the one I knew as a teenager (when I was looking for meaning, like we all do), and no doubt their barely post-adolescent brains are absolutely ablaze with neural activity as they process all this condensed ideology and philosophy, making conceptual connections and constructing their makeshift worldviews and fighting with each other and probably enjoying it all massively.
Maybe it’s a good thing that these young people are doing this now, and hopefully as they mature and gather more lived experience it will lead them to similarly interesting (but perhaps more constructive) ways of thinking about the world and what to do with it.
But in the meantime, I’m happy to just sit back and enjoy the memes…
Seize the memes of production!
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MKY: STARTSELECTRESET
@thejaymo made a zine out of his Permanently Moved podcast. I am so Team PDF. Your Attention Is Sovereign, so dl and read at ur leisure ;)
CJW: Jay mentioned his podcast when he took m1k3y and I out for dinner last year (thanks again, Jay!), but I’ve not had a chance to listen to it yet. But there is some great stuff here in the transcripts:
I’ve been attempting to find mechanisms to remind myself that my attention is sovereign every single time I open an app on my phone. The only solution, has been to keep it in my pocket and not even try and open an app.
I do the same thing. Leave my phone in my pocket when I’m waiting, commuting, walking, etc, let my thoughts and my eyes wander, stay happily disconnected for a time.
In another section, Jay basically breaks down why we (for example) are more likely to share intelligent commentary after the fact about a news story than to share actual news. And this link (via Sentiers) touches on some of the same things Jay talks about in the zine.
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CJW: The Perfect User (via marcel)
With Siempo installed, the phone becomes akin to Foucault’s “body-tool,” demanding of the user continuous, intentional behavior. The phone as body-tool prompts the user to engage in self-surveillance and self-discipline, subjugating themselves to the modes of use that have been designed into the app.
This piece from Real Life Mag covers a few different topics we like to talk about here - subtle control through design and gamification of apps & services, privilege and dis/connection, wellness capitalism and more.
DG: Ok, so this immediately set me thinking about about the work of Ivan Illich (probably best known for his views on education and deschooling). It’s kind of the core of my current research so it does fill a disproportionate amount of my brain but I’m pretty sure it’s still relevant. One of Illich’s key concepts was the idea of convivial tools:
Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. […] Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.
The idea of the tool is pretty expansive, so it includes productive institutions such as, say, a library or a factory. What conviviality breaks down to is an extra axis alongside ownership of the means of production and exchange and the choice between hard and soft technological solutions, expanding out into the need for a democratically governed process of actively determining the use-values of tools. Creating the perfect user is really creating the perfect worker, i.e the perfect commodity. We’re just a new frontier to be mined. Conviviality is a direct challenge to the ongoing organisation of nature by capital.
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DG: “We have to recalibrate our notion of abundance”
And let’s face it: if you want to raise the living standards throughout the Global South to the levels of the Global North, the world capitalist system would have to multiply its size six or seven times. That’s totally unsustainable! So in order to make this work, we’d have to ‘de-develop’ - in capitalist terms - large parts of the Global North, we’d have to reorganise our ideas of what’s desirable, what’s nutritious, what’s tasty, what’s good to have, and so on. We’d have to re-evaluate our sense of ‘quality of life’. And there’s no straightforward answer to that.
A short interview with Richard Seymour, one of the editors of Salvage magazine. Covers a few topics; scarcity, thinking in geological time, marxism, psychoanalysis, and finally Twitter (the subject of his new book which I really want to read).
CJW: As far as I’m aware, I’ve not come across Richard Seymour before, but there is so much great stuff here about Left vs Right and socialist vs capitalist visions of and options for the future, with a balanced, rather than optimistic or pessimistic, outlook.
This is hardly the best or smartest part of the interview (that’s possibly the section Dan quoted from above), but is still grabbed me:
[The Amazon fires represented] the wanton, brazen capitalist death drive at work. Capitalism, increasingly obviously is an apparatus of the death drive, because it’s absolutely not concerned with the questions of survival. In a way, capitalism doesn’t really believe death can happen.
I also appreciate that he’s saying some things that I also think, but which I worry could be misconstrued. So it’s encouraging to see someone smarter than me approaching these topics from a thoroughly Leftist point of view while also denying hippy bullshit about the unique glory of humanity. (People look at me like I’m a nihilistic/pessimistic/depressed piece of shit when I talk about this stuff… and maybe they aren’t wrong, but that’s also not the entire story.)
DG: Exactly. I’m really interested in solid socialist/communist/anarchist/etc. approaches to topics like scarcity in a just and equitable society that doesn’t do the techno-fantasy, “post-capitalist” stuff like Fully Automated Luxury Communism. It’s why I’m interested in writer’s like Illich (see above).
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CJW: Gaming’s #MeToo Moment and the Tyranny of Male Fragility (via Ahmet A. Sabancı)
The response to the death of Alec Holowka throws this double standard into razor-sharp relief. The harassment of Quinn and others has nothing to do with concern for Holowka and his family and everything to do with making examples of women and queer people who dare to speak out. The message is clear: Men’s mental health matters more than women’s. Men’s suffering and self-loathing is treated as a public concern, because men are permitted to be real people whose inner lives and dreams matter. Who cares, then, how many women they destroy along the way?
I’ve been following this story via RPS, but will take any excuse to share a piece from Laurie Penny. This is a great piece about mental health being used as a shield by/for abusers and a weapon against women and queer folx.
The same “won’t somebody think of the abusers?!” mindset that Penny touches on in this piece is why I no longer follow the comics of one former favourite writer, but after the hate-filled misogynyfest that was gamergaet, this whole turn of events is entirely unsurprising.
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CJW: Comrades in Deep Future (via Ospare)
On the colonial, extractivist ideology behind current plans for colonising Mars, and alternatives sourced from science-fiction.
The fact that Musk is not capable of recognizing Martian agency, simply because it does not mimic what he is willing to consider “life,” mirrors the undoing of our own terrestrial existence, given the similar negation of ancient ice caps and forests on earth. A politics of hyperempathy would not terraform the Other, but demand the transformation of the collective self to enable expanded terrestrial and interplanetary comradeship.
There’s also a section on what I’ll call Communist Object-Oriented Ontology (COOO) that is kind of stunning to consider.
For a propaganda art of hyperempathy, there are no “dead planets,” but living worlds of comradely constellations and construct families yet to be embraced.
DG: Yes!
The literary social experiment […] enables imaginative models for more-than-human comradeship across coexisting scales of time and space, from interplanetarianism to intra-planetarianism.
If there was a mission statement for the kind of writing I’m interested in producing then this might be it. Good to see Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars getting a shout. McKenzie Wark tackles Bogdanov and the Mars Trilogy in Molecular Red, which is well worth a read.
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MKY: Hints of rain clouds found on small alien world
“There is actually rain on this planet, like on Earth,” Benneke says. “If you were up there in a hot-air balloon you would probably be quite comfortable, as long as you had some sort of breathing equipment.”
Yay, another world to ruin! Send the immortal rich. It’ll be fiiiiiiiiiine.
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Cutting Room Floor:
What Happened After My 13-Year-Old Son Joined the Alt-Right (via marcel)
About a University of Arizona study on agrivoltaics (via Ed), which were mentioned in the solarpunk book we shared in the issue when Andrew Dana Hudson guested.
Heaven or High Water (via Ed) - On realtors in Miami selling false hope (and expensive houses)
This Routine Gyno Procedure Could Mean You Never Orgasm Again
CJW: Restricted Frequency #137
Ganzeer has a great summary of the events currently going on in Egypt that could very well be the beginning of a third revolution. Check it out.
CJW: Winter by Dan Grace
Even before he was sending great replies to this here newsletter, I was paying attention to Dan’s (now defunct) twitter account. As you can see from this issue, he has plenty of interesting things to share and say about our world and sociopolitical happenings. But it was only earlier this year that I finally got around to checking out Dan’s fiction.
Told in brief and usually quiet moments, Winter is a beautiful and claustrophobic look at the lives of a small group of revolutionaries on the run after a (failed?) uprising, caught between the machinations of the authorities and the incomprehensible power of nature.
Those brief moments mean that much of the story is suggested rather than told - the histories and personalities of these characters rendered through snatches of dialogue and interaction.. In this way, the story comes together in such a way that it’s greater than the sum of its tight page count.
DG: Thanks Corey. The book was a culmination of a certain period of my writing where I was moving from doing mainly poetry to mainly prose, which I think informs the structure and (what I hoped) was an impressionistic approach to storytelling. Also, the idea of writing something short and it still being “a book” really appealed to me. Mainly because it takes me ages to write anything (this took a couple of years at least I think).
There were really two moments of inspiration behind the whole thing. The first, a walk through deep snow along an abandoned railway line on the east coast of England and coming across a pair of deer just stood on the track ahead of us. It was one of those moments where everything sort of melts away for a second or two and you feel something else creeping in. The second, a reaction to some of the ideas/people I encountered in being involved with revolutionary politics, who I just felt hadn’t really thought about what “the rev” would be like, how hard it would actually be for those that lived through it. How it might not turn out how their neat little theories predicted.
Winter is intended to be the first of a quartet (no prizes for guessing the names of the remaining three) but I finished it just prior to the birth of my first kid and returning to uni, so the follow ups have ended up on the backburner. It’s been mainly short stories since then, at a rate of a couple a year. Should have one appearing soonish in the next issue of Big Echo. The PhD should (finally!) be done next year, so I’m hoping to get back to this then.
I don’t really have any online presence right now (I subsist mainly on a diet of newsletters and RSS feeds - I’m thinking of starting my own newsletter, but time), but if people want to check out any of my short stories here’s a couple of links (only the first one is free I’m afraid :( - happy to send any of them to anyone though if you have a burning desire to read but lack the income to do so):
Immaterial (The Future Fire) - When you’re meat, because you’re poor, but maybe that’s okay.
Fully Automated Nostalgia Capitalism (Interzone) - When everything is automated and should be great but capital’s still finding things for you to do with your time.
Waves (The Shadow Booth vol 2.) - When your depression manifests as a strange bird like creature that follows you on holiday.
So yeah, buy the book if you can afford to. And if you can’t, steal it comrogues.
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CJW: No Friend But the Mountains, by Behrouz Boochani
To save on space, I’ve posted this review to my website. Short version: This book is beautiful and harrowing and important.
MJW: Unbelievable (Netflix)
Based on a Propublica article, this series comes from true events and details two rape investigations, one done horribly wrong, and one done as right as something like this can be done. Unbelievable comes with a serious trigger warning for sexual violence. This show is heavy: while depictions of the assaults themselves are few, and never played for sick titillation effect, the performances capture a very real sense of the after effects. As Marie (Kaitlyn Dever) is interviewed and retraumatised by cops in the aftermath, you can feel her powerfully dissociating. Hell, I was powerfully dissociating as I watched. I can’t say I’ve ever been as emotionally affected by a TV show as I was by this one. I get the sense that this is important viewing for anyone who… no, for just anyone. Rarely does a show set out to do something and actually achieve it to this degree. Powerful performances, excellent writing, perfect casting. Don’t just watch it if you can stomach it. Watch it because you can’t stomach it - because this is real, this is what happens and this is important.
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MKY: BREXIT: THE UNCIVIL WAR
The best quote I’ve heard about #brexit is “if you think you know what’s happening, you’re wrong.” So, I took the advice of the Trashfuture podcast and watched this Ch4 movie from early this year about the Leave Campaign - and how they totally out-maneuvered the rest of the UK political establishment, and pulled some Sith Mind Tricks on its populace - starring one Benedict Cumberbatch as the latest insurgent dark enlightenment politico to hit my radar, joining the likes of Steve Bannon, Mr Dominic Cummings. And it’s one hell of a film. What’s noticeably missing from it is his dark enlightenment politics… the dude loves eugenics, for instance. If you haven’t already seen The Great Hack, these go well together. In hell, anyway.
DG: No. You see Leave won because of the Genuine Concerns of the White Working Class. But seriously, I haven’t watched this yet and I’m not sure I could, I’m so tired of this now.
CJW: A DIY Guide to Feminist Cybersecurity (via Ospare)
A long and detailed guide to protecting your data/identity/etc online, of particular use to women and other folx who can expect to receive a lot of harassment simply for existing online. That said, I still took the opportunity to change a couple of things about my online toolkit based on the guide.
DG: Swampside Chats and General Intellect Unit discuss Designing Freedom By Stafford Beer
Really interesting (first part) of a discussion of Stafford Beer’s work on cybernetics, his relationship with the Allende government in Chile and how we can achieve our future anarchist society of federated units through marxism!
MKY: SOLD! Thx Dan.
CJW: Twelve Twenty Two by Anthony Baldino (via Craig Puzahki)
There’s only one track up so far, but that track was so good I immediately pre-ordered the album. Cyberpunk-esque synthy goodness - perfect for a sci-fi writing soundtrack.
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DG: Ghost Condensate by Mesarthim
Cosmic depressive black metal you say? I fell down a black/death metal hole in bandcamp a year or two ago and am still in there, finding stuff like this.
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MKY: DIVISIONS by Starset
Do you like high concept scifi infused screamo space rock? Then join me in listening to nothing but the third installment in Starset’s series of anthemic astrognostic audio novels. Turns out this band is even cooler than I realised. Here’s their first single, Manifest - FREE YOUR MINDS KIDS.
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue. As ever, hit reply if you’ve got anything to share with us