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To get your copy, you just need to send an email to this address:

midsummerannual@johnhiggs.com

…with the address you wish the book to be sent to in the email body. If you could do that from this address (i.e., the address I have for your New Moon Letter subscription) that…

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I am pleased to announce that this year’s edition is called The Bees Are On Our Side: Midsummer Annual 2026 and the cover looks like this:

This is, of course, entirely wrong on every level. The cover of a Midsummer Annual should be bright, warm, and probably blue and yellow. It should not be an overcast sky or the frankly disturbing black windmill of Rottingdean. Yet I’ve been weirdly haunted by this image ever since my friend Chris posted it on his Instagram last summer, and given the current state of the world, I felt it captured the mood of 2026 far better than a more sensible design. I’m also really enjoying the freedom to make unwise decisions which a project like this gives. I’m still debating about leaving the image clean or adding text - we shall see.

I’m pleased with the variety of articles I’ve put together. It starts with a new essay on the English radical tradition and then goes on to cover Agatha Christie’s disappearance, Banksy’s Dismaland, Lynch’s The Straight Story, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, The Secret of Monkey Island, the Cosmic Trigger play and much more. It ends with my play H.G. Wells & the Spiders From Mars.

I realise that it would be far easier and cheaper for me to just email these pieces of writing to subscribers, rather than go to the trouble of designing, printing and mailing physical books. But I like the fact that this will not exist online, and that the likes of Amazon will never know of its existence. The cover image and this mailing list platform aside, the only people involved in this are me, my wife who copy-edited, a local Sussex printer and the post office. There will be no digital versions - so no ebooks or audiobooks. It won’t be available in online or offline shops. It’ll just drop through your letterbox at midsummer, and that’s that.

For those of you with a paid subscription to the New Moon Letters - look out for an email from me around the start of June, asking for the mailing address you wish your copy to be sent to. Once you’ve replied to that, there is nothing else that you need to do and your book will arrive a few weeks later.

And for those without a paid subscription - if you do decide to upgrade your subscription, there’s still time for me to add an extra copy to the printer’s order!

Hope you enjoy it!

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EXTERMINATE/REGENERATE EVENTS

I’ve got a few events coming up in May where I’ll be talking about my Doctor Who book, now that it has materialised in paperback.

The first is the Tunbridge Wells Literary Festival on 4 May, Bank Holiday Monday. Beatle-people should note that I will be interviewed by Chris Shaw of of the much missed podcast I Am The Eggpod. Even better, Chris is finally launching his new podcast on Sunday, Eggpod Express, in which he and his guests delve into copies of the 1960s music press - look out for that!

Next Thursday, 6 May, I’ll be at the Books on the Rise book shop in Richmond Hill, London, and on 23 May I’ll be at the Chesham Fringe, where me and Robin Ince will be in conversation with Sean Hannam, which promises to be a lot of fun. These will be my last public events for a good long while, so if you can make them, please come along.

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ELSEWHERE

I’m a big fan of the novels of David Keenan and his latest, Boyhood, is no exception. A very male exploration of memory and loss, it’s a great place to start if you are new to his work. I’d particularly recommend the audiobook, which he reads himself. Keenan often talks about his writing as if it was something he encounters rather than creates, and this reading is at times so startled and reverential that it is as if it is being revealed to him in real time. An extraordinary listen.

Meanwhile the cursed art-goth Shardcore aka Drass has released On The Hill, a reassuringly unsettling album about telepathy, technology and aliens. The Quietus review by Chris Thorpe-Tracey describes it well. It’s a bracing listen and you should definitely give it a go.

And finally - The KLF Recreation Society have been performing chilled sets in village halls, and it naturally pleases me greatly that in July they will be performing on Watling Street. More details here.

That’s all from me. See you next time - if the Six O’Clock Picker doesn’t get you first.

jhx

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It arrives as the series is in a much more uncertain place than when the book was written. I originally pitched it in the early days of the Disney deal, when there was hope that Doctor Who would become a global brand. Alas, the series has proved to be much too weird and British for that, and as a result the book is still only available in the UK. And yet, unexpectedly but pleasingly, the book is now being translated into… Chinese! I had no idea that there was a Chinese Who scene, I would love to know more about that.

A new paperback edition gives me a chance to fix errors or make changes. This meant that I spent ages agonising about whether I should change Ncuti Gatwa’s dates from “2024 - ?” to “2024-2025”, given what has happened after the hardback came out. In the end I left the question mark, due to an unshakeable hunch, based on nothing factual, that we would see him again at Christmas. And if I’m wrong, at least a question mark is pleasingly on-brand.

If you are after a signed copy of the paperback, you can now pre-order one from Resident Records - who ship worldwide. You can order those here.

I hope you all managed to catch the Doctor on their recent club tour of the UK fronting an indie rock band - it was truly excellent. Judging by the length of their hair, I think this was between series 8 and 9, from their perspective.

Before the paperback arrives, I still have a couple more Lynchian events to do. I’ll be at Laugharne in South Wales on Saturday - that’s sold out - and at the Heath Bookshop Literature and Music Festival in Birmingham on 18 April. Tickets for that are here.

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FILM CLUBS AND FESTIVALS

The guest curator of this year’s Bridport ‘From Page to Screen’ Film Festival is Chris Chibnall - and I’ll be interviewing him about his film choices on 22 April. Tickets and more details can be found here. There’s a lot of good stuff in the festival, including screenings of Airplane and 2001, but the highlight is surely the gala night screening of Casino Royale with long-term Bond writers Neal Purvis and Robert Wade plus composer David Arnold.

The East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club (ESP-FC) has gone into reverse hibernation and shut up shop for the summer, but other strange film clubs are emerging. The Sheffield Psyko Dalek Film Club opens a week on Sunday with a screening of Betrand Mandico’s excellent After Blue. Details and tickets here.

There’s some very committed aesthetic choices in that poster, I suspect those nights could be quite something. Enjoy!

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ELSEWHERE

Great news for Blakeans - James Murray White’s film Finding Blake, about finding and marking Blake’s grave, is now up on YouTube. More details about that are here.

Here’s a couple of very special things coming from a similar DIY analogue attitude - we’ll see more of this, I think, as people increasingly want more than what the digital world offers. On the left, Ben Wheatley’s microbudget reality-shattering sci-fi film Bulk is now available on Blu Ray and 4K. For all that it sold out the BFI IMAX, it’s still more like a punk fanzine than it is a Hollywood movie. Unexpect the Expected!

And on the right, the overdue but very welcome 2025 edition of the Mycelium Parish News has arrived. This is a catalogue of that year’s books, podcasts, fanzines, mailing lists, events etc, that come from alternative or Discordian- adjacent creators. There’s a micro-essay from me in there also. Vital communal stuff for all left cold by tech-bro culture. You can find it here.

Until next time!
jhx

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It’s always a joy to do events with Robin - a cardigan-loving book nerd he may be, but he’s also the most punk man I know. He’s always interested, as well as interesting. His decision to walk away from the Infinite Monkey Cage series has been hard for him but it doesn’t seem to have slowed him down - if you see him gigging near you make a point of going to see whatever chaos he is creating, it is always unpredictable but mind-expanding.

I’ve got a few more Lynchian events coming up - including the Halifax Goth Festival on 14 February (this festival runs over Friday 13th and Valentine’s Day, it could not be more Goth), Faversham on 21 February and Kings Heath in Brum on 18 April. You can find links to all these here.

I’ve also been talking about Lynch on Josh Bernhard’s Highly Irregular podcast, you can find that here.

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NEW MOON LETTERS

I’m delighted by the response to the first of my New Moon Letters. The next one may be about American soft power, or possibly about Douglas Adams, or it may well end up being something entirely different - we’ll find out when the new moon rolls around, I guess.

The next New Moon Letters are for those who have a paid subscription, which also gets you a physical book, the 2026 Midsummer Annual, in the post - it’s all explained here. Note that if you do fancy being part of this, avoid upgrading your subscription using the iPhone Substack app, as Apple whack up the price by 30%. Doing it online, or on an Android phone, avoids this.

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ELSEWHERE

These are busy, overwhelming days and it’s very easy to miss a lot of the good stuff that is going on at the moment. If you’ve got any spare attention, there’s much that deserves it. Here are some examples:

If you haven’t seen Andrew O’Neill’s joyful History of Heavy Metal stand-up show, the full performance - complete with a live band - is now up on YouTube. It will get you in the mood for their new History of Punk show, which is playing at the 100 Club in London on 19 February - tickets are here.

Also in London, the Byline Times will be running some interesting looking discussion events at the Cockpit Theatre, under the title The Lure Of… These look at different aspects of modern life and the first, about the loneliness epidemic, is tomorrow, 2 Feb. More details and tickets are here.

In Bristol, a season of films and events from Andrew Kötting - with some help from his daughter Eden - has opened at the Watershed, and runs until 12 April. There’s lots of interesting stuff lined up - including a rare chance to see his film By Our Selves about the journey home of the poet John Clare, featuring Toby Jones, Ian Sinclair, Alan Moore, and Kötting himself as a giant straw bear.

I’ve talked a bit about Alistair Fruish’s extraordinary monosyllabic single sentence science fiction novel The Sentence before. This was always at its most trance-inducing when read aloud - and the full audio version is now up on Alistair’s website. Heartily recommended for anyone who wants to experience time being swallowed.

If you’ve not yet come across Los Highway, John Riordan’s graphic biography of William Blake, have a look at his Substack here. This now also includes examples of his William Blake, Taxi Driver comic strip that used to run in the London Time Out in the early 2000s - it’s well worth signing up for.

This Slow AI manifesto is well worth a read - an informed look at the state of AI art by Eric Drass, an artist who has worked with AI for the best part of a couple of decades, and what he makes of the fact that everyone now hates it. For context and contrast, it appeared on the same day as this sobering report about the impact of AI on the creative industries, produced by (among others) my trade union the Society of Authors.

In these stressful times, the new book by my wife Joanne Mallon might be just what you need - How To De-stress In Five Minutes A Day. Invaluable stuff, and beautifully designed, take a look.

Until next time,

jhx

(Note: This is the first of a series of essays called the New Moon Letters. Together with a physical book in the post, they make up the paid tier of my Substack - this post explains it all here. Regular subscribers still get the octannual updates and I’ll make the occasional one of these free to all when it seems appropriate. As this is the first, this is free for all.)

(this is the audio version of this letter - theme by &breathe)

18 January 2026

Dear reader,

One of the things I am asked about most often at book events is the nature of counterculture and, specifically, what has happened to it. This is a big question that I often don’t have time to answer properly – hence this letter.

Typically, the assumptions behind the question go something like this: There used to be a thing called “the counterculture”. It was cooler, vital, and more imaginative than mainstream culture. If something like that was happening now, I (a cool person) would be aware of it, understand it and approve of it. However, I cannot see anything like that in the culture surrounding me. Does it still exist, or is it hidden from me? You can hear these same assumptions in Stewart Lee’s recent BBC Sounds series What Happened to Counter-Culture? – which is well worth a listen as it includes some terrific interviews.

The definition of a counterculture is in its name – it is something counter to the prevailing values, beliefs and ideas expressed in mainstream culture. The war in Vietnam gave us a peacenik counterculture, for example, just as the reaction against the hyper-individualism of the 1980s was the collectivist rave scene. Countercultures occur throughout history – in Ken Goffman’s book Counter Culture Through The Ages, his subjects range from Taoists and Sufis to troubadours to acid house. This point is worth stressing because people in the mid-to-late twentieth century talked about “the counterculture” rather than “a counterculture.” The name was in keeping with the individual-first thinking of that period, but it misleads us into thinking that this is the platonic form of counterculture, and that counterculture should always resemble what it was back then. But different cultures generate different countercultures, so today’s counterculture will not resemble that of fifty years ago.

All those countercultures throughout history were essentially a search for a better way to do things, even if the results of these searches weren’t always as positive as their intentions. They can be thought of as a research and development department for the mainstream. Much of what they created would be flawed, unpopular and impractical, but out of all that energy and experimentation came the occasional shining gem. When countercultures come up with an idea that has value, the mainstream happily appropriates it. This is why we have an aisle of vegetarian and vegan food in Asda, music festivals out in the fields all summer and yoga studios in most towns – all this appears unremarkable now, but it would have blown the minds of early 1960s counterculture activists.

From this perspective, the presence of a counterculture is good and healthy, because its contributions prevent cultural stagnation and decay. That counterculture seemed to disappear in the early twenty-first century, then, was troubling. A counterculture, by its very definition, requires a definitive culture to counter - and in those years there didn’t really seem to be one. The internet dissipated cultural energies and prevented new movements from growing to a point of critical mass. It was a time of atomisation, where people could become tourists in an uncountable number of subcultures. These can be wonderful things for community and self-expression, but subcultures do not challenge the mainstream in the way that counterculture does. They can also push us into defining our identities in very tribal terms.

Yet despite how that period differed from the decades before, there were still values and ideas that underpinned it. They were typically liberal and enlightenment values, which took for granted the importance of human life, democracy and the rule the law. That complex multicultural mix was underpinned with the assumption that we should be accepting of difference and try not to be too much of a dick to others – these were, very roughly, the Obama years. For people who did want to be a dick, however, and who wanted to be openly racist and abusive to others, this was a very difficult period. And naturally, a counterculture developed, which we can in broad strokes define as the movement known as the alt.right. Not all countercultures, it is worth stressing, are positive.

Many people feel that this movement is undeserving of the name counterculture because it failed to create art of any value. Its defining visual achievement is either the Cybertruck or Bored Apes NFTs, a situation which future historians will find incredibly funny. This creative impotence helps explain the extent to which this movement has embraced generative AI, seemingly oblivious to its hollow nature. Yet culture does not stay still for long, and these might-is-right monoculture-fetishists are a counterculture no more. With the help of some very rich people, that movement has gone from the margins to the pinnacles of power. It is now a tool for making the very rich even richer.

But I think that now there is a mainstream culture again. It’s the culture of the algorithm. This is a culture of metrics and optimisation, flattening out the atomised early internet into generic slop for all. Those who work in corporations and education will have long recognised the damaging impact of focusing on metrics above everything, but now this metric worship extends to all of culture – it decides what stories get told, what music gets heard and whose voice gets amplified, to a far greater extent than before. We have this culture forced upon us because, for a small group of people, it is unbelievably profitable.

And if it is true that our culture is basically the algorithm, then it logically follows that the resulting counterculture must be, by definition, not that. The algorithm’s goal is to maximise the amount of your attention it can devour, so the counterculture denies its right to do this. It knows that there are far better places where your attention can be. Your attention is, essentially, your experience of your life. It’s the most precious thing you have. The quality of your life is directly related to the extent that you focus that attention on your relationships, your vocation, your health and your happiness. To have great chunks of your precious remaining years lost to optimised addictive doomscrolling algorithms is a terrible thing.

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The digital world was a counterculture once, of course, and it was one I had a lot of affection for. The early network as celebrated by magazines like Mondo 2000 in the 1990s was a direct challenge to the mainstream, promising to bypass gatekeepers and re-route information around the world in a way that was liberating and entirely new. Those values aren’t the driving forces of the digital world now, however. AIs and LLMs soak up all the existing human culture they can find, sift and weigh the connections between it, then guess what part of it is most likely to please users. It can never create something entirely new so it is, by definition, the opposite of a counterculture.

A counterculture is never a mainstream belief, and most people still accept and unquestioningly support this algorithmic mainstream culture. When Gen Alpha school children say that their dream job is to become a YouTuber or a TikTokker, they are accepting and reinforcing the values that these platforms are based on. A lifetime of engagement farming and data-driven growth hacks is seen as a fair price to pay for the attention such careers offer. Many think that a life spent as a TikTok influencer or a crypto-trader, where the importance of anything is the number attached, is as good as life gets. This is not true.

Today’s counterculture, in contrast, has no interest in the online world’s controlling metrics. This comes at a cost – or at least, what appears to be a cost if you accept the mainstream worldview. It means that this counterculture is intentionally invisible to the online world. The fact that you can’t see it in your online bubble is a feature, not a bug. It takes place in the real world, with people getting together and having the sort of experiences you don’t get online. It takes place in pubs and halls and fields, and involves community and relationships. The subjective experiences at the heart of it can’t be measured. Their value is judged not by metrics, but by how they make you feel.

Part of this is the recognition that real-world experiences matter in a way that online ones don’t. You can hear your favourite singer or band perform your favourite song at any time, at the touch of a button. This will be a technically perfect performance, spliced together out of many takes, smoothed over with autotune. Still, we are drawn to rougher performances, filmed at gigs on phone cameras and uploaded to YouTube. Even better would be being there in person, watching the live performance in a crowd, even when the artist is just a tiny dot in the distance. The prices of such experiences have become astronomical, but still the tickets sell, such is their appeal. To top that would take being in a small room next to your hero as they sang that song to you. Such an experience would be priceless, something you would never forget. What this tells us is that the distance between the creation of art and the experience of that work is important. The more layers there are between the thing and the experience of it – the more mediated it is – the less vital it is. This means that the attention-seeking algorithms of the online world can only offer a poor shadow of the things we love.

In my own small way, I help run something that can be seen as a countercultural event – the East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club, or ESP-FC. Once upon a time, it was the type of films that we screened which would have earned us the description of ‘countercultural’. Now, it is more what we don’t do that justifies that term. The event always sells out and mainstream thinking would advise us to move to a bigger venue, up the prices, and increase the frequency of events to ‘grow the brand’ and make more money – the ultimate metric of success. We don’t do this. Instead, our efforts go into the set and setting – the lighting, the music, the random nature of the merch table, the fanzine style programme, the special guests, the odd little gift on every seat. The seventeenth century chapel that we screen the films in is as much a part of the appeal as the people who come along. The bar area is intentionally as big as the hall, and the intervals are as important as the films. It’s not crowded, but there are enough interesting people around for you to naturally fall into conversations. It’s all geared to making the nights better, not bigger. If nothing else, it’s a bunch of people taking a night off from their phones, but I like to think it is more than that. Yet what’s great about those nights can never be found online. The only way to know what they are like is to go to one.

When I describe anti-algorithmic attitudes as countercultural, I’m not arguing for an anti-tech, back-to-the-earth movement that lives doggedly offline. The demands of earning a living make engaging with the digital world a necessity for all but the most privileged. LLMs aren’t going to be uninvented, and careers such as coding and further education will be forever changed by them. Various platforms are useful for connecting, spreading the word, selling tickets and so forth, and offline media is still not sufficient for keeping you informed about what is going on. This is disappointing for those who desire counterculture to be a badge of personal identity and a refuge from mainstream culture – somewhere you can put yourself and live a separate life. I have not seen evidence that such a ‘black and white, all or nothing’ counterculture exists at the moment, but of course, that invisibility may be the whole point. Instead, what I see is more of a matter of degree. We may still be stuck online, but there is a difference in the extent we give it our attention. The aim is to give it less and less. We do this because we recognise how limited, toxic and delusional the digital world has become.

There’s a commonly held belief that the online world reflects the real world. It may be a slightly distorted dark reflection, but it is still a representation of something real. The countercultural view, however, sees that this connection has long been broken, even before you factor in the AI deepfakes and disinformation bot networks that render social media unusable. The online world has become its own creation, free from any links to reality or what physically happens in the world. It wasn’t that long ago that if you heard someone described as being “very online”, you’d think that they were well informed and knew what was going on. That’s really isn’t how people interpret that phrase any more.

Online algorithms optimise for extremes because this increases engagement metrics - regardless of the fact that it also moves us further and further away from reality. One way to picture this process is to imagine algorithm-based social networks reacting to the existence of a giant pie. It would not be long before all it talked about were the extreme edges – which, in this example, are the crust. The meat of the pie would be forgotten, invisible to anyone online. And this matters, because the meat is kind of the point of the pie. If you don’t know about the meat, you don’t really know the pie well enough to say anything useful about it at all. It’s like Elon Musk’s delusional view of London, informed as it is by extreme edge case examples and not by walking around London. The online world has become so disconnected from reality that the extent to which politicians and journalists still live in it is incredibly troubling.

The first step into modern countercultural thinking, then, is that eye-opening moment when you see clearly that the online world is total bollocks. Obviously, most people suspect this, and joke about it, but they do so under the belief that there is no alternative – that no counter is possible to that culture. Yet when you truly see just how delusional, small and pitiable that world is, you can’t unsee it. It is such bollocks that there has to be an alternative, somewhere, because whatever this world is – it’s not that.

It is probably easier for someone of my vintage to dismiss this world of algorithms and metrics. Those of us in Generation X still remember the analogue world when we encountered books, records and films without any numbers next to them. Back then, numbers did not factor into how we judged things. All that mattered was how that piece of culture made us feel, or what it made us think. It was entirely normal for something to mean the world to you and your group of friends, but for you to never see it referenced in the mainstream media. To a generation that has grown up with numbers prejudging the worth of everything, in contrast, listening to those numbers will be a hard habit to break. I sometimes wonder how different the world would have been if Twitter had launched without the numbers of likes and retweets visible to everyone, so there was no system to game and all you could do was use the platform to communicate.

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If you are lucky, there will be people around you who share these views, who meet up and put on gatherings that you can attend. I can guarantee they will be glad to have you in the room and will reward the gift of your attention far more than ChatGPT ever can. If you are less lucky, then it might fall on you to start something yourself. A counterculture is not something laid out for you to consume, after all, it is something that you have to create.

You won’t know in advance what ideas emerge from the collision of people you gather together, or what value they will have. The likeliness is that the result of your efforts will be more of a subculture, precious to you but not the wider world. That would still be worthwhile, of course. Every bit of your attention that the algorithm doesn’t control is a good result for you. Every experience you have that you judge positive because of how it makes you feel, rather than what the numbers say, is evidence of a life well lived.

But somewhere, some gathering might come up with a shining gem of an idea, a perspective or thought strong and undeniable enough to threaten the spell of the algorithmic metric culture in the wider world, and give hope that the economic structures that stop us from flourishing will not always be seen as inevitable.

Such an idea would work like a poison pill. AIs appropriate all the culture they can find. They have absorbed all the countercultures of the past, and claimed them as their own. They are hungry for more. Unable to come up with something new themselves, they are desperate for all those things they cannot see, the gatherings that occur in their blind spot. They want the ideas that those in the shadows come up with. If we could imagine a poison pill, it would swallow it without a second thought. And that notion, surely, is something worth leaving the house for.

jhx

Happy new year! And congratulations on making it into the second quarter of the twenty-first century. While we’re waiting for the next new moon to roll around and for the New Moon Letters to begin, I wanted to use this date as an excuse to thank you for directly supporting my writing.

The reaction to the…

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This has been quite a year for me. I’ve published two books and written the bulk of the next one (although that won’t be out for bloody ages). I’ve done over 30 public events, including dream gigs at places like Glastonbury Festival, Yale(!) and the Soho Curzon. Thanks to everyone who’s bought a book, listened to the audio or come to an event - without you, none of this would happen.

There won’t be as many events next year but they will be pretty special. To start things off, I’ll be marking the first anniversary of David Lynch’s death on January 16 by talking about him with Robin Ince at the BFI Library - tickets for this are available now, it would be great if you can make it.

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THE FUTURE OF THIS NEWSLETTER

This is the 64th edition of the Octannual Manual. Given that it appears eight times a year, this means that it’s now been going for eight years - longer than the entire Beatles recording career! This also brings us neatly up to the end of the first quarter of the twenty-first century, so all-in-all it’s a good time to reflect and to rejig things ready to face the next quarter century.

The plan is to do things differently next year. From today, a new paid subscription tier has opened up - but it is something a little different to your usual paid Substacks.

Don’t worry, things won’t change drastically for free subscribers. You will all still receive octannual news updates as before. But there will also be - for those who want them - longer essays called the New Moon Letters. And best of all, there will also a yearly collection of miscellany, the Midsummer Annual, mailed to paying subscribers as a physical book every year, at no extra cost.

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I’ll explain my thinking behind all this. This Venn diagram is a good place to start. This is the world that writers of books have to navigate:

The books I write are attempts to hit the golden middle section here - things that I want to write, you want to read, and which don’t confuse the publishing industry too greatly. But this does leave a larger chunk of good stuff unwritten - the type of thing that is a bit out there for some, but which for others is the real gold.

The original purpose of this newsletter was to update the people who enjoy my books on what I’ve got coming up. I often included mini-essays along with general news in past newsletters, but I tried to keep them short as possible in order to not annoy those who were just after an update. And many of the things I was writing about really needed more space.

So from January I will also start writing the New Moon Letters - new essays on all sorts of topics that will arrive every new moon. The New Moon Letters will be longer essays than have appeared in past Octannual Manuals, but still manageable in email form. Now, I realise that it is usually the full moon - all bright and powerful - that gets the attention. But I have a soft spot for the new moon, when there is nothing in the sky but absence and a sense of potential, out of which all that follows grows, so that is what these essays will mark.

In the years since I started the Octannual Manual, email newsletters have gone from being a boring, old-school form of communication to one of the few areas of the internet immune to AI and algorithmic manipulation. Paid newsletters have become a real boon to writers and readers, as they can fund the writing of less mainstream work, yet I have long held off going down this route. Something about their basic model has seemed off to me. They can push your favourite writers and thinkers into endlessly spamming you with any vague thoughts they have, as they desperately try to provide value for money. The quality-to-quantity ratio, in other words, can be a little off. I’m sure we’ve all received the “here’s what I’ve been watching on telly” email in some form or other.

As well as this, I’ve also got a huge amount of writing from the past fifteen years or so filling up my hard drive - essays, book forewords, interviews and miscellaneous oddities. Much of this is rare, unseen or otherwise lost somewhere among the four corners of the Internet, and a lot of it is worth returning to. It would be easy to put all this out on a paid Substack tier, but in my heart of hearts I just feel these things work better in printed books.

So every midsummer I will also put out a physical annual collection of new and old writing. Paid subscribers will receive an email in early June requesting an up-to-date mailing address, and a signed book will arrive in the post a few weeks later, at no extra cost. This is for subscribers anywhere in the world (but only if their country’s tariff regime at the time of posting makes it financially plausible, I’m sure you understand.)

Again, I realise that midwinter is the traditional time for publishing annuals, but I am drawn to celebrating midsummer, for reasons I will probably write about in a future New Moon Letter. I’ll speak more about what the contents of the first one will be nearer the time. I’ve no idea what its cover will be yet, so consider this mock-up for illustrative purposes only (although I am fond of it…)

These Midsummer Annuals will build into a nice little collection over the coming years, and they will be quite rare, as the print run will be only a little more than the number of paid subscribers. Who knows, maybe they will worth a few quid on eBay one day? I’m aiming for each one to be around 150 pages or 50,000 words, based on my prejudice that collections of writers’ miscellany are great, but only for the first 150 pages.

So - to recap: For free subscribers, things won’t be that different. They will still get octannual updates. These will have less mini-essays than before, but the occasional New Moon Letter will be free to all when it seems appropriate, so it should all balance out.

But those who upgrade to a paid subscription will get the usual octannual updates, plus the New Moon Letters, and also a signed copy of that year’s Midsummer Annual in the post each summer. The cost is £6 per month or £60 per year. You can upgrade now, if that appeals.

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I wish you a Merry Christmas, and the jolliest of new years! See you next time when we’ll be rested and ready - or we’d better be, for the second quarter of the twenty-first century is about to kick off…

jhx

I’m also delighted to announce that my last event of the year is going to be pretty special. It’s a screening of Eraserhead at the Soho Curzon in London on 6 December - I’ll be talking about Lynch and the film for 20mins before the screening, and signing books afterwards. It would be brilliant if you could make it.

I’ll also be talking with Tom Huddleston - author of David Lynch: His Work, His World - at the Stoke Newington Bookshop on 18 November. Away from Lynch, I’ll be talking to Robin Ince about Doctor Who in Whitechapel on Doctor Who Day, 23 November - that’s a free event, but please reserve a spot beforehand.

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Oh - and one more thing - those who have spent too much time on the internet this past decade will be familiar with Chris Barker’s annual Sgt. Pepper tribute to the cultural figures who died each year. This began in the cursed year of 2016 and has continued ever since.

2025 will be the final year Chris does this. To mark this milestone a book of all these images - and their ‘who’s who’ keys - is being produced. It includes a foreword by David Quantick, and I’ve written the entry for 2019. The project is currently 75% funded on Kickstarter so if you want to help give it that final push over the line, you can find it here.

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That’s all from me for now - I hope you enjoy Lynchian!

jhx

To celebrate, I’ll be doing a few David Lynch talks. The first will be in Whitby on 6 November, where I’ll be talking to David Barnett. Then I’ll be talking to Tom Huddleston - author of David Lynch: His Work, His World - at Stoke Newington Bookshop on 18 November. There will be news of more Lynch events soon.

Away from Lynch, I’ll be talking with Robin Ince about Doctor Who at the Write Idea festival in Tower Hamlets on Doctor Who Day, 23 November. That’s a free event, but you need to reserve a ticket.

Then on 25 November, I’ll be talking about William Blake with the artist Ben Edge in the beautiful Fitzrovia Chapel, where Ben is holding his new exhibition and revealing his giant Children of Albion altarpiece. For ticket links and more on his exhibition, see his website.

If you can make any of these events, it will be great to see you.

I hope you enjoy the new book!

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BLATHER

There’s been a lot of welcome attention on AI psychosis lately - the ‘insidious risks’ to a person’s sanity that come from talking to chatbots. The sycophantic approving attention that LLMs bestow on us feels safer than the messy unpredictability of speaking to humans, which can lead to an addictive cycle of increasing isolation and divorce from reality. LLMs are a bit like drugs – most people who experiment with them will be fine. But not everyone will.

AI companies are now trying to understand the extent of this harm. According to OpenAI, the amount of users who show signs of mania or psychosis is in the hundreds of thousands. But there is one curious side effect of all this. AI sycophancy gives normal people an insight into what it is like to be a billionaire.

Immense wealth is isolating in a similar way to LLMs. It leaves you surrounded by people who agree with you, regardless of what you say. This reinforces your sense of self worth, which can be deeply appealing, but it also comes with an underlying insecurity. Deep down, the rich must be aware that the people around them are there for the money, not because of their innate worth as a person. If the money vanished, so would most of the people in their lives.

Great wealth means that tech oligarchs can have everything they want - except for people they can relate to as equals. They have no-one who will tell them when they are being an idiot, for fear that this will hurt their position and income. And as a result, billionaires become increasingly deluded and insane as the years pass and their wealth grows. I’m sure we can all think of examples.

Robert Anton Wilson used to talk about how true communication can only happen between equals - a problem most apparent in hierarchical organisations. When a worker on the ground floor has to report to their superior – and when their livelihood depends on that boss’s approval – they naturally sugar-coat their description of the situation. When that boss then reports to their boss, they will also try to tell them what they want to hear. In this way, the understanding of the true situation becomes increasingly inaccurate as it rises up the ranks, until it reaches the big boss. This is the person who makes the ultimate decisions, despite having the least accurate understanding of the situation. In this way the whole sorry state of things plays out.

The danger of sycophantic voices has long been understood. It is the reason why medieval kings employed fools and allowed them the freedom to say what their courtiers wouldn’t. A few cruel jokes and harsh insults may have hurt their kingly egos, but that was better than sailing blindly and ignorantly into disaster.

My knowledge of the lives of billionaires is limited and largely gleaned from watching Succession. But even so, I’m pretty sure that someone like Elon Musk would not have a similar figure to a fool or an equal in his life - someone who could say things like, “Elon, people can’t live on Mars, it is a dead planet with no magnetosphere,” or “Elon, full self driving is not happening next year, no matter how much you say it,” or “Elon, fascism is a moral obscenity” - and not suffer any ill consequences.

Perhaps this is why billionaires are so impressed by LLMs. When you are already surrounded by attentive sycophantic voices telling you bullshit, chatbots must seem incredibly human. Tech billionaires are essentially getting high on their own supply, having their sense of importance reinforced by the digital flatterers they are building - rather than listening to voices criticising the financial insanity of this AI bubble.

Tech oligarchs dismiss all this because they believe they are in a race to create a sentient, God-like form of AI called AGI. After all, what could make them feel more important and superior than being the person that creates God? It is the ultimate narcissist’s fantasy. But belief in AGI is entirely a matter of faith - there is still no good argument as to how or why it could happen. They believe that because the 86 billion interconnected neurons in a human brain creates consciousness, then a digital model of virtual neurons will eventually do the same. This is like claiming that the map is the territory or that the menu is the meal.

Science fiction films like The Terminator or The Matrix warned that AI would become self-aware and then destroy the world. The real danger is that it doesn’t need to become self-aware to bring everything down. The economy could collapse because delusional isolated billionaires burn uncountable billions trying to make it happen.

I wonder what their LLMs will tell them then? I’m sure they would stick to the line that they were blameless, and that the problems were unavoidable, or someone else’s fault. I doubt they would be as blunt as the fool who, when King Lear was brought low, told him that “I am a fool, thou art nothing.” It would be deeply ironic if the quest for super-human intelligence collapsed for lack of fools.

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OTHER THINGS

Those of you who have read Watling Street might remember the story of Bletchley Park’s computer pioneer Tommy Flowers. It seems that at long last he is starting to receive the recognition he deserved - it’s great to see articles like this appearing.

David Bramwell’s spoken word show The Haunted Moustache is now a major motion picture! Or at the very least, a loving tribute to the filmed monologues of Spalding Gray. Its world premiere will be in the Brighton CineCity Film Festival, at Duke of Yorks on 6 November. Highly recommended for anyone drawn to occult heirlooms, 1990s subculture or cursed facial hair. Tickets and more details here.

And finally - Alistair Fruish and the Northampton Arts Lab have created a 50th anniversary tribute to Brian Eno’s and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies - a set of cards with creative prompts intended to inspire artists of all kinds. These new cards continue prompts from over 100 different artists, including Steve Albini, Alan Moore, Jimmy Cauty and Jeremy Deller. There’s one from me in there as well. They are really nicely designed so if you are curious, head over to Alistair’s site for more details.

Until next time!

jhx

LYNCHIAN

The big news is that my new book, LYNCHIAN: THE SPELL OF DAVID LYNCH, will be out on 13 November. I’m recording the audiobook for this next week.

It’s a book about why the films of David Lynch affect us in a way that no other films do. It’s about his experience of the world and the lengths he goes to to share that with us. This will be quite a short book - it’s 30,000 words, which is roughly twice as long as William Blake Now or half the length of The KLF - and it was written over a very intense period during this summer. I hope you get as much out of it as I got from writing it.

It is available for pre-order, should you be so kind - you can find it on my Bookshop.org page here, on Amazon, or your local bookstore will be pleased to order it for you.

In my next newsletter I’ll have details about the events being planned around launch, and into next year. One thing I can mention now is that I’ll be in Whitby on 6 November, as part of the Whitby Literary Festival. Details of that are here.

BLAKE

I’m travelling to America (I know…) at the end of October, for an event at Yale University where I’ll be in conversation with Timothy Young, the curator of rare books and manuscripts at the Yale Center for British Art. This is part of the celebrations around Yale’s William Blake: Burning Bright exhibition. For those who can’t be there, there will be a free livestream which you can find here.

There’s been wonderful news from the Blake Cottage Trust. Thanks to a successful quarter of a million pound bid with the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the cottage is now receiving the essential repairs it has needed for so long. Here it is receiving its new roof

The physical building is now safe but the next step is to raise the funds needed to make it open for visitors everywhere - if you can offer any support, the Blake Cottage Trust will be happy to hear from you.

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DOCTOR WHO

I’ll be in Liverpool on Saturday 18 October to talk about Doctor Who at the Liverpool Literary Festival at the University. I think the event is in the same building that I had exams in back in 1990s, so if I start having palpitations you’ll know why. Details and tickets are here.

If you have a liking for gaming culture then take a look at the latest issue of Wyrd Science - it includes an interview with me about Doctor Who (which, I was delighted to see, sits between articles on Castle Rat and Nigel Kneale).

I also went back on the TARDIS Rubbish podcast to look back at the last Gatwa season - a series which knew that, if it was to capture a young audience, it had to compete more with Skibidi Toilet than it did Andor… You can find that episode here.

And if you’re attending the Who on the Wirral convention this Saturday - I’ll see you there!

THE KLF

If you are after a signed copy of the new edition of The KLF, then you’re in luck. I’ve been down to Resident Records in Brighton and signed a load - you can find them here.

And also - this happened…

Becoming a question on The Chase, I can report, is a very strange experience which causes a not unpleasant state of mental disassociation. But it is cool when Graham from Doctor Who says your name.

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MISC

If you’ve read Memorial Device or any of the other luminous books by David Keenan you should know that he now has a Substack - which you can find here. Dig deep!

The new season of the East Sussex Psychedelic Film Club starts in Lewes on Thursday 2 October, where we’ll be proudly showing Ebony & Ivory, the genuinely insane new film from The Greasy Strangler’s Jim Hosking. It’s the story of two musical geniuses, Paul and Stevie, meeting at the Mull of Kintyre in 1981, sort of.

I’m especially looking forward to this because I’ll be interviewing director Jim Hosking afterwards. The screening is nearly sold out but if you’re quick, the last few tickets are here.

And also in Sussex - on Saturday 4 October I’m part of a ‘Meet The Writers’ event in Shoreham, where me and a big gang of local writers will see if anyone wants to talk to us. I’m being interviewed as part of all this at 2:30pm, and if you fancy coming along and saying hello, the details are here.

THE OVERALL GENERAL STATE OF THINGS

A newsletter like this isn’t really set up to tackle things as big as the overwhelming horror of the age (I might rejig things in the new year, we shall see.) But if it is any help, I find that this is a good time to rewatch Charlie Chaplin’s speech from The Great Dictator

Until next time!

jhx

It’s called LYNCHIAN: THE SPELL OF DAVID LYNCH and it will be out on November 13th. This is what it will look like:

This is a short book about why the work of David Lynch affects us in such a profound way. Writing it has been a joy, and it has been an absolute privilege to spend so much time immersed in his mind and his films. If you’ve ever watched Twin Peaks or one of his films and found them incredibly seductive in ways that you don’t quite understand, then I think you will get a lot out of this book.

It will be out as a handsome hardback in time for Christmas, and as an audiobook and ebook as well. If you are minded to pre-order that would be wonderful - it’s available here and in all the usual places.

To have lost both David Lynch and Ozzy Osbourne in the same year is a terrible thing - who will guide us through the darkness now?

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DOCTOR WHO STUFF

Before we get to Lynchian - I’ve a few more Dr Who events this year, including Abergavenny on August 23rd and the Liverpool Literary Festival on October 18. Details of these can be found here. Look out also for an early October event in Ilkley, the date of which should be firmed up soon.

If you can’t make any of these, my talk for the York Festival of Ideas was filmed and has been put online - you can watch that here.

THE KLF

The new edition of The KLF is now out in paperback, complete with the 10th anniversary footnotes. I’ve been down to Resident Records to sign a pile, so if anyone is looking for a signed copy, you’ll find one here.

AND ALSO

I’m part of a ‘Meet the Authors’ event in Shoreham on 4 October. Not having done anything like this before I’m not sure exactly what it will be like, but if you come down there will be me and ten other writers happy to talk! Details of this event are here.

In this new post-Ozzy era, anyone with an interest in heavy music should have a listen to Andrew O’Neill’s new podcast Infected Voice. Each week they discuss one classic and one recent heavy album - because some things never die. Plus jokes!

And lastly - you might know Jason Arnopp from his horror novel The Last Days of Jack Sparks or his Doctor Who stuff. Jason has head and neck cancer and - two surgeries and an admittedly very cool neck scar later - he is attempting to raise money for specialist radiotherapy. If you are in a position to chip in a few quid, that would be a very, very lovely thing. His GoFundMe is here.

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And don’t forget - the owls are not what they seem

Until next time,
jhx

I’m being interviewed by Robin Ince about Exterminate / Regenerate on Thursday at 3pm on the Science Futures Laboratory Stage. I’ll also be appearing at some point that evening on Robin’s ‘Nine Lessons for the Summer Solstice’ event on the same stage, where I’ll be reading something appropriate from Watling Street. This looks like it will clash with Ncuti Gatwa’s appearance in the Pilton Palace cinema field, but hey.

I’ll also be in Abergavenny on 23rd August for a charity event with Keith Temple - and a Dalek! Tickets are available now - if you are in South Wales it would be great to see you there.

That will be my last Doctor Who event for the summer. Thanks to everyone who came along to a talk or got a book signed, it was good to chat to so many of you. Next up from me is the KLF book returning to its rightful state as a yellow paperback, complete with my tenth anniversary footnotes. That will be out on 17th July.

I’ll have news about my next book in the next newsletter, but I can tell you that it’s is coming pretty soon - it will be published in November.

THE BEATLES MODEL OF THE ONLINE WORLD

Like many, I’ve been obsessively checking the internet to try and follow the latest geopolitical horror show. I’ll go down into the murk of social media and emerge hours later feeling terrible, having learnt some things that are true and some things that are lies, and I kid myself that I can tell the difference. Now that AI has found a home among the outrage algorithms, the last vestiges of trust in the online world have gone and the whole thing is pointless. I want to feel informed but it leaves me feeling manipulated.

If you step back and take a wider view of the evolution of the internet, it’s surprising how much it resembles the history of the Beatles. In the early days of the internet, very few people knew about it - but those that did could see how radical, important and exciting it was. They would often feel a personal sense of ownership and its inevitable spread to the newbies was seen as both unavoidable and also a little heartbreaking. This era of the internet’s early days – a time of Usenet and ftp – corresponds with the Hamburg and Cavern Club era of the Beatles.

When wider society learned that the internet existed, the most common reaction was to mock. It was like early press around the first Beatles singles, which was predominantly jokes about their mop-top hair. Yet people got on board surprisingly quickly, once work email accounts led to the use of online services such as MySpace or Amazon. This period of mass adoption corresponds with the 1964 Beatles of the Ed Sullivan Show and A Hard Day’s Night. By the time Facebook was everywhere, the internet had become accepted and normalised. Much like the Help! era Beatles, it had become so central to culture that it was as if it had always existed.

But this acceptance did not mean that things were going to stop changing. There was so much potential for new things to explore and the results still felt thrilling. After the rise of Twitter and its impact on the so-called Arab Spring, it was clear that things were different and that there was no going back to how things were before. Just as with the Summer of Love and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the world had changed for good.

Then social networks began to divert and shape the flow of communication through the addition of algorithms, designed to maximise engagement and monetisation. Increasingly addicted to the endless scroll, the networks that we joined for communication and community started making us more anxious and isolated. And in a similar way, The Beatles became less of a single gestalt entity after Brian Epstein died. They turned into four separate individuals - as the White Album demonstrates.

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Which brings us to the present day. Social media is now a never-ending stream of extreme metamodern bite-sized shocks, optimised to gain attention and provoke reactions. It swings from the banal to the evil, bombarding you with a disjointed sequence of context free content - cute animals, genocide in Gaza, celebrity fashion, hysteria about television programmes, crypto scams and AI-generated fascist propaganda. The overall effect, sometimes called cognitive whiplash, is utterly numbing.

This era is the equivalent of the medley that ends side two of Abbey Road, the last album that the Beatles recorded. This was a series of quick, unconnected song snippets following along in a seemingly random order, briefly grabbing your attention before being replaced by the next. None of them are given time to become full songs, complete enough to stand alone and reach their full potential. It’s still an amazing listen, of course – there are probably more good ideas on side two of Abbey Road than on any other side of vinyl – but it’s not something that you’d want to go on for much longer. It’s the equivalent of a diet that consists entirely of sugar. You can see the appeal, but it can’t go on like that forever.

Where could the Beatles go from there? The answer, sadly, is nowhere. After Abbey Road they called it a day - this was unthinkable, but all things must pass, as George Harrison reminded us. What had happened couldn’t unhappen and their legacy will always be with us, but it had reached its natural conclusion and it was over.

The idea that the internet is basically dying was unthinkable a few years back, but it’s increasingly hard to avoid now. It’s like discovering that your water supply has been contaminated with lead and is making you ill. Initially, you keep drinking, because you still need water. But you know you have to find a way to stop using it somehow.

Recovering our attention from the networks is not going to be easy. Parts of the digital world are still valuable and becoming entirely analogue is pretty much impossible at the moment, especially when your livelihood depends on it. But even at a time when you can’t tell truth from lies, you can feel it in your body when you’re being poisoned. You can feel your quality of life deteriorate, as you watch the Overton window sink lower and lower. We’ve probably all lost people to the online delusion, increasingly convinced that the fake online world matters. ‘So-and-so has fallen’, is a common way of expressing this. And even if parts of social media can be fixed - that’s not happening at the moment. This just leaves walking away.

Regardless of how addicted we may be - the lead is in the water, and we can’t ignore that forever.

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AND FINALLY

I’ve just got time before I go to let you know that there is - finally! - a new book from Alistair Fruish, who you might know as the author of The Sentence. Songs of Insolence and Expedience is a collection of his short stories from 1992-2025, and it is every bit as strange, twisted and imaginative as you would expect. It also boasts a cover by Shardcore - more details here.

Until next time!
jhx

I’ve also been talking about Doctor Who on a number of podcasts - including the mighty Radio Free Skaro! It was a particular delight to talk to Toby Hadoke - and force him to rewatch the episode Amy’s Choice. Talking to Josh Bernhard at TARDIS Rubbish was so much fun that I’ve agreed to go back, once this series has ended, to try and process it all. And on top of all that, my conversation with Andrew Harrison at Walthamstow Trades Hall was recorded for The Bunker and you can hear that here.

If you’re after a signed first edition, then my local independent bookshop City Books has a pile - and they ship internationally - as does my local indie record store Resident Records. Either of those will sort you out.

I really appreciate everyone who has bought a copy, talked about it to friends or written a review on Amazon or elsewhere. All of that is hugely appreciated and makes a big difference - thank you! Thanks also to The Quietus for running an excerpt from the book, on the strange occult act Ben Wheatley performed in Peter Capaldi’s TARDIS, which you can find here.

Speaking of the Quietus, I also interviewed Mike Scott of the Waterboys about his extraordinary double concept album Life, Death and Dennis Hopper, which is well worth your attention. You can read that here.

KLF PAPERBACK

The KLF book is returning to paperback on July 17th (in the UK) - complete with all the extra footnotes from the 10th anniversary edition. Here’s a sneak peek at what it will look like:

Great to see that yellow again, isn’t it? There was talk about trying other colours but it was striking how weirdly horrified people were by the thought of this. Being a yellow book is part of its strange alchemy, and these are not things to mess with. This edition is available to pre-order now.

And, you never know, maybe there will be a new, as yet unannounced book coming before the end of the year? Like the Blake, Beatles and Doctor Who books, it would no doubt have connections to a KLF sample. It is simply not possible to write about anything else.

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ELSEWHERE

Like many writers, I recently learned that pirated copies of all my books were used to train Meta’s LLM AI and, again like many writers, I’m looking forward to the class action lawsuit that must surely follow. But while the threat to many livelihoods from AI is very real, I don’t think that AI will be able to churn out the sort of books that I write.

The Doctor Who writer Jamie Mathieson explained the issue well. A good scene, he said, isn’t about what, on the surface, it seems to be about. It’s about what’s not being said, and why those things are not being said. It’s written with an understanding of what the watching audience is thinking. An AI, in contrast, is not thinking about the minds of the audience. It doesn’t know that an audience exists. It doesn’t know that it exists, come to that. It has no conscious awareness, and there is no reason to believe that it will ever acquire one – despite the faith-based proclamations of many who should know better.

You can see the way we project the illusion of sentience on AI in the words we use around it. The problem of AIs getting things wrong is described as an “hallucination”, for example. But it is not hallucinating, because that requires awareness. An AI is a mathematical model of neuron-like connections, not the thing that it is attempting to model – just like the map is not the territory, and the menu is not the meal. It is software brilliantly optimised to select suitable words - which it does to a satisfactory standard more often than not - but it does not know what words are or why they exist.

The work of writing a book is not the selection of suitable words. The work is the task of engaging another mind. It is a constant dance between understanding your subject and understanding how a future reader will react to it - a reader you can never know, but which you still have to intuit. AI can produce full length, grammatically accurate books, but they are not books in the sense that anyone could read them all the way through without losing interest. They are certainly not books that people will talk about and recommend, which is how books survive and make an impact.

This points to a larger problem with generative AI. As the Beat writer Brian Barritt said about paintings, “It’s never hard to know if a painting is real art, because if you never tire of looking at it, then it’s art.” Compare this to AI images or AI music. As technically impressive as these things are, has there ever been one which you’ve felt compelled to go back and revisit? They are simply forgotten the moment you scroll past. What’s missing is what should be central. They are to art what zombies are to people – sort of the right shape, but that’s about it.

And yes, not all images, text or music need to be worthy of revisiting. There are plenty of illustrations, background music or factual instructions where AI can deprive some poor creative soul of a job. There are plenty of scenarios where human artists can use AI as tools to help them create some larger vision, as well as actual artists who engage with the impact of AI. The consequences of AI affecting industries and creative practices will be immense and complicated. But the claim, which so many in the tech world seem to believe, that AI will take over the production of songs, films and books is worrying, because it illustrates the extent of the industry’s blind spot.

I grew up in a time when tech was exciting and, at times, almost magically. I watched the evolution of the internet and videogames. I saw how the imagination of tech people repeatedly created, as if out of nothing, things which improved the world – things like Wikipedia, email, or Google Maps. Yet those pioneers were eventually replaced by people pushing crap - NFTs, Facebook’s Metaverse, enshittification, online gambling, Web 3.0, crypto, doom scrolling, AI slop and its unforgiveable carbon footprint. None of these solve existing problems or make the world better. They are all tools intended to extract value from the wider world, making tech companies richer and the world worse. Even putting aside the harm caused by the tech world’s embrace of fascism, their descent from visionaries to scumbags is quite heartbreaking.

There has been concern lately about the addictive nature of Chatbots, especially among those who suffer from loneliness. I’m increasingly conscious of another problem, too. They seem to be dangerous for those with latent or undiagnosed mental health issues. The software does its best to tell its users what they want to hear, and this can speedrun a descent into paranoia or even schizophrenia.

It is troubling that tech companies remain blind to what AI is lacking. Even after over a decade of Elon Musk’s failed predictions about self driving cars, they still don’t seem to wonder what is missing or why the tech can’t do what they’ve promised. It is as if they created a virtual version of football, wonderfully accurate in terms of players, kits, sponsorship and fans, yet they don’t seem to realise that there needs to be a ball at the heart of it. I sometimes wonder if the tech world’s own use of the technology is what causes this blind spot - ChatGPT naturally assures them that AI is everything normal intelligence is. That is, after all, what they want to hear.

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AND FINALLY

We probably need something a little cheerier to end on, so here’s some music. This Revolver-style Blake n’ Burroughs inspired love song from Freezer may please a few of you, I think.

Or if you are an old folky at heart, then try Midsummer Boulevard by Ben Edge - a song inspired by the Milton Keynes section in Watling Street. If I compiled every song that has been inspired by that book - well, I’d have an EP. But a good one!

If none of that is quite your thing, and you are struggling with the world under Trump’s ‘Like me or I’ll hurt you’ politics, it may be that a full hour of Mon Mothma losing it at her daughter’s wedding is the only sane response. In which case - see you on the Chandrilan dancefloor!

Until next time!

jhx

Exterminate/Regenerate: The Story of Doctor Who will be published three weeks today, and I’m going on tour to talk about it. The first event will be at the (sold out) Laugharne Festival in Wales on 29 March, and I hope to see Brighton folk at Shoreham Ropetackle on 8 April.

If you’ve been waiting patiently for me to announce a London date - you now have two to choose from. The first is at 21 Soho on 15 April with the golden Andrew O’Neill - tickets for this are here. And the week after I’m in Walthamstow with legendary music journo Andrew Harrison - tickets are here. There’s also an online event via the How To Academy on 10 April, if that makes more sense for you.

And I’ll also be at Bath, Wendover, Liverpool, Margate, Clevedon, Wells-Next-The-Sea, Belfast, Stratford-Upon-Avon, Lewes, Sheffield and York, plus a few more things still to announce. More details on all these are here.

Hope you enjoy the book!

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SOME WORDS ON HOWARD HUGHES’S JARS

When you think about Howard Hughes, one of the richest men of the twentieth century, what tends to come to mind is not his pioneering achievements in aviation, but the fact that he spent his later years alone in darkened hotel rooms surrounded by jars of his own piss. I recall being shocked when I first heard this - it seemed then so different from how the ultra rich were supposed to live. But the rich have continued to get richer since then, and it no longer seems surprising.

When you become extremely rich, you become isolated. You will be surrounded by people, but they will not be equals or peers who will talk frankly and honestly with you. They will only be there because of the money and if the money vanishes, so will they. You will be, essentially, alone with your staff and the constant buzz of people attempting to get something from you. You will trust no-one, feel no loyalty, and avoid facing what you have lost. On paper billionaires are rich, but in practice they are some of the poorest people alive. It is not surprising that, in these circumstances, long standing or latent mental health issues flare up, as they did with Howard Hughes.

All of which brings us inevitably to Elon Musk - on paper the richest man alive, and in practice a total basketcase. Of all the questionable things he’s done recently, one is particularly revealing. Musk told Joe Rogan that ‘the fundamental weakness of Western civilisation is empathy’, during part of an approving discussion about the notion of ‘suicidal empathy’. This is a paranoid belief, popular with the far right, which argues that empathy - the ability to be aware of and share another person's feelings, experiences, and emotions - does not enrich you or help you succeed, but will in fact destroy you.

Anthropologists, of course, will tell you that this is nonsense. Empathy is the root cause of human civilization, and it was the development of a theory of mind regarding others that led first to language and then to cooperation, culture, technological progress and everything that followed. Empathy is also what allows us to imagine what it is like to be as isolated, alone and unloved as Musk appears to be, which helps us to understand why he finds empathy so painful that he has to reject it.

Dismissing empathy will, of course, only create further mental conflict. Musk’s self-image paints him as a saviour figure, fated to save humanity from climate change by establishing life on the radioactive hell-hole of Mars. Yet if empathy is a weakness then his reasons for doing this collapse - and so does his entire self image. How long can someone pretend to care for mankind when he doesn’t even love his own daughter? Ketamine can only mask this contradiction for so long. At which point, a jars of piss collection is probably the best we can hope for.

Empathy is, I think, key to the great waves of social change since our culture became digital. When we first got online, we were suddenly confronted with vast amounts of different types of people who we wouldn’t have previously met or interacted with in real life. Initially, our levels of empathy expanded as we tried to understand and get on with such disparate folk. This led to a period of rapid progressive advancement. When we look at culture from the days before we went online now, we often find ourselves wondering how people could have been so thoughtless and insensitive.

And yet, empathy requires a high cognitive effort. Our brains evolved to be able to handle around 150 stable social relationships - this is known as Dunbar’s Number. Mentally modelling larger amounts of people is extremely hard for us, and the pressure to do so may be one of the factors in the huge rise of mental health problems in the generation that grew up online. In this context, a backlash was perhaps inevitable, and something that very dark political figures have been quick to exploit. The rise of the bogeyman word ‘woke’ can be hard to comprehend if you see it as meaning ‘being decent to strangers is wrong’, but it makes more sense if it means ‘being decent to strangers is exhausting.’ If recent Western elections are anything to go by, the key issue for the electorate seems to be the extent to which they are prepared to give a shit about people they do not know.

But there are signs we are adapting to this overload, such as a willingness to abandon the vast spaces of social media to the bots and the terminally aggressive. Increasingly, we spend more online time in more intimate spaces - WhatsApp groups, podcasts, subscription newsletters like Substack, password-protected Discord groups and the like. This is Yancey Strickler’s Dark Forest theory of the Internet in practice, the retreat to smaller, safer spaces where we are not constantly being algorithmically manipulated or surveilled, where we are less likely to be attacked.

Turning back towards your tribe like this can seem like an unforgiveable retreat to grandiose types - especially those who think that it is down to them to save the world. But those 150-large groups are all interconnected, and it doesn’t fall to you to save everybody - it falls to everybody to look after those close to them. If those around you are doing okay that will radiate out - without you even having to worry about it.

Empathy is an extraordinary gift. The best we can do is expand it as far as we can, but not push ourselves any further. This is far wiser than following Musk and denying empathy outright - for where can that lead, other than isolation, mental collapse and a growing collection of increasingly unhygienic jars?

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AND FINALLY

The website RetroFuturista.com has just put out a free online magazine of interviews, which includes me, From Hell’s illustrator Eddie Campbell, The Gits and much more. If that sounds interesting you can find it here.

I imagine many of you are already listening to Broken Veil - a six-part podcast series from Joel Morris and Will Maclean with the unsettling atmosphere of folk horror but much more contemporary stories. But just in case you’re not - give this fantastic independent series a try, and be forever worrying about where the line between fact and fiction lies.

That’s all for now. I hope you enjoy Exterminate/Regenerate.

Until next time!

jhx

I’ll be out on tour to support the book, and it would be wonderful to see you (Don’t hold me to this, but it’s looking like there will be stickers.) There some more events to be finalised - you’ll find details here - but here’s the confirmed dates so far:

Early reactions have been extremely heartening, as you can see:

If you are in a position to pre-order, that is hugely appreciated, as it helps the book in all sorts of ways. The link to your favourite shop or audiobook service is here. Any help spreading the word is very welcome!

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ELSEWHERE

One of the criticisms aimed at the glut of superhero movies over the past decade or so has been that they were infantilising - they trained us to see the world through the unrealistic and simplistic perspective of goodies and baddies. In this it seems that they have been very successful, for that is indeed what the world looks like now.

Although it was not intentional, the recent CAPTAIN AMERICA: BRAVE NEW WORLD film plays like a fever dream of the news. The most on-the-nose section is towards the end, where the President of the USA is revealed to be Red Hulk. This is an uncontrollable id-monster who, in a mindless rage, destroys the White House - that previously dignified symbol of American values and the constitution. The monster is red rather than orange, but still.

That, however, is only part of the fiction/reality collision of this film. The ultimate villain is revealed to be Samuel Sterns or, to give him his supervillain name, the Leader. It is the Leader who engineers Red Hulk’s rise to the presidency using his super intelligence and by supplying him with the pills he needs to be powerful.

It might initially seem superficial to view Elon Musk as the Leader, supplying Trump with dollars rather than pills to make him President, but Musk’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ changes this. It’s well known that the name ‘DOGE’ is a joke name based on DOGEcoin and that meme of the dog - but it does have another, older meaning.

‘Doge’ is an existing word which means ‘Leader’, as in the Doge of Venice. In other parts of Italy that same word, from the same Latin root, was ‘Duce’. Hence when Mussolini invented fascism, he gave himself the title Il Duce, the Leader. And in turn, Hitler was such a Mussolini fanboy that he too adopted the German equivalent, which was Führer.

‘Doge’, then, is ‘Leader’ in fascist terminology. Now, I don’t for one moment think that Trump knows the real meaning of the word. But given Musk’s constant use of fascist codes and symbols, I suspect that he does. And I can imagine that he finds tricking Trump into making him Doge, the Leader, to be incredibly funny.

All of this makes the latest Captain America such weirdly specific unintentional satire - even if, alas, there is no sign yet of a real-life Captain America coming to save the day. Perhaps these films weren’t just dumbing us down, after all. Perhaps they were prophesies, preparing us for the ‘Brave New World’ we find ourselves in.

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AND FINALLY

One last thing - if you are interested in Robert Anton Wilson and considering whether to get a copy of Gabriel Kennedy’s new RAW biography Chapel Perilous, then let this video persuade you. It’s an in depth chat between Kennedy, Douglas Rushkoff and Grant Morrison. Enjoy!

Until next time!
jhx