In The People Are Not One, and dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Pre-order 'The People Are Not One'

There’s already been a decent amount of buzz about this book, which seeks to engage with substantive questions about what’s next for left-wing movements around the world. Check out our interview with Tutt and Varn below, and look out for some reviews and features on the book, coming soon on this blog.

This July, the authors will travel to a few US cities for one-off events to promote the book, discussing the populist turn and the future of the left. Visit the links below to book yourself a ticket for what promises to be an engaging and provocative series of conversations.

• 20 July, Free Library of Philadelphia

• 21 July, Red Emma’s, Baltimore

• 24 July, People’s Book, Washington DC

• 25 July, Woodbine (with This Wreckage), New York City

Daniel Tutt is the author of Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family and How to Read Like a Parasite. His writing has been featured in Jacobin, Current Affairs, Philosophy Now and Aeon Magazine. He is the host of the Emancipations podcast and study group collective.

C. Derick Varn is an author, poet, and educator, and host of the podcast Varn Vlog, where he publishes podcasts and series on the great thinkers, and interviews authors and academics. He is the author of Apocalyptics and Liberation and All That Bright Etc. He has been a union rep for the past six years.

This podcast is produced by Strange Exiles. Scroll to the bottom of this post to watch a video version below, or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube.

Recommendations from Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn

Tutt and Varn mention a lot of texts and authors over the course of our conversation. More than once, they refer to James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution, published in 1941. It’s one of the most useful accounts of the rise of the managerial class, and technocracy, from that era. They also refer to Burnham’s The Machiavellians, from 1943.

There is more than one reference made to Musa al-Gharbi’s We Have Never Been Woke, which analyses the increasing influence of social justice politics and bona fides in the managerial and professional classes, and unpacks the contradictions in so-called “woke” ideology.

We go on to discuss Stuart Hall, and his work on moral panics and authoritarian populism. Many of these essays and arguments can be found in his Essential Essays (two volumes), and Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays. As I mention, my father worked with Hall in the 1980s as an editor and collaborator — they produced the book Formations of Modernity together. Hall has a deep and lasting influence on social justice culture, and theorists including Mark Fisher.

They mention Anton Jäger, and his concept of Hyperpolitics, explored in the recently published book of the same name. Christopher Lasch is name-checked several times as a key influence and source for Tutt and Varn’s ideas in The People Are Not One — his texts The New Radicalism in America from 1965, and The Culture of Narcissism from 1979 are two of his most enduring and influential works. Varn also has a series of podcasts on Lasch’s work.

Also mentioned several times are Barbara and John Ehrenreich, whose work coined the term “professional managerial class” in 1977. Dissent Magazine has a great interview with Barbara Ehrenreich about the importance of this term, and the analysis of the class it describes.

Alain Badiou also gets a mention — of his more recent political writing, the Verso books The Communist Hypothesis from 2009, and Philosophy for Militants from 2012, are the most closely related to the topics Tutt and Varn discussed.

Structuralist Nikos Poulantzas is mentioned briefly — his books State, Power Socialism from 1978, and Political Power and Social Classes from 1973 are both important discussions of the way power can work under socialist conditions, and how different strata of class interact in political landscapes.

Alvin Ward Gouldner, the American sociologist, is also cited — again, you can look to Varn’s channel for a series of podcast episodes on his work and theories, including influential early works Patterns of Industrial Bureaucracy (1954) and Wildcat Strike (1954), which laid some of the foundations for a sociological analysis of workplace conditions, and worker organising.

Briefly mentioned are the sociologist Werner Sombart, who is credited with the genesis of the term “late capitalism”; Victor Serge, who participated in the Russian revolution, and wrote the 1951 book Memoirs of a Revolutionary; Jacques Rancière, contemporary and torchbearer for Louis Althusser’s theories, who also took part in the 1968 Paris uprisings; and Göran Therborn, author of the 1981 book The Ideology of Power and the Power of Ideology. Check out Daniel's discussion with Mike McCarthy about Therborn over on the Emancipations channel.

You can pre-order The People Are Not One from Revol Press now.

Revol Press is set to publish two major new works of critical theory and philosophy, out 29th May and 26th June from Rob Faure Walker (author of The Emergence of ‘Extremism’), and the duo of Daniel Tutt (author of How To Read Like A Parasite and host of the Emancipations podcast) and C. Derick Varn (poet and educator, and host of Varn Vlog). We’re excited to put these important books out, each directly engaging with the crisis of late capitalism, and possible visions of a Socialist future.

In Radical Jung, Rob Faure Walker explores how Carl Jung’s insights can guide us through the crises of digital era capitalism. The increasingly popular pursuits of psychotherapy and other wellness practices can result in a retreat from political activism. Yet without engaging with the growing horrors of modernity, from livestreamed genocide to ecology destroying data centres, there is little hope that our minds, society and the natural world will be able to heal.

By critically engaging with the work of Carl Jung, Radical Jung explores how we can engage in a journey of introspection that not only avoids a retreat into individualism but can inform and develop our political agency.

Rob critiques the appropriation of Jung by right wing and conservative thinkers like Jordan Peterson while emphasizing the need for creative solutions rooted in Gnostic introspection. Through our dreams, and psychedelic and sober visions, we can engage with the unconscious. In doing so, we cultivate compassion and political agency in a chaotic world that is becoming increasingly overwhelming.

By integrating Jungian processes and archetypes with contemporary issues, the book offers a path towards collective healing and a reimagined relationship with radical politics, nature, and ourselves.

Order Radical Jung now

In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party–oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left.

What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists—uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power.

Pre-order The People Are Not One

Look out for our extended podcast interview with Tutt and Varn in the coming weeks.

RevolPress is a new author-run and oriented publisher dedicated to putting out solid left wing theory.

Our goal is to revive countercultural dreaming alongside incisive materialism, emphasizing quality over ‘edgy’ content and hot takes, putting out considered yet incisive reflections in a timely manner. We aim to support established writers and discover new talent, prioritizing fair royalties, ongoing dialogue, and an emphasis on quality essays and books that promote formal and theoretical innovation.

Our writers are part of a collective effort in publishing, taking a percentage of profits from all other books we produce and sell, as well as from their own.

Revol is here to reassert the creative opposition of the author, as a community. Where once you paid lip service to the revolution and were considered credible, now you can build something revolutionary without compromise.

Find out more

When Mark Fisher died, he left behind an introduction to a book that he would not finish. He describes naming this book Acid Communism as “a provocation and a promise. It is a joke of sorts, but one with a very serious purpose”. This purpose, as he lays out in his parting gift of writing to us, is to explore the counterculture of the 1960s as a “stumbling beginning” rather than the “best that could be hoped for”. The failure of these beginnings according to Fisher was precipitated by the failure of the left to engage with “the dreaming that the counterculture unleashed”.1

The tragedy that we are left with is that this germ of a collective utopia was destroyed by the release of a new aggressive form of capitalism or “neoliberalism” in the 1970s. Since then, we have watched neoliberalism subvert and colonise any remaining countercultural trends. Environmental consciousness has been claimed by corporations as cover for their millenarian growth at all costs, even at the cost of the collapse of the ecological and climate systems that we all rely on. The World Wide Web that was meant to be “for everyone” has been colonised by a handful of impossibly vast corporations whose aim is to destroy our political futures. Even the language of the counterculture has been co-opted. In the 1960s, to be described as a “woke” by civil rights organisers and members of the Black Panthers was to be praised for your understanding and empathic connection to those who didn’t look or think the same as you did. Yet today, “woke” is more likely to be used as a slur against anyone who dares to express empathy or care for others.

Radical politics promised a better future in the 1960s. But even this word, “radical”, has since undergone a slow transition via west coast surfers and cartoon reptiles to now be used by the state to describe the imaginary “radicalisation” process by which people develop their opposition to the neoliberal state. This process is imaginary as it supposes that people become opposed to political norms due to their infection by the ideas of others, rather than by their increasing consciousness of the injustices met out by systems of capitalism and colonisation.2

At the height of the British Empire, the west got rich off the suffering and murder of millions of African slaves and the plunder of India and elsewhere. In my previous work, I have explored how the word “extremism” was almost non-existent in the press and politics until the 1960s. It became more common in the 1950s when it was used to denounce anyone calling for an end to British rule abroad. Hence, Kenyan politicians calling for the British to leave Kenya are cast as “extremists”, likewise in India and anywhere else calling for an end to British colonisation of their lands. As with so many colonialist police tactics, “extremism” has since crept home to be used to denounce and ignore anyone calling for radical change to the way we do politics. Call for an end to corporate behaviour that could lead to an end of human life on earth and you might be cast as an “extremist”. Speak out against genocide, “extremist”. Question the legitimacy of the UK’s parliamentary democracy, “extremist”. Accusations of “extremism” are now the standard tactic by which dissent is shut down, with governments around the world being encouraged by the United Nations to develop their own strategies to tackle “extremism”.3

A system that seeks to pathologise “extremism” is a system that seeks to control what we think. This is a system that has grown since the 1970s to stymie any of the countercultural possibilities that were tentatively emerging in the 1960s. An early and powerful voice against the normative trend of neoliberalism was the maverick Jungian psychiatrist R.D. Laing. Known as the “acid Marxist” and “high priest of anti-psychiatry”,4 Laing observed that: “…sanity today appears to rest very largely on a capacity to adapt to the external world — the interpersonal world, and the realm of human collectivities”.5 Like “extremism”, Laing regarded sanity and madness as a hegemonic construction. Working with patients who had often been abandoned by the mental health system, Laing was able to help them find meaning in experiences that other professionals had cast as psychotic. His interest in acid stemmed from a belief at the time that psychedelics mimicked actual psychosis, the psychotomimetic model.

This idea that psychedelics mimic psychosis has since gone out of fashion as academics and corporations, seeking to promote the health-giving benefits of these chemicals, try to make them as palatable as possible to investors and the general public. Yet, as Laing and many others know, great meaning and purpose can be found in visionary states, whether sober and psychotic or chemically induced and psychedelic. This is because, whether they are purposefully induced by psychedelics or unintentionally emergent through psychosis, visionary experiences connect us to the unconscious.

As almost every worldview outside of western modernity knows, there is great wisdom and guidance to be found if we learn how to understand and integrate the symbolic meaning behind visionary states and dreams that emerge from the unconscious. With the guidance of indigenous thinkers such as Melissa Lucashenko and Tyson Yunkaporta,6 and more enlightened psychiatrists,7 we learn that the guidance that we receive from the unconscious leads us towards a more harmonious way of being with nature and with each other.

Despite this, the father of deep psychology, Carl Jung was “greatly opposed” to the use to psychedelics in psychiatry, fearing that users might be lost to the unconscious.8 Yet, in the UK through the 1960s and 70s, a psychiatrist was quietly giving LSD to psychiatric patients. Ronald Sandison developed a protocol where he gave LSD to his patients before engaging them in Jungian psychotherapy that included art therapy and extended group analysis. In doing so, Sandison and others had great success in helping people troubled by depression, anxiety, and psychosis to recover their agency over their lives and actions.9

Sandison and other’s work and research into the therapeutic use of psychedelics was rudely cut short by the war on drugs in the 1970s. Three decades later, research into these chemicals tentatively restarted and we are now seeing a corporate race to invest and cash in on these powerful chemicals. With corporate funded research seeking to develop new chemical variants of classic psychedelics such as LSD that offer the original chemicals’ healing potential without the patient having to suffer the inconvenience of a day-long acid trip.10 Other areas of interest are microdosing to increase productivity at work11 and tech bros turning to ayahuasca to recover from burnout and maintain their megalomanic trajectory.12

These uses of psychedelics, to enable our continuation in the extractive neoliberal economy, work against Fisher’s “dreaming that the counterculture unleashed”. Dreaming is what happens when we suspend our ego. When we suspend that part of ourselves that wants to fit in with the tribe, wants to do better at work, and to impress others. While psychedelics can catalyse this process of “ego death”, we don’t need these chemicals to achieve this. Yet, in a world of mortgage repayments, precarious employment, and social media, suspending our ego can be very hard to achieve as it demands that we step outside of sanctioned ways of thinking and risk being accused of madness.

Yet, it is only by taking this leap of faith into the unconscious that we have a chance of continuing the dreamings of something better that were tentatively explored in the 1960s. This may of course see us cast as mad and then, as political ideas emerge from this apparent madness, we might be labelled as “extremist”. In my forthcoming book Radical Jung, I explore the emancipatory possibilities of this dance with madness. If we are to avoid the pathologisation of the ideas that come from this great adventure, we must take back the language that will otherwise be used against us. This is why calling for “Acid Extremism Now!” is a joke and a provocation with a very serious purpose.

• Radical Jung: Emancipatory Politics and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of Late Capitalism is out now from Revol Press.

Rob Faure Walker is a writer, theorist and ecotherapist. His first two books are 2024’s Love and The Market, and 2022’s The Emergence of Extremism.

Theory Gang blends personal anecdotes with theory, offering “analysis and maybe even emotion as I struggle to live and work in a world where competition feels like freedom, and efficiency replaces meaning.”

• Read Part 1

• Read Part 2

Friends in low places

I’m facing a kind of exhaustion that just culminated in me singing Friends in Low Places, sober, unironically, at a corporate karaoke event that capped a week-long national sales meeting. I’m hoping it garners cultural capital, but I don’t care if it’s the kind that boosts me up the ladder. I’m still on a high after hosting my closest out-of-town friends for my birthday last week. It’s increasingly rare to experience genuine camaraderie, and I wanted to share that.

How we’ve gotten here became apparent this week: the 40+ hours of our lives are spent leveraging relationships like human shields or dropping them as liabilities. You should like your colleagues enough to work with them but just until they inevitably fall off the treadmill that accelerates at an ever-increasing pace. It’s easier (and tax-deductible) to procure a logo’d vest than genuine human connection, despite the fact that we’d all rather have the latter. I’m part of a dying breed of corporate mercenary who understands that kinship, like other non-revenue-generating indulgences, are being swallowed by what Allen Ginsberg called Moloch - not exactly the god the Canaanites fed their children to, but the modern iteration: a system that requires you to compete with everyone eventually.

The Quiet Conscription to Moloch’s Army

We kicked the meeting off with a treat. The emcee marched on stage with a little girl who had been enrolled in one of our clinical trials. After requisite questions about how our product changed her life, she was asked what wanted to be when she grew up: a vet, a doctor, “...or maybe I’ll work for a pharmaceutical company.” There was a mixed murmur. We all know that patients are brought into meetings like this to boost morale and inspire us to action, like a USO performance. And it works, for a moment, because a sweet little girl looked out and saw something in us that we’d lost sight of long ago: loyalty and purpose.

Her mother’s closing remarks drove their naivete home: “I just want to thank whoever came up with this drug. I can’t believe you were interested enough in this rare condition to do it.” To her, we must all have some deep drive to help people like her daughter. Maybe we did, once, but there was a cultural substitution, a bait and switch. The Women in STEM propaganda is better than the old Marines commercials. Convinced we’re doing something good for humanity, girls like she and I sign up to serve humanity via science and end up in golden handcuffs watching an innocent victim being paraded onto the altar of Moloch.

The calculated applause reminded me how the organizing myths that gave humanity purpose had dissolved into spreadsheets and pivot tables. Eventually, they’ll quantify our whoops and whistles to understand the ROI of this meeting. There’s no need for God and Country when the myth of Science For Good can collapse those myths into a single quantifiable imperative: maximal individual accumulation, for shareholders first and foremost, then a bit for everyone else insofar as they serve that end.

What used to operate by virtue is now automated into Key Performance Indicators, which, astonishingly, have not produced an effective pax humana but a disorienting hyperwarfare. John Allen and Amir Husain describe a state in which decisions outpace human deliberation, a condition largely found in military theaters. But Paul Virilio saw heading everywhere like a freight train. A civilization organized around acceleration doesn’t need a declared war. Low-grade constant warfare becomes the necessary operating condition because no one can keep up, so we’re always on guard. Quantification will lead our systems to become more and more like the sci-fi series Snowpiercer, where citizens are strategically pitted against each other to keep the system operational.

The Naval Mercenary

We’re sliding toward Snowpiercer territory by means of what Zygmunt Bauman calls “Liquid Modernity,” where the former social order of concrete structures and durable identities has dissolved into whatever can move money the fastest. The best kind of human capital for these conditions is what Herbert Marcuse called the One-Dimensional Man, a subject so absorbed in production and consumption that her ability to resist atrophies. And if she got the energy, she’d be hard-pressed to find the outside from which to critique the system. Seemingly disparate work serves the same objective. The Starbucks VP and the mom-and-pop barista are united not by liquid gold, but by creating shareholder value: one for a publicly traded corporation, the latter for the private equity firm soon to acquire the shop. Time and resources are dammed up and concentrated, so the individual can do nothing but keep swimming. In the modern environment, the One-Dimensional Man is a naval mercenary.

The naval mercenary is the only figure who can survive the harsh conditions described by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin in Chokepoint Capitalism. To liquify their metaphor: Corporations engineer legislative and structural chokepoints, narrow straits of Hormuz through which all cargo must pass and at which dominant players collect a toll. Resources are funneled through a series of pinch points and mercenaries are paid to dredge and manage these channels, a process that is increasingly being automated. When the extraction architecture is fully operational, even the mercenary labor will become dead weight to be jettisoned. The severance package, if there is one, is a life ring that will barely keep you afloat until you reach another chokepoint. The only certainty is that every chokepoint will choke its own laborers when the math requires it.

I realized this about a decade ago at yet another National Sales Meeting. a VP of Sales — call him FatCat — posed a question to my team about the scientific difference between our product and a competitor’s. My superior, Derek, locked eyes with me, a tactical specialist, nodding toward the directive: answer briefly, serve the sales narrative. I gave an accurate, concise explanation, but FatCat bared his teeth, asking me to “dumb it down for the sales guys”. Confused, I thought my job was to present data the way Q presents weapons to 007, but FatCat had taken the weapon, pointed it at me and what I’d just heard was a safety click.

Over a beer, an older colleague, Uncle Ben, explained that FatCat was neither cat, nor 007, but an officer with his sights on our superior’s budget and I was a human shield used to demonstrate that. He warned me that in corporate warfare, friendly fire isn’t an accident but a tactic. He also admitted that he didn’t trust me at first. He could tell I was smart enough to understand the strategy and only decided I wouldn’t use it against him when he’d teetered over the edge in a situation and I held out a proverbial hand. We became actual friends when crammed in the back of black car that night after chowing down on In & Out and buying lottery tickets we promised that if either of us won we’d split it. He called it “Fuck You Money’” which would be enough, he declared, pointing at imaginary people, to say “Fuck You, Fuck You, Fuck You… You’re Cool. Fuck You I’m out”. I was grateful for a laugh and friend, but I knew it wouldn’t last.

Uncle Ben Dies in a Permanent Emergency

And it didn’t. FatCat got the best of my superior, and we all jumped ship, but I was hellbent to play Uncle Ben for whoever I could moving forward. I had a few years of peace outside the direct danger of corporate, but then last year, on my first day back in the field, I found myself at a conference with two junior colleagues — the Tweedles (Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee). This was their first corporate deployment so I introduced them to several important customers and even shared my thoughts on some of the weaknesses in our company-issued artillery. My honesty visibly took them aback, but after a subtle warning it seemed they were disarmed. In a pre-mature Uncle Ben move, I told them that the fronts shift constantly and that we are mercenaries who will eventually fight for another paymaster, so it’s advisable to remember the comrades who had your back.

Next thing I know, I’m cornered in the barracks (Microsoft Teams) by my superior, Karen, and accused of treason. My new “comrades,” concerned for my well-being, had marched back to report my unusually honest behavior. Their concern was valid but ill-placed; after all, my behavior had come out of concern for them. I wanted to help them, but learned quickly how caring for others in this environment is a high-risk activity.

Luckily, as a vet, I never take off my bottom layer of kevlar. I’d already been open with Karen. She commended my honesty and was a fan of Radical Candor and other airport literature on women’s empowerment. She called us SEAL Team 6 and said my strategic insights were needed, and to operate “in good faith”, she explained the Tweedles’ behavior charitably: a recent culling of the ranks had put them on edge. “You understand?” And I did, better than she knew. They were young and scared of being thrown overboard. They didn’t mean to bayonet me. Stab first, ask questions later.

Walter Benjamin accounted for this when he declared that for the oppressed, the state of emergency is the rule rather than the exception. The Tweedles were always going to be on edge, and Hannah Arendt showed us what people become inside permanent emergencies. The greatest atrocities only require functionaries following incentives, meeting targets. Karen has three children in private school and a husband with health problems. She will fire at will if she feels threatened, and the system is counting on it. The banality of evil is activated when power declares an emergency, and then only partially resolves it. The one-dimensional man slides around with weapons in hand, which is great because Snowpiercer runs on internal competition

The temptation is to identify the enemy as corruptible soldiers: FatCat, Derek, the Tweedles. But this is the wrong lesson. These people are not uniquely or inherently villainous. Their one-dimensionality is the result of a successful system of erosion. The best thing we can do is take a risk, attempting to add some dimensions back our working lives through the most human of Arendt’s vita activa (active life), “Action” (or “praxis”), as outlined in The Human Practice. Action represents the sticky, difficult, intangible things that human relationships are made of. The way we recover this is to build bridges of trust, like the one Tweedle Dumb and I are working on after he quietly confessed remorse for what happened in his state of confusion. Tweedle Dee, however, is still carrying a sharp object in her boot.

Unfortunately, she’s been building bridges with allies who believe sharper weapons are the answer. This week her corporate bestie, Tanya committed a court-martial offense: being difficult with a customer. So she’s on high alert, and having witnessed this, I received the gift of her deflection, despite being the one who attempted to save her ass. Taking the covert, caring approach (a tried and true technique these days) Tanya told my mentee Maria that she would take the blame for me, while actively engineering my demise. It is a sophisticated maneuver: friendly fire issued from behind the posture of solidarity. Having been raised in Benjamin’s permanent emergency, Tanya believes that the only way to survive is to forgo loyalty. She’s teaching her flank the same, recently signing a birthday card “Remember don’t trust no one!” But Maria and I would rather believe in a world where if the fighting ever ends, there are still allies with whom to enjoy the peace, even if only for a moment.

The Cost and Opportunity of Mercenary Warfare

So it’s possible Dee and Tanya will eventually shank me, but in the meantime, one thing we can count on is that Moloch never chooses the losing path. Tweedle Dee and Tanya were recently promoted, social geometry which confirms that Moloch rewards cutthroat behavior. “Why aren’t women like you promoted?” Maria asked when telling me about how Tanya warned her that certain women will “cut you” for a promotion (without naming her and Dee, the only women promoted recently). Maria knows that after decades in the business, everyone has blood on their hands either through covert complicity, or directly. I have been promoted, but by Derek, who saw me as a secret weapon. The only way I get promoted in this every-corporate-girlie-for-herself landscape is if I can somehow create a girlboss megazord. And that may serve Moloch in the short-run (he’s incredibly short-sighted), but the only goal I actually have is to help my fellow girlbosses. So if it comes down to tossing Maria overboard or jumping ship, I’ll do the latter. It seems the only way to beat the God of competition is to be willing to lose.

The only thing we shouldn’t be willing to lose is the practice of love. Erich Fromm argued that love is not a feeling that happens to you but a practice you either maintain or abandon. It requires care, responsibility, respect, and genuine knowledge of another person. It can’t flourish in what Fromm called the marketing orientation — a character structure where we experience ourselves and others as commodities, perpetually assessing exchange value. If you lose the practice, your capacity atrophies. If you withhold love from difficult people, you find it easier to stop extending it to everyone. You start wondering, in quieter moments, whether the people in my life are allies or liabilities. bell hooks, drawing on Fromm, insists that we do not live in a cruel culture but a loveless one. Maybe people like Tanya and FatCat are indeed cruel, but what if their cruelty is just a consquence of 40+ hours a week in a loveless environment? Perhaps someone decided they were liabilities early on, and it just stuck with them.

Perhaps like cumulative exposure to forever chemicals, lovelessness fills up spaces quietly where competition thrives, and chokes out everything else. As Carl Jung said

..”where power predominates, love is lacking”

Moloch doesn’t forbid love outright. The God of sacrifice and competition is just hoping to engineer a cheap substitute that can be sold for a premium. Love for the Tweedles was expensive, and my need for genuine relationships may cost me everything I have. I know it’s bad business, but if I don’t try to promote genuine connection as vigorously as we’re asked to promote our products, I may have all the Fuck You money in the world, but I’ll have had to say “Fuck you, Fuck you, Fuck you and… Fuck you, too.”

So, that’s why I stood in front of our department looking ridiculous in a sparkly cowboy hat: to try and strike a flint before whatever warmth remained could be washed away or frozen over. Jung also said that “where love rules, there is no will to power”. The benefit of being a corporate mercenary is that I’m not required to buy into the will to power. I can sail under my own flag — heart-eyed and impractical. I’m tired, but I’ll keep loving/fighting with what my friends have invested in me, and with some human speech action from a little girl and her mother that I can’t fully explain or quantify. Maybe I’ll even get promoted, fooling Moloch for a little while, but if ever I’m required to list my relationships as a line item I’ll jettison myself to retain the ability to love. In a liquid world, that’s the only cargo worth keeping.

The trouble with our times is that almost everyone is unable to see beyond the moralizing noise of social and mass media to the material realities that govern our blighted existence. Blighted as we ought to be capable of contentment, but instead are caught in culture wars, climate change debates that should long have become climate action, machismo debate and pithy new age spiritual platitudes. Meanwhile, the onward march of capitalism goes on unhindered, questioned only by marginal activist groups, academics and a vocal but practically irrelevant online marxist commentariat.

Underneath life’s “lessons”, which might be summed up in a few pithy moralizing aphorisms, there resides a material reality. To do with money, class, to do with rising damp and cockroaches, to do with how your boss greets and fires you, to do with dignity and its affordability. To many people this material reality is repressed. Swept under the carpet and ignored even when that carpet barely conceals a mountainous inconvenient truth: you are a peasant, expendable and superfluous.

Nothing is put to greater use in hiding this reality than “culture”, itself a material construct composed of things caressed, molded, battered and cajoled into taking on forms that are conducive to the social status quo. And nowhere in the last 40 years has culture been both as consistently complicit with and critical of power structures as in London, arguably the progenitor of today’s finance capitalism. This criticality and complicity has gone far beyond the traditional model whereby rebel music or art becomes sugar coated vitriol marketed to the masses. Rather, critical art projects and capitalist ventures are often entwined from the outset, and the artistic autonomy that long dead German scholars once waxed lyrical about is itself now long buried. The effect of this on the art world and on artists has been profound, as the latter contort themselves into beings capable of both critiquing capitalism and whitewashing (or ‘artwashing’) it.

This balancing act involves being fundamentally a dialectician, or a skilled negotiator between opposing states, both within and without. If dialectics is about disagreement, the frequenters of the ‘90s to ‘00s era East London art scene took it to an art form, as barely concealed mockery and disdain for the art establishment. Everyone wanted a cut of the money pouring into the formerly deprived boroughs of Hackney and Tower Hamlets, yet no one was blind to the negative side of gentrification.

While the artworks on display at East London galleries in the late ‘90s to early ‘00s were often towards the dark or macabre end of the spectrum in world view, the gallery goers on opening night were on the whole nothing short of sardonic. Londoners, or indeed anyone who has lived in the capital for a while have a great talent for sarcastically dismissing anything and everything (food, tv, friends, their romantic partner), even if they like it or them. As a result, the crowd assembled outside an art gallery in Hackney on a given opening night, smoking and clutching semi-frozen Beck’s beers were nearly all scathingly opposed to the exhibition inside, to the gallery, to each other, to the art world itself and to its awkward complicity with capitalism and gentrification.

The height perhaps of this kind of humor-infused, post-punk disdain for both art and the world came about in the mid ‘00s, a period in which contemporary art and the cultural fields in general lacked any clear direction or purpose. It was the period of late Blairism, which had allied the art world closely with a government which had embarked on an almost universally unpopular war in Iraq. While back then we could not have known the true damage of that war, or that New Labour’s laissez faire economic policy would contribute to a coming economic collapse, there was a growing sense of apathy and powerlessness in the UK. This total apathy and lack of political intent was on the whole expressed with a sneer towards the establishment just because everything merited a sneer anyhow, and by extension to the establishment’s newest toy and bedfellow — contemporary art itself. This put contemporary artists in a quandary. Simply, while something seemed to stink about Blair’s regime, not least its cosying up to the art world whilst bombing out hapless Iraqis and Afghans, there was money to be had in Blair’s notion of “creative industry”. This Third Way neologism, so central to New Labour policy-making was — like “public-private partnerships” — deployed to put the shine on the marketization and bureaucratization of the arts. Its main impact at the day-to-day working level was felt in the practical injunction to work around social issues or marginalized communities in order to gain money from the Arts Council of England’s seemingly very deep pockets. The overall vibe in the late ‘90s to early ‘00s was that “art was cool” so long as artists didn’t mind muddying their hands by engaging with the lives of underprivileged people. That is to say, art could appear aloof, fun, unconcerned with the serious worlds of business or politics, so long as it made a pact with both, whitewashing them by taking state and corporate money and using it to put a little back into society through the programming of side projects — “workshops” and “wellbeing” programs — involving underprivileged communities.

It was a perfect, if slightly crooked, trade off: Tony Blair got to look like a somewhat hip Medici era patron, while artists got to look useful for once, by engaging in the kind of pastoral care that more qualified health and social care professionals probably ought to have been engaged in. And herein lies the rub, for the art world was being prepared for an impossible task, and that was to “artwash” the unscrupulous Blairite policy of presenting a partial sell out of public services as a partial maintenance of state involvement in those services. The elephant in the room at that time was that a third way policy between public and private would always be less pro-public than a true social democrat welfare offering. Blair was leading a slide into what would later become Johnson’s and Cummings’ “Thatcherism on steroids” — while using art to plug the gaps. If there was a leftist element that remained in New Labour it was the practice of issuing “quotas” (a term that evoked fear in Stalin’s Russia), so that even cultural pursuits were measured on quantitative bases, such as how many audience members attended an exhibition or how many people from underprivileged groups were ‘reached’ by a given art event. Artists found themselves in the bizarre position of trying to recruit hapless migrants, homeless, elderly or sick people to their art projects. This led to a great deal of social and political art making in public institutions, though the greater availability of money for such causes, together with the at least ostensibly booming dotcom sector provided funds for an almost diametrically opposed hedonistic strand of apolitical art to grow up, alongside a vacuous party scene. This meant that if the East London art scene had been to adopt a theme song in the ‘00s it would almost certainly have been an indulgent, responsibility avoidant track like Don’t Stop Me Now by Queen and not the Socialist Anthem, The International.

Blair hosted many of the famous YBAs (or, the “Young British Artists”) at Downing Street. As such any latent radicalism appeared co-opted. Though from the offset they had perhaps more of the petit-bourgeois entrepreneurial spirit than any sense of anarchic community. Many of the most prominent YBAs emerged on account of an exhibition held between graduating students from the Fine Art Masters course at Goldsmiths College in the ‘90s, entitled “Freeze” and held at a disused warehouse building Surrey Docks in London Docklands. It’s a classic art world success story that could be an illustration of the coming passage from Thatcherism to Blairism. In a nutshell, a number of angry young men and women who specialized in slickly sardonic artworks drawing on popular culture and fashion held a show in a grungy disused warehouse space, invited advertising magnate and collector Charles Saatchi (who had once led Thatcher’s electoral campaigns), impressed him, and rose to stratospheric success. Other factors included the proximity of the students’ course leader, Michael Craig Martin, to prominent art world figures such as Nicholas Serota, who had recently become director of the Tate, and the cheek and tenacity of the show’s organizer, Damien Hirst. The exhibition affected the art school aesthetic for 15 years to come, and provided artists for national level solo shows and biennials for decades, as well as several winners of the prestigious Turner prize. Of the group, Hirst became a household name and hugely wealthy. To this Napoleonic rise we can add a host of other grand successes: Fairhurst, Collingshaw, Hume, Davenport, Patterson, Sarah Lucas and Landy, Glenn Brown, Matt Collishaw, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Liam Gillick, Marc Quinn, Marcus Harvey, Gavin Turk, Rachel Whiteread, Jenny Saville, Sam Taylor-Wood, Chris Ofili, all go which have made seminal works, recognisable to a broad public far outside the clique of experts, monetizers and hangers on who make up the core of the art world. Freeze provides a backstory for the YBAs which, among other things, supported the notion that success in the arts was as much due to gumption, hard work, and luck as to the whims of collectors. After all, Hirst and Emin — the truly two household names to emerge from the YBAs — were both from working class backgrounds.

Though another factor may be significant in terms of who becomes famous and who spends a lifetime dropping snide comments about those who did, Namely, the level of desire a given artist has to become a “successful artist” in the colloquially recognised sense of success, involving shows at state museums, relationships with bluechip galleries, and newspaper and TV coverage. In my experience in art — as in academia or popular humanities — those who enjoy a conventional measure of success, meaning they have a high level of recognisability in their field and are associated with recognised academic or artistic institutions, tend to be those who seek precisely after that kind of attention. To be sure, this requires that they are capable artists, adept at both making ambitious works that talk to the society of their time and of managing their public image — these days increasingly online— as well as a busy calendar of social events at which they must always be charming yet edgy, spirited, yet deferential towards patrons. All of this certainly requires dedication, skill and, if one doesn’t have an inheritance or trust fund, sheer grit. However it does not in itself imply a greater artistic talent per se. For sure, it is possible to speak of the most famous artists of any generation as the outliers, yet outliers of and from what? And then towards what, or where? Perhaps they are outliers who stand outside that category of artist who lives purely for their art, cocooned and unafraid of irrelevance, making works for lowly collectors or simply individuals who selectively buy objects they genuinely want to spend time with. These are the most fortunate kinds of artists, unsullied by the capitalist stronghold over culture and unaffected by the whims of mainstream or social media.

Sadly many artists don’t know they don’t want success, and as such spend their life wondering why they never reached the heights of Hirst, or even of far lesser players, thinking they must be deficient. In reality, however, they just don’t have the ego for media or financial success, perhaps to their credit. As such, along with the YBAS in the ‘90s and ‘00s a parallel scene emerged, not as an imitation of the YBAs but as the YBAs’ estranged poorer and earthier cousins. That is to say, there was a whole movement of artists of YBA age-range that had grown with the YBAs, shared life histories with them and often still hung out with them, but who never enjoyed the same level of recognition as them. Though to say they were not YBAs would be a mistake. They were the greatest of the Young British Artists that were never recognised as such, and they were, unbeknownst to them, better off for it as artists, being able to focus on the art, rather than on celebrity or on managing their studio.

To better explain the economic dynamics of the art world, and the pitiful position the working class art professional is in, it is worth considering a fundamental tenet of marxist economics in relation to the art world, namely Marx’s Theory of Labor Value. For the purposes of simplification, let’s say that no money in any industry can be made without driving wages down, given the equal cost to competing manufacturers of materials. For this reason,wages among the lowliest workers in any given field are basically equal to the cost of maintaining the worker in adequate enough health to come to work each day. Some people have trouble seeing how the art world can fit into the Theory of Labor Value, given its application to large scale industrial production and the ownership of that production by capitalist bosses who benefit from the exploitation of often tens to hundreds of unskilled workers. How do the owners of art foundations, the directors of museums (which are often in any case state funded) or art collectors fit the description of the spendthrift factory owner? After all, collectors often have other primary income sources or significant savings (“family wealth”), and the people they employ rarely seem exploited, in the same way as, say, a factory worker does. Often art workers are freelance and choose whether to work or not, while artists are practically individual artisans, able to choose their hours as they shape material at whim into artworks. This can lead people to argue that Marx is at best irrelevant to the cultural sector, at worst completely outdated, with his talk of yards of linen exchanged for bibles and lowly agricultural or cotton mill workers trekking to work at 4am, and sometimes even selling their children into slavery. Such are the guffaws of people in denial of their own exploitation or role in the subjugation of others. However, consider this: the art world is rarely the only source of income for its apparent hobbyist directorial class precisely because it is the conduit for channeling sources of income made in other fields. The parity of prices for materials and production equipment leads to competing industrialists to drive down prices until they cannot drive them down any further. Once the cost of labor has also reached rock bottom, the only way to increase profit is to diversify investments into other fields, with art being one of many sectors that the super wealthy invest in as sidelines to their main industrial or real estate activity.

Put simply, many private financiers of the arts use the arts to launder money earned in other fields, to avoid taxes, or to whitewash (or “artwash”) other activity via the display of high cultural and/or ethical credentials. This being the case, there is simply no desire on the part of the average person running an art foundation or association to pay high wages (not when the foundation itself serves as a means of offsetting tax from money earned via driving wages down in other fields). Nor do high wages make economic sense in a field as unproductive and useless as the arts in the sense usually understood by those terms. This means that where Marx argues that the principle means of maintaining a profitable edge over competitors is to drive wages down (give technological parity between competitors most of the time), in the field of the arts, which is seen anyhow as an honorable hobbyist pursuit, the aim is often to drive wages down to zero (hence the amount of voluntary labor and internships in the cultural fields). The art world managerial class are often worse capitalists than mere industrialists, though it is the influence of the industrial sector and its need for alternative sources of investment (in the form of high end artworks) that drives the cultural director to offer low (or zero-) wages. Though beyond managers and collectors with backgrounds in the military industrial complex there is a sprawling and autonomous capitalist system that seeks profit at all costs. No one is directly to blame, and that’s why the capitalist class looks aghast that we should discuss class issues: diversification of portfolios comes as naturally to the rich as shopping around for “2 for 1” supermarket meal deals does to the poor. None of this is to say however, that the capitalist class system is not exploitative, or exclusionary. Low wages and a scarcity of permanent contracts mean that the cultural sector continues to be seen as a kind of privileged space. A museum or gallery job is the ultimate accessory, given only the rich can afford one. In summary -- the art world is a place for industrialists to diversify profit and is no place for the poor.

None of this can come as any surprise to anyone with the faintest grasp on marxist economics, which I would say should be obligatory for art students, given the sense of abject failure often felt by ‘unsuccessful’ artists. If only they knew how far the odds were stacked against them, they might spend more time making Trade Union banners, and less bemoaning their lack of art world clout.

The development of Vyner Street in the ‘00s is a good record of the success, failure and ultimate senselessness of Blair era cultural and economic development. Situated in theBorough of Hackney, Vyner Street was the center of the East London arts scene, having about 6 galleries dotted along its length, punctuating anonymous warehouses. In around 2006 it became central to a monthly initiative begun by TimeOut magazine called “First Thursdays”, whereby galleries across the capital would throw open their doors to the public with a free offering of beer, wine or both. For many hardened East London art scene acolytes this marked the death knell for a scene that despite benefitting from Blair’s ‘Cool Britannia’, felt itself to be a bit removed from the glitz of London’s West End.* With the lower rents available in the East End, a number of West End galleries had already begun to move themselves East when First Thursday signaled the mass-marketing of a scene that had until then depended on some kind of debauched exclusivity.

Debauchery doesn’t like company, or at the least it prefers to pass time with no more than a select few fellow dissolute friends. The thing is, the debauched are a clique, no less than the LA slim shakes and fitness crowd is. First Thursday meant two things — hundreds more people attending private views, battling to get the admittedly larger amounts of free beer before it ran out, and an opening up of the East End art scene to a wider crowd. A crowd that represented the shameless wannabe aspect of New Labour’s quest to get everyone visiting museums. It resulted in Vyner Street being host to a kind of street festival once a month — a festival about art, free beer and letting off steam about the dire state of the art world. Yet, behind all this, and as counterintuitive as it may seem, these nights were actually a necessary function of capitalism, and the negativity of so many assembled artists, art viewers, and hangers on was unknowingly a reaction to each individual’s position as a functionary of capital. The revelers at Vyner Street were, largely unwittingly, actually staking out and holding the ground they stood on (often by eventually taking apartments there) as a means of gentrifying it and raising the prices of its houses, bars, and warehouses. Even the most ardent anti-system artist was inevitably employed in service to this system. What was perhaps most remarkable about this on reflection and in light of the Black Lives Matter Movement and its online reach today in 2021, was the uncritical approach we took at that time to the fact these events were predominantly white in an area largely populated by African and Asian Brits and migrants. The fact that this influx of white visitors and settlers to East London (that might be called a “wave” by the right wing and even mainstream media if the ethnic dynamics were inverted) also represented a shift in social class dynamics barely needs to be said. We were witnessing the interests of the capitalist class operate with open disregard towards the subordinate working class. Perhaps nothing new there. However, with the art world being so keen to push openness to diverse cultures, its role would appear particularly hypocritical. The contemporary art world was in the early 2000s at the vanguard of a notion of multiculturalism that has politically come under attack on both sides of the Atlantic in recent years. By now, neoliberal notions of “inclusion” are identified by both left and right populists as merely opportunist platitudes that serve to hide the real desire for cheap labor from migrant workers. These migrant workers in turn fuel the need for social cohesion between different nationalities and ethnicities living in our cities and countries. This raises issues over whether doing the right thing for the wrong reason is ok. Can the art world be forgiven for pushing for the acceptance of minority interests while simultaneously aiding in tearing up the communities of second and third generation migrant communities to sell them off to white people and wealthier non-whites? The notion of the multicultural ‘melting pot’ (a bizarre term, to be sure) that apparently and impossibly privileges all of its component parts while actually subverting them to the needs of local and global elites was beyond reproach in the UK’s news media until the catastrophic Brexit vote kicked away that pillar of neoliberal capitalism (replacing it with outright wanton opportunism and a blatantly racist handling of the most needy migrants).

It is of course tempting to say that the art world’s superficial support of multi-ethnic and racial togetherness is better than the opposite extreme, which would be an openly white supremacist art. Though shifts in the Overton Window show us that the opposite extreme to global neoliberalism — right wing populism — merely presents a flipped facade. That is to say, populists make platitudes to isolationism and espouse anti immigration sentiment, remaining all the while beholden to global capitalism and its need for a flexible migrant workforce and free trade (post Brexit the Tory government has made platitudes to asian economies in the hope of attracting migrants to replace the lost EU workforce). Whilst there is something heinous in the market friendly false representation of cultural togetherness fostered in the ‘90s and ‘00s, the rise of a global nationalism that saw Brexit and the Trump presidency was undoubtedly worse and even more deceptive, not least as it contained the sins of neoliberalism within its hard right facade. Where neoliberalism peddled the superficial representation of racial equality to hide the reality of class stratification and post imperialism, the global nationalism of Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Salvini, presents patriotic values that only thinly hide a continuance of neoliberal policy, albeit with fascist undertones. Of course, it is tempting to say they are as bad as each other, but something feels intuitively worse in a system that seeks to hide its nefarious tendency towards exploitation behind racialist rhetoric. Has the reality of the perniciousness of capitalism become so clear to the mass that only racialism can excuse it?

The answer to how or why multicultralism has appeared to come to an end is simple. Capitalism is built on competition and internal dynamism and its reinvention is a motor allowing for profit to pass from one group to another. Ultimately, as Marx teaches, value is limited to what can be squeezed out of human labor. As such, competition for control of human resources is ongoing between the monied classes. A large part of this battle for resources involves changing the legal or commonly accepted rules and even aesthetics under which trade is carried out, so as to facilitate upheaval and the passing of lucrative contracts from one camp of moguls or oligarchs to another. Changes that include, for example, the weakening of laws protecting workers, or a clamp down on protest, will see favorable returns for the politicians who bring them in. Seen in this light, changes in social perceptions and laws leading to higher immigration levels in the Blair era, and the subsequent ending of freedom of movement within the EU under Johnson are financial and not fundamentally racially driven policies. Though this is not to say they do not have an impact on the daily lives of ordinary people. Unfortunately, so long as capital treats people as potential labor value (that is, profit that can be made by their hard work) lives can be ruined by pragmatic political decision making. It is worth noting that at times, politicians speak publicly about tightening migration, while actually continuing to permit migration at previous levels so far as it facilitates profit. The populist right-wing Italian prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, recently facilitated the migration of half a million workers to Italy over 2024-2026, despite maintaining an outwardly anti-immigration stance.

It is this same tendency of saying one thing while doing another that leads the apparently left/liberal art world to set up shop wherever investment value resides, leading to gentrification and the subsequent displacement of poor, often non-white communities. The decision for the art world to decamp to Vyner Street, Dalston, Peckham, and so on, is not an aesthetic or political one based on the potential of these London districts to spearhead a flourishing multicultural society. Anyone who knows Lower Clapton in North Hackney in the period up to around 2005 will recall a vibrant area home to an Afro Caribbean community, reggae bars, caffe’s, non-stop music, despite it forming part of the notorious “murder mile”, so called for its high number of gangland killings. It has also been home to a number of musicians and artists on their initial move to London, where a large number spent their time on Rowhill Road, a small street that form a kind of nodal point between Lower Clapton and Upper Clapton to the north (with its Orthodox Jewish community), and the more upmarket “yummy-mummy” zone of Stoke Newington, with its artisanal bakeries, parks and Gastro Pubs to the west. Rowhill Road has been home to a high number of people I met before and since I lived there in 2003 to 2005, from artists to video gaming theorists, to clothes designers. A couple of hundred meters south of Rowhill Road and with its main door on Lower Clapton Road, the main artery of Lower Clapton, stood the Lord Cecil Pub. The “Cecil” was known as a bar frequented on the whole by locals and as such was a kind of dingy and depressive affair that was kept barely afloat by lonely alcoholics (to be fair, the default target consumers for community pubs in general). Though its Friday night reggae evening drew both long term locals and early gentrifiers to its makeshift dance floor (its shabby tables piled along the sides) and its beer garden. For that night each week the relatively poor incoming population of art students and graduates entered into a world that practically resisted reality. It was for those several hours the space of Orwell’s ‘proles’ or proletarians, who in his novel 1984 lived on the outskirts of London in abject poverty yet sang, danced and conversed freely despite the main part of London being uptight, under totalitarian surveillance.

Dancing was practically obligatory at these events, but not in any totalitarian sense. No one felt they had to dance, yet everyone felt they must, with none of the sense of awkwardness or shame that leads to the turgid shuffle so characteristic of pub dancing in the UK. Not everyone danced particularly well. The art student fraternity for the large part used ironic dad dancing moves or Jarvis Cocker poses to hide the fact that they knew no other way to dance. Yet there was genuine openness, without ego, sarcasm or hypersexualisation-for-the-male-gaze. In a sense it was Herbert Marcuse’s “Great Refusal” in a teacup (or an Ale glass). German, US based philosopher Herbert Marcuse used the term the Great Refusal in the late ‘60s to describe a hypothesized multi-ethnic, multi-class, mass movement that would reclaim desire from the glib and one dimensional sexualisation of advertising. The term was only ever loosely defined and the movement it envisioned never truly manifested. Instead it was co-opted by the student and anti-Vietnam movements which, whilst having brilliant intentions, never got beneath the surface of the deep rooted problems that blighted and still blight our woefully materialist and hierarchical societies.

Of course, it is all too easy to burden the proles, the unemployed, the LGBTQ community, and minority groups with the responsibility of liberating our bodies, libidos, and goodwill. In any case, it is unclear from Orwell’s account to what degree he considered the proles who lived so free on the edge of London to be a necessary safety valve for capitalism. A population that existed for the workers of London to let off steam through engagement in illegality and promiscuity outside the heart of the financial mechanism. This could be seen from the early ‘00s as bankers would leave the early closing bars in the City of London and head off to Brick Lane for a curry, then Shoreditch for a tour of its strip bars. Yet if this was the case then Clapton at that point was a hinterland, a kind of territory that hadn’t taken full form in the minds of gentrifiers, but registered more as a kind of amorphous blob, a possibility. It certainly wasn’t frequented by the banking class. It was a future prospect marked to return for later, to buy up wholesale.

This all changed as 2012 and the London Olympics approached, leading to massive reinvestment in Stratford and Hackney Wick which were back in the ‘00s still no go areas beyond Lower Clapton to the east. I frequented The Wild Wild East — as my immediate crowd called it— just once. I had been convinced to attend a squat party with a friend who I knew from a construction site job I had taken on to earn extra money. Jake was from East London and had been fostered in his teens. He was mixed race and had out of no choice fought a lot due to being excluded from the principal gangs in a de facto racially segregated comprehensive school. Somehow this hardship had made him basically fearless and he ended up in a lot of fights later on as a consequence. The night had started well, the party was everything London then boasted to be, a coming together of diverse races and social classes gathered in a grotty but charming former warehouse that was now home to some early pioneers who had decided to set up their art studios there. Of course, this all sucked as it would inevitably mean the gentrification of the area with all the problems that entails. Yet as far as parties go, the night was promising (this being the lure that makes even the most hardened socialist acquiesce to the conditions of capitalism).

It had the right ratio of Chelsea to Cockney accents, Chic to Chav, Cocktails to Cockroaches. This could have been Whitecapel in the ‘60s, with the Kray brothers rubbing shoulders with the emergent rockstar elite of the time. There was even a pale faced singer from a B-List band amongst the crowd, sporting black saucer-like heroin chic eyes. The DJ impossibly played a medley of everyone’s favorite coming of age songs, despite there being 4 generations present. Then the record scratched and spun off into dead sound, exactly as a 6 ft 2 inch brickhouse stood on Jake’s toe. What would have been barely audible beneath the music rang out like a war cry as Jake turned instantly upon the dancefloor and responded, “Watch it or I’ll cut you from ear to ear”. Silence descended on the room for an implausibly long period of time, during which the light dimmed profoundly, its Hawaiian party patina fading to a sepia tone. Everyone became less attractive, less welcoming, and dust began to sprawl out from the darkest corners to the center of the dancefloor. And then, all of a sudden, with Jake and this unknown quantity eyeball-to-eyeball, the music started up again and the party proceeded, its patina subdued but still shining all the same.

At 3.30am the hosts began to clear the building and Jake came and told me that the guy who had trodden on his toe 5 hours before had called a gang to wait for “us” outside, then continued that it’d be ok as, “beatings from gangs are usually less thorough than from one or two people”. I had the rare sensation of my throat descending to my stomach, before rising back up again galvanized. We and Jake’s girlfriend had little choice but to leave when the staff kicked us out and headed across the car park in the direction of our home, holding our heads high, and staring straight ahead at a gang of around 40 people. Just as we had taken not more than 5 paces, a police wagon ambled into the space, appearing like a vision. It reached the assembled crowd as we did, allowing us to walk casually past it, with Del repeating in a hushed tone “look straight ahead, don’t speed up” for about 10 minutes, by which time we were well clear of danger.

Three things conspired to lead me to leave London. One, I met an Italian girlfriend while she was visiting in the summertime and entered a long distance relationship. Two, I found rising rents (from 300 to 500 quid a room in a shared house taken on after my eviction from my previous flatshare) impossible to keep up with. Three, I witnessed a knife murder of a 17 year old boy in broad daylight in Angel Islington from the window of a bus. I later learned the victim had simply been in the wrong postcode zone and was attacked by a gang despite not being a gang member himself. I also learned that he wished to go to art school the following year. This together with the fact that Italy was just way more appealing for its food and climate made the decision a no-brainer.

The epidemic of knife crime in London, or anywhere, was not a result of certain practices among predominantly non-white subcultures predisposed to knife crime for cultural reasons (such as ‘machismo’ or ‘pride’). It was the tip of the iceberg emerging from a huge substrate of aggression that is continual and all pervasive in a city inextricably linked to the violence of wealth accumulation and inequality. It manifests in every shade of aggression and violence and did in fact leave me with a chipped tooth and broken nose among other less visible injuries due to two random street attacks. The most brutal of which took place just ten days before witnessing the aforementioned knife murder. Anyone with a keen sense of self preservation would have chosen Rome over London at that point.

Back at the Lord Cecil Pub there was always one familiar face in the throng of happy revelers, an 80 year old Jamaican migrant to London, who out-danced everyone in the room, week on week. He would have danced if there was an Olympics or not, through economic depression and boom. Perhaps the influx of artists, then coffee shops, then developers to Lower Clapton bemused him, perhaps he didn’t notice much, aside from the rise in rent. The Lord Cecil is now listed online as “permanently closed. Being used as an office in December 2017 with flats above.” This stands as a sad symbol of gentrification, as a bar given a new heyday by art student revelers eventually succumbed to closure due to rising rents. Where will future generations go to dance in London? Capitalism doesn’t care, it just rides the currents created by hapless creatives, drawing upon their energy then converting it into property and cold hard numbers. The energy dissipates in ever fading concentric circles, the creative dance pushed outwards, perennially reaching retirement and death, before starting anew in a further flung district.

An alternative version of this text appeared in ‘Underground Theory’, published by Theory Underground.

*The scene has migrated up from Underwood Street, just off Old Street, which had been the central focus of the East End art scene in the ‘90s, establishing itself as an irreverent alternative to the glitzy West End scene, which was where a great deal of the sales of YBA work took place. Well known galleries that were once located in Underwood Street include Bank and Five Years Gallery. Prices became too high in the early ‘00s and the street was for a point home to a Jamie Oliver restaurant.

Some events are recounted from experience. The name of some people have been changed.

In our world, in our time, where ceteris paribus does not necessarily obtain, where the rational and the irrational coexist or may be entirely inseparable, where knowledge is imperfect and experience can or must inform judgement — it is in that place that the anthropologist has something to say.1

— Douglas R. Holmes

The cold indifference and omniscient spectre of bureaucratic overreach is, today, ubiquitous, and, without exception, all-encompassing. It scuppers and thwarts; frustrates and obstructs; coerces and manipulates; humiliates and dehumanizes. Perhaps, most importantly of all, the rationalizing pragmatism behind bureaucratic interventionism proactively seeks to underwrite the ideological state apparatus2 of the prevailing power structure, which utilizes bureaucracy as a distancing mechanism uniquely positioned to concentrate and exacerbate the already existing social antagonisms conferred across the class divide. Indeed, the all-pervasive — and constantly evolving — iron grip of bureaucratic proceduralism is one of the most all-consuming socio-political paradigms of our contemporary age. Combined with AI we face an unprecedented era of control.

As a thoroughly discursive practice, and the means through which the ruling regime reifies the convoluted logics of its own ends, the presumed efficacy of bureaucratic rationalism has emerged, hand in glove alongside the administrative and managerial arsenal unleashed by the financial elite’s comprehensive assault and uneven subordination of the populations of the developed world and far beyond. Bureaucracy has unquestionably entrenched itself, penetrating through a profuse range of multifaceted incursive techniques into almost every conceivable sphere of the social world, whilst it simultaneously casts a needless swathe of alienating discontent across the landscape of our ordinary, everyday lives. The intrinsically detached and impartial character of bureaucracy bestows upon it the rigid formalities of an impersonal and arbitrary social adjudicator — the very root of the quasi-egalitarianism that rests at the core of its foundational appeal, which explicates the inculcating particularities of its validating role as the primary regulatory (re)enforcer. Certainly, the inclination to entertain the belief that humanity is currently living through an era of unprecedented bureaucratic expansion is regularly sermonized by media commentators and pundits, economic liberals and lobbyists alike, all of whom consistently advocate for reductions in the imposition of regulatory “red tape” in order to better encourage “economic growth”, for example. According to a report published in 2015 in Finland, where I carry out the bulk of my ethnographic research and fieldwork, the Foundation for Municipal Development — or Kunnallisalan kehittämissäätiö (KAKS), as its known in Finnish — claims that some 76 percent of Finns “think [that] the country has too many unnecessary rules and regulations”, and that 78 percent think that “the existing rules and regulations are too strictly enforced”. Additionally, a further 47 percent of Finns have claimed that their own lives have suffered “under the weight of [too much bureaucratic] over-regulation.”3 Moreover, the Finnish public’s misgivings regarding the intrusive impositions of bureaucratic institutionalization have also contributed to growing fears amongst the populace about the extent of bureaucratic corruption in positions of high public office. This shouldn’t be surprising, given that the innate opacity and unintelligibility of bureaucratic structures necessarily arouses suspicions. Such fears feed into any number of conspiracy theories that conjure up images of inscrutable men in dark suits maliciously pulling society’s strings behind a curtain of technocratic secrecy. No less than 48 percent of Finns say that they consider corruption “to be very or fairly common among politicians operating at the national level”, whilst 38 percent “believe that political decision-makers… are prone to corruption”4 as a consequence of bureaucratic overreach.

It’s also perhaps inevitable that the more layers or levels of institutional bureaucracy that reside within any single complex corporate organizational structure, the more likely it is that systemic corruption and abuses — tax avoidance and evasion, for instance — will occur as a direct result of the very same bureaucratic structures that were put in place to prevent this outcome from happening in the first place. The elite class, however, have always been uncannily adept at finding new ways to skirt around bureaucracy’s otherwise impenetrable façades, but this knowledge is (deliberately) seldom ever accessible to the general public at large. There have been numerous illustrative examples of this in recent decades. Think, for instance, of the fraudulent accounting practices that were purposefully orchestrated and perpetrated as part of the Enron scandal in 2001;5 or, more recently, the 2007-08 financial crisis, where the labyrinthine-like deals that investment bankers engaged in — often involving “insider trading” and massive “conflicts of interest”6 — were papered over and buried beneath mountains of bureaucratic documentation in order to conceal from the FSC (the Financial Services Committee) what was really going on, to the point where even the bankers themselves were unable to fathom what had actually occurred. The risk management departments of these institutions — the presumed rational actors and guardians against moral hazard in the financial services industry — which are themselves separate bureaucratic entities within the overarching organizational structures of these banks, failed completely to contain the eventuality and extent of the crisis that they were tasked with (rather ironically) managing. But equally, this is also a prime example of how unaccountable oligarchic elites exploit the loopholes in “too much bureaucracy” that allow them to pave over the cracks that, in the end, serve only their own interests at the expense of the rest of society, which then has to foot the bill for the systemic abuses that bureaucratic inefficiencies notionally engender, and that a lack of regulation failed to prevent.7

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Given the aversion of UK elites to bureaucracy, the encumbrance of the EU’s supposedly unwanted regulatory intrusions into British industry and commerce was one of the primary selling points put forward by those who sought the extrication of Britain from the clutches of EU bureaucratic entanglement.8 But if Brexit has proven anything conclusively then it is this: those wishing to sidestep bureaucracy completely will, in the final analysis, simply be met with a barrage (or should we say a “Farage”) of renewed rules and regulations replacing those that were equally despised for the same reasons. In the very public court of Brexit vs the EU, the punishment facing those wanting to avoid bureaucracy at all costs, put simply (and rather ironically), an even greater degree of bureaucracy to contend with. The bureaucratic fallout from the whole Brexit debacle — its palpable human cost — had been, however, perhaps felt most acutely by the millions of Britons — myself among them — who then had their lives turned upside down and inside out, as new third country nationals, in the tumultuous scramble to secure residency rights from the bureaucratic machinery comprising the various migration and immigration services in their adopted home countries.

Another everyday example of the unpleasantness of officious bureaucratic overreach, which doubles serendipitously as an illustration of the fundamental socially-instigated biases and class character of bureaucracy, can be found in the rationalizing processes implemented by (un)employment offices throughout much of Europe. It should be noted that at the time of writing, Finland is currently mired in a prolonged economic recession which has resulted in an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent — the worst in the entire EU.9 Unemployment in Finland has not reached levels this consistently high since they peaked at between 18-20 percent in the early 1990s, before Finland joined the EU.

These overly-bureaucratized armatures of state governance are directly responsible for the enforcement and prosecution of procedural oversight that directly controls, modulates and affects the socio-economic well-being of the unemployed within their respective countries — which without question treats the unemployed as a problem to be solved through the dubious efficacy of what the sociologist Pierre Bourdier referred to as “officializing strategies”.10 These rationalizing stratagems, as Bourdier detailed, form the core mechanism through which the symbolic use of cultural or structural violence11 — a tacit feature of institutionalized bureaucratization — serves to mask the true motivations behind the state’s “official” policy agenda, which seeks to universally normalize the enactment of deliberate cruelty and manipulation as the acceptable face around which underlying economic ends can be achieved. The officializing strategy of the employment office is thus devised exclusively to coercively cajole the unemployed back into work, oftentimes utilisingwhat’s metaphorically referred to as the carrot (the receipt of welfare payments) and stick (sanctions) method. This pressurizes certain motivational incentives that increase the already endemic psychological stresses that the unemployed are concurrently exposed to by dint of their already precarious situation.12

The late anthropologist David Graeber astutely observed that the end result of what actually occurs within the frameworks of institutionalized bureaucracy (here, the employment office) is the direct consequence of an attempt to rationally obfuscate the irrational outcomes of problems (structural unemployment) that can’t easily be remedied without actively eradicating the crisis-prone nature of its systemic inadequacies (market failures, recessions, depressions etc.) in their entirety.13 As Graeber writes: “The whole idea that one can make a strict division between ends and means, between facts and values, is a product of the bureaucratic mind-set, because bureaucracy is the first and only social institution that treats the means of doing things as entirely separate from what it is that’s being done.”14

Or, in other words, when the inherent irrationalities of the system are incompatibly irreconcilable with its own requirements, the illusion of (bureaucratic) rationality has to be conjured in order to obviate the integral redundancies of its own in-built inefficiencies. “The truth of the bureaucratic machinery”, writes the philosopher Slavoj Žižek, “is not to pursue its goal, to solve the problems it is dealing with, but to repeatedly re-create or even magnify these problems and in this way reproduce the reasons for its own existence”.15 Bureaucratic inefficiency is thus representative of the “self-reproducing cycle of its own movement.”16 The “symbolic” value of bureaucracy, moreover, always precedes the efficacies of its use-value. It is this symbolic function that ultimately (re)produces the illusive contours of rational social control without the impediment of any moral or ethical considerations getting in the way. The “[r]ationality in [this] view”, Graeber notes, “has nothing to do with morality. It is a purely technical affair – an instrument, a machine, a means of calculating how to most efficiently achieve goals that could not [by] themselves be in any way assessed in rational terms.”17

The unemployed, as a consequence of these detrimentally rationalizing bureaucratic practices, are rendered — but never portrayed — as “sacrificial victims”18 to the underlying dysfunctionality of the prevailing economic order (neoliberalism), and are collectively “symbolically” punished for the fact that they’re socially unable to contribute to the continued “health” of the economy (note that “the economy” is almost always referred to in anthropomorphizing terminology), and thus require state assistance in the form of social security payments (welfare) in order to survive in the otherwise Darwinian cut-throat competition of the (global) market place.19 The (mental) health of the unemployed is, of course, seldom taken into consideration by the bureaucratic institutions tasked with policing the unfortunate circumstances the unemployed find themselves in, because, ultimately, bureaucracy does not care about you. The state — together with the vitriolic propaganda spewed out by various silos in the right-wing press — then retroactively castigates the unemployed, and particularly, unemployed immigrants. Foreigners are often seen as social pariahs and effectively “scapegoated” as the cause of the economic conditions that resulted in their becoming unemployed in the first place.20 But rather than addressing the intrinsic systemic failures of globalised capitalism, governments seek to place the blame for “market inefficiencies” squarely on the shoulders of ordinary individuals, who, through no fault of their own, had no hand whatsoever in creating the problems they now find themselves confronted with.21

The ignominious and humiliating indignities with which the unemployed are met — which, as one my Finnish contacts noted, can be likened to being forced to “jump through hoops” that patronize and demean22 — and which bureaucratic regimes everywhere unconditionally enforce, have certain symbolic similarities to the ceremonial enactments in the pre-Columbian cultures of the Maya, Aztec and Toltec civilizations. They were known to have had sacred rituals that were intended as offerings to their deities in order to invoke — and provoke — certain socio-economic outcomes.23 These rituals, which often notoriously involved the extensive use of human sacrifice (state sanctioned social murder, in other words24), have, we might suggest, analogous “performative” features that serve a correspondingly similar social function to those carried out by bureaucratic institutions within the modern nation-state, which, in turn, utilize comparable ritualized practices in order to justify the procedural consequences of their actions.

The most obvious fictional re-enactment of performative sacrificial economic symbolism — and the bureaucracy that provides it with its undergirding ideological framework — is, despite its numerous historical inaccuracies, presented in the Mel Gibson directed action-adventure epic Apocalypto, released in cinemas in 2006. The film depicts the Maya using human sacrifice as both a literal and symbolic device in an attempt to remediate the economic — and cultural — decline of their civilization. We follow the film’s primary protagonist, Jaguar Paw, portrayed by Rudy Youngblood, in a kind of pseudo-ethnographic witnessing, as he, along with other members of his tribe, are captured and accosted by a militia of the imperial regime — or, as Graeber would perhaps have referred to them, “bureaucrats with weapons”25 — and brought to the Maya capital in order to be offered as sacrificial victims to the gods in a gruesome religious spectacle designed to overturn the obvious socio-economic decline and subsequent famine that this state of affairs has inured. The questionable moral reasoning behind all this is never critically examined in the film, but for the historical Maya, human sacrifice would have been seen as an officializing strategy carried out by the bureaucratically-inclined religious sects (the socio-political elite of their day) that presided over Maya civilization. These violent rituals were carried out in order to project power and knowledge, and thereby exert a measure of rational social control over the citizenry.

Throughout the duration of the film, we see Jaguar Paw repeatedly dehumanized and humiliated by his captors as a framing device intended to convince the audience (the public) of his unworthiness (in the same way that the unemployed are always deemed as unworthy by the right-wing press). Jaguar Paw, in this context, is essentially an inverted reconceptualization of what the Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben referred to as “bare life”,26 in that Jaguar Paw, as the excluded “other”, only exists — in his inclusion — as a vulnerable figure persisting at the margins of Maya civilization. He therefore has no innate or inalienable rights to speak of and is therefore easily disposed of with impunity and without recourse to any conventional moral infringements or threat of societal retribution. Jaguar Paw, as a reiteration of Homo Sacer, clearly produces no economic value to/for the Maya. The only commodifiable “sacred” use-value (to the Maya) Jaguar Paw has lies in the potentialities of his symbolic exchange-value as a disposable human being given up in sacrifice as a gift27 to the gods (the “invisible hand” guiding the economy). In the brutal literalism of the ritualized human sacrifice that awaits him, Jaguar Paw essentially becomes the symbolic scapegoat for all the problems that the Maya civilization has heretofore encountered, whilst the viewer is rendered as a stand-in for the ethnographic participant observer and encouraged to enjoin with the Maya masses in the belief that in the sacrificial slaughter of Jaguar Paw to the (economic) gods, all will be righted once again; economic growth will be returned and the empire restored. This draws parallels with the ways in which the unemployed are often portrayed and treated by bureaucratic institutions and the media in our contemporary society, with the media audience enabling the system through acquiescence.

Moreover, the bureaucratic use of apocalyptic metaphors is notoriously abundant in the politics of the contemporary West — this is just as true amongst Finnish politicians as it is for their ideological counterparts in the UK. In times of economic crises, it’s very common for politicians to make rhetorical statements like “sacrifices will have to be made” or “we’re all in this together”. The emotional impact and obvious religious connotations that this type of language evokes is, of course, not incidental; on the contrary, its symbolic/metaphorical function is paramount in order for the state apparatus to foster the legitimation and social acceptance of socially destructive austerity policies28 — which are always framed as economically unavoidable — and to propagate, encourage and spread what the anthropologist Micheal Herzfeld described as “the social production of [institutional] indifference”29 to those suffering at the sharp end of economic insecurity. The neoliberal order — the zombified current (if beleaguered) incarnation of contemporary capitalism — relies, of course, upon this feature of bureaucratic governance in order to normalize the obscene inequalities that currently pervade in all societies across the globe. Obviously, under economic conditions such as these, and for the majority of the working-class, “we” — the Jaguar Paws of the world — are most certainly not “all in this together”, which is an obvious absurdity. Likewise, the “sacrifices” that politicians claim will “have to be made” seldom ever affect them, or any of the other members of their social class.

The fundamental difference, of course, between the performative symbolic structural violence encountered in the bureaucracies of contemporary nation-states and its evident (literal) historical usage in the classical period of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican cultures as a religious/economic ritual, as depicted in Apocalypto, is the extremes to which the dialectic between symbolic/literal sacrificial violence is taken in order to shore up the reversal of socio-economic decline. In our contemporary post-religious, highly secularized societies, the metaphorical/symbolic sacrifice implicit in the state-sanctioned cruelty that the unemployed are forced to bear is, in itself — and from a moral perspective — completely unnecessary, and yet is still deliberately perpetuated by bureaucratic systems predicated upon making examples of the vulnerable and unfortunate. Or, as Franz Fanon once anointed them, the wretched of the Earth,30 in order to terrorize, and, likewise, coerce the remainder of the population into toeing the line of the prevailing socio-economic and political order for fear that they may end up like them. “Terror as usual”,31 as the anthropologist Michael Taussig once described those besieged by unremitting regimes of stultifying social control, is not the state of exception, but is rather the dominating rule in the hyper-normalized state of affairs of the bureaucratically-administered, socially-mediated neoliberal world — where human sacrifice is, once again, back on the proverbial menu, legitimized by the economic God of the day in order to stave off or offset what has, in essence, already arrived (economic decline as symptomatic of global mass-inequality). Indeed, the bureaucratically-inclined technocratic aficionados that we today call “economists” are, in most respects, not too dissimilar from the religious zealots found in the pre-industrial, or “primitive”, societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied.

In his insightful book, Seeing Like a State, the anthropologist James C Scott explores the outcomes in the overarching surveillance structures of bureaucratic planning at the macro level.32 Utilizing a wide array of historical and contemporary examples, Scott adeptly demonstrates how the rationalizing principles — and authoritarian leanings — of the state’s bureaucratic overreach often result in the mismanagement or mistreatment of the very thing it set out to administer and control in the first place, oftentimes with unforeseen and unintended side-effects — and, in the worst-case scenario, with catastrophic social consequences trailing in their wake. The Chernobyl nuclear disaster of 1986 is perhaps the most extreme indictment of where this kind of top-down, bureaucratic tinkering can lead when there is ostensibly no substantive guardrail in place to facilitate, all things being equal, the rational prevention of overreach escalating beyond the point where any single institutional organizational structure or individual can be held responsible or accountable. Scott, writing well before the complexities and far-reaching cultural complications of the digital age, could not have foreseen the rise of AI or the roll-out of mass-surveillance technologies, which have been partially enabled and amplified by massive leaps forward in the global connectivity associated with the widespread use of social media platforms, which have — unequivocally and decisively — altered the very nature of the socio-cultural world far beyond what anyone in the last decades of the twentieth century could have possibly imagined.

Anthropologists such as Arjun Appadurai, Jonathan Friedman and Ulf Hannerz have written extensively about the consequences and ramifications of globalization under the aegis of late modernity, and, in particular, where this applies to the neoliberalization of world-systems, in terms of the global spread and corrosive acceleration of harmonized bureaucratization.33 Indeed, we might even suggest that the globalization of bureaucratized interconnectivity in general is now a ubiquitous feature of the socio-economic order, as it materializes in the form of various influential and monopolizing transnational organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, the WTO, the OECD and the European Union’s various supra-national institutions, including the European Central Bank (ECB) as a prime example of this phenomenon, and which the rise of Big Tech has also assisted in facilitating further. These giant, highly-bureaucratized political and extra-societal entities have, moreover, also contrived to short-circuit and over-simplify many of the democratic imperatives that nation-states once formally enjoyed and were able to exercise at their own discretion. The more that countries fall under their sway, surrendering the prerogatives of their once sovereign decision-making capabilities, the more the world starts to feel compressed and drained of the emancipatory possibilities for any real or lasting societal change, as the imposing walls of Kafka’s castle begin to starve, suffocate and snuff out the normal social concerns and realities of everyday life. The Greek debt crisis of 2015, we should mention, is a prime example of how the imposition of transnational bureaucratic overreach, which these globalizing organizational structures aggressively enable and undemocratically enforce, can be visited upon the government and people of a nation-state perceived to be falling out of line with what, until very recently, was commonly referred to as the “rules-based international order”— which of course serves to benefit only the audacious interests of thoroughly disinterested and disaffected global elites.

What all this actually means for the long-term future of humanity is nothing short of the institutionalized globalization of a mass-societal straitjacket, built, controlled and administered, not just by the bureaucracies residing within the governments of nations-states themselves — and upon whose mercy most of us depend for our security, community and sense of social well-being. Beyond this, we must also consider the very intrusive — and often sadistic — bureaucratic administrations of unaccountable and secretive tech billionaires and the corporate entities such as Palantir, Meta and Amazon, through which state bureaucracies seek to coerce, manipulate and control every aspect of social life for their own nefarious and highly profit-orientated purposes. These monstrous corporate conglomerations, these “castles” dedicated solely to the farming of information, incorporate the extensive use of data mining in order to establish pattern recognitions that can then be geared toward the personalized targeting of consumer advertising and marketing — and which are, of course, designed specifically to overwhelm and stimulate the anxieties and desires of ordinary individuals who, through no fault of their own, don’t have the wherewithal to switch-off from interacting with these highly-addictive platforms. The activation of compulsive forms of behaviour is, of course, the essentializing ingredient necessary for producing dependency in the first place. This is, alas, the ubiquitous dystopian nature of technologically enhanced and bureaucratically enabled mass-surveillance in the dehumanized world of early twenty-first century neoliberal capitalism: The Anthropos (ἄνθρωπος in Greek) — mankind — has, then, in our uniquely troubled times, nearly been altogether extinguished from the whole algorithmically-generated bureaucratic equation in its entirety.34

Throughout The Sublime Object of Ideology,35 Žižek repeatedly and continuously emphasizes the argument that no one is ever really outside of the scope of ideology — or, “the big Other” in Lacanese — and that it is ideology, in general, that structures the very framework around which we live out the daily routines of our lives. For Žižek, the world is always already ideological, and thus, for most of us, its infringements go unnoticed or are of largely no concern. This unawareness is an endemic feature of what Bourdier referred to as “the habitus”, which serves as a cultural intermediary bridging the gap between the individual and the rest of society. Conversely, with bureaucracy, which is most certainly the bastard child of ideologically motivated ways of thinking, one could also make the similar claim, in conjunction with Žižek’s assertion — and due to the all-pervasiveness of its nature — that no one can ever truly be outside of the grip, influence or reach of bureaucratic technocracy either, with Brexit being a prime example of this as a case in point.

Bureaucracy, in summary, is, then, nothing less than the supreme, binding — and seemingly obligatory — authority embedded in the bizarre and absurdly pointless rituals, hurdles, hindrances and obstacles that occur within the surreal confines of the maze-like castle that Kafka’s “K” could never learn to adequately overcome, properly navigate or escape from.36

Far from creating the open society37 that the philosopher Karl Popper once envisioned as an essential element for the realization of a more egalitarian, socially democratized world — and which the utopian promises of the internet once hinted at ushering in — we nowadays seem to be heading in the complete opposite direction, moving head-on toward the disaster of an imminent collision with something altogether far more sinister and more akin to the dystopian nightmares one finds in the cinema and literature of high-modernist culture.38 The omnipresent disenchantments of bureaucracy’s brand of bounded institutional rationality is, then, the diaphanous prison we ourselves have allowed to be created all around us. It is something that we should, likewise, definitively concern ourselves with and push back against whilst there is, perhaps, still time to do so. For if we do not take the ramifications of the mass-acquiescence to the mass-social surveillance that bureaucratic overreach is endeavouring to encase us all in, then we might just lose the last remaining vestiges of what it is that makes us truly human in a rapidly approaching post-human (dehumanized) world, where the cold, dead hand of bureaucratic rationalism (technocracy) conspires to reign supreme. For the impartial reasoning of the socially detached blueprint of bureaucracy’s indifference toward human connection and belonging has always striven, perhaps above all else, to remove the perceived failings and accountabilities of forever flawed human beings. This is an integral part of its Enlightenment origins, which emerged alongside the beginnings of the capitalist mode of production. The pragmatism of bureaucratic rationalism, in the final analysis, extends only as far as it finds use-value in its own obviated functionalism; and this, perhaps, best illustrates how bureaucracy has managed, in perpetuity, to disenchant the modern world. This is where, as the anthropologist Douglas Holmes pointed out in the epigraph at the beginning of this essay, the institutionalized ritualizations of the symbolic and performative aspects of banal and meticulously bureaucratized practices might best find their location: in the mystifying, inchoate and amorphous interstices where “the rational and the irrational [seem to] coexist”39 simultaneously.

— Richard Jones is a social anthropologist and an alumnus of the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Originally from the UK and now based in Finland, he’s currently working on an ethnography that deals with the consequences of neoliberalism within Finnish culture.

Mike Watson: Your research is grounded in artistic practice. How does this help you think through your relationship with metal and its relationship with society?

Tom Cardwell: As an artist and as a painter I’m always looking first at the visual and considering how images, symbols etc. communicate ideas. Joe Petagno — the designer who came up with Motorhead’s ‘Snaggletooth’ logo — talks about how the visual impact can come before the music has even been heard, and I relate to that. I’ve always been interested in how a relatively simple symbolic device can have many layers of meaning, which change and accumulate over time. So the meaning is never permanently fixed. I’m interested in whether an emblem such as the skull motif can speak to us now in a similar way to an audience for the Dutch vanitas of the 17th Century, or a viewer of Pompeiian mosaics in 50 AD, for example. The study of symbols in artwork has been explored by art historians such as Aby Warburg and Erwin Panofsky, so I’m indebted to their ideas.

To apply this to metal, there are all kinds of visual devices that are prevalent in metal culture — the skull being an obvious example — that have roots in older traditions. For me it’s about tracing these connections and seeing how metal subcultures reinterpret these things in new ways. A lot of metal is concerned with history — or histories — whether actual or mythical/imagined — so there’s often an attempt to evoke the past in nostalgic ways.

MW: You use the battle jacket and band patch as key motifs in your work. What do these items mean to you?

TC: I grew up in the 1980s, so I remember the later stages of NWOBHM when you would see a lot of people around wearing customized jackets. There were some older kids on my school bus who had jackets with Maiden and Slayer patches, which is how I first knew about metal. I was fascinated by these and, before too long, began making my own. More recently, I came back to thinking about battle jackets in relation to a series of paintings of suits of armour I had been making. I started thinking about how the battle vest is a kind of symbolic subcultural armour, so I started making paintings of these. I’ve always been interested in customization and DIY traditions in general. This ended up being the subject of my PhD, which I later developed into the book ‘Heavy Metal Armour’. Through all of this, I’m thinking about these jackets in relation to painting history and craft traditions, and how metal fans are carrying these things on today. It’s always good to see some really unique customization where people have just made something themselves — like those old photos of Fenriz where he’s wearing a denim vest with the Destruction logo marker-penned on the back. That kind of thing relates to the NWOBHM heyday of battle jackets.

MW: Having worked for years as an art critic (Frieze, Art Review, Art Forum) and curator (Venice Biennale, Manifesta12, etc) I can say that there is not a great crossover between metal aesthetics and contemporary art. While there exist artists who reference metal and certainly a few mostly covert metal fans, the overall field of contemporary art differs greatly from metal. In the contemporary art world, the underlying norms defining behavioral norms (Bourdieu’s nomos) are starkly middle-class and, within that, stratified. Dress is elegant, movement and mannerisms are polished, and there is a reverence for the artist as a kind of channeler of transcendental truths. In metal, airs and graces are abandoned. The field is certainly stratified (from fan, to groupie, to backstage staff, to the band and record label), yet the vast mass of supporters and even bands exist on a level plateau where deference is frowned upon. It is a denims and t-shirts, come as you are, field. The bands express sublime truths, but this is achieved via grit, determination and honesty (Think Max Cavalera, James Hetfield, etc), not grace. How do you navigate these vastly different terrains? What could one teach the other?

TC: Well, I’m not convinced the two worlds are actually that different when you look at what’s really going on. For sure the aesthetics are different, and to some extent they might still appeal to different class/culture demographics (though I think that’s changing to some extent). I wrote about this a bit in ‘Heavy Metal Armour’ - how both worlds have a sense of connoisseurship and a sense of being ‘in the know’. They both have their cliques and ways of operating that might seem opaque to the outsider. In both scenes there are also very few people at the top getting a lot of the limelight and money, with lots of people aspiring to that but existing in a more hand-to-mouth kind of way. Actually, in both metal and contemporary art, artists on a grass-roots level are making a lot of the most vital and interesting stuff.

But you’re right that on a style level they are very different, and art scenes would often be pretty sceptical of metal (and probably vice versa). There have been a number of high-profile contemporary art exhibitions in recent years that have explored these connections, though these are exceptions rather than the norm. There was ‘Altars of Madness’ at Casino Luxembourg in 2013, Matt Stokes’ Cantata Profana installation at Dilston Grove, London in 2015, a number of exhibitions around the Home of Metal exhibition in Birmingham in 2019 and the Satyricon and Munch exhibition at the Munch Museum in Oslo in 2022, as well as others. Artists like Banks Violette in the USA, Mark Titchner in the UK, and Joel Slotte in Finland all make work that explores metal culture and aesthetics in different ways.

MW: In my experience of the field of contemporary art, I will say I found the highly stratified class composition challenging as a person with little money (much less at that time than now) and being from a working-class background. That goes as much for hanging out at art events (or just with other art world people) as for working at them. The metal scene at a spectator level is much more down-to-earth. I frequently find myself speaking to bands after gigs in Finland. These are obviously small-scale gigs, but with even small-scale art shows the artist, and more likely the gallerist and curator, may feel themselves to be above elements of the audience. Of course, as an art critic, I had no trouble talking to whoever, but I still didn’t like the stratification.

TC: Yes that can definitely be true, and unfortunately these class/wealth biases still persist in the art world — particularly in the commercial gallery system. It’s also true that metal was born out of a mixture of blue collar working class cultures (Black Sabbath cite the sounds of the steel mills as an influence on their music, and there’s the famous anecdote about Tony Iommi’s finger being damaged by a machine at work which led to the doom bass sound) and 1960s countercultures so that gives metal scenes very different inflections. Metal is very concerned with authenticity (“death to posers” and “false metal” etc.), but I think what this actually means is complex, and hard to unpick in some ways. The art world is also concerned with an appearance of authenticity in a different way — more like the fetishized commodity as Marx would have said.

MW: You wrote the text New Patches, Old jackets: Reclamation and Re-purposing in Metal Clothing and Style for the forthcoming ‘What’s Left of Metal?’ compendium. Can you describe its concerns and how they reflect the changing field of metal music?

TC: It’s really about how symbols, artworks and emblems are appropriated and reappropriated in black metal aesthetics. I discuss how a lot of left-wing black metal artists are reclaiming imagery and symbols that might previously have been used by or associated with right-wing or NSBM bands. These scenes in turn usually got these from older traditions — military insignia, biker cultures, medieval heraldry, etc. It’s not about trying to judge who first used any particular emblem, or who might be thought to ‘own’ it — to me that’s a fruitless quest. Rather, it’s interesting to look at how these meanings and uses are constantly evolving, being contested and re-contested. Like a kind of meme culture in a way.

MW: Metal seems resurgent today. One of the greatest surprises of my life is that bands like Anthrax, Exodus are producing great new music — far better, in fact, than their mid-career work. We all thought they’d be washed out or dead by their 60s. This gives hope to all of us in middle-age! There are also a lot of new bands. How do you see this resurgence? What are you listening to now, and how does it reflect your artistic and research concerns?

TC: Yes it feels like a very exciting time to be a metalhead. Like you say, there are plenty of bands who’ve been around quite a while who are still going strong or who have reformed and are putting out good records and live shows. Equally, there are so many exciting new bands coming through. It’s impossible to keep up with everything! Increasingly there are more and more different strands or niches of metal that have their own audiences, scenes and subcultures, yet are still somehow related to the rest of metal culture. I suppose it’s partly due to people like me who grew up with metal and are now older but still engaged with it. Once upon a time metal was a youth scene, but now it’s definitely got the whole age spectrum in the audience.

Right now I’m listening to a lot of atmospheric black metal — a genre that has its roots in Ulver’s early albums, amongst other things. Some of my favourite bands include Saor and Fuath from Scotland, Panopticon, Wayfarer and Blackbraid from the USA, Can Bardd from Switzerland, Sacred Son and Cistvaen from England, Primordial from Ireland, Spectral Lore from Greece, Déluge from France. I’m also partial to a bit of dungeon synth — some of the cross-over BM/Dungeon synth stuff like Stormkeep from the USA, as well as the more melodic PC gaming type sound like Questmaster from Australia and Flickers from the Fen from England.

MW: I feel I should now share some tips from Finland. Great bands living and playing here now include: Mädätys (death/doom); Sgt. Slime (Crossover Thrash); Stolen Kidneys (hardcore/noiserock); Mother Tenebris (Horror Metal).

I feel I should say something like “hell yeah” as I sign off. But beyond that, check out Toms’s art here, and info on the forthcoming ‘What’s Left of Metal?’ compendium here.

Bio

Dr Tom Cardwell is an artist and researcher based in London, UK. His research focuses on DIY subcultures, clothing and image traditions.

Tom’s book Heavy Metal Armour (Intellect, 2022) and PhD thesis (University of the Arts London, 2017) employed painting practice and ethnography to examine the customised ‘battle jackets’ made by metal fans. He contributed a chapter on clothing in metal scenes to the Cambridge Companion to Metal Music (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and to the forthcoming volume What’s Left of Metal (Revol Press, 2026).

From 2022-23 Tom was Kone Arts Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies where he researched the urban ‘message boards’ found on the streets of Helsinki. This research subsequently featured in an article for the Journal for Urban Cultural Studies (2024) and the artworks from the project were exhibited at Kiasma, the Finnish National Gallery of Art, Helsinki (2025). Other recent exhibitions include ‘Music Was My First Love’, Filter, Berlin (2026).

Tom Cardwell is Senior Lecturer in Painting at Camberwell, University of the Arts London.

Gareth Stuart Farmer’s next book Writing Autism: The Anti-Biography of a Liminal Resident is forthcoming from Revol Press in 2026-27. Gareth is a writer, poet and academic whose work focuses on the lived experience of autism, with a mercurial approach that puts the reader into the neurodivergent experience in direct, unique and sometimes challenging ways.

Bram’s conversation with Gareth kicks off a new series of episodes of Strange Exiles in association with Revol Press, an independent left-wing press dedicated to reviving countercultural dreaming, publishing new socialist theory and prose, and finding new voices on the contemporary left. You can find out more about Revol here.

This post was originally published by Strange Exiles. Scroll to the bottom to view a video version, or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube.

Recommendations from Gareth Stuart Farmer

This is Bram from Strange Exiles (and Revol) with a few show notes featuring texts, art and topics Gareth and I discussed.

We started by talking about some of Gareth’s academic work, a lot of which has focused on the poetry and critical theory of Veronica Forest-Thomson (more on her below). We touched on his podcasts, which you can find on Substack under the title ‘Poetic Particulars’. We also talk about his poetry — check out his latest collection What’s That: Instead of Ego II: Acrostic Aftermaths and Other Poems, published by Broken Sleep.

We actually kicked off with a brief discussion of his passion for woodworking, based on his very good-looking bookshelves, which you can see in the background on the video of this episode (see below). Also in the background throughout the episode is Gareth’s cat Veronica (named for the poet!), who strides into shot more than once.

We begin by discussing the now-defunct term for autism, once very commonly applied especially to ‘high-functioning’ autistic people, Asperger Syndrome. As Gareth points out, the term has fallen out of favour, not least because of some ties between Hans Asperger and the eugenics movement under the Nazi regime in World War Two. Gareth’s book Kerf (2022, from 87 Press) was his first poetic work exploring autism, and his woodworking practice. Gareth reads from this collection in the video below.

We go on to discuss his work at the University of Bedfordshire, in English Literature (specifically poetry), and linguistics. We discuss the work of Veronica Forrest-Thomson, who was the subject of Gareth’s PhD — he is also the executor for the estate of Forrest-Thomson’s work. Gareth examined her work, techniques and legacy in his book Poet on the Periphery. He also edited a major new edition of her seminal theory text on poetry, Poetic Artifice: A Theory of Twentieth-Century Poetry, which was reviewed here for the London Review of Books, and discussed here in The Guardian.

Gareth mentions Raymond Williams’ work on ‘structure of feeling’ — you can read more about that here in a piece from the Raymond Williams Society. He also references some of his recent essays, including ‘Experiences of autism in higher education’ (published in the collection Social Justice in Practice Education), and another on poetry and the welfare state (published in Literature and Institutions of Welfare).

We go on to talk about Gareth’s forthcoming book for Revol, which is in the editing stages now. Gareth read from it in Twickenham at The Gathering Dark, showcasing its unique approach to language, which places the reader in the centre of an experience of neurodivergent thought processes through use of the second person. The subject is ‘You’ not ‘I’, allowing readers to identify with and see through the eyes of an autistic person when considering issues of language, communication, and identity.

Gareth and I reading our work for Revol Press at The Gathering Dark in Twickenham

Gareth mentions Louis Althusser’s notion of ‘interpellation’ — some notes here explain the term and its usage, which is to do with how ideology and identity are formed and influenced by the experiences we go through, and the ideas, thought systems or normative practices we encounter and absorb. This article from Not Even Past explores the history of interpellation in Althusser’s writing.

Gareth also mentions Julie Kristeva’s notion of ‘abjection’ as a way to understand marginalisation and exile — you can read more about this in her book-length essay ‘Powers of Horror’. Later, we also introduce the concept of the ‘subaltern’ as a way to categorise people at the margins of society, first coined by Antonio Gramsci and later explored by Guyatri Spivak and others — there’s a good introduction to the term and its history available on the website for Global Social Theory.

For more in his approach to language, and the use of the second person in Writing Autism, check out the recent article below from the Revol Press blog, where Gareth talks about the books themes and intent, and how he approaches language in the text.

Revol Press

On Writing Autism: Communication, Culture & Constraint

Revol Press author Gareth Farmer on the particular challenges of writing about neurodivergence as an autistic writer, including excerpts from his forthcoming book Writing Autism: The Anti-Biography of a Liminal Resident (2026-2027 from Revol Press…

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7 months ago · 8 likes · Revol Press and Gareth Farmer

Gareth discusses how all of these theories interface with his work around neurodivergence in the workplace, and I bring up the book Neuroqueer Heresies by Nick Walker. I read this last year, and it was a great introduction to the ways in which neurodivergent experiences and identities can be reimagined, reinterpreted and re-interpellated into our understanding of the world, and how people with autism and ADHD can flourish within it.

At this point we also start to talk about the links between capitalism and mental health in the work of Mark Fisher, which he explores in Capitalist Realism, Postcapitalist Desire and other books. This leads into an exploration of Revol’s aims as a publisher, particularly in engaging with these themes.

Gareth mentions my book The Darkest Timeline, and also Adam Turl’s Gothic Capitalism as interesting but distinct approaches to some of these themes. Gareth also mentions the late Sean Bonney as an example of a poet who engaged with these themes from an anarchist perspective. The Poetry Project has a nice profile of Bonney by Ted Rees, looking at his work and the topics he explored.

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We go on to talk about the so-called ‘crisis of over-diagnosis’ of mental health and neurodivergent conditions, which was talked about a lot in the British media — here’s The Guardian begging the question, some analysis of the Tory party’s Jeremy Hunt’s remarks on the subject, and some critique of Labour’s Wes Streeting for jumping on the bandwagon. Gareth is quite forthright in pushing back on the notion of an over-diagnosis crisis, but has some thoughts about how this overlaps with the more identitarian premise of making oneself unique or ‘special’ through identification with diagnoses, and the communities that grow up around people with specific conditions (particularly online).

We finished by talking more about ‘hidden disabilities’ and problems around representation, and how applying Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theories on intersectionality to think about neurodivergence can unintentionally lead to a competition between people with different conditions — leading to the commodification of those conditions to make “neurodivergent clickbait”. Gareth makes the excellent point that this false sense of “competition” between identities and communities is tied to the way capitalism forms identity — and that we should try not to think of rights and accommodations for disabled or neurodivergent people in this way.

He ends the conversation with some advice for the friends and family of neurodivergent people about respecting their unique lived experience, which is well worth hearing. Gareth’s book Writing Autism: The Anti-Biography of a Liminal Resident will be available for pre-order soon from revolpress.com.

Also on Strange Exiles X Revol: Rob Faure Walker

Our next guest from Revol Press was Rob Faure Walker, an author, academic, and (more recently) ecotherapist specialising in ‘forest bathing’ — using nature to treat and manage mental and physical health conditions in a holistic way. His book Radical Jung: Emancipatory Politics and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of Late Capitalism is available for pre-order, and will be released in Spring 2026.

Rob’s new book will explore how Carl Jung’s insights can guide us through the crises of digital era capitalism by integrating Jungian processes and archetypes with contemporary issues, offering a path towards collective healing and a reimagined relationship with radical politics, nature, and ourselves.

The 2025 killing of a US Border Patrol agent by members of an alleged “rationalist” cult, later connected to three more murders, was linked to the ideas of programmer and AI expert Ziz La Sota1 — a fringe figure in Silicon Valley, convinced of the need to save humanity from a malign artificial intelligence in the far future. Tyler Robinson, the killer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, carved messages into the bullets he carried. They included references to the “furry” kink subculture, ant-fascist political memes, and the space combat game Helldivers 2.2 Incel mass shooters Eliot Rodger, Christopher Harper-Mercer and Alek Minassian all published some form of manifesto online before committing their atrocities. The killing of health insurance executive Brian Thompson by Luigi Mangione was ideologically motivated, and carried out with a 3D-printed “ghost gun” sourced online.

Axel Rudakubana, who murdered three young girls in 2024 in Southport, was initially misreported as being a radicalised Islamic extremist, leading to widespread anti-immigrant riots in the UK. When it was revealed to the public that he was not a Muslim, questions began to be asked about how the UK’s counter-terrorist Prevent programme, designed to catch radicalised teens before they commit violent acts, could be updated to identify those inspired by ideologies more obscure and less coherent than Islamic fundamentalism.3 Rudakubana was referred three times under the Prevent scheme, but he was not “radicalised” in a way that fit into a neat ideological box — so the referrals led nowhere. The surveillance of children by their teachers as part of the Prevent scheme was an ineffective tool for preventing his alienation, radicalisation, and the violent acts that transpired.

Explicitly political violence, and violence inspired by new and strange ideological forms, is rising, and states have attempted to respond. Whether you consider the extra-judicial killings of Alex Pretti and Renée Good by ICE agents in Minneapolis, the race riots that rock Britain with disturbing regularity, the imprisonment and mistreatment of UK protestors speaking out to support Palestine Action, or the assassination attempts made against Donald Trump in 2024 and 2025 as all part of the same trend is a matter for debate. As the stakes rise and unrest grows, it is getting harder and harder to parse the ideologies that inspire mass shooters, spree killers, and the perpetrators of state-sponsored violence. Even the US government indulges in extra-judicial killings, assassinations and kidnappings, while shit-posting Nazi-inspired memes.4 Lone wolves often become heroes online, sometimes inspiring further violence. Are we doomed to be trapped in a spiral of polarisation, radicalisation and violent chaos?

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As the threats of climate collapse, rising political instability and the problems that come with new technologies like artificial intelligence intensify, we may in all likelihood face the prospect of more ideologically-inspired violence — more manifestos, more shooters, and more surveillance of (and brutal crackdowns on) “domestic extremists”, sanctioned by our governments. How do we engage with the substantive aspects of the critiques of society these violent acts represent, let alone understand how radicalisation works when it is not connected to an ideology we have seen before? We cannot afford to write these killers off as monsters, and ignore the ideas that motivate them – any more than we can take at face value the motivations of groups like Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League, or the confederacy of right-wing figures pushing ICE purges in the US.

The outsider is sometimes the only person permitted to speak the truth. In the opening lines of what came to be known as the Unabomber Manifesto, Ted Kaczynski wrote:

The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world.5

The evidence for this proposition is all around us. Despite the borderline psychotic, libertarian, racist and misogynistic currents in his writing, Kaczynski’s manifesto nonetheless confronts us with difficult truths. His murders obscure and problematise these arguments, of course — his ideas are mostly lost to his actions. But undeniably Kaczynski wrote lucidly about how technology would usher in unprecedented influence and control over authentic human agency and thought. On that topic, his predictions and provocations continue to prove prophetic, even as we seek to distance ourselves from the extremists who increasingly influence, dominate and terrorise our political life and culture.

In the manifesto, Kaczynski mentions “the system” multiple times — this could easily be read as a stand-in for capitalism, the machine driving not just ecological catastrophe, but also unchecked technological accelerationism. It might be reductive to characterise Kaczynski as an anti-capitalist, but we can ill afford to ignore the salient points he made about how what he called “the system” drove him to take such violent actions, escalating from acts of sabotage and anti-corporate vandalism to a bombing campaign which claimed the lives of three people, and injured many more.

Just like the science fiction writer William Gibson, who began his equally prescient 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer on a typewriter, Kaczynski did not create his manifesto electronically. It was hand-typed on a portable Smith and Corona, later auctioned for close to twenty-five thousand dollars.6 Industrial Society and its Future was published in 1995 just as the acceleration of digital media and technology began to usher in unprecedented changes to the sphere of human interaction.

Unlike Gibson, whose later work would increasingly focus on surveillance, Kaczynski was perhaps unable to see clearly that digital tracking technologies — and later our voluntary submission to real-time tracking via social media — would be one of the principal ways in which human agency would be undermined and controlled. His manifesto mentions surveillance just four times; the discussion of it passed over briefly in reference to CCTV. The deeper layer of invasive surveillance and digital presence that would be the direct descendant of the almost-total CCTV coverage in cities like London, already extant in the 1990s, was not yet visible in Kaczynski’s dire prognostications about technology’s malign influence on us. It is difficult not to wonder what he made of the internet, smartphones and digital media from his cell in Florence, Colorado in the years before his death in 2023.

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As climate collapse continues almost unabated, the possibility that others might follow in Kaczynski’s footsteps, as Alek Minassian followed in Eliot Rodger’s, is increasingly high. In a 2017 piece for Foreign Policy about the possibility of a coming rise in “extremist” environmental activism, the journalist Jamie Bartlett wrote:

It’s not clear how society ought to respond to a new wave of environmental extremism. So far, previous waves of extremism have encouraged us to believe that radicals and extremists are always misled, confused, irrational, manipulated, or evil — not rational thinkers who have made their decisions based on a combination of scientific data and utilitarian philosophy. The tools we’ve developed to counter radicalization are based on these assumptions.7

Bartlett is likely correct when he argues that we are ill-prepared for the return of environmental activism of the kind Kaczynski’s murders foretold. In a 2018 piece for Intelligencer that includes interviews with Kaczynski from his jail cell, John H. Richardson writes of the movements already following in Kaczynski’s footsteps:

They cluster around a youthful nickname, “anti-civ,” some drawing their ideas directly from Kaczynski, others from movements like deep ecology, anarchy, primitivism, and nihilism, mixing them into new strains. Although they all believe industrial civilization is in a death spiral, most aren’t trying to hurry it along.8

As Richardson says, most of the groups he spoke to for his piece are focused on the climate aspects of Kaczynski’s thought, often centring on his goal of a return to pre-Industrial Revolution levels of technology — and for the most part, they do not endorse violence. Whether this will continue to be the case is what both Richardson and Bartlett question. But like Kaczynski himself, few of these new activist groups focus their concerns or their analyses on surveillance, and the increasing degree to which we are subjected to invasions of our privacy thanks to the technologies on which we have come to depend, from artificial intelligence to the algorithms of social media. And yet, when governments talk of how to counter extremism, it is often to propose increased surveillance and monitoring of their populations.

What William Gibson foresaw and what Kaczynski only dimly appreciated was the degree to which technological presence and the data-mining of our every waking thought would become not just a common factor of modern societies, but a desired outcome. The life of total surveillance is one we participate in, for the most part, with consent. That consent is expressed through our buying choices, and the technological brands we consume. This consent functions differently in autocratic, totalitarian societies than in notionally democratic ones. In China, invasive surveillance of the population is guided directly by the state. In democracies, it is guided by corporations, as Gibson and other cyberpunk writers predicted.

There is more similarity here than difference. In every state, from the most brutal dictatorship to the most democratic republic, human beings are manipulated, controlled and policed in every aspect of our existence with increasing force and invasive surveillance. In democratic societies, the right to protest, participate in public debate, or publish and be damned is under unprecedented threat. Writers, activists and academics alike are caught between two impossible and irreconcilable poles. On the one hand, there is the legislative overreach of campaigns to protect statues of slave traders and demagogues, or the free speech of bigots. On the other, there is the emergence of an increasingly febrile and censorious arena of public debate, stoked and inflamed by a media, academic and political class obsessed, at both political extremes, with the language of the so-called “culture wars”.

This atmosphere has had a stifling effect on activism and debate, and it has devastated solidarity across activist causes. The always-delicate alliance of people with liberal, progressive, utopian and revolutionary values, in the shared pursuit of ideas of community and universalism, is shattered. Resistance to autocratic, anti-democratic and actively hateful ideologies has been effectively atomised — even the anti-Trump “resistance” movement is riven with division and disagreement, often splintered into bitterly opposed camps of activists who should by all rights share concrete goals and aims. The boundaries of acceptable ideology have always been patrolled, not just in public discourse, but by the policemen in our heads.9 In the current moment, dogmatic voices have become so loud as to drown out sense, solidarity, and common human feeling. Increasingly, those engaged and “radicalised” by ideologies are instead turning towards violence.

Those of us who live in notionally democratic states have passively consented to be controlled by technology, to live under constant surveillance, and to be subject to the unquestioned ideology of hypercapitalism. For some, realising this can come not as a liberating epiphany; the man behind the curtain revealed. It is instead a dawning horror. Disillusionment makes you an exile. The “choice” and “consent” exercised by the radically-decentred capitalist subject is a false choice, and therefore no choice at all. Our only true choice is that of brands, identities and lifestyles, each defined within the strict correlates of success-or-failure capitalist metrics. The crux of this is an unexamined faith in meritocracy, and the fairness of the market.

How does one opt out? Non-participation by the denial of consent makes you an outsider, a pariah. Depression can follow this realisation, and the experience of “othering” or rejection from the societal mainstream, an activist movement, or a political philosophy. Sometimes violence is the direct consequence.

Crazy right-wing ecofascist lunatic or not, Kaczynski was on to something. Conformity and competition are indeed the conditions of capitalism, and since the transition from industrial capitalism to exponential-growth, technologically-driven hypercapitalism, this has only intensified. The ruthless Social Darwinism that was renewed in Thatcher and Reagan’s toxic neoliberalism has now become the norm not just in economics and politics, but in human psychology. You either embrace this pragmatically, or you will be crushed.

Ruthless self-interest and a belief in a tendency towards competition, specialism and tribalism in human beings now manifests as uncontrolled extractivism, and the disruptive market terrorism of technological accelerationism. And yet, the knowledge that this is a created ideology, one that is self-sustaining, and ultimately toxic to the existence of all biological life on this planet, is an increasingly insurgent mainstream point of view. Whatever the norm is, and however the loosely-defined coordinates of our current era’s “common sense” narratives were arrived at, growing numbers of people are beginning to question both. From within our filter bubbles, it is almost impossible to gauge where possibilities for change might exist within the bounds of civil society and non-violent political action.

Capitalism has strangled effective activism, and radicalisation is the direct result. As writers of the Situationist International such as Mustapha Kayati apprehended in the 1960s, the existence of alternative modes of illusion, from theocracies to dictatorships, are merely a cracked mirror to what Kaczynski called “the system”:

In spite of apparent variations and oppositions, a single social form dominates the world. The principles of the old world continue to govern our modern world; the tradition of dead generations still weighs on the minds of the living.10

In The Society of the Spectacle, Guy DeBord’s searing dissection of a media-saturated, image-fixated culture, he writes of the ways in which this “old world” power manipulates and subverts any and all opposition and resistance to it. DeBord’s Spectacle society absorbs attempts to seek power by those who do not already possess it:

Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that material.11

The point is not that certain people have power and control, and therefore they are the enemy. That is the first mistake most people make when they analyse power relations. The point is that in the chaos of the world we inherit, bad actors and malicious, selfish interests find it all too easy to manipulate us to their own ends. Rather than persecute or bring violence to them, we must enlighten ourselves, or risk becoming “conspiracy theorists” of one kind or another. It doesn’t matter who’s behind 9/11, or whether Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. It matters who profited from it, who had what intelligence, who appropriated an event’s symbolic weight for their own agenda. The story is more spectacular than the truth. Perhaps our artists know this best.

As Alan Moore says:

Conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Illuminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening. Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.12

Perhaps Moore is even being optimistic when he says “nobody” is in control. Rather, control is held by those who have always held it — those who have successfully sought and held power, sometimes for generations, sometimes for hundreds of years. If there is a conspiracy, it manifests as a vast, time-spanning web of secrecy and complicity in service of the protection of individual legacies. The value of these legacies, and the power of those who control them, has increased in the past few decades. The political interests of the individuals concerned do not necessarily manifest in the same monolithic way that the Chinese state does, or that American military might did during the Cold War, but they are just as powerful and influential, if not more so. The interests of capital, which is to say the interests of the rich and the powerful, are concealed behind layers of opaque mystery through tactics like offshoring, legal tax loopholes, and soft forms of inherited wealth; from home ownership to the “family business” of Hollywood “nepo baby” celebrity.

As the whistleblower Edward Snowden wrote in 2021:

Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered on to the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens — all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions... This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition… We talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.13

To single out a figurehead such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk or George Soros as the exemplary of this economic and cultural power is to miss the point. They are just avatars of the interests of capital. It is their job to argue that capital’s dominance is not just inevitable, inexorable and assured, but that it is also just and enlightened. They are the salesmen — billionaire carpetbaggers. They are not the company. They are not the money, not big-C ‘Capital’ — just its utterly disposable envoys. Their “conspiracy” is too big to miss, too powerful to meaningfully fail. Its avatars, if executed, are simply replaced, Hydra-like, by new, smiling automata.

The way in which we suppress and avoid this realisation is expressed fully in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism when he writes:

At the level of the political unconscious, it is impossible to accept that there are no overall controllers, that the closest thing we have to ruling powers now are nebulous, unaccountable interests exercising corporate irresponsibility… the centrelessness of global capitalism is radically unthinkable.14

Capital’s ability to nonetheless control and define a rudderless world is the story of its dominance and indomitability. If the rudderless nature of the world and history, and by extension our lives is truly “unthinkable” then it is where we must begin our thinking. This starts with the realisation that if the world is truly rudderless, powerful interests have already — and will continue to — step into the void this creates. We are often powerless to do anything but observe this as subjects, as Fisher states:

Capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that we have left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and the relics… A detached spectatorialism replaces engagement and involvement.15

What shapes this belief that we are powerless? What ideas inform it? In whose interest is it that we consider ourselves to be passive spectators, and how can we avoid despair at this conclusion? How do we escape the feeling that because we are powerless, nothing matters? Where do these feelings and questions lead, except to the belief that violence is the answer?

The failure to address such questions is what will produce a new generation of Kaczynskis — with all the same flaws in thinking, and the same risks to public safety. The ideologies of the Zizians, lone figures like Luigi Mangione or Charlie Kirk’s killer, Islamic fundamentalists, and even incel killers must be understood if they are to be countered. The issues they identify must be addressed in a clear-eyed way.

If the only approach to mitigating these risks is more surveillance, the problems will not just remain, but increase exponentially. We, as technological consumers, voluntarily participate in the creation and maintenance of a system that seeks to ensure our control and compliance, even while it drives division between activist movements who desperately need solidarity to achieve their ends, and discounts the ideas of radicalised killers as “insane”, “monstrous” or “extreme”.

Which is more dangerous — an ideology we understand and perhaps even sympathise with, like that of Ted Kaczynski or Luigi Mangione? One we don't, like those of Ziz La Sota, or Tyler Robinson? What about when motive or ideology are absent or inscrutable, as with Axel Rudakubana — how are we to understand such events?

Perhaps in our current moment, as Freddie DeBoer writes:

… political violence is not the product of ideology but rather an attempt to will ideology into being through violence itself. To create meaning in a culture steeped in digital meaninglessness by the most destructive means available.16

Escaping a future where thousands of Kaczynskis hold us hostage through violence means rejecting what Byung-Chul Han has called the “digital panopticon”17 — where new, malign ideologies evolve, fester and metastasize; and where total surveillance is the only solution we can imagine. Once more, we must find community in the real world. It is here that we can challenge the avatars of capital, and perhaps find ways to counter their centuries-long dominance of our thoughts, actions and ideologies. Unless we find a way to do this, we may already be approaching a future where more of us see the fatal logic in picking up a gun or a knife to make a difference, find meaning or purpose — or to change the world.

Bram E. Gieben published The Darkest Timeline with Revol Press in 2024. He hosts the philosophical podcast Strange Exiles, where he is currently publishing the ongoing essay series Crisis Masculinity, exploring male identity under late-stage capitalism. His next book for Revol is anticipated in 2027.

Scroll to the bottom to view a video version, or subscribe to Strange Exiles on YouTube. Check out our first collaboration, featuring Gareth Stuart Farmer, here.

Recommendations from Rob Faure Walker

Speaking about his choice to move to the countryside, Rob mentions the release by Sadiq Khan of suppressed data on air quality at London schools in 2016. This was a major factor in Rob and his wife’s decision to move out of the city, and change their lifestyles — a process that would eventually lead Rob to his current practice as an ecotherapist, which you can read about on his website.

Going back to his time as a teacher in inner city schools, Rob mentions the “Trojan Horse affair” — a scandal that involved false reports of the “Islamification” of schools in Birmingham in 2013, later spread by Conservative MP Michael Gove. A 2022 Guardian piece details some of the false information the conspiracy theory drew upon, and the flaws in its subsequent coverage by the popular podcast, Serial.

Rob spent time in the Birmingham schools mentioned in the conspiracy theory, and his first book The Emergence of Extremism offers some rugged critiques of successive UK governments’ attempts to counteract or pre-empt extremism in schools and other places. Eventually, the school in Tower Hamlets where Rob worked became part of an effort to identify a “Trojan Horse 2” taking place in the borough.

Rob goes on to talk about the UK’s ‘Prevent Strategy’ — designed as an early-warning system that would identify extremists, or potential extremists, in British schools. The strategy has been robustly criticised, not just for the ways it discriminates against (predominantly Muslim) children, but also for its failure to identify non-Islamic “extremists”, such as Ali Harbi Ali and Axel Rudakabana. Rob spent nearly a decade writing and organising against narratives like this — we talk about the way he and other teachers pushed back against Prevent. His activism fed into some of the work done by organisations like CAGE and PreventWatch.

Next, we start to talk about Carl Jung, the subject of his book for Revol. Rob first got interested in Jung’s theories by reading about his concept of “shadow work”, which looks at reconciling the darker aspects of human psychology with more positive ways of thinking and being. Here’s a 2023 Guardian piece on how shadow work has gone viral on TikTok. Rob also mentions a previous interview we did with him under the banner of Revol’s original podcast vertical, Theorize And Be Damned, which you can watch below. It was after this podcast that Radical Jung began to take shape.

Rob connects his growing interest in Jung to his years as a climate activist, a theme he draws out in Radical Jung. He mentions another big figure in the book, Ram Dass (aka Richard Alpert), an early advocate of psychedelics in the 1960s, heavily influenced by Eastern religions. You can find out more about his work and legacy at the Love Serve Remember Foundation, and via the Here and Now podcast, which features recordings of his lectures. The video below gives a nice overview of his life and work.

In the context of Jung’s thought, we talk about “activist burnout” and the pressure that the need to “stay angry” brings to those trying to effect change. Some of Rob’s new writing deals directly with this, offering a Jungian approach to self-care, through reconnecting with nature, that could help those involved in protest and resistance movements.

We move on to talk about the embrace of certain aspects of Jungian thought by conservatives, and some of Jung’s own views and statements, which can seem problematic by today’s standards. I like what Rob says — we should rehabilitate the work, where it can still be useful, without rehabilitating the man. Rob feels that some of Jung’s views on topics like race are simply dated (if abhorrent), and that this does not or should not overshadow doing the work to unpack the usefulness of his writing — which is a major aim of his next book. Rob connects this to his thinking about pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking, which he explored at length in Love and The Market. He connects this to Jung’s writing about alchemy and gnosticism.

After the break, I ask Rob about his practice as an ecotherapist, and his move away from the city and back to the countryside. Recovering from long COVID, Rob discovered the Japanese practice of shinrin-yoku, or ‘forest bathing’. The activity has provable health benefits, and is recommended by the NHS and other organisations in the UK. Forest bathing was developed in the 1980s as a strategy to help people deal with life in Japan’s densely-populated urban areas. Practitioner Dr Qing Li wrote The Art and Science of Forest Bathing in 2018.

Next, we talk about psychedelic therapy, which is a growing part of Rob’s therapeutic work. He talks about his own experiences with psilocybin, and how they helped to treat his anxiety and reconnect him with nature. Even the UK government have started to accept the potential benefit of psychedelic treatments in recent years — a massive turnaround from the derailment of studies into psychedelics in the 1960s, led by (among others) Timothy Leary and Ram Dass. Rolling Stone has a good 2024 piece about the barriers (and legal punishments) these practitioners and pioneers faced in 1960s America.

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We talk a bit about our own experiences with psychedelics, and how they helped us process some difficult experiences, and Rob mentions recent studies that show how psilocybin therapy can help people feel more connected to nature. Rob mentions the influential work done by anthropologists Gregory Bateson and his wife Margaret Mead to pioneer the use of psychedelics, not just in therapy, but to transform society — explored in depth in Benjamin Breen’s recent book Tripping on Utopia.

For more on philosophical enquiries into psychedelics, check out my conversation with Dr Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes in an early episode of Strange Exiles, and his book Philosophy and Psychedelics, which features essays by major practitioners and theorists in the field of psychedelic studies. Rob also recommends the recent book Psilocybe Pickers by his friend Robert Dickens, which offers a history of psilocybin use in Britain.

A theme Rob explores in his book is the role of “witches” in preserving ancient knowledge of natural healing, and the persecution of women accused of witchcraft in the 16th and 17th century in Britain. Another early episode of Strange Exiles offers a deep dive into this story, featuring Zoe Venditozzi of the podcast Witches of Scotland. We touch on this briefly, but if you want to know more, you’ll have to pick up a copy of Rob’s book.

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We talk about the state of UK and US politics and the rise of the far right, which relates back to the advocacy and activism Rob’s been involved in around extremism and domestic terrorism. He describes the actions of the Trump regime, particularly in relation to the recent ICE purges and the murders of Rene Good and Alex Pretti, as “Nazi cosplay theatre” — I like his conclusion, that we should try not to be too “triggered” by this behaviour, so that we don’t become too disheartened to act. The same lessons will no doubt be useful should we see a rise to meaningful power by the UK’s own far right figures. We mention Mike Watson’s recent Revol post about the reluctance of sections of the academic left to robustly criticise the politics and rhetoric of the far right.

Finally, we share our concerns about “filter bubbles“ and the decline of trust in objective reporting, which links back to some of the work Rob did at SOAS on how to source and share accurate reporting. We end on quite a gloomy note here, reflecting on the voxpops at far right rallies, where people speak of their distrust of the “mainstream media” and increasing reliance for news on partisan channels and creators. Rob recommends sites like The Canary, who aim to report on current events in an unbiased and rigorous way, and operate on a subscription model. We both hope that this is a challenge the media, and political figures, can meet… although neither of us have a clear idea of how this might be achieved.

Q: If an autistic person has a meltdown or an autistic experience in the woods and no one is around to witness it, does it mean anything?

Or, another question, to refine the implications of that oft-cited philosophical enquiry:

Q: If an autistic person experiences complex difficulties with, for example, sensory overwhelm, and no one is around to ‘like’ it, will it still have meme meaning.

The answer to the first question is, yes. There is ‘significance’, of course, but it will only be experienced by those in the forested locale, and it will take time and energy to understand.

The answer to the second is, no. There is signification, of course, but it will only gain sanctioned ‘significance’ as a ‘meme’ in the corrupt, degrading and fleeting conditions of social media. Without social media, there are no ‘memes’ as we currently understand them. Without ‘meme meaning’, therefore, where is the profit in sensory overwhelm?

My last article on the Revol substack featured a collage I made to accompany the post. I was very proud of my collage and was keen to share. It features the words ‘writing autism’ in cut-out letters overlayed on meticulously cut and pasted scraps of photographs, stickers and slithers of paper. Since creating the collage, I have also made an oak picture frame for it, created from the sides of cupboard doors from a jewellery shop who were discarding their old furniture to refurbish. As the photograph accompanying this post shows, the whole package – collage and frame – is displayed on my handmade wooden mantelpiece, accompanied by a collection of special teddies. The picture and frame are flanked by Clark Gable Teddy and Autistic Barbie. The mouse with her handmade mini furniture will go unobserved.

I created and curated these objects because they make me happy. I reproduced the collage on the last Revol substack post to demonstrate my whimsical autistic creativity, to advertise the post and book, as well as to visually signify the ways in which I collect and arrange items into framed order.

I reproduce this image here to illustrate my previous demonstrations of whimsical autistic creativity (adding details as to my woodworking skills), my writing of a book, and to express the fact that I have already reified my collection and arrangement of things into framed order.

I have uploaded the collage, the frame and the mantelpiece of curiosities to social media in gestures enfolding all the motivations outlined above: happy curation; demonstrative whimsical autistic ‘creativity’; signification of arrangement and control.

While the former two ‘uploads’ are accompanied by long-form explanations and excurses, the latter act of uploading to social media inaugurates a short-form, short-hand meta-commentary, submerged as intention, but nevertheless apparent as the contention: I Am Autistic. See! And please recognise these expressions of my identity by liking the post! Like the Autistic Barbie – which I willingly and excitedly purchased – autism is being packaged and sold. Via social media I can entreat others to consume significations of my (autistic) identity. I can eagerly beg for the apparently beneficent notion of being ‘seen’, while at the same time cooperatively giving over my intimate life, labour and identity and their multiple vulnerabilities to an exponentially rapacious surveillance capitalism.

It seems to me that many of us who grew up without the tactically constricted performative platform of curated social media have lost the cynical thought-loop or affect-instinct that told us, with irreducible logic, that trading on our personal narratives, quirkiness and disabled identities for debased ‘likes’ is demeaning, risibly reductive and rather desperate. When, we might ask ourselves, did going to the supermarket, walking down a boring street, or observing a slightly irritating interaction, become news-worthy items that we thought the rest of the (online) world would want to see and consume? It has been a subtle and insidiously unnoticed slide into capitalised and commodified curated selves, a form of narcissism that is sanctioned, invested in and eagerly adopted by millions of us.

When I was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder in 2020, receiving the fat psychiatric report in the middle of a solitary Covid lockdown, I was stunned. I might have had, at the time, one of several Instagram accounts that I had created then rapidly deleted (because of my distrust of the platform), but I was very sceptical about using it and would not have thought to turn it to offer solace, solutions or information (this reticence may be naïve and unusual). It also didn’t occur to me that I should immediately film a ‘coming out’ video to court sympathy. From what I can remember, there were very few videos on social media about autism or neurodivergence during this time and, if there were, they were boringly or responsibly informative. Jump to 2026, and my algorithm feeds me an endless stream of takes, tips, reveals, infomercials and maudlin musings about what it is like to be autistic.

I am ambivalent about this profusion of ever-evolving and endlessly recycled short-form and evidence- and condition-abolishing ‘lived experience’ testimonials. On the one hand, it is very positive that people like me, as well as people with diverse forms of autism, are platforming themselves, being platformed on short-clips of podcasts, have a Ted-talk/conference/discussion about autism. All these things ‘raise awareness’, create communities and offer comfort and necessary coping strategies for those who are diagnosed, those who are curious and those who need their ignorance of autism to be combatted. On the other hand, I do wonder whether the preponderance of short-form takes, reveals, illustrations and visceral Autie-pitches might have damaging unintended consequences for us all. Another way of putting this is that the short form of social media posts may undermine, reify or abolish an understanding of the long form struggles and actual conditions of autistic peoples’ lives.

Sound-bites versus rounded, complex fights to live.

Knowing that I wanted to comment on what I am calling ‘Meta-Autism’ in this piece (more on that below), I turned to Instagram and saved a few such illustrative posts. Instantaneously, the algorithm responded by gifting me an almost entirely autistic-orientated thread of videos. After a while of watching these things, I needed to decompress from the oppression of ever-more autistic individualised performances of unique struggle, of various selfies, soft-lighted depictions and stylised representations of quirky despair or the perkily impaired. Many of these posts are benign and well-meaning. We all recognise them: the selfie series, entitled, for example, “As an autistic person, I now know…” or “What I now know post-diagnosis” or, “This is what an autistic person looks like…” followed by a list of guidelines, tips or autistic traits, all accompanied by whimsical music inducing the affective zeitgeist. The “reveal” videos are interesting, such as the “I didn’t tell people that I’m autistic, but now…” types, followed by more selfies (taken by a partner, art director or supportive other) on a walk, up a mountain, enjoying a drink or doing something “normal”. The optics of the latter are to promote a sense of newly emergent awareness and the performance of, to be reductive, living my authentic autistic life.

And there are some darker, and I would suggest more malign and dangerous, videos of meltdowns, shutdowns, burnout, self-harm and other very painful things, the aims of which, it seems, are to show the world the tough, dark and gruesome “reality” of autism. Such posts come in many forms, but they commonly feature a series of pictures or videos, personally shot, made by partners or friends, or (most troublingly of all) recorded by parents of children who may not be able to give consent, accompanied by descriptions of the meltdown, shutdown, burnout or difficulty that is visually curated, packaged and re-presented for the consumption of the online world. You wonder if the people who have taken the time to shoot, edit, upload and audit responses to these videos have already seen comparable posts doing the rounds on social media? If so, why do they need to create and laboriously curate their own? If the job of such videos is simply raising awareness, why don’t we collectively just create one Ur-Autie-Video and point to that as broadly illustrative of the ‘meltdown’, for example, with the caveats that::

a. when you’ve seen that video you have seen that video (to echo the common expression: if you’ve met one autistic person, you’ve met one autistic person),

b. there are lots of different versions and iterations of meltdowns and that they vary with each particular person?

Why don’t we create this one Auti-infomercial? Well, because we are impelled or compelled to perform our uniqueness – not to simply ‘raise awareness’ for autism, but to drive attention towards ours or our children’s unique and personalised struggles. We are caught in a trap of capitalist individualism, exacerbated in the digital era.

I am appropriately hesitant about writing about these aspects of neurodivergent culture and expression for fear of offending people. However, my focus – as should be clear – is on the institutions and structures enabling and perniciously encouraging this type of production and consumption, rather than on individuals and neurodivergent allies creating this stuff. If the selfie videos of trauma – in particular – are benignly motivated, they are often darkly and malignly compromised in ways outside of the individual’s control.

Excerpt from the chapter, ‘Censorious Sensoria’.

In this chapter of Writing Autism, I outline my own sensory overwhelms as they express themselves in relation to the demands of society and culture. At one point I discuss my own uploading of autistic materials to social media, particularly my playful, semi-ironic, but also genuinely authentic, doodles. (I use the second person, ‘you’, throughout the book).

Another such whimsical doodle-list featuring your alter-ego, Glum Plum, was ‘Daily Things Gareth Finds Difficult’ (Fig.).

Fig: Glum Plum nonchalantly holding a flag-banner listing ‘Daily Things Gareth Finds Difficult’.

You are concerned about your own and others’ usage of social media to ‘publicise’ your/their autism. Publishing your own silly diagrams on social media has been a useful snail-slither into greater visibility and more meaningful unmasking. You are trying to tell people that you find things difficult. However, you are permanently worried that people might find you attention-seeking or self-absorbed. What you are calling ‘Meta-Autism’™ is a new problem enabled by social media. You know, those TikTok and Insta hot-takes, click-baits and barely-disguised infomercials trading on the ‘lived experience’ of the performance of autism (you sound cynical, you know). You use the word, ‘meta’ for a range of reasons. The Greek word means ‘after, beyond or alongside’, but as a prefix or adjective it signals self-referentiality or an overarching level of commentary or analysis on that thing. Set up a camera to film, for example, an autistic meltdown, and the subject is already self-referentially performing the ‘meltdown’, while initiating the process of re-watching, editing and uploading, followed by a monitoring of others’ signals of consumption via their ‘likes’ or ‘empathetic’ comment. This is ‘Meta-Autism’, existing only for the purpose of stoking the algorithm which, of course (ta-da!), is owned by Meta.

As a prefix, “meta” has been discussed in relation to a companion prefix, “post” in the word ‘postmodern’. A commonly understood illustration of postmodern narrative technique is one in which the omniscient narrator or a character draws attention to the fictional construct. It’s so meta! This “meta” process could be productively critical. For example, Jean-François Lyotard defines the prefix in ‘postmodern’ as signalling an immanent critique of the “modern” (an ‘incredulity’ towards totalising meaning). One of Lyotard’s various definitions of postmodernism is that the “post” does not mean “after” in a temporal sense, but that it signals a critical engagement with the modern, particularly a scepticism towards the idea of “progress” or any overarching ‘meta’ narrative or totalising world view (ideological, for example). Meaning is contingent and relative. As he puts it in “Defining the Postmodern”: ‘the “post” of postmodernity does not mean a process of coming back or flashing back, feeding back, but of ana-lysing, ana-mnesing, of reflecting.’ Such an immanent, self-conscious and critical evaluation of “autism” or an idea of “Autism” as it exists on social media would be useful.

However, your understanding of “Meta-Autism” on social media is more aligned to Frederic Jameson’s definition of the “postmodern”, as “the cultural logic of late capitalism’” In his Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson writes that postmodernism expresses “the inner truth of that newly emergent social order of late capitalism’ in that it ‘replicates or reproduces – reinforces – the logic of consumer capitalism”. “Meta-Autism” on social media very often simply parrots the cultural logic of late capitalism and neoliberalism in several ways. It commodifies neurodivergence; it reifies a long-form, life-long developmental disorder into packaged, processed and portioned videos; it feeds into the “sensation” culture, which also props up cults of individualism and, the most popular of such videos are by good looking (by conventional standards) people, thereby reinforcing beauty standards and hierarchies. Perhaps most insidiously, it also provides fodder for reactionary, right-wing commentators to argue that neurodivergence is simply something someone “performs” as an identity. You try not to feed into these algorithms, but you do post things about autism. As you always caveat: you are complicit but try to critique. You leave it up to a reader to decide whether you are disingenuously or hypocritically doing the “meta” that you have so assiduously critiqued. You would suggest that your “performance” of autism via social media contains within itself a Lyotardian ‘“meta’”critique of the performance. But you may be wrong.

In 2012, Damian Milton outlined what he called the ‘the double empathy problem’. To summarise: it is not that autistic people lack empathy; rather, they express empathy differently to normies and, because normies are predominant, Auties’ empathy isn’t recognised as such. Call it a neuro-normative affective hegemony, or something. To finish this piece, I would suggest that the plausibility of this double empathy problem is potentially undermined when Auties seek recognisable and normative empathy from the crass and complicit infrastructures and algorithms of social media, which are always, necessarily, homogenising and hegemonic. Whose ‘capital worth’ are we courting, we might ask, and for what purpose or whose profit? As I put it in Writing Autism in relation to my own style in the book:

throughout much of this book, you are deliberately offering an immanent critique of normative linguistic algorithms (grammar, syntax, word choice, rules of register and of ‘appropriacy’) and conventional language use. Convention is culturally hegemonic; using linguistic convention to describe or inscribe autistic experiences might be considered vulgarly moronic. A critique of neoliberalism, of ableism and the concomitant disablements inherent and necessary to enable contemporary society and culture to function is veined throughout [Writing Autism].

We might need to vein such a critique thoughout our use and consumption of social media if we are to represent autism and autistic people in ways that do not simply perpetuate, prop up and feed the institutions and systems that oppress, demean and debase us all. We might need more critical and less complicit ‘Meta-Autism’. My own collage and wooden frame propped up on my mantelpiece should, perhaps, be enough to give me solitary joy without craving the quickie-like of others’ approbation and the dopamine-spike of capital consumption.

But as I always caveat: I am complicit too and I do like to be liked.

Writing Autism: A Neurodivergent Critique of Culture will be available for pre-order soon from revolpress.com

Their talk kicked off by considering Watson’s text ‘Playing Dead Under Totalitarian Capitalism: When Camouflage Becomes Acquiescence’ from this same substack. Following an introduction of the text, Watson, Turl and Myles went on to discuss left-wing critique, strategic silence, and how commentators and critics become sock puppets for the political and economic system.

The talk included an in-depth consideration of whether the US and global populist right is fascist, and the usefulness of the term “white supremacy”. This last question has recently been raised by Myles in a text here, although it was a point of contention between Mike and Jason on the show. The term “white supremacy” does risk alienating some elements of the working class to be sure, yet when as one (considerable) grievance among many, should it not be highlighted and encountered alongside other materialist and identitarian concerns? As a point of reflection coming from this discussion, probably we could all be schooled in the history of genuine, effective intersectionality (rather than the shrill appropriation of the term seen in recent years).

From here, Turl discussed left tactics and the Benjaminian wager, linked to an editorial he recently co-wrote for the latest issue of Locust Review with Tish Turl and Adam Marks:

“[... from that editorial] If the subject chooses to believe, and they are wrong, they lose nothing. If the subject is right, however, they win eternal life.

For Pascal, belief — the irrational choice — becomes the only rational option.

Benjamin imbues this with a modernist and secular outlook tied to Marxism — his wager on modernity. But Benjamin also adds a sense of the sensual, and an appreciation for the erotic aesthetics of the wager itself.”

As such, there may be little sense in doing anything other than artistically opposing the techno-fascist moment.

Continuing on the theme of creative opposition, Myles asked whether satire was even possible today, given the absurdity of post-truth politics, which led Watson to a consideration of Mark Fisher’s Acid Communism as an antidote to the corrosive effects of fascism. As Watson asked if Acid Communism might be the best defence against what he termed “Acid Fascism”, a new oppositional dyad was born: the psychedelic left versus truth-bending right... acid vs the acRid. Watch this space for more on that over time... and for now give the above video a watch.

You can buy Turl’s Gothic Capitalism here and Watson’s Hungry Ghosts in the Machine here.

Trust in dreams and visions.

The strong man is a myth.

The Horror!

Jung returns to the horrors of war throughout his works, repeatedly insisting that we are destined to be trapped in the violent nightmare of conflict and modern warfare if we do not recognise and integrate the unconscious aspects of ourselves.1 This is because the inherited characteristics of our unconscious minds are manifest as projections that are reflected back at us by the world and other people. Writing more than half a century before the advent of social media and its catalysing of our innermost fears and desires, Jung wrote that “our ordinary psychological life is still swarming with projections. You can find them spread out in newspapers, books, rumours and in ordinary social gossip. All gaps in knowledge are still filled with projections”.2 If we are not aware of these aspects within ourselves, we fight them as if they belonged to the world beyond us. We experience them in conflict, whether that be in conflict with the environment, with our nearest neighbours, as inner turmoil, or in international wars.

The development of nation states and modern warfare, Jung tells us, has resulted in the projection of aspects of ourselves onto the world becoming ever more destructive:

[War] is no longer a matter of burning down a neighbouring village, or of making a few heads roll – whole countries are devastated, millions are slaughtered. The enemy nation is stripped of every shred of decency, and our own faults appear in others, fantastically magnified. Where are the superior minds, capable of reflection, today? If they exist at all, nobody needs them – instead there is a general running amok, a universal fatality against whose compelling sway the individual is powerless to defend himself. And yet this collective phenomenon is the fault of the individual as well, for nations are made up of individuals. Therefore the individual must consider by what means he can counteract the evil. Our rationalistic attitude leads us to believe that we can work wonders with international organizations, legislation, and other well meant devices. But in reality, only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations. Everything begins with the individual.3

Yet, despite this clear imperative that we focus on ourselves, how can we do so while children in (at the time of writing) Gaza, Lebanon, across the Zionist imaginary of Greater Israel, and in less reported conflicts from Sudan to Iryan Jaya are bombed, burned alive, and intentionally starved? While women around the world are denied access to reproductive healthcare? As our common wealth is transferred to an increasingly small cadre of oligarch billionaires? And as yet another hottest day on record passes and the world literally burns as tinder dry forests and grasslands catch fire, again.

I know that I am not the only one trapped by the compulsion to focus all my attention and efforts on these horrors. But where does this lead? Ultimately, the people killed, injured and traumatised by British and American-made Israeli bombs in Gaza and elsewhere gain nothing from my attention. They gain nothing because my attention is not being solicited by traditional and social media to help them. My attention is being solicited via media barons and social media algorithms that do not care for the suffering of families burned alive in their tents. Capitalists and their algorithms only see the images produced by the suffering as a tool to gain our attention. The attention economy is the new frontier of colonialism and the territory being fought over and destroyed is our minds.

While this new colonialism is depicted via images of genocidal land grabs that are equal in scope and barbarity to earlier phases of colonialism, it is also being played out as a battle for our emotions. It is a battle that we are losing as those emotions fall prey to the network, the corporations that maintain the algorithms that drive the network, and the ideological allegiance to capitalist growth that steers them. Like Jung in the above quote, the algorithm knows that “Everything begins with the individual”4 and it constantly gathers our data to inform it how best to solicit our next emotional response. If we are to resist the colonisation of our minds by the attention economy, we must also be aware of this. We are constantly reminded of these horrors via social media, yet the algorithm doesn’t care what the content is as long as we react to it. As the algorithm appears to understand, we are all triggered by different content. As Jung repeatedly observed, this is because we are most affected by the reflection of the hidden aspects of our unconscious psyche:

…the unconscious of one person is projected upon another person, so that the first accuses the second of what he overlooks in himself. This principle is of such alarming general validity that everyone would do well, before railing at others, to sit down and consider very carefully whether the brick should not be thrown at his own head.5

This reflection and catalysis of our inner and outer turmoil is exquisitely portrayed by “the horror” experienced by Mr Kurtz in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, reimagined in Marlon Brando’s character Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. Both stories of Mr and Colonel Kurtz see them travelling up-river on a boat — a strong archetypal image of working against the unconscious — into horrific scenarios that reflect their inner turmoil. Mr Kurtz heads into the vicious colonialism of Central Africa in the 1890s and his military namesake into the heart of the Vietnam War. They both are shown to have created even more horrific circumstances than those they seek to escape. The self-fulfilling nature of inner turmoil and its fuelling by colonial violence means that our frequent moments of being triggered by social media as our minds are colonised by the attention economy should be causes for self-reflection as much as for political action.

Jung maintains throughout his work that it is our failure to appreciate our shadow, those aspects of ourselves that we are most ashamed of, that we would rather remain hidden, that hides the world as it actually is from us:

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course – for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon which in the end completely envelopes him.6

For Jung, repression and denial of hidden or ‘shadow’ parts of ourselves is a major if not primary cause of warfare and of our personal antipathy towards the world and other people.7

We must incorporate this principle into our understanding if we are to see the world clearly and act accordingly. This could not be more important than in our witnessing of a society that seems set on its own destruction and that can be understood as the manifestation of an ongoing genocidal colonialist logic that has laid waste to people and the natural world for at least the last 400 years.8 As ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant explores, the destructive tendencies of modernity can be understood as going hand-in-hand with the emergence of positivism and patriarchy through the Enlightenment. This, Merchant proposes, must be viewed in the context of the witch trials, from which “the experimental method arose out of techniques of human torture transferred onto nature”. This process was epitomised by Francis Bacon’s “rhetoric and his vision of the interrogation and control of nature” in the 1600s. This approach dissected nature into atomic parts, denying its complexity,9 laying the foundations for the digital world and its reduction of living complexity to bits of data.

However, Bacon was not simply a naïve empiricist. In his essay on "‘Simulation and Dissimulation’, he pre-empted Jung by hundreds of years when he recognised the impact of the “hiding and veiling of a man’s self”, hinting towards this being a process of hiding an undesirable shadow self. However, he fell short of the depth of Jung’s analysis by suggesting that this veiling is a conscious decision made by people to “expressly feign and pretend to be that he is not.”10 By proposing that the hiding of the undesirable aspects of ourselves is a conscious process, Bacon falls short of understanding the deep psychology that underpins the conflict and colonial expansion that has defined European engagement with the world over the last four centuries. At the time of writing, the widespread denial by our media and political leaders of Israeli genocide in Palestine and of ecological collapse raises the horrifying prospect of the creation of yet deeper shadow within the global psyche, a shadow that Jung proposes will inevitably emerge in further violence and conflict.

If the network’s manipulation of our emotions has become more significant than its representation of reality to us, its use for us has collapsed. So, perhaps we should turn to our political institutions. Yet since the 1998 invasion of Iraq by Clinton and Blair’s coalition, in the face of unprecedented public opposition, many have given up on the ability of our political institutions to avert atrocity. Yet this horror is repeated and grows by the day as we witness our current political leaders’ support for genocide and failure to alter the course of a society set towards environmental annihilation. The question of whether our political institutions have ever served their stated aims to represent the people is up for debate. As stated above, Jung described it as foolish to think that “we can work wonders with international organizations, legislation, and other well meant devices”11 and it is clear that our political leaders do not represent the concerns of the majority or the needs of the planet. It is in this context that many have turned to politics through protest groups such as Extinction Rebellion (XR) and Just Stop Oil. Yet this is neither a new nor proven tactic for changing policy.

Throughout his works, Jung refers to the process of enantiodromia.12 Emerging from the frequently oppositional dispositions between aspects of consciousness, enantiodromia results in the inevitable emergence of opposites in our psyche and in the world outside of ourselves. Here Jung refers to this by writing of the collective conscious and collective unconscious, the aspects of group or societal psyche that are known to us or which move us subconsciously:

If the subjective consciousness prefers the ideas and opinions of the collective consciousness and identifies with them, then the contents of the collective unconscious are repressed. The repression has typical consequences: the energy-charge of the repressed contents adds itself, in some measure, to that of the repressing factor, whose effectiveness is increased accordingly. The higher its charge mounts, the more the repressive attitude acquires a fanatical character and the nearer it comes to conversion into its opposite, i.e., an enantiodromia.13

Writing of the horrors of the Second World War, Jung suggests that political justifications for warfare are generally “exquisitely absurd,” yet are recognised as “an unmitigated psychic disaster only by a few.” The seemingly endless political analysis of world affairs that can be found across Fox News, CNN, BBC, YouTube, TikTok, and elsewhere suggests that our culture is yet to embrace violent world affairs in the context of Jung’s “psychic disaster.”14

This psychic disaster, Jung suggests, has led to the horrors of modernity and our living in a world that conforms to what early Christians anticipated as “the end of time”:

It is as if, with the coming of Christ, opposites that were latent till then had become manifest, or as if a pendulum had swung violently to one side and were now carrying out the complementary movement in the opposite direction. No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell. The double meaning of this movement lies in the nature of the pendulum. Christ is without spot, but right at the beginning of his career there occurs the encounter with Satan, the Adversary, who represents that tremendous counterpole in the world psyche which Christ’s advent signified.15

Jung’s focus on the development of the Christian or western psyche is helpful to our understanding of modern politics, which has by and large emerged from the horrors of the Enlightenment and subsequent colonialism at the hands of Christian informed western ideologies. The failure of the West to appreciate the duality and shadowed complexity of the psyche is traced by Jung back to the symbolic emergence of Christ’s perfection. Konrad Lorenz adds to Jung’s analysis of Christ by reference to animal behaviour to suggest that Christ’s command to “turn the other cheek” may, like Christ’s encounter with Satan, point towards a shadow side to Christ – and to our psyche – that has been largely overlooked.

Lorenz observed that animals with a greater means to hurt each other such as dogs avoid intraspecies conflict and opposition more readily than apparently passive species such as doves. He observed that dogs will readily submit in a fight by revealing their neck to the jaws of an adversary, resulting in the cessation of hostilities as instinct demands that they cannot attack a defenceless foe, while caged doves appear to have no ingrained mechanism to prevent pecking one another to death.16 Lorenz hypothesises that this is the source of the Biblical command: “And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer the other.”17 The wolf, Lorenz tells us, “has enlightened me: [this is] not so that your enemy may strike you again…but to make him unable to do so.”18

Pioneer of LSD research and use Richard Alpert (better known as Ram Dass) explored this in the context of the political division of the 1960s – “Hippies create police, police create hippies. If you are in polarity, you’re creating opposites.”19 Jung looks further into our political past to suggest that the violence of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution (to which we might add countless human conflicts) inevitably emerged in the West from the Church’s literal interpretation of the “coming of Christ”. The banishment of our shadow side, that part of us that we would like to suppress, is not possible. So, the embodiment of the ultimate good in Christ and the Church’s attempt to banish evil and emulate Christ, rather than to understand our complex characters as the earlier Christian Gnostics did, results in the inevitable emergence of evil in our psyche and in the wider world.20

As Jung observed, attempts to suppress the negative aspects of our psyche results in their catalysis and inevitable emergence. This would explain why every disagreement on social media simply adds fuel to the fire of whatever is being opposed. As such, we might be wise to seek a passive way of escaping the attention economy that has such a negative impact on both our psyches and on our politics. We don’t find salvation in our existing political systems, nor in political engagement via social media platforms, nor in nature connection software or meditation apps. Yet we can escape the attention economy by directing our attention elsewhere, away from our phones and other screens and onto nature.

Being in nature does not just offer us respite from the attention economy. Research carried out at the University of Utah Department of Psychology and published in Nature in 2024 showed that we gain even more than respite from time spent in nature. Amy Strayer and David McDonnell took a cohort of 94 participants and set half of them to walk in the woods for 40 minutes, while the other half walked in an urban environment for the same amount of time. By testing the participants’ executive function before and afterwards, they were able to show that those who had walked in nature experienced a significantly greater improvement in their “executive control capacity”, our ability to direct our attention, than those who had walked in the urban environment. The research demonstrated “a potential neural mechanism for attention restoration in nature.”21 In short, they showed that being in nature reestablishes our capacity to resist the colonisation of our minds by the attention economy. Or, as Jung observed of our mind’s relationship with nature, “Whenever we touch nature we get clean.”22

Yet we are spending less and less time in nature and since 2006 when Facebook was launched as the first social media platform the average time that we spend on screens has increased dramatically. While at the same time, the amount of live TV shows that we watch has decreased.23 Thus, we are not only spending more time on screens, but we are also spending less time doing so as a shared experience with others.

As Mark Fisher pointed out in Capitalist Realism and his other extensive writing, observing the mental health crisis as the bio-chemical result of damaged individuals is not only a misrepresentation of the global causes of our despair, but it also serves a capitalist logic that can profit from selling individualised solutions to people who are facing a problem that is bigger than them.24 Extreme anxiety is perhaps the only reasonable response to the world being laid waste by the millenarian corporatist logic for growth at any cost. But is much of the anxiety that we experience actually the conditioned response of people who have been overwhelmed and paralysed by the attention economy?

Anxiety is a valuable emotion that historically protected us from sabertoothed tigers, marauding Vikings, and other violent colonisers. It is of course also an expression of empathy for the people and planet that are being killed and burned by our military industrial complex. Yet, this is not the only empathetic response to what we are witnessing, anxiety in the face of such horrors is the emotion that has been forced into our minds by the corporate paradigm that seeks to dissatisfy us and to disable our executive function, so that our valuable attention is drawn into spending mindless time consuming the toxic content of social media and other corporate products. This does not just apply to images of genocide, the same mechanism is at play if someone’s media feed is filled with the sun-kissed skin of beautiful people on perfect holidays, with images of perfect homes, or of past lovers.

Whatever the images streamed at us, they are primarily set to fuel our dissatisfaction, an emotion that we will try and fail to satiate by further consumption of social media, holidays, soft furnishings, or whatever desire can most easily be triggered in us by the network. We must do what we can to avoid these emotions that are forced onto us by the colonising logic of corporate media.

• Radical Jung: Emancipatory Politics and the Search for Meaning in the Ruins of Late Capitalism is available for pre-order now.

This dialogue took place in 2010 between Mike Watson and Mark Fisher. It was first published in 2010 on Frieze.com prior to the site’s reconstruction, then on the Zer0 Books blog prior to management takeover. It was titled “Capitalist Realism: Is Art the Alternative?”

Drawing: ‘Capital Feeding’ Andrew Cooper https://andrewcooper-unseen.org/

Mike Watson: Your 2009 book Capitalist Realism, as well as lamenting the state of a world in which capitalism has become apparently the only societal option, upbraided the left for its lack of viable strategies. A lot has happened since then and — for a moment late in 2010 — it genuinely seemed as if the traditional left was resurgent, a point that at the time I felt to be worrying. It appeared unlikely that any viable challenge to capital would come from that quarter — not least as it would be unlikely to gain public backing. Therefore such an engagement was only ever likely to squander an opportunity for social transformation.

For the capitalist class this arguably presented a useful diversion of counter-capitalist resources. A year on from widespread protests in Italy and the UK, and despite recent unrest on the streets of London – and the Wall Street and St Paul’s Cathedral protests – the machinations of power seem unmoved in their support of the rich, whilst ignoring the needs of the poor. At this point, what viable and positive alternatives are you seeing emerging, if any? And with David Cameron’s “Big Society” presenting a kind of rightist Anarchism (or ‘libertarianism’) would a suitable response be some kind of anti-statist option from the left?

Mark Fisher: I don’t see the issue as one of developing a leftist anti-statism, just as I don’t think the goal should be taking over the State in the way that the old left wanted to. Part of the problem is that there has been a tendency amongst certain areas of the “radical” left to concede the state – along with mainstream media – to the right . The consequences of that are now horribly apparent. The bank crises have triggered a major crisis of legitimation for capital, but there is simply no-one in mainstream politics capable of taking any advantage of it. Parliamentary politics is given over to capitalist realism, but, at the moment, no other area of the left has sufficient power or influence to propose a serious alternative.

The issue isn’t control of the State per se; it is the forces outside the State that are brought to bear on it that are crucial. With the decline of trade unions, the State is now subject only to the influence of capital and its agents. The ideologues of Cameron’s “Big Society” are correct when they argue that it is the terrain between private space and the state which is important – we need to occupy this terrain.

Unions, if transformed, could still occupy it; but more than likely we will need to invent new kinds of organizations and institutions. This will require imagination, but then so did the invention of the trade unions and the labour movement in the first place. But we have to recognize that the old base of the left — industrial workers — have largely disappeared in the global North. The focus now needs to be on organizing precarious workers.

The right has successfully associated the left with what it has characterized as a superseded “top-down”, “authoritarian” and “bureaucratic” mode of politics. It has commandeered critiques and concepts that originally came from the left — hence David Cameron’s right-wing autonomism. But this shouldn’t tempt us to return to the strategies of the old left — there is no way back to them, and they failed, for good reasons, the first time around. What we need is a left that has responded to the anti-authoritarian critiques made since the ’60s. We have to resist the idea that these critiques had to lead to something like New Labour.

I didn’t see the “traditional left” rallying at the end of 2010. The student protests in the UK involved whole groups of people who had not been active in politics before. In 2011, we’ve seen another incredible series of events in the UK — the whole ruling class coming under pressure with the phone hacking scandal (which has by no means finished yet) and then the riots (which, again, are not the last displays of anger and disaffection which we will see). I believe that we are seeing a major shift in the ideological atmosphere, but we can’t quite grasp yet what form the new left will take. But that doesn’t mean that nothing is happening.

Mike Watson: Well, we agree at least on the need for things to change in a way that we cannot yet fully grasp. Of course, one runs up against the problem of precisely what can be done when capitalism is so far ingrained, and here it is easy — but not excusable — to seek refuge in the past. For if we now live — as is often suggested — in a world that is completely capitalist then it must be supposed that everything opposed to capitalism is part of that capitalist whole. Though it would perhaps be more accurate to say we live in a social whole in which injustice and domination are ingrained. And I think it is important tactically to admit of this inherent total lack of freedom.

To believe that we are free when we are completely unfree (naivety) would jeopardize any chance of finding freedom, yet to think we are completely unfree when we are in fact free (paranoia) would render us unfree in any case. Finally, to think we are completely unfree when we are indeed completely unfree (resignation) would impede permanently any chance of achieving freedom. We are left only with the option of assuming that we are completely unfree and then feigning freedom in response, as a means of enabling a fightback against that same unfreedom, should the conditions ever arise.

This feigning of freedom I consider to be an artistic statement in that only art can deliberately feign something and maintain its credibility. In this way I feel that art and its institutions should be used to mimic social and political institutions in order to leverage some space in which to think a viable alternative to capitalism. Something akin to the perfect crossover of art into political discourse as seen in Oliver Ressler’s What is Democracy (2009), in which activists at locations across the world talk about social participation, with the final product being a documentary presented as art. The question posed ultimately by this work is how to make a similar concrete political intervention.

The book I am working on for ZerO books (Towards a Conceptual Militancy) will propose that a tertiary-level humanities education (obviously limited in intake initially, and in terms of subjects offered) could operate at low cost or free from a network of art spaces, with initial accreditation provided by disgruntled professors. The point of such an education would be to foster the conditions to develop further similar initiatives in other fields.

Precedents do exist, such as Tania Bruguera’s long-term project Immigrant Movement International (2010-2015), which operates from a centralized location in Corona, Queens, but aims to foster awareness of immigrant issues worldwide, employing a network of artists and institutions worldwide. The aim similarly, is to utilize the existing network of art institutions and spaces to create an international social alternative.

This is to be worked out in full — obviously a funding model is needed — but for now, disregarding our disagreement on the nature of the current opposition to capitalism, I’d be interested to know how you approach the status of “art” in terms of this opposition, considering your personal engagement with the arts, which runs parallel to your political activity?

Mark Fisher: Well, I agree that it’s crucial to move beyond what my comrade Alex Williams calls “Canutism” — with the left continually in the position of seeking to roll things back. Capitalist realism lurks beneath this model of resistance, obstructionism and immobilization, because it implicitly concedes that history is only going in one direction — capital’s — and all we can do is delay its further progress.

We urgently need to recapture modernity, and we won’t ever have a better opportunity than we do now. Art and culture will play a crucial role in this. Their poverty in recent years is both a reflection of capitalist realism and a means by which capitalist realism has perpetuated itself. Their political importance will not primarily be to do with any didactic intervention, but the power of denaturalization. By its very nature, capitalist realism depends upon a very circumscribed account of what reality is. Art’s political role will be to reject this, to break the paradoxical spell of capitalist realism’s supposed ‘demystification’.

Mike Watson: OK, but do you see art as being particularly equipped for rejecting the false but widely held notion that capitalism is the only viable form of society? Should we be somehow appending art to politics, in the sense that politics could benefit by incorporating elements specific to art, or ought we to politicize art? There is a problem in both cases, for if politics takes on art’s flippancy it would further excuse it from intervening in any concrete way against social injustice, but if art were to take on the concrete demands of politics it would lose its critical distance. The political capacity of art risks presenting yet another distraction from positive social change, for its inefficacy.

Mark Fisher: Yes, both are dangers. My own work as a cultural practitioner – rather than as a theorist — deals with ‘political’ themes only in a glancing way. My cultural practice has taken the form of audio-essays, which I’ve co-produced with my collaborator Justin Barton. The first, londonunderlondon, was broadcast in 2005 on Resonance FM. My friend Kodwo Eshun of the Otolith Group called it ‘part theoretical fiction, part audio-essay, fictional collage, sampladelic montage, dream-text, sonic portal’. A section of londonunderlondon was about the ‘finance necropolis’ of Canary Wharf.

The current project I am collaborating on, On Vanishing Land, is about the Suffolk landscape, and it touches upon the role that containerization plays in contemporary capitalism. But these themes are part of a wider mosaic, other elements of which aren’t obviously political.

But we can’t say in advance what political effects art and culture will have. There’s certainly an aesthetic dimension to the struggle — part of the reason we’ve lost is that leftism has become associated with the dreary and the de-libidinizing. We need to reclaim concepts like “designer socialism”, arguing that a left-wing world would be one that was better designed and more alluring than capitalism! At the same time, we have to remember that not everything has to be hyper-libidinized — political organization is not always exciting.

We need to think about what conditions are necessary for art and culture to flourish in — and that involves thinking about what kinds of bureaucracy would be desirable. Neoliberalism has made us all self-surveilling bureaucrats at the same time as it injected a rhetoric of ‘creativity’ into work. It’s just as Fredric Jameson has argued — neoliberal culture is full of the language of innovation and novelty, but culture has never been more standardized and homogenous. If generalized insecurity produces conservatism in culture, as I believe it does, then the question is: what forms of stability, what forms of security, might allow culture to become adventurous again?

Mike Watson: This is an important question. I would add that we must not be content with the obscure hinterland that the link between art and politics presents. We have an opportunity to eke out the potential of art-as-politics. In fact, people working in the arts are, I believe, obligated to explore this territory, utilizing the available human and physical resources to provide socially useful services. Though if it doesn’t work, if these possibilities were to be closed down by the powers that be, we could at the least say we tried, whilst — with a network of galleries and institutions in place — a more aggressive form of resistance might be possible.

Bram E. Gieben published The Darkest Timeline with Revol Press in 2024. He hosts the philosophical podcast Strange Exiles, where he is currently publishing the ongoing essay series Crisis Masculinity, exploring male identity under late-stage capitalism. His next book for Revol is anticipated in 2027.

In the 1963 episode of The Twilight Zone, “He’s Alive”, a young Dennis Hopper plays Peter Vollmer, an aspiring political rabble-rouser and leader of a uniformed gang of proto-fascist thugs. Both a direct allegory for the conditions that led to the rise of the Nazi party in Germany and a chilling ghost story in its own right, the episode now offers some disturbing parallels with the incipient fascism of Trump’s America, and its slide towards authoritarianism and racial purity politics. Written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, a World War Two combat veteran, the episode’s condemnation of Vollmer and his politics is both unambiguous, and undeniably relevant. However, its conclusion also seems optimistic when viewed through the prism of Trump’s distinctly modern fascist politics. Vollmer’s eventual death and defeat leans on tropes of American decency and humanism, both qualities that seem to be in short supply among Trump’s supporters.

The episode begins with Vollmer’s gang preaching their doctrine of racial hatred in the streets of a small town. A gathered crowd listens until one man offers resistance, and beats Vollmer bloody in front of his goons. Dispirited, Vollmer retreats to the apartment of his childhood friend and mentor Ernst Ganz, an elderly Jewish man who we later learn is a Holocaust survivor. Ganz recalls Vollmer’s childhood as the son of a drunken, abusive father and a mentally ill mother, reminding Vollmer that he was a scared and damaged child “... crying in my doorway at night.” Despite Ganz’s disgust with Vollmer’s politics, the two have remained friends over the years. Vollmer defends his ideology, arguing: “It’s not hate, it’s a point of view, it’s a philosophy.” He rebukes Ganz for his humanism, and characterises even the sympathy he showed the young Vollmer as weak. Ganz does not contradict him, agreeing that his flaw is “...softness. The weakness that makes a man his brother’s keeper… this is my sickness. I only see the boy, not the man.”

Vollmer sleeps on Ganz’s couch, but is awoken by the sound of a voice calling his name from the street. The man’s face is shot in perpetual shadow. He offers Vollmer advice on how to increase his appeal to the masses: “Let us start by your learning what are the dynamics of a crowd. How do you move a mob, Mr. Vollmer? How do you excite them? How do you make them feel as one with you? Join them first, Mr. Vollmer. When you speak to them, speak to them as if you were a member of the mob.”

The shadowy figure speaks with a clipped German accent, foreshadowing the reveal that this is a visitation from the ghost of Adolf Hitler. Here, the parallels with Trump’s approach to whipping up the American public begin to become clear. What the figure advises Vollmer to do at his small-town rallies is, blow-for-blow, the Trump playbook: “Speak to them in their language, on their level. Make their hate your hate. If they are poor, talk to them of poverty. If they are afraid, talk to them of their fears. And if they are angry, Mr. Vollmer, if they are angry, give them objects for their anger. But most of all, the thing that is most of the essence, Mr. Vollmer, is that you make this mob an extension of yourself.”

Vollmer asks the figure how he found him. “I simply followed your ideas, Mr Vollmer,” he replies. Serling’s script hints that this is a different kind of ghost story. Far from being a mere ghost of the Nazi Führer, this shadow-faced figure is his geist of Nazism – an expression not just of Hitler the man, but of Nazis as a group, and an ideology. Hitler’s geist (or spirit) has found a new avenue for expression in Vollmer’s rhetoric, and like a moth to a flame, is drawn to him across time, death, and existence itself. Serling’s allegory aims to show that the ideology of fascism is not dependent on historical, materialist conditions – rather it is a shadow of human nature, always ready to be brought into being by damaged, angry young men.

Serling’s opening monologue describes Vollmer as “...a sparse little man who feeds off his self-delusions and finds himself perpetually hungry for want of greatness in his diet,” a description that fits very well with the egomaniacal Trump persona. Like Vollmer, Trump too is the product of a brutal father figure. Frederick Trump was an angry, domineering presence, as detailed in Mary Trump’s book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. “By limiting Donald’s access to his own feelings and rendering many of them unacceptable, Fred perverted his son’s perception of the world and damaged his ability to live in it… Softness was unthinkable”, she writes in an excerpt quoted by the BBC in 2020. The result is a man who craves not just greatness and approval, but also self-justification. As Serling says of Vollmer in the opening monologue, Trump also “... searches for something to explain his hunger, and to rationalize why a world passes him by without saluting. That something he looks for and finds is in a sewer. In his own twisted and distorted lexicon he calls it faith, strength, truth.” Like Vollmer, Trump’s revenge against the world, and his father, is dressed up as virtue.

Following the shadow-figure’s advice, Vollmer quickly learns how to whip a crowd up into a frenzy. The audience of his town hall meetings grows, much as the audiences of Trump’s rallies ballooned in the run-up to the 2024 elections. Vollmer’s association with Nazi ideology is not portrayed with much subtlety by Serling. He delivers his speeches – complete with Hitlerite sweeping hand gestures and forceful podium-banging – in front of giant photographs of Hitler and his generals, surrounded by burning torches. His followers are dressed in military garb.

Trump’s evocation of Nazi propaganda is subtler, but not by much. A recent piece by Mehdi Hasan in The Guardian analysed the similarities between the imagery and rhetoric of Trump’s government and that of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, including a Department of Homeland Security video with the caption “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage”, directly referencing the Nazi propaganda slogan “Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer”. Hasan identifies many similarities and covert (or not so covert) references to far-right propaganda, memes and tropes spread on social media by Trump and his cronies – references that his audience may or may not understand as fascist memes and images.

Vollmer’s unabashed fanboyism for the Nazi regime’s figureheads and imagery might stretch our modern credibility, but Serling’s script recognises that fascist ideas often appear unserious, or brash, and easily dismissed. When Ganz and a friend draw parallels between Vollmer’s speeches and their experience of watching the Nazi party rise in 1930s Germany, the friend argues: “It was another time, Mr Ganz. Another place. Another kind of people.” Ganz explains how the Nazis’ propaganda and posturing seemed at the time; a kind of “...temporary insanity, part of the passing scene, too monstrous to be real.” This carries echoes of our own time, as many liberals and leftists who offer parallels with 1930s fascism are denounced for having “Trump derangement syndrome” – something the Trump administration is now attempting to codify as a diagnosable mental illness. Even figures on the left dismiss other leftists’ concerns regarding the fascism of the Trump administration. Ganz continues: “…we ignored them or laughed at them. Because we couldn’t believe that there were enough insane people to walk alongside of them. And then one morning, the country woke up from an uneasy sleep, and there was no more laughter… The wild animals had changed places with us in the cage.”

As Ganz considers how to show his resistance to Vollmer, Hitler’s geist continues to counsel the aspiring dictator. He advises him to create a martyr to the cause: “You take one of no value, and you make him into a symbol. You wrap him in a flag, and you make his death work for you.” Following his advice, Vollmer orders one of his followers to kill another, and make it look like the killing has been carried out by an anti-fascist. The parallels with the killing of right-wing podcaster and ‘debate’ advocate Charlie Kirk, and his subsequent canonisation as a martyr and saint by Republicans, cannot be avoided. There was much debate online in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, with both poles of the political spectrum suspecting a psyop or “false flag”. Although it is not the point to support such an argument here, this phenomenon is of interest.

Ultimately, few conclusions can be drawn on whether Kirk’s shooter Tyler James Robinson was radicalised by either end of the political spectrum. His parents were registered Republicans, but Robinson’s politics emerge from a murkier world of online radicalism where mass shooters are rewarded for their viral fame, rather than their political beliefs, as Kyle Chayka argued in a piece for The New York Times. Robinson carved messages into the bullets he used to target Kirk, but those messages were open to interpretation: “One bullet said ‘Hey fascist! Catch!,’ then included a code for dropping a bomb in the video game Helldivers 2,” Chayka writes. “Another said ‘If you Read / This, You Are / GAY / lmao’… a third contained an emoticon-laced message drawn from furry subculture.” In particular, media coverage and online speculation focused on Robinson’s alleged relationship with a trans woman, and messages posted on Discord – both of which became fuel for the bonfire of conspiracy theories about whether he was a “redpilled” conservative or an “antifa” plant.

The martyring of one of Vollmer’s followers echoes the death of Horst Wessel in 1930. Wessel was a member of Hitler’s paramilitary organisation the Sturmabteilung (SA), nicknamed the “Brownshirts”, for whom Vollmer’s ragtag band of racists are a direct allegory. Murdered by Communist activists, Wessel was mythologised by the Nazi propaganda machine just as Trump’s followers mythologised Kirk after his death. Wessel’s murder was used to justify violence against Communist activists, and to encourage Nazi followers to lay their bodies on the line for the movement. The death of Vollmer’s follower has a similar effect, swelling the ranks of his crowd. The murder is explicitly a false flag – something much harder to prove than in the case of Kirk’s killer. It is devastatingly effective as a propaganda technique.

Similar false flag allegations were made after the attempted assassination of Trump by 20-year old Thomas Crooks in 2024. Like Robinson, Crook’s politics were hard to parse. He was a registered Republican, but does not seem to have been overtly political, let alone radicalised. More effective than rumours that he was an antifa shooter was the famous ‘Fight’ image of Trump, taken seconds after the shooting. This image became a powerful symbol, one that Trump’s campaign team used to devastating effect in the 2024 election, despite later ejecting the photographer Evan Vucci from the White House press pool. Vucci’s response to how the photograph was used and interpreted remain guarded: “So as far as how people view the images and how they market it, and how they use it for their own point of views, that’s none of my concern,” he told Time Magazine.

Spurred to action by the increasing popularity of Vollmer and his movement, Ganz storms their town hall meeting and delivers a powerful speech denouncing the ideology of Nazism. Many of the local crowd attracted by Vollmer’s charismatic rhetoric leave the hall. In the scene that follows, the actor Curt Conway steps into the light, revealing himself to Vollmer for the first time. Realising that the ghost who has been advising him is Adolf Hitler, Hopper’s face at first betrays surprise and shock – but at the Führer’s urging, he pursues Ganz to his apartment and shoots him dead. With his dying breath, Ganz still asserts his victory, saying: “You can never kill an idea with a bullet.” He is referring to the idea of resistance to fascist politics, but his aphorism cuts both ways – if either Robinson or Crook intended to silence their intended victims, the effect of their shootings arguably served to bolster the Trump movement’s popularity rather than diminish it. After the shooting, Vollmer flees from police and is killed resisting arrest – a conclusion that Serling will later complicate with the show’s trademark closing monologue.

Parallels between Vollmer and Trump are unavoidable. Like Vollmer, Trump’s speeches allude to the ‘Great Replacement’ theory, which speaks of white populations being supplanted by foreign invaders, sometimes at the behest of a shadowy Jewish elite. This conspiracy theory has deep roots, preceding even the Second World War, but its echoes persist in Vollmer’s insistence that America has been “infected with vermin from foreign shores”, and in Trump’s recent comments about Somalia as “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime”. He argued in his speech in Davos to the World Economic Forum: “They’ve destroyed our country. And all they do is complain, complain, complain.” It also finds echoes in the chants of the far-right activists who descended on Charlottesville for the ‘Unite The Right’ rally in 2017, who led a torchlight procession with chants of “Jews will not replace us.”

While the militaristic occupation of cities like Minneapolis, Portland and Los Angeles by ICE agents may be turning the tide of opinion against Trump among certain segments of the US population, many are still susceptible to the dangerous false nostalgia of the promise to “Make America Great Again”. As Vollmer says, directly parroting Hitler’s ghost, many white Americans still consider themselves to be part of a threatened, increasingly minoritarian vanguard against foreign invaders and a corrupt liberal establishment: “Because patriotism is a minority. Because love of country is the minority. Because to live in a free, white America seems to be of a minority opinion.”

Trump’s evocation of a “free, white America” is increasingly self-evident in his appeals to the idea of a white ethnostate grounded in promises to deport over 100 million people – more than the current US population of first-generation immigrants. This shows the direction of travel. Trump’s administration is not focused solely on the goal of controlling or reversing immigration or “securing” US borders. Rather, it is the first wave of a push to create a majority-white America through forced “remigration” of anyone with a nonwhite background. In “He’s Alive”, Ganz gives voice to a patriotic, small-town American vision of egalitarianism, tolerance and decency – one that eventually triumphs over the heated, racist rhetoric of Vollmer. In today’s America, such faith in the ability of American traditional values to both recognise and triumph over Trump’s racist policies and beliefs seems, if not naive, then certainly beset with challenges. Just as with Vucci’s photograph, the symbols and values of American history and politics have been successfully bent to the purpose of the MAGA movement, allowing Trump to paint everyone from antifascist activists to students, teachers, lawyers and judges as “un-American”. It is difficult to imagine how this capture of American tropes and beliefs can be reversed, even if the Democrats manage to win in the 2028 elections.

After his speech, Ganz tells Vollmer: “An old man stopped you with a few words.” By pointing out the parallels between the ideas and rhetoric of Vollmer and Hitler, Ganz manages to win over at least some of the crowd, and expose the fear, weakness and cowardice of Vollmer to his public. Attempts by American journalists to draw such parallels between Hitler and Trump have largely failed – Anne Applebaum drew comparisons in a 2024 piece for The Atlantic, while academics from Berkeley and other universities have spoken at length about the similarities between 2020s America and 1930s Germany. Trump and his circle have used “Trump derangement syndrome” to derail such critics, or have hidden behind the joking, “post-ironic” posturing of edgelord meme culture to explain away racist messages from young Republicans leaked to the press.

Beyond the martyring of Horst Wessel, another key event ensured the consolidation of Nazi power – the arson-caused fire at the Reichstag in 1933 allowed Hitler to suspend civil liberties, and in short order, to end democratic elections by declaring a state of emergency. If the January 6 riots in 2021 can be considered Trump’s first attempt at a “Reichstag moment”, it is likely that more of the same can be expected. As Elliott Ackerman argues in a piece for Time Magazine: “Democrats have, largely, been unsuccessful in using the January 6 insurrection as a tool to hold their rivals accountable, but this doesn’t mean that such accountability — or even a purge of rivals — wouldn’t be possible under similar conditions; if, say, a January 6-style attack on institutions were to repeat itself with different, more ruthless political leadership at the helm of American institutions.”

As the 2026 midterm elections draw closer, the likelihood that Trump may choose to engineer or co-opt further moments of civil unrest to justify the erosion or suspension of democratic norms seems almost inevitable – and self-evident in his government’s labeling of the decentralised, anarchist-affiliated antifa movement as an organised terror group, just as it is in J.D. Vance’s labeling of Renee Good as a “domestic terrorist”. Unlike Vollmer’s incipient movement, Trump’s shock troops don’t need to stand in front of pictures of Adolf Hitler, nor do they wear uniforms – they are recognisable in the anonymous masked appearances of ICE agents, or prior to his election, the Fred Perry-adorned Proud Boys. Like the Nazi party’s Schutstaffel (SS), Trump’s ICE agents act as an unaccountable, ever-present military presence in American cities. Groups like the Proud Boys, the Oathkeepers and other smaller groups have all played the part of American Brwonshirts, both in the January 6 riots (for which their members were charged and indicted by the Biden administration, then pardoned and released by Trump), and in subsequent street-level clashes with anti-Trump protestors.

Trump supporters in the mainstream of American politics seem able to ignore or look away from the regime’s worst excesses, either writing off his fascist propaganda as an elaborate form of trolling, or simply ignoring the consequences of his ideas and policies when they contradict their own democratic, Christian or libertarian beliefs. On the resistance side, there seems to be a belief that mimicking the extremely-online, populist approach of the Trump movement is the way forward, as evidenced by the all-caps posts disseminated by California Governor Gavin Newsom’s media team. Such efforts seem doomed to fail in their attempts to recapture the zeitgeist of American media and discourse.

The right wing still holds a position of cultural dominance, whether through the normalised fascist rhetoric of podcasters like Nick Fuentes, the naked trolling of Kanye West’s song Heil Hitler, or via the hipster literati of Dimes Square, who (ironically or not) have aimed to reclaim avant garde literature for the right. The reaction to an era where so-called ‘woke’ values dominated American public life seems to have continued public support, with some liberals and leftists initially backing the Trump team’s push to rid academia of diversity initiatives, positive discrimination and identity politics.

Against a backdrop of growing authoritarianism worldwide, many critics of Trump, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin and other proto-fascist figures seem reluctant to speak up at all, as Mike Watson pointed out on the Revol Press blog this month. Perhaps most significantly, the Trump administration is deeply connected to, and funded by, the billionaire class of “Dark Enlightenment” reactionaries in charge of big tech. Figures like Peter Thiel seem to have missed the message that the cyberpunk genre was a dire warning, and not a roadmap to an undemocratic, fascist future. Inspired by the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, Nick Land and others, the Trump administration is powered by a deep undercurrent of accelerationism. This should come as no surprise to anyone with a passing familiarity with the history of 1930s Germany, where companies lined up to fund, arm and support the Nazi party.

This capture of big tech, culture, academia and media has far-reaching consequences, serving to both normalise Trump policies, and to save his administration from doing the heavy lifting to win over hearts and minds. As Robert Reich points out, the capture of these institutions means they serve as “mechanisms for giving the Trump regime power to prevent these institutions — a television network, university, or corporation — from doing something that the Trump regime doesn’t want it to do. But because that power is held in reserve, Trump doesn’t have to display it. The heads of these institutions will do all the work for him; they’re likely to go out of their way to avoid offending the regime. The potential chilling effect is enormous.”

In “He’s Alive”, the would-be dictator is shot, and his revolution stopped in its tracks. As Rod Serling underlines in his closing monologue, this far from assures that the malign ideas, approaches and tactics of fascist movements have also been defeated. They persist, haunting the imaginary of democracies and inspiring the actions of autocratic regimes. Trump doesn’t need a ghost whispering in his ear. He has already captured the geist – the spirit of the times, and the imagination of a large swathe of American voters. Who will speak against him, and be heard and understood, in a climate of open disaffection with politics, economic policies, and politicians of all stripes? A skilled and charismatic orator, Trump continues to speak in the idiom of jokes, but rules through paramilitary and extrajudicial fiat. He’s already got the crowd behind him – for many of his supporters, like Mussolini, Trump is never wrong. He’s always been a racist, but that no longer seems to matter much. Our disillusion with neoliberal democracies, and the dangerous power of false nostalgia, have combined to make him unassailably powerful, at least for now.

We cannot escape Hitler’s geist unless we remember the lessons of history – but sadly, the last generation of men like Ernst Ganz, who carry with them the memory of the death camps and pogroms, are all but gone. Without them, who will step forward and carry the message embodied in Rod Serling’s epilogue for this enduringly relevant episode of The Twilight Zone: that we must remember not just the atrocities of fascism, but their origins in populist narratives of hate and disunity?

Serling’s final monologue makes clear that despite the death of one leader, and potentially his whole movement, Hitler’s geist remains: “Where will he go next? This phantom from another time, this resurrected ghost of a previous nightmare… Anyplace, everyplace, where there’s hate, where there’s prejudice, where there’s bigotry. He’s alive. He’s alive so long as these evils exist. Remember that when he comes to your town,” Serling urges us. “Remember it when you hear his voice speaking out through others. Remember it when you hear a name called, a minority attacked, any blind, unreasoning assault on a people or any human being. He’s alive because, through these things, we keep him alive.”

• “He’s Alive” is available to watch on Apple TV.

Of all the conservation methods currently utilized by environmentalists, gardeners, scientists, and policymakers, none is so rhetorically vicious or violently merciless as that of invasive species management. Discourse around invasive species is often rife with suggestive language that invokes visions of invading enemies that we must do our part to battle against. Management methods include shooting, poisoning, bulldozing, and even releasing other species into ecosystems for eradication. These modern forms of invasive species management create a controversial spectacle—with supporters and opponents on both sides. But what this spectacle often offers is a distraction from the root cause of biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, and even invasive species themselves. The problem of invasive species is ultimately a problem of capitalism and colonization.

In the summer of 2024, the US Fish and Wildlife Service announced a strategy to manage the invasive barred owl that thrives in the Pacific Northwest. Since then, article after article relays the same grim plan: 450,000 barred owls are to be shot down.1

These are shocking numbers without context, and only slightly less shocking with context. This eradication is in place to attempt to protect the endangered spotted owl from going extinct. Now, most of us may be familiar with the barred owl—brown with white specks and a familiar hooting call. It’s one of the most common owls in the United States. But if you’re not local to the Pacific Northwest, it’s less likely you’re aware of the spotted owl.

The spotted owl is a little smaller and rounder than the barred owl. While the barred owl has its charismatic “Who-cooks-for-YOUUUU” hoot, the spotted owl’s is more of a bark. And the spotted owl, unlike the barred owl, is undeniably native to the Pacific Northwest. It’s this piece that justifies the US Fish and Wildlife’s management plan—barred owls are labeled as an invasive species in the West. And according to conservation custom, this invasive owl, like all invasive species, needs to be eradicated.

But this owl vs owl controversy is nothing new—their story spans decades, and this barred owl management plan is just the most recent iteration of a long battle to navigate the political and environmental climate in the woods of the Pacific Northwest. I initially learned of this owl story in one of my first classes in graduate school. The class was on forest ecosystems, and it was a warm, sunny day in April when wildlife biologist Lowell Diller was scheduled to speak to my class about his work with these two owls.

During his talk, Diller described how, from the ‘60s to the ‘90s, mounting evidence indicated that the spotted owl was dying out in West Coast forests. The main culprit was clearly logging, which destroyed its habitat. Still, another culprit seemed to be the barred owl, a species native to the East Coast that had followed the path of settlers as they colonized the continent. When the barred owl landed in western old-growth forests, its population spread, infringing upon the spotted owls. The barred owl ate what the spotted owl ate; it lived where the spotted owl lived; it even looked like the spotted owl—but it was better adapted for survival.

In the late 2000s, Diller initiated an experiment to see if shooting barred owls would help spotted owls escape extinction. By the time he came to speak to our class, he’d already killed over a hundred barred owls. He said that every time he shot one, he felt like what he was doing was wrong. Diller shared that the first time he had to shoot an owl, he was so overcome with emotion that he nearly couldn’t pull the trigger. As he told us this story, he explained that, though it was hard, there was “nothing else to be done.” And even though two out of five of the sites in his experiment indicated nearly no change after barred owl eradication, Diller argued that it was the best plan available.

Sitting in the classroom and listening to Diller talk, I was horrified. I mourn extinction and care about the preservation of endangered species, but this method of conservation seemed so incredibly counterintuitively cruel, even to the man responsible.

After all, the existing theory is that barred owls had only come to the West because of human colonizers. Barred owls are native to Eastern North America and could not cross the Great Plains or the Canadian forests, likely because of the controlled burning Indigenous communities practiced in these ecosystems. After colonization, controlled burning was outlawed, bison and beaver were extirpated, and islands of forest spread across the Great Plains, while the boreal forests of Canada grew. This created new routes for the barred owl to migrate.2

Colonization (and capitalism) are also responsible for the original decline of the spotted owl. Spotted owls thrive in the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest. Studies estimate that individual spotted owl pairs can easily range between 1,900 and 3,800 acres of forest.3 But after the westward expansion of settler colonizers, these old growth forests became hotspot of resource extraction. Frank Shaw, an early settler of the Pacific Northwest, stated, “The question was, shall a great country with many resources be turned over to a few Indians to roam over and make a precarious living on, making no use of the soil for timber or other resources, or should it be turned over to the civilized man who could develop it in every direction and make it the abiding place of millions of white people instead of a few hundred Indians.”4 This racist and capitalist perspective helped perpetuate the violent genocide of Indigenous peoples and wholesale appropriation and consumption of the ecosystems of the Americas. In the Pacific Northwest, this involved logging. It is estimated that by 2003, between 70 and 95 percent of the original forests had been cut down.5 Elder Jack McCloud of the Nisqually tribe accused timber companies like Weyerhaeuser of destroying “a part of the one great sacredness . . . Trees produce oxygen; companies produce poison.”6

Over the decades, there eventually grew more widespread recognition of the devastation of logging, specifically with regards to spotted owl habitat. Thanks to the environmental movement of the 1970s, awareness of biodiversity loss was growing. When the spotted owl was added to the endangered species list in 1990, there were concerted efforts to enforce preservation of its habitat—the old growth forests of the west and the epicenter of the United States logging industry. During this time, environmentalists who sympathized with the spotted owl’s decline protested logging—and loggers pushed back against the environmentalists to preserve their jobs. T-shirts, banners, and bumper stickers bearing the slogan “Save a logger, eat an owl” were common among logging crews7, while Earth First! and other environmental activists participated in tree sits and were accused of tree spiking.8 Clashes between the two parties became more frequent and more violent. But, within the decade, Diller would begin that initial barred owl extermination experiment, and environmentalist anger towards logging industries would be redirected.

Today, it has been nearly forty years since the spotted owl was placed on an endangered species list and nearly twenty years since the barred owl was placed on a hit list. And now, the public is split over this new plan to exterminate nearly five hundred thousand barred owls. Over seventy-five organizations have pushed against this proposal, and state that:

The timber industry financed the “studies” and fieldwork that are the impetus for this owl-killing plan as an attempt to distract from the industry’s continued destruction of spotted owl habitats… It seems far easier, as a political matter, to authorize the mass killing of barred owls than to provide enduring and consistent protections of key habitats for the animals where there is a major political and economic influencer pushing for an expansion of logging opportunities.9

Despite controversy, Diller’s original barred owl extermination experiment was successful in shifting the blame from the logging industry and onto the barred owl. But the science is biased. After all, it was Green Diamond that originally funded Diller’s experiment. Today, we face only a recent chapter in the long story of owl versus owl as the US Fish and Wildlife finalizes the details of this barred owl management plan.

This story of the barred owl vs the spotted owl is a story of colonization—the genocide of Indigenous peoples and their homeland, and the suppression of their traditional land stewardship and cultural practices. And when you look at the ongoing story of invasive species management, you will find similar stories across the world.

For example, in 2023, wildfires broke out across Maui, Hawaii. Nearly one hundred people died, while twenty-two hundred structures were damaged or destroyed. What caused the fires were the outdated power lines that were deemed a serious public risk by none other than the power company themselves.10 However, article after article pushed a common narrative—the invasive grasses were at fault. The blame was not cast on capitalist corner-cutting, or the colonizers brought these grasses to Hawaii in the first place while violently suppressing Indigenous controlled burning, but rather placed on the grasses themselves.11

Another example, back in ‘90s, the island Pinta of the Galapagos was covered in over 100,000 invasive goats (brought there by fishermen in the 50s as a back-up food source during a fishing expedition). To prevent the invasive goat population from continuing ecological damage, conservationists initiated a plan to exterminate all the goats. For this project to succeed, a select number of invasive goats would be captured, tagged, and injected with hormones to make them go into heat. Let loose on the islands, these goats—which were ominously referred to as “Judas Goats”—would be tracked as they sought out other goat herds. When the “Judas Goats” found another herd, all those goats would be shot down around the unlucky Judas Goat, who would then wander off in search of more goats. This violent process would be repeated until only the Judas Goats were left alive.12

To bring it back to the Pacific Northwest, there have been other invasive species management efforts which nvolve the eradication or relocation of certain mountain goats. While these goats are native to some of the mountainous regions (like the Cascades), they are not native to others (like the Olympics). These goats are also being shot and killed, or hauled off alive by local conservationists and the department of fish and wildlife.13 Meanwhile, from across the landscape, you can still easily spot all the large-acre clearcuts of native evergreens—so common that the mountain ranges often look like they’ve got intermittent buzzcuts.

Rather than an effective tool for conservation, invasive species will often serve as a politically useful scapegoat. Their management becomes a distraction from and justification for ecologically destructive capitalist practices. Invasive species are marked as dangerous monsters that you, too, can fight against in the ongoing battle to save the planet! All the while, capitalism and climate crisis are allowed wreak havoc across the world. It is not invasive species that are the problem here—capitalism is to blame.

Like many other invasive species, barred owls are innocent victims of colonization. These owls are attempting to survive in an Anthropocene that invited their ancestors west, then destroyed their preferred ecosystems, and has now decided that killing them is the best plan available for conservation. Meanwhile, logging continues to destroy spotted owl habitat.

The US Fish and Wildlife and other conservationists who utilize this sort of invasive species management resemble a magician performing a magic trick. In the one hand, our magician gives us a captivating demonstration of inspirational environmental restoration efforts! Here we see a fascinating and terrifying display of invasive species removal—complete with action-movie violence or an easily villainized antagonist. But up his sleeve, our magician still hides the environmental damages of industry. Under the spell of this spectacle, our attention is diverted from the extractive and exploitative practices of our capitalist society. What the scapegoat narrative of invasive species provides is deliciously irresistible: someone else to blame.

So, could Lowell Diller not fathom any alternative solutions to save the spotted owl because to actually address the root cause of spotted owl decline would mean to challenge his employer? It seems that Diller’s legacy may be a successful scapegoat story that sacrifices the barred owl so the logging industry can go on clearcutting without protest.

We Earthlings stand together on the precipice of a catastrophic anthropogenic climate crisis, and we are facing a strange new world where the outdated concepts of native habitats, of native species, and of Sisyphean invasive species management nevertheless maintain a firm hold on public belief and conservation policy. This is a systemic problem with a systemic solution: if anyone is to take the concept of invasive species management and our broader conservation efforts seriously, it will first mean targeting our global capitalist society.

—

Clare Follmann, MES, is a writer and environmentalist whose work engages with themes of landscape, ecology, climate crisis, language, and philosophy. She is located in Olympia, Washington, where she contributes to urban farming and botany initiatives.

Buy Scapegoat: What the Invasive Species Story Gets Wrong (AK Press) here.

Some modified image elements designed by starline / Freepik.

Theory Gang’s series on the Revol Press Substack “Tales from the Corp” presents field notes from the trenches, which are overflowing with champagne. The purpose of champagne in the trenches is to be a sedative, dulling our ability to perceive the invisible war that compels foot soldiers to participate in the corporate acquisition game.

Drawing on insights from Clausewitz, Isaiah Berlin, and Zygmunt Bauman, this essay argues that modern power operates on human psyches through incentives, speed, comfort, and distraction, turning our attention into the primary grounds to be ceded. The call to action is to use the comfort afforded to observe the war and, in so doing, recognize that this vision may be blurred by champagne bubbles.

Reporting Live from the Fanciest of Foxholes

My mind is in the column of tiny champagne bubbles rising in my glass, not on the conference call in my headphones where a colleague is way too excited about an “optional” journal club. I’m waiting for a flight in the Delta lounge, juggling the call and how to write this piece describing the invisible war for humanity, but from this vantage point, I’m struggling to see past the shimmer.

In my glass, I understand what’s happening: Under pressure, carbon dioxide needs only a single catalyst, a flaw, a scratch in the glass to nucleate into a bubble. The bubble grows invisibly until it detaches, and the buoyant gas rises to the top of the liquid. The bubble drags liquid upward with it, creating a teensy wake and a path for other bubbles to follow.

In my headphones, an analogous physics apply. The pressure is pooled in the bottom of my mind, invisible until this dorky try-hard makes a snide remark that puts me on the radar. A small, unknowing act of aggression functions as the scratch in the glass. It gives structure to the invisible problems that begin to nucleate. I unmute and release a playful retort, creating a path to ensure this becomes a sparing session, sublimating aggressions that reliably arise in this environment. To survive corporate conflict, you have to be aware that status signaling is constantly bubbling up, but you swish it around and spit it out. Swallowing too much causes indigestion.

Now that I’ve made my contribution to the call, I could sign off (“flight’s boarding!”), finish my champagne, and enjoy the illusion of peace inside this fancy foxhole. From here, the problems are as tiny as the bubbles, but that’s the biggest problem: comfort and luxury dull the senses required to make out the battlefield.

“This difficulty of seeing things correctly, which is one of the greatest sources of friction in War, makes things appear quite different from what was expected.” - Clausewitz

I can imagine it might be hard to see what I see if you haven’t experienced this kind of warfare. Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz describes a novice’s approach toward the battlefield: “...The thunder of the cannon becoming plainer and plainer…Balls begin to strike the ground close to us…Here the bursting of shells is so frequent that the seriousness of life makes itself visible through the youthful picture of imagination.”

The description of 19th-century warfare seems almost as cartoonish as what I’m describing, but one of my mentees, Maria, confirms my assessment. Seeing the potential skirmish, she issues a private text: crying face emoji. She’s learning that this war is no joke, but at the same time, it’s a masterclass in absurd theater. In these trenches, I grab whoever I can, bring them close and narrate like a modern Clausewitz until they start seeing things in champagne bubbles, too.

“The young soldier cannot reach any of these different strata of danger without feeling that the light of reason does not move here in the same medium, that it is not refracted in the same manner as in speculative contemplation.”

There’s a different logic to war, especially this one, and normies get swallowed alive by it. My colleagues don’t know I’m writing a manifesto on corporate warfare, but no one would be surprised. It takes courage (liquid, in this case), erring on the side of brashness (Aristotle’s preference) to describe a battlefield while you’re still on it. Ballistic investigations typically happen after the fact, but only someone obsessed with understanding the conflict would write an account mid-combat. You’ve got to be a little unhinged to even attempt to see it.

There Will Be Blood… Flow

If we can’t see the normal symbols of war, and the people who can see it look bat shit, how do we know we’re in a war at all? We’ve come to expect a surge of blood, the striking of a gong, or at least a CNN news bumper declaring a “WAR ON ____”, but Clausewitz locates war in its effects not its announcement. By the time the war is announced, it’s well underway. For Clausewitz, war begins the moment action ceases to persuade and begins to compel. All modern compulsion seems to be in our heads, and this is exactly where modern power asserts itself.

Behind your eyes, blood is coaxed, not spilt. The way agents of conflict gently coax us into securing our own restraints makes even MK Ultra look like a broadsword. What we surrender now is cognition. As political theorist Isaiah Berlin first observed, our negative liberty (freedom from physical interference) remains intact, but our positive liberty (freedom to think and judge for ourselves) is quietly commandeered. Until we start acknowledging the human right to cognitive liberty, we just keep strapping ourselves in at every turn, happily surrendering the burden of thinking and agency. Addictive algorithms make our psychobiology easy to quantify, calibrate, and nudge into its most profitable configuration. He who controls your blood flow controls your universe.

The perfect example is clamoring for my attention.

My superior, who would probably enjoy this article if it were about some “other” company, takes attendance. For an “optional” study club she set up. She’s a pretty, perfunctory-looking woman with a perfect fringe resting above occasional glasses, and she’s always on camera. Most of my colleagues unknowingly participate in a sort of Ansch conformity experiment, turning their cameras on, too, despite being in transit. Even if they knew, they’d be unconcerned with the negligible cognition allegedly being eroded by succumbing to the pressure of an unofficial “cameras on” policy. One is in their car, another is hustling through a corridor to their next meeting, and another stupidly admits he’s headed to a dentist appointment. The sharks are polished in blazers, and the one I know who’s hanging on by a thread is in a hoodie with no makeup. I’m one of three with cameras off, Maria, and one other who I suspect understands the layers of surveillance and compulsion that we do our best to thwart.

We’re expected to stay extremely busy, juggling travel, internal and external meetings, staying up to date on the latest data, and in return, we’re compensated handsomely with a high level of “autonomy”. But… there are correct autonomous choices. If you choose wrong, you end up displaced in the next round of layoffs, or at best, you never see the upper limit of the 3-5% annual merit increase. In 2025, the last of the corporate Mohicans are defined by an ignorance toward or acceptance of the gradual erosion of their autonomy.

“...he must be a very extraordinary man who, under these impressions for the first time, does not lose the power of making any instantaneous decisions. It is true that habit soon blunts such impressions;... we begin to be more or less indifferent to all that is going on around us: but an ordinary character never attains complete coolness and the natural elasticity of mind.”

The Fluid Front Lines

Coolness and elasticity of mind are exactly what I’m trying to procure in this lounge. I’ve earned “Diamond status” with this trip, which grants me a place to stop and think, a luxury, yes, but more importantly, essential for clarity in what Zygmunt Bauman calls Liquid Modernity. In this world, those who are free to move (or think) rule.

Stopping in Liquid Modernity is both costly and risky. Bauman describes what speed and mobility are used for: “Those who are able to accelerate beyond the catching power of their opponents, rule.”

Modern “rulers” have learned that capital erodes everyday problems, lubricates difficult spaces, and can even flood opponents.“The besieged sedentary populations refuse to accept the rules and stakes of the new ‘nomadic’ power game.” With fluid frontlines, it’s hard to know when or where the next surge is coming from. In resisting the swell from all angles most people are swept away by the force of Liquid Modernity.

Airports are an exchange port of the fluid front lines. They’re a “non-place” for Bauman, where you have to buy the right to rest. “‘Non-places’...discourage the thought of ‘settling in’, making colonization or domestication of the space all but impossible.” Status buys you a temporary spot to think before being flushed through the terminal, down the jetbridge, and shunted into a metal tube where jet fuel propels us off to our final location. For corporate travellers like me, it’s usually a customer meeting, the only place where we mercenaries are paid to stick around ​​— because there’s profit squeezed out of live humans.

Liquid modernity makes the invisible battlefield even more impossible to detect. It’s constantly moving, and we’re whisked away, bobbing up and down, gasping for air. With less than $400 in their bank account and a war for their attention, most people can’t get enough oxygen to find a place to rest, let alone understand David Foster Wallace’s fish metaphor (we can’t see our environment as we’re immersed in it). Sadly, the ones that do seem to use their knowledge to swim in champagne, not water.

A Bottle of Champagne Makes the Poison Go Down

Sitting here for too long is a dangerous luxury. My legs are warm and tingly, a pleasant hijacking of blood flow, a physiological component of Liquid Modern warfare. One more glass of champagne and the problem dissolves. The comfort afforded in liquid modernity makes a perfect environment to pickle us into Roger Crisp’s oyster: stupid, and flaccid, but unburdened by this invisible war.

My bartender raises an eyebrow, offering another glass, but I don’t need it. I’m in the perlage where torrents of stories and theory spill onto the page. I already have to levy the ideas pouring out into 5 separate essays. I’m not intoxicated, but in that golden flow state where pressure finds its release.

This war can’t be discerned from sedation because the blood-brain barrier is one of the key fronts. There is an enemy here, it just isn’t a single person or even a group of people. It’s the logic of a system we’ve built that replaces persuasion with compulsion so quietly that we mistake it for our own preference. The weapons aren’t bullets but incentives, metrics and dopamine loops. The battlefield isn’t land, air or sea but cognition itself. The casualties are the subtle attrition of attention and judgement, slowly replaced by fatigue and zombified compliance. And the solution isn’t a hack or a wellness perk, but a reckoning with the human tendencies that this system exploits.

This will take time, focused attention, and solid courage. We can’t let the trenches fill up with champagne, or else we’ll miss how power is dammed and diverted, and lose our chance to enact a strategy for drawing down the reservoir.

Feeling ground down by work? So stressed by the obligation to pay rent and bills that your limbs ache? Constant near-flu symptoms? Well, that’s unsurprising, really. Capitalism is a lifeless object that persists in its goal of self replication by taking over the bodies of living labourers and pushing them to breaking point. And knowledge of this is nothing new.

The parasite formula goes back at least to Marx:

Capital is dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

As a polemic metaphor such a quote functions very effectively in our social media age, being able to capture our attention and keep it fixed on its image of deathly subjugation. Yet beyond its schlock horror value, it tells a truth more relevant than at any other time prior to now, albeit one which many political commentators (worthy ones and those self-styled) are reluctant to admit. For people who make a living telling us how to find a way out of the drudgery of life under digital capitalism, admission that we as individuals and as a society have only limited agency as we are animated (or de-animated, reified) by a lifeless runaway system hold little benefit.

The influencer, businessperson, or politician portrays themselves as exceptional, possessing an extraordinary capacity to tame the virus, to resist de-animation by it, to even animate it and turn it to their own ends. Let’s disregard the big industrialists, weapons dealers and bankers, who are anyhow beholden to the deathly aspect of capitalism, channeling it to all four corners of the earth. Let’s focus first instead on the folly of the petit-bourgeois small business owner, who through their “ingenuity” seeks to channel a portion of the virus into their wholesome product or service. Perhaps in this way, they reason, they might reanimate a small part of it and make it “good”. And such attempts would be laudable in intention, if they weren’t so ill-fated.

Imagine a producer of organic soap, handmade at home, with love. It washes away the sins of capital. A commodity that cleanses the remnants of its own origin in the viral-vampiric capitalist system. Perhaps the small company is owned by a couple, who “don’t do politics”. They don’t want to dirty themselves, and if they just do soap, then they can perhaps rely on someone else to do animal-friendly knitwear, and another small business owner to grow impossibly crooked looking — because authentic — vegetables. And so on. Perhaps such an infectious trend could dislodge the virus eventually! So long as the cosmetics companies, the textiles giants and the agricultural conglomerates (including pesticide producers and GM labs) all wilfully disband, along with the investment bankers and the arms manufacturers.

Of course this really is folly to imagine (although such thinking exists in hobbit-like pockets of society), though this naivety hides a deeper tendency: namely, the practice of assimilating ourselves to the threat of capital by mimicking it. We try to avoid being taken over by feigning similarity with it. We play dead to avoid becoming prey. And this is something shared across fields of work.

In The Dialectic of of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer describe the fallacy of free agency under capitalism, with reference to the myth of Odysseus and the “Parable of the Oarsman”. In the parable, Odysseus and his ship’s crew veer closely on their nautical travels to a small island upon which the ‘Sirens’ live, women whose enchanting song threatens to distract the men from their journey, thus potentially leading them to fall prey to the various forces that set out to thwart Odysseus’ hubristic ambitions. Ultimately they risk having their ship dashed on the rocks and men drowned if they follow their song.

Odysseus devises a clever means of escape, but one that binds him to fate, as equally as it allows him to escape it: He knows only two possibilities. One he prescribes to his comrades. He plugs their ears with wax and orders them to row with all their might. Anyone who wishes to survive must not listen to the temptation of the irrecoverable, and is unable to listen only if he is unable to hear. Society has always made sure that this was the case. Workers must look ahead with alert concentration and ignore anything which lies to one side.

The other possibility he has applied to himself: tied to the mast on his own request by his men, he is able to command the ships direction whilst being unable to respond to the Sirens’ lure. As Adorno and Horkheimer point out, however, the path Odysseus takes is still the fatefully prescribed path, running close to the island on which the Sirens are based. Odysseus did not succumb to the Sirens as such, yet in not succumbing he had himself and his men bound. He mimicked the death he wanted to avoid at the hands of the Sirens, who would have otherwise entranced him, yet he anyhow lost his agency. They had still taken control of him, and his men.1

Mimesis is for Adorno a byword for the way in which humans falsely substitute objects for experience — in order to ward off the threat of primary nature, as with the use of magic charms, mythic tales, and religious rituals which mimic the power of nature in order to remove its threat. The trouble is, we then become bound by a second form of control — their observance of magic forms, which compels them to observe ritual. Or in our own age, the algorithm.

The retreat from capitalism into running a homely small-scale business, as mentioned above, bears a similar misfortune as that suffered by Odysseus’ men. You can retreat into an imagined barter system, as a small-scale craft producer or humble artist of some kind — “just lil’ ol’ me producing pictures for people who like ’em.” Yet we all are anyhow subject to the ravages of capitalism, including taxation, welfare and health-funding (or lack thereof), aggressive competition, crime, economic depression, and warfare. This is also true of the business and political leaders (as in Odysseus’ case).

Again in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer argue that:

Society perpetuates the threat from nature as the permanent, organized compulsion which, reproducing itself in individuals as systematic self-preservation, rebounds against nature as society’s control over it. Science is repetition, refined to observed regularity and preserved in stereotypes […] In technology the adaptation to lifelessness in the service of self-preservation is no longer accomplished, as in magic, by bodily imitation of external nature, but by automating mental processes, turning them into blind sequences. With its triumph human expressions become both controllable and compulsive. All that remains of the adaptation to nature is the hardening against it. The camouflage used to protect and strike terror today is the blind mastery of nature, which is identical to farsighted instrumentality.2

Put otherwise, it is humanity’s bid to overcome nature (death, effectively), by attempting to categorise it scientifically and surpass it via technological advance. that ossifies the individual both in its outward countenance and in its internal mechanisms of thought. People become enslaved by the technology sought to emancipate them, and this is something visible as a form of negative progress. There are clear parallels with the advance of AI, and it is telling that the CEOs of AI companies issue constant warnings and look perpetually stressed by their own invention. Musk is a prime example of the adage that wealth doesn’t bring happiness, his gaunt visage being poor advertisement for tech dominance.

We could also add that wealth doesn’t bring freedom either. Sam Altman looks more positive on TV than Musk, a throwback to the days when Silicon Valley execs were chipper salesmen for the notion of computers as a cure-all for the world’s ills. Yet recently Altman raised alarm by telling Jimmy Fallon that he could not imagine how it’s possible to raise a baby without the help of ChatGPT. This raises the question over what other previously entirely natural processes might be outsourced to AI: falling in love; coitus; dying?

Yet the hypothetical humble purveyor of craft soap and the tech mogul are at two ends of a continuum (albeit ones that are equally lacking in agency in the face of capitalism). Neither fulfil roles in which you’d expect them to be critical of the capitalist system. In working life, as in child rearing, they float as digital driftwood in a sea of 0s and 1s, constricted as part of its ebb and flow. We do not expect anything else of them. For a mix of background, DNA and circumstance, these individual conglomerates of cells have congealed into unwitting hosts of capitalism.

For the former this occurs despite a belief that their ostensible non-compliance (as humble barterers of craft produce) would exonerate them from participation in the capitalist system. For the latter, tech giants, they find themselves taken over by the parasite despite believing that they could direct it to their ends (world domination, inter-planetary plunder of resources, thought-control, god-status — or, more positively, tech-utopia). These are players in a vast story of universal subjugation, and their story is simple. They try to adapt themselves and profit from capitalism, like humble hosts to an invading army at a border tavern.

There is however another area of work where acquiescence to capitalism is less easily explained; where assimilating oneself to the virus cannot be seen as a natural course. This is the area of societal and political criticism, which exists across a number of academic and pseudo-academic sub-fields, and in the arts. The critique of society is broadly left wing by nature. That is to say, it critiques power systems and particularly inflexible ones, an activity designated ‘left’ ever since the anti-monarchists sat on the left side of the French National Assembly in the revolutionary period, although the tendency has effectively existed as long as communities and societies have. Taking a functionalist perspective, checks on society are needed for its security, making a certain amount of power-critique necessary even in a Conservative or Neoliberal society. From a Marxist perspective, critique is part of the dialectical interplay between social classes, although it requires concrete action for the next step of history to be realised.

Of these perspectives, only the Marxist one requires that the critic believes what they say and what they purport to be. Otherwise, a critic of the status quo can function within their field and serve the interests of capitalism within a neoliberal or fascist system without actually fully embracing the role of critic (both theoretically and practically) in reality. Given this, it is in fact common that a supposed critic (say, critical theorist, political theorist, political philosopher, sociologist, anthropologist, etc.) in the academic and para-academic fields (including podcasting and live-streaming) engages the same self-preservatory behavior as the aforementioned petit bourgeois business owner. They ostensibly eliminate themselves from the battle between competing ideologies through a softly-softly — neither one side or the other — approach. Their words are chosen to hedge rather than judge. They appear frustratingly unable to see the political situation at any given time for what it is, skirting issues and engaging in perpetual “whataboutism”. The problem is particularly acute today as we face — no, witness — fascism in the USA, and the very clear threat that it is exported to Europe and the rest of the world. After all, the USA forcibly neoliberalised the world — they can forcibly totalitarianise it too.

But too many of today’s critics feel the urge to ask what about?:

Totalitarianism? — What about the routine injustices of a liberal democracy?

Enforced deportation? — What about the innate racist tendency of liberal capitalism?

And so on… and these are the ones who have not just looked the other way entirely, retreating into some obscure apolitical niche within their field: Like the purveyor of organic soap, they washed their hands of politics long ago.3

The “whatabout” points would be valid, except no serious critic of the system was ever happy with the injustices of capitalism in the first place. The point today is, fascism is an extreme and extremely violent form of capitalism rolled out by the elite to protect their wealth. As such, retorting to the racialist totalitarian tendencies of fascism by issuing critiques of neoliberalism is like giving a free rein to both. Insofar as Žižek cast neoliberalism as capitalism with a friendly face, fascism is neoliberalism with an angry face, and all its worst tendencies exacerbated.

Fascism is also more dangerous to the critic than neoliberalism. It is important to say this, as while it is more dangerous anyhow to many people (the LGBTQ community, minority racial groups, women, and so on), it is not more dangerous to all; in fact some people can on the surface do well from it by staying silent, playing dead, assimilating themselves to it. Not the forthright left wing critic, though. Relatively recent history shows they could end up jobless, or in a cell, or worse even. It is for this reason that so many left wing critics have in recent months and years begun sitting on the fence, or wholesale changing sides, while playing good capitalists by engaging the algorithm with crude talk that justifies (or fails to condemn) the fascism we face. They play dead or mimic the system so much they resemble its profit driven deathliness. They should have assumed the mantle of previous revolutionaries. They instead settle for safe academic jobs or X’000 views a week on YouTube, and a role obfuscating reality. The trouble is, in playing dead, they’ve already lost — the battle, any semblance of agentic-living, and all their credibility.

A lack of willingness to fight a dangerous, bigoted system in favour of self-preservation is unbefitting of anyone. Yet what is damning here for the social critic (whether they tread the hallowed halls of academia wearing faded tweed, or wear out the cushion on a gaming chair in their mum’s basement) is the degree to which their actual impact and worth differ from their self purported aims and values. The cultural and societal critic is a product of enlightenment thinking; a guarantor of the thoroughness of the modernist project underpinning rational inquiry, with their tendency to question not just academic and scientific procedure, but the social and political structures behind all inquiry.

To be sure, the privileged status of the academic, who does not have to dirty their hands with manual labour, or descend to the picket line or protest, has always allowed for fence-sitting. Even academics and para-academics with experience of manual labor (myself among them) see society refracted via the lens of detached inquiry, as a necessity to ensure critical standards. Yet even so, the pursuit of truth via criticism becomes worthless at those crucial historical points when fence-sitting is no longer a method of true critique, and becomes instead a shield to both defend against and protect the powerful. So when political side B overturns the rule of law, criminalizes critique itself, and systematically imprisons immigrants as a means to lay structures for the systemic imprisonment of left-wing critics, it is no longer the time for left-wing critics to say: “Yes, but the alternative, side A, is also capitalist!”. When “Yes, but migration is a liberal-capitalist tool” becomes the response to systemic brutalization of the most vulnerable in our society, the left has already lost. Such statements are tautological, given that the common complaint of the left critic is anyhow that society is thoroughly capitalist beyond any remedy. If this is so, why should the capitalism of liberals be used as a motive to go easy on fascists?

Yet it is precisely this same logic of the all-pervasiveness of capitalism implying the sameness of all systems that leads the critic down the route of assimilating themselves to the threat by playing dead. The academic or podcaster resembles the petit bourgeois soap producer, cleaning themselves and their public of capitalism symbolically while changing nothing. It is a hollow gesture, resigned to the virus’s omnipotence.

This has been the case for many academics for all of the modern period. I’ll let the reader judge which among them have stayed true to the task of critique (and remarkably, some have). The truth is, most para-academics (podcasters and Substack writers among them) have managed over the last few years to generate a following and income by playing it fairly safe. Occasional calls to protest have been so hyperbolic and unrealistic as to elicit no real response from power. For the most part, academic chat online has been so caught up in minutiae that it flies below any radar, and rightly so: it’s all anyhow an exercise in doing precisely that. Critiques of capitalism have mostly been cheap shots fired off to little effect (aside from exciting a few people to “subscribe and follow”).

Today instead, many feel there is no capital to be made from critiquing capitalism when the critique may lead you to lose your job or to go to prison. So a new form of critique begins, which contorts critique of power so as to direct criticism not to the barbarous and sick US administration (or to the impossibly right wing UK Labour Party), but at other critics who ostensibly haven’t understood the nuances of power. Hilarious yet tragic gotcha moments aim critique not at the fascists in power, but at anyone but them. The message: “Why critique the hangman (or the ICE agent) and not the worker who spun their blessed cotton socks?”.

There are a few possible outcomes to this situation, and I won’t play clairvoyant. One outcome involves the brave people who still stick their heads above the proverbial parapet being silenced by brutal means. Those who instead decided to play dead can continue talking like sock puppets for techno-totalitarianism, with the bizarre image that conjures. However hard they try to conceal it, their faces and their frankly odd takes betray the pain and embarrassment their compromised position entails.

The past is fucking prologue.1

— Roger Stone

Machiavellian political consultant Roger Stone’s political “rules” and the “Twelve Rules for Life” set out by conservative self-help salesman Jordan Peterson have a similar tenor. They both betray a knowing surety that while nostalgia should always guide the choices and norms of the world, it should be a nostalgia that suits only the protagonist of what Joseph Campbell called the ‘hero’s journey’.2

For the Petersonian hero, the past is surely a prologue. It all leads up to the moment of departure, the epic quest, and the triumphant return. Just as Stone’s adage (taken from a book simply called Stone’s Rules3) points to the ease with which political fortunes can be turned around, and past mistakes erased, Peterson’s mythos asks us to consider only one viewpoint on the world: our own. Their philosophies are both born of a ruthless social Darwinism that privileges the idea of autocratic, great (male) figures. This is a basic misunderstanding of the cosmology of the ancient myths upon which Campbell theorized the archetypal “hero’s journey” was based. The mythic hero is not destined to break the chains of the past and re-configure the future through sheer force of will. Rather, he is a pawn of fate; a plaything of indifferent or capricious gods. The hero is a straw man, and the past is a settled fact. Prologues have weight, they fix the shape of the drama to come.

Why are stories important? This is a vital question in the current political and cultural landscape, as long overdue conversations about identity and representation begin to emerge from the political fringes (though not for the first time). This is a moment where historical narratives, our collective prologues, feel open to question. There is a revolutionary potential in movements like MeToo and Black Lives Matter that could reckon with the kinds of wildly inaccurate myth-telling our capitalist societies have indulged in for centuries. From narratives about the slave trade and the institutions it funded, to real engagement with the racial, gender, and class dynamics of policing and imprisonment, the need to interrogate our prologues has never been more urgent.

The fact this makes many people uncomfortable is understandable. Adam Curtis, the documentary filmmaker, has often explored the distance between cultural and historical truth in his work. In a 2021 interview, he speculated that the future “might be a moment when all the old stories that made sense of the world are collapsing,” asking whether the experiencing self might become privileged over collective narrative.4 Curtis, a liberal in the classical sense, seems to see a historical present where the questioning of imperial, colonial and capitalist narratives has created a vacuum. His conclusions are far from comforting. He continues:

… and then from somewhere that we can’t possibly imagine at the moment, someone will start to reassemble all those fragments in a completely new way — and out of that will come the new big story. That actually we might be living through a moment of almost complete freedom from meaning, which is why we are so terrified and anxious. It might be like that moment in the eye of a storm. Outside, the giant forces of history roar on — but in the eye it has gone quiet and we are just experiencing, but have no story to tell each other.

There remain very few coherent narratives on the left or mainstream of politics that can reassemble the fragments of history in a new way. The left has plenty of expertise in the fields of deconstruction, disruption, and networked protest. It encompasses many sophisticated community and volunteer networks tied to political activism, which have evolved to do what they see as necessary to mitigate the worsening disaster effects of apocalypse capitalism. The academic left, and its media, can deconstruct the “old big story” of capitalism in a million ways, but it nonetheless feels like the only “new big stories” are the empty promises of authoritarian populists and the crazy propagandistic conspiracy theories they sustain. This is what gives the current moment a particularly apocalyptic hue. In moments of paralysis and decline, fear controls the narrative. As the cultural critic Henry A. Giroux writes:

History as an act of dangerous memory is whitewashed, purged of utopian ideals and replaced by apocalyptic fantasies. These include narratives of decline, fear, insecurity, anxiety and visions of imminent danger, often expressed in the language of invasion, dangerous hordes, criminal and disease-infected others.5

The “dangerous memory” of nostalgia-powered corporate capitalism is that it has always been thus, that there can be no alternative. Apocalyptic visions underline the ideological position that deviation from capitalism would be too dangerous. The genuine left, or even the truly liberal center, have not held meaningful power in capitalism’s wealthiest nations for a long time, and so they struggle to dictate any counter-narrative beyond mitigation. The efforts of those engaged in professional left or liberal politics are too often diverted into projects that are reformist, and like politicians of all stripes, they too can be (and too often are) careerists and power-hungry parasites. Those engaged in revolutionary or community politics do what they can, but they are easily dismissed by state propaganda or repression; or in the case of infrastructure activists, co-opted by it through systems of grants, loans, and petty bureaucracy.

The powerful narratives of the right may be lies, and they may be horrific, but they offer a coherence to the false nostalgia that co-opts the capitalist imaginary. Conservative myths promise to return to the time when ‘capitalism worked’ and everyone had a ‘fair share’ of opportunity. This false meritocracy is the utopia of capitalist realism, at both ends of the political spectrum. The ‘change’ promised by generous and humane activism is an illusion of collective faith. The ‘change’ promised by right-wing demagogues is one of violent negation — an image of catharsis, restorative justice; even revenge. This is nominally undertaken in the service of meritocracy, but operates all too often as a defense of power structures with deep imperial or corporate roots.

Curtis says:

One of the things that is stopping that change is the failure of any group to actually describe an alternative and better kind of future… they remain trapped in a mood of total distrust, constantly imagining what is being done to them as weak, manipulable individuals, rather than imagining what they as strong people can do to change the world.

In his schema, all it would take to shape that narrative for real progressive change would be more idealism and enough collective will. His documentaries often tell a different tale, casting a cold eye on the history of state surveillance and social control. What if the truth is that capitalism’s omnipresence and inevitability have made us all “weak, manipulable individuals” and we are simply unable to recognize this? How much worse to recognize it, but be unable to do anything about it? What if the only way to wake up to that control was to admit its existence, to understand how deeply capitalism’s mechanistic, anti-life ideology controls us? Curtis talks of a “mood of inevitability” as if it could be countered with some sort of faith in the future, but then admits that such a future is radically unthinkable. Curtis the pessimist and Curtis the idealist often come into conflict in this way.

In his ‘New Year’s address’ of 2021, the revolutionary communist Bob Avakian proclaimed: “Let us dare to act to make a reality of what science reveals as possible: a radically different and far better world and future for humanity.”6 In placing the image of a better and different world in the hands of science, he arguably displays as little faith in humanity’s capacity for will and agency as Curtis seems to. This is at the heart of the philosopher John Gray’s argument that what we call ‘progress’ is a temporal illusion we experience due to our short lifespans; a kind of evolutionary confirmation bias. This is why he calls faith in science, reason or progress a legacy of Christian slave morality — a secular heresy. On the secular heresies of self-described ‘transhumanists’ he writes:

It seems feasible that over the coming century human nature will be scientifically remodelled. If so, it will be done haphazardly, as an upshot of struggles in the murky realm where organised crime, and the hidden parts of government vie for control. If the human species is re-engineered it will not be the result of humanity assuming godlike control of its destiny. It will be another twist in man’s fate.7

For Gray, “the good life is not found in dreams of progress, but in coping with tragic contingencies.” This describes the political activity of many, many good and well-intentioned people working to ameliorate the worst effects of capitalism upon their fellow human beings. If you ask anyone working on the frontlines of society’s poorest, most war-torn and dangerous regions whether a better world is possible, many would say it is. That faith in progress, and the possibility of change, obscures both the tragic fact that complicity in capitalism is practically inescapable. It also obscures the illusory quality of working towards a better world under such a system, whether through reform or emergency intervention. For their utopian ambitions to be realized, the problems they are there to solve or mitigate would have to disappear completely — an impossibility in a society that already expects volunteers to plug the gaps.

As Gray quite rightly points out, science won’t save us either — not by solving the problems posed by climate change, or by improving the human body to survive for longer. It’s unlikely science will even achieve the dreams of immortality fervently pursued by tech giants and CEOs. Techno-optimism is never balanced by sociological cynicism outside of science fiction. The basic lie of all utopian promises derived from technology is the bare fact that most advances happen during wartime. It takes extinction-level events to significantly change human culture. That’s the problem with putting your faith in nanotech and quantum computing. These are fin-de-siecle technologies and will most likely not be realized in any useful way until it is too late — and if they were, they would be monopolized by global elites, and so would not in any way solve the problems of wealth and resource distribution. Capitalism won’t be ‘fixed’ by technology — in all likelihood it will simply decline. What comes next is likely to be ugly.

We have the technology, but we also still have oligarchic hypercapitalism, so if the technological solutions that would bring about post-scarcity or a post-finance, post-capitalist economy existed (rather than being latent potentials, which is in itself arguable), they would either be suppressed, trademarked and ring-fenced, or in some way only made available to a rich minority. Anyone who has followed the initial utopian promise of blockchain technologies and their eventual co-option and eclipse by pyramid schemes such as cryptocurrency and NFTs will recognize this pattern. The societal and attitudinal changes needed to bring about post-scarcity are huge challenges that require more than simply having the extant tech lying around in order to solve them. The same is true of the techno-optimist’s wish to transcend mortality through cyborg modification, or the ‘upload’ of their personality into digital realms. This technology will not save humanity because it cannot even save the multi-billionaires funding it. Gray explains why:

Cyberspace is an artefact of physical objects — computers and the networked facilities they need — not an ontologically separate reality. If the material basis of cyberspace were destroyed or severely disrupted, any minds that had been uploaded would be snuffed out… Every technology requires a physical infrastructure in order to operate. But this infrastructure depends on social institutions, which are frequently subject to breakdown... For these believers in technological resurrection, American society was already immortal… Cyberspace is a projection of the human world, not a way out of it.

None of the promises transhumanism makes are based on a less unfair sharing-out of resources. If anything, transhumanists believe that such acts of transcendence are the purest form of capitalist commerce. After all, the benefits will be delivered by market research and investment. Why would the product of such a process — a transhuman society — be any different, let alone fairer, or more utopian? Any and all post-human projects conceived under capitalism will reproduce capitalist ideals, as Antonella Dibiase writes in her definition of ‘neurocapitalism’:

Without awareness and without struggles to create lines of flight opposed to neoliberalism, there is no guarantee that we will see the birth of a different ethic… even posthumanism, assuming that we reach it one day, will remain marked by the economic rationality which currently dominates.8

The same is true of all our efforts to transcend, whether by changing our physical appearance, our political affiliations, our habits, or our minds. Nothing that we can create or embody implies a particular future, a particular outcome that we can control or even influence. We are less able than we think to control the present, and the physicality with which we inhabit it. The present is a place where we are constantly surveilled and controlled, yet we remain convinced, at all levels of society, that rituals of performance can offer us an escape into an imagined future, a better place. There is no escape, not even to the fantasy of virtual realities, as Douglas Rushkoff writes:

This “out of sight, out of mind” externalization of poverty and poison doesn’t go away just because we’ve covered our eyes with VR goggles and immersed ourselves in an alternate reality. If anything, the longer we ignore the social, economic, and environmental repercussions, the more of a problem they become. This, in turn, motivates even more withdrawal, more isolationism and apocalyptic fantasy  —  and more desperately concocted technologies and business plans. The cycle feeds itself.9

There is no future to be had unless the present can be truly witnessed, but we have no desire to see. There is no ‘self’ for us, beyond the narcissistic individual self under hypercapitalism. Every piece of culture we produce is just a cracked mirror for our prejudices, our naive beliefs, and our illusions — and yet we are captivated by the reflections in the glass, even when we know that beyond our gaze, in our peripheral vision the world is crumbling, and the suffering of others continues. The saddest truth is that under such a system, even to engage with the poverty, suffering and abuse in the world without a clear-eyed knowledge that your efforts are in vain is to allow yourself to slip into a solipsistic fantasy where the past is mere prologue, and the future unwritten.

What if the first step to true freedom is to admit you have no control? What spaces does that open up for us in the imagination, towards John Gray’s conception of “the good life”? In confronting how radically powerless we truly are, perhaps we can begin to see the need to dismantle the apparatus of control — if only to improve the present, and only for a short while. Empathy gets lost in the future, and is easily forgotten. It must be practiced in the present. The stakes have never been higher, but the wager is similar to the one Jimmy Carter took in 1977. As the anthropologist Jason Hickel puts it: “Either we evolve into a future beyond capitalism, or we won’t have a future at all.”10

Science may drive and deliver progress in the kind of measurable, statistically-provable ways so beloved of neoliberal thinkers, but there are consequences. Progress is asymmetrical. The cost of civilization is measured in poisoned oceans, skeleton coasts and cornfield tundras. It leaks catastrophically, spewing out bubonic ice and rolling death smog. Progress is conflict expressed as heat death. It is counted in jetset haloes with permafrost price tags. Its face is the drowning of ancient homelands in anoxic water feedback loops. It walks in the footsteps of displaced populations. Progress is the poisonous miasma of social fate. Technologies sustain the illusion of progress by hiding the parts of reality they do not reach — those that cannot pay for technology, or which must be exploited so that we can have our laptops and mobile phones.

We tell ourselves that these technologies are tools, that we need them in order to produce the future. What does it mean to be ‘consumers’ if we really want to call ourselves ‘producers’? Progress, after all, is measured in the things we make, from medicines to industrial robots to artificial intelligences. It’s also measured in the energy we expend to bring such monstrosities into the world. It’s in the toxic runoff from our factories and the clouds of smog that rise from our vehicles. We leave the artifacts of our progress all around us, and quickly discard them to fester in trash heaps. How do we resolve these contradictions? In a 2021 conversation with the philosopher Leonardo Caffo, Slavoj Žižek returns to a proposition he first explored in 2010’s Living in the End Times:

What is required from us in this moment is, paradoxically, a kind of super-anthropocentrism: we should control nature, control our environment; we should allow for a reciprocal relationship to exist between the countryside and cities; we should use technology to stop desertification or the polluting of the seas. We are, once again, responsible for what is happening, and so we are also the solution.11

Some, like Žižek, see a kind of invidious double-bargain at play in the finality of the scientific intervention required to perhaps undo centuries of fatal production and consumption, and restore some kind of balance to the ecosystem of the planet. Others like John Gray consider ‘climate-hacking’ interventions like cloud-seeding, carbon capture, or other such science-fiction, moonshot projects as inherently flawed, or at least as prone to error and disastrous vulnerabilities as the project of transhumanism.

Maybe these two positions give us the contours of the dilemma. The solutions we seek to apply to climate collapse will have their own side effects, perhaps yet more disastrous than the wreckage progress has wrought so far. The idea that we could unite on a global scale, as Žižek says, and apply a single, technologically perfect solution or series of solutions to the problem still seems impossibly utopian. The idea that science will save us rests on the fallacy that we are producers, not consumers. In truth, both activities generate their own ruin. It’s an error to think the fruits of the resources we extract are borne out in the glorious light of progress; that what we make exceeds what we burn through, that it eclipses what we excrete. To that idealistic proposition, there can be only one response — look around.

Perhaps, as Natalie Wolchover writes, we are just “super-consumers who burn through enormous amounts of chemical energy, degrading it and increasing the entropy of the universe as we power the reactions in our cells.”12 It’s an image that should appeal to anyone steeped in the apocalyptic, city-smashing fantasies of superhero comics. Humanity as the herald of entropy, a plague of Galactus-like beings; eaters at the edge of conceivable reality, flattening and filling the entire universe with our cosmic excrement.

• The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future is available now from Revol Press.