Radio Anthropocene in 22 Hours

 You can stream it here. There's an interview with me, which I really enjoyed. Brilliant architect host. The collective of scholars and others they have assembled is inspiring and precious. 

This Is Still the Greatest

God wants sedition
God wants sex
God wants freedom
God wants semtex

I Talk about My Favorite Books

 On the nicely named Shelf Awareness. Each paragraph is a mini class on the book in question, really. I put a lot of my feelings into this. 

This Is Gonna Be HUGE

The Long Player Conversation: Timothy Morton and Denise Ferreira da Silvahttps://t.co/wHSccsYDtB pic.twitter.com/XV2q5pUYtW

— Timothy Morton (@the_eco_thought) October 17, 2021

Two Hours of Me + the Greatest DJ on the Planet

 Yes that's right, Rinse France recorded me and Edouard Isar (seriously, I mean it and I've been clubbing where Frankie Knuckles was the DJ). Half an hour ago this uploaded. I talked about everything, on the occasion of two books being published in French: Etre ecologique and La Pensée ecologique. You'll see. Please enjoy. 

Rinse France · Ed Isar invite Timothy Morton - 08 Octobre 2021

The BBC Are Rebroadcasting My Radio Show in Time for COP26 in Glasgow

 You can stream it here. 

Call and Contact Manchin and Sinema NOW

 We require massive outpouring of passion and rage in the direction of the two senators who are blocking the future. 

This Is Beautiful, Touching, Funny, Deeply Ecological--it's right

 If you haven't seen Over the Hedge yet...what on earth. 

I Love This Ad

 

This Is Good

 ...from my pal, George Monbiot. 

Every Trick in the Book

Dance is the default art. Everything is made of it. And I got almost all my eco ideas from being in the techno scene from 1988 to now, so listen up hahaha: 

If you haven't tried MDMA, this tune pretty much embodies the initial sensation--especially if you've taken slightly too much or you're taking some more slightly too soon  :)))))

I was at all the places in London in the late 80s and early 90s where everyone like Goldie and Bukem showed up and invented drum and bass. Makoto is doing this here, but also, he's pulling every trick I've ever heard of to make A Good Dance Tune in any techno format whatsoever. And he's gone and bloody used them in exactly the right amounts, in exactly the right places. To wit, in no particular order:

Double time (or even triple). You can dance to this very slow. Nothing like dancing slow motion in a welter. 

In particular, that delicious moment at which the bassline appears to be suspended above the tune, like bells, before we dive back in. That's just too confident, isn't it haha

The introduction of a second riff that is slower than the first one, and inverts. 

The sicky, detuned modulation down a tone for four bars, then back up. Serious MDMA imitation thing there. House music hugely favors bitonality, often by accident, for this reason. 

The sicky in general main tune on whatever non-percussive keyboard sound that is. Modulated. Too much bliss, you're about to throw up unless you figure out a way to channel it out of your body. 

The use of that "I'm turning a key in a clockwork toy, I'm winding this up and soon..."

The initial sinister "alert, alert, something is coming..." sound. Warning: Emergency Exit. You Will Activate Pleasure Alarm. 

The gentle versus brutal. The chords versus the rhythm. 

That, coupled with the "this record is malfunctioning, a riff is stuck" on the high Rhodes piano-like minor third oscillation. 

Alarms are always always good. I remember outside Trip in central London, the police turned on the sirens and we just danced to them. 

The way the voice is a siren, or either, or neither. And the way in the end it's gated to the cymbals. 

The This is just a bouncy piano riff or is it the Mothership descending above Devil's Tower. 

The major/minor oscillation, the feeling of This is demonic intense...or is this beatific intense, that ambiguity. 

The suspension, the fact that in general the rocking back and forth doesn't resolve ever, and the endless pedal points, not just one but maybe three at times, in the treble, and the reinforced bass. 

The one and only sudden stop of the brutal drums. 

The reverb: on the one hand, we're in a very small room; on the other hand, we have just pushed out of orbit and look, there's the hyperspace tunnel opening. 

Makoto's colleague Mr. Wheeler, who is said to be collaborating, but you can't hear him sing or speak, you only hear his voice going "huh" in the way you do when you're slightly impressed by something slightly unexpected, "curioser and curioser" as Alice would say, this "huh" being placed almost inaudibly during gigantic tsunamis of tune. Thus imparting a feeling of "This gentleman is so deeply interwoven in the music that he doesn't need to stick his ego out, he's got a nerdy trip master intellectual vibe that is frankly very sexy because he is in fact In Charge, but of what? Just the 'record and observe' kind that you are reduced to when you're sliding down a wormhole at superluminal speeds." "Fancy that, this is a fucking belter masterpiece." The dandy approach. It's the end of the world but I'm going to be so polite and wear the best suit. James Bond. 

Did I miss anything out LOLOL

Watch Laurie Anderson doing her incredible thing

I helped her out with the second one of these.  

Primitive Accumulation at the Supermarket

 Primitive Accumulation. It's Marx's term for colonialism, whereby capitalism accumulates gigantic piles of wealth via slavery and other forms of colonialist violence. 

Cut to this Monday, in the supermarket, with a tropical storm rolling in. 

White men, young men, whom I never ever see in the supermarket (I got lots of times a day), piling their shopping carts full of almost random stuff. Depriving others. 

It's primitive accumulation, still in effect. 

When white men panic they seem to go straight to pure plunder. 

Register Here for My Lecture Today (1.5 hours time)

 For Aarhus University. 

Register Here for Amitav Ghosh Lecture

 Here at Rice today, Amitav Ghosh will be wondering why on earth there aren't more humanist scholars working on global warming. He loves my stuff. You can register here for the zoom. 

Spacecraft Number 1 in Astronautics and Aeronautics

 haha! 

Support This Amazing Film

 Clem Goldberg is a genius friend of mine and you should totally and utterly support this project. Look. How can you not support something to do with human-mushroom symbiosis! 

A Fascist Poem about Fascism

 ...sort of accidentally. Eliot was dreaming of a fascist solution to this hollowness. Unfortunately (have you read Hannah Arendt? Why not!), the hollowness is a consequence of it. The nihilism. The longing for a big bang. Whole poem here. 

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when 5

We whisper together

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass

Or rats' feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar 10

Shape without form shade without colour, 

Paralyzed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes to death's other Kingdom 

Remember us--if at all-- not as lost 15

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men

The stuffed men.

...

This is the way the way the world ends 95

This is the way the way the world ends 

This is the way the way the world ends 

Not with a bang but a whimper.

Space Team Electra

 Blue Oyster Cult's producer and songwriter Sandy Pearlman said "This is the most important band in the USA," which is why he decided to produce them. If you haven't, please do: 

"The Kindness Project"

 Head over to my Patreon to hear me giving the new psychological fad of researching kindness a stiff talking-to, on behalf of abused people everywhere. 

Hypothesis

 Why is gravity so weak over the tiny distances in which the other forces are really really powerful? Yet extremely powerful over larger distances? 

Because there is only one graviton. 

Book of Architecture Essays

 It looks like I'm going to be publishing a collection of my essays on architecture. You heard it here first! There are perhaps a surprising number of them, going way back to the later 2000s. I'm very happy to be doing that as I'm teaching a bit at groovy Sci-Arc heading up a program called Synthetic Landscapes. (Our slogan: STOP MAKING SELFIES OUT OF NONHUMAN BEINGS.)

Hyperobjects in Buddhist Door

 I'm touched that they talked about my work. 

Reaction Reaction Reaction: It Was Too Progressive for the Guardian so I'm Posting It Here Instead, Part 3

(Scroll down for Parts 1 and 2) 

9/11 is when most Americans suddenly realized that there was an outside. They really didn’t know. Actual thing said by my ex-mother in law, in 2006, on visiting London: “Wow, you have traffic lights too.” Totally sincerely. She meant it. It wasn’t a joke. She was genuinely amazed. She lived in Colorado. On September 11, 2001 the outside came crashing into two skyscrapers and Americans woke up from some of the dream, that had become strangely and quite wonderfully fin de siècle-ish under Clinton, and plunged into another one, orchestrated by Al Qaeda, whose explicit aim was to make America into a fascist country. I was so spooked by how quickly they came up with a name for an event which, in the memorable words of Fredric Jameson one week later in the London Review of Books, “hasn’t really happened yet.” A name that Al Qaeda must have wet themselves with delight at—the emergency call number they deliberately chose as the date for the attack on the Twin Towers. State of emergency. Habeas corpus suspended. I was on a green card and technically could’ve been rounded up without bail. They probably still can do that to people. See, it’s the 1790s. 

I liked the Twin Towers. They were built when computers were really starting, when Derrida talked about them in the introduction to Of Grammatology. I thought the Twin Towers were a joke in binary. They looked so starkly like number ones. In binary, 11 means 3. Where is the third tower? 

I arrived in the USA in 1992. America was like a marshmallow or a hamburger. So soft. So comfy. The nukes protected the marshmallow, or something. The USSR was gone. You could walk right to the gate to wait for your loved one. The idea that past security was No Man’s Land, which was legally correct, was not civil-society correct. At Heathrow Terminal 4 the United guy would interrogate you for ages, because of the IRA. But in America flying around from city to city on said United, you could trust your girlfriend to be waiting for you at the gate. “Keep me safe” is a thing children say to their parents. George Bush “kept us safe.” He said it over and over, because he hadn’t. 

Bin Laden was some rich dude from Saudi, “in construction” as they say, like my girlfriend’s brother, or Donald Trump. It means corruptly connected to everyone and anyone. Bin Laden was in the Sudan. My girlfriend spoke Pashto and was negotiating with the Taliban and etc about that pipe. It was 1998. No one knows that, but I’m writing it here out of sheer frustration. Bin Laden didn’t just appear like some wizard played by Christopher Lee in a Tolkien film. Like some demonic version of Christ. How he was portrayed in the media. The Taliban were never a terrorist organization. The whole thing was shit. 

The BBC was threatened with extinction when they questioned the bombing of Afghanistan. “Dresden-style” was the phrase one journalist used. The Labour Party, excited to win over thugs who would eventually vote for Brexit, and weirdly happy to be in charge in a moment when war might be on the cards, were outraged. I think the current corporate structure of the BBC can be traced to that moment. The compromise they made was, they were able to criticize Iraq, what a relief, but don’t lay a finger on Afghanistan. It’s all I can come up with to explain the outrageous failure of thought this last week. Please will someone start thinking, in public. Please, enough of the reacting. You have no idea how quickly the American Taliban will get back in power if this carries on. 

Reaction Reaction Reaction: It Was Too Progressive for the Guardian so I'm Posting It Here Instead, Part 2

(This continues the essay I started here) 

 I made a podcast about it. I never stop listening to the BBC, not ever. But I just can’t, not right now. So I ranted on to my followers. Here is a true story, which I told on my podcast. My girlfriend in the later 1990s was Afghani and she joined the CIA. Before that she had been in A&R in the music business, managing Henry Rollins, of all people, and several others. Such I guess are the vagaries of life. But yeah, there came this point at which she got her badge and security clearance and walked into the CIA and started to not tell me everything about her day. 

The CIA were negotiating with Bin Laden since at least 1998. He wasn’t some kind of Saruman in a cave, weird how that movie came out right after 9/11 and Saruman was the spitting image (Lord of the Rings). He was in Sudan, mostly, and was a well-heeled Saudi. He had a past. He didn’t just materialize. He was as we know a CIA asset himself, from the days of the Soviet occupation. 

The CIA was trying to help Unocal, a Californian oil corporation, which Al Gore had a huge stake in. Unocal wanted to put an oil pipe under the Caspian Sea. This required negotiating with everyone in Afghanistan. 9/11 happened because someone got pissed off, maybe they asked for too much money and the CIA said no, I have no idea. 

It was all funded by heroin—the Taliban, the warlords, everyone. Afghanistan was basically like Tudor England or just before that. Just a bunch of insanely violent men ripping people apart, people tied between tanks that reversed away from one another, so I heard. Swap the sheep for opium and you have the same thing, primitive accumulation plus the Tower of London or the Taliban, whichever. 

My girlfriend would call me about how many poppies there were over there. How many pipes they all smoked. Just decriminalize heroin. It’s better than drone strikes. The largest number of solar panels on the planet are owned by the Taliban to grow opium poppies. Papaver somniferum. We’ve been asleep at the wheel. “Just go shopping, relax, we will keep you safe.” That was the George Bush message, almost word for word. Take another Vicodin, I’ll make it great for you, again. That was the Trump version. Vicodin is an opioid. It turns into morphine in your body. Morphine is one of the most powerful active ingredient of opium. Heroin is the active ingredient of morphine. Also it’s the first brand name Bayer came up with, before they came up with Aspirin. 

It’s all about consumerism. It’s all about the Romantic period. It’s all about…De Quincey. 

No one is talking about George Bush. No one. And Obama’s main sin was, he should’ve held very public trials for all those torturers. And started a truth and reconciliation process. What a tragedy. Put a foot wrong, and you’re dead. That’s the horror of being Black in the USA. Of course he caved to the generals and did the “surge.” 

I’m saying “of course” a lot. I can hear my D.Phil. supervisor telling me not to. Of course he would. 

All Art Is Ecological Is Out and It's a Bestseller

 My first one I think! I like the cover. 

Reaction Reaction Reaction: It Was Too Progressive for the Guardian so I'm Posting It Here Instead, Part 1

 I'm writing a book with Nicholas Royle, it's such an interesting project. And this is my latest installment for it. Nick thought it was so good that I should send it to the Guardian. But that was a few days ago when everyone in the media was going neocon insane. Probably even the Guardian. I didn't dare to look, ,as you will see. So a few days have gone by, and I'm pretty sure they still can't quite print it. So I'm putting it here instead. It's a few pages long so I'll post it in installments. 

Reaction Reaction Reaction 

Timothy Morton

I can’t listen to the radio. The Khyber Pass-ness of the way the BBC in particular is handling the exit from Afghanistan, the beyond fatuous editorials of John Soper, worst Washington correspondent ever. The Facebook and Twitter-initiated age of sensibility in which exactly the right opinion must be jumped to immediately. As if without mediation. I often feel we’ve been teetering on the edge of the Romantic period for two hundred and thirty years, since 1790 we’ve been teetering, and social media—which appeared just after 9/11 and appears to have installed at its heart that fact as an inviolable basis for its existence, isn’t helping, not at all. 

People do die, hit by drone strikes at a wedding or falling off planes. By accident or on purpose, that’s the choice right now. 

The media has loads of neocons on, the people who took us into Afghanistan. I think it’s to distract from the more serious issue—forgive my Wildean humor here—of how offended everyone is by images on their screens. 

The reactive culture of sensibility meets the reactionary politics of Dick Cheney. Reactionary neocon responses to the withdrawal are just exactly that—reactive. They take 9/11 and Afghanistan as givens. And, I now realize, they always were. All that invading and bombing and imposing democracy on people looked for all the world like the acting-est actions ever. But they weren’t. 9/11 happened, then came the reaction. 

The idea of a just war that at least was a feminist way of bombing the crap out of people, sustaining the illusion of British imperialism one more time, seems particularly acute on the BBC. I simply won’t listen. At least NPR is saying, wait. Give it some time. 

My mum told me that when my grandfather went into Berlin, my communist grandfather, he was one of the first in Berlin, “liberating it” in 1945, many Germans behaved exactly like the Afghanis now. Desperately clinging, begging to be taken out of Germany. Of course. Everyone’s relative or neighbour is some kind of Nazi. Everyone’s brother is in or supports the Taliban. Of course everyone is terrified. Of course. There’s no way to get this right. I’m reminded of when I left ____. There was a moment when I actually had to physically leave. Things had been sort of kind of okay, but this was a moment that could not be okay. I remember saying, “I can’t make this part better for you, I can’t.” Couldn’t make it better for myself either. I had to make myself do it. It was right to do it. It felt so wrong. It was right. She tackled me to the ground. She broke my glasses. I had to keep on and on leaving. It took months. But it all started one night when I just…left. I went to stay at my new address, with a suitcase. It was either that or die or go insane, or both. 

I actually admire Biden. He did a thing, and stuck by it. What to do, pull people out weeks ago and then the same things happen, only weeks ago. There’s no good time to do this. But it’s right. The whole thing was a total lie. Of course it’s going to seem wrong. My grandfather leaving Germans to die in Berlin. The instant opinionating is part of the violence. Of course the guy who exposes that it was a total lie is going to get in terrible trouble. 

Three Thousand

 Hyperobjects now has over 3000 thousand scholarly citations. It's the first of my books to do so! A few months ago, it crept past Ecology without Nature, which now has 2923 scholarly citations. It's been translated into four languages: Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian. 

This Really Is Nice

 The hour I spent with Verso, talking about my work: 

French Being Ecological

 ...it's coming in October! 

Italian Dark Ecology

 Isn't that a beautiful cover? 

Lecture in Australia Next Week

 ...it's a big deal because city planners will be there, city planners and government types. And the morning I'm doing it is in part based on this statement by Aboriginal tribes in Victoria. I'll find out if others can watch. 

French Realist Magic

 You can download it here. 

Spanish Being Ecological

It was just published and here is a piece about it in a pop magazine...

Inertia

 ...I have these thoughts about gravity and time and so on. 

Doesn't the fact that things move at all weird you out, at all? The thing we just take for granted? I mean we explain things in terms of subatomic particles, such as electrons. But we never explain simple mechanical motion. I'm not talking about strange quantum vibrations. I'm talking about, how come there can even be the illusion of mechanical motion, if it is indeed an illusion? And so on. 

We even explain mass using the Higgs boson, but not this. I'm talking about things moving in space and the feeling of time passing, yeah that feeling. There's a physicist at Imperial College, I don't recall her name, she's also obsessed with that. She thinks that we shouldn't just explain away the regular every day taken for granted feel of time passing. 

I like that because it's really Heideggerian. Examine the most incredibly obvious seeming thing in the room, the elephant. 

So let's talk about a basic basic fact of movement called inertia, the fact that things keep on moving. 

In short, when something is moving through outer space and it just keeps moving until it's stopped. What is that, actually. What the fuck is it. 

So I'm crowdsourcing this idea because I think it's quite strange. There are lots of parts of it, but here's one. 

In a supercooled fluid, the electrons are all over the place, and it's a superconductor. 

If there are gravitons then spacetime is a supercooled fluid, mostly ("the vacuum of space"--it isn't one really). The gravitons are all over the place. So things can slip and slide easily until something stops them. 

Movement in a vacuum is pretty much because spacetime near to its ground state is superconductive.

Discuss. 

(There's a whole bunch of these speculations, all related, and I'm going to start sharing them here, because I don't know how else to talk to physicists.) 

No Fly

 I shan't be flying to give lectures and etc etc anymore. 

It's the 2020s, and as I observed on Twitter, it's time to get extremely real. 

Italian Dark Ecology Came Out Today and Here's Something from It

 I'm very happy with how the press has handled this book. 

I Think You Will Enjoy This New Yorker Piece about Me

 Morgan is a brilliant writer--you'll see what I mean at once. Something very very actually "me" was captured here. 

Want to Sponsor My Friend?

 My dear dear friend Carlyle. Grief counselor, hospice chaplain, so much more. He's walking for water and it would be great if you supported him. The organization was started by his mentor Sobonfu Some. 

Dublab Desert Island Discs (You Can Listen Now!)

 ...this was such a good thing to do. An hour and a half of talk and lots of music as well. If you've ever heard Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4 you will have heard something like the format here. But this was so much more in depth. Really nice to hear afterwards for me. 

Clap for Carers

 I was yet again getting angry at the leaf blower in my street and very sad for the poor worker who had to use it. I could smell the fumes two hundred feet away. 

They were exploiting him the Sunday before a holiday. Must keep those driveways free of bits! 

Then I thought oh, we exploit nonhumans every Sunday. 

Then I thought oh, most nature writing is basically Clap for Carers. 

Yeah? 

YES: Report this News at Planet Scale

 Great piece in the New York Times, that finally makes all the eco actions not look like piecemeal, weird, unique events but aggregates them all into one thing. 

This is exactly how this news should be reported. Black Lives Matter and MeToo issues should be reported like this too. 

All three are something new: something as big or bigger than global corporations and religion. 

Nice Interview

 For those of you who didn't hear it, it will be archived soon. It was a sort of "Desert Island Discs" one if you have ever heard that show on BBC Radio 4. I liked doing it very much. 

Recombinant

 I've realized that I haven't written much if anything of my many coronavirus thoughts here. So here's part one of me making up for that. 

When I got the vaccine, I had a lot of side effects. I felt feverish, that was the main one. When I checked my temperature, it was totally normal. Yet I felt as if I had a virus! What was happening? 

By the way, if you have a fever, and this is me speaking as someone from four generations of atheists whose mum's friend was a doctor, the thing to do is not, I repeat not, to wrap yourself in blankets. That will only drive your temperature up. My brother was once hospitalized because he had all these hot showers and blankets and drove his temperature up to 105! 

It sounds stupid, until you try it, but cool things. Take off that blanket. Soothe your wrists with a cloth soaked in cold water. Your wrists have prominent veins. The cool water will cool your blood. Cool cloth on your forehead and upper arms too. It works! 

So I had this side effect and I got thinking about recombinant RNA. Basically it's one level below a normal vaccine. That kind of thing is bits of dead virus. This is stuff that's telling your RNA to make the "vaccine" as it were. So it's causing a very very intimate part of you to do some different work. 

So it feels like you have a virus. 

Israel-Palestine Podcast

 I've made episode 31 all about it. Join us and donate to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. 

New Podcast Episode

You'll find it if you go to my Patreon page. I hope you like it. Right now we're donating $850 a month to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. To give you an idea of how the site has been growing, that figure was $300 in December. 

Vsauce Says Hyperobject

 I don't quite know who YouTubers are. Of course I do, but not like my kids do. So I'm not sure quite why they got so excited about this chap talking about my book about four minutes in. But he does appear to have about 17 million followers and this got about 2 million hits when I saw it just now. 

The word hyperobject is great I think, because it makes you feel like a cool scientist. And we need more people feeling that way. 

All Art Is Ecological Final Cover

 Look look! This is the first book that acknowledges my non-binary-ness! 

My Grandfather, My Role Model

 This is a great website about one of the most important political actions in the UK in the early twentieth century, the Cable Street riots. My grandfather, a communist who is my role model, was part of it and talked Marxism on a soap box! They used marbles to deter police horses and they won! I mean the Jews, Communists and anarchists. 

This is the real reason Britain didn't become fascist. And this is the level you have to go to--I use the present tense for a reason. 

My children are now proudly learning about their ancestor... 

George (my grandfather) refused to go on the boat with the other officers to the front (North Africa in his case). He went with the privates. 

The officers' ship was sunk by a U-Boat. 

You are reading this because my grandfather was a communist. 

So, To Recap

 These are the books I'm publishing this year: 

Hyposubjects

All Art Is Ecological

Spacecraft 

...in that order. 

But wait, there's more. I don't know how fast they can do this, but it's quite a short book: 

The Stuff of Life

I'm writing it now. Will be done by June at the latest. 

It's everything you always wanted to know about Tim Morton, without having thought to ask London Underground stations and concealer sticks. 

Very Interesting Interview Last Week

 ...with the director of An Inconvenient Truth (the Al Gore global warming film). Also of ER and NYPD Blue! It was long! As I learn more about his new project I will let you know what is happening. 

When I say long, I mean it was one and a half hours! That's intense...We got to a number of very deep and painful topics. 

I'm Still Mad at Jared Diamond

 ...if you recall, last week he was on a highly propagandistic (worse in a way because this appears acephalic, automated, no one that smart is in charge) radio news show on the BBC. He said that "Anyone who predicted what coronavirus would do last year was lying," which in context gives the British government an out for their terrible policies, and the BBC an out for their terribly damaging both-sidesism: "But what about getting back to work?" "It's so damaging for children to not be in school." "Why can't we have small groups of carol singers at Christmas?" It went on and on and on. 

Science makes predictions. That's what science does. I was arguing that a couple of days ago. Einstein predicted gravity waves. It turns out his prediction was correct and the waveform is the same as he predicted. 

I'm going to go one level deeper here and say science just is prediction. It's the hallmark of science, not a spin-off. It's not that good theories are predictive it is that all scientific facts are predictions. 

Sodium chloride will dissolve when you put it in water. That is a prediction. It keeps happening over and over and over, confirming the prediction. That's how scientific facts work. 

It goes back to Hume: when you say "This billiard ball will hit that billiard ball" you're not having a premonition. Maybe it won't. You can never be sure. You're making a prediction. That's the basis of modern science. Truth is statistical. Not just quantum theory truth, but it's a great example. Every few zillion times your finger will actually go through the wall. 

We rely on scientists to predict things. That's why we pay them and value them. That's exactly why. Because science just is the art of predicting things in as accurate a way as possible. 

Thirty seconds of Diamond talking on that show, on the occasion of the anniversary of the first UK lockdown, has done enormous damage to people's concept of science and their sense of its social role, and their beliefs about the virus. 

New Podcast Marking the Start of the Chauvin Trial

 Join us today and contribute to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund! 

https://www.patreon.com/timothymorton?fan_landing=true

Captain Grief

 I was just interviewed by the creator of An Inconvenient Truth, ER and NYPD Blue. Very intense and fascinating interview. He's creating a project do with our ecological age, another one I mean. 

Where we landed in the interview was thinking about grief. I have been learning a lot more how to grieve throughout 2020. And with coronavirus killing and debilitating and destroying so much, people seem ready for this gigantic life-scale emotion that you can't get on top of, that gets on top of you--which is great, and humbling. 

I'm writing a chapter about it directly in a new book, The Stuff of Life, which you'll hear about a bit more as time goes by. 

In early 2020 I started to feel a lot more directly what I talk about all the time--geotrauma, a newly recognized kind of trauma brought on by global heating and mass extinction. And I started talking about it with  my new friend Caroline Hickman, co-creator of the Climate Therapy Alliance which has worked with Extinction Rebellion Youth and Greta Thunberg. 

And I have been going through a lot of grief--joy and pain and laughing and crying--connected to finding out a whole lot about my gender. 

And my dad died and my lizard died. I've been in such a tunnel since about mid-2018, and if you've been on here for a while, you can see from the way my attending to this blog just started to plummet. 

I was thinking, one reason why Biden is truly effective is, he is Captain Grief. Grief wraps fear, like paper wraps stone. We ended up defeating T**** in part through the political power of grief. 

Comedy includes all the emotions without deleting them. Which also grief does. An interesting loop there. Grief and comedy are phenomenologically like nice healthy habitats where different species of feeling and thought aren't deleting one another. 

Being the most holistic of all emotions, grief is very very good for thinking a holistic aka socialist politics. 

Don't you think? 

Where My Mind Is At

I got this email today, and I think my reply to it might be helpful for you to see where my mind is at. 

Oh, you will also see that the editor is remarking on my non-binary gender identity, so here I am remarking on it officially in my blog. Yes it's true! 

_____

We're publishing an upcoming gloss on and transformative artwork about Hyperobjects/Hyperobjects and a "stubbornly dogmatic" Marxist response to the same. We'd love to know what pronouns you'd prefer in the piece: your Twitter says "she/him," but we're not sure whether that means people should alternate, pick one and stick to it, or use "she" in subject position and "him" in object position. 

*****

Hello—that’s great. When I was writing Hyperobjects, I was abstaining a bit from using words like “socialism” (I am a communist) because sometimes people have strange reactions to it. I was instead trying to give people some of what I take to be the socialist structure of feeling (if I can use Raymond Williama’s term—I’ve been theorizing it recently). 

I was at the time taking very seriously Fredric Jameson’s and Slavoj Zizek’s injunctions for us to do some cognitive mapping of the space in which we find ourselves, before we get on with figuring out exactly how to proceed. 

Since there is very little time left now, for all kinds of reasons, I’m being much more up front about socialism, which I take to be the only way to work realistically with what we have going on in the world. It’s a very strong contrast really between continuing the past, not just in terms of continuing neoliberal capitalism, but the fact that capitalism as such is based on the past because it is in essence algorithmic—or basing our world on the future, aka creativity, aka socialism. 

I was a lot more up front about all this in Humankind, my Verso book, and now I’m trying various ways to be even more direct. 

I regard BLM and MeToo as planet scale collective awareness and action, arriving just in time to work with the crises we have at hand. I regard ending white supremacy and patriarchy as foundational to any socialist project. 

If you could please note that I have started a Patreon podcast series in which I am very directly addressing these issues? All donations go to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. See the link below (and please use it in your description of me). 

And you can use “they.” Thank you for asking. 

PS: The other thing I would very much like you to do is to mention the sequel to this book. It’s a free pdf and it’s called Hyposubjects. It was written by me and my friend the anthropologist Dominic Boyer. He’s a Hegelian Marxist and I’m an OOO Marxist so we thought, instead of squabbling, let’s combine forces. 

You can find it here: 

http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/

It’s very short and it’s been getting a lot of attention recently, it just came out last week. I’m cc’ing Dominic as I’m sure he would be interested in what you’re doing here. The age of the hyperobject is the age of the hyposubject—you’ll see. 

Jared Diamond, You Are Officially DONE

 First you even consented to being on British Pravda aka the BBC, as a propaganda stooge, without realizing it. Or maybe you did. You went on PM, one of the more stupid BBC Radio 4 news shows. A show on which Megyn Kelly had appeared, defending the indefensible, the speech by the ex-President that even made Stephen Colbert weep, genuinely actually weep, the next day, because he saw it for what is was, a coup attempt. You went on that show, two nights ago. 

Then you served their purposes by saying "If anyone predicted that the coronavirus wouldn't be over until July 2021, they were lying." In fact you said if anyone made any predictions, they would be lying. 

PREDICTING IS WHAT SCIENTISTS DO. 

A while back lol Einstein predicted the shape of gravity waves. Then in 2015 they were discovered. They had the waveform Einstein predicted. That is what a scientist does. They predict stuff. 

We want them to. We need them to. We need not to have politicians spouting crap about get back to the plantation of neoliberalism, and we need journalists to pay attention and not go on and on and on about why can't we have Christmas. 

I predicted the coronavirus would last at least until July 2021. Look at my Twitter feed for last year. 

Every epidemiologist said, between one and four years. 

I'm never taking you seriously ever again Diamond. You've just spoken utter nonsense and you've been used as a pawn in the acephalic stupidity that is the BBC propaganda machine. 

PS: How can a prediction be a lie? Like, at all? It confounds logic. 

The Radical Experimental Form of Hyposubjects

 As you will see, and I hope enjoy, Dominic and I wrote this book in a very interesting style. 

My very favorite writer of all time is Virginia Woolf and one thing I love about her is that she lets streams of consciousness bleed into each other. 

So we interviewed one another, transcribed what we said...in such a way that there is never a dramatic script with a dramatic personae...there is no 

DOMINIC: 

TIM: 

...stuff at all. It's all "I...but I...and I..." like "I love ice cream. I hate ice cream. I am indifferent to ice cream, really. I totally agree. I don't agree at all."

We thought this radical experimental style embodied the main topic of the book, which is subscendence. You may have read about this already in Humankind. But we were writing this book before I wrote that one! This is the prequel. It stands in relation to Humankind as Obscured by Clouds stands in relation to The Dark Side the Moon. Only we published this afterwards, mostly on the heels of Black Lives Matter. 

I love Obscured by Clouds. The improvisational feel. The short songs that suggest vastness. Nick Mason really loves it too. 

Hyposubjects Is Out!

 At last, Dominic Boyer and I have published our book. You can download it (for free), or you can buy it. 

As you might be able to tell, it's the sequel to Hyperobjects. 

Past Talks Updating

 ...I promise I'm going to get on it soon! It's been ages. 

Penguin Green Ideas

 "Over the past 75 years, a new canon has emerged. As life on Earth has become irrevocably altered by humans, visionary thinkers around the world have raised their voices to defend the planet, and affirm our place at the heart of its restoration. Their words have endured through the decades, becoming the classics of a movement.

 

Here, in twenty short books, Penguin Classics brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth. From art, literature, food and gardening, to technology, economics, politics and ethics, each one deepens our sense of our place in nature; each is a seed from which a bold activism can grow. Together, they show the richness of environmental thought, and point the way to a fairer, saner, greener world."

Very Surprised to Find This Out

 They never told me! But I'm in the Norton Anthology of Theory! I'd been boycotting it for years, because they had nothing in there on ecological criticism. They wrote to me about it about six years ago and I never heard back. Didn't get a desk copy! 

Anyway, here's the citation if you're interested: 

“Introduction: Critical Thinking” (from The Ecological Thought), in Vincent Leitch et al., eds., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism (Norton, 2018), 2619–2630. 

Event with Laurie Anderson

 Please register for it, it's free and it's going to be quite a performance. Laurie (my friend!) is hugely adept at masks on Zoom, it's going to be amazing. I'll be helping her out during the performance. 

New Podcast on the Subatomic Structure of Fascism

 I just made it! And you'll find over 8 hours of podcasts if you join over 200 of us donating money to the NAACP lawsuit against the ex-President, his lawyer and two fascist organizations for the fascist coup of January 6! What's not to like?!

Also in this episode, if you're interested, there's an outline of my theory of time and some thoughts on the Anthropocene. 

Mission Statement

 Because of the weather in Houston it wasn't possible for me to prepare for my stint at the wonderful Eyebeam. Hopefully I can be present there soon but I did send them this mission statement: 

interview with the director of Gunda

 I'm very proud of this. It's a beautiful film about, mostly, a pig. 

Docs in Orbit Podcast · Gunda with Victor Kossakovsky