Automating the Master–Slave Template, Again

From Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back

Like Satan, an algorithm is a servant that carries out your commands...perfectly (be careful what you wish for). Think about plantations. They're attempts to force human beings to carry out other human beings' commands perfectly. A silicon wafer is a plantation for electrons. 

So many other links but that's one huge main one.

...I used to live in Davis, CA. It was a gigantic factory, made of columns and rows and columns and rows of fruit trees and almond trees and etc, stretching as far as the eye could see. Machine-like in its precision. The Great Central Valley is so flat you can see it from space, and they use lasers to guide the irrigation channels. Workers and enslaved people also treated with this kind of profit maximizing precision aka violence.

Next step: all the dualisms that plague us, subject-object, human-animal, person-machine, masculine-feminine...are possible because of the master-slave template of Mesopotamian-style societies with a certain agricultural logistics running in the background. 

The fantasy of AI is that its personhood will be "greater than the hum of its parts" (as Daniel Dennett put it). 

This is precisely the problem. We are inventing the wheel of the master-slave duality, and hardwiring it into powerful machines made of silicon and plastics and metals, and robot dogs. Dogs have always been trained as slaves.

Ozymandias Hyperobject

 What fun. Let's all have a jolly old flirt with fascism shall we? Italy, Israel, USA, UK, Russia. Anyone else want to join in? 

This is how we turn Earth into lone and level sands stretching far away. Literally. 

A thousand Ozymandias statues, proclaiming how "great" they made their nation. 

The only thing we can logically do is COOPERATE. We are facing a planet-scale problem. You think global warming gives a shit about your precvious national boundaries?

It used to be obvious with pollution. I remember Chernobyl. "Radiation doesn't care about national b boundaries" was how ecocriticism said it at the time. 

But ecocriticism wasn't loud enough. And ecocriticism was subtweeting "theory" aka flirting with symbolic fascism lite by using words like "dwell." And ecocriticism was positioning itself as "ecology is neither left nor right." 

So ecocriticism was about as useful as a chocolate teapot for addressing the real issue at hand, which we all knew about since the mid-1950s (and before if we'd really been paying attention): global warming. 

Time to stop kicking this fascist ball around and do what you were always going to have to do anyway: COOPERATE. 

This is where Shelley, who stood up to the institutional bullying at Eton at age thirteen aka nailed it young and was ridiculously brave to the point of foolhardy, really really comes in handy: 

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

How Wham! Made Us Ecstatic

My Jamaican stepdad Maurice was a reason why the 1990s did not cause implode. So was a little tablet called MDMA. What's good enough for PTSD soldiers in the US army is good enough for me, says I.

1983. I'm painting in the art room at school. My paintings have DO NOT DISTURB scrawled on the back in deliberately insane looking script. 

1983. So George Michael returned from DJ Alfredo's Amnesnia in Ibiza and wrote this perfect ad for MDMA. 

Club Tropicana drinks are frEeeeeeeeeee....

First rule of advertising: you sell the user to the product. Never say "MDMA is great." Pump that shit through something familiar. 

Michael had an almost frightening genius for writing lyrics that were perfectly ordinary sentences: 

Club Tropicana, drinks are free, fun and sunshine, there's enough for everyone. All that's missing is the sea, but don't worry: you can suntan. 

All that's missing is the sea: this is an artificial paradise, not just an inland club, but something you swallow. Pack your bags...don't miss the flight: swallow the capsule. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...the crescendo like coming up on E.

"Let me take you to the place ... where strangers take you by the hand," says MDMA, destroying two decades of Roger Waters-induced Meddle misery ("Strangers passing in the street...Do I take you by the hand...")

But don't worry, you'll feel like your birthright as a lifeform is being given the best massage. The birds and crickets on a loop at the start...

Let me take you to the place / Where membership's a smiling face / Brush shoulders with the stars. Yeah, those stars. 

The song has a perfect surface of "Rapper's Delight" fused with tropical Latinx-ness multiplied by the four to the floor of techno hidden beneatrh the Ibizan jollity. And ends with the mystic cool of Yoruba philosophy that every American has deliberately or accidentally downloaded. 

Freakin love this tune. 

AI Traffic Stop by William Shakespeare

(Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo are creeping into Prospero's cell, trying to ... I don't know what, they might not know what: surprise? usurp? rag? the colonial wizard Prospero. Ariel is Prospero's I don't know what: servant? police? ideology?)

A noise of hunters heard. Enter divers Spirits, in shape of dogs and hounds, and hunt them about, PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on

PROSPERO

Hey, Mountain, hey!

ARIEL

Silver I there it goes, Silver!

PROSPERO

Fury, Fury! there, Tyrant, there! hark! hark!

CALIBAN, STEPHANO, and TRINCULO, are driven out

Go charge my goblins that they grind their joints
With dry convulsions, shorten up their sinews
With aged cramps, and more pinch-spotted make them
Than pard or cat o' mountain.

ARIEL

Hark, they roar!

PROSPERO

Let them be hunted soundly. At this hour
Lie at my mercy all mine enemies:
Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou
Shalt have the air at freedom: for a little
Follow, and do me service.

Exeunt

"Life after the Traffic Stop": A Brilliant Podcast

 ...by Audie Cornish. 

How the Media Is Failing the Turing Test

Pretty much all the stuff on AI is part of the problem. Here's my take: 

AI should be taught to forget, and accidentally too. A person is a malfunctioning AI. What makes a person is that they are less good. The search for a super-subject, a super-master, is what scares the crap out of me. That and machine learning  robot dog Harpo Marxes with guns. Masters and their weaponized slaves. 

We are already living inside an adaptive AI. Capitalism is an adaptive AI that machine learns how to extract life from the biosphere. It would not be good to find out whether it will or will not go into an infinite loop. 

The English were as amazed by the adaptive AI they had created in 1600  as some of us are now. With this AI they could produce value at unimaginable speeds. It was almost like cheating. It was called settler colonialism and slavery. One of its brand names was East India Company. America was another.

A fascist just is a bot (Arendt). Algorithms just follow orders.

What is really wrong about AI is not the I but the A. I means that I was always A to some extent. But automating that shit on a kind of plantation called a silicon chip means you're building the past out into the future. The future becomes the metastasis of the past. 

Why Marx Was Leery of Anarchism: A Very Clever Clogs Blog Post even by My Standards LOLOL

 I just had a run-in with someone who said, this global warming stuff is bourgeois distraction and class struggle etc etc. 

I said this is white supremacist shit. 

They said "we're all humans and race is irrelevant." 

I said I knew you weren't a Marxist. 

They said you don't have to be a Marxist talk about class struggle. 

I then realized he was the kind of anarchist Marx is rightly wary of. "Who educates the educators" is going after the kind of "we're all Man underneath" Enlightenment philosophy that fuels a lot of that (Godwin for instance). 

"We're all Man and reason beats superstition and ideology is superstition, like what they think in Africa." 

Marxism needs a fecal transplant of a certain kind of anarchist thought about how to live communism. But anarchism needs a kick up its Enlightened ass. Basically this is what Humankind is about. 

Ideology is not superstition. Ideology is how the determined "objective" world of commodities and exchange and profits is based on an unconscious, fluctuating, moving too-cheap price of human labor. "Stuff is made by exploited workers" is a thing that capitalist theology already knows, relies on. 

Marx's genius, like Freud's and Darwin's, was to notice that the real issue was a flowing, unconscious mechanism that turns capitalism into a hyperobject. Freud (the unconscious) and Darwin (evolution) are also talking about things that are created by simple interactions that then have their own causal dynamic. Darwin's and Freud's and Marx's innovation was also about seeing how these invisible forces are constructed, not given. 

DJ Spooky's Peace Symphony

 This looks amazing. Follow the link. I'm working with Spooky on things for my graduate drama class next term. The title is Victorian Drama. 

My Space Laser Is Better

 I always saw deconstruction as detecting how medicine is laced with poison, and transmuting poison into medicine so it can't hurt anyone anymore. 

And I've gotten to the point where in class yesterday I noticed I can now make Heidegger make the most anti-racist, decolonial noise I've ever heard in white western philosophy. (!!!)

This is on the same day when I found out I won the Outstanding Faculty Achievement Award in my job, which is lovely timing, because this is the year in which my lovely new colleague Kiese Laymon won the MacArthur genius award, and I have committed to creating the most powerful anti-racist laser I can create as how I talk about ecology. And on that note, here's something I tweeted. Think about it: 

I write about ecology. I’m a big fan of Snoop Dogg. The BBC should hire Snoop as the next David Attenborough. I am deadly serious. 

@SnoopDogg @BBC

Their voices overlap for a start. Think about it. 

A few years ago I was one person away from David Attenborough and I was trying to persuade him that his parting gift to the world should be a show about whiteness where he turns the camera on himself. 

This show could now include him handing his mantle to Snoop. 

Who by the way is doing this, which is very similar to the Cool America tactic. Actually it IS a Cool America tactic: 

Suzanne Vega's Songs of Innocence and of Experience

The younger Vega made a version of "Small Blue Thing" that ambiguously encapsulates an adult with unresolved childhood trauma, a need for basic fundamental holding. Ambiguously, because there's a child in there too: 

This is perhaps someone who is being loved for real, who allows themselves to be small, to be held in someone's "pocket," to be parented by their partner. That's how I saw it when I was eighteen. 

 The older Vega made a version of "Small Blue Thing" that less ambiguously gets to the child version of something like that feeling:

This is perhaps someone who doesn't have enough of a loving parent. Who is exposed to something. Who feels funny even when they're in that parent's pocket, so to speak. 

Gosh I love this song so much. It is one of my go-to PTSD grief release songs of all time. 

Which one is more disturbing? 

Is that the wrong question? 

Isn't it interesting that sometimes a caring genius grown up can find the child aspect of a thing better than a younger person reaching for the "grownup" sound? They feel safer so they can find the vulnerability with more confidence? 

And isn't it amazing a younger adult can find what is terrible or hypocritical--or in this case, broken and unresolved—about the older adult stance? 

Isn't it? 

And isn't it interesting how 18-year-old Tim who heard young adult Vega's version totally loved it and had a pretty accurate intuition that it could be about a grown-up with unresolved childhood trauma? 

And isn't it interesting how now-Tim who hears that and the older Vega's version can't decide which one is better? Loves them both? Sometimes loves one better, sometimes equally? And neither "both" nor "either" kinds of loving are better kinds of loving, because loving is loving and tuning to that love beam is the only thing that makes sense the older you get? 

What are Blake's songs? Who are they for? 

One thing about the older Vega version: there is more silence in it. The younger version's narrator is straightforwardly ambiguous, split between grown up and child feelings. 

The older version's narrator is however ambiguously straightforward. They allow for a lot of silence around the singing line. Like a child who doesn't need to fill in the space. Who doesn't know they are signaling how much danger they are in, to a caring grown-up, in that very quietness. 

From the very first two lines of "Luka," you know something is terribly wrong. It's the very straightforwardness with which they go, "My name is Luka. I live on the second floor." To someone they may have seen on the stairs but have never spoken to. To a stranger they need to talk to because...

I actually can't listen to that one, not because I don't like it but because, see remark about PTSD. Because it's so on the money. 

Then there's the fact that planet Earth is a small blue turning thing and condensation and evaporation and scattering like light...how babies think they're the universe. 

Like I say, this is a genius song. 

Here's a Thing from the Book

 Imagine Toad of Toad Hall escapes from prison disguised not as a washerwoman but as a jazz-funk bass guitarist. Hang on. Don't. No one wants to imagine that. 

I freakin love this. And it was the first thing that summon the Grief, who (it is a who, I feel), the being I call "The Inner Bodyworker" in The Stuff of Life. 

So much that it's made it into my memoir with humans in it, Escape from the Morgue. I've written 55,000 words in six days! 

See, if you want to cry, always use the major key like the medievals say. 

By the time Barbara holds up the sign that says "MUSIC" I belong hopelessly to this video with the ocean coming out of my eyes. Erm, that's in the first frame :))))

Just to make it much "worse" listen to the albeit bad recording of Allan Holdsworth does to this when he's their guitarist for a couple of glorious years (below). 

If you want to add to crying thing, just play that keyboard riff so that it's now in the major. Nice one Allan, understated Tim. Then slide it Latin-ly under the tune, a gentle caress. Really really nice one, Allan. 

Which enables him and King to have the most wonderful conversation in the last chorus and a new coda...Good Grief indeed.

Here Is the Stuff in The Stuff of Life

Concealer

Secret Door

Grief

Teddy Bear

Cowboy Costume

Antidepressants

Train Station

CPAP

Sound file

The brain

Afterimages

Power Station

Small Blue

 

Epigraphs (Beginning and Ending) of Escape from The Morgue

 Beginning; 

End: 

Description of Escape from The Morgue

[redacted]

So writes Timothy Morton in this courageous, intense, passionate, funny and heartbreaking memoir about how his father shaped him. Here at last is the book Morton has been working tirelessly on his whole adult life, pouring countless hours of research and lecturing and writing into never ever imagining it, let alone writing it. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll realize everything in this blurb is accurate. If you have a pulse slash Complex PTSD slash care about mental health, race and gender activism, ecology or how to resist fascism both inside and outside your head, this book is for you. 

Get Me an Agent

 I mean it. Lovely crew, help get me an agent. Help me publish Escape from The Morgue. If you believe in my work then this is the one. Drama too, and Hell and The Stuff of Life, all of them happening now, all related because they're so personal. But this one is...

Drama was intense. But I wrote that in 20 hours over a couple of weeks. This was 40 plus hours over five continuous days. I need to do more, but I have it now, another totally unscheduled book. It's 45,000 words. I wrote 10,000 since yesterday afternoon. 

Demon is leaving. I can feel my brain falling asleep and jerking awake.

It was like Contact, downloading instructions for building a ship, in my case a bathysphere, made of music on rotation. It’s now 45,000 words.

I want an agent or a crowd of loving fans to get this published good and proper with a heavy duty press when I’m done. 

This is the first book I’ve shared before I’ve finished and what a doozy … it’s because finally I’m in my being totally and really enjoying it, no need to fabricate some cute persona to be lovable or whatever. Just being open. Realizing I have pals.

Book will be of huge benefit to trauma sufferers and it’s a death ray to the anti-w*** people (refuse to say or spell it). 

At the end are maxims and tips and how-tos. Book goes from dark to light. 

I also have a short book of of those maxims which will cause Peterson’s to collapse like metal helmet of Witch King of Angmar and that fraud Harari to blow away like ashes.

The Even Later Latest Book

 See immediately below. I've written 9000 words a day for five days. I won't stop, like the hip hop song. 

This Often Happens Part 2

 The trouble is if you have an original idea, it hasn't been published yet, and that's already scary because it doesn't come in the form of a pre-existing shiny book that costs something. And you sometimes can hardly explain it even to yourself: that's the joy of it, really. 

This Often Happens

 Happened in New York City, 2019. Author of New Yorker piece about me? "Never heard of him." (Manager having been to Ivy X too (I assume, why they know this agent) takes note and will eventually drop me.) Plans for new books? "Everyone's writing that book." Other proposal? "I don't really see what this book is about." Thank you Mitchell and Webb for helping me to process...

Hip Hop's Proof of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem

 Have you seen the film? Deep Cover I mean. This song belongs to the closing credits. 

Haunting, this song is. That LA feeling of quiet suburbia laced with absolute menace. The single piano chord with semitones, the augmented fourth bass line. 

I studiously avoid anything that sounds like acting Black. Frat boys with sideways baseball caps at CU Boulder helped. My stepdad Maurice being from Jamaica helped. But, I have strong feelings about Deep Cover, because it reminds me of parts of my childhood. The drugs and the criminal gangs part of my childhood. Nothing scares you once you've met a Kray Twins assassin. In your dad's living room. At age 12. I'm coming for you De Sadist. And this is the song for the closing credits.

Strongly identify with some of it, overlap in the region of 12-year-old Tim walking through his dad’s neighborhood, “Fairyland” aka Maryland, "an island of lost children," as he said with characteristic sinister poetry. Roy the junkie lives over here, who one Christmas Day showed up on Dad's doorstep and died on the spot in his doorway, Dennis over there, similarly addicted, keep walking Tim, through a bombed out post-WW2 misery space on the edge of Hell. Then, far worse—arriving at Dad's house where on any given day the police might show up and arrest his partner for possession of 1000 tabs of acid and a lot of speed, everyone from off the street and worse piled in his living room. A place where the worst thing you could be was not a murderer or a thief or ... but a snitch. 

That LA noir feeling of quiet suburbia right up next to not-suburbia (but what is it...what), laced with absolute menace. The sound of a car rounding the corner two blocks away. The single piano chord. Snoop Dog like a cartoon mouse on a 1920s Disney loop, “Creep with me as I crawl through the hood…” His utterly strange and uncanny intonation of “187…” like a teenage ghost descending from a broken traffic light. That incredible line that slips over the bar like a kid slipping down an alleyway to avoid the cop cars and the not-cop cars: “But I got the hook up with somebody who knows how to get in contact with him.” 

This song and the film are the most wonderful noir loop, anti-racism’s proof of Monty Python’s proof of Turing’s proof of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem. Mathematical objects (numbers) in deep cover as logical propositions sticking it to the bad guys then sticking it to the really bad guys, the cops, and then the really really bad guys, the government (logic). How you have to be ridiculously smart just to cope…how much RAM that takes up. How badly I feel for anyone who has to calculate just to get across the street without being shot. 

The Monty Python version, called "Argument Clinic," is handy and also comes laced with its own kind of genius menacing grin: 

For every sketch, there can never be a police officer with enough authority to arrest everyone in it for violating the Strange Sketches Act, since every time an officer enters the sketch they are in the sketch. 

Change "sketch" to Dad's house. 

This Book Kills Fascists

 I've been working really hard all my life on never writing a book. This book. But I appear to have developed a bad case of blocked block. 

It's called Escape from The Morgue. 

Big publishers keep asking me for stuff then dangling the carrot further away. "Write something like Hyperobjects...I mean, not that, but like that." You ever see the agent skits on Mitchell and Webb? Where one of them draws a smiley on the Mona Lisa and says "Do something more like that...not THAT, of course, but you know, that."

I don't have an agent for that reason. Agents never get what I say. It's from the future and they're dealing with reliable money makers with identifiable record store labels. 

When I send the publishers things, they say ooh, that's too strange. 

It't not too strange. It's just not published yet. Hyperobjects is published, giving you the impression that it's okay to support it. 

Been running into this all my life. Hasn't stopped me. 

But this book is about child abuse. And it's coming for the whole crew of "anti-w***" sadists, whose very use of that mockery of Black dialect and allies implies they already know too much. They themselves do. The cat is most assuredly out of the bag. And they don't scare me. And in particular, the transphobic everything going on right now? They chose the wrong thing to attack there, in terms of activating me. I am coming for them. 

Publishers, if you're reading this, you really ought to consider this one. I will get someone to publish this and then I will get on TV with my lovely new Bernie speaking agent person. 

The De Sadists of this world don't scare me, because from day one on this Earth I have had to deal with the fact that my father was a psychopath. They're pathetic little clowns by comparison. 

This Really Got to Me

 I'm injured. I've had a three-hour operation. I hurt. I'm not in a good mood. It's going to be two months before I'm allowed to lift anything fifteen pounds or heavier. I can't walk more than a few feet outside my house. 

I posted something anti-racist about structural racism on Instagram. As sometimes happens, someone took it upon themselves to tell me how to do my job. They told me that they "used to understand" what I said (a suspicious remark in itself in the context), and why didn't I get back  to writing amazing books and doing amazing lectures (where have they been? There's a new one every couple of weeks these days, counting the translations). And they rounded it off by calling me "Timothy." 

I blocked them. I wanted to tell them "Don't ever call me by my first name unless you know me, in which case, tell me who you really are." As is often the case, the most aggressive people hide behind a pseudonym. 

I had just had to block an obsessive someone on Twitter whose incessant communications had unfortunately caused me to relax my boundary a little. In intense pain on Sunday, I remembered the Oscar Wildean reason why I had decided to stop talking with them a few months ago. Their name was an ungrammatical, fake-Latin one based on an idea of mine. Intimate with my work, yet weird and critical. I don't know who writes this stuff, but it says "I have borderline personality disorder." Says it. I'm not diagnosing someone. I'm reporting the effect of someone's rhetoric. 

Calling me by my first name is a form of abuse. You're reaching into my pocket and fiddling around. That's actually happened to me, you know. You'll find out more if you keep reading my stuff. I have absolutely zero time for it. If you want to me to block you, go right ahead and call me by my first name. 

Rhetorically this is the equivalent of psychopathic personality disorder. You are unaware of the suffering of others or worse. No matter how much you hurt them, you can't seem to get through. I have met several psychopaths, including my father, and this is the common trait. 

One was called Patrick. He lived with my schizophrenic brother in a house run by a very neglectful Catholic charity. Soon after I met him, he murdered his mother. Then he went to Broadmoor, the notorious psychiatric prison, where he soon stabbed Ian Brady, the Moors Murderer of the 1970s. Brady murdered girls sadistically. Patrick stabbed Brady in the eye with a plastic fork in order to show how hard he was. 

I'll repeat that. I  have met and spoken with on several occasions someone who stabbed one of the most notorious serial rapist-murderers in the UK, ever. In the eye. 

First thing Patrick did: he came right up to me. Right up. Within one inch of my face. He stared right into my eyes with his little tiny pupils. "Hi! I'm Patrick!" Real friendly like. Call me by my first name, I double dog dare you. 

I had met psychopaths before. My dad introduced me to a Kray Twins assassin when I was 13, he was sitting on the floor in dad's living room, He fixed me with his tiny pupils and my head immediately went "psycho killer." His amusing sadistic clown nickname ("Lofty") and his lack of a "real" name (see the similarity with the encounter on Instagram) was a symptom. I never felt his house was mine, but then again, he was also a psychopath. I thought I had a blind spot about them but really I was just in denial about how bad my dad was. 

Soon after, Lofty was in jail for doing a hit job on someone for the Twins. My dad used to love telling me the story over and over. "I sliced his face up like a pizza" Lofty would say to dad, in a thick cockney accent. Lofty murdered the police dog belonging to one of the officers who arrested him. So violently that the police officer broke down in front of him. 

I'm glad my memoir isn't about humans. If I were to write one, and believe me I will, you probably won't believe it. Probably the only way for  me to write a convincing one is to leave out the humans. Definitely the only way that doesn't trigger me beyond belief. It was hard enough writing about the humans by leaving them out, if you know what I mean. 

Don't ever call me by my first name if you don't know me. Whether or not you are a psychopath this is how your words are coming across. Be aware of that. The internet is very bad because people forget that manners are not just nice, they're essential. 

Right now, as you can tell, I am in the most I don't give a fuck mood I've been in, perhaps ever. So if you want to antagonize me, now would be a great time to do it. Go right ahead. See what happens. 

Cut Out and Keep

 Since when did “structural” mean “immutable”? 

You “have to” see it that way, you poor sad bigot people. You have to because you can’t. You can’t because you know. But you make like you don’t. The effort. 

So you have no room to cry. So you have no room to smile. So you have no room to really cry. So you have no room to laugh. So you have no room to really really cry. So…

You talk Jesus but you missed a spot. Right on the exit wound you don’t even know you have. Forgiveness. Mercy.  

Don’t you see? You’re creating the horrible rigid structure you’re aiming at. You’re creating it for yourself too. 

This

 

Earthly Things

 My friend Whitney Bauman is about to publish the most amazing book with karen Bray and Heather Eaton, and you should definitely get ahold of it. It blew my mind to read this collection of essays. Here's the endorsement I wrote on the back: 

Way to bring religion down to Earth! Humankind needs to get its act together, but we aren’t feeling it yet. Every essay in this book reframes ecological speech in the key of religious uplift, an affect that can achieve Earth magnitude. 

 

But wait, there’s more. I hold that religion is the phenomenology of the biosphere: how it is lived. Religion is too often essentialized and naturalized and displaced and kicked upstairs into a heaven where a mostly white mostly male cis psychopath who mostly wants to hurt you needs protection money. 

 

This wonderful book is part of making sure that can’t happen. 

Timothy Snyder Recently

 My lovely shoegaze sparkelcore band Rubyliquid featured me and Timothy's brother. He's very good, if you haven't already. 

And Here's Another One

 John Oliver is impeccable, I feel. 

"I am your retribution": He Must Not Come Anywhere Near

 Think. What happens when he takes revenge on those who prevented him from taking revenge on those who prevented him from taking revenge on those who prevented...

It's revenge turtles all the way down. 

He just said "I am your retribution" at CPAC, the right wingest GOP forum shy of a KKK meeting. This is biblical rhetoric. 

Groups are narcissists. You have to train them not to scapegoat. You have to train them hard. I was in group psychoanalysis for a decade. I know what I'm talking about. 

The problem with polarization cannot be solved by political science. Thomas Edsall in the Times sometimes offers weirdly helpful poll-driven thoughts, but his bailiwick is nowhere near to solving what he calls (along with other political scientists) "affective polarization." They're out of ideas because they don't understand group dynamics. 

You have to train groups. It's difficult but the results are in fact wonderful. Isn't it scary to think that groups are basically narcissists and aspire to being Alien? You really really want to take charge of that shit. 

Free Patreon Podcasts: The Moral Theology of The Devil

 I decided that two podcasts were too important to put behind the paywall. One is an interview with the Punk Pharmer, Paulo Candiani. 

The other is me reading a very favorite essay, "The Moral Theology of the Devil" by Thomas Merton. 

I've you're a publisher of mine and are wondering who should read the audiobook, the answer is, quite frankly, me. :))))

This essay should give you some ammo if like me you're having a bad time with all the it-was-horrible-then retro-homophobia and transphobia being written into law right now all over the USA. I realized yesterday that basically this is QAnon entering the legislative dimension, being inscribed into law. Then I decided to do something about it. This is what I did. 

That's a Confirm: Dark Ecology Is Having a Moment

 Well, I was guessing from the attention it was getting that Dark Ecology is now outpacing Hyperobjects as my most popular book. And a glance at the royalty statement I just received confirms it. By a lot. I would be curious to know why you think this might be. 

On the whole that word "dark" is doing a lot of work. It's talking to our moment. I wish it wasn't. 

I imagined writing a book with that title as the third part of a trilogy in 2005. Ecology without Nature, The Ecological Thought, Dark Ecology was how it was going to go. Blowing up the old paradigm, explaining a new paradigm and then deploying it was the very intentional plan. 

Hyperobjects, Humankind and Being Ecological were spinoffs from that trilogy project. Needless to say, like a lot of spinoffs they have a lot of good ideas in them and might actually be better books in lots of ways. 

In more detail, I think Dark Ecology is popular right now because it's talking to history and culture at all kinds of scales and thinking about "how this happened" and "what do to next." And because it has the flavor of a kind of psychodrama or pilgrim's progress into the darkness. The Dark Night of the Soul was a template. 

I'll Be Reading the Audiobook of The Stuff of Life

 Finally! To be honest I'm not fond of the people from central casting who've been reading my audiobooks thus far, and anyone who wishes to have me re-record them is most welcome. Listen to my BBC Radio 4 series, The End of the World Has Already Happened: face it, I do have a lovely radio voice. I do. I'm not bragging because it's just how I sound, it's an accident. 

People come up to me in lunch queues and say that...

3000 scholarly citations of The Ecological Thought

 I loved writing that book. I wrote it in three pages then I just kept adding sentences so that in the end, it was the right kind of size. It took about eight weeks. I'm eternally grateful to Harvard for publishing Ecology without Nature, because that let me write this one. This is the one Gary Snyder said was a philosophy book, the first person to have used that word on me. 

The Worst Day of the Lunar Year Was the Anniversary of the Invasion

 The lunar year of the Water Tiger reached its nadir on Friday, where all the mud churned up by the Water Tiger caused it to overwhelm us with dirt. It's very often a day in the calendar where all kinds of intensity and obstacles come up. It happened this year to be the anniversary of the start of the war in Ukraine. I spoke with my Russian graduate student in LA. She was as you can imagine feeling pretty miserable about it. 

Today is a neutral day, and tomorrow is losar, the lunar new year's day. Of the Water Rabbit? What will that be like? Imagine a rabbit made of water jumping around in a stream. You'll figure it out. The Water Tiger was mostly pretty rad as far as I was concerned. A wild ride, much needed. 

If a Republican wins the White House next year, it's likely that China will prevail and enjoy its new found role patronizing the USA as it forces Russia and NATO to make some kind of rotten deal that will in effect be Russia winning.

Desmond Swayne

 His one-size-fits-all rhetorical tic is as small minded and as aggressive and as stupid as the Brexit he voted for. 

ISN'T IT.

Sapiens LOL

 Professional jealousy and a genuinely urgent sense of his utter and dangerous wrongness led me to write Humankind as a riposte to Sapiens. What Graeber (was just befriending him when he died) and Wengrow say about Harari is the shiznit, every time (The Dawn of Everything). Basically, he's popular because he tells people exactly what they already know. Humans are special and different and liable to transhumanist godlike becoming. And there's "no way out" of inevitably oppressive social structures. Which is why he gets to talk at Davos and I don't. Grrrr...

The professional jealousy slash outrage nadir was in Blackwell's Bookshop in Oxford 2019. Harari was on every single "important books" table, I assume he has an agent who insists on this. I was in the basement at the bottom right of a shelf at the back about "Earth Science." 

I can't get an agent because I have trouble telling people what I'm going to write, because creativity. So I do it all myself. I tried a few times and then just said, fuck it. I'd rather publish cheap and free things that agents don't like, anyway. 

That anarchist review someone sent me entirely misses the point of why Graeber and Wengrow wrote that. It's the same reason as why I had to tell John Zerzan to stop stalking me. It's a big old flaw of a lot of anarchist thought that it's caught in an Enlightenment rhetoric, whether upside down or the right way around: first we were great, now we're fucked. A fall narrative without the Jesus stuff. It's one reason Marx wrote "Who educates the educators?" The concept "Man" jerking off one more time. Colonialism upside down served with lashings of cynical reason. Destroy. 

Blimey

 Fuck it's good. This drama book is good. I can say that without any arrogance art all because I didn't write it. I sneezed it. 

If there's any justice in the world, this is the book I'll be remembered for, above Hyperobjects. It's that good. 

Isn't the Cover of The Stuff of Life Lovely?

 Look at the spine! 

OMG

 I've just written the drama book. It took five days. Or more accurately, twenty hours. 

Hyperobjects took fifteen six-hour days. That was the record so far. 

The Ecological Thought took eight weeks. 

Ecology without Nature took about six months. So did my other new book, Hell (Columbia). Have I told you about that yet? They really like it. They say it's real theology and they're going to circulate it in religious fora. 

I can't believe how much of a sneeze this drama book was. Twenty hours! 

It's good. I swear. I had a weird experience writing Hell of having the idea simultaneous with typing. But with A Theory of Drama, the typing happened before I had the idea. I'm not kidding. It was so weird. 

Today Is the Day

 ...when Google Scholar tells me that scholarship has cited Hyperobjects 4001 times. 

A Theory of Drama: ANOTHER Book!

 A month or so ago Routledge asked me if I'd like to write a book for them, in a theory series. A few weeks ago I said yes, but can I just send you some writing rather than a proposal? I don't do proposals. Luckily I'm at a point where I don't have to do them, either. 

I hate them. They've never worked. Chat GPT might do them for me better than I could possibly do, because I just don't know what I'm going to say before I say it, especially at this point, after twenty five or so books where allowing your unconscious mind a wide berth is the whole deal. 

I hate fellowship applications and book proposals. I've hardly ever been given a fellowship, because I just don't know how to say what I want to say on those damn forms. 

But I do know how to write and last night I wrote the whole thing in a thirty-page scope. 

It's a theory of drama. Why, you ask, would an eco philosopher have one? Why indeed...it is indeed an ecological theory of drama. 

I'm really really happy with it. 

Hyperobjects Is...

 ...just about to hit 4000 scholarly citations. 

There It Is: The Ultra Right Is Still Obsessed with Ecological Politics

 This guy persuaded a poor lad to sail on a boat from Hawaii to the south Pacific where there was less covid, he said. I'm reading about it on CNN. They're lost at sea. 

CNN reproduced some screenshots of his videos, and on the far left you can see "Agenda 21 injections." Injecting people with Agenda 21? Agenda 21 as an injection? 

The covid shot was seen as the mark of the Beast. 

What is Agenda 21? It's section 21 of the Biodiversity document produced in Rio in 1992, the Earth Summit. America didn't sign on, even. All that paragraph says is, nations should cooperate to promote biodiversity. 

The extreme right takes this to mean that a world government of bla bla insert-antisemitic-trope-here will keep the Aryan race from thriving. 

Almost every extreme right organization in the USA has a genealogy that can be traced back to hostility to Agenda 21. 

George I's America didn't sign on to the document--but you see how not signing on actually fueled the ultra right conspiracy theory? That America was going to be overrun/defeated/etc?

If you're interested I cover this in Humankind. 

There's more than you'll read on CNN. Why did this bastard think of sailing to the Pacific islands? He assumed they wouldn't mandate the covid shot. Why? 

I believe what Derrida liked the most about my first book, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste, was how it discusses the Pacific islanders in the racist imaginary of Europe, how they were seen as embodying the template of the perfect human, an amalgam of Adam and Apollo, Eve and the Venus de Medicis. In other words, discovering whiteness in the pacific, as if to vindicate white supremacy. 

The "guru" jerk who did this to actual human beings was most definitely intoxicated with this, I claim. 

2001 Is a Black Comedy and It Fooled You Because Acid

 Clue 1: It's a Kubrick film and it has the military in it. 

Clue 2: There's an interminable intermission featuring a blank cinema screen. 

Clue 3: The monolith is a blank cinema screen on its side. 

Clue 4: Dave's reaction shots in the Stargate are almost identical to Scotty freaking about women in Vertigo. 

Clue 4a: There's a sperm and an egg in that sequence. 

Clue 5: Everyone ends up in a gigantic version of the bone, which tries to kill them for being inefficient. 

Clue 6: Hyperspace is Versailles. 

Clue 7: Acid heads get upset when you say this. 

Clue 8: The climax of human evolution is a gigantic baby. 

Clue 9: The thing that kills a warthog turns directly into a waltzing space shuttle. 

There are many other clues. 

Hell: Another Book

 ...along with The Stuff of Life, I'm working on quite a different kind of book. Different, I mean, from every other one I've published. I really didn't know for whom I was writing it, which is a first, and come to think of it, I really didn't know what I was writing either! 

This isn't showing off. I write like I sneeze. Often I've had a thought just before I type it. Occasionally I've had thoughts simultaneous with typing them. 

But a lot of this book, I kid you not, was typed before I thought the idea. I know people describe writing as a form of reading (I do), but this was ridiculous. Like reading someone else. 

It's a book I've written "with" William Blake. "About" seemed wrong. I've been trying to write a "Blake book" since I was nineteen. it took me until last year to figure out that "about" wouldn't work. How could I sit in judgment, however slight, over Blake? Or, how could I write a book filled with the verbal equivalent of arrows: "Now check out this line, it's totally rad!" 

Besides, this is a book about the underworld. OOO believes that everything has an underworld. Having an underworld, come to think of it, is a prerequisite to existing at all. 

Underworlds require a guide. It's true in Homer, Virgil, Dante, Milton and Blake himself. And any number of religious traditions such as the rolog tradition in Tibet, where people give accounts of near-death experiences. 

And I have a companion too: Laura Mvula, my absolutely very very favorite contemporary lyricist and singer. Much analysis of her work in here. 

It's called Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back. 

Race is a foundational topic. Race and ecology. 

Columbia University Press love it, in fact they loved on it harder than anyone on anything else I've ever done. 

They say that among many other things, it's actual theology. (!!!!!) They're going to promote it in all kinds of religious fora along with the regular ones. 

Yeah, this is my Fragile Absolute. 

Expect more and more on this. I'm really really into it. 

The subtitle is from: 

Propaganda for the Planet (podcast)

 Briahna Joy Gray's Bad Faith Podcast had me on for a really deep talk. She was very good. You'll see: 

Sorry Christine

 Christine Skolnick, I'm very sorry I accidentally deleted a comment! Can you send it again? 

Patreon Fired Up

 Hi--if you haven't already, why not try joining my Patreon for as little as $1 per month? There are now 89 podcast episodes and a number of other features you can check out. I'm considering adding a phone in session once a month or every two months so you can talk with me directly. There are about 300 of us and we make a good and inspiring group. Just search for me on Patreon, you'll find me. 

Coming Soon

 The Stuff of Life. It's an OOO memoir. 

Happy New Year

 Favorite Sunday morning music.