Live in Italy TODAY (stream link) 9:30 CST, 3:30 GMT, 4:30

The Lucifer Effect: How to Act in a Bad Barrel

 As we are seeing, I hope, evil is not simply a case of "bad apples," it's a bad barrel. Evil is banality, just going along with the situation, which defaults to white supremacy and patriarchy. 

Milgram's experiments demonstrate that two thirds of people will do an evil act all the way up to murder if it is socially sanctioned. 

Zimbardo's Stanford Prison experiment turned psych evaluated Stanford grad students into Abu Ghraib torturers in 36 hours. 

We are witnessing abuse of immigrant prisoners in Gauntanamo Bay (see what Dick Durbin has said about this). 

We witnessed Theresa Borenpohl being dragged out of a town hall meeting in Idaho by fake fascist police. 

Watch and learn. Teach someone. 

Great Graduate Students

One thing's for sure. The graduate students this term are INCREDIBLE. I'm very lucky when it comes to my job. I had the privilege of being on the graduate committee and determining who would come and study with us these last couple of years, and it's been a wonderful thing to do. The students in my ecology and culture and philosophy class are just fantastic. 

Well Isn't This Interesting

Hell continues to be the most important event of my career, if interest in this blog is a metric. 

This in itself is interesting because Hyperobjects, if you need to know, vastly outsells everything else, still. Even the most recent stuff. And Hell is actually one of the slowest selling books! 

But people who are into it, are really into it. I get correspondence all the time about it. 

If you haven't already, give it a try. The area under the Hell spikes is now so much more than that of the moment at which I was working with Björk. 

The Nightmare Vision 2

 For those of you who have been following for years, it's beyond irksome how some daft ideas in supposed posthuman and accelerationist philosophy got weaponized. Several of us (the OOO ones) were trying to warn people. Here's the plan: 

The Nightmare Vision

 A friend of a friend writes: 

"One way to think about the Trump-Musk-Putin project is that it is Neo-Barbarism. The old left critiques of ‘Neoliberalism’ actually assumed the horizon of a liberal democratic order (credit John Gamey). In other words, however ‘radical’ critics of Neoliberalism thought they were being, they were attacking the established order from within a framework which assumed the existence of nation states, international trade, intergovernmental organizations, civil society organizations and liberal democratic institutions in at least many of the most important states. 

"What the Trump-Musk-Putin axis does, is to blow this all up (credit Nancy Ries). They are not only destroying the old order, but also rendering standard critiques of Neoliberalism irrelevant. In their new world , instead of nation states there will be billionaire barons allied with armed garrisons; instead of international trade, coerced resource extraction; instead of social participation and welfare provision, massive repression and individualised struggle for survival. 

This explains why Trump can talk so freely of seizing Canada, Greenland, Panama: he no longer assumes any of the external or internal constraints on power holders that have, however unevenly, developed over the last 200 years. This is not about going back to 19th Century colonialism or further developing 20th Century Neoliberalism. Rather, this imagined future corresponds most closely to something like the western part of the Roman Empire in 500s and 600s: magnates with armed hordes swirling across ill-defined territorial boundaries, slaughtering and seizing resources, while production falls off a cliff and the standard of living of the mass of the population falls to unfathomably low levels."

Now...

You know, the way to see the nightmare dystopian vision of these dark ages late late Roman Empire tech bros is, 

Once you get over the shock, 

IT'S STUNNINGLY UNIMAGINATIVE

It's out of Gladiator slash Alien 

IT's CRAP

IN.CRED.IB.LE

Dark Ecology Passes 2000 Citations

Hi--for those of you keeping score (none I hope!), this means that for books have over 2000, citations, with Hyperobjects leading the way, approaching 6000. There was a time a few years ago when "Queer Ecology," my essay, outranked several of my books, but that is no longer the case. "Queer Ecology" is now just below all the books that have been out for a while, apart from my earliest books on Shelley and spice. 

Dark Ecology is a very beautiful book and it's one of my deepest. I was a great honor to be a part of the Wellek lectures along with Derrida and Balibar and Cixous. 

Paradise Prequel

SECOND Printing of Hell Is Now Out

 We sold out the first printing in half a year, let's see what we can do with the second! 

Object-Oriented Ethnography (new podcast)

 On Patreon. 

This was the first time anyone ever gave me a khata (Tibetan scarf)!