Eating myself to death in the age of netflix (my couch sees more of my ass than grindr does which is saying something) #anxiousdepressionbingetelevisionandyou

I dont know if I would be diagnosed by a professional as an emotional eater but there's definitely something that goes beyond nourishment in my habits. I eat to 'cosy' (as a verb), to fill the spaces of a room in a house that's a home, allegedly. To fill space where I otherwise feel I am not enough without the literal 'filler', that hackneyed adage of filling inner emptiness; but it's more than that. I eat to substantiate the otherwise void-ish pock-marked streaming of time, a current which passes sometimes without that immaculate feeling of completion, passing without that feeling of being airtight. Like to be anxious, to have cloudy thoughts and the inevitable sinking of the stomach which comes with dire thinking; those things take chunks out of the passing of time, create vacancies which I need to retroactively fill by eating, in proportion to the negative-strength of the thought and the damage done (which I alone can intuit; there is no objective measure for this devastation, only the lingering sense of things not being right).

Having the television on while I eat isn't the purview of the lonely, because I live with flatmates AND a loving partner. No, it's definitely more than this. If there's anything it's resonant with it's David Cronenberg's gestures in his movie Videodrome, namely the idea of staging cultural repatriation of the homeless with shelters that specifically cater to each transient's lack of televisual access. In the movie there's something hammy about cathode rays specifically, the then current television technology; like this fed a neural function directly, an empirical hokey-science McGuffin to better persuade audiences of the outlandish mind-control possibilities the movie explores (still outlandish even now after CIA papers were declassified detailing every lurid and very real MK Ultra experiment, no longer explosive speculation of the paranoid but after careful disclosure somehow just banal fact; go figure).

Obviously we've come a ways since cathode rays, we have LED and whatever is coming after LED blah blah blah. There's 4K whatever that is and HD, and Ultra HD which I think is less cutting edge than 4K. Anyway, the point is that the connection between comprehension of culture and a phylogenetic assimilation of cultural tenets and credos is not reliant on the tech. It's the memes themselves, it's language itself which inseminates the mind, which then seeds physical responses in the nervous system, which persuades the body to facilitate new forms, to bloom discordancies like cancers.

Videodrome got it half right.

But what do I know; maybe there does exist a frequency or tech which can emit instant mind-shaping rays or emanations. Like in Joss Weldon's Doll House.

Everything comes back to media, to television shows or memes or movies, their mythos and pathos shaping my sense of self, allowing me to even negatively locate myself in this miasma of warring pre-existing territories both internal and external. And I find myself taking comfort in eating in front of the television because, like in Videodrome, the food gives me a literal prop for what the images are doing. I am nourishing and strengthening myself, I am eating products of a certain world, this one, which will bolster my presence in it. Memes and cultural artefacts are metabolised by that part of myself which is member to a network of precepts, which collectively generate this sense of reality, life, society; it's the wider consensus, the great Jungian mesh which is living, responsive, and yet tirelessly normative in that it takes vital shape by a sort of passive majority rule (unconscious is the word). The minority report is a surplus, an excess. An unthreatening speck.

That 'surplus speck' is reified in the canon of underground, liminal, Avantgarde, where it's either starved into non-existence or brought back later on once the whole can assimilate it's code (so long as the functionality of the majority-construct isn't too disrupted, which it never is).

This is what it means to eat the spirit, partake of the sacrament of the flesh and blood of the lamb. Eat the sign. That is why I eat in front of the television.

Because it is godly, Eucharistic in it's implications. Sign becoming matter, of word becoming flesh. Episodes of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (in my opinion superior to Riverdale which it shares a universe with) transcending it's commercial and even technological confines as I partake of ramen and corn-chips and bags of microwave popcorn. These things inhabiting the same sacred function as those little wafers and sour red wine at mass.

Whatever is on screen I take into the spoonful of ice cream or mouthful of pizza and then of course into myself, assimilating the mythos and pathos of an adolescent devil worshipper who just wants to straddle the mortal and immortal world equally, aspecting with Emily as she takes Paris, physically invoking the True North and the first scintillating signs that winter has finally come. All through otherwise plain foodstuffs made profoundly substantial through the magic of story (which as magics go apparently isn't strong enough to remedy acid reflux).

Mea Culpa.

PARIS FUCKING HILTON; some thoughts on recent doco This Is Paris

I don't know what I was expecting starting the Paris Hilton documentary, whose release seems tone fucking death in this the absolute year zero of American empire. White fragility during a major overhaul of our structural racial prejudices? Or at least on paper this seems like an audacious move.

But actually watching it, expecting to find very little which would resonate with me, expecting to see nothing at all to identify with (because what common factors exist between the lives of a low earning brown gay guy and a hyper-affluent Caucasian heiress, respectively?); yeah, watching it I was more than surprised. By the end I was pretty much gobsmacked, crying, put into a melancholic and meditative mood processing anything from the markedly different expectations we have of male celebrity versus female celebrity, processing how desire speaks with traumas held in the body by which our wants are subsequently shaped and moulded, thinking about how ambition can often be an armouring against a world we perceive to be threatening. The documentary left me thinking about all of these things, and more. As good documentaries should.

A solid entry acts as a provocation, starting with the smallest aperture and expanding with persuasive realism, planting it's subject in universal themes. Which is technically also a strategy for broadening potential audiences and subsequently adding to the value of your product. But in this Netflix era are there any storytelling conventions unmarred by the minimising of profit logistics?

Anyway, the 'universal' themes of trauma in This Is Paris got me thinking; maybe rich people are just scared, like the rest of us. Which doesn't excuse the frequently bigoted conservatism that comes with wealth, the partitioning of themselves as a class from the labouring majority. Nothing ever excuses class violence. But Paris did get me thinking . . .

Obviously it's hard for me to sympathise with very wealthy people, and I know that seems ratchet; like, they're human beings too. It's just the struggles of highly 'successful' people (if being born into established lineages of inherited wealth is considered a moo-point in the category of success) are alienating, unrelatable because those 'struggles' often entail making difficult decisions around the handling of enormous resources the likes of which normal people will never see; let alone divvy up among tiers of a 'self-made' empire.

Nostalgia is very similar to dreaming, in as much as nostalgia locates and territorialises artefacts belonging to a certain time and place, characterised by a feeling. The similarity here is that dreams, their objects and settings, are rendered in a subjectivity unique to the dreamer; subsequently, their legitimate translation is almost impossible. Note I say translation and not decipherment, the possibility of the latter having been long assimilated within a pop-psychology zeitgeist thanks to Freud and Jung.

Paris Hilton represents a nostalgia for me, and it's one I find latching onto me and dragging me back to a whole memory-canon with more and more violence the older I get. It's that early to mid noughties era which isn't so unusual seeing as it was then that Paris first bloomed into mega stardom crested by a few good PR decisions around a leaked sex tape and a resulting reality-television series. With the effervescent Nicole Ritchie, who I still think is more charismatic than Paris. Maybe she's not 'more' charismatic; maybe the essence of what makes Nicole Ritchie watchable is just different. Anyway, in the interim many of Paris's celebrity practices, micro documentation to reality-television self-exposures and lucrative omniscient branding, have become not just a standard for the famous but arguably a measure by which everyday people live their lives, plugged in as we are to the carnivalesque panopticon of social media. The gaze of celebrity has moulded itself to the civilian, piggybacking the anxieties of a post-9/11 world which was already gestating and experimenting with invasive surveillance methods. Reality television is perhaps a concomitant and disingenuously benign symptom of this surveillance aesthetic, by way of which the latter was normalised practically overnight.

Carrying all these impressions for me in a conveniently self-minimised bundle of Paris-ness is Paris Hilton; and it's come to my attention, after seeing her documentary, that she perhaps enigmatically signifies similarly discordant themes (as a meme, as an idol) to the wider public. It's not just me that can't look away when she appears on my feed, or when I rewatch episodes of The Simple Life to see if her face is as quietly transfixing as it was back then; maybe even more so now because of it's waxen quality, what with being preserved in numerous difficult-to-pronounce unguents and drawn tighter than dick-skin with the surgeon's knife. Oh no. In fact, I suspect her appeal resides not just in the glorification of conspicuous consumption which Hilton and her ilk have come to signify as per a more conventional celebrity party-line (Kardashians, rappers and semi-professional bombshells etc), but most probably consists in large of a sort of po-faced dystopian mystique; the beautiful face of our demise, the siren with the scythe. The first symptom of a societal self harm which is equal to collective psychosis.

Because that's the takeaway from the documentary; that Hilton invented the vapid Paris avatar not simply as a means towards a marketable persona with which she could launch a bunch of product lines, but as a trauma response from a bad time she had in a 'troubled teen' boot camp her parents sent her to in Utah. We're given the gist of Paris's time at this facility in various animated flashbacks, and afterwards we're left with what's obviously meant to be something revelatory about Paris's authenticity, a notion of her at odds with the carefree and constantly partying bimbo which she's framed herself as for almost two decades. And yet there's something disingenuous about it which may or may not be the residual suspicion savvier audiences had ages ago that the Paris phenomenon was more constructed than we'd been lead to believe (not a stretch in itself; most pop artefacts are painstakingly manufactured).

And now the disclaimer.

What's somewhat off-putting about Paris's turn here is that in the midst of conversations about social media, how the compulsive documentation of oneself is something of a Hilton legacy, there's the uncanny feeling that Paris is simply updating the brand, giving it necessary depth only because the commercial barometer is suddenly pointing in a more woke direction. Thus the dissonance. If anything it resembles the most recent Netflix-Gaga collaboration Five-Foot Two, in which Gaga does a similar penance, alleging to dismantle her own artifice and give her adoring public a more candid glimpse into her life as she records her 'realest' record to date, Joanne (which is only 'real' aesthetically, in as much as it opts for country riffs over the usual electronic bells and whistles).

And yet like a fungi, like some bacterial culture beneath the costume and the suit, there's this impenetrability; perhaps the posturing of celebrities who are too far gone in their avatars, too used to fabricating human responses to properly expose themselves. Instead of actual 'realness' (whatever that is) we get a packaged version, 'real' as a performative affect. The marketable notion of realness only as a proportionate contrast to an existing brand's theatricality. It makes of Paris and her ilk sort of spiritual actors, like damned souls. The kind of profound loss of self that a real actor will arguably never know because it's always the other they're asked to enlarge, and not luciferic distortions of themselves. A written character who normal actors are lending their bodies and voices will rarely consume them like a warp-self might (despite David Lynch's contrary thesis; see Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire).

Gorgeous duplicity. That's what Paris Hilton represents to me now. The lucrative appeal of a life of lies, like a candy-coloured hyper-femme varietal of the espionage career otherwise demonstrated as aggressively masculine (spartan-miserable in John Le Carre, affluent-consumerist in Fleming). Her face hides both the collapse of the public sector crystallising in the impetus to self-objectify as the only means of salvaging a living from a collapsed economy, and also the airbrushed subterfuge of consumer society as a whole; pulled tight and painted seamlessly to hide the wrinkles, to hide the inordinate rot which the whole destructive-productive apparatus not only generates as a by-product, but arguably thrives on. I'm obviously becoming mythic and florid in my framing of a celluloid airhead now but perhaps the assumption of the banality of celebrity is a mistake; if Jung were alive he'd tell you about the magical thinking that orbits our investment in celebrities. And in this way, with A to D listers being member to a heirarchic pantheon of exemplar supermen, we can maybe position Paris Hilton as a figure of anachronistic femininity (a goddess of antiquity), nostalgic not just for being a synthetic artefact of the early noughties, but also as a surviving remnant of pre-feminist prescriptions for ideal female presentation and behaviour. A contemporary-aristocratic fantasy of the perfect woman.

Soft. Ageless. Utterly infantalised, sexualised, and finally canonised as the highest measure of womanhood. Even in the midst of 'wokeness' we are apparently not done with a collective appetite for The Marilyn. All she needs is a trauma and then presto; the new criteria of empowered female with a mind to reparative justice is met, though she remains a grossly entitled heiress whose primary concern always is branding. I think it's incredibly distasteful to be asking audiences to sympathise with an impossibly wealthy white woman in this, a time of such gruelling overhaul in which most people find themselves fully or potentially slippng through the cracks; if only because the ground has literally opened up beneath them.

I would sooner sympathise with the leader of North Korea.

I'm not saying that the rich don't share in a common humanity; of course they do. But the symbolic value of wealth in terms of discourse cannot be minimised. It's generally symptomatic of prejudicial distribution of resources (even if you consider it 'hard earned'), and most (maybe all) conversations around wealth right now should be primed for utopian builds, not ignored as the ambience of celebrity-in-confession. A confession which somehow justifies the broken systems by which that wealth was accumulated in the first place. It doesn't, bitch. And blinding audiences to the inherent cruelty of those systems by rendering someone who is so clearly not a victim, as a victim, takes up space where actual victims seeking empowerment through clarity might otherwise have a platform. Save the sob story for your weekly heiress-brunch sweetie.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol. 7

Sometimes I think it would be easier to have been born into a rich white family with a sturdy lineage of inherited wealth to fuck around in while the world lurches into smouldering self-imposed ruin. Like everyone I feel more and more anxious the closer we get to the election, especially with Judith Colins sharing the same air as me; I really can't fathom that such a disreputable troll can get up in a public debate and say nothing of merit worth or even legibility, and somehow the fuck-nugget analysts can still say she 'won'. Like, I know we're in pretty deep in terms of American-influenced politic-styles, the post-Reagan politics as spectacle which we've come to know and love (gag), but do we really have to lean so heavily into it, even encourage it and normalise it for your average audience who might otherwise be persuaded to see beyond mere 'performances of strength' and actually engage with the words coming out of our politician's mouths? With America burning, what exactly is the obligation to sustain this commitment to sensationalist celebrity-styled political coverage?

I mean, look at where it's gotten America. They have an actual reality television star screwing their country into the ground. I feel like I can barely see or think through my anxiety. I just can't imagine navigating the world as it is, as it's becoming, under the management of neoliberal assholes who cannot grasp that a system which presents economic well-being and keeping people alive during a pandemic as conflicted interests, is clearly a broken system.

I feel like starting sentences with I feel. Anything else feels too declarative, too imperative, too much of an imposition on reality; like maybe I'd upset the fates (who are already clearly exacting some terrible vengeance). I feel like I'm tipping into that 'magical thinking' Joan Didion talks about in her book about grief; the one where she has a hell year in which her husband dies and her daughter almost dies (or actually does die? I can't remember now) from a rare terminal illness. Is my anxiety right now so full-throttle it's approximating the same bodily disturbances of grief, which I definitely remember from burying my dad in my early twenties. Or maybe it's not an approximation of grief, but real grief, and the bereavement is of a sort of innocence, a way of life or assumptions it was recently (maybe only tenuously this decade) still possible to make about the world; and even though the world before this year was still a confusing place the core-illusion (whatever it was) has finally collapsed. It feels like every year or so there's a certain 'loss of innocence', that this feeling is typical of the experiences of younger generations and how it feels to be in the world right now; just an unending procession of 'loss of innocence' moments to which we are becoming increasingly desensitised, until our ability to critically resist or consider each change is lessened, beaten into submission by sheer frequency.

Despair sets in, all the exhausting affects of grief, the free fall of depletion, of disillusionment, a type of negative surrender that has it's own sort of stark grandeur. Feels like drowning but also strangely comforting to have such complete desolation. Oddly more satisfying than a stopping-and-starting incremental approach to apocalypse. When the catastrophe is this global and subsequently confirmed, not just the neurodivergent hunch of some hysterical conspiracy theorist.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.6

The body is a finite resource, like the planet itself in a framework of industrial extractionism, moulded to time like a second-skin, petering out when and if time shrugs it off to adorn itself in a wave of newly minted skeins; ones without the bitterness of unmet expectations, hobbled dreams, sexual jealousies and the mortifying realisations surrounding youth's currency and it's inevitable recession. But are kids really born happy, spotless, and all the things we sunnily assume about those halflings which by society's measure are literally halflings; as in, by default they have half the rights of everybody else (even less in some countries). The irony is that we worship youthfulness aesthetically, but in it's embodiment only curtail and manage and otherwise belittle it's voice. We only want it available as a fashion, as a tonic, as a revitalising mantra when the gears of adult-life start grinding us down (which are only and ever the gears of society itself, never to be taken as subjective absolutes, as forgivable norms; if only we could let workaday drudgery segue into bomb-throwing radicality because honestly, that strikes me as a more rational response to this world than dejection and resignation and pandemic anxiety; rage ALWAYS seems like rationality to me in a wilfully fractious world). We want youth as a poster, as a psychological refrain to mentally fortify against the onset of decay, which is horribly misconstrued as virality even in a word, 'decay', too many negative connotations bundled up in this word like hurtling towards death (the only inevitability) was somehow shameful. At the very least, make very effort to stopper plug or plaster over the ravages of time, as they're declaratives of that thing we pathologically avoid here in the west; DEATH. So by an avoidance of Death we worship youth but gag it. Because in light of our warped phobia of death Youth is formed as a comparative and distinct virtue; and in this dyad is only acceptable as a utility for those who've passed through into the rapids of life's second act (or something)? Perhaps the more phobic we are of death the more violently we embrace success paradigms which offer a sort-of transcendence of death through the legacy of achievement. And then perhaps there's a relationship between successful individuals and their predations on young bodies, because they're in the realm of pathological death avoidance by pursuing legacy, which also puts them in the ideological mire of youth's (aesthetic) worship. So I guess fucking kids would just feel like a logical arrival point, right? Am I saying that success dialectically arrives people at kiddy-fiddling, as a symptom of a praxis motored by the transcendence of death? Yes. Yes I am saying that.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.5

I think it's important to keep on top of conspiracy theories so that you're better equiped to deflect them from legitimate discourse. In that spirit I've been reading David Icke for a few years now and while his theories of lizard-people and multi-dimensional energy prisons around the planet are fun, they're also telling of certain beliefs about the world that flat-earthers and anti-vaccers and anti-maskers all share in their respective crusades against the tyranny of empirical fact. Obviously this common element is the belief in secret societies influencing events, operating clandestinely while a veneer of fictitious democracy is maintained. Belief in secret societies is perhaps the founding gesture of all conspiracy theory, in as much as a conspiracy is defined as secret coordination behind the scenes. An orchestrated undermining of a mainstream narrative. A movement of synchronised insubordination. In this vein conspiracy isn't necessarily a bad thing. I'm sure the authoritarian regimes of the Arab Spring felt conspired against when thousands of pro-democracy. protesters used social media to organise themselves effectively (though sadly the dictator they ousted was merely replaced by another). But David Icke is special in that he characterises governments who may or may not be inadequately executing their promise of democratic rule while merely performing democracy, meanwhile making any decision they please behind closed doors for which they're very rarely held to account; yes, Icke is special because he characterises the failings of a democratic system being incrementally undermined by deregulated market forces and burgeoning corporate super-entities, as reptilian otherworldly overlords. Creating a mythic, a fantastic narrative of vampiric powers versus the mired every-man, a sort of corporate surrealism which Grimes herself has pitched as her aesthetic of the moment (towards which Miss Anthropocene is a kind of thesis). In this way, seeing as it's the aesthetic synthesis of a myriad of timely variables and factors into a coherent (if conspicuously ridiculous) thread, Icke's meta-stories of alien espionage and dimensional saviours are on a par with Art with a Capital A; for me, anyway.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.4

All I wanna do at the moment is play Zelda. Hyrule, which if you don't know and which I feel like a total virgin for even writing about, is the mythical land in which Zelda is set. Thus far Zelda canon is pretty crazy, and there's a lot of time-jumping and multiple threads in a sort of quantum-manifold way, and which there's plenty of YouTube tutorials on so I won't go into so much detail; but from what I can gather (lol, changed my mind) Hyrule was created by three goddesses of creation, one of whom took an especial interest in Hyrule (Goddess Hylia) and bequeathed to it's people the Triforce as an artefact of immense power, the intended use of which was religious awe and general maintenance (or something). But the object through some founding kerfuffle was split into three pieces, one being 'absorbed' by Princess Zelda, a piece representing the sacred aspect of Wisdom; another being 'absorbed' by Link, Zelda's personal knight, specifically the piece with the sacred aspect of Courage; and a third being absorbed by the game's antagonist Ganon, a piece representing the sacred aspect of Knowledge. Why knowledge of all Triforce pieces is demonised in Ganon is ideologically questionable, but then what isn't these days right? At first I thought there was something Garden of Eden about the Knowledge piece of this fallen/wrecked artefact being 'bad', or at least suiting the villain more than the other pieces. Like, I got the feeling it was on par with the sort of propaganda which services centralised governing bodies, of the kind that both Old and New Testaments of the bible love so much (being a transparently religio-political tract, like most monotheisms actually). But then I remembered Buffy the Vampire Sayer season four and how that's about too much money/power tied up in the military/industrial complex, and how the paramilitary Initiative underneath Sunnydale University ends up being wielded by just one person because there's no collective by which her actions could be mediated and moderated; which is ultimately the role other people play in each of our lives. Thus the societal necessity of herd-living, going beyond whatever congenitally transmitted preferences we might have as a species. Society needs us to measure each other against a majority status, which in these hyper-individualistic times seems oppressive, villainous, but which actually (so long as the majority status generally favours democracy) safeguards against any singular individual or group hijacking the whole tiered edifice; like what happens on Buffy season four. In this way Ganon perhaps represents Knowledge centralised within a single individual with no external safeguards to ensure this information isn't wielded destructively. Seeing as entertainment media targeting any mainstream audience, but even more specifically with the younger ones (indoctrination?) tends towards the capitalist edicts of narcissistic curation of Self, and that within these entertainments any thought to the collective is only excusable under the moniker of immediate family or some mutual gain (seriously, watch a recent Disney movie), does Zelda's tentative caution against centralised power replicate popular culture's capitalist realism or does it resist it with something more minded to communistic peer-management? Certainly Ganon can be seen as the infernal endgame of individuals committing to the neoliberal-consumerist propagandising which enamours publics through carefully pruned/glossed medias, pitched as benign by being 'popular'. He is a literal neoliberal monstrosity, assimilating his environment through an increasing technological sophistication which only serves his purposes of domination and pitiless rule. But then what of Zelda and Link? What values do their respective pieces of the Triforce example; capitalist-individualistic, or socialist-holistic? Again, the setting is telling here which makes sense in a game that was released to debut the graphics and gameplay capability of Nintendo's newest gigs. In Breath of the Wild Hyrule is an embodied character, in as much as the Switch console is the first Nintendo platform allowing for richly detailed open world gaming. Traversing Hyrule as Link, meeting all it's different people's in the varied realms without bigotry or disdain (which technically as a royal personage, at least by association, you'd be at liberty to exhibit), engaging with this painterly world which reposnds to you with such intricately programmed interaticivity that it feels, miraculously, actually intuitive. Yes, being set so fantastically leads me to believe that maybe holistic is a better word for Zelda's potentially capital-resistant (vaguely creationist) premise. Not strictly socialist but that and more. But then in Zelda canon the three holders of the Triforce pieces have been battling each other for thousands of years, apparently being reborn over and over to do battle, never reaching a definitive conclusion but sustaining a shifting Hyrulian topography of light and darkness and everything in between. After all, perhaps the dynamic this tripartite theatre best exemplifies is the crisis-dynamic of capitalism itself, in as much as Ganon is the 'villain' which we could here read as crisis/recession/depression, infrequently allowed to surface as the prevailing sacred aspect (like the mechanical boom and bust of market forces). What's more, the goddess whose dominion the Triforce gleans power from presumably has the means to finish Ganon off once and for all (being a goddess), but so far hasn't done so, and we can only surmise actively and consistently chooses not to. What are we to make of this? That Ganon as a villainous devastator of the realm, using proxy Hylian power no less, is in fact a part of the goddesses plan? That the self-sustaining conflict between Zeld Link and Ganon spinning endlessly like a perfectly balanced gyroscope, is itself the divine plan (if there is one) and not an infernal anomaly in it that needs to be rectified? If this is the case then holism and socialism aren't necessarily bedfellows, and neither are holism and neoliberalism necessarily mutually exclusive. In fact, perhaps most holism as it's 'popularly' located is frankly apoltiical and, like the Link-Ganon-Zelda trifector, resembles nothing more than an infinitely variable search-engine; or the rabid hypertextuality of the Internet itself. I don't know. Either way I just wanna live in Hyrule right now.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.3

There's so much construction happening at the moment and obviously that's a part of city living, but there's this voice in my head now which stands on recent globally catastrophic events (increasingly frequently this century) which is saying; 'why bother' It whispers this now behind everything I do. When I get out of bed in the morning, when I wash dishes or vacuum or make the bed or read a book, or boil water for another pot of coffee presumably seeking an energy boost for some project. Every little ritualised thing now in my day is underlaid by this creaking skeletal voice, rising up from this crypt of existential doubt and dread (only very recently furbished), and also boredom (of all things), and it's refreshingly consistent compared to everything else right now. Always and ever the same. Why. Fucking. Bother? Like everyone I live in the barely habitable gutter between hope and despair in a rat's nest of junk food and netflix. I see and hear people moving around me, doing things, striving for things, torn between their own motivations and the objective intel around them that the aspirations they had are mostly meaningless now, desires constructed from a world that suicided around April. The new world, which is really just a default setting of morbid uncertainty that those denuded of infrastructural accoutrements already know intimately, those unfortunates that Badiou tallies as the remainders in a less-than-universal equation of Human Rights; yeah, the new world is a winter-garden and those desires and dreams which have motored me and others towards an untenable horizon of affluence are summer strains that will barely seed, and if they manage to sprout at all will certainly wither and die before budding. Lol. Individualistic competition and it's ecologically damning cultures of environmental abstraction/extraction are meeting a wall. My optimism about capitalism's 'end' though is tentative just because it's proven time and again to be a fluidly adaptive beast that can assimilate it's poisons and reconstitute them as strength and merit; even in lethal doses. Whether or not the system regroups beyond this critical moment as a doubly insidious enslaving force (i.e. binding the poor to fixed precariousness and a spiritual shame of themselves despite their circumstances being mostly systemic; ignoring the red-flags of global warming and continuing plunder-for-progress as per the western fable of Growth with a Capital G), depends on these elections, depends on these next few years and whether the holders of the world's wealth are comfortable with both having kids and knowing that inherited wealth won't save them; that in fact the earth will be an arid unliveable ash-pile in the next few decades; that increased and lethally mutated virulence has been a long expected diagnostic of climate-change, that covid is a symptom of rising temperatures which scientists have a morbid hunch (more like an empirically supported forecast) is probably the merest tip of the iceberg. If you're thinking of having kids right now you may as well just take a loaded gun into the delivery room with you and the second it breaches pop a cap in it's head, because essentially going full term is the equivalent only with an arduous middle-man; by 'middle-man' meaning adolescence and if they're lucky a noirishly hardboiled adulthood (but definitely not middle-age lol). Bringing it back to the construction going on outside my window, driving a slow screw into both my temples with it's incessant industrial ambience; I understand it's election year and towards Christmas there's a lot more works going on because council needs to give the appearance of having sensibly spent it's grants etcetera, but Jesus fucking Christ that voice in my head screaming 'why bother why bother' is seeing cycle-lanes and newly smoothed curbs and wondering who the fuck is that for? Like, it's the veneer of planning for the future, of fortifying infrastructure in the most cosmetic capacity because honestly it's gonna get another generation's fair use and then bye-bye. And what's it like to be in high school right now? What does it feel like to be in the middle of formal-ish compulsory training for a world that imploded overnight, no less as a cumulative result of our hubris of which secondary curriculum is a complaisant buffer? Does it feel like those last few weeks of school before the summer holidays when you;re there but not really, when everybody's relaxed and half the school's bunking anyway and teachers might share your smoking spot without batting an eye. Is it like that but a whole year of it, with an additional doom-aesthetic? Are the kids okay or is it giving them ptsd? I guess only time will tell.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World vol.2

I've been reading a lot of Nick Land recently and I know he's something of a controversy because he's been recruited by the alt-right (or his ideas have) since his 'ousting' from academia. But to be honest this is on brand for him. If you don't know Land was a contemporary of Mark Fisher, the Capitalist Realism guy, and if Land didn't invent accelerationism then he definitely mainstreamed it (or took it as mainstream as you can when you're a fringe-cultural-theorist-cum-contemporary-philosopher). By accelerationism I mean the idea that the only way to transcend capitalism is to unleash all of it's self-destructive potential by leaning radically into it's fundamentally suicidal tenets, deliberately exacerbating it's more incendiary systematising to trigger a cataclysm; from the ashes of which a surviving remainder (cyberpunks and occultists?) can create a new world. I first discovered the guy when I picked up a pretty-looking book at the library, recently published; a collection of the anonymous writings of the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, which Wikipedia will tell you existed as a cultural theorist collective at Warwick University in England from 1995 to 1997. Land's involvement in the CCRU was minimal, the Unit being more of an online forum for critical exploration of his thinking by alumnis and acolytes. What's even more interesting about the CCRU is how it's contributors have remained anonymous, tying in with Land's narrativising of late-stage disaster capitalism as a faceless force of profoundly omniscient/omnipotent and prophetic annihilation. Hyperstition he called it; the collective realisation of apocalyptic 'hunches' proliferated through a rabidly decentralised media, giving material force and self-fulfilling potential to mere superstition through the internet's connective ability to create swarms (plagues?). Like Land's, the CCRU writings fixate on the eschatological mythologies of H.P. Lovecraft and his subterranean horde of Elder Gods, nightmarish forces which lie dormant in a netherworld but which are slowly waking up. At the time Lovecraft's convention of cosmic horror was a xenophobic expression of his more personal horror at the prospect of immigration in a newly-industrialised (and decentralised) world. This more than anything probably obfuscates Land's work as covertly racist, making possible it's ideological high-jacking by violent conservatives and traditionalists. More than anything this cleaving to Lovecraftian mythology shows capitalism and it's myriad death-dealing flows as abject, as within Land's work capitalism establishes the conditions by which the Elder Gods (a legion lead by Lovecraft's own demon-god-king Cthulhu) finally awaken and unleash unholy retribution on the cultural hubris of the developed world. Even more interestingly, and further bolstering Land's defensive case, racism and the animosities it invokes within Land's eschatological schematic can be read as symptoms of capitalism's self-annihilating potential, in which case (maybe not so defensibly) he can be seen as (ironically?) querying Charles Manson's purge-like Helter Skelter, in which a race war would cleanse contemporary society of it's performative hypocrisies and in doing so hasten it's own end. Perhaps Charles Manson can be cited as the original accelerationist, and Nick Land merely a doe-eyed follower transplanting Helter Skelter's unwieldy motivations in an academic setting. What was infuriating for high-browed academia at Land's work was how it dipped into theatricality, posturing itself as conspiracy only to demonstrate the notion of hyperstitiality (prophetic self-fulfilment) that he cited within entropic capitalist systems. His work took theory and reflexively performed the socio-cultural mechanic it alleged to be critiquing/theorising, INSIDE the theorising. The result was a reimagining of theory as much more plastic, fluid, and dare I say fun, than academia has any right to be. Running wildly with an academic register and extending it's possibilities. By modelling his work as the pseudo-religious writings of a cult, stealing from such academically counterintuitive genres as science-fiction, cosmic horror, and the occult (specifically a cyber-punk Kabbalah), Land presented his idea of capitalist tendencies towards fanciful (apocalyptic/dystopian) world-making by DOING that world-making; so that his critique of capitalism's inherent barbarism retains an extra-dimensional didacticism which more conventionally executed critiques lack. It's a dismantling of a capitalist-mythic (perhaps a counter argument to Fisher's Capitalist Realism), by generating an equally insidious capitalist-mythic. But even without Land's dark whimsies, the Cthulhu Club (a fictitious cult which the CCRU monitor through their collected writings) is still operable as a metaphor for the inherent 'boom-and-bust' of capitalist systems. In a century of capitalist experimentation every 30-40 years produces a crisis, as if on a timer. In the 1930's it was the result of real-time production catching up with unbridled financial speculation (which let's be honest is still a fucking blight), in the 1970's it was the collapse of Fordism, and in the late 2000's it was the implosion of willy-nilly lending schemes around sub-prime mortgages. If anything, Land's schematising of the Elder Gods is as the mythic embodiments of capitalism's tendentious curve towards crisis. So far though, the crises experienced tend to be more Keynesian than Marxist. To explain; economist Maynard Keynes alluded to capitalism being sustainable with just enough fiscal strong-arms to bring us back from ruin at every systemic depression (which inevitably occurs when growth's winners hoard capital), seeing crisis as almost necessary for re-shuffling social relations and replicating market forces in a sturdier and more egalitarian form. Call it a programmed learning curve towards which the fluctuating unemployment levels of any society is a critical barometer; keep the little hand on green or yellow and we're sweet, let it drop below red and the Elder Gods awaken. Marx on the other hand denounced the economic necessity of cyclical crises and urged the working masses (whose labour hoarded capital undermines) to exacerbate the potential for radical rupture in each scheduled collapse. In this way, capitalism's systemic crux potentially affords the means towards substitutes and alternatives. In light of this you could say Karl Marx was the very first accelerationist, though cultural Marxists prefer a more bespoke version with community gardens and genderless divisions of immediately productive labour. It makes you wonder; has anyone even read Marx? I feel like Nick Land actually has; what's more, he presents a radical Marxist playbook which looks a lot like psychopathic scheming against the corporatised state by full-immersion in (satanic) capitalist flows. Sounds fun.

BIRTHING DEATH; 365 Impressions of a Dying World, vol.1

I used to think cinematic mysteries approximated those of the void, the world, the impenetrability of matter itself, the incorrigible secretiveness of bodies remaining subjectively secretive despite how readily accessible an online MD. I used to think cinematic mysteries could bare similar shapes to the riddles of time and birth and death and the seeming performance of the air itself only pretending to be air. You know? But actually I feel now like I've seen behind the curtain and glimpsed all there is to glimpse, taken all the pleasure there can possibly be in deconstructing constructed riddles and mysteries. That are then honeyed with attractive players and gilded with expensive production values and borne aloft digitally enhanced screens; with popcorn and soda and neutral company. Is this everyone's theatre experience? So cinematic mysteries no longer feel satisfying to me, the convention of the entertainments available which I used to religiously pursue now seem so fucking stale so laughably faded and expected, dropped like palliatives like sedatives; I'm embarrassed to have ever thought storytelling (in this medium anyway) had radical potential. But then I guess that's my personal measure of value, if something has radical potential; a fluid measure seeing as capitalism is so adept at coopting the means of it's demise aimed by dissident hopefuls. Who more often than not cash in somewhere along the way because a comfortable life is a sunnier prospect than misery, poverty, and eventual defeat. No matter how principled. Maybe cinema is only ever as exciting as a mirror, so this dysphoria I'm experiencing could be symptomatic of some other seismic shift in my personality. Navel-gazing is perhaps a suitable cinematic accompaniment. It is after all about window dressing the capitalist individual's psyche, the Hollywood productions anyway. But it's naive to think that 'indie' cinema, whose budgets are still passed through gate-kept thresholds, whose content is still calculated through a metric of manageable (even complimentary) dissidence; it is naive to think, for example the recent prestige-kerfuffle of A24, that independent or alternative cinema which then pitches itself as such is anything but a variation in flavour, as opposed to being emblematic of the weakening of parasitical commerciality's hold on despairing publics. Despairing is right. We are systematically beat down by an ideological accessory to nature's existing cruelties which include the corruption of time, the inevitable loss of being temporally bound beings. Tethering to others in the harrowing flux, for comfort, according to our programming as social animals; only to have these tethers painstakingly un-braided over life's sublimely indifferent march towards oblivion. I used to think cinema was a refuge but now, having proven itself the oppressor through the insidious omnipotence of streaming, the toad nestled in the tree-roots has eaten every last spore and grub, every last possibility of magical renewal of itself, of fresh saplings; gone. Why do I even care so much that cinema seems dead to me; not that it objectively is, just that I'm having a momentary loss of romantic feeling for it. A romantic feeling which for me has historically been very strong. I think it's a sign. From my wider self, from the version of myself that uses gut-feelings and cock-twitches to communicate to my shallower, more limited conscious self; the single-hemispheric management department, the vantage which collates objective materials only and neglects in it's rigid equation all the penumbric deities like hunches and nightmares and excessive horniness. I personally believe there are messages from the divine in excessive horniness. But as a gay man I might be biased. What I suspect is happening is that my higher self is registering that the world is winding down, and cinema being the mirror or lens through which I'd cohere my environment into a legible 'world', now seems defeated by a surplus of information, by a maelstrom of pressurised data. Cinema as an external hard-drive, as a cognitive extender, has reached maximum capacity (personally speaking). Of course, there's always the fact that cinema no longer functions as centrally as it once did in terms of dictating/manufacturing reality. Even before the hyper-connectivity of the Internet and normalcy of personal computers, and way before smart phones, the cinema screen and it's dominant diegesis shifted from ideological strong-arm to a richer discursivity, an increased number of voices producing a greater variety of images/stories/affects towards dynamism, plurality, and other words people use when they want to critically justify watching semi-pornographic 'art'. But cinema's specific diegesis no longer monopolises cultural production in the universally influential way it did for the latter part of the twentieth century. T.v. does that shit now. You'd think approaching ruin as we are on a global scale that television, long keeper of temporal flows what with classical forms being dictated on a nationally broadcast schedule (now freed in a soupy internet time-flux from which viewers can conjure and shelve entertainments at will); yeah, you would think that a medium so wedded to temporal regulation, so enamoured of the 'normalcy' of the five-day work week and it's vetting, would suddenly be exploding with apocalyptic thematics. But it's doing the opposite. I only see shows about life sans pandemic. They are unbelievable at this point. The normal lives they depict are even more fantastical now than they were a year ago; not because of their tailored bodies or effortlessly maintained inner-city apartments or polished quippy dialogue, but because the presumed backdrop of all of these whimsical players and their interactions just imploded. 'Normal life', from this side of 2020? What a fucking fairytale.

Zelda breath of the wild death stranding cigarettes ecological dysphoria

I can't think straight enough to say anything about the world right now so I'll talk about video games. 

Video games have always fascinated me, like from a distance because when I was growing up we could never afford a recent console (don't worry I'm not going to use gaming to demonstrate closed access to leisure-as-commodity, though obviously that's a thing). When I was a kid we picked up a decrepit sega system from the late eighties at a garage sale and that was me for the summer, addled by an increasingly violent world (post 9/11) and the then inarticulable suspicion that I was a raging homo. It was the system that had in-built game Alex The Kid, which anyone familiar with the console and that particular era of gaming will tell you brings back fond memories; which in reality is a retroactive sugaring of what were probably reasonably dissociative childhoods with high instances of trauma (lol). 

But whatever the reasons people throw themselves into games, and at whatever age, I find myself immersing in Legend of Zelda; Breath of the Wild like I haven't since I was a kid, whether on our ancient sega system or on a neighbour's or cousin's more up-to-date unit. This probably has something to do with the fact that we are in lockdown yet again, a combination of excess time on my hands coupled with the lure of escapism against a backdrop of societal collapse (which of course is the founding gesture of this blog). There's no way of knowing if I would be as readily embracing this Zelda game without a pandemic, without a lockdown. But that remains beside the point, the point being I am so enamoured of this game that spending time with it, pouring over it's narrative devices, it's eerie and desolately beautiful landscapes, meandering between it's loftier quests in details so infinitesimal you'd swear they sprouted from their own immaterial ecologies; the point is, this game has the sublime feeling of bonafide literature, the transcendent aura of high fantasy which works as both political and spiritual allegory, and then goes further than metaphor in being a numinous property all it's own.

Literally another world.

Again, my haphazard experience with games means my opinion falls short of what I imagine is the male-ish purview of more 'committed' gamers. That said, my respect and druggish thirst for pop artefacts won't let me ignore gaming. I mean,  it's a billion dollar industry and still only of marginal interest to cultural studies. I feel like the internet happened, so arbitrary demarcations of high and low culture are exactly that; arbitrary. So why the nearly total lack of critical attention to gaming?

I used to have this absent notion of video games as indoctrinating media that was persuading a generation in it's youth to think and feel reality in certain ways. Of course mass media does this to a certain extent anyway, or attempts to; but for some reason I had this bias around video games, that they were particularly insidious examples of 'immersive propaganda'. Nowadays the fractal deluge of information is so great that I wouldn't deign to pretend to know from where and in what ways I'm being manipulated into this or that mindframe. And I wouldn't peg video games with being particularly responsible for this state of affairs.

If anything, perhaps the haphazard accessibility of gaming offers alternatives to mainstream narrative-building in as much as it's audience is less managed, and in that respect retains radical potential where cinema and television (and even News) reside in agendas of mass-produced homogeneity. 

A scarier (expansive?) thought; I pertain to criticality but in all seriousness, what does that even mean? Where did my register of alleged criticality come from? How do I know that criticality itself, as a mediating looking relation, isn't another methodology of mediated knowledge-formation; of designer world-building?

Ironically this ability games have to world-build easier than any other medium is the source of both my suspicion and adoration of gaming, perhaps because the worlds of games are 'given', disguising their biases more easily than in the mediums of cinema and literature. Or so you'd think.

Could this possibly be because we are more familiar with the diagetic methods of cinema and conventional text, as opposed to being a textual feature of gaming itself? 

One of the reasons I think I love Breath of the Wild so much is because it's so gorgeously rendered, the world so layered, and yet the questing of it's protagonist is so gently imbued with what feels like organic exploratory relations that you're barely aware of the story moving around you as you follow your own whims; basically picking a point and heading out with the faith that eventually everything will tie together. What makes Breath of the Wild so special is that a lot of breathing space is allowed between player autonomy and story; and I do mean a lot. At times the map seems so vast that it's like throwing yourself into a high-resolution void. Am I meant to be here? Should I double back and find some path, some recognisable gaming feature; a side-quest, a boss level. That sort of thing.

While these features exist in Breath of the Wild they are few and far between, and also end up feeling secondary to the pleasures of wandering. 

It bears similarities to another recent release, Death Stranding. 

For starters, both games are set in a dying world, or worlds that have seen a cataclysm and are subsequently inhabited by survivors. In both games players learn the history of each world's fall, and it's with this knowledge that you 'wander', always with the sense of being in a fallow aftermath. The painterly construction of both games is in this respect Gothic with a capital G, as much as the genre of gothic storytelling spends time flashing back to tragic histories juxtaposing memory with a present laid waste (Wuthering Heights, Frankenstein etc). 

The most striking similarity here is that Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild, while bearing elements of gothic storytelling, offset an ambience of gothic despair/desolation with the possibility of reconstruction. In Death Stranding you are literally rebuilding America which has been laid waste by a legion of science-magic demons, connecting fortress cities by putting an old communications system back online. This is done by physically visiting regional sites and re-activating the network terminus by terminus. Between sites you wander, which comprises the majority of game-play. 

To any die-hard gamer reared on violent button-mashers such as Doom or even God Of War, this might seem boring. To anyone not habituated to the tropes of gaming this might seem esoteric, considering the shoot-em-up formula dystopian science fiction normally hews to (in film and television anyway).

And to the discerning aesthete, this gorgeously experimental and oddly high-profile provocation is the gaming equivalent of an Andrew Tarkovsky film. I'm not even kidding. 

Breath of the Wild also opens on a broken world, ravaged a century ago by a demonic entity named Ganon. And just as in Death Stranding you're tasked with visiting and bringing back online a grid of ancient technological sites, shrines and towers which belonged to the kingdom of Hyrule before it was destroyed. And between these sites which are numerous you wander, traversing vast swathes of empty lands that are riddled with interactive flora and fauna. And just as in Death Stranding, for huge stretches of the game you are entirely alone.

Though both games have other characters for the most part the biggest character is the land itself. After a while, and without the didactic trappings of games in which story oversees a players every action, gameplay becomes meditative. The minutest fluctuation in weather, a change of the wind or bolt of lightning or fresh veil of rain all becomes a phrase of the game itself, standing in for story in when moves towards narrative coherence are absent.

This has been a dormant possibility of gaming ever since 'open-world' became technically possible with last decade's rash of consoles, from the PS3 to the XBOX ONE. Nintendo missed out on a console with open-world capability so they're reasonably new to the party, but whatever the reason for the wait it was well worth it because in my opinion Breath of the Wild takes the existing formula, more conventionally explored in games like Dark Souls and Batman's Arkham Trilogy, and elevates it.

What comes through more strongly in Breath of the Wild than Death Stranding is a romantic loneliness, a sensibility of sweeping-spiritual environmentalism harking to colonial conceptions of the commons, of the wilds as mirrors of the human psyche. On top of this we have two worlds whose destructions were brought about by industrialising gone awry; in Death Stranding a subtle weapon which rent the seam between the worlds of living and dead, and in Breath of the Wild a kingdom whose guardian-machines were hacked and turned against them. Both doomsday scenarios were ushered in by measures of war, and both can only be remedied by rehabilitative wandering from post to post, a gradual rebuilding on an intimate scale as opposed to the oppressively totalising metrics of Defense. 

When 'open world' first started being thrown around to describe this new type of game I thought it sounded like a gimmick. But now I think it's nothing short of a new art form, a medium which 'game' falls short of describing in all it's possibility. If a book or film or television show makes allusions to vastness, it is gaming now which can actually approximate it. I think we've only just scratched the surface of what profound implications these open-world statements are making.

Anyway, I've gone full rabbit-hole with Breath of the Wild. Wading through a mythical place where new life pushes through the rubble of ancient ruin kind of makes me want to lay waste to this world rather than endure the long, slow, agonisingly drawn out demise. Is that the appeal of utopian/dystopian fiction? I would call my relationship with Breath of the Wild escapism is I wasn't having such an intensely emotional reaction to it. 

Maybe I need to up the ante on my cardio game. 

Identity is a bust and am I even human? Maybe there's something in post-humanism beyond silver eye-paint and art-parties where they try and pass noise off as dance music lol

Here we are in a wasteland of netflix and home cooked meals. If I see one more post about resisting capitalism by not being productive then I am going to fucking kill myself. I mean, does capitalism own productivity? And what is so fucking radical about not doing anything for twelve fucking hours, what's so fucking radical about binge watching a series or sitting on your bed staring into the wall like a piece of mould, sad and thoughtless? (Or wearing track pants until they're discoloured and masturbating until your dick or clit falls off).

Also; I do not care if you are using this time to dig deep and learn how to cook, or acquire a second language. These are things that no one should be advocating or that no one needs to know about, not your friends or family or colleagues. People are literally dying. 

What I am interested in is thinking about how life will 'carry on' on the other side of this fucking shit show, with respect to the fact that we have endured a pandemic and people have lost their lives. Anyone brazen enough to reduce this period of enforced isolation to an 'opportunity' to clean out their Tupperware drawer or spend quality time with their family is a brainless fuck-wit with the emotional intelligence of a mole-rat. 

PEOPLE HAVE DIED. END OF DISCUSSION.

What matters now and what everyone currently identifying as human should be concerning themselves with is whether or not the previous capitalist status quo, comprised of collective human misery and socioeconomic uncertainty, is something we feel like resuming after this breather. 

Important questions to ask oneself before we exit level-4 lockdown; 

Does mindless consumption make you happy?

Does having an unthinking unfeeling complicity in systems of third-world exploitation and deliberate impoverishment bring you happiness? Are you content with this being the premise of our lifestyles, and the legacy of our generation?

Are you content with the bombastic inequality within our society, in which you can enjoy relative comfort while others struggle through subtle blocks of discrimination which disable them from attaining the same levels of basic subsistence? 

I hate to bring 'discrimination' into it because it serves a bullshit identity politics which would like to think it is transcending the raced and gendered biases of history, but which uses history as it's ultimate signifier, has wrung cultural/social/cognitive capital from the late-capitalist model of immaterial currencies while masquerading as some kind of disruptive force. The truth is identity is never a disruptive force. Identity is a commodity and will NEVER have a radical influence on the way society organises itself because it is structurally identical with the commodity form. Identity is a product, whether you're gay or straight or white or non-white; it is all up for grabs in the metric of capitalist value. So even though I am firmly sided with the majority of Leftist values and crusades for re-distributive social justice, if you are someone who thinks that society can be renewed through this crusade then you are fucking deluded. 

The only radicality available to us is yet to exist, will only come into existence when we find a means of extending beyond identity, the endgame of which I cannot see but an action towards which might be in acknowledging identity itself as a technology, as something akin to the avatar and it's systemic function of mobility through an existing matrix. 

Right?

Fuck identity. Is what I'm saying. Alienating people on the basis of what they are has somehow become the Leftist argument du jour, and I refuse to participate beyond this point because the stakes are too fucking high. 

So with that behind us, is there a possibility now of a more profound and spontaneous solidarity? If this crisis has any benefit at all perhaps it's in this, levelling the usual socioeconomic demarcations towards a unity of an elite billionaire ruling class versus everyone else. I'd like to think so but I'm also aware of how deftly capitalism has proven in the manipulating of it's own crises towards an even stronger position for itself. Look at the 2008 financial crisis for example, in which governments bailed out banks with tax-payers money, despite the low-income tax-payers being the obvious victims of deregulation and the double bind of systemic debt and credit. Instead of state power disciplining the recklessness of speculative value and it's corrosive effects on production, the most vulnerable were left footing the bill so that a toxic status quo could be maintained indefinitely. The end of the world is apparently a minor obstacle when it comes to the up-keep of executive lifestyles. 

And it's those lifestyles and their ecologically devastating modes of production and consumption which have brought us to where we are, a pandemic symptomatic of an ideological manoeuvre pitted against the environment in service to capitalistic efficiency, an efficiency which tabulates human life itself as equal in value to the methods and materials of production; just another resource. And so this pause is a breath being taken by the world machine which has two options before it; either implement a more mindful model in which profits are distributed evenly, a reconfiguring of production to serve actual human welfare (including a more infinite-minded approach to environment-as-resource), or total barbarism. 

Democracy and it's free-market mascot have always been heavily flawed but within them the symbolic value of a world order, allegedly pitted against exploitation and war, has kept total global barbarism at bay (if only selectively and in fits and starts).  That symbolic order has just taken a heavy blow, and utopian thinking has all of a sudden become less of a fantasy and more of a viable solution. That is, compared to the alternatives. 

An unpopular opinion; recently my IG feed has come up with anti-Jacinda sentiments which I find hard to swallow. Firstly because she's in a coalition government and so the logistical failures of a bipartisan cabinet, not to mention an eight year neoliberal legacy which there's no way one person can rectify in a four year term, are disconcertingly being lumped on Jacinda in the manner of scape-goating. This is something I would expect of alt-right agitators such as Mike Hosking, but never of mutual friends and acquaintances who I'd assumed fairly intelligent, or intelligent enough to recognise the reluctant value of 'lesser evils'. Secondly this sentiment, which apparently includes a failure to acknowledge or meet needs of Maori, is dividing the left all over again, which during an election year bodes ill for the ballot. Certainly, if I have anything positive to say about National it's that they efficiently managed Iwi reparations for which I am grateful (even if Nga Puhi couldn't organise themselves in time to get a decent slice of the pie). However, I wouldn't have them back in a million years even if it meant more money for Iwi's, because they're operating from distinct neoliberal premises which have otherwise destroyed the middle-class and created a terrifying new world of precarious working poor. The Left cannot afford to splinter now lest in our confusion we let National back in, which will surely mean a tipping of the scales towards barbarism. 

A solution to Jacinda's allegedly sub-par approach to Maori (which admittedly includes neglecting to visit Ihumatao) is to vote double red, to give her full authority so she's not bound by anyone else's racist conservatism (Winston Peters, cough).

Ardern's competency and compassion cannot be understated. I know for a fact that she is in direct conversation with small business owners and renters, keeping herself informed on a grass-roots level which I can't imagine there's too much of a precedent for. 

If you have an issue with how she's conducted herself to date, check yourself, repeat the words 'bipartisan government', and on Election Day tick red. Otherwise shut the fuck up, because the Left cannot afford to be divided right now.