FEELING DIZZY AND SICK HERE AT THE END OF EVERYTHING WHERE TRAUMA IS A STATUS UPDATE AND DEPRESSION IS A MEME; ALSO WANNA FUCK?

As the world ends so does everything we've come to lovingly mediate the occasionally fraught business of living with, all those phantasmagorical buffers of culture and ritual which can gild a turd into a bronze ornament, or suddenly make flowery a soggy paper bag. I'm talking about all those rosy consolations, like romantic sex and love and friendship blah blah blah. I hate to slide into sentiment, but perhaps my aversion towards cliched behaviours and romantic platitudes about love conquering all (and the normative pressure to 'realise' adulthood by engaging with a long-term romantic partner), is both a horror of ideological snares AND a fearful skirting of the rich psychological possibilities the deep diving of a 'serious' relationship proffers our way. Risking sounding like a beige Luddite social media and the internet generally have done funny things to interpersonal relationships, depending on which angle you're looking at it from; like, I for one think things like Grindr and Tinder were birthed from anxieties around strangers and wanting to mediate the 'date' experience, coming ironically with their own horror stories of deranged homicidal bogey-men. It seems risk is the stain which cannot be erased when it comes to other people. Also within these apps there's an annoying fixation on preference and wanting to curate casual sex as much as possible. I think this detracts from the urban experience somewhat, holds people to their little social-ghettoes and minimises the 'cosmopolitan' difference of city living. It's what Peter Sloterdijk (a hawt as fuck contemporary philosopher that's obsessed with wombs) is describing in his Spherology, which is just the study of how people contain themselves, and how the hyperconnectivity of the internet has only facilitated having holding-spaces which are technically close but functionally continents apart; much like the socioeconomic difference within a single apartment building, where the rich and poor can live on top of each other quite literally while never having any significant contact (see J. G. Ballard' s High Rise, Super Cannes, or even Cocaine Nights).

Professionally the mores of increased transparency on the internet, particularly with our socials, makes perfect sense. I never thought I'd be arguing for privacy because I've historically argued that privacy as we've known it will become an antiquated notion as the benefits of complete online divulgence surface with gaining detail. This new world demands it's pound of flesh which sooner than you think will no longer sting, but will be tantamount to brushing one's teeth or doing the dishes. A banality, a chore. I think we might actually already be there. The commonplace-ness of things like Only Fans and other platforms in which the category 'sex-work' has become liquid, spreading spectrally outside the once firmly socioeconomic parameters by which it used to be defined, are testament to this fact. The objectification of the self is nearly total, approaching a voyeuristic completion the likes of which even Hitchcock could not have envisioned. If anything as we transition into an era in which privacy becomes not just outmoded but counterintuitive, I predict the next fetter on infinitely permeable self-hood to be dismantled will be the censor. Censorship for whatever reason stands against the logics behind complete and commercial transparency of every facet of Self. If there are things we cannot talk about in public forums, then there are things which cannot be made into functioning capital. They are forced into shadow economies and people will profit from them anyway, but it's best to mediate potentially violent proclivities within sanctioned spaces, ya know?

Or maybe it's not. I think that's the question I'm posing. Does mediation really minimise risk, and if it does then at what cost? Also; doesn't the democratic dream of universal representation fold easily into the ultra-conservative push towards complete surveillance? Both operate from the assumption that the more we see and know the safer we will be. 

I call bullshit. 

I think bottom line is risk is ingrained maybe, an unavoidable reality. Maybe even our tendentious behaviours themselves are affective tropes of the evolutionary process (as experienced outside of deep time), and that every cultural effort to mediate our animality, to contain it like some pathogen, is doomed to be derailed by a larger physiological impulse. Or something (I know Evolution is a potentially dangerous subject because it's often conceived to naturalise spurious 'scientific' hypotheses which are really people totalising their prejudices). 

As this relates to privacy, I guess interpersonal skills have to some extent arisen as a buffer between individuals and their obligations to society as a (barely) harmonious whole. Within that skill set is the ability to negotiate public and private space in a way which establishes mutual benefit, withholding personal details when it's advantageous and allowing for others the freedom to do the same. But now we have technologies which insist on routine evacuations of private life into the public sphere. For those perennially anxious about Orwellian statehood this has been a sure sign of society's devolution into mechanised Being where the necessary breathing space between people's experiences and their divulgences, the space which would otherwise allow for critical thought, evaporates in a clamorous grab for liquid-capital; the kind of capital you get for posting a TW-stamped trauma or a high-res pic of your butthole. That social-capital blankets sex and suffering as being within the same genus of affective exchange is telling, in as much as such divulgences were once almost exclusively reserved to symbolically register and bolster interpersonal relationships, the kinds which helped people weather the frequently impossible demands of society and to aid and support each other (and to when and where possible foster solidarity and resistance).

That said; as the concept of privacy changes, or withers as it becomes increasingly inconsistent with the demands of the times, perhaps it's the kinds of content previously considered private which have shifted and not the litter-box of 'private' itself. Perhaps what we are divulging has no affective value between peers in it's commodification, and relationships aren't losing their communicative reverence so much as finding other ways to weld solidarity. Like, the new working class angst will be something along the lines of getting faster internet and rights to affordable grooming services, how to manage work/life dissonance when work is equal to mining the personal for gain, sharing experiences with various pay per view platforms and rating these for fellow precariats whose dick pics are available for purchase alongside your own in a near-infinite row. That sort of thing. Gone will be the days of relaying traumatic events to a confidant (or even a therapist) because trauma pays the bills, it's already out there and so useless in terms of signifying the intimacies between friends it once did.

I'm guessing the commodification of self and how to fortify against related toxicities is nothing new to sex workers, but it's worth noting how similar the psychosocial labours of peddling one's brand across numerous socials (regardless of whether or not the actual content is overtly sexual) bear resemblance to that historic profession. We all do it now to some degree. 

I'll withhold my judgement until an alternative presents itself. For now I'll salt my brand with nudes and trauma in the faint hope I can in some far off day monetise my followers. 

Is Photo-shop still a thing? Asking for a friend. 

COOKING WITH PARIS IS A DIZZYING GLIMPSE INTO A HELLISH NETHER-REALM

A few days ago Paris Hilton launched her You Tube cooking show. It's a lot of things, among those potential descriptors, 'bland', 'riveting', 'mundane-surreal', and 'dissociative'. But maybe above all of these things, it felt dystopian. To the point Paris is wetting a paper towel to remedy a (nearly) comedic instant of over-seasoning from a refrigerated bottle of Evian, saying 'you don't know what's in the sewer; omg brutal'. It's difficult to gauge just exactly if she's consciously inhabiting the public Paris persona (whatever that is in 2020) or if she's possibly presenting herself with celebrity-skewed sincerity, or if the whole thing is a deliberately murky combination of the two, generating a mystique which, on paper, a mega-rich blonde-haired waif-heiress has no natural right to. 

But there it is, pulling us through a laboured ten-ish minutes of Paris, lazy-eyed and mannequin stiff, walking us through the making of an apparently infamous lasagne (how a lasagne can be infamous remains an unexplored tangent), which she alleges to make often enough for friends and family; though anyone as slender as Paris is either lying about eating lasagne to 'normalise' herself with a carb-huffing public, or has access to science-magic type fitness and nutrition regimens to counteract things like ill-health and fatness (I tend to think it's the latter; I know those Illuminati med-pods exist, the ones where you climb in and zap away any known illness from a cold to leukaemia). 

I can't pinpoint the appeal of Paris Hilton but it is there, perhaps less in it's own right these days and more as a nostalgia for a simpler time; seems horrendous that we're able to look back on a decade characterised by the war on terror as a 'simpler time'. But it really was. Maybe because climate change still felt like a distant threat (Al Gore be damned) and our anxieties were less scattered, could be traced back to specific events and entities. Our fears were drawn within identifiable bogies, instead of being dispersed like the fluttering rapturous ash of Thanos's utopian genocide, spread out like a mist. An ambience of cloistering dread. 

And to think Paris even knows how to cook a lasagne! 

It was definitely not a skill I'd think to find in her set, sitting comfortably alongside tax-evasion and weaponising sex.  But as the video shows, even if she has trouble navigating the kitchen ('I don't know where anything is, I haven't cooked in this kitchen before'), Paris Hilton does in fact know how to cook a lasagne. She says she grew up watching her mother in the kitchen and that's where she gets her natural love of cooking from, but I cannot imagine anyone from the Hilton empire condescending to cook their own meals when a paid staff's at your beck and call, unless it's in the realm of 'austerity cooking' which if you don't know is where rich people try cooking meals with limited ingredients, emulating the Poor Experience. Just for the lols. 

Did she have someone teach her how to cook a lasagne for the sake of the video then? As the clip ends Paris looks into the camera thanking her viewers, asking that they suggest other meals for her to cook in the comment section. Is she going to learn from scratch how to cook each meal before filming herself doing it with acted finesse? This is of course assuming she doesn't have any culinary skills going in and that she's being primed to give the appearance of knowing her way around a kitchen by a (probably lavishly paid) production team, who are making a statement towards what? Rich people are just like you? 

There's a moment where Paris puts on a giant pair of sunglasses with diamanté-covered frames (lets be honest, they're probably diamonds) and turns to the camera saying this is what she wears when she's cutting onions 'to help with crying'. Bitch, as far as I can see you don't have anything to cry about. The whole thing feels like an unnecessary juxtaposing of extreme wealth inside the abject, frequently destitute experience of 'cooking for one'. Like, when you don't have plans and you're kind of relieved that you don't because you didn't really have the money to go out anyway, but you're also really hungry and you're gonna make something heavy and yum and in bulk so there's leftovers throughout the week. To me, outside Indomie noodles, lasagne and most cheap pasta dishes encapsulates the specific sadness of this kind of solo, financially constrained cooking. And I do not need Paris Fucking Hilton haunting my lonely Saturday nights while I'm dissolving pasta noodles in a pot or letting onion vapours ravage my bare cornea (because I'm sans Gucci sunnies). 

GTFO.

That said I'm probably going to watch whatever meal she makes next, especially if it's fried chicken. When that happens I'll know the gates of hell are opening up. 

Paris (Oz) is motherfucking burning and I still wake up to a stomach clenched with fear over whether the price of durries is going up #cognitive_dissonance

Just heard the fires in Australia are so hot they're creating their own ghastly miniature climates, these diabolic weather-mobiles conjuring meteorological nightmares like flash-storms and fire-twisters. There's literally a fire-tornado sequence in Mad Max Fury Road. Fuck kids, this is really it isn't it.

Also just saw that the crowd-funded aid-relief is in the ballpark of fourteen billion. Holy Jesus Mary Mother and Joseph! Could this possibly be because the fire's are symptomatic of that long mythologised and yet for the average westerner yet to be intimately experienced slide into ecological catastrophe called Climate Change? Though disastrous, the manifest signs of what has been a stretch of gas-lighting to most middle-class citizens of developed countries can only be experienced as a (negative) relief; an evidentiary release from a half-truth which equally vague scientists (conducting various tests in the wings) kept telling us was an invisibly pending bookend to industrialisation. The fires in Ozzie have a certain 'told you so' ring to them don't they? Also if I see another meme about how they could have been averted if only Australia had privileged it's indigenous with sovereignty over their own lands then I think I'll fucking kill my self. I think the scale and immediacy of the crisis makes political recruitment as bad as hijacking it as an ad-space, which is practically the same when identity-based solidarities occur mostly across social-media platforms and exempt 'real-space' (as if the virtual had zero relationship with 'the Real'), until of course there's a disaster. No matter how networked we are we can't pretend real-space doesn't exist in the middle of an earthquake, for example. 

Or a fire tornado. 

Which actually isn't to say I don't agree with this retroactive consideration of indigenous ontologies as a salve to industrial processes. Because I totally do. But it's a bit late for that honey. Also this kind of blame-projection, no matter how accurate, tends to deny our consumer complicity in anything that happens here on out. I tend to think of this as an escapist manoeuvre where individual consumer practices can be carried on with guiltlessly (like air-travel lol) because we're so temporally removed from industry's genesis, namely the colonial expansion of Empire. Don't waste your breath! Literally, it's precious af rn.

Against this kind of backdrop I'm asking myself why I even bother writing! I mean, I'm aware of being drawn to a career in this shit, a drive which honestly is comprised of less noble aspirations, like those for wealth and status etcetera. But then I've always told myself those things are just means and that the ends justify those egotistic indulgences which are frequently packaged with a wide-reaching platform. I mean, look at M.I.A.! Problematic (I think?) but also holding space for celebrity to tackle not just platitudinous meme-worthy political stances, but to agitate for specific and vested causes into which she has a particular and therefore valuable insight. Political celebrity not as fashion but as righteously indignant mobilisation. Before her I'm guessing Right Aid or fucking Bono would've been the precedent, taking limp-dick stabs at remedying global poverty or playing stadium gigs for world peace, or whatever. 

Happy fucking last ever year in the failed experiment that is western society lozzles #2020 (also Disney is a huge cunt and will pretend they love you when they really don't)

Historically people do not vote for their self interest but in dogged defence of their identities. Trump is an obvious example where working class citizens thwarted their own chances at fair wealth distribution only to bolster the standing of a man whose vitriol they 'identified' with, in as much as 'working-class' speech is patronised for being unenlightened by educated intellectuals privy to the micro-linguistic upheavals of identity-premised social-justice rhetorics. I can only assume the very same has happened in Britain with the election of Boris, another sagging conservative with draconian regard for immigrants and refugees who has expertly recruited workers as a border-patrol task-force which, if you asked them, they'd call by any other name; most likely self-preservation, protecting their jobs etcetera. 

Identity is a fucking bitch and a half and I'm personally over it tbh. I know there's a certain tribalist thrill in gathering with recognised brethren to rouse each other vengefully over this or that slight perpetrated by a morally deficient Other, usually rich and tardy and painfully well-dressed (I guess my imagined corporate enemy is a Patrick Bateman lookalike, equal parts scary and fuckable). But I think the world needs an imaginary beyond tribalism, also beyond the anaemic alchemies of universal humanism which absently nullifies difference in it's project of total inclusion. Like anyone else with five senses right now, I can see that if alternatives to nationalistic hooplah aren't leant into with even half a heart then we won't survive the building pressure of dwindling resources, the approach of climate-induced disasters, the sublimely indifferent sword-fall of nature as it flexes a long delayed response to industrial prodding. We'll tear ourselves apart before the world has a chance to, and a part of me likes to think some vegetal sentience of the biosphere is secretly looking forward to levelling cities and giving it's crusty shoulders one big apocalyptic shrug. 

Hardt and Negri in their Empire trilogy, theory books on how cooked the current world system is, admit identity will probably have to go before a decent shove to capitalism can occur because it's a concept too closely allied with the commodity form, acting as an entrenched conduit within consumer ideology not just for the distribution of goods but also consumer ideals and affects themselves. Basically identity is an ideological mannequin and anything under it's banner pitches everybody as a clothes-horse for cosmetic variants on the human being essentialized as capitalist. You're a trailer pimp, and you might already know this, but awareness does not delete the function. 

There's the faint hope awareness over time might instil vigilance and that opportunities to glitch or 'queer' systemic fetters will occur, opportunities which the enlightened capitalist has been patiently awaiting and which they've probably simulated in their tortured-liberal minds for decades. 

But this becomes less and less likely considering anti-capitalism is often a feature of capitalism, an affective trinket with as much novelty value as acrylic nails or a weekend in Raglan (and just as lucrative to vested parties). I mean, has anyone seen a Disney movie lately? They've recently purchased a dozen franchises, absorbed a plethora of lucrative icons and squeezed them into a single streaming package, bearing economic clout equal to a collapsing star and with just as much insidious suck on surrounding planets; their status as capitalist behemoth is undeniable. 

And yet they cannot resist pitching themselves as 'woke', spitting out narratives for kids with gently anti-capitalist codas which nonetheless eschew radicality in favour of a pean to the resilience of family, as if strength-in-numbers were preferable to remedying the capitalist-ailment. Bunker down as a 'community' and you'll get a happy ending these storylines say, disavowing entirely the possibility of alternatives; all while reinforcing the capitalist construction of the individual as it passes through that hallowed site of ideological re/production; The Family. 

In this way Disney colours between the lines of the flabby-liberal status quo in which social media enables instant commentary and reduces political actants time and again to just this. By Twitter standards political activity is mere gesture, is 'representation', by which is meant slave to the commodifying principle of identity. Getting studios to produce content with more queers and people of colour is NOT going to effect real and lasting change. Tweeting about violence is NOT going to magically draw back the curtain and get the masses on board with overhauling the limits of 'rendition'. And punishing cis-men for being the villains of a gender construct rather than mere products of the same is NOT going to vanish predatory behaviour. Period. 

So long as identity is the organising principle of western social worlds, we're fucked. It's scary to think what other relational modes we might shuttle towards in aid of averting crisis, but also exhilarating; how else would I think about Self without the bias of Identity as we've come to know it? Is it truly possible to extricate Self from Identity, and how do we even discern the two? Identity being a coordinate heavily contingent with memory, where would History sit in a society which no longer worshipped linear sequencing as the only measure of civilisation? What within Life does History camouflage? 

God?

Lol. Maybe. 

Though we're a couple of days into January now, before you commit to any no doubt ideologically compromised set of New year's resolutions just ask yourself; who fucking cares? When the world is burning and nation-states are rounding up dissenters for liquidation, nobody's going to remember that in 2020 you managed to quit smoking or shed a few kilos. And will you still be vegan when the only available proteins are bugs and human flesh? I don't know about you but personally, my tolerance for exhaustive goal-orientation is the lowest it's ever been. The only upside to once universal hegemonies crumbling and cut-throat tribalism taking the place of a failed experiment in global politics, is that the difference between trivial and crucial has never been clearer. 

Good luck out there.