Hormuz doesn’t seem to be escalating (yet), like it ‘probably should’ (any day now); but nor is it resolving, which is in any case fairly improbable.

Alongside this, ‘stock market go up’. The market is not crashing (au contraire), and even the AI Bubble seems to be pulling its frog throat in (without really subsiding, deflating, or croaking), for a moment.

So far, 2026 proves only that the world of geopolitics and finance capital can remain irrational far, far longer than we can stay sane.

But who knows what next month, or tomorrow, will bring…

So on the one hand, yes, ‘take your protein pills and put your helmet on’… yet on the other… ‘planet Earth is blue, and there’s nothing we can do’… about the fact that pseudoreality prevails, and continues to prevail…

…and so we subsist in the strange distended hovering of whatever it is that should or might kick off, but… just… not… yet… quite… or not…1

It also feels clear that events and developments have gotten away from us. This is not only the dire straits of geopolitics, the stonk or be stanked of finance capital, the boom doom gloom & vroom vroom of AI, the uncontrollability of the world (running at 400mbps), morbid momentum and path dependence at a scale of 5+ billion urban consumers in overshoot, and/or social acceleration – though all those things are in the mix, to the max.

The world’s events eluding us is also ‘visible’ in ironic absences: the news to hand suggests not much news, while my podcast feed, though full of ‘new’ episodes, mostly seem to be struggling for angles on what we already know all too well2. We are at a point now where the ‘so much, way too much’ of what is going on has tipped into this strange moment of ‘nothing to add’.

The hot takes have gone cold; the scoops are melting in the bowl; Andes Hantavirus might have made it off MV Hondius, and the Russians are moving nuclear warheads around, but somehow we don’t care3. So much happening; so little to say. Somehow, speedrunning the fossil-fuelled AI-driven apocalypse has left us with an awkward silence we don’t know how to fill. For now.

If this is ‘how the world is right now, strangely’, then how are we – autonomous agents, with free will! – grappling with it agentically?

Agency seems elusive for most of us humans.

This is especially the case the younger and more precarious we are. One Chinese generational surmise on this (tang ping) might seem like a good call4: lie flat, adopt the NPC role, order up some bao and bubble tea, stream, scroll, game, post, fire up the vibrators – order some more woolly slippers with kitten eyes, and colour-coded Grogu jibbitz for all five pairs of your Platform Crocs. Maybe go to Tokyo and Kyoto for a holiday for a week; wages won’t stretch to a mortgage, but they will still cover that, at least, for now. Go take a crap and a selfie in someone else’s town. It’s an experience, apparently.

There is a grim acceptance in this style of agency. Its reflexive variant effectively says: ‘whatever polycrisis tsunami comes down the pipes, we will be reamed by it. Might as well get comfortable in this long strange meantime, and when the time comes, just let the world have its way with you – it’s going to anyway.’

In a way, everybody in this mode stayed in lockdown after covid, while also locking even harder into being a consumer, fundamentally orienting everything in our lives around disposable comfort and low stakes pleasure: in a world where building, making, or doing something seems pointless. Hence the pervasive indifference to single use plastic and disposable coffee cups now. In the before times, it used to bother some people; now no one cares.

Those of us a bit older have lived through a number of transformations that have lead to this. If you’re of this generation and did well out of the late 20C and 2000s, you probably carry your NPC halo heavily, in part because of the bittersweet memory of the olden before times and its set of big expectations and high hopes. We remember our agency fondly: when we dared to dream, and dreamed, and acted in the world in ways both fulfilling and inconsequential.

In those days (which were the days, for the lucky ones), many of us from this globally privileged group took for granted that there was a middle: stable communities, solid professions, excellent ‘schools’. At best, if you could access them, these were and would be havens that could provide landing places, bedrock, ground, safe harbours, inlets, ports.

In complex ways, the middle was the guarantor and enabler of agency, in many different ways. It’s not just the CIA: so many institutions were agencies, full of agents with agency5.

So we could aspire to good work, and have a profession. We could all join the agency, get some agency, be agentic. Ideally, some of us hoped, we would accumulate experiences that would allow us enough pillow, fat and affluence to look after ourselves and our families into the future (a kind of potentiated agency of the future in the future). Once we became more senior (because there was career progression), we might look forward to having gravitas, wisdom, experience, respect, decisional authority over resources. Thus, agency would add up, then multiply and be bountiful, then we would pass it all down to the next generation, in better, more agentic shape than we’d received it – then retire, garden, listen to jazz, go slowly to Patagonia, before the darkness set in quietly.

We often talk about ‘the middle class’, and think about it in terms of class and privilege. We’re right to. What we don’t give enough thought to is ‘the middle’ and what it did: not only for itself and its own comfortable perpetuation (at the expense of the working class and subaltern others), but for everyone who relied on the agency it provided, and underwrote. Because now, seemingly everywhere, the middle is shaky, struggling, dysfunctional, breaking down, or straight up broken.

We are now facing the involution6 of the middle7.

Losing the middle means losing agency. This is also because the middle hosted – or was, or enabled, or protected – so many of the institutional lillypads and community rocks that made navigating the existential swamps of existence less sketchy, or that sheltered and repaired us when we got chomped while crossing them. All those middles, and all the intergenerational havens and transmissions they sheltered. So many of them are really struggling, or they don’t work any more; in many cases, it’s entirely unclear if they’ll survive the decade. So In terms of career, at least, there are fewer good launching places. Even if you eventually decide to leap from a building, you still need a building to leap from. If the building is gone, there is nowhere to launch, and nothing to leap from. Mothballed buildings housed our agency; moribund institutions hum quietly as they unwind; no one is in this office today, it’s a Friday – not even me. We’re all working from home, but we’re long past the wanking stage.

In no small measure the middle was also the shock absorber between the top and the bottom. So in losing the middle, we’re also losing the shock absorber. That too is a kind of receptive, bouncing agency. We all feel its absence so keenly: this is a general, collective, cumulative issue. Without the shock absorber, we experience more shocks more directly, with less absorption, with little or nothing to take the force of the blow. It’s even harder to feel agentic, when you’re rattled.

We saw the global value of this shock absorber role very clearly with the aftermath of the GFC in 2008: after ‘saving the banks and socking it to the people’, finance capital rebooted itself, assisted by over a decade of QE, consultant-driven restructuring, and flogging to asset managers to pump and dump, and austerity. The middle absorbed those hits, but it took the blow; then covid happened.

Since then, things have basically gone globally K shaped; we have the bifurcation blues, and The Great Bifurcation, it is not so great. In this shitty dynamic, the global minority on the side of capital have surged massively ahead (and continue to do so, while ‘stock market go up’), while nearly everyone else, whether on precarious hourly rates, or even – in that middle – on formerly decent wages, struggled, continues to struggle, has no pathway out of this, and is left to grapple with wage stagnation, high inflation, burnt out colleagues and shaky workplaces – and now global Hormuz and AI-pocalypse pseudoreality. Again, getting reamed and feeling swamped by being forcibly bifurcated through the middle… it’s a real bummer for agency.

The collapse of the middle is also entrenching and accelerating this not so great bifurcation sometimes described with ‘k shaped’ recoveries, economies, and realities. This points to what I was trying to capture a few years ago with the idea of Gorzworld. As Gorz noticed even then, in late 80s France8, society was on the path toward a division of labour in which a tiny minority of enormously well-paid, pampered, overworked professionals get serviced by a growing mass of servile service workers delivering them their luxury products and leisure services.

For Gorz, this is because capitalism was-and-is fundamentally oriented around gaining a competitive advantage through quantifiable efficiencies. The first mill owner who figured he could squeeze more out of his potters or weavers did bring more stuff to market, more quickly, for a lower price. It was more profitable; there was more cheaper stuff sooner; so everyone bought his commodities. More profitable, more efficient, more competitive. The moment that happened, everyone else in the field had to respond, adapt, or go to the wall. So they too started squeezing their newly former artisan labourers.

Once all this squeezing was unchecked by culture, tradition, and religious mores, Gorz tells, the field was open for an unlimited elaboration of this squeezing dynamic, oriented around ‘lowest total unit cost’ in order to deliver the goods9. In the short term, this was a huge boost to the agency of capital, and owners; in the mid-term, it has delivered a global oversupply of stuff at ‘always lower prices’ (Amazon and Walmart as a paradigm, see Otis’ new book); but in the long term, it might end up evacuating the whole scene of any agency whatsoever. Strangely, Gorz reckons this happens by way of the real productivity dividend we do get – through automation. This means that his model also obliquely has some things to say about AI, and all the NPC anxieties it does rightly raise.

For Gorz, the technological elaboration of capitalism means the continual reduction of labour inputs to produce ‘the same’ output. Automation does produce productivity gains; they’re just not evenly shared. Not at all: not in the division of labour produced by the selfsame system, which continues to elaborate unevenly across space and time, creating hyperspecialisations, hyperelites, a hyperservile hyperfungible mass of taskrabbit mechanical turk Deliveroos – and a crazy array of products, for ridiculously low prices.

Thus: autonomy and agency for the privileged few, heteronomy and fungibility for everyone else (nearly everyone).

We can see how this shakes down in contemporary life: you can have platform Crocs delivered to your apartment door, in colours like Atmosphere, White, Latte, Blue Frost, Blue Bolt, Lavender, Pink Crush, and Frappé. And you can have 12 different types of boba put into 25 different types of tea, 91 flavours of vape, and 100s of kinds of vibrators (probably in colourways to match your platform Crocs… maybe there’s a Grogu vibrator, even… ). But if you want a world in which “all is order and beauty, luxury, calm, and sensuousness”10, a world you can act in, be yourself, be seen, recognised, valued and find contentment – you are shit out of luck, my friend.

This speaks to why it is that some younger people are opting to lie flat. There is a general surmise that this is the state of play; I also picked up something similar with what Spotify was reflecting back at its younger audiences with Sofa King Real.

Again, let’s notice: this is a world of extraordinarily diminished agency – for everyone.

For Gorz, now recruiting 80s Habermas, this evaporation of agency (and ramping of alienation) happens because heteronomy11 colonises autonomy. As economic reason eats up all the time, all the activities, and all the leisure, everything becomes a mere plague of products and services, to be delivered, chop chop. If you become a content producer – on this platform, or OnlyFans – you become the product. Here, you reveal your words; there, you reveal your bits. As I tried to show, entering into a gamified battle with the content monster – any content monster – again ramps the bifurcation: cos in Gorzworld’s division of labour, you’re either Deliveroo or Deliveree – and either way, you have some relation to take away food that is going cold, hasn’t arrived, and is not very good12.

Our world of heteronomy is one in which all the ‘instructions’ arrive via our devices, from an interrupting elsewhere that provides a summons we cannot refuse. Notice your device and how it compels you, both your attention, and in relation to your tasks. So a pampered worker babysitting LLMs in lieu of their old professional competences gets a Slack message from a boss wanting that report already; an Uber driver juggles a request on that platform, while seeing if something more lucrative is coming in on the Didi they’ve got running on their other phone – while delivering the current occupant of their Camry to wherever it is they need to be. The occupant of the taxi, meanwhile, is on their way to an apartment block, to provide some kind of content-revealing niche service, to whoever has called them up. Everyone is in a hurry, everyone is rinsing or being rinsed, and nobody feels anything beyond paid or gratified. It is a very bare game, in which what is on offer is all that there is. I think it’s not wrong to use Marcuse and see this as global one dimensionality, and notice that we are trapped in it right now.

Of course, even where it is as global as it has become, heteronomy is very unevenly distributed. Those at the top do have far more agency than the precarious mass that services their whims and dies by their platforms. At the same time, it’s noticeable that even the supposedly sovereign founder Gods of our time are subject to economic reason, and herein, the imperative to maximise, quantify, and (say) ‘keep delivering ever more powerful models’ arrives as a summons from outside the self that one cannot really refuse. Thus heteronomy rules supreme over (nearly) everyone: we are all harried, trapped, fucked off, alienated, and ramping the fuck up. This isn’t working, this feels bad: max it. We can see this is in the gigantomachy between Open AI and Anthropic, or between American and Chinese AI and robotics: it’s not like anyone will stop, or slow down, will they. Maybe they can; it’s almost certain they will not.

So even Dario and Sam, they do have so much more agency than we do: but they are still NPCs in the realm of economic reason, just the next fungible guy taking their turn being top boy, until they fall, or are knifed, and are forgotten13. My sense is they don’t feel that agentic (about) themselves14: my sense is that, once the arrogance and complete lack of social conscience is peeled away, they are scared little boys, with no fucking idea what they’re doing, winging it, hoping market goes stonk and not stank.

A lot of talk about AIs has – rightly – focused on the capabilities and dangers of the models, the reckless pursuit of new capability with no regulation and guardrails, the current ‘shoot, ready, aim’ dynamic affecting white collar labour in the US, where corporations are firing people first, then working out how AI will replace everyone, and the new, uncanny agency – ! – these nonhuman iterative cognitions have, which don’t quite align with our world and interests. This is all very much happening, and is scary, dangerous, and heedless of the consequences. Sadly true; and many people I encounter appear curiously incurious about it.

However, in a lot of talk about AI, we miss something about why it is nonetheless desired and used by so many ordinary people: all the more so in a socially accelerated, bifurcated, bifurcating situation, it is still an efficiency dividend. It also appears – like magic – to hand you back some agency (even if it robs you of it elsewhere). For certain tasks, LLMS save time: you can get that email, spreadsheet, target list, or report to your boss sooner. You can change that reference list to APA7 (just check the DOIs, FFS, cos Claude makes them up, very confidently) If you do, you do have an edge on your competitor… and you can get on with the next task… which you can then do faster… and are expected to do faster… if you don’t want to lose your job, or find that job.. …15

In other words, LLMs are not only cognitive entities in their own right with their own possible kinds of uncanny agency, operating unchecked and unguarded in networks and at a scale and pace we have not experienced until now. They are also an excrescence of the efficiencies- seeking logic of rationalisation through quantification and technology; just another wave of automation, giving people a temporary advantage over their competitors, along with a confidence inspiring bump of agency that, however quickly it wears off, and however icky the hangover, feels good in the moment.

Beware the heteronomy hangover that comes after the agency bump.

In the broader timescale, long before LLMs emerged, indeed, for the past 170 years and more, we have all become progressively more involved in these ramping, escalatory, expansive, extractive processes, many of which that have involved all kinds of automation16. The ones that ‘feel best’ to us give us a sense of BIG agency: the boomstick feeling. Which is, of course, great; until the next guy, then everyone, has a boomstick.

But this time may be different. This time the automation may shred our cumulative and collective agency in entirely different and gnarly ways, for a number of AI-specific reasons that should not be diminished or ignored, and don’t just subsume into the automation drive and division of labour inherent in the Gorzworld unfolding of economic reason. At the same time, let’s notice the continuity in what Gorz was noticing way back in those Mitterand 80s, as well as the fact that so much of this stuff that’s been shredding us and our agency has been happening long, long before LLMs emerged17.

So then:

Automation does produce gains in productivity. But: these will not be evenly shared. And this will not produce bounty for everyone, or some kind of great new society in which we do less work and experience the fulsome contentment of Eros. No, it will entrench a division of labour characterised by a tiny elite, a servile precarious mass, and pervasive alienation and heteronomy. That destroys and is destroying the middle. Leaving everyone feeling like an NPC, bereft of agency, and capable only of choosing between Croc tones and bubble tea variants, in a world where nothing can be done and everything feels helpless and hopeless.

…

I could land the post there, but wow, what a downer – even for this blog’s tracing of involutions. If I did so, it would leave out that Critique of Economic Reason also had a lot of interesting normative prescriptions for what we should do instead. Prescriptions we could do interesting experiments with, and that could be tried. Faced with heteronomy and alienation as a result of automation – as we now are – what might we do?

If we go back to Gorz, the solution to all this not to resist automation. If automation can do the work, let it. But if it does, rather than use automation to work ourselves and one another even harder (and produce new tasks and new servile ‘task rabbits’ and ‘mechanical turks’ to do them), we must reclaim the spaces of autonomy that are only possible with leisure and free time. ‘The task’, oh my taskrabbits, is not to resist automation, it is to use it to reclaim all those spaces of creation, all those kinds of non-profitable, non-extractive, non-commodified activity that comprise most of what actually makes life wonderful. Back to Marcuse dreaming of Nirvana via Baudelaire, a world where “all is order and beauty, luxury, calm, and sensuousness”. Sounds nice hey.

A few of the tech titan founders have spoken glibly about something vaguely like this – something uncosted, which I also assume they don’t feel like they would pay or take responsibility for. They make the reality; we pay for the dry cleaning. After their orgy, our laundry.

My instinctive response to the whole of this, even if I’m giving it more credence than my cynicism allows, is ‘yeah, maybe…’ immediately followed by a feeling that this wouldn’t even be good, and is a non-starter, given the communities of fate in which we actually live, characterised by interdependence without solidarity, in a majority urban world in which we are in ecological overshoot and dependent in all kinds of invisible and profound ways on what makes up the piped society: the pipe of fuels, the pipe of signs, and the pipe of stuff and things we consume. Nothing of this, nothing in this half dreamt, half desirable half arsed half mast thought experiment, none of it feels like it has any agency, because so little of it has any purchase on our real and mounting problems: all the work we could actually do together, and that urgently needs doing, once we stop pretending and face up to the century we’re now a ¼ of the way into. None of this has hands for our present, let alone grip strength that can grapple with it.

– grip it without the middle… and this is the really slippery thing I personally feel like I’m grappling with.

Global Hormuz and ‘stock market go up’: pseudoreality may prove me wrong by triumphing for another year or five, but c’mon, surely it cannot last, surely we cannot go on like this. How can there be so many colours of Crocs, and eight billion people, and Grogu jibbitz… and so little agency (and so much alienation, and so much heteronomy18)? Why are we so strangely, stubbornly incurious about all this, like the way so few people who use LLMs interested in how they work or why they do?

And when Hormuz blows up, or stock market really goes stank, or someone finally does pop Trump, or Putin does decide to nuke Europe, or Israel does decide to nuke Iran, or Xi does decide to go take Taiwan, and it all kicks off (if it does), whatever agency we then have will have to grapple with a void where most of the middle used to be, while also dealing with this new, nonhuman ‘autonomous agency’ we’ve introduced into the world, in lieu of our own.

Whatever our autonomuous agency looks like, it will be bodied (and have hands), local, co-operative and material agency, that will only work in kahootz with the world as it actually exists – whatever that will look like, when the future finally kicks in: tomorrow, next week, or in five years.

I find myself at a strange juncture, in a world that is incoherent. Perhaps you do too.

A few times a day, this world gives me the wobbles. It’s not quite depression, it’s not quite anxiety. It is alienation in the face of a totality that is known, terrifying, beyond my control, but that hasn’t quite started spiralling yet – indeed, that persists in a kind of reality that looks normal, until you look closely, and see how low res it is.

Chris put it well in his most recent post:

agency without structure, structure with agency, irreality clashing with materiality. The underlying dynamic persists: some things, some people, some places ‘need’ to break, surely will break in one form or another. But what… who… where… these questions remain undetermined, even if some answers would appear more likely than others…

On a personal level, I’ve spent several years grappling with societal involution and institutional failure in the face of it (including at length here: this is ‘season five’ of this blog, after all). These are such hard dynamics to deal with, because nothing works well; but if you’re as old as me, and you share the unearned good fortune of a good placement in the lottery of birth, you can still remember when things worked better, when there was hope and function, low price gas in the tank – a future.

Now everything is brutal, and everyone is rinsed.

– and where is the future?

This is a terrible and terrifying moment in global culture.

In fact, I now think nearly everything that has been made and defended by the incumbents is no longer valid1. But it persists. So alongside the lack of coherence I find in the world at large, there are so many instances of local, organisational, regional rackets, played by Weber’s nullities (‘specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart’) which no longer have any validity or purpose, yet they roll on. Very often, the incumbents still hold all the resources, and the credentialing stamps. So we persist. And, after all, there’s no other plan, no other resources, no other way right now.

Most of all, they roll over all of us,

And they do so ‘without care’; so much that is systemically agentic is also nonrelational in its dealings with us. It does not care.

I’m reminded of that great quote in Marlantes’ Matterhorn:

“The jungle wasn’t evil. It was indifferent. So, too, was the world. Evil, then, must be the negation of something man has added to the world. Ultimately, it was caring about something that made the world liable to evil. Caring. And then the caring gets torn asunder. Everybody dies, but not everybody cares.”

Given all of this (and given the current-imminent sophistication of the LLMs), why ‘write a blog’, and why engage in blogging’s algorithmic, gamified, involuting 2020s simulation on this platform? I don’t think I have a response to this that I am satisfied with in myself. Last year I more clearly put forward all the reasons why I would and should close it off. That piece is still worth reading; the prudent wisdom is in those arguments, not these notions right here.

Nonetheless, I don’t want to lose my own hope.

And I don’t want to lose my own dignity, in the face of what are, without a doubt, terrifying, huge, impersonal structural forces bearing down on all of us. Brutal forces, rinsed feelings. One cannot get ‘revenge’ against the Death Star (that’s just the Skywalker fantasy, which is also a too easy Oedipal fantasy); but one also cannot make one’s peace with it, or simply capitulate to its terms.

This is one point of wisdom in Zizek’s recent, unusually good, very Eurocentric, very long speech-derived piece:

“Our answer to the often repeated argument against Ukrainian resistance – ‘Ukraine doesn’t have a chance to win against Russia” – should be the old pro-resistance motto: if you resist aggression and fight back, you may lose; if you don’t resist, you’ve already lost.”

Personally, I know I’ve ‘already lost’ on this platform – by any of the platform’s gamified measures, this is a losing wicket, a cold hiding to nothing. I’m reading Nguyen’s uneven, interesting trade book, and I’m reminded on every page: fuck, I hate rock climbing, and I hate games. I also really resist any idea that there’s anything heroic, or ‘resisting’, about writing a substack.

At the same time, there’s something in me that wishes to continue.

I don’t to suggest anything heroic about what is being attempted here: mostly this is about a ‘bad or worse’ dilemma. It feels bad to be writing about the state of the world, because of the state of the world. But it feels much worse to stop.

So with this in mind, I will continue for a while longer. It doesn’t make sensible pragmatic, algorithmic, consequentialist sense. Substack does not stack up. Sovereignty does not emerge from ‘the stack’: I think that’s probably true for 99% of the people engaged in the platform. A LLM would probably advise me to stop (or kill myself), or it would advise me to embrace one of the recognised growth strategies.

But in the face of all this, for reasons that don’t stack up, I’ve decided to continue posting for a while; and I’ll just persist doing things in my own busted H.I. way. If you want to stay with me, thank you for doing so. I didn’t reply to the comments I turned on in the August 2025 piece, but if you’re one of the 90 or so people who read this blog, I truly thank you for sticking with me and paying attention. It’s the only meaning I need.

This end:

I hope I can add something to the incoherence, confusion, destruction and nihilism that isn’t incoherent, confused, destructive, and nihilistic.

This is what (my) hope looks like to me right now.

well the usual thing happened. I thought I could get the thought out in one <2000 word crisp post, but following this blog’s methodology means I have – to some extent – to obey the meanders of what emerges.

In what follows, I’m trying to account for some portion of the latter part of the above title: why no strategy? Obviously, Xi has strategy in spades – indeed, the Xina problem seems to be that it’s all long game, and no apparent fast-moving tactical movement.

In any case, in getting beyond the ‘close enough for jazz’ of ‘why Iran’ I introduce just below, I was brought back to Hobbes’ useful tripartite division of ‘why we attack’ – the three causes of quarrel in human ‘nature’ laid out in the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan.In this post, I’ve decided to cover the first two, in the order I take them: first glory, then competition.

This is because I think the third one, diffidence – mutual mistrust, the distrust of all by all – merits its own whole post, which I’ll follow up with as soon as I have time. Diffidence is surely the basal structure of feeling gripping the world now, regardless of whether our analysis then hews to Hobbes and talks about fear (Davies), anger and ressentiment (Mishra), or anxiety (Neumann).

In terms of the tone and style of what follows…. I really enjoyed Chris’ most recent post, especially the deliberate fragmentation of the fragments and thoughts: in the way that John Maus’ most recent album has a ‘high res low res’ sound that matches a world of 4K MAGA slop, Chris managed to create in me a readerly effect which captured something about the atmosphere of what, below, I call The Funny Zone. So in writing this piece, I also tried to let myself go with this one even more than usual, trying to privilege ‘atmospheric feel’ and ‘intuitive metaphors’ rather than try to crispen everything up. Fast and loose, rather than high and tight – but hopefully not where it counts, with the fundamental veracity I’m trying to give a crack of theoretical light to.

And the World Enters The Funny Zone: the globalisation and rationalisation of 3SD (surreal, stubborn, stupid; dangerous, destructive, dumb)

As mentioned in my gliberalism piece, big chunks of The New Yorker have become a tough hang. But I still regularly read Isaac Chotiner’s Q&As which, though hit and miss, I usually learn one or two interesting things from. In his most recent but one, the following really captured something:

“I am curious how you are thinking through these issues broadly right now, because to some degree these questions seem a little bit almost beside the point, because we essentially have this unstable guy carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and it almost feels like this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about.”

I mean: yes.

And: what more could reasonably be said after this?

The sensible thing would have been to just publish that, wouldn’t it, as both Q and A.

Needless to say, the Q&A continued, and it continued with an ‘aboutness’: as a Q&A, and moreover one about international law and the attacks, as if the former has any bearing on the latter whatsoever. And both sides, esp. said guest, continued to play tennis with discourse by way of giving way too much credence, way too much thought, way too much explication to things which are the epitome of ‘regardless’ – and are happening regardless1.

Then, at some point in the background, Jürgen Habermas died, and the unforced force of the better argument – and the whole postwar North Atlantic idea(l)-phantasy of deliberation and reason – died with him2.

So yes, here we are in full-blown stage four 3SD 2026, in which it’s just true:

“this unstable guy (is) carrying out a war for some unknown reason that no one can figure out, and… this whole set of rules that we have from the middle of the twentieth century is absurd to talk about.”

So if we’re done with laws of war and international criminal and humanitarian law, what then? Next topic? “Here’s Tom with the weather…”

And yet… we are now – all – in The Funny Zone because of this lapsus, aren’t we: 3D’s dumb dangerous destructive ramps up, then 3S’ stubbornly stupid slides everyday life further over into the surreal.

Middle class life outside this month’s war zones continues to chug along in its involuted somehow, in a shrinking zone of coverage, with more sand in the gears, more onerous cost of living pressures, more disorientation and shrinking hope.

In middle class Melbourne – again just voted the world’s best city3 – my neighbours are experiencing the expansion of Bibi’s unchecked bloodlust and warmongering against the whole region, but only as no more than the ‘sudden’ expensive ballache of 10,000AUD p/p (7000 USD/6,000 EUR/50k RMB) economy tickets to Euroland, as they try to get their in-laws back to France. Over the road, the local petrol station is probably price gouging, there were queues for fuel over the weekend, and diesel is dollar a litre more than it was, meaning it’s now 2.70/litre4.

This does have real societal effects. For example, it will surely piss off the tradies in their Raptor Rangers (all purchased as tax write offs over the past ten years, negating any emissions gains through hybrids and EVs, who will then vote One Nation, after Murdoch’s tabloids tell them to protest at ‘Labor making fuel cost more!’, thus making imminent-future burnouts more expensive, more racist, and more populist.

Australia has 33 days’ demand, according to one report5; so there was – and is – the looming spectre of a resource-rich country ‘running out’ of what it has ample supplies of, because it was-is still operating under the brainbendingly complacent assumptions of the postwar and neoliberal era, where the US could be counted on as a good actor, and GDP growth would just keep trucking and tracking in the smooth, uninterrupted direction of gain.

So yes, the bare majority feels the effects of Bibi’s dirty regional wars here in the Antipodes, but they still feel them like the OECD middle class of the late 20C – they’re expensive annoyances, structural nuisances. We don’t have Israeli jets dropping American ordinance on the world’s most livable city yet, so we’re luckier than the ordinary people of Tehran and Beirut, with their less livable warmongered lives.

Back to the Q&A. Chotiner dropped the act for just a second, and ‘just said it’, didn’t he. This, for me, was the highlight of what was everywhere elsewhere let down by being… the kind of Q&A that is still perplexingly committed to LARPing internationalism by way of a kind of rattled and defensive, but still self-righteous and indignant gliberal exasperation.

The Funny Zone is this weird – surreal, stubborn – realm in which words fail and words proliferate, or where the truth is spoken for a moment, like the bubble of a bath fart, then we revert to habitually telling each other lies and disavowing what’s going on. Reasons are explicated, reasoning is adduced: some kind of Papier-mâché sense of the whole is induced – maybe it’s Tooze taking it from the not quite right bits of Baudrillard; though the spectacle of bombardment perforce unfolds, real people do get bombed in their thousands, and Bibi continues to dom the region via his unchecked schoolyard bully routine, instead of standing trial on his criminal charges. Bibi: he is very much ‘at large’, isn’t he. But in the Funny Zone, ‘we’ still don’t think these could be our kids getting bombed by US ordinance, we still think it’s out of reach of us and the people we love, don’t we.

This is another aspect of pervasive, population-level stupidity that Musil raises in passing that I haven’t yet addressed: the idea that ‘playing dumb’ somehow protects us all, that stupidity, a kind of bimbo pretence, has some kind of prophylactic value for all of us. In this global ostriching, as long as we know as little as possible about Hormuz, and Caracas, and the acceleration of the land grab in the West Bank, if we just ignore it or diminish it or make it clear it’s ‘not chill’ when someone raises the topic, then we’re safe, and we can go back to blathering about our real estate, long haul travel, fine dining, home renovations, and the manosphere’s entrée into Married at First Sight (way to make a dire thing even worse).

Moreover,

– it’s a Debordian spectacle, Guy…

so

in this structure of relations, the idea at least is that the spectators remain at a ‘safe distance’, secured in our relation of separation, still able to offer a hot take, grab some popcorn, post some more.

But in the mi(d)st of The Funny Zone, we also know very well, don’t we? Chotiner knows, and so does his gliberal guest. For just a moment, Chotiner reached across and did the Jonathan Franzen title thing and said, hey, ‘what if we just stopped pretending?’

So then, what if we *did* stop pretending … what would we know very well?

We know very well that Iran isn’t really about Iran – and yet we have Iran.

We know very well that Venezuela wasn’t about Venezuela, and yet6, that happened…

and it disappeared down the memory hole: barely remembered, although it was six weeks ago.

We know very well that Greenland (remember Greenland?; you will!) is not really to do with Greenland – and yet we will have Greenland, or Trump will have Greenland, at some point, and then Greenland will have Trump and his entourage of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies kicking its prone and rubbery head and body, just as we will have Cuba getting stomped in the guts while down (its people already starving), at some time later this year.

‘Stay tuned…’ Monitor the situation… &c

We know very well that, on the hegemon’s side, this resplendent stupidity is completely unchecked and uncontrollable, for the moment. We know this. Planet Earth is blue – and there’s nothing we can do. And we also know that the Trump regime is basically running around looking for unsympathetic regimes who on their knees that they can just kick and kick and kick.

We know this because Hegseth just said it directly:

“This was never meant to be a fair fight, and it isn’t… We are punching them while they are down.”

Yes, it’s a funny zone, The Funny Zone. Full of cartoon villains and schoolyard bullies.

At home, I’m resigned to my relatively safe distance inside The Funny Zone, and I find myself complaining to my friends that I’m so embroiled in my life I’m at saturation point. Yet I’ve read enough Hartmut Rosa to also know that social acceleration continues to accelerate, and the curve to the horizon is nonlinear from here, keeps curving inward like a fern’s fiddlehead.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are now witnessing the banal phenomena of circinate vernation as social acceleration unfurls through the croziers of our quotidian lives.

(stay tuned, because this is the curvature this whole long post will bend towards by the end of the second post on diffidence, and knowing this will give you something predictable to expect and look forward to, ha ha)

On one such day, maybe it was yesterday, a friend reached out online, on a chat thread, a very old one we still have going, one that’s been ‘on again and on again’ since the middle of last decade or so. Beside A Trump-is-a-paedo meme and two screen dumps showing the stock price of Lockheed and Chevron (rising, and rising), the friend asked:

‘Anyone got a more sophisticated analysis of the Iran attacks than can be provided in these three images?’

I wrote:

Schoolyard bullies

Cartoon villains

Yawning gaping absence of strategy

Bibi played Trump

I think Chotiner’s ‘come off it, lady’, and the above comments, address the bullies and the villains, and frames it well enough by way of Musil’s Principle of Insufficient Cause (ie, for no good [enough] reason). But looking back above at my chat thread ‘analysis’, I’d like to use my small place on this dirty platform to address the yawning gaping absence of strategy part, which also, obliquely, points at Bibi (and Trump, and Hegseth, and all of us who subsist in The Funny Zone).

Why is there such a conspicuous absence of strategy in play right now?

When we tell the grandkids about 2026 (if we get to), we’ll have to explain this cavernous flapping instance, the lapse that has fallen fully out of its clench into a full and final prolapse. With Iran, it’s less ‘Pandora’s box’, and more as if someone had somehow managed to goatse the sarlacc of geopolitics. You don’t get the impression that things can now pop back into their nice tight clench, hey. There’s no plastic surgery for a burst Hormuz, although apparently the new Ayatollah already needs his face re-done.

In The Funny Zone, we are subsisting in a moral and existential voidtime of strategic prolapse, a global spectacle whose main event is a simulated gigantomachy between petty, vengeful, emotionally immature egotists who have no regard for the world or other people, cannot care for people or institutions, cannot think, never move outside their own reactivity – and don’t have a plan.

Funny old world, isn’t it.

As Chris picked up in his most recent post from our earlier thinking together, to me this is most notable as a particularly American style of heedless stupidity – one that plunges headlong, reckless as to causes and consequences, a grand fuck you to natural causation’s neat and ceaseless demand for tight and cogent relations of cause and effect, and complexity’s fragile reminder of nonlinearity and interdependence.

And these domineering styles of stupidity, as I’ve been trying to track, are stupefying when weaponised and deployed against the whole world in bad faith: opponents’ words fail, we get pipiked, then we are confounded, deprived of moral seriousness and good reasons – the gentle, subtle and substantive is relegated to NPC, the shallow, unconvincing, and grotesque are globo-goatsemaxxed to Main Character Energy.

As I suggested in a recent post, where domination co-mingles with domineering stupidity this *is* the big chunky ‘bombing you now’ part of the point; it was-and-is always how schoolyard bully domination works. The point is just to dominate, to punch people in the guts and steal their lunch money, to be a mean, cruel asshole knowing the person you’re victimising can’t hurt you back the way you keep hurting them, and enjoy continuing to hurt and terrorise them. Once you add in Bibi’s unchecked warmongering and bloodlust, you probably have enough of a read on ‘why Iran is happening’.

But there’s more to the attacks, I think; not just these attacks, but the attacks before (Caracas) and the attacks to come (Grreenland), the ‘attack attack attack’ aspect of The Funny Zone in 2026.

In thinking about attacks in all this, I’m convinced we can get a little something from Hobbes that points toward the yawning-gaping absence of strategy that is so apparent and so alarming in all this, in the midst of so much attacking: attack, attack, attack, no plan – why?

In this famous passage from the thirteenth chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes adduces three basic causes of quarrel in human nature:

“So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel.

First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.

The first makes men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation.

The first use violence to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name”.

Stirring my friend’s chat thread question, Chotiner’s ‘what if we stopped pretending?’, and my basic ‘analysis’ (cartoon villains, schoolyard bullies) through Hobbes, I think we can usefully divide those ‘involved’ in all the attacking attacking into three categories, each of which has a fairly distinct (yet fuzzily overlapping) modus operandi.

Importantly, as I’ll try to lay out below, the groups have very different relations to size, scale, and agency. My hope is that, once I explicate this (and I’m thinking by writing here, so this may or may not come together), it might become clearer why there is a void where strategy is supposed to be. NB as I mentioned in the preamble, in what follows, I scrambled Hobbes’ order of the ‘causes of quarrel’ to suit my purposes (and because his chosen order never quite read well to me). So I’ll start with glory, then look at competition, before reflecting on diffidence.

Glory, or: attacking ‘for trifles’: Rise of the global Glory Clown

As intimated and Chotinered above, we are in this Funny Zone where there’s this orange guy who can do all kinds of things. Most of them are unlawful, immoral, unconscionable, stupid, and very consequential – you may have heard of him, and have thoughts and feelings of your own. He grabs the whole world by the pussy, like he warned us he was gonna, yet nobody does anything, none of our leaders (except Pedro from Spain) say fuck all about it.

In line with Don Moynihan’s viral piece that Wired picked up, I think it suffices to frame this as a kind of clicktatorship, ‘a LOLviathan in which everything is content’.

Herein, attacking Iran, or attacking anyone anywhere for any apparently stupid/insufficient reason, is about clicks and likes and shits and giggles, it’s the involution of our infinite jest, as we amuse ourselves to death. This is spectacle (Debord), this is simulation (Baudrillard), this is deadly entertaining (Postman). And what do we do? We like and follow, we are ‘monitoring the situation’.

As Moynihan clocks with clicks, this whole clicktatorship lolviathan assemblage is doxically-toxically dopaminergic; it is dopamaxxing:

“It’s worth remembering that social media operates like a drug, feeding us dopamine and rewiring our brains’ reward pathways. The fundamentally unhealthy dynamics are worsened by the fact that standing out online often demands being awful – channelling negative emotions like anger and outrage, usually based on misinformation or conspiracy theories”.

I’ll touch on conspiracy theories in the second post on diffidence, but sticking with the clicktatorship and its relation to glory, in such a milieu, everything substantive and prudent can be chucked out, nothing careful or subtle survives, and above all, the most angering, outrageous, dickhead behaviour ‘wins’. The clicktatorship is a dicktatorship, which is why Trump and Hegseth and Rubio &c &c are all such dicks7. And we love it. Trump is more entertaining than Biden was; you could tell how ‘relieved’ news media was when the T bag one again.

Bringing Hobbes’ causes of quarrel into focus here, we can think of this mob as ‘Glory Clowns’ – and this speaks to their cartoon villain aspects. Whenever they have the joker, the play the joker; they method act the Joker. We then move from the street parade scene in Burton’s Batman to a world afflicted as The Dark Knight put it: ‘welcome to a world without rules’.

In the hands of a Eurovision entrant, ‘no rules’ makes a funny Finnish song. In the case of Hegseth, it makes for the spectacle a vapid and vacuous news anchor8 adding sleeve tattoos and emojis to Strangelove’s General Turgidson.

In the case of a veritable Trump, a true world historical Glory Clown, the real danger here is closer to Fromm’s idea of the ‘marketing orientation’: a person who is entirely transactional, always peddling, wheeling and dealing and grabbing pussy as he can, because everything and everyone (including and above all ‘personal brand’) is just-only a commodity to be snatched and exploited.

Glory Clowns subsisting in the marketing orientation have no relation to truth or morality. This makes Trump (and his ilk) the kind of haute charlatan who don’t understand (or have any care about) what’s wrong with how they operate. This means they are (thus) capable of doing things that most people would balk at as unconscionable. Ordinary guilt-and-shame riddled people, from our cage of inhibitions, call such people ‘brazen’ and ‘shameless’, but these words contain moral condemnations of states of being that are foreign to the marketing orientation’s fundamental mode of relatedness.

The grand irony of ‘all of the above’ is that a specific – and uncontrollable – agency emerges from this: uninhibited by ordinary compunctions, they are very capable of unhesitatingly ‘doing’ a bunch of stuff that you or I just would never dream of doing to other people. Attacking Iran for no substantive reason is the least of it; it’s just one transaction of many to come.

Dangerously for all of us, Glory Clowns get ahead. all the more so in conditions of involution where people crave the clear voice of a ‘strong leader’. Berlusconi was the ultimate proto Trump Glory Clown; Bolsonaro, and especially Milei, are regionally significant Glory Clowns. This is also because not only are they disinhibited by viewing the world-and-people as commodity objects to get pimped and pumped, they also tend to be ego maniacs, so profoundly centred around an – always inflated and endangered – self, that they will say and do anything to achieve their glory. They’re the ultimate ‘front’, ‘eyes without a face’, the faceless face that wears no mask.

As Hobbes noticed, this means that they attack ‘for trifles’: any perceived slight, any endangerment of rep, anything that can be perceived as a diss, no matter how petty (especially if petty), activates a boundless wish for Attack, for limitless revenge.

In such a mode, it’s also that everything is personal, because every moment is comprised in relation to the defence and entrenchement of one’s huge ego, continually exposed to the massive threat of endangerment. The Glory Clown who attacks for trifles reads the world as either a commodity-object to be totally exploited, or a potential imminent total threat. Thus every entity is either a potential total donor to the ego, or it is a looming total threat that can and must – ‘regardless’ – be pre-emptively annihilated.

Tragically for anyone within his radius of stupidity (which is by now global) this means that Glory Clowns can be very easily manipulated behind the scenes – by a Bannon, or an assiduous lobby group, or by the cannier among their backroom tactician handlers.

I think this speaks directly to why there’s no strategy.

We can zoom in on this by looking at what Marco Rubio said about the Iran attacks. (As with Chotiner, there’s a real flatness to the truth in 2026):

“We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action… We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces … And we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

This on its own is ridiculous in its implicit profession of moral hazard: ‘the Israelis told us they were going to bomb Iran9, and if they did, Iran would attack us, so we had to attack them first’. Wow, so if you’re Israel, all you have to do is fly to Washington and warmonger with a convincing PowerPoint, and your schoolyard bully will rush in with you as you kick the hornet’s nest. Nice.

But then, once we add in the Glory Clown, Rubio’s further comment leads it all to make its own sense:

“If you tell the president of the United States that if we don’t go first, we’re going to have more people killed and more people injured, the president’s going to go first. That’s what he did.”

Ie: ‘Mr President, you might look bad – if you don’t attack Iran.’

Truly, yet another country is being bombed for trifles, because of the egoic vanity of an a very insecure, emotionally immature, narcissistic Glory Clown, forever just pimping his own personal brand and business interest, all for clicks and likes and shits and giggles.

It’s yucky to realise this is the state of the world from this perspective, yet here we are.

—-

Competition, or: attacking ‘for gain’. The entrenchment of the nihilistic master tactician.

But there aren’t too many Glory Clowns: not many of us get to scale the empyrean heights and achieve such clowning glory10. So, sadly, living through the Funny Zone means we have Glory Clowns in High Places, and, as I’ve just explored, this does amount to meaning that Trump can very easily be pulled right down into Bibi’s dirty little regional war in a way that is destablising the whole global economy – over trifles.

However, just below the Glory Clowns, and feeding them all kinds of glory offers and ‘rumours of being slighted’ that can goad them into attacking for trifles, there’s a venerable intra-institutional dynamic in the mix that is fundamentally about ruthless competition.

In these realms, groups of people you’ve never heard of are scheming away in the background, on the downlow, jockeying for suction, traction, faction and position, in ways that lead to the kind of dominance that will play well in the division of spoils.

In these realms, it’s not as if we leave ego and vanity behind, but the game is more about expediency, pragmatic flexibility, the ruthless running of the numbers, the pitiless seeking of advantage11.

We can also see competition ‘in’ all of us (as an introjected subjectivation12), in the prevalent culture, in the predilection for games and gaming and everything governed by points systems: check out m/any of C Thi Nguyen’s podcast appearances or his book if you’re interested in this.

Although there’s a Highlander dynamic at the heart of all such competitive individualism13, it’s strikingly notable that, in contemporary society, most of these fields or realms are undertaken in groups, as groups, by groups, deploying different kinds of group agency and resonating in sympathy with group identities.

Group chat – which I’ve posted about before – is a paradigm in a point here, and its centrality to how everything actually runs (or gets run) shows us toward who we actually are when we are ‘together’. On this I am strictly Luhmannian: this is how society operates now.

And it operates like this for good reason: one must communicate directly and frankly with one’s co- people, whether collaborators, co-religionists, or co-conspirators.

In instituted politics, we can see the cumulative-collective effects of this most of all in the group chats of staffers around ministers, those hyperactive hive minds that – dangerously – are both hall of mirrors and pinball machine around the Glory Clowns (or pusimaxxing beanbags) they serve. I feel like the proto or Ur Figure portrait-avatar of all of this is either Jonah or Kent Davison from Veep (or Sir Arnold Robinson, if your memory extends back to Yes Minister). However, the Andreessen Signal groups reported on last year bring us closer into the political present’s tone, atmosphere and style. Sufficed to say, one is in the realm of Ianucci-style ‘satire’, filled with ruthless manipulation, zero sum hardball, and pointy stabby Machiavellianism. In the back end, competitive individuals are stabbing each other in the back end, in a world of knifey discourse, where Glory Clowns come and go.

(Enter conspiracy theories here [for just a moment, I won’t let this pull focus until the next section]: we suspect manipulation because, indeed, there are groups conspiring. Less to do with ‘nefarious control’ and more to do with stitching things up. More like Cambridge Analytica and the Andreesen groups than Epstein – though latter also exists, doesn’t it, as did PC Houthi Small Group.)

Most of those who thrive in these groups work 80-100 hours a week, they have no hobbies, are usually divorced, have terrible boundaries, and would kill you, or have you killed, to get ahead in their game. Among their kind are (Glory Clowns and beanbags notwithstanding) the worst bosses many of us have had: taking breaks is a sign of weakness, showing feeling is a sign of weakness, caring for someone or something is a sign of weakness. Even your mum’s cancer was a sign of weakness; ‘that’s why you were sacked – because you were weak and didn’t take this seriously enough’. In other words, the people who thrive in these ruthless intragroup fields of competition succumb to a loss of perspective that leads to the loss of basic humanity for which they’re perennially famous – with the collateral damage of their sense of humour, proportion, and spacious appreciation for a broader context in which ‘none of this matters’.

In the course of becoming hardbitten playaz, the world and other people disappear, and only the game and its tactics and state of play exist. Ball don’t lie, ball don’t bawl, ball only balls.

To bring in Hobbes’ ‘reasons for attack’ here, those driven by competition attack for gain. They’re there to grab an advantage. So, if they think it is in their interest (or their group’s interest), they’ll nab your job, your “wives, children, and cattle”, just as they’ll bomb your institutions, your desal plant, or whatever.

For such groups, every Glory Clown is something between a Trojan Horse and a puppet, and the front of house is just a spectacle who can be ‘puppeted’. The point is to stitch it all up in favour of your faction, hog tie ‘the competition’, and…. Well, what exactly? What then; now what?

This speaks – again – to the absence of strategy.

As I get older and I see more people who become successful in institutional life by operating in this way, the more I notice that they seldom actually ‘win’. In chess terms, they’re all mid game, and no end game. Ruthless playaz are masterful tacticians within strict game logics. To this extent, they are perennially embroiled in ‘moves’, so there never comes a point where things are clinched, let alone is there ever an ‘off season’ where a glorious victory could be enjoyed in voluptuous peace. Above all, I think this is because operating so ruthlessly deep inside a game logic not only means losing your basic regard for other people14, it also perforce means seeing the world with a wide aperture: context and background is a big blur, so you never see the horizon, never notice the sun rising or setting, don’t see the missile heading toward your generic climate-controlled office building. This means everything is just tactics, ‘next move’ – and thus both the victory and any point it could have had is completely lost.

The grand irony of a group of people for whom the means justifies the ends is that they completely lose track of the ends, and are all means (and very mean).

Ultimately, the individual-in-competition might become a playa, and be a masterful tactician within the bounded space of the game (they take to be the totality), but as such, they no longer really know why they’re playing, what they’re playing for, what it means, or why (or indeed, if at all) any of it matters.

At its now necessarily blurred horizon, ‘playing to win’, or being the ‘last man standing’ in an ‘only one can live’ dynamic is fundamentally amoral and even nihilistic.

Once we become absorbed by the game of competition, once we become ‘operators’, once we only ever ruthlessly seek our advantage on the next move, every tactical victory brings us closer to strategic annihilation.

~

Stay tuned for: diffidence.

The previous post tried to pinpoint what it is that makes certain kinds of stupidity devastating when weaponised in global politics now. Bannon’s pipiking shitflood stupidity is stupefying; this is its stupor power. Deployed over 15+ years, by an idiocy the size of MAGA, on a global/social/media megaphone the size of the USA – you have…. chunks of America now.

But this pointed to the unheeded cumulative irony of Bannon’s strategic use of stupidity as ruthless information warfare. When you flood the zone with shit, you don’t just own the libs – everything gets super shitty. And if you’re the kind of Stinkfink who sticks to stink as strategy for a decade or two, you end up with a shithole country. “Après le déluge, c’est nous”.

That’s where I landed, and here we are. However, I didn’t make clear that I’d originally intended a kind of ‘compare and contrast’: one of the signature stupids of the global right, and one from the left that’s left or what’s left of it. Bannon and MAGA were my ‘shit right’ example1; Anthony Albanese is my ‘what’s left’.

I wasn’t 100% satisfied with the last post. But the fact that the ‘shit right’ can be conveyed well enough – I hope – using emojis and a quick use of Idiocracy indicates how MAGA embodies an all-too-American style of ‘big bootied, base, in your face stupid’. As if Miami Bass were applied to geopolitics, MAGA is *so* flagrant, obvious, and very loudly and directly trumpets what it’s doing. No subtext, no dissimulation2. There’s nothing about Bannon, Trump, MAGA, or Flooding the Zone (FTZ) that is veiled, subtle, nuanced, unobvious, or only comes into a !click! focus – for a small moment – after two good coffees and 30 minutes of shamatha-vipassana meditation. They just say it; they just do it. The latter points to another part of how FTZ works as domination – because, yes, it is as stupid as all that, and if you hate it and oppose and are incensed by its stupidity, and you can’t do a damned thing about it, then it not only ‘wins’ and doms you, it also rubs your nose in it. It’s that stupid, and it’s ‘bombing you now’. As FTZ’s poet laureate Pete Hegseth said: ✊🇺🇸🔥.

But the reason there was nothing on Albanese was not because Albo is a bit of a nothing… or ‘more than a bit’ of a nothing (we’ll come to that). It was that I couldn’t land it, couldn’t find ‘it’, couldn’t nail the Albo jelly to the wall. Albo’s stupidity turned out to be ‘hard to find’ – like a good prime minister. Partly this is – yes – because Albo and his run-of-the-mill forays into stupidity are usually unmemorable, boring, quintessentially mid. MAGA’s stupidity is shock-and-awe stupefying. But Albo’s stupid – and thus its stupor power – resides in a political Bermuda Triangle of nebulous entities, a fog of Professor Farnsworth-voiced ‘wha…’ in which concise precise points are hard to pinpoint, hard to keep in focus, hard to keep track of and pay sustained attention to. Maybe this just means I’m stupefied, under its spell. But the closer I’ve looked, the more I’m convinced of there’s more to it.

MAGA/FTZ pulls focus, commands attention; Albo’s stupid pulls out of focus, repels attention. There’s a clue here.

Initially, I thought Albo Stupid would be comparably simple to convey. MAGA is the stupidity of the postwar Americana schoolyard bully: it’s Biff from Back to the Future, Ace Merrill from Stand by Me, Victor (and his dad) from Ren and Stimpy. Albo’s is pusillanimous3 stupidity. It’s the stupidity of the guy who doesn’t want to upset anyone, and is hung up on not being seen to be losing, or being seen to be uncool and unpopular, when, deep down, they’re really, really worried he might (be) all the dreaded things.

MAGA is the stupidity of the apparently dominant; Albo the stupidity of the disappointingly weak. MAGA is Alpha stupidity; Albo is Beta stupidity.

But beyond something like the above characterisation, about a few hours of trying to think more deeply into to Albanese’s stupid I got bogged – and it wasn’t cos the zone was flooded (although there had been a shitskreig – see below). I realised I was actually encountering ‘something’, something almost impossible to keep in sharp focus, something that resisted staying in the foreground, something that repelled my attempts at critical attention. ‘Maybe I just don’t have the Auspol chops to pull it off: but I haven’t grasped it,’ I thought. Well, there’s that. ‘Maybe it’s this atrocity, maybe this whole thing is just too depressingly complicated to re-litigate. I have to tell non-Australian readers so many details, and every single detail is somehow dismal and further parochialises what is just a gruesome matter, until only 6-12 people could possibly be bothered following it’4. I think those things are in the mix.

But there is something about Albo’s particular forcefield that is operative here; and it has some force. In other words, Albo’s stupor power actually works by generating this kind of focus-repelling forcefield. This forcefield isn’t necessarily Anthony Albanese’s stupidity (see below), but it is a kind of stupor power that stupefied me a little. And, in turn, it’s how this stupor power was deployed, and what that means in the mid 2020s (once there are shitskreig predators as opponents) that got him into the position where he could commit a much grosser stupidity, one that has – I feel so sad to say – undermined the public good and social cohesion in Australia, and paved the way for only all the bad faith actors to benefit, while making it nearly impossible for any good faith actors to have agency, let alone prevail.

Anthony Albanese. There were years when I couldn’t remember his name. It happened between about 2015-2021. Something to do with the Labor party or Auspol would come up, and I would blank on his name.

Then, in 2022, Albanese became Prime Minister – of Australia. Suddenly, a guy whose name I kept forgetting – a man who many people had discounted as being in some ways ‘too small’ for the role – got the gig.

Anthony Albanese got elected as Australian Prime Minister of this Australia5, 2020s Australia, by employing the Small Target Strategy (STS). This is our second clue.

Interestingly, the STS works by observing the stupidity of one’s opponent6: let the opposition look stupid, watch the news cycle blow up reacting to their daily boo boos. Sit back, say very little, don’t launch any big policies or say anything complicated. Then, hold tight, because, in this game (essentially a two horse race where the opposition are still willing to concede defeat and hand over government to you if they lose) all you have to do is appear sensible and competent enough, and you and your party appears the one more ready to govern. When it’s a two-horse race, and the other mob are so bunglingly stupid, but still believe in law and the norms of a parliamentary democracy, good enough is good enough.

So in that context, with that opponent, the STS won Albanese power in 2022: it was Labor’s turn to run one of the world’s truly great collieries – and its middle-weight post neoliberal service economy. But still, the STS didn’t deliver a thumping victory. Albo just won. The first Albanese government only won a bare majority in 2022 (the threshold is 76 seats, they got 77). They also received just 32.6% of the primary vote – less than 1/3 of voting-Australians put them as their first preference. I mention these details not to bog us down in the details of Australia’s voting system, but to sketch how one of the world’s better functioning parliamentary democracies (however involuted it is, and it is), came to be presided over by a creature of weakness, in the context of a widespread dislike and unpopularity of anyone and everyone from both the main parties7. The two party monopoly is so shrunken now that neither party can really claim anything like a ‘popular majority’. Each side comprises one half of a small, half-impotent-self-important pusillanimous little Pushmepullyou (two party, neither preferred), with both sides shrinking.

Albanese, like his STS, is a kind of ‘small man’ who presides over his own somewhat self-inflicted ‘small hands grip’ on Prime Minister. In part it’s because Labor have a gift for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and that hurts to be a part of. But there’s also-often the lingering sense (like the smell of vomit that won’t wash out of a towel used to mop it up once) that opposition is Labor’s natural state affairs, and that ‘leadership’ for anyone in Labor is tenuous, doesn’t come naturally, and could be revoked at any moment.

Albo brings a kind of personal ‘edge’ to this. He seems like a person punching way above their weight with a love interest or intimate partner who, they fear, will at any moment realise they’ve been dating a dweeb, could do much better, and (sensibly) ups-and-leaves. Albo looms small, and this seems to be… not so much ‘how he likes it’, as something – perhaps – deeply comfortable, maybe because it lines up with deeper insecurities and iffy sense of self-worth shared between this PM and his party. Albo never seems like he is owning it or rocking it; as my kids say, ‘he’s not aura farming’, and is often ‘minus aura’. I do apologise for dipping into manospheric language for just a sec (but hey, the spectacle of politics is a phallic field in a patriarchal system), but the ‘gestalt optic’ he gives off is like he expects a sudden cucking, which could come from any direction, robbing him both of what he seems to crave very badly, as well as the Prime Ministership8. Sadly, yet without much of a doubt, there is something like SDE in the STS.

In this shading, it’s telling that, as Carney characterises it, Albo – circa 2021 – was already a guy who built a reputation for being all about what he hasn’t done.

“Albanese’s approach so far has been to emphasise what he won’t do. He has overseen the stripping back of the party’s platform and junked proposals deemed to have hurt Labor at the last election, covering franking credits, capital gains tax and negative gearing”.

This shades into Adorno’s analysis the power of identification9 as key to the schtick of the autocrat leader. Where Adorno characterised the fascist leader as the enbiggenment of the little man (likening Hitler to a composite of King Kong and the suburban barber) since becoming Prime Minister – twice! – Anthony Albanese has remained committed to being a living embodiment of his Small Target Strategy. Thus, Albo is a man who has proven again and again you can be in every way the Smallest Man Possible, and still get elected, and stay PM….. if the opponent is the Coalition… (read on). The MO or ‘mode of relatedness’ here is basically this: when in doubt, be nice to everyone… then when that fails, ball up like an echidna…

Then, three years on from the STS path to a bare majority, the Albanese government did a weird thing: they ended up with a fat majority (94 of 150 seats). In theory, this gave them a strong mandate to enact policy reform. Perhaps now – finally – they would be a real social democratic powerhouse, living up to what they ‘should be’: “the party of ideas, change and legislative ambition” (Carney). Kind of: ‘you may now be the Labor party you wish to see in the world’. Not only that, but the second Albo Labor Party won this juicy majority in an election in which the opposition leader lost his seat, and the opposition imploded (and has not stopped imploding as of this writing). Thus, without having to Flood the Zone for fifteen years to ‘own the Libs’10, and without scaremongering around the Reichstag Fire (and terrifying their opponents with ruthless attacks by brown-shirted stormtroopers to transform their mere 33.1% [November ‘32] into 43.9% [March ’33]) the Labs whooped the Libs, or more accurately: the Libs knocked themselves out of the game11.

So by dumb luck (or, more precisely, by dint of the chronic stupidity of the opponent) the Labs here were delivered the strongest plausible command possible – over a field without credible opponents. This remains basically true. It was and is insane; it was proper Lucky Country, Steven Bradbury levels of luck. Not only did Labor really ‘win power’, their opponent effectively lost the ability to do anything but lose. It was Parker Lewis Can’t Win, for at least a couple of electoral cycles, and maybe indefinitely. You would assume this was a position of almost unassailable strength – the kind of dream that any autocrat dreams dreams of, and (in the case of Bannon) works their arse F-ing tZ in order to ensure the dream comes true.

Enter Albanese’s stupid – the kind of stupid that proves that is possible to lose at chess, even when you have no opponent.

So…

The challenge I’m setting myself for the remainder of this post is to sum up ‘what happened’ up in a few paragraphs without mentioning many of the key words and people. This is not because of an (actually prudent) fear of retribution from a few different assiduous and well organised interest groups in the mix. No. What I’m trying to do here – which, I hope you can see, is hard to do – is try to keep Anthony Albanese (and his emergent stupidity) in focus, where you have some opponent groups who are world beaters at pulling focus and making it about them, commanding the discursive and symbolic field while ruthlessly neutralising or eliminating opposition and opponents. But this is a post trying to keep focus on Albo, in order to see his stupidity – as a serious danger for all of us.

In this instance, a barbaric atrocity was committed by two citizens, against another group of victims12. Notwithstanding formal ties of citizenship to France and Slovakia (two individuals), as well as deep roots in Ukraine (in a few cases), the former Soviet Union, and Israel (in one case), the victims were substantially Australian.

Undoubtedly, Albo deployed the STS on the day the barbaric atrocity happened. Then, the very next day, Albo got metaphorically sucker punched right in the nose by a senior representative from one of the several countries from where some – but by no means all, or even the majority – of victims drew a sense of belonging or membership. The punch was ruthless, below the belt, and so well calculated, both to neutralise and eliminate rivals while also ensuring that that group’s story – a story from another country, where there is an asymmetrical dirty war happening – became ineliminably a part of the barbaric atrocity for all subsequent political purposes, and something that Albo ‘couldn’t not’ reckon with. The STS didn’t matter, because this fist was hard and sharp enough to hit even something so small, and it did so, I think, clocking the STS and the SDE very clearly. This opponent had clearly seen Albo – this shows true political acumen.

Two months later, and the New York Times did some solid reporting on how Albo had created a ‘tinder box’.

“People were shoved, charged, pepper-sprayed and thrown to the ground. Two officers who had a man in frayed jean shorts pinned to the ground repeatedly punched him in the head and his side. A mother rushed her family away, wiping away tears, her eyes bloodshot”.

This crackdown, in turn, had transpired because the response to the aforesaid atrocity, by and large, has been to kinda-sorta ban public protest – based on the ¿very stupid? logic that the best way to protect vulnerable minorities is to prevent people from gathering to protest the systematic ill treatment of a stateless minority by a state and its military13. The ‘national interest’ logic seems to be about beating up unarmed citizens14, in order to prevent armed citizens from massacring unarmed citizens.

However, many of the protesters who were beaten, capsicum sprayed, and arrested by the police were also expressing outrage at the fact that Albo had invited an official representative from one of the countries – hint, not Slovakia or France or Russia – to a memorial to mourn the victims. This was the moment that things became ghoulish to me, because the representative of this country effectively came along and claimed the meaning of these people’s lives – and their deaths – for that country. Where the US dumped ObL’s body at sea, the represantive of this country effectively ‘took’ the atrocity and the suffering of the victims back to their country. This was a discursive and symbolic appropriation; the victims were territorialised, annexed, claimed. In no small measure, this transpired because Albo openly invited them to do precisely this. Which was very stupid.

In other words, Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister of Australia, the person who should only and primarily act ‘in the national interest’ and govern and decide in the interests ‘of all Australians’, allowed an atrocity, one that substantially transpired between Australians, in Australia – and the grief and political bitterness generated by that atrocity over two excruciating months – to effectively be extradited by another country, and recruited into the exact same ruthless asymmetrical dirty war tactics that punched him in the face two months earlier, and that may have contributed to the atrocity’s taking place – if we don’t buy into the partisan logic expressed by the person who did the face punch, and how that ties to the particular claims attached to the ethnonationalism expressed by that group.

So of course: Anthony Albanese got played; man he got played. Albo got poned.

But more than this – and I feel angry about this, angry about how stupid all this is – as a result of the poning (which was, substantially, a self poning, because it’s not as if the opponent had form doing anything else but what they chose to do) Australia is a less united, less confident, more divided, more polarised, angrier, less cohesive place than it was. If you had game planned a strategy whose objective was to produce the ‘worst possible outcomes for all Australians’ in the face of a barbaric atrocity that shocked everyone, you would have basically played it like Albo did.

And this is the big-general point, given I’m trying to get at what’s such a serious problem about how different kinds of stupidity now operate in global politics.

In 2026, we are in this situation where many of the OECD countries’ major decisionmakers – the ones who haven’t become posterbrain Nazis (who can’t do push ups) – are Albo kinds of people. Beige, mid, pusillanimous stupid STS and SDE kinds of people. Kier Starmer is definitely one. So was Chris Hipkins (‘Who?’ ‘Exactly!’), so are the current and previous German Chancellors (whose names I can’t recall, and won’t google to undermine my point). The crucial point when considering the key problem of this pusillanimous stupidity in global politics is that, in spite of their quirks up close (Albo and Starmer are very different beasts, on closer examination) none of these people are capable of making (good) decisions under pressure. At best, yes, their STS shenanigans worked in the previous decade of endgame neoliberalism (and its short post covid hereafter), against party-parliamentry opponents like the English Tories and Australian Coalition. STS won Albo power in that game, against that kind of stupid opponent. But the moment any one of these beige-mid STS pusiMAXXers15 hits a genuine shitskreig warrior who is a ruthless baller playing an ‘only one can live’ game, their whole STS game is bunk, and they do nothing but lose and lose and lose while appearing cringe and weak in a way that does nothing else but stoke kinda reasonable support for populist opponents. It’s the kind of oopsie that can lose you a whole parliamentary democracy. It’s that serious a problem.

When the zone starts flooding with shit, when a predator launches a shitskreig, STS ‘please like me’ pusiMAXers panic, get reactive, and start fucking up. They have no courage, they have no keel, they lack spirit. So they spiral, and between them and the staffers on their private chat threads, they foam into saying and doing all the wrong things. They change laws, stress or erode already strained institutions, and usually ruin their political party’s prospects, leaving the national rump exposed for some shit right nutjob to just come in and victory pump the corpse of something that, if flawed, was still much better than ‘what we have from now on’.

This is the big point for small privileged countries like Australia.

The opponents have changed now.

The opponent is no longer just ‘the opposition’ and its leader, as well as big chunks of the media. The opponents include massively empowered bad faith shitzkreig specialists. 2026 is not the 2010s, and it’s not even 2024.

We’re in murky, sharky, shitty waters here – and the beige-mid STS pusiMAXers can’t hold a candle to the shitskreig warriors.

It might get rough.

We know this; since Idiocracy became a documentary, circa 2021; since Tony Abbott bit that onion and broke satire, in 2015; since the formal beauty and rueful irony in nearly every scene of Jaques Tati’s profound and gorgeous films, all clocking the stupid the loss of quotidian local cultural reality to the Americanising consumer society, fully clocked by Baudrillard by 1968.

As Musil publicly noticed the year before the Anschluss: stupidity is hard to take seriously. It has defied sustained examination. We don’t even know what stupidity is. Unlike terrorism or neoliberal economics (often thoroughly stupid), there are very few sustained critiques of stupidity. DeLillo gave us Hitler Studies, and we have Weird Studies and Walking Studies, but there is no Stupidity Studies.

If it’s also pervasive, this means that Stupidity Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone, and yet, formally speaking, we have nearly no knowledge about this. We have almost no knowledge of stupidity1 – that’s amazing. Although we are so intimately acquainted with it. Although it pervades and damages so many important and norms, processes and institutions, stupidity not only walks forth naked, it has been left ‘uncovered’ in our thinking. We are so stupid, we have not yet thought to think about stupidity, and when we try – we quickly come up short.

Among the reasons for this, Musil and Ronell notice, is that stupidity is stupefying. Rapier wit sharpens as it cuts, but like the Suck Cut, there’s something about stupidity that sucks our will to live as it takes away everything it hoovers into itself. With chindogu, this can be very funny, this can be satire (of which, more soon). With so many of the chindogu offerings on temu.com, which are ‘real’, and offered up as useful and wanty, what can we even say but ‘what the fuck…’ So stupidity stupefies.

This means that, like outrage, stupidity has enormous mimetic potentiality and, online, can be a great weapon of collective sabotage. Stupidity can render everyone speechless, it is its kind of stupor power. Stupidity quickly moves from 🤡to 🤦, but the moment it is weaponised, we should notice that it does 😵‍💫. At this point, it stupidity’s joke is not funny anymore: it is incapacitating.

Stupidity, like outraged anger and pissy resentment, is truly viral: it is as clickable as it is trapping, and like a computer virus, once we’ve clicked, it delivers its payload, wrecking our logic-driven systems, locking up our minds and keyboards, and demanding its ransom. As a global deployment, it hits with a huge force. Its payload is the grand and tragicomic irony that induces a 🤦reaction in nearly everyone, then renders nearly everyone in that forcefield 😵‍💫: much less able to speak up, name, oppose, and destroy it. Stupidity’s stupefaction marinates everyone in the acidic asininity of its donkeypiss: Obamas are apes (tee hee); there are dick jokes and toilet humour and bombs over Caracas and Tehran; a nasty old seven-year old wants Greenland and a peace prize – and we have not words. In the face of the ass of stupidity, the world has been struck dumb.

For all these reasons, global stupidity has become a global power. This makes it a core problem we need to reckon with. Yet, because we have almost no knowledge of it, and because of its blinding stupefaction effect, it resists becoming a core concern. This is tragic for us in 2026, because stupidity is something incredibly destructive in global politics and society right now. Perhaps, in the same way we struggle to countenance how large attacks with large consequences could have been sparked from tiny causes or the small actions of idiosyncratic individuals of no consequence (Gavrilo Princip, Marinus Van der Lubbe2), we find it hard to truly recognise that, right now, so much of the world is on fire, and most of the fires were ‘well lit’, or keep burning everything in their path, for very stupid reasons.

Yet we tend to pretend, so we attend and pretend: we show up to work and we keep reading the newspapers, don’t we. The responsible ones keep picking up the phone and answering emails and taking our low res colleagues and involuted institutions and clients seriously (as if they’re serious people who deserve to be taken seriously). We roll out of bed and tacitly all agree to keep LARPing the world ‘as if’ it added up to anything that makes sense. Although we secretly feel: all this is stupid. This is so stupid.

Yes it is. It is.

Carney’s recent Davos speech was not stupid. It expressed wisdom concisely and precisely, and this took some courage – courage we no longer expect, and are very (pleasantly) surprised by, in 2026. ‘Wow, someone told the truth, as if the world was real, as if things matter’. That Carney’s speech seemed so electrifying only shows how rare it is that an elected official could publicly say something that is still serious, cogent, and showed courage as well as wisdom. How unusual is it now that a prominent public figure says anything that makes good and complete sense? The proof we all have pruned fingers from long bathing in a marinade of the utmost stupidity is that Carney forces us to notice how fresh that seemed. This leaves the dire remainder and the balance of the story: telling the wise truth is unusual these days, and when it happens we know it takes unusual nerve, and that this combination of factors is an exception. In a world where verbiage garbiage impo-rage reactivity is 100% the rule, cool heads and calm words ring out so clearly – and so rarely.

In 2026, it is a strange event to tell the calm truth wisely.

This is where we are.

~

Like many kinds of pervasive affliction, contemporary global stupidity is an equal opportunity employer. It is certainly not anti Woke, but nor is it anti MAGA. In fact, when we point to what remains of the gliberal or technocratic-neoliberal left, or look at what the Anglocapitalist right is super pumped by (and pumping), much of it, nearly all of it, is deeply stupid, given contemporary conditions – and is thus all the more destructive and dangerous for that.

At the same time, the style and flavour of each stupidity is so drastically different. As Clausewitz noticed, in the fog of war, one has to have a nose for scenting out the different smells of things:

“War is the realm of uncertainty; three quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty. A sensitive and discriminating judgment is called for; a skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.”

So, with the above in mind I’d like to begin a tiny contribution to the development of ‘critical stupidity studies’ and sniff out a few of the dominant, virulent, contagious, and nasty strains of stupidity affecting the gut, nose, brain and mouth of all of us, in this surreal community of fate we find ourselves in, so afflicted by so much stupidity.

In the next post, I want to examine one style of stupidity of the middling left. But in what remains of this post, I want to tackle one of the big obvis of global stupid, and trace out how Flooding the Zone led to total societal Scheißflut (shitflood).

Scheißflut: the stupidity that pervades because MAGA neutralises its rivals by mercilessly flooding the zone with shit

Of all the MAGA Hats, Bannon is one I’d never call stupid. Nasty, mean, ruthless, and one eyed, yes, but not stupid. Yes, he inflicts great stupidity: he is above all the person who has weaponised it more effectively than nearly anyone, so well that, in fact, ‘you gotta hand it to him’. Bannon not only pulled off Cambridge Analytica – he named and in a sense was Cambridge Analytica! – and contributed significantly to getting Trump elected in 2016, he also managed to stick around, stay relevant, and achieve many of the tactical goals he has clearly spelled out, not only on the War Room, but indeed ever since he pilled himself into alt right supervillainhood in the late 2000s.

Bannon is the Pipikmeister. As Naomi Klein notices with grudging yet sustained acknowledgment in Doppelganger, Bannon achieved a lot of the above by pipiking many of the left’s best arguments against neoliberal globalisation3. In listening to the War Room in 2020-1, Klein noticed what amounts to the ‘all too late’ holy fuck of the anti globalisation left’s ‘Michael Moore becomes Ultron’ moment. So many of her 2000s talking points were right there, only munted into something monstrous: it was a cogent critique of neoliberalism, only pinched, jacked, and sent back as the superpowered avatar of the left’s destruction (mwah ha ha ha ha…).

So let’s give Bannon his due. It’s very clear that that his kulturkampf process – actively on foot at least since 2010-14 – has been remarkably successful in generating polarisation, division, and near total neutralisation of effective opposition. It wrecks the heads of the glibs, and it has made it very difficult for any opponents – especially non-stupid, high res, morally serious opponents – to organise, and stay organised, and be an effective opposition.

Stupidity is a core part of how this works so well. In fact, it’s the central part of what ‘Flooding the Zone with Shit’ is and means and does.

In 2016, Trump’s tweet storms (sheets? sheeits?), the endless Hillary emails thing (never mind she was hacked, hey), and constant nods to what would start brewing into Qanon from the following year transformed Wag the Dog /Neocon-era focus on the Clintons into something with truly devastating destructive force5. The Perplexity.ai summary of these events from a decade ago reminds us all very neatly of what this did: “The approach eroded media focus, fostered cynicism, and helped Trump dominate headlines without unified opposition narratives. It set a template later refined in his administration”. Yes, my LLM friend. Yes it did. But because it’s been so stupid, somehow we are still not clocking it. This *is* still the MO.

All we see in 2026 is Flood the Zone writ global, geopolitical, and ICE-paramilitary. With Epstein revelations just running away there in the background, we have Venezuela one week, Greenland and Iran the next, alongside Trump trolling with racist cartoons, hot on the heels of cold-blooded murder of unarmed civilians by Blackwater wannabe Stormtroopers6.

As America, however involuted, still has so much of the mic, such globalising stupidity is devastating – it is deadly. Stay tuned for what may/not happen to Iran and/or Cuba. Moreover, if you’re still LARPing liberalism and so you’re relying on coherence and cogency in order to have your politics and mental health (which, remember, you only have do to if you’re still acting responsibly and in good faith), you lose. You lose the election 🤡…. 🤦….., you lose your mind😵‍💫, you lose everything 💩. Stupid wins, cos stupid doesn’t have to care about anything: not the unforced force of the better argument, not laws or rights, not good taste. Stupidity just shits where it likes. And stupidity does not wash its hands.

At the same time, perhaps I and Naomi Klein are giving too much credence to Bannon. Or, at least, given where we are in 2026 – and given the state of America and how this cuts up rough for everyone – we have to move beyond an admiration for the pragmatics and their expedient tactical result (‘yes, the glibs got owned, well done, America is a roiling mess, excellent work’) and start returning attention to natural causation and consequences. We can see what they are with a brief final excursus into satire.

In Idiocracy, everyone believes that crops must be fed Brawndo (the thirst mutilator), a Gatorade-ish drink – made by the Brawndo Corporation. This is because, as so many of the ¡stupid idiots! in the future believe, ‘electrolytes are what plants crave’.

Like nearly all satire, this is a vicious attack on stupidity. Because, of course – ¡you idiots! – the plants are dying. Coz plants need water. Or they die.

Thus to the thirst mutilating MAGA Brawndo of Bannon’s ‘genius move’: when you flood the zone with shit, the zone is flooded with shit. This makes reality incredibly shitty, it makes the air horrible and hard to breathe, and beyond a certain point it causes the MAGAs, no less than the glibs, to sicken and die, to get giardia and dysentery and choke on their own shit7. The shitflooded zone is a zone of unmitigated shitness, full of stupid idiots who are full of shit.

In this world, there is nothing left that isn’t excremental. Flooding the Zone leads to 💩MAXXING. We move from from 🤡 🤦 😵‍💫 and end up in land of the 💩, home of the 💩. It’s funny, then, that Trump is so hung up on shithole countries – given that his chief strategist has made one for him. ‘All yours’.

This shitholing of one’s whole country is a monumental stupidity. To me it is also a demonstration of the greater seriousness we should accord to stupidity’s effects on ‘serious politics’. Flooding the Zone is just so destructive, its outcomes are horrible, and it traps all players into a busted flush spiral into the sewerage, where everything then stays. Flooding the zone is coast-to-coast autoshitholing, it has gone a long way toward wrecking whatever Fox News and Goldman Sachs couldn’t quite fuck.

The moment we see this terrible outcome for everyone and how it transcends and annuls Bannon’s partisan ‘victory’, we can see that stupidity, unleashed and left unleashed for so long, transmutes politics into something profoundly bad – for everyone. Bannon’s ‘war against cultural Bolshevism’ was supposed to just destroy the opponent, leaving the field for the MAGA hats so they could ‘MAGA’ (not MASA). But in fact, although nothing is in any way definite and certain in America from now on for a while8, I would say it is all spiralling downward, covering everything, as it does, in a total societal shitflood. When you launch a shitskreig that involves carpet bombing the polity for a decade, eventually, none shall ‘scape wading. And now there’s a national shortage of gumboots, which are all Made in China. Somehow, alongside their victims, the MAGA hats will have to wade this one out – in Crocs9. ICE-d Others get Alligator Alcatraz, sure; but, from now on, everyone still has to live in what America has been made into.

~

In the next post, I’ll have ago at another style and smell of stupidity. Stay tuned for part two.

Santa baby, just slip a Sable under the tree for me
Been an awful good girl
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa baby, a ‘54 convertible too, light blue
I’ll wait up for you, dear
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Think of all the fun I’ve missed
Think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed
Next year I could be just as good
If you check off my Christmas list

Santa baby, I want a yacht and really that’s not a lot
Been an angel all year
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa honey, one little thing I really need
The deed to a platinum mine
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa cutie, and fill my stocking with the duplex and checks
Sign your ‘x’ on the line
Santa cutie, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Come and trim my Christmas tree
With some decorations bought at Tiffany’s
I really do believe in you
Let’s see if you believe in me

Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing
A ring, I don’t mean on the phone
Santa baby, so hurry down the chimney tonight
Hurry down the chimney tonight
Hurry, tonight

– Eartha Kitt, ‘Santa Baby’, 1953.

~

The inflatable Santa Clauses are back1. If I get a chance on Monday or Tuesday next week, I’d like to try to make time to explicate some of Baudrillard’s ideas around Christmas. Have we failed to notice that Father Christmas manages a global logistical miracle, solo, and that he comes down the pipe to do so? Santa is Amazon without its anaconda; he is the river of goods without the Suzhou River. All Heil Santa Claus.

The US holiday season just became a trillion dollar jam. I find this hard to wrap my head around, but then again, it’s also perfectly 2025 3SD. A trillion…

Another great 3SD moment from the internetz: McDonalds Netherlands new AI-slop generated campaign, which resulted in this bizarre – yet so apt – image, followed by an equally surreal and stupid response. I kinda love this; at the same time, this is the future, sadly. It seems a shame to ‘put society through the woodchipper2’ *for this*.

But what is the *logic* of this, and more specifically, what is the Logic of Father Christmas? Well, I’m so glad you asked. Here’s a short section from Baudrillard, from The System of Objects, in 1968. B doesn’t capture all of it, but wow, how astonishing to have captured this nearly sixty years ago.

~

“Those who pooh-pooh the ability of advertising and of the mass media in general

to condition people have failed to grasp the peculiar logic upon which the media’s

efficacy reposes. For this is not a logic of propositions and proofs, but a logic of

fables and of the willingness to go along with them. We do not believe in such

fables, but we cleave to them nevertheless. Basically, the ‘demonstration’ of a

product convinces no one, but it does serve to rationalize its purchase, which in any

case either precedes or overwhelms all rational motives. Without ‘believing’ in the

product, therefore, we believe in the advertising that tries to get us to believe in it. We are

for all the world like children in their attitude towards Father Christmas. Children

hardly ever wonder whether Father Christmas exists or not, and they certainly

never look upon getting presents as an effect of which that existence is the cause:

rather, their belief in Father Christmas is a rationalizing confabulation designed to

extend earliest infancy’s miraculously gratifying relationship with the parents (and

particularly with the mother) into a later stage of childhood. That miraculous

relationship, though now in actuality past, is internalized in the form of a belief

which is in effect an ideal extension of it. There is nothing artificial about the

romance of Father Christmas, however, for it is based upon the shared interest that

the two parties involved have in its preservation. Father Christmas himself is un-

important here, and the child only believes in him precisely because of that basic

lack of significance. What children are actually consuming through this figure,

fiction or cover story (which in a sense they continue to believe in even after they

have ceased to do so) is the action of a magical parental solicitude and the care taken

by the parents to continue colluding with their children’s embrace of the fable.

Christmas presents themselves serve merely to underwrite this compromise3.

Advertising functions in much the same way. Neither its rhetoric nor even the

informational aspect of its discourse has a decisive effect on the buyer. What the

individual does respond to, on the other hand, is advertising’s underlying leitmotiv

of protection and gratification, the intimation that its solicitations and attempts to

persuade are the sign, indecipherable at the conscious level, that somewhere there

is an agency (a social agency in the event, but one that refers directly to the image of

the mother) which has taken it upon itself to inform him of his own desires, and to

foresee and rationalize these desires to his own satisfaction. He thus no more

‘believes’ in advertising than the child believes in Father Christmas, but this in no

way impedes his capacity to embrace an internalized infantile situation, and to act

accordingly. Herein lies the very real effectiveness of advertising, founded on its

obedience to a logic which, though not that of the conditioned reflex, is nonetheless

very rigorous: a logic of belief and regression4” (Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects, 166–7).

~

~

So – we are living in a surreal moment in human history; this is perhaps not news.

But as I’ve been trying to characterise it, this is more than just a surreal time. Times is weird, but as I would have it, this is a stubbornly stupid and dangerously destructive moment where the involution of everything in the piped society appears to be pumping out maxed out bad copies of ghastly stupidity and stubbornly destructive patterns. Soon, this process will appear as an automated agentic ‘assistant’ on the apps and platforms that are the Ordinary Person’s De-Facto Non Choice, a strange amalgamation of the Swedish Chef and Hal 9000. Cool.

In the midst of this 3SD world I’ven been sketching out this year, what I’ve been trying to get at, including in the last big post, is that part of the reason so many of us feel upset is that we ‘know’ and experience and feel and struggle with some version of all this. Most of us feel – keenly – the absence of meaningful agency, while some of us notice that, to paraphrase Adorno, society has lost control of itself1; we’re not sure if we can manage; there is huge anxiety2. Friends we once knew to be solid enough are now seemingly on edge, or lost in Broken Brain Syndrome (the other long covid).

In terms of ‘command and control’, an aspect of 3SD is that no one is flying the slop plane, but the slop plane is flying, but the slop plane’s flight cannot be stopped by human intervention, but when it crashes, it won’t only slop crash. Sadly, the last possibility would not be all simulation. To paraphrase W Gibson, the simulacra is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed. If-and-when the Boeing 3SD Slop Plane Formerly Called the USA crashes, it will take a lot of the real and good down with it. In the meantime, we can fake work and speculate on memecoins ‘til Steve’s Lava Chickens do come home to roost (and they’re tasty as hell). There can be WFH, Deliveroo, and half-hearted online masturbation – for everyone. But when the hunger and 25% structural unemployment comes, much will be sadly pre-Baudrillard spec.

And then: in walks gliberalism, playing such a dud melody, striking such an odd pose.

Like the alt right3, the gliberals say they want the future, but actually, they want a return to their group’s own private status quo, the one in which they were most comfortable and relaxed, profiting in an untroubled way from the triumph of their values and interests, with very healthy ROI, great superannuation, eco holiday houses and ethical investment funds, and carbon offset. But of course, like the MAGA hard on for the vanished mid50s/mid80s, this is a dud phantasm, because that status quo is redundant, over, never coming back, and anyways was an objectionable set of ideals and settings – which led directly into our present prolapse into involuted fascism, autocracy, and populism. Gliberals: your norms co-created this present. This means they won’t get us out of it. To paraphrase Audre Lorde (and gliberals love to quote Audre Lorde), we cannot dismantle the master’s fantasy with the master’s vibrator. But we can gratify ourselves…

Reading the New Yorker this year has offered a grim case study of how group-gratifyingly 3SD gliberalism has become in 2025, especially given the terrorstupidity emanating from America now. Yeah, there’s been good stuff, and there are always half a dozen amazing investigative long reads from the top shelf writers. But in terms of the editorial line, and the fundamental way the world is being framed by it ‘the world and the trouble with the world’ that the New Yorker conveys as of now is off, naff, and in no way even has a read on the moment, let alone offering any kind of viable counter-model which is worth dreaming into being.

Ezra Klein clinched this gliberal naffness in his conversation with David Remnick: two patricians of gliberalism, perhaps the world’s best gliberals (certainly much sharper than most gliberals deserve, or, at least, the very best this assemblage is capable of producing), sat down to have a conversation4. The upshot of it? We need to bring out Obama more. The charismatic ‘generational talent’ Obama of 2008; not the 2009 Obama who saved the banks and socked it to the people; nor the 2010 Obama of the Targeted Assassination Program.

So Klein also gets my 3S gliberal gong for 2025 – mostly for his Abundance book, with the aptly named sidekick, ‘Derek’ (if there isn’t a chatbot called Derek yet, there should be).

Abundance sold like hot cakes; it produced lots of hot takes; it was a Hot Pick at my lending library; the treasurer here was spruiking it. I didn’t get to finish it, ‘cos it gave me the shits (as you’re about to read), and if you want a proper and thorough review that far exceeds it in terms of depth and rigour, read this.

Abundance is an odd book, and the ways in which it is odd pinpoint precisely what is 3SD about gliberal 2025, as well as indicating what’s gliberal about gliberalism. I think gliberalism is a structural problem of the involuted present. It’s not only that, to paraphrase a Terre Thaemlitz track title, ‘the crippled left wing soars with the right’. It’s also because gliberalism enacts and partakes of and entrenches the shitness that abounds – and then comes in with set of solutions that are so beige, so naff, so off, and such a poor read on things, that I really have to wonder what the fuck is going on here… ‘Is this the best response you have to this?’

To wit:

Apparently, red tape and risk aversion are what’s stopping ‘big build’ Nice Things from happening. The Problem is asphyxiating policy bottlenecks, and lawyers.

But like: wasn’t that Silicon Valley’s plaint in 2008-9, and the whole pretext for 2010s disruption? And how did that all go? 15 tears of quant eased free capital went to VC to blow on disruption start ups, and we all we got was these lousy e scooters, and Elon Musk. As I’ve written about with Uber, disruption was extremely dubious, and much of it was a long con and a big grift.

Then, apparently, what Anglocapitalism needs to do is finally (metaphoricall)y listen to Frank Sobotka, get each of our hands out of the next guy’s pocket, and start building things again in this country, making stuff. But again: wasn’t that the idea Bannon fed to Trump – in 2016? And that Biden kindasorta transmuted into the beiged out Green New Deal of Build Back Better?

The Abundance difference seems to be a kind of turbocharged Keynesianism that gives unfettered ‘Warp Speed’ power to the government, hand in glove with technocracy. This government? No, more like the CCP do, the way they’re all so effective at building stuff, only without all the Xi Xinping Thought and surveillance capital(totalitarian)ism. The droids Ezra and Derek are looking for is Breakneck, but without a few hundred million broken necks.

So if I’ve understood them correctly… if Ezra and Derek had their way, we would see some new digital aufhebung of SV-Bidenomics, where we could ‘build back botter’ and scoop the kind of high-speed rail Japan and China have, and that the latter built from the late 90s.

But is this a thing? I mean, we might ‘want’ to return to the aesthetics of Baywatch 1989, and this might be our vision of American abundance… but is this still possible?

For what it’s worth America made its choices, a while back. There have been so many, but consider these few.

In 1956, the Freeways Act directed huge amounts of federal funding, over decades, to an increase in national average speed, that was really just massive support for trucks and unfettered private car use. So now America has freeways and gridlock. And wherever this model was copied, which was nearly everywhere, we have freeways and gridlock.

Then, in 1962, America chose a second time a second time, when Walmart and Target opened, beginning the era of big box suburban discount retail – which only really made sense once there were freeways and everyone had a car and drove everywhere. So now America has Walmart and Costco and the death of high street community, outside gentrified areas. Again, this model was copied a lot, and has had similar results nearly everywhere.

Then, America chose a third time, when, after containerisation, it fundamentally plumped for price and profusion. America demanded ‘more cheap stuff sooner’ over and over, and this empowered huge buyers like Walmart and its mass of suburban consumers, to the detriment of organised labour and community – for decades and decades and decades. It was all-everywhere-also ‘made in Asia’: first Japan and Hong Kong, then Taiwan and South Korea, now China. America got what it chose here too: it got an unimaginable profusion of goods at low prices.

Then, that whole shebang was financialised, and over the top of that was laid the American internet, dotcom norms, smartphones, and Silicon Valley messianic solutioneering and grift.

In the wake of this – which was the American Dream – in walks the gliberal conceit to draw you the 1989/2005 big tent squarecircle of Field of Dreams and lolcatz: if you build it, they will come… and can haz: high speed rail, affordable housing, and cheap electricity.

But let’s be honest: having chosen freeways, Wal Mart, Made in China, financialisation, and streaming… that *was* the abundance. You don’t also get to have another culture’s abundance – which, of course, came at huge cost.

If you want a repudiation of any-all of what Ezra and Derek put forward, consider Actually Existing America and how it was ‘made’. Re-read the late 2000s era Matt Taibi of Griftopia, and note the way Goldman Sachs worked with the Mayor of Chicago to sell that city’s parking meters to an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund for 99 years. Or more recently, read Alec Gillis’ Fulfilment, and clock the existential bifurcation of Dayton Ohio and Seattle, or notice that rich folks in DC pay to literally move Baltimore houses – brick by brick – down the road to Washington, rather than live in Maryland.

‘Abundance’ is also a strange thing to desire in a country where the holiday spending season is now a one trillion dollar jam. Consumption in America is 64% of GDP (China’s is 39.6%, France or Germany is about 53%), while household debt sits at 18.5 trillion, public debt is 38 trillion, and the US, which is only about 4.5% of the world’s population, still produces 15% of world CO2 emissions. These are all downstream effects of basic postwar choices toward suburbia, freeways, car use, discount retail, financialisation, and low hanging steady-high ROI: they all denote the abundance that America can already haz. America chose the Big Mac. This means it doesn’t now get to have bento boxes at 350km/h. Japan produced the VFR Honda; America the hog. Japan produced the Suzuki Carry; America the RAM. America might not like the banquet of hangovers now piling up in its direction, but for fucksake: a very strong set of cultural choices have been made, with a clear set of beneficiaries – no, you probably don’t get abundance now.

On a deeper level, the ‘abundance’ desired in Abundance is another signature for postwar affluence. This too we’ve known about for some time, and it hasn’t been all good. Affluence casts huge, long, dark shadows. Riesman was clear about how it might go in The Lonely Crowd in 1950; Galbraith was already ambivalent about in The Affluent Society in 1958; Vance Packard warned everyone about planned obsolescence and the throw away society in The Waste Makers, in 1960. These were bestsellers that had an impact on public conversations in their day; these are not minor works.

Marcuse, reading these and other critical texts on postwar affluence, and living in strange alienation in San Diego with a set of experienced eyes that saw deep continuities between the postwar US and Nazi Germany, also reminded us about affluence in Eros and Civilisation (1955) and One Dimensional Man (1965). Never forget Marcuse’s Kalashnikov wisdom:

‘Capitalism delivers the goods’

– and it does.

But as it does (and it does and does), so we don’t desire and can’t even really imagine radical social change.

‘The community is too well off to care!’

So between Riesman, Galbraith, Packard and Marcuse, ‘we’ knew – or could know – all this about American affluence: by 1965 at the latest, all of sixty years ago. Six decades later, in walks Abundance to (glibly, oddly, naffly) talk about affluence again, but without having done their lit review. ‘Capitalism delivers the goods – gliberally’.

And actually, what Ezra and Derek call abundance – is just one dimensionality.

For Marcuse, the pursuit of affluence through technocracy was producing a one-dimensional society in America by 1965. A one-dimensional society was/is one in which “subjects as well as objects constitute instrumentalities in a whole that has its raison d’etre in the accomplishments of its overpowering productivity” (26). If you read One Dimensional Man, it’s clear this is not good. It was a bad outcome, to have so little from so much, including so little desire for change, so little imagination. So much stuff, so little spark; so much abundance, so little voluptuous peace and contentment.

Yet this kind of technocultural instrumentality is what Abundance is promoting in gliberal form: a ‘future’ in which we can have medicines delivered to us by drones. How does it ‘get’ this? Apparently what America needs more of is what the US already had 30 years of 1945-1975. As Paul James points out, Ezra and Derek basically want AT&T, Bell Labs and DARPA – but without the Agent Orange and Total Information Awareness this time. ‘Can we please have the harmless and sustainable version of that incredibly harmful and unsustainable stuff that also made us great – for a few glorious decades?’

The promise of Abundance is a weird post-neoliberal redux of the ‘supreme promise’ of one dimensionality, which, for Marcuse, involved creating “an ever-more-comfortable life for an ever-growing number of people who, in a strict sense, cannot imagine a qualitatively different universe of discourse and action”. One dimensional society/abundance was/is a ‘heaven’ in which “society takes care of the need for liberation by satisfying the needs which make servitude palatable and perhaps even unnoticeable, and it accomplishes this fact in the process of production itself” (26). This was a bad jam then, when it was achievable; and it is a bad set of ideas now, and is not at all achievable, because of what was chosen instead. And what is happening is something else, something much worse, something that is already happening, or may have already happened, something that may already be ‘too late’. A more honest account might start with what’s really become abundant in the US as gliberalism ceded to involuted fascism after the abundance hangover and morbidity has really kicked in: inequality and memecoins, billionaires and data centres, gooning and loneliness, ICE paramilitaries and a terrified precariat. Again, go back and read Griftopia, read Fulfilment. It’s all pretty clear where this has actually been heading.

As Marcuse saw clearly, the system had its shadow. In the same passage of One Dimensionality quoted above, he notices directly that there was another group there (and there are always ‘those others’, les autres, Sartre’s ‘hell’), “those whose life is the hell of the Affluent Society”. They, as he saw, “are kept in line by a brutality which revives medieval and early modern practices”. Just as Amazon’s ‘Digital Turk’ involved actual ‘Turks’ (Kenyans), postwar America was fuelled by racialized proletarians. When the Afro-American auto workers of Detroit were no longer capable of delivering the Fords cheaply enough, the Japanese, then the Koreans came along to replace them. If America allowed Chinese cars, now it would be the Chinese. Because Wal Mart expressed the true signature of American abundance:

“Always low prices. Always”.

At a deeper level – and this pinpoints what’s gliberal about it – Abundance seems to be about a wish to deliver ‘affluence without shadows’, the kind of high res one dimensionality (that pops on Insta), and in which capitalism delivers the bots (all made in America using completely transparent and non-Chinese supply chains, including single origin rare earths). As its consumer-beneficiaries, The Abundants not only get affordable housing, fast trains, and cheap green electricity, they can all fly Boeing (the old kind that didn’t crash) to their holidays somewhere – where it will be pleasant and sunny, and not raining mud or fire (unless Burning Man is the holiday you have planned for your abundance).

But overproduction means burning people, it means aerial bombardment and urban pulverisation, because, if we follow Marcuse, this is where affluence’s shadow ‘goes’ as part and parcel of all the expansion, accumulation and extraction needed to get the dirt needed for capitalism to deliver the goods. As he wrote in the 1965 political preface in the secdon editon of Eros and Civilisation,

Historical backwardness may again become the historical chance of turning the wheel of progress to another direction. Technical and scientific overdevelopment stands refuted when the radar-equipped bombers, the chemicals, and the “special forces” of the affluent society are let loose on the poorest of the earth, on their shacks, hospitals, and rice fields. The “accidents” reveal the substance: they tear the technological veil behind which the real powers are hiding. The capability to overkill and to overburn, and the mental behavior that goes with it are by-products of the development of the productive forces within a system of exploitation and repression; they seem to become more productive the more comfortable the system becomes to its privileged subjects. The affluent society has now demonstrated that it is a society at war; if its citizens have not noticed it, its victims certainly have (xvii-xviii).

The shadow of what Ezra and Derek call abundance is overkill, it is overburn. Only they don’t acknowledge the shadow, don’t acknowledge the broken necks of Breakneck. Again, this style of maxing out and doubling down (then failing to acknowledge consequences, shadows limits and responsibility) are another part of the cultural signature. America can’t easily let go of its stuff (no culture does), but it would be great if it would start for its ‘thought leaders’ to take ownership of it, rather than glibly calling for another round of affluence: more overproduction, more overkill, more overburn.

In a sense, Klein (and Derek) are not so different to American reactionaries, from 90s Paleoconservatives like Pat Buchanan, right through to the parts of the post alt right MAGA crowd who are still flying the flag for flying the flag (rather than being into seasteading). Both groups are calling for a ‘restoration’ of what is really just a pick and mix montage taking bits and pieces from their favourite prior decades. Abundance talks about wanting to create a great future for all Americans (and this is its phony universalism, as Vaheeson points out), but what it also oozes is a desire to regress back to a simplistic 20C world in which we could just play with big train sets and ‘mom’ could deal with the externalities. Whereas the right from Breitbart to Bannon wanted to glom Eisenhower’s 50s and Reagans 80s (and include racialized hierarchy, patriarchy, and cruelty into it [and probably Pamela Anderson]), Abundance reads like nerdy upper middle class white boys dreaming of those 90s, the years when they made train sets or played Sim City in houses as huge and opulent as those of Chris Columbus films like Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire, but without the parental indifference, abandonment and acrimonious divorce that shadowed those realities in reality. Too bad if the blighted reality includes properties more like the cover of billy woods’ Hiding Places: let’s re-zone urban land, get the gubbamen out of the way, and haz nice trains and houses – in abundance.

Thus the odd-dud Gliberal Idea for 2025 – if there really is ‘an idea’ – appears to be that somehow we can haz 2010-2014 and/or 1996-2000 again, but in a ‘sustainable’ redux glow up in which all material injustices are addressed through a hyper provisioning techno state, and all moral injuries are healed through the floating idealism of left neoliberal identity politics: Stanford for the policy problems, and The Atlantic, New Yorker, NY Times and the Guardian for the op eds to think about it. Really, this is just another group of privileged people doubling down on their comfort zone norms – and wanting to have all the entitlements they presume as a right, while also wanting to feel guiltless about the Other and harmless about the ecology. Make America Great and Shadowless Again. So Gliberalism is MAGSA. In an era fundamentally characterised by the explosion of inequality and climate overshoot, which American abundance created, benefited from, and forced on everyone else for several decades, claiming it all as mathematically rational and technically optimal. Like App-and-EV salvation in the 2000s-2010s, abundance is not a thing, it turns out; the disruption narrative of ten years ago was a rack and rob (that broke things), as it moved quickly. But gliberalism still wants a piece of this, only rendered sustainable and harmless, while its avatars get to keep flying long haul to talk with other gliberals about saving the planet from everything deemed ‘problematic’.

« l’enfer, c’est les autres » .

Readers, be forewarned: this was one of those posts that semi wrote itself. I’m not talking about AIs, just the fact that, once I got going, it just kept going in lots of directions. In line with the original ethos of this blog, the idea is to just let this happen, to some extent, and to try to go with it, and see where it ends up. The results, which I wrote and wrote, almost without a break, are bloggy, baggy, and billowing: or as Substack warns me, ‘Post too long for email’. What’s your mood? If you want a hot take, this will be TLDR. If you’re willing to go with me, come along: I had no idea it would move in these directions, although my patterns and tics are all of a style. In a certain irony, I had to kind of submit to the agency of what the post ‘did’ with me.

~

What then of our agency? What can we do; what difference can we make?

Both my previous post on global involution, and Baudrillard’s ‘World War Four’ provocation (where global systemic involution is the world war of the system on itself), raise these kinds of questions of agency, without really giving a sense of where and how we find it.

This is where, I thought, Mike Davis was beginning to point our attention, at the end of the post. Anger and love – like empathy, as I was writing about last year – are at least potential ways to have agency through relationality, ways to actually live together (somehow) in a community of fate, without enacting corrosive dynamics and entrenching this erosive involution we’re all involved in. Davis and empathy ‘say’: if we are in a community of fate, then it is only by coming together, and building, based on our transformative passions, that we can hope to have any positive agency – in a world structured like this. If you want an ‘answer’, then take it now, because this is as close as you’ll get, in this post…

A world structured like this is also a world of elusive individual agency.

This is a structural feature of ‘how things unfortunately are’. Elusive individual agency can feel especially difficult for those of us – like me – who internalised the wish to make a difference in the world, tied to a belief that the work we did ‘could make a difference’. The late 20C meritocratic ideal here – incredibly ideological, totally bogus, but still very sticky and hard to overcome – often congeals in the fantasy scenario of a job in which we get to demonstrate our individual merit by going out there agentically. In the script that ensues from this ideological position and its normative unconscious, we get to go out and act, and when we do, it makes a ‘real’ difference. In exchange, we get buckets of meaning and recognition, while also experiencing job satisfaction, great pay and conditions, and even ‘work life balance’. This is a whole shebang in which the individual agent shows their merit among likeminded, like-endowed ‘friends’, and is rewarded with entitlements, security, ‘career’, happy first and third world children, and the ability to afford EVs and organic groceries. Or something. Fill in your blank (receive your super [enjoy your agency]). I would say, nearly all of gliberalism is still trying to enact this fantasy; what makes it tragicomic is just how over it all is. Interpolating Kafka: there is hope, just not for individual gliberal agency.

Elusive individual agency in a world of domineering, indifferent, impersonal systems was also transcended through communitarian go getter do gooder ‘teamwork’.

In the final decades of the twentieth century, the cultural mythology powering this social imaginary often came by way of children’s TV cartoons. Depending on the decade and milieu you were raised in, Scooby Doo (70s), Voltron (mid 80s), Captain Planet (mid 90s) all played to the idea of a group of plucky under-age do-gooders who could band together and save the world – or just the neighbourhood – and did so, emphatically. It was also a fun adventure where wrongful villains were rightfully exposed and vanquished1.

Across the twenty-first century to date, we only have to look the rise of the Marvel franchise and screen dominance of the MCU in the 2010s to notice how this idea of triumphant group agency still carries a deeply held wish. The new 21C difference is that, by now, it’s only the chosen few – a tiny elite with monstrous super powers – who can become part of The Avengers, or The Guardians of the Galaxy2. As a culture growing into these ideologically loaded fantasies,, our ‘job’ has been to experience, as spectacle, a kind of super empowerment which gratifies our deepest wishes for super agency.

Marvel’s broad cultural resonance also indicates that the less agency we have in our actual lives, the stronger the super powers have to be, and the more popular super heroes become. So the more powerless we actually feel, the more gratifying it feels to watch superheroes do all the things we have to fantasise about doing to our enemies – because in fact we are tiny and helpless in the face of the world as it actually confronts all of us these days. K Pop Demon Hunters, though with some pink purply different K colours in the rinse, reprises this basic idea: 325.1 million views, and counting.

In fascism it’s kinda the same, but you do it through someone else you identify with. Trump, Bibi, Putin or whoever just stands in as the superhero, the guy who is gonna protect you against whatever your particular monstrous Other happens to be. Hitler, as Adorno noticed, was just a composite of “King Kong and the suburban barber”. This is one thing we should notice about the rise of populism, autocracy and involuted fascism: it’s all an appeal to the idea of agency, while also adding the additional appeal of getting to have someone fight our battles for us, and getting to enjoy domination as spectacle. If we can’t go Fight Club and smash the reviled status quo with our own mind and fists, then we can bestow power on a group who’ll do it for us. Sadly, this is something Freud and Adorno were right about, and it applies to ICE in Chicago or the IDF in the West Bank: there are people at home who love the idea of some bully dominating their loathed monster, and they like the idea that the dirty work is being done for them. Team sport, on this level, is no different: we want to watch our team smash and destroy the enemy team, and we enjoy this spectacle, as well as enjoying our position of clear visibility and relative safety.

But in a world of systemic global involution, instead of superheroes and supervillains and superefficacy (with the super clean split between ‘those evil baddies’ we can watch being defeated, and ‘our heroes’, who we can watch destroying the baddies), we end up in a profoundly paradoxical, ambivalent, and indeterminate situation. This is where I landed by the end of last post: what then? At this point, we might notice, as I intimated in the previous post, that even the fascists are so involuted they can’t even do proper push ups anymore. Sadly, the situation might be more like Logan (or One Battle After Another) than Guardians of the Galaxy: all the ‘adults’ have gotten old and useless, and all the heroes are has beens who have lost their superpowers and their mojo. What’s left to the younger generation is just to survive, somehow, and make it to some place better. That’s kind of the truth, right?

So a world of involution puts paid to even these kinds of fantasies where super empowerment gets enacted against our ‘baddies’ on behalf. As the Marvel fantasy wears off, perhaps we glimpse the Aphex Twin comedown, in which Trump, Putin, Orban or whoever have been re-done by an AI trained on Patricia Piccinini. Trump’s neck wattle, and his reactive rage about its existence, winks at this sagging peepshow: we are all governed by mad, clueless septagenarians; the whole culture in a terrifying proximity to ageing and death (I’ll return to this). We are dommed by what is old and dying, but does not die, not even when it’s shot. Again: no agency, no control, and all of us just tiny pink writhing pupae, baby kangaroos before the AI-powered steamroller of precarious planet slop.

This is our imperfect, ambivalent – undesirable, unwanted, unfortunate – reality. You don’t want it to be like this, yet it is. You want to have agency, but you don’t; not as an an individual, and certainly not as you fantasise (which is part of why you do).

In such a clench, we might have psychic space to concede the fundamental paradoxes of life and agency in a world of involution I was gesturing to above: we are and are not the issue, the life support system is and is not destroying us, what we do say and think does and does not make any difference whatsoever., We might also notice that nothing is ever quite addressed or fixed, but also that nothing is ever quite destroyed. Things are fairly broken; and there is some weak hope. Some points for Team Fucked and Broken; some for Team Resilience and Hope. And so it all goes on (somehow), continuing to expand, extract and accumulate, but in a spiral of iterating entropic copies.

Welcome to the desert of our maxed out, low res destructor.

Rare is the individual who could bear such a reality all the time. I don’t profess to be one of those people, and I don’t know many. Around me, I see some people really doing their best, and doing a very good and very imperfect job of it: usually this means keeping the blinkers on and focusing on tasks and everyday life. Right now, at least where I am, these are the people keeping the lights on, the ones who still answer the phone, respond to their email, show up in person to meetings, and actually keep giving a fuck about their professional duties, although, under conditions of institutional involution, there’s a de facto tax on this, and no de facto tax on being a shitbird – as follows.

I also see perhaps the bare majority of people – especially the ‘leaders’, the managerial class, those between 45-65 – who are, in essence waiting to become boomers, waiting in the ‘queue’ to join the Boomer Supremacy, while actually taking the piss with what they’re doing, in a way that’s wrecking what good we have left, institutionally and socially. Parasocial presenteeism and the slow motion ghosting of everything and everyone appears to be the order of the day with the bare majority. Why do we have paedophiles in childcare centres? Look at the blue suits who govern them for private equity.

What the fuck is going on here? My sense is that agency – and its absence – is actually at the core of such positions people take. The Parasocial Presentees, the human beanbags, they glimpse their own nullity, their own helpless absence of agency in the face of the world.

In the face of this, this group basically abandons relationality, in favour of a defensive autonomy whose essence involves ‘getting away with doing as little as they can get away with’ at ‘work’, while also jealously elbowing other people to keep what they have, in terms of entitlements. This has really contributed to pervasive institutional atrophy and brokenness, and is nothing else but wholesale intergenerational theft. Let me purloin some Japanese animation, once more, to draw you a picture of these intergenerational ‘relations’.

Many such people claim to be lonely; few of them seem to realise their own contribution to our collective erasure, and that – pardon the ressentiment for just a second – many of them deserve to be lonely, just on the basis of how they treat institutions, other people, and the world around them. The tragicomic probability from involution is this: they won’t get to become the boomer they wish to see in the world. By then, all the property, ipads and wine will be consumed. Super won’t be so super. Agency won’t be so agenty.

Is there agency here?

No, longterm. But for now there is the tactical victory of getting paid for one more fortnight without having really done anything. Maybe this feels like one is ‘winning at life’ (but what then is this ‘life’ that one is ‘winning’?). But there is the strategic defeat of having contributed to the involution of all the institutions while doing so. It’s also hard to care about a cohort of people who don’t care for anyone else or the world. I don’t want to succumb to the contempt of ‘they can fucking burn’, but this is a part of how I feel. I don’t like that, but I feel it, and there is validity. I can also understand how we can become governed by loss aversion, but I don’t actually think there’s much agency – and certainly no hope, not in the long run – in taking such positions.

‘Main Character Energy’ (M©E) and Main Character Syndrome

Alongside what has become of a big chunk of the middle aged white collar middle class, I first want to notice a newer kind of ideological position. This is another kind of subject position formed, taken, and popular among some of the children of the above late neoliberal nullities. It’s a very different position to variants of neijuan, which (I wrote about) substantial numbers of Chinese people are inhabiting. This is a kind of ideological position that emerged out of a world of global scale involution, a world of planetary systemic involutions, a world which we cannot really belong to, but nonetheless subsist in anyway – without love, without hope, without agency, but still by entertaining the following fantasy. In other words, if the above description disses on ‘involution’s parents’, what now follows is some of the prevalent ways that involution’s children try to find some individual agency, in a world there it is so elusive.

Over the past ten years or so, but especially by 2020, ‘Main Character Energy’ bubbled up online. One conspicuous time-and-place it bubbled up was in May 2020, when the following sign value resonated like crazy in a few different places on TikTok and Instagram:

“You have to start romanticizing your life. You have to start thinking about yourself as the main character”.

‘Main character energy’ (henceforth M©E) continues as a hashtag into the present; search it up for some recent examples if this is off your radar3.

At heart, M©E appeals to our fundamental, basic protagonism, our deep belief that we are the absolute centre of the universe. As DFW noted in ‘This is Water’

“everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive*. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real”.

M©E appends the protagonism of our base self-centredness – by carrying a wish to have agency.

By ‘romanticising our life’, we get to be – and stay – at the centre of the drama, the action, the crux. The lens’ aperture is always wide open, the foreground focus is always on us, and everything in the background is either the pretty dimpling of bokeh, something there to support and serve us – or it intrudes as an obstacle to enacting the wish, and must be destroyed.

M©E reads the whole world as will and representation, on the basis of a grandiose self and robust ego who is in charge, who can and does do things in the world –and to the world – in ways elicit a response, have an effect, not only giving us gratification an opportunity to ‘feel good about oneself’, while also driving the action. You do you, you what you like, it feels good, you win the prize, you’re the champion, blah blah blah. This is a huge fantasy of individual agency.

To a global May 2020 audience of early twentysomethings who had just been grounded, suddenly thrust into a world paralysed by fear – fear of a tiny, invisible pathogen we did not know or understand, to which there was no vaccine – it’s very easy to see why ‘main character’ energy resonated so much as a fantasy of individual agency. In a ‘story’ whose actual main character was a virus capable of destroying everything about everyday life, work, travel, and hedonism that the global middle class took for granted, the ‘vibe’ that ‘I am the centre of this story, a story that is about me, in which I do what I want, get what I want, feel good about myself’ of course had a huge appeal. It’s just that, as Adam Curtis might say, ‘they were living in a fantasy’ – but as long as it stays on the level of ‘energy4’, no Curtis-ish levels of scrutiny are necessary.

However, no sooner did M©E become a thing than ‘Main Character Syndrome’ became its online riposte: the immediate, May 2020 reaction to M©E in May 2020 was the diss that you’re behaving ‘as if’ you’re the centre of the fucking universe, as if your life is a movie and you’re the protagonist, as if you’re the most important one, and “everyone else is often a sidekick or a villain. You often see yourself as the most important person in the room, and you act according to the narrative of your plot — however you define it” (link).

What I find interesting to notice is that some of the most Titanic male egos of the contemporary United States all show signs of Main Character characterology: Tate, Diddy, Kanye, Trump, and Musk all emanate M©E, and could easily be pop diagnosed and dissed for forcing everyone around them to suffer through their Main Character Syndrome, all served up with big lashings of toxic individualism and patriarchy.

In terms of individual agency, each one of these people, as obnoxious as they are popular, are imbued with the ‘superpower’ qualities of genius, which permits them to break all the rules afflicting everyone else – in a way that we identify with, and admire. Elon gets to do DOGE (and then leave DOGE, and then get a trillion dollar pay check?); Trump gets to wreck everything, including the White House, and can haz the Nobel Peace Prize. But for their supporters: ‘He’s playing four dimensional chess – he’s a geeeenius’. At heart, again, this is a swollen dark twisted fantasy of individual agency, but one that goes further by granting that violations, even/especially grotesque violations, are okay for them. Thanks to their genius and uniqueness, these protagonists get to grab the world by the pussy, just like you – if you identify with them – would really love to do.

M©E vs NPCs (and the spectre of NPC Anxiety)

The next ‘step’ in this contemporary quest for agency has been to split the world into a binary. As already expressed in the above quote, taking the position of ‘Main Character’ tends to render ‘everyone else’ as a sidekick or a villain. What’s notable here is how gaming culture – actually, 70s Dungeons and Dragons, so it’s been with us a while – stepped in and supplied the social imaginary with the idea of the NonPlayer Character (NPC) as an immediately legible way of describing this. This is how it goes.

After investing in the idea of romanticising my life and fully embracing My Own Private M©E (or in identifying with a Musk and having someone enact it in a way that gratifies me), it immediately appears, through the binary, that ‘everyone else’ (though they might assist and support me or oppose and defy me) cannot be a protagonist, cannot be an agent, is not really a playa, not really a character, not really…. anything.

What’s really interesting about this is how it doubly gratifies agency. Now, not only am I the progagonist, I alone always remain the protagonist, because all those others are NPCs. Through the neat structure of splitting and projection, we’ve just managed to not only hold ourselves up, we’ve managed to hold everyone, and all the world, down, in contempt, keeping them in the non-agentic background, ‘where they deserve to be’. To the one up of the M©E (only me) is the one down of the NPC (everyone else).

One place I came across a world binarization in the style of M©E vs NPCs is in this post. Although some parts of the analysis are ‘not wrong’, the tone has that odious overconfidence of techno-libertarians, the preference for making the kind of stark pronouncements and value judgments that flatter the egos and ‘intellects’ of their tech bro audiences – the M©E that made Balaji Srinavasan and Mencius Moldbug so popular, and contribute to them being, by the sounds of it, a tough hang. The tone, as it turns out, is a harbinger, not only for how it splits the world, but how it allows its identifying audience to sit on the M©E side of the split. The trick, as always, is not only to make others look bad, it’s to feel good about oneself while doing so, while knowing they are bad and you are good, and that it will always stay that way.

According to the post, a Great Decoupling is upon us. All this hinges on agency, and redounds to the following kind of tech bro aufhebung of the M©E vs NPC distinction.

As Prue write(s), what we are witnessing is two5 ways of dealing with the world by decoupling from the ‘the friction, risk, and unpredictability of the physical world’.

These two ways of dealing create two ‘classes’:

“The Agency Class is decoupling its biological fate from the averages of public health and its productivity from the constraints of traditional labor. The Managed Class is decoupling its social and emotional life from the messy reality of in-person community, executing a managed retreat into the digital realm”.

Basically, the Agency Class get Attia and Huberman and a Hawaiian island and surfing lessons, while the Managed Class get the piped society, our lovely global dopamine gavage, pumping right to its screens.

It’s ‘not wrong’, especially in its characterisation of the Managed Class (and I’ll come back to it, because it tells us something about our culture of death, and the dying of the middle class). At the same time, it’s not as if there are ‘two classes’6, is it? The distinction is surely bogus in a world with a precariat of 3-5 billion, and a few more billion surviving right on the margins or cast out and abandoned by the piped society (though not away from its waste and aerial bombardment), all of whom – if we don’t need any more than a billion for factory labour – are stricto sensu superfluous to the system’s tripartite game of expansion, extraction, and accumulation.

But given this post’s focus, what of the agency of the Agency Class? Who is this group of people who ‘have agency’ – individual agency – and what do they do when they have it?

The Agency Class are imbued with a capacity to “exert force and ideas upon the world, to become an orchestrator of systems, capital, and, increasingly, automated labor”. They are also cast as a generative class, those whose work, godlike Creator-Founder-Titans, the “5% of your population generates 50% of innovation and GDP growth”.

We don’t really need to say much more about this. Perhaps you don’t identify, so read it and it just entrenches your view that that anyone who believes this Ayn Rand stuff is just someone suffering from full-blown Main Character Syndrome7. But anyone who reads-and-identifies as the Agency Class can read themselves ‘in’ as one of its avatar-protagonists. Having done so, we not only feel like we have agency in a world of involuting systems: tick! We also instantly ‘know’ that ‘those others’ are just schlubs demanding that their tendies come smoothly down the pipe. So they also deserve whatever’s coming down the pipes.

As the post goes on, the Managed Class have recovered a supplemental agency against the stresses and strains of this world. But it’s the kind of defensive agency, ruled by fear and loss aversion, in which people have traded “the high-stress, low-reward reality of physical life (stagnant wages, unaffordable housing, social anxiety, impending necessary re-skilling) for the low-stress, high-reward certainty of the digital feed”. This is resulting in “a ‘homebody economy’ where superior digital entertainment makes staying in more appealing, but creating

“a generation whose social muscles have atrophied (and who lack personality), making them prime customers for a suite of products that service this new reality. The market for the Managed Class thrives by transforming loneliness and boredom into monetizable, on-demand services. It provides ‘social snacks’, quick, low-friction digital interactions, that satiate the immediate need for connection without the difficulty and reward of a “social meal””.

Hmm.

What’s most interesting to me about the above quote is how it mixes a few elements. On the one hand, there is the ‘not wrong’ description of how an increasing number of parasocial presentees are ‘choosing’ to subsist while WFH in to the 2020s. As I mentioned above, I do know of a number of people, and the number seems to be increasing, whose life goal seems to be finishing Netflix, and whose idea of a good work meeting is one where they can Zoom in and game and also listen to NBA podcasts. Para and infra are the order of the day. A lot of students also undertake education with the same basic orientation; the results are, likewise, very shitty.

At the same time, the analysis based on the split, and how it creates a one up, one down that helps those who feel one up feel good about themselves. So in the ‘one down’ category, we have total dismissive contempt for ‘those NPCs’, the Managed Class. While in the ‘one up’ category, we have the – incredibly M©E – idea that the Agency Class are individually agentic, distinct, superior, separate, and above – and can thus look down on ‘everyone else’ from the safe distance of the heroic story of their life. Fundamentally, this is a story of the world that tells its audience ‘don’t worry, smart guy, you are part of the Agency Class, and you are safe: lock in on your workout, go surfing, go to Burning Man – your crypto wallet is safe’. When of course: there are no protagonists (single anomaly below notwithstanding), the world is not a story, and no one is guaranteed safety and separation, not even in their Queenstown bunker.

On a deeper level, the assertion of belonging to the Agency Class, to the Progatonist Class, can also be read as a way of warding off NPC anxiety, which I see seeping right through this post through its focus on avoiding death and dying. Hobbes is still the boss here.

The denial of death permeates the post, just as it soaks like old dark congealing blood through all of optimisation culture, and nearly everything that tech bros extract from Attia8 and Huberman.

In the post, the denial of death is all talked about by way of ‘fortress’ and fortification’: the secession of the Agency Class from the involuting conditions they did so much to co-create now involves transforming the body itself into a gated community capable of repelling its Others through the indefinite forestalling of The Demise. I’m not sure if it’s intended as satire – and living in 3SD also means that satire is impossible to parse – but this is how this is worded:

“The core principle of the Agency Class is the fortification of the human asset for long-term strategic work, scaled impact, and capital compounding. For this emergent class, often resulting from a tier of wealth that allows one to go slow to go fast, technology is a fortress against the decay of time and the volatility of the world.”

Lol. Dude, you are getting bald and old; you are dying; you can’t even get it up without Viagra, and no one wants to love you, because you are so hard to love – yes, the spiralling intensification of your Main Character Syndrome has been a big part of that.

This whole thing is getting kinda old, isn’t it? The worship of gerontocracy and data centres, in the ‘era’ of the probable death of the middle class

So I’m saying that the assertion of belonging to the Agency Class, to the Progatonist Class, is also a way of warding off NPC anxiety. And, honestly, I think we all have more than a little NPC Anxiety. We could of course ease our NPC anxiety by refusing the whole bogus dichotomy: ‘I don’t want to have M©E, but nor am I an NPC! I am neither protagonist nor stub.’ In realising this, we could find some kind of agency in a a third form, some kind of ambivalent person who, in letting go of their contempt for the weakness of other people, can be a little more open about the vulnerability and porousness of the self. Somewhere here, between anger and love, and with empathy, there might be agency. I think there are no guarantees.

However, this is still 2025, so things are still 3SD for the time being.

And here, leaving aside the popularity of involuted fascist and autocratic morons, what characterises the government of the world is that it is a gerontocacy: we are governed by old men. We are governed by nasty old men, edging closer to senility and death, but never quite dying. If the new struggles to be born, in no small measure, it’s because the old refuse to hand over the mic, refuse to retire, and never quite die. Biden’s final ‘act’, his final agency, expressed precisely this: ‘from my cold dead hands’. Fuck you, man.

Trump is 79, Modi 75, Putin 73, and Xi 72. These are all men several years beyond retirement age. All of them, except ?maybe? Modi9, are extremely wealthy. Yet they insist on remaining the protagonist in their own cultural variant of M©E, and all of them are totally fine with millions, or billions, suffering, or dying, as long as it means they can remain the centre of the story, a story almost entirely rooted in their own twentieth century struggles, a century that ended a quarter of a century ago. If they have individual agency it only exists by virtue of the fact that, for some reasons intimated in this post, groups of people identify with their domination, in order, perhaps – this is the question – to feel a little agency of their own, in a world where this is so very elusive. Maybe, their supporters hope, they are strongman enough to have the agency to bring back that twentieth century, breathe a little life into its corpse. In a world of involuting systems, where individual agency is elusive.

As the Great Decoupling post implicitly describes, there is now a huge crisis of the middle class, the middle class increasingly drawn to such strongmen (who are no longer strong men). If we intuit a pervasive crisis of agency around us, it’s also because it’s no longer clear what the WFH middle class are there for, why they’re still here, or what exactly they do, aside from collect entitlements and drive flagging demand by renovating their heavily leveraged investment properties and flying long haul for global tourist experiences, in order to ‘spend the kids’ inheritence’ (SKIs). A big chunk of the middle class no longer knows what it’s for – and it knows this – and this powerlessness, alongside loss aversion, is completely terrifying. Even its obsession with ‘bucket listing’; all this shows us is the conspicuousness of the bucket, poised to be kicked. Quick, spend the kids’ inheritance, before you kick the bucket! What is this if not death before death?

Finally, we not only live among half dead but still stubbornly living gerontocrats and a dying middle class, we live in a culture of death. The most pervasive evidence of this is data centres themselves, places where life, like moisture, has to be evacuated. As Baudrillard noticed with the usual spooky prescience of his best,

“This is the true face of ultra-modern death, made up of the faultless, objective, ultra-rapid connection of all the terms in a system. Our true necropolises are no longer the cemeteries, hospitals, wars, hecatombs; death is no longer where we think it is, it is no longer biological, psychological, metaphysical, it is no longer even murder: our societies’ true necropolises are the computer banks or the foyers, blank spaces from which all human noise has been expunged, glass coffins where the world’s sterilised memories are frozen” (Symbolic Exchange and Death, 205).

Right now, if you pump enough dead dino-powered electricity, enough to power a city, into this blank and dead space, you can teach an algorithm ‘to guess the next word’ with enough accuracy to have an LLM appear to you, in your browser, and return you a sense of individual agency – in a world of involuted systems.

~ What then of our agency? What can we do; what difference can we make? ~

We are neither protagonists, nor NPCs.

At the same time, there is one individual in the world who does have individual agency: Jensen Huang. In a sense, it really does matter what happens to NVIDIA, and how the whole gigantomachy between AI and society, and US AI and Xina AI shakes down.

At the same time, in traversing a lot of these different ideological positions, and their relationship to fear, anxiety, loss and death, I’m really struck by how little ‘what is on offer’ offers us, as this post draws to a close. Nothing but buckets and data centres, nothing but blackouts and sudden flooding rain.

No. I don’t pretend to have an answer to the world in this moment. I can describe it as 3SD and notice its involution, but beyond this, I’m struck by two things.

The first thing is that I have honestly no idea what is going to happen, even in the next six months. I think anyone being honest might come to a similar conclusion. At the same time, Baudrillard guessed many things ‘well enough’ by 1975; and this shows us that, in a sense, modernity has been on rails toward this calamity for several decades. This opens us back onto this world of ambivalence, indeterminacy, and paradoxical agency. And that’s probably where we are.

The final thing, however, is that I think we are really not ‘on the money’, for the most part. Between Main Character Energy and the Agent Class, or between the Managed Class and its strange death drive wish to spend its children’s inheritance (which, like all kitsch, is evil), I think we have misread ourselves and the world. Data centres, bucket lists, global tourism, involuted fascism: it is not very good. If there is agency in the midst of this – and there is and is not – it might lie in disinvesting ourselves in nearly everything, all this deadly bullshit and stupidity we’ve become so convinced of. It’s time to disabuse ourselves. The elders have abandoned us, they have no wisdom; we are on our own, and we need to think, and we need to feel our way through this.

What happens after that is open and unknown.

This has been a ghastly year.

Or no: 2025 has been a great year – for ghouls, grifters, chancers, chasers, and for bullies, above all.

But for those who don’t have a boner for that circus, how can we think a way through this carnival of morass: the spectacle of binfires pulled into the yawning galactic anus of an AI sloppy sarlacc?

In attempting this, a few things I’ve been exploring in 2025 have proven true enough to be worth returning to, as approach November.

Firstly, it seems clear enough to me that involution is a global master process. Involution is what is happening in 2025. And right now, it is owning us. Globalisation – and most of society – has lost control of itself, and it is unwinding, curling into itself, entropically unspooling.

In 2025, the fascists are involuted. Their erection of violence lacks the tumescence, chest and jawline of their twentieth century hatefathers. Bolsonaro couldn’t do push-ups; ICE chooses to use Pokemon and Halo to advertise their bullying domination to ‘jobseeker’ manbabies; they use the Ghibli filter to make one of the darkest works of art imaginable about American culture. The whole thing is so grotesque, so infantile, so worthy of contempt – and yet, on it goes, getting worse and worse but never ending, even in the absence of a firm chest and strong jaw.

In 2025, even genocide is involuted. In 2004, nine years after Yigal Amir popped Yitzak Rabin, an interesting long read asked: Will the settlers destroy Israel? Twenty-one years on, we can answer. Yes, they 90% did: for themselves, for nearly all Jewish Israelis and, needless to say, for all Arab Israelis and Palestinians… but, thanks to involution, Israel-Palestine will hover around 90% wrecked, and not be definitively done enough for anything to ever be over. There won’t even be any Evil Paradise of Neoliberalism; no Grifter Ghouls Riviera on the Mediterranean. Instead, there will be Tony Blair.

Israel is now so involuted it can’t even control its own genocide. Having armed them and patted them on the back, it was the US told Bibi to put the IDF’s donated death toys away – for now. Yet in line with the ‘90% fucked’ rule of involution I’m sketching in here, more than 90% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed; and Hamas lives, clawing their way out of the rubble in keffiyahs and balaclavas, 90% killed, but still 10% scraping on. This photo of Yahya Sinwar says it all.

And having 90% wrecked Gaza and cruelled the lives of its two million people, the Knesset votes 71–13 (84% in favour) for the total annexation of the West Bank, which even Vance and Rubio think is worth opposing. Then, once it happens, once it’s 90% ruined – for the settlers – three million Palestinians will still have to live there somehow, just under involuted terror from ghoulish bullies, without peace, prosperity, happiness, or anywhere else to go. But don’t worry: involuted fascism and genocide ‘will take care of everything’. And there will be Tony Blair. This is the only gambit of the remaining parts of politics that are fully pumped for what’s happening.

In 2025, we can even see involution transpiring through the enshittification of Amazon and Google. We can also see an involution stand-off between Xina and MAmeriGA, a strange death match in which, the moment either side wins, everyone loses. Then we see the Own Goal Involution of everything EUropean, which is pretty much no one’s fault but Europe’s, as well as a forseeable outcome of three decades of geopolitically incoherent decisionmaking, inertia, and momentum (alongside a strangely self satisfied evaluation from the elite that got ‘em there that these are our norms and values and we’ll stick with them). In 2025, it seems that, no matter what happens, no matter where it happens, it is subject to involution, and this means, necessarily, it will be a bad sequel, it will have destructive slop and click bait flashing in the margins, it will involve pitfalls that turn out to be a pixelated sarlacc you can still really fall into, and die a low res death in, slowly finding “new definition of pain and suffering, as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.”

In fact, what’s most fascinating, if one takes an involuting Amazon, Google and the EU as trillion+ dollar examples, is to notice that involution is such a powerful dynamic now, that it seems to be owning things even in the absence of a complicated substantive wrong (like military occupations and atrocities), a massive extrinsic shock (like covid), or eco-geopolitical disadvantage (like being under aerial bombardment or underwater, like Gaza, Ukraine, or Pakistan). 2025 has taken us into a place where, no matter what happens, there will be involuted thinking, involuted processes, and involuted outcomes. Quite often it’s bamboozling: how could it all be this bad? If we had all sat down and worked out a fiendish plan to attack ourselves and everything, it would uncannily look just like ‘how shit rolls’, just because everyone can’t shoot straight, is asleep at the wheel, jacking off to GPT’s new AI porn offerings while they should be paying attention, or distracted by a trying to buy their loved one a *genuine* Labubu.

But beyond a certain point, involution isn’t ‘destructive like a war’: it is war. I don’t think we clocked this. Or like: involution is happening and we know it is very destructive, but because we still don’t think it is possible that the system could take itself down, could be its own destructor, we don’t acknowledge it to be true. And it could actually-also turn into hot war: armed conflict between major power is still, sadly, a crapshoot chance. But at the same time, the biggest source of conflict and destruction in the mid 2020s is ‘just what shittily happens’ as the whole shebang, this globally involuting pseudoreality, prevails. Baudrillard, as often, glimpsed this back in 2008:

“The first two (wars) put an end to colonialist Europe and to Nazism. The Third, which we euphemistically call the Cold War, though it was a very real one, sealed the fate of Communism. Note that on each occasion we’ve moved towards a more all-encompassing world order, more towards one world. And this process has now virtually reached its end. Hence the widespread sense that we’re dealing with an enormous unified system today, an integral reality, in which the enemy is everywhere and nowhere. This is what I have in mind when I speak of a Fourth World War: the war globalization wages on itself. In a globalized system, face-to-face conflict is no longer possible; there’s no declared enemy any more, no territory to conquer. The system’s gone too far. To the point where it eventually breaks down and begins to consume itself by secreting a form of inner corruption. Not corruption in the moral sense, but something like a dismantling of the whole, terrorism being the violent metaphor for this tension that is irreducible to the system. As though it played the role of a virus which, in the end, might be said to affect everyone’s imagination, adding a supplementary element of tension to the system, though this time a symbolic and virtual one” (link).

Reading this resonated deeply with what I was describing, earlier this year, as 3SD, the moment where the 3S of ‘surreal, stubborn and stupid’ of 2022-4 compounded with the 2025 added 3D of ‘dangerous, dumb, and destructive’. 3S, 3D, and 3SD were ways for me to try to give some metaphorical designation to what seems to be happening, while saying: ‘this is a bad trip, look forward to a very bad comedown indeed’. We can see the world tripping balls on 3SD in the crazy levels of slop (see the background pics); we can see it with the polybubble of gold, silver, crypto, and stock prices; we can see it in the choice to grant weapons-grade plutonium to Sam Altman.

But in going ‘full Baudrillard’ and naming this as World War Four, and in designating involution as its putative cause, I feel like theory helps again. This is because, by seeing involution this way, I can get my head around something else that’s really been troubling me – and this will be the focus of the next post – the fact that ‘all of this’ feels beyond human agency. For me, this is stronger than ‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind’; it’s differently shaped to some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born; and it’s different again to the pathogen-induced shock of covid. I think of Mr Stay Pufft in Ghostbusters, but at least there, the Marshmallow Man took shape as some remnant memory from childhood: there had to be something imaginable and imagined about Mr Stay Pufft. There is nothing in human history or experience – as far as we know – that could have prepared us for the fact that *this* would be our undoing.

If World War Four is caused and proceeds by way of involution, that means our undoing will be our undoing, that our unravelling will be its own causal-effective snowball. Ai ai ai.

This means we can say now, with full clarity and perplexity, that we are the cause and the problem, and that we are its only solution – which might mean there is none.

I don’t have much hope. In fact, I’m with Mike Davis here, in this interview shortly before his death:

“To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly and realistically as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a city decaying from the bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so important to me as a Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see fascism. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless” (link).

I agree with Davis, and ‘hope’ you might be more animated by love wallop than a hope dollop. At the same time, how does one fight a revolution against involution, when it is us, in our systems, shredding ourselves, with our systems – we who cannot live now without our systems? For this, I have no easy or simple answer.

Hello all,

based on the previous post, you may be wondering if the blog will continue. I’m still not sure, although I’m 95% certain I’ll be moving the work from this platform to one or more others – something where the blog can be more like a blog, anywhere in the lee of the winds of enshittification and personal brand/growth maximisation.

Since August, all my writing energies have been going in to this manuscript I’m writing, which is about the piped society we’ve been living in, and especially containment, containerisation, and decontainment. Long-time readers of what I’ve been attempting here since 2022 will be a little familiar with where this might be headed. I’ve been writing like crazy, and it’s finally coming together.

But for the end of the year, I’m planning 3-5 final sprays.

I want to go back to Baudrillard and Christmas, as well as maybe Halloween. I want to think about these two festivals as excessive, and for how they work the system of objects.

There’s something on what I’m calling ‘The Pupped Society’ (some things entrenching ‘it doesn’t matter and ‘we do not care’)

And there’s a kind of attempt to aufhebung 2025’s 3SD by way of The Golden Chainsaw, ‘can haz hamburger’, and a Pepsi ad I saw riffing on SV’s NPC trope: basically how current dynamics seem to be creating a creating a ‘mass’ of bystanders, NPC perps, and tendies-craving nazis. Oh, and there’s slop. Like these knees, above… and below.

I also want to do something on the idea of friendship, and how we struggle to practise it.

So anywway, thank you for your patience, and prepare for a post…. next week, or end of month. Then a few more. Then, who knows…

If you’re interested in the genesis of the above and below knees as they knead need: Baudrillard

I started writing here for a few clear reasons, back in 2022.

In the first instance, I thought substack could function as a kind of repository for posterity. I had a few archival pieces I’d written for close friends that were sitting in my dropbox, and merited some kind of appropriately scaled, low cost outlet. By putting them here, I would have a URL I could give the rare person who might be interested. For them, it would add whatever modest resonance that piece was capable of. I’m still glad I have these, this piece and this series (one, two, three, four, five) is still some of the work on here I’ve been happiest I could share. These works tell a truth I’ve experienced, in my own voice, from a place where neither that truth nor that voice is allowed a space.

Substack was also a means of unblocking modes and styles of expression that become impacted under the weight of late 2010s paywalled journals. I was writing against what the Gatekept Graveyard (ie, academic publishing) had done to me, my writing, and my writerly self-esteem. Here, I was writing toward something faster, looser, and more connected with unformed felt sense, intuition, imagination, and the unconscious. This was also about reconnecting with lost parts of self from my 2000s, including my prior blogger selves, restoring the right brain its place as master of the left brain’s emissary, and acknowledging the best parts of writing can happen when we just let go and let loose – though there are no guarantees with that.

Before moving to the third reason, it’s worth sparing a paragraph to notice just how bad academic writing has been, for everyone, including me, how bad it is, and that it’s becoming even worse. About 2,500 years ago, Buddha noticed people floundering like fish in the puddles of a dried-up stream. As Chris has noted, all of academia presents the sad spectacle of grumpy polar bears fighting over shrinking icebergs (and see his recent post exploring this). From Swift we know: smallness and territoriality beget one another as projected aggression (or: just look at Israel now). These days, peer review basically demands we be as small as possible, so we say as little as possible1. It’s hard to convey this to outsiders, but rather than creating and keeping a space for truth through reason, evidence, and the ‘forceless force of the greater argument’, journals are mostly a place where we collude with the unspoken injunction (in exchange for gold coins): never, under any circumstances, say anything. The more ‘direct truth’ one puts in a journal article, the more those who patrol the Gatekept Graveyard seek to ding it out of you, so you comply with their vision of rigor (mortis). It’s not only a failed experiment, as Chris’ post notices; it’s Dr Frankenstein’s monster. For we fail to pity the monster (and think he is Frankenstein); just as we fail to see that Victor Frankenstein was a fucking jerk. In peer review, nearly everyone behaves like a fucking jerk (strike two for online anonymity), and nearly everyone becomes a stupid loser who goes home with nothing. Only famous Names and friends of the editor tend to ‘win’ (which – and see below – is a bit like substack has become).

Thirdly, I kept going with substack as the first two purposes were clarifying: I began to want to build something through it, something for me. Subbing and stacking was still a means to an end, but I started to see that through a combination of loosingly letting myself ‘go’, committing to continuing to post, and by always hitting post before the piece ‘felt ready’, I could create something I didn’t have to bolt down and be in control of – because it could take care of itself. This has been about restoring some faith in the generative process of ‘just writing’, and letting one’s curiosity and interest lead and form what gets written, without too much second guessing, without re-writing and careful editing. ‘Let’s just see where this goes’ – and as we do, let’s keep going, pulling it along by consistent effort, but without trying too hard. As it so happens, this has led to the kind of style-aesthetic that characterises the blog. For what it’s worth, I think it has come together at moments, and I think that, after an uneven ‘season one’, the ensuing seasons have iterated toward posts landing better and more consistently.

So…. Substack has been a ‘solved problem’ for my three basic purposes. I got what I needed by doing this, it’s led in certain directions, it’s been generative for me. This has all been great and worthwhile.

At the same time, it’s clear the platform is involuting, and as it’s iteratively rolled inward-downward, we can see a few sad-familiar dynamics in play.

At some point this year, I downloaded the app. The app designers have gone for a ‘social media feed’ experience. I spared myself Twitter and Instagram on purpose. Partly for this reason, as soon as I’m on the app, I feel yuckily drawn into the sticky trap of likes, shares, being fed stuff by some algo (which, unlike the seeming majority, repels me). I feel like I ‘should’ engage with the app, and when I do by pushing past my repelled feeling, I always find one interesting post I hadn’t come across. But honestly, who could be bothered with another headshredding timesucking social media platform, as of 2025? If I have 30 minutes in the evening, I’d be better off reading the LRB, or the stuff that’s still top shelf on the New Yorker. Most of us would.

There’s also way, way too much content (and way, way too many writers and stacks): this is what even a five-minute toe dip in in this ocean of content reveals. We can’t drink the ocean – and if we tried, it would give us the shits and make us vomit, rather quickly as it turns out. There is something fundamentally emetic about all this inscription on offer: the surfeit is cosmic in its implications, while my person and its body and attentional resources remain as they are – finite, stretched, up to Pussy’s Bow with what I’m already doing, ‘thank you very much’. The purpose of content is containment, and containment is about pacification, not happiness. But content does not contain, it only causes me to want to push it all away, because I know I can’t process it, and I’ll end up like Mr Chunks the Goat2 if I try (see above).

Substack also has a huge incumbency bias, which belies its image as a scrappy newcomer disrupting legacy media (which: ‘duh’, and also ‘whom among them…’). Substack’s algo rewards the awarded, entrenching the ‘nothing succeeds like success’ Power Law in a way perhaps only Spotify matches. If you’re already Ed Sheeran (Noah Pinion) or Taylor Swift (Matt Taibbi), the algo will play your slap bass solo for you, pushing your pushed content to everyone, who already had it on high rotation, ‘cos people were forwarding it . I’m sure you can site valid and notable exceptions, but is it just me, or are nearly all of Substack’s big successes white American men who brought their audience and rep to the platform, and get their growth from YouTube, podcasting, Twitch streams – or because they produce opinion sets that resonate in sympathy with tech titans and oligarchs?

This creates the following funny dynamic, which ‘piles in’ to growth. Substack has grown because most people piled into substack looking for growth; yet substack itself does little to help growth-hungry substackers grow, while it grows mostly because it can leverage established writers to its advantage (because legacy media has turned to shit, ‘cos of Facebook and Google across the 2010s). Substack benefits the fully grown, not the little known. Again like Spotify, Substack looks after itself by looking after people who can look after themselves, while peddling the fantasy that it is looking after, or therefore, or inclusive of the 99.9% of people buying in – for growth. But look closer… as its name says, it is about stacks and subs. On Substack, if you’re stacked, you never have to be a sub. If you’re subbing for the stack, you’re basically forever dommed3.

The obsession with growth and metrics is also striking, both about the platform, as well as the way many of its would-be ‘successful writers’ think about what they’re doing when they chat about it on reddit. This one isn’t on Substack, it’s a resonance from Anglocapitalist culture, where growth is an almost total cultural obsession. I see it in so many places, from the terrible (growing!) use of growing as a transitive verb in the realm of finance (‘we’re here to grow your wealth’) to the obsession with GDP and muscular development. Everyone wants to grow, everyone wants growth, and Substack pimps and is pimped as a platform to grow your growth growingly. As Max’ Protein reminded its shred-hungry customers: life’s too short to be small.

Under the overweening influence of postwar America, we are now at this moment where growth is the only measure of success, value, and lovability. Growth is all we have left, before death. If we are not growing, we are dying, we are shit, we are worthless. Key being: if we buy in to Substack’s growthist ideology, then we are subjecting ourselves to this value capture. As C Thi Nguyen noticed, every game tells you what to value; Substack says, ‘value growth’, even if it kills you going for it.

Then there’s the whole thing about personal brand. There was that moment in the ¿first season? of Queer Eye where Karamo Brown was advising some poor ¿widowed? sod that he needed to ‘work on his personal brand’. The guy needed some hope, new clothes, and clipped nails and nostril hairs, but – personal brand?! The fact that Karamo delivered this as a flat fact, without breaking the fourth wall with a wink, without any hint of eyeroll, showed me that, by 2018, the US had passed fully into a realm in which personal brand had become ‘that which one cannot not want4’, the terminal blessing of post GFC hustle culture. Always be hustlin’; always be on brand.

Then, at some point, I felt the involution really started to kick in, and substack switched to being something more like a stubsack or a suckstub, and we all became stubsucking sack stubbers. Last one in debasement is a sucker!

I don’t know about you, but aside from there being too much content and too many substacks and too many freakin’ emails in my clogged inbox, there’s also the fact that a good Mr Chunk of what passes muster on the platform is merely okay, and is getting more mere and more meh and less and less okay, and more like Mr Chunk’s whole MO, as a basic proposition: ie, we all vomit and shit content all the time, into some big tub, just ‘cos…. growth…. likes… internet…

There was this time – but when, maybe a couple of years ago – when it seemed like Substack could have created something interesting. ButImean, there was a time when lInkeDin seemed like social media at face value5, just as there was a time when Blueski could have been something more than wokeleft Twatter. Aside from enshittification dynamics, there is something about platforms themselves: they all turn into social media, and they all involute, then they all become hellscapes of themselves. Mr Chunks basically described all of the internet, and our own perverse involvement in its hot tubs. Just ‘cos we want people to like and validate us.

But what of the reader(s) in all this?

Honestly, if I can’t be bothered reading it, 70% of the time – why would I expect anyone to read my purple prolixity? I don’t know – you tell me? Other people’s experience might be very different to mine. I’m happy to sit with that in all its ambivalence: after all, I’m not that concerned with growth or personal brand, and for a while longer, snibstuck could probably be a place where I can post things just like this?

But no. I’m going to close this substack at the end of the year. There are 4-6 more posts to do, then the solved problem of 2022 will be solved by 2025. It’s not that I don’t want to keep blogging; it’s that I do want to ‘keep blogging’. And here, there’s one dealbreaking aspect of substack that has terminally pissed me off.

Substack posts don’t SEO at all. Unless you know the URL, everything on here is invisible. So if you sub for the stack, you’re fundamentally feeding your content into this one way mirror: it’ll reflect your inscriptions back to you and anyone with the link, but damned if you can see in, or if anyone can find it later on. There’s something deeply anti archival about this, I find it really upsetting. Medium, which has its own fleas and flaws, at least SEOs well: I’ve gone looking for (eg) obscure things on 70s Baudrillard, and someone’s post popped up. For a post like that, that was 1/2 the point on it being online. Blogging, in part, was about stumbling across new information. And with substack, this appears to have been designed out, in favour of – no search results.

So for me with this blog, it wasn’t the ‘screaming into the void’ aspect that got me. I don’t think I expected much more acknowledgment or applause than I get from my eight dozen readers, and that’s fine. I love that you read this, and I hope you enjoy it, with all my heart. But for me, what’s dealbreakingly galling is the realisation that I’ve been chucking my inscriptions (110 posts, actually) into a forever blackness. What, all this is just on some corporation’s servers, and it’s not on the searchable internet?? Are you fucking serious? Information might not want to be free, but I don’t want to be black holed, consigned to some server where it’s probably training a LLM that’s learning to impersonate my ‘authorial voice’, the better to kill Gazans or Houthis or Uighurs or something, or to enrich some CEO who invests in things that do that kind of thing.

So in the new year, I’ve decided I’ll move Living Together, Somehow to a blogging platform. I was gonna go with Wordpress, but then I found out it it’s no longer an open source not-for-profit, but a privately owned entity currently tied up in litigation. How very 2025. I’m thinking about ghost.org; I’m open to ideas. But yeah: once I realised that all the work I’ve done on here was ‘turned to black’ by the stack, I couldn’t continue anymore. Life’s too short to be blackholed. So my solved problem has been solved, but in a way that opens…

‘well, how did we get here?’

One signature of simulation’s 2025 ‘here’ was conveyed by three emoji.

In the combination of these three characters, so much is compressed – to the point of collapse. Conveying is squashing and quashing here, whether it’s the s|quashing of the real suffering of the real people actually bombed, the ordinary chain of command and protocol attending US military strikes overseas, the death of structural linguistics via the sucking clenching of the signifier into a set of cute ‘lil picto-logo-ideo-grams.

How could so little mean so much; how could so much mean so little?

Yet: we are at a moment in culture you can be bombed, but in the shallowest way. The pretexts are flimsy, but the bunker buster makes it five storeys deep.

Emoji are, in a sense, the sign-seal-delivery of meaning’s co-lapse. Emoji involve us in the slipping together of meanings, affording the simulation of those meanings by pictures. Emoji are a picto-logo-ideo-lapse into the simulation of ‘something’ that conveys, a fuzzy and approximate something, as befits the fuzzy and approximate somethings given as pretexts for invading countries, signalling the end of the current rally with Bitcoin Treasury Madness, or ‘playing the Iran strike as a win for your portfolio’ (last week’s headline).

Like LLMs, emoji are never totally accurate: they always convey their data entrant’s ‘best guess’, an アバウト (‘about’) conveyance for an アバウト1 world. The emoji you got today was what your interlocutor guessed was the thing that came ‘next’, as prompted by your previous string of words. To your lame knock knock, I write 💀. To your profession of love, I write 💀. To your declaration of war, I write 💀. Like Stephen Colbert’s screed on truthiness, emoji don’t ‘say things’ to you, they feel the world at you. What you actually feel, that is anyone’s guess 💀.

But I’m not here to talk about emoji (or in them), so much as I’m trying to get from emoji what it is we’re involved in now; what is the emoji society we ‘live’ in, what does its signification signify – or just emote? If emoji are the ‘best guess’ simulations befitting the ways meaning is (dis)simulated online now, their prevalent uses are a cute crystallisation of the shit we’re in. There’s a lot of meaning inside the death of meaning…

As a pictogram, emoji simulate a picture of a referent object.

As a logogram, emoji simulate (eg) The Artist Formerly Conveyed in Words (which conveyed what was conveyed in sounds by mouths2).

As an ideogram, they simulate the emoted idea of the thing, so they feel a smile, a nice day, a dad joke, a bad meal, a dud lay, or a grizzly death at you3.

This too fits a moment whose ideals are: are you chill, can you hang, what’s the feelz?

In the 90s, Gen Xers were petrified of being labelled try hards. In the emoji society, there is no danger that anyone will try too hard.

‘Sadly’, Baudrillard never lived to see communication translated into its emoji form. For once in his prescient untimeliness, he failed to glimpse or anticipate what we’re now in the midst of. The first strong memory I have of emoji being translated into a cultural artefact was in 2010’s How I Ended Last Summer, where, in one scene, one of the characters reads an SMS aloud, and ends by saying ‘smiley face’. In this sense, Baudrillard was untimely; he died in 2007. He copped ring tones, but outside of Japan4, he missed the pervasion of emoji… kind of from the following year. How did emoji come to pervade or comms so much so fast?

In one sense, the reasons are given above: we need the next guess, ‘cos we’re time poor and inattentive, and we want to give to others a token of the instant gratification, both ‘cos they crave it, and ‘cos the whole of the piped society is built around giving-and-receiving in this way. Emoji circulate – and they also are circulation, both more and less data conveyed more quickly, with less effort.

More deeply though, all this is apiece with the general slide into simulation that, for Baudrillard, started with political economy (visible by the early 70s), and then pervaded cybernetic codification of everything (from the early 70s).

The four-step sequence Baudrillard laid out in 1981, based on his mid 70s work, gives a blog post’s worth of ‘way in’ to his thinking.

“These would be the successive phases of the image:

1. It is the reflection of a basic reality.

2. It masks and perverts a basic reality.

3. It masks the absence of a basic reality.

4. It bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum (italics mine)”

Looking up and down B’s ‘listicle’, it’s so notable how emoji have a conspicuous power to move almost instantly between points 1–4, often in any combination, and sometimes by hitting all four points at once. In fact, at their witty best, one could imagine the profound riposte of an emoji that would move like quicksilver from good to evil appearance, then sorcery, then full simulation – and back – in one fast character. Like chess masters, certain teenagers seem to have prodigious talent here. Haute emoji is a young person’s game.

But when we reach right down and rummage and scratch our way into Pete Hegseth’s ‘level’ of emoji use, fondle the meat and potatoes of a lingering stage four simulation, we reach a scrotal hyperreal where the emoji stands as both as figleaf and in lieu

– of the void.

What reality is behind this simulation? Well in one sense, the whole military industrial complex, dying under rubble in Saada. In another, nothing, nothing at all, not even masking or LARPing vacuity, just: nothing. Aerial bombardment and the bubbling of a bath fart.

What is at stake in waylaying of reality by simulation is the evacuation of reality, and its retrenchment… not by simulation, or an AI ethnostate riviera in the Middle East, but by the absence of any reliable reality whatsoever, followed by William Gibson’s Singapore5, or even – the carpark of William Gibson’s Singapore6. Anything could be anything, anything will be anything, nothing means anything, but people still die.

But, well… how did we get here? We weren’t looking for this, were we? Were these the droids we were looking for? Nearly nobody guessed the smartphone, and it’s hard for us to grasp how strange we’ve become in its cultures, because we’re so marinated.

What were we looking for? Nobody was looking for Pete Hegseth; nobody wanted that.

How then? Surely, is not something that can be told in one story; no set of causes can exhaust or explain how all this has transpired.

The older I get, the more I realise how much the eras of computing I lived through tell important parts of this story: arcade games, video games, computer games, Dungeons and Dragons, first person shooters, and the rise of Gamers. It would be impossible and silly to traverse all of this in one stubsack. But in the following post, which I will work toward by the end of this month, all I can do is point to a few undeniably important precursors (and their blinking cursors), and dwell in some more detail on those parts of these simulations I’ve been close to that have contributed in limited but important ways to making the hyperreal bombscapes at the end of the Trump administration’s shallow group chats.

What if we traded the milk cow of materiality for the magic cucumber of simulation? As in: what if this has already happened, and the cow is gone? How then shall we deal with where we find ourselves; how then shall we live together, somehow?

In speaking of the Ordinary Person’s Defacto Nonchoice (OPDNC) of messaging apps, part of what I was opening to thinking was the idea that, by 2025, the apps have become an almost unavoidable simulation of ‘community’ and ‘group’. One can choose or refuse Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and Meta’s platforms (and, like, probably you should, although most still do not). But for most people, there’s almost no way around obligatory inclusion in-on some family-community-work group combination of WhatsApp, Signal and/or Telegram. One of the perverse ironies of a terminally individualistic society and its anomie is that things have never been more oriented around the group, and groups, and groupthink, and the petty tyrannies of its inherent echo chambers. To Noahpinion’s “Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens”, in this great piece on the Signal-to-Yemen bombing we should add: group chats are now where everything unimportant and uninteresting and obligatory interminably happens – family, work, and community groups. By 2025, group chat turns out to be that which we cannot not want, and cannot fucking remove ourselves from. Somehow, a simulation as hard to love as it is to extricate oneself from (ie, a very very hard simulation) has become a planetary OPDNC. ‘Oh well’.

Alongside the sad fate of joyless parasocial obligation for which such groups are both avatar and vortex, there is also a pervasive societal desire and preference for simulation. We can see it in how advertising addresses us, enjoining us to mum-nipulate the algorithm, coaxing us to milk it milk it milk it milk it. Somehow, everything trends toward being a silicone nipple’s pixelated simulation, calling us to another rubber nipple to simulate pixelation. The dummy1 is the universal gesture of our wanting.

This is a complex of our cultures; these on-screen promises of latex nipples, they’re the junk in our culture’s trunk. One would need to do an exhaustive comparative study, but my sense is that most human cultures across most of our species’ history have lived in and had a preference for reality, over and against pixelated renditions of rubber nipples. Until the Axial Age; until the monotheisms; until commodity exchange came to dominate the various modes of symbolic exchange that had been the true glubricant of human society until then. This becomes clearer to me returning to Mauss’ Gift, and how it stands behind Baudrillard and Bataille. Here’s one simulation ‘we’ made earlier.

Many and growing numbers of people love and prefer the simulation of the thing to the thing itself. Why hand ‘solo’ when you can do it online, or into the new latex bot you share your apartment with? We might notice a fate of humanity in where the fap has gone: where our ancestors made do with hands and imaginations, now, capitalism delivers the buzz. As Tony Tula explores so beautifully in the ‘Ahegao’ story suite in Rejection, this can lead people into the crazy dead end of needing some kind of anatomically impossible, coercive, cruel and boring Urotsukidoji-like scenarios just to maintain arousal. In 2025, the simulations of Onan have become many wanded ways of fucking ourselves – above all, for anything resembling ordinary human intimacy and relationship.

Leaving aside the simulation of intercourse, we can see the perversion that attends pervasion in our fetishes for digital things evacuated of use value: why trade in material commodities like grain and oil when you can speculate on simulated currencies like BitCoin; why play plastic Lego (20C) and kill real indigenous people (19C) when you can do both digitally inside Minecraft (21C); why write a real essay for your assessment when you can have Chat GPT simulate one for you (and then have your assessors simulate feedback in response)? This all happened in 2021, the moment that the NFT of a Colnago road bike sold for two thousand dollars more…. than the rideable version of same. Why have a bike you can ride, when you can ‘own’ the picture of one you can’t? There is even a simulation in which this all makes perfect sense right now; it’s called the stock market.

With Minecraft and gaming in mind, I tried to indicate that the deepest appeals of simulation are to do with death, judgment, and enjoyment. Firstly, one can kill and die without the irreversible mess and destruction of actual-real killing and dying. Simulated death and killing is so much neater than the real thing, and when you’re through, you can reverse what transpired – and enjoy it again, and again. Gaming is one space of play where, thanks to simulation, we can flirt with killing and death, while indulging a gratifying repetition compulsion, and no one dies, and you don’t get to ‘kill kill kill’ only once2.

Secondly, one can explore power and danger (which are always seductive) by enacting one’s fantasies of killing and dying, shielded from judgment. This is the thymotic nub of the whole shebang. The ressentiment-fuelled doxings of Gamergate, like the rare instances of incel killing sprees, show us to the central place of humiliation and shame at the core of what happens to some people when their enjoyment is stolen by the pricking judgment and ridicule of the scolding and contemptuous Other.

In so many contexts, being caught in flagrante delicto, being suddenly re-exposed and judged in the middle of one’s obscenely enjoyable simulation, triggers a detonative wish for revenge. It’s the fuel that powered Trump in 2016, and in 2025. When the judging Other steals your enjoyment, you want to destroy them – with interest. This too can be a form of enjoyment, and in some cases appears to be what happens when a person marinating in simulation no longer parses the difference between killing in Doom and killing IRL (and, above all, having killing undertaken on our behalf, from a safe distance, like Iraq 2003, like Iran 2025). What’s unusual about inidividuals who actually kill is that they see their fantasy through; they’re unusually thorough. There is a wobbling path through simulation to mass killing without compunction. This is not about gaming; it can happen when you’re a settler and cheer the deaths of your Arab Israeli neighbours. 82% of Israelis favour expulsion. Not coincidentally – because any fascist death cult is also a simulation – nearly all the Haredi want to dodge the draft and have someone else to do this dirty work for them.

Sufficed to say: there probably exists in all of us a deep wish to get our jollies without ‘it’ or ‘them’ judging us for wanting-and-doing ‘that’. Via the power of thymos and ressentiment, I believe this is a large and under-noticed factor in play in the apparent 3SD of the geopolitical binfire of 2025. Look closely: so much of the world’s current garbage conflicts are fueled by the perceived theft of enjoyment and the promise of revenge. In such (ob)scenes, simulation permits us – to do what it is impossible for most to do IRL. Simulation opens a place of Adidas and Nike, ie, where ‘impossible is nothing’, and you can ‘just do it’ – without consequence IRL (or: consequences only for them, your group just gets to watch it from a safe distance). Threaten to scold that enjoyment away from nearly any group identity (whether incels or settlers or football fans), and they are ecstatic in seeing the scolding enjoyment thief spectacularly destroyed.

Like so many facets of this debounded community of fate we share, and the piped societies in which we live, this is ‘okay3’ at an individual level? We all have our internal death metal parts; most of us keep it to ourselves and keep it online. These crannies, those parts, that’s okay? Arguably, we either have our fantasies, or they have us – better that be by simulation? My ex friend, who used to play shooters as a way of getting through his depressions, was probably doing the world a favour by enacting his usually repressed sense of hostility and shame-in-powerlessness in these ‘harmless’ ways. Aggression and abjection do need places to go, and one can even explore these corners of ourselves reflexively, as well as with consenting others. Although it’s too literal and camp, Scandinavian black metal does at least have an intellectual honesty in its fulsome exploration of these dark parts4.

The trouble is scale, and how the stake in simulation’s pervasion is raised when we shift to the cumulative-collective.

Like so many facets of this debounded community of fate we share, and the piped societies in which we live, our pervasive indulgence of the kinds of violent, sexual, and sexually violent simulations we go for is maybe not ‘okay’ at the collective and cumulative level, actually. It’s not that I want to enter here as the moralising wowser or censor (don’t worry, I’m not here to steal your enjoyment). It’s that, when nearly a whole culture loses itself in its enacted desire and preference for simulation, we not only face a collective loss of world and solidarity, but also the eventual general disorientation of no longer knowing how to parse a given reality from its simulation, and the moral indifference at realising all-too-late that reality has been completely evacuated and annulled, and that this really mattered, was what really was what mattered, all along.

By 2025, after living, thinking and feeling this thought through for four decades, I now say all this with a fair degree of confidence. All this porn and gaming, all these head-shredding scroll holes, all the 8 hours a day we do on our phones for the corporations: it matters, and it’s wrecked a lot of us a lot. After decades of indulging it, it turns out that our preference and desire for simulation might be among the main reasons we now cannot face our real problems (and start feeling we don’t have to, as well as ‘can’t even’): climate change, institutional corruption, societal involution. We’re too busy fapping at, shooting at, gawking at pixels. Simulation is what subs in for life now, so simulation is what we’re dommed by.

This also of course matters very much because the material world is spinning and ramping, it is the steel boomerang of Mad Max Two. In the famous scene, that early 80s idiot made the mistake of trying to catch the dang thing. In a 2025 world of pervasive simulation, we would be so busy gaming, scrolling, or double screening, we wouldn’t even clock it swooping for the back of our exposed necks (for some, the threat of that happening would be the fantasy they were preoccupied by, that their simulation allowed them to indulge). In worrying about AGI, we forget about climate change. In obsessing over Trump, Musk, BitCoin, and Open AI vs Deepseek, we forget about fibre optic cables (can be cut!), containerised shipping (is fragile!), gas, oil, and (eg) mass extinction events caused by algal blooms caused by unseasonably warm ocean temperatures. The world is all happening; we’re missing the world happening, but we don’t miss the world, because we’re preoccupied with simulations. We are a species that worries about the flying killer robots we nonetheless try so desperately to invent, while something as prosaic as an algae or virus unfolds its microscopic doom in bloom – for all of us.

Do you agree?

Well, you could start by getting off the apps.

– but will you?

It’s interesting to regard 2025 as the full-blown, stage four, 3SD ‘binfire of the manatees’. Looking back, everything was an involuting simulation of the world consumed by fire – by 2015? Since then we’ve just seen a further pixelation of values, then reality, then simulation itself – with the smell of burning plastic, and the hazy knowledge of sea life lying dead inside a toxic algal bloom, somewhere off the coast, somewhere…

It’s interesting to notice the paradox ruling the past decade: that nothing has changed and everything has gotten much worse. I see the ten years we’ve just lived through as the excrescence and involution of dynamics put in train in 1945, compounding and accelerating from 1973, concretising from 1989, and ‘setting’ in 2001, both with the stolen US Presidential Election and Bush Regime’s ‘War on Terror’ response to the 9/11 attacks, and with China’s (much quieter) accession to the WTO. Absent any extrinsic shocks – which surely also could have happened, and will happen1 – momentum and path dependence have carried the day to 2025 from 45-73-89-01, meaning were already slouching toward Bethlehem by 2015. I say this with such rage and grief2: it’s no stretch to call the last ten years a wasted decade; a decade of wastage; a decade of wasting.

Bloat and simulation; involution…

By 2025 I regard involution as a master process, maybe it’s the master process now. We now collectively endure involuted war in Ukraine, involuted genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, involuted civil war in Syria, Israel3 and Sudan, an involuted US in the US and the rest of the world, and involuted fascism in the US and Hungary and elsewhere. Reading what people have been writing of late, I feel I also notice involuted sadness, anger and ressentiment, and especially involuted ‘community’.

Involution is also affecting everything from cafes to airports to primary schools. Even within the realm of ‘first world problems’, nearly nothing is as good as it was; nearly everything has become the shithouse, pipiked version of what it was; everything that doesn’t deserve to exist persists – somehow for this precise reason. The strong are weak but still do what they please, and the weak suffer what they ‘must’…. why? Kinda because of Musil’s ‘principle of insufficient cause’ (ie, for no good reason).

In the community places I’m most familiar with, one ‘leader’ with the soul of a real estate agent wrecked the institution in their care and got a new job and a promotion for their troubles, while another stole tens of thousands from literal babies and children, then went cray-cray when they found out this might mean they might not get a reference, after they were stood down (you know, for, like, stealing money from children). From universities to corporations and whole countries, many of our most important institutions are run by emotionally immature sociopaths, malignant narcissists, paranoid weirdos, and Swedish Chef-level nincompoops, who enjoy the strange halo of immunity befitting the involuted culture in which their MO thrives. All around me, I noticed how intelligence and care tends to get ignored or swamped by stupidity, and the responsible and good faith actors in my midst tend to be taxed by drudgery or undermined by all the ambient shitness that abounds – most of it going uncensuredly on its morally indifferent way. In an involuted world, to the beanbag4 goes the spoils.

There’s no shortage of reasons how and why it got this bad; there’s never any shortage of causes (Koselleck). Actually, what would be healthy and feel good to acknowledge is just how ‘well supplied’ we are with dangerous stupidity and moral indifference of all kinds: like fentanyl in the American drug supply chain, there is a deadly supply of 3SD doing the rounds. It’s out there. You just wanted to get high and have fun, but look out: 3SD could kill you, and it may be coming to a (bean)bag near you.

(Bean)bagfuls of 3SD-style stupidity are being foisted on us hapless publics5. In terms of the goonish grinning supply of stupids, I’m reminded – again – of a panflash pervasive stupid from a decade ago: dockless bike schemes. At the time, in trying to think about O Bike, I noticed “the stubborn absence of demand relative to deafly enthusiastic supply”. Want O Bikes?! Too bad, you got ‘em.

Ten years on, Siri is still as comfortingly useless and half deaf as she was, but we can see the ‘too bad, you got em!’ Supply Foist throughout the AI solutioneering arriving of late via automatic updates on our phones and laptops. Whether or not I need or want or asked for Microsoft’s Co-Pilot, or insanely electricity-intensive AI-enhanced ‘search results’ from Google and Bing – too bad, I got ‘em!

High-speed networked computing and algorithmic data processing could be so amazing; instead we have this.

I see Silicon Valley’s big foist of all these AI-powered gizmos6 as the coercive imposition of a dependency-creating future, which we’re induced to focus on while the actual-real world suffers terribly, without us giving it our proper share of loving care and attention. To me this amounts to a bad trade in exchange for a shitty future, one that lines up perfectly with the power, interest, values, ideology, and vision of ‘what we should want’ that’s pervasive among tech bros now. Of course it’s what bro wants, in the same way that a 17 year old bro wants-and-gives a girl The Push: because they want to get blown, because this matches with their raging sense of entitlement, because negotiating consent makes them feel vulnerable and anxious and opens them to the possibility of the rejection they fear more than anything. So let’s be clear: every time one of the big SV corporations gives you The Push with some AI thing you never needed-wanted-asked for, it’s ‘cos they want you to blow them (4eva), and they don’t care that you might not want to, and they don’t really want you to have a say in it all. SV don’t love you; they just want to get blown; they don’t care how you feel. In SV since the onset of disruption over a decade ago, Blurred Lines still rules supreme.

‘Fail quickly and get blown’ is the real motto of SV. And don’t care.

Simulation is at the heart of all of Silicon Valley’s fears and fantasies and failures, all its hopes and dreams. And fantasy is no coincidence or accident. This is the key point I’m bending toward here: say what you will about the postwar dominated by the US’ victory in ‘45, neoliberalisations from ‘73, the end of the Cold War from ’89, America is now pinning everything on simulation (quick, before Xi grabs Taiwan, you got about two years!). If you thought Baudrillard might have gone too far by betting the house on simulation in ‘76 (Deleuze, Bourdieu, and Foucault all did, hey), consider AI and crypto by 2025.

In the 17-20C, America tried to solve everything that land appropriation couldn’t by way of Jesus, everything Jesus couldn’t solve by way of money, and everything money couldn’t solve – by shooting to kill. These are still the durable American backstops when all else fails, but it’s so conspicuous how seduced by simulation America has become. Baudrillard only made it into the Matrix by ’99; by 2025, his social theory runs the whole economy, the stock market, the internet, and a huge-growing-fatburg chunk of people’s minds and time and attention. Hot tip: feed Baudrillard PDFs to the LLM you’re also using to short Trumpcoin – you can’t lose. Give it The Push, your fantasy will come true. It doesn’t matter how the world feels.

To the obvious final point: the involution of everything isn’t just happening because of simulation7. However, simulation is compounding-and-accelerating the involution – including the involution of simulation, as well as the whole living world and 5+ billion of its now very angry, sad and broken human peoples. Never mind Woke Mind Virus or Trump Derangement Syndrome (I mean, ‘do’, but…) ; all the world’s sweatily afire with the delirious simulation of simulation right now. The simulation of simulation now not only controls the news cycle, but seemingly what it is actually possible to many people to say, do, think, and imagine. The apotheosis of this is Jia Tolentino in 2025: so articulate about being so broken by it… but… she won’t quit the apps, will she.

In 2025, the world also endures the febrile volatility of groups of people trading on the febrile volatility of groups of people trading on the febrile volatility of a set of simulated assets, whose value (which is ?only8? the value of those assets as assets with value as those assets) is reactively affected by what a strange9 orange con man with the mental and emotional age of a 7-8 year old boy ‘says’ about them in a given day.

And 99% of people are still totally cool to use Meta’s platforms, and won’t get off Twitter.

As this transpools and unspires, groups of supposedly more intelligent people (than platform produsers, that is) in California and coastal China race heedlessly ever further into the simulation of intelligence itself, ‘in the hope’ that they will not only win against the other racers, but produce an Artificial General Intelligence… that wants to serve us… and will smile kindly on its meat machine inventors…?

Even a glancing look at this from outside the race indicates a chancy and ill-advised enterprise. Yet the only people with agency and decisional authority are so deep in this simulation of intelligence they now only want to accelerate their headlong plunge – to be ‘the first’ to break humanity and destroy the world10?

In essence, simulation has spiraled into digital covid: it’s making people sick, crazy, and broken, but through their continued actions, they’ll ensure its global propagation.

Let us all jump feverishly into this fire, and be consumed, ‘cos that will be good.

~

The question – which is for the next post – is: how did we get here, via gaming… and Dungeons and Dragons?

Why do most people now prefer simulation to reality?

In the emotional denouement of A Minecraft Movie, Steve1 remonstrates with the other characters about going back to the real world:

“There you got constraints, judgements, obstacles”.

It’s an interesting moment that tells us something, both about this world of piped simulations we remain captivated by (or captive in), and how the avatars of this world represent its values and preferability back – to a willing audience of children and school holiday parents.

Whether the Overworld, the Nether, or The Wend, the worlds Minecraft simulates in the film are presented as being about limitless creativity. In the simulation, a person – typically a kooky outsider who didn’t quite fit in IRL, because their talents were not recognised and valued – can make and take whatever they want, without judgment. In simulation, IRL-stymied creativity is unleashed, jocko-normie bullies are absent, the world’s your oyster, or your Enderman. Minecraft is offered as a set of worlds ‘for you’2.

This is the film’s dichotomy, then:

IRL = constraints, judgments, obstacles (IRL = CJO)

online = limitlessness, creativity, play (OL = ‘LOL’)

How true is this, really?

Steve’s IRL = CJO occludes one or two of the most important appeals about what Minecraft simulates; the film subtly misrepresents why most people prefer this simulation, and this, in turn, can tell us a little something about why people prefer simulaton – in general, overall, and indefinitely.

A Minecraft Movie performs a fairly novel feat of being a simulation about a simulation which is itself a Lego-isation of the world. The film does to Minecraft what Minecraft does to reality: it pixelates the world into chunks. But in pixelising the pixelisation in this way, A Minecraft Movie leaves out important parts of the game and the appeal of its simulation (although it does capture that, in certain senses, it’s a very boring game, a huge elaboration of something not actually that interesting – so much digging, so little depth). These are the bits of the game in which you get to build, manipulate, destroy, control – and accumulate for doing so. The bits, in other words, that are like capitalism’s 19C fantasy of itself3.

In Minecraft, you accumulate as an individual, gaining new and more powerful tools and weapons that ramp up your creative, extractive and destructive power. This ‘coin collecting’ dynamic, is at least as old as Mario, is also what academia has become, and is part of what make Duolingo so sticky. In Duolingo, you gotta keep your streak; in Minecraft, you gotta keep grinding, if you wanna get anywhere. In Minecraft’s pixelation of late Victorian plunder and pillage, you’re in control of the extractive-destructive actions that allow you to accumulate (and I’ll come back to control). In practice, for the majority of players4, it is basically Texas and Queensland in the 1890s, with mobs and villagers playing the role of indigenous people. If all goes well, you get to accumulate, they get to die.

We can see one ‘reality of this simulation’ by glancing at DreamSMP, the invite-only survival multiplayer server. Its founding players are all guys, now in their mid 20s5. Most of these players not only had talent in Minecraft’s various simulations and servers, they sunk a brainbending amount of time grinding their way there. Just as the term ‘Warcrack’ revealed the in-game truth of World of Warcraft (just like Lee Seong Seup revealed that fifty consecutive hours of Starcraft could be deadly), Minecraft could be more honestly called TimeSink. This is because there’s a direct correlation in Minecraft between grinding and rank: if you were prepared to give several years of your life into the game in the 2010s – literally thousands of hours logged – and you were savvy enough not to be fucking around on the marginal servers, you could ‘make it’.

In this sense, although Minecraft simulates aspects of capitalism’s Herbert Spencer 1890s, it’s thoroughly unlike capitalism now IRL: in the simulation, the correlation between effort and success still roughly holds, you do get out what you grind in. Thanks to the co-emergence of Twitch and 2010s-style YouTube, the reality of this simulation now washes up as actual IRL millions for its 1%ers, like the DreamSMP invitees of five or so years ago, when that was a thing. The main players of the game’s 2020-1 elite are now all men in their 20s who, based on their stats, have made a few million from… making it to being them… (a pittance compared to Mr Beast or other YouTubers, but still, it beats selling feet to men who beat for feet).

But what has such intense involvement made, what value does it amount to, what has it created?

This is a point where an aspect of C Thi Nguyen’s idea of value capture comes in. In the simulation, DreamSMP players did some things which seem very creative and funny: there was a whole role play scenario, apparently based on Hamilton. I can’t pretend to understand it properly – but the key point is twofold. First of all, I don’t have to, and I’m an outsider anyway, it would be weird and cringe if I tried. Whatever cool stuff happened, that language, those meanings only make sense to those for whom it is meaningful.

And yet: this is a set of worlds made and maintained by Mojang, owned by Microsoft. In giving over our autonomy, our time, our effort to a gamified simulation owned by a multibillion dollar corporation, and grinding for it, we’ve actually pixelated our values. We start off as people, but we end up like villagers.

But can this even be creation? Or like: what does this amount to, outside of itself6? In opening thinking about simulation beyond simulation, we have to think again about constraints, judgments and obstacles (CJO).

CJO are not only ‘bad’, they’re not just impediments. CJO also describe boundary conditions that comprise the constructive features of realms in which we attune and learn skills and wisdom to do actual creative work. Yes, all of IRL = CJO.

Leaving aside the crucial social factor all this – judgment – constraints and obstacles are apiece with physics and causality. When you rock climb, descend at 70km/h on a road bike, or sail on a big swell out of side of land, you feel this as an existential bodied truth. Sky is high and blue, water is cold and wet, rock and asphalt are hard. In such situations, constraints and obstacles are acutely experienced (which is what can make such activities awe-inspiringly wonderful and terrifying), but they exist in all times in all places. As Pascal quipped: we are embarked.

Much of industrial modernity has been about shielding, padding and piping our existential embarkation out of awareness: contemporary air travel and cruise ships likewise pour a huge amount of effort and resources into padding the edge out of the ocean and skies7. They do this because constraints and obstacles are part of what defines our world existentially: all padding hides the bony truth of the world.

But can we have creation if we insist on as much padding as or culture prefers? This is an open question. My guess is we can have a little bit, but not much.

One thing we can see clearly Minecraft creates is an enjoyment in destructiveness. As with all computer games, the thrill we get from blowing shit up, digging shit up, and fucking shit up comes from the exhilarated denial and simulated annulment of constraints and obstacles: cos IRL, you couldn’t do this. They wouldn’t let you; you’re not strong enough; you might die. In One Man Chorus, Anthony Burgess paired creation and destruction, showing their intimate proximity. He wrote:

“Creation always involves destroying the status quo, breaking the rules, violating the norms. Creative acts demand destruction. But creation demands talent; destruction does not.”

I would say, then, that maybe at its apogee, even Minecraft is creative. Hell, in its best five minutes, even A Minecraft Movie managed creation8.

When we blow shit up in computer games, we get to simulate doing things to people and the world heedlessly– with zero fucks given. It can be fun fragging your friends; it was fun when I was doing it Playing Duke Nukem 3D over dial up in 1995. We had fun, we killed time, boredom, one another’s avatars. We blew shit up, and it didn’t matter, because we didn’t blow shit up. But we created nothing. Minecraft is a game that held out the promise of creation, as a kind of digital Lego. But ten years on from early Minecraft, it swerved back into being mostly a first person shooter – little different to Wolfenstein 3D in terms of its pixelated fast pace and un-nuanced spree killing. In other words, 99% of the time, for 99% of its players, Minecraft creates nothing; all it does is divert its players, mostly children, from the CJO way things work IRL.

All of this to say:

Multi-billion dollar global scale corporate-owned simulations like Minecraft are not only driven for a wholesome, understandable, human desire for play and escape. On the demand side, they’re driven by a desire for constraints and for obstacles – because the simulation gifts the player a felt sense of responsive control. This is what Steve doesn’t say.

Games obey predictable laws of response, the world does not: the shittier reality is for you, and/or the more you find skilful means IRL challenging, the more appealing this becomes. If you are a young, scared, unskilled person living in a shitty world, suddenly the simulation… wow, it seems amazing.

A more realistic way of writing Steve’s denouement line would have been:

‘There you got shittiness, loneliness, uncontrollability9’

When you hold the controller, control is in your hands – provided you remain in simulation. When you simulate control effectively, you can play or live a different persona, or live your fantasy. But fantasy is no accident. So what are Minecraft’s most popular scenarios?

In most of Minecraft’s simulations, you get to dig up and destroy shit, while accumulating metaphorical coins that give you access to better tools and weapons: in a controlled, controlling way where you are always the controller – without anyone in the game judging you for doing this single-mindedly, all day, for years.

For me this is the kicker, and boomerangs back to the core human truth: gamers want to enjoy the fantasy enacted in their simulation – without being judged for that. Those who want their simulation really want it, and if an outsider or Other threatens it, most players do not like this10.

Back in 2006, Joseph LeLappe showed what might happen when you yuck on someone’s yum with dead-in-iraq. LeLappe would enter Armies of America, start playing, then, in the in-game chat, he would start entering the names, ages, service branches and age of death of each American casualty. As he was giving all his attention to typing the names correctly, he would get shot – but then just keep entering details11.

In the mid 00s, responses among players were mixed: hostility, incredulity – and occasional support. One response from a deployed airman at the time, quoted in Wired, is worth brinking back from oblivion, for what it says about how simulation seemed in 2006:

“If I were to die in Iraq I would not want my name to be used in this manner at all. A dead soldier is not, and should not, be a political icon used to justify beliefs that they may not have shared."

People go to games to play, to have fun, said the airman, and while players do go to America’s Army to learn more about the Army, “they don't want to be brought down by reality. Video games are usually used as an escape.”

In a sense, 2006 seems like another world, one in which the fine line between simulation and reality was still precisely what was at issue in first person shooters, which were still a way of escaping ‘a reality’ one could be ‘brought down’ by’. Eight years later, with Gamergate, a percentage of gamers were happy to have female critiques of gaming doxed, raped or killed. A group-held perception that outsiders were going to steal the enjoyment gamers derived from simulation was so strong, and the compulsion of reality’s constraints and obstacles so weak, that insisting a stranger be doxed and threatened with rape and murder came to be what ‘feels right’. What’s striking in hindsight is not only the vacuous absence of empathy or care by the gamers whose simulation felt threatened, it’s the pixelation. What starts with the pixelation of reality, in exchange for control, ends up with the pixelation of the self.

As I reflect on this, I’m left with the centrality of control, fantasy, and judgment.

It’s vanishingly unlikely that Steve would have said

‘There you got shittiness, loneliness, uncontrollability.’

But what he could have said was

“Here you got constraints, obstacles, control – and no judgment”.

Because, in essence, this is what nearly every currently popular game offers, and it’s why people prefer simulation12.

Alongside the state of the world. Reality hurts and seems to be getting worse each year right now; simulation is painless, and the graphics keep getting better.

Perhaps I should finish the post there, so we can go back to doomscrolling, or fragging our friends on Hipixel Skyblock.

But I’m still so curious about so much in all of this, especially as an ex gamer (a 20C gamer!) raising kids who game a bit, in a very uneven 3SD 2025.

So yes, I’m with Baudrillard: simulation ‘won’ (game over), gaming continues.

But I also don’t want to forget Foucault, and the reminder that nothing is necessary. This means many other things are possible, and that this is a surreal hyperreality that came to be, and could be otherwise. There is the Netherworld, and there are many other worlds besides.

So for part two, I’m going to go back over the way in which simulation evolved across the last five decades – next week. We – all of us – got into this somehow.

Oh, and (spoiler alert): Steve eventually does jump through the portal, back to IRL. Like nearly everyone, he must have realised… Minecraft is boring.

I’ve been working on a bigger post here, which I think should be out next week. What I’ve been trying to do is think through the point at which the integrated spectacle of pure simulation we live online spirals into an increasingly precarious materiality. How can I square the circle with Jia Tolentino’s profession of Broken Brain, the moral abyss of what is escalating in Gaza now, and a world in which climate catastrophe, driven by mass-ive material processes unfolding as extraction, circulation, construction, destruction, is percolating away there in the attentional background? These connections truly matter; I’m not yet convinced we’re making them well enough.

Baudrillard is typically a thinker we would only use to help us with Jia’s conundrum. In the foreground, it’s very clear to see that he bet the house on simulation and burnt his bridges with Lefebvre’s Marxism, Bourdieu’s sociology, and the poststructuralism of Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari (which have dominated most of left-critical scholarly work since… is there a Verso or Duke book that isn’t kinda one of those?) Baudrillard *seems* like he capitulated into a kind of Neitzschean nihilist, spouting aphorisms in aviators in the Arizona desert, like a character from 90s DeLillo. However, reading him carefully and in order, not only are his criticisms of his fellow travellers of Paris’ 5th arrondisement valid, I think there’s something we can take from his untimely disclosure of our almost total domination by the metaverse back to our catastrophically bad geopolitics and our fragile and damaged ecology. The following is a DFW-size footnote from Symbolic Exchange and Death, which I quote in full, because there’s something in it about capital we haven’t yet quite seen (or obscene?). Once I start talking about Minecraft next week, this should become clearer.

Basically, where it seems like Baudrillard traded his 5th Arrondisement ‘cow’ for the magic beans of simulation, it is actually we who have traded reality – for broken brains, for broken cities, and for broken ecologies. And it’s only once we start truly seeing how captivated we are by what we are held captive in, that we can break out of that.

Doomscrolling – it really is both those things… more on this soon via Minecraft. First, Baudrillard, with two very deliberately chosen visual-public solicitations by capital.

~

“As an illustration of this, we might analyse an advert for the Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), which reads: ‘I am interested in your money – fair’s fair – lend me your money and you may profit from my bank.’

(context: the ad campaign)

To begin with, this is the first time (1973!) that capital (in its front line institution, namely international finance capital) has so clearly and openly stated the law of equivalence and, surprisingly, in the form of an advertising slogan. These things are usually unstated; commercial exchange is seen as immoral, and all publicity tries to cover this up as a matter of urgency. We may therefore be sure that this candour is a second-degree mask. Secondly, its apparent aim is to convince people on economic grounds to do themselves a good turn and take their money to the BNP. Its real strategy remains unofficial, however: to convince people by this ‘man to man’ capitalist openness, saying ‘let’s not be sentimental about this’, ‘no more of the ideology of dependence’, ‘cards on the table’, etc., and so to seduce people by means of the obscenity of revealing the hidden, immoral law of equivalence. This is a ‘macho’ complicity where men share the obscene truth of capital. Hence the smell of lechery about his advert, the salaciousness and smuttiness of the eyes glued to your money as if it were your genitals. The technique used by the advert is a perverse provocation which is much more subtle than the simplistic seduction of the smile (such as was the theme of the Société Générale’s [a bank – tr.] counter-offensive: ‘It is not the banker who should smile, but the client’). People are seduced by the obscenity of the economic, taken to the level of the perverse fascination that the very atrocity of capital exercises on them. From this perspective the slogan quite simply signifies: ‘I am interested in your arse – fair’s fair – lend me your buttocks and I’ll bugger you’, which is not to everyone’s distaste.

Behind the humanist morality of exchange there is a profound desire for capital, a vertiginous desire for the law of value; and this complicity, both economic and non-economic, is what the advert, perhaps without knowing it, seeks to recover, testifying to an intuition for politics.

Thirdly, the advertising executives could not have been unaware that this advert, with its vampiric image, scared the middle classes, so that to emphasise their lecherous complicity with this direct attack would provoke negative reactions. Why did they take this risk? Here we have the strangest trap: the advert was made to consolidate the resistance to the law of profit and equivalence so as to be better able to impose the equivalence of capital, profit, and the economic in general (the ‘fair’s fair’) at a time when this is no longer true, when capital has displaced its strategy and so is able to state its ‘law’ since it is no longer its truth. Announcing this law is nothing more than a supplementary mystification.

Capital no longer thrives on the rule of any economic law, which is why the law can be made into an advertising slogan, falling into the sphere of the sign and its manipulation. The economic is only the quantitative theatre of value. This, as well as the fact that the role of money in all this is only a pretext, is expressed by the advert in its own way.

Hence the commutability of the advert itself, which can operate at every level, for example:

− I am interested in your unconscious – fair’s fair – lend me your phantasies and you

may profit from my analysis;

− I am interested in your death – fair’s fair – take out a life insurance policy and I will

make your death into a fortune;

− I am interested in your productivity – fair’s fair – lend me your labour power and you

may profit from my capital;

and so on. This advert could serve as a ‘general equivalent’ for all real social relations.

Finally, if the advert’s basic message is not equivalence, a = a, fair’s fair (no-one is fooled, as the advertising executives well know), could it be surplus-value (the fact that the operation ends up, for the banker and for capital, showing the equation: a = a + a’)?The advert can barely conceal this truth, and everyone can sense it. Capital slips in and out of the shadows here, almost unmasking itself, but it is not serious since what the advert really says comes neither from the order of quantitative equivalence, nor from surplus-value, but from the order of the tautology:

not: a = a

nor: a = a + a’

but: A is A

That is: a bank is a bank, a banker is a banker, money is money, and you can have none of it. While pretending to state the economic law of equivalence, the advert actually states the tautological imperative1, the fundamental rule of domination. For whether a bank is a bank, or indeed whether a table is a table, or whether 2 + 2 = 4 (and not 5 as Dostoyevsky had it), is the real capitalist credence. When capital says ‘I am interested in your money’, it feigns profitability in order to secure credibility. This credibility comes from the economic order (creditability), while the credence attached to the tautology sums up in itself the identity of the capitalist order and comes from the symbolic order” (Baudrillard, 1976/2017, pp.68–69.)

The digital is not separate or minor; we do not ‘log on’ to ‘cyberspace’ to ‘surf the web’, then ‘log back out’ to our separate and entire meatworld banalities. The digital, as one of the key pipes, is a vital global hyperobject of existential infrastructure. We do not need it like we need potable water and sewerage in a big city, but we are as immersed in it as fish in a tank of our own making. Without the pipe of signs on screens we do not ‘die’, but we lose the war, and chaos ensues. Xina told us this only the other day, in its inimitable style.

‘Inside’ the ‘protection’ of the local sovereign, any urban life worth living involves enmeshment in ceaseless streams of signs. Streaming is what we do, in the piped society. In this piping we live by, to be separated from our phone means social death. But not only. Losing connection with the signs pipe means being locked out of our accounts, our computer, our banking. To lose internet access – constant, high-speed access, not this – is tantamount to being banished, lost, penniless.

So in the piped society, constant, steady streamed, highspeed access – it bringeth, and it taketh away. The digital is a fundament of the piped society^[1], it is the cloaca of the vampire squid. Surveillance capitalism feeds on its digital exhaust; Xi’s digital totalitarianism eats TikTok shit, munches on the dumped pump of WeChat. We feed the fundament, it feeds us feed. The content monster grows, discontent contained by infinite scroll, a cloaca the size of 5+ billion, pulsing.

Much of what comes down the digital pipe is an ‘ordinary person’s de facto nonchoice’ (OPDFNC, [nonchoice]). We have no choice about the existence of content, nor do we have any says in its ‘fire hose’ flow. Mostly, we have no choice but to keep prosuming content, if we’re to remain employed produsers. No grind and hustle without content. No monetisable anxiety rage and ressentiment without discontent.

I’m writing this on Microsoft Word. In theory, as a Dropbox subscriber, I could use Dropbox Paper, or I could downloadLibre Office. As an Apple user, I suppose I could use Pages. If I was game, I could pump this post straight into substack’s interface here. However, the moment I have to interface with my workplace, Microsoft’s Office suite is 1:1 required^[2], all the way through the backend. So whereas that certain kind of retiree or hobbyist can tinker with their Linux computers, like any person working for an enterprise, I must use one of two American corporation’s systems^[3]. Before my workplace switched to Microsoft… I had to use Google’s suite.

So in the realm of the digitally piped society, the OPDFNC reigns supreme. If we are lucky, we live in the privilege of these styles of nonchoice. If we are unlucky, we are outside the digital, working in an abattoir or prison, or we are in Gaza and the West Bank, dominating or being dominated.

Nonchoice also applies to phones. To the OPDFNC of having a phone^[4] is added the duopolistic Pepsi-Coke pseudo choice: Apple or Android^[5]. Once on board my ‘personal’ OPDFNC, I do have a suite of app-level hypothetical choices. If I don’t like Chrome or Safari, Brave or Firefox; if I don’t like Google, DuckDuckGo, or Baidu. If I don’t like G Maps, I can use A Maps (but only on iOS), Waze (but it’s owned by Google), or OsmAnd (but I’d never heard of it). Only: this choice regresses back to a defacto nonchoice the moment a friend asks you to send them a dropped pin, and doesn’t or can’t use Apple Maps (like the majority) and hasn’t the foggiest idea what OsmAnd is^[6]. So, in practice, almost all goes to Google, and so we live in a world where anyone can see a photograph of our house, in exchange for the affordances of the pipe, and ‘we’re cool with this’. To anyone from the twentieth century, this would be deemed a creepy and outrageous invasion of privacy, and a bad deal. To us, it’s one among many signature nonchoices of the piped society.

A similar OPDNC emerges the moment a small group contains Android friends, which, I’ve discovered, nearly every group (n=>2) has (especially if that group is out of the white middle class^[7]). To the time of writing, Apple doesn’t allow iMessage with Android; in fact, they said they were maybe gonna, then decided not to^[8]. So a subset social fact of life in the piped society is that we face the nonchoice of establishing and maintaining ways for groups to communicate between operating systems, with a limited set of app-level options that enable this, at population scale. A relatively invisible fact about Meta’s platforms is that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp got there, and now facilitate this^[9]. Where communication goes and must go and go, incompatibility clogs the cloaca. Then as now^[10], interoperability is what keeps the pipe piping, it’s what keeps the fundament flowing. As individuals, ‘we have no control over this’.

Before tightening the noose on the nonchoice, I want to spend a paragraph noticing that social media presents a stark contrast to these OPDNCs. Social media was and is a choice. In the piped society, no one needs to shred their head on TikTok (this is a choice you’re making), just as nobody ever needed or needs to be on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Twitter. We may want to, we may like to, we may feel we ‘cannot not’, we may be habituated, dependent, addicted, so lonely – we may fear withdrawal, FOMO, social death, or career suicide if we’re off it. All these factors are viscerally real, but they do not diminish the fact: nobody needs social media. It’s a fiendish trap for nearly everyone, but stricto sensu, it is an excrescence of the piped society. It’s where the majority of us choose to spend the excess of our lives (and hey, we need something to do while watching Netlflix, don’t we, cos it’s not excellent, is it), and there’s compelling evidence suggesting why we do it: but we don’t need to, and it is a choice, an ordinary person’s de jure choice (OPDJC). We can live without social media, and most of us now ‘know’ we’d have better lives if we did, but…. we still just choose not to. Why, actually?^[11]

But the moment we need to co-ordinate, we do need to contact one another, as groups, in groups. Humanity – or, at least, this humanity, the humanity of the piped society – needs messaging interoperability.

As recently as 2013^[12], much of this intra-group messaging, co-ordination, chat and gossip was done via… reply all email. At its best, reply all had an artful swirl, an iterative Linnean taxonomy of re: re: re: – but it required all participants in a thread to have been paying very close attention, often for weeks, not only to everything anyone had said, but the temporal order in which it had been said.

At its worst, in the offices of the 2000s and 2010s, reply all was a way for co-workers who can’t read the room to declare things to everyone, usually things that didn’t need declaring, that probably should not have been declaring (especially on reply all). Reply all was always half broken, never really fit for purpose, and only ‘worked’ for those who should never have availed themselves of it – and unfortunately it’s still not broken enough to be broken. But at least it as dwindled….

We never realised it at the time, but in those years in which reply all put us through its elusive pleasures and workplace micromisery, it did demonstrate the inexhaustible demand between humans: to co-ordinate, to chat, and to gossip.

Over the last dozen years, this tripartite communicative demand of the piped society has been met with the chat apps. Snapchat for teens and dick pics, Signal for the CIA and the surveillance minded, Telegram for grey hats, drug dealers, the FSB and the alt right, Discord for 2/3 male people, most between the ages of 16-35, and WhatsApp, for more than two billion people: by different measures between ¼ and 1/3 of the world’s population. In India, it has a monthly user share of 91%; in Brazil, 93-96% (different sites give different measures).

In my own ‘corner’ of the piped society (if a pipe has corners), WhatsApp has achieved a near monopoly on community: every sports club, every extracurricular activity, every single thing involving groups of parents and people at the scale of local schools and local neighbourhoods. It has become and Ordinary Parents De Facto Nonchoice, squaring the nonchoices, and creating the OPDNC², or maybe OP²DNC.

There’s a curious reversal of how things stood eleven years ago, when Facebook bought Whatsapp for nineteen billion USD and no one quite knew why, and that seemed really expensive (before Musk paid 44 bill. for Twitter). Back then, you might miss party invites from friends who just assumed you were on Facebook, ‘cos everyone was. In this piped society’s 2025, no one ‘in the community’ of ordinary parents/adults really ‘expects’ you to be on Facebook^[13] any longer, nor Instagram, and certainly not TikTok, Snapchat, or Discord. But: in 2025, most everyone, and certainly all ‘ordinary community members’ I have contact with so far fully expect that everyone is on WhatsApp, is totally okay with being put into a school/ club/ members group on WhatsApp, and can be fully expected to read, follow, comment, participate – and make decisions involving time money and logistics based on what someone has mentioned off hand in the context of an emoji-heavy version of what is basically… a low res reply all. Now, your OPDNC² is to be stuck in a forever chat with local acquaintances, many of whom you soon discover have extremely diverse views on life, parenting, and what it is appropriate to say about their (kids’) bowel movements on a group chat with 50+ members (most of whom they wouldn’t clock on the street). 99% of it is verbiage-garbiage, but if your kid is on one of those chats, you can’t afford to miss what passes, and so, if you’re a ‘good parent’, you have to monitor it regularly, or you’ll/ they’ll miss lifts, downpayments, parties, etc etc – and you’ll be seen as an irresponsible, bad, rude parent. Who knew the digital future would be so infinitely-indefinitely banal and hard to escape?

At scale, however, this has a much greater meaning.

WhatsApp’s grip on humanity goes beyond local communities and parents. It’s not only the app for that. It’s kind of become the default messaging app for being a person involved in any kind of group, from India to Brazil to Russia – basically, everywhere except China. So: kinda by virtue of being minted enough to pay 19 billion dollars for something that plugged the lil’ interoperability gap insisted upon by Apple between 2007-13, Meta has achieved the threshold of creating a OPDNC at near-global scale^[14] with an instant messagin app that still has a logo showing its VOIP lineage as a kind of pumped up Skype. Wild.

What does it mean that a key part of the communicational architecture of the piped society is owned by Meta, a private corporation whose track record indicates it has an entrenched culture that blinks at its own gross moral turpitude – Cambridge Analytica, Myanmar, fascism-without-moderation – and is headed by a CEO who appears whose basic level is skeezy cringe like this and staring down Bezos’ partner’s cleavage during the Inauguration?

So far, it’s hard to say. According to one account, Zuckerberg kinda let WhatsApp do its thing from 2014–2019; since then, there has been in-house recognition of its importance, and attention on monetising it. As he says in his usual GPT style,

“Now that everyone has mobile phones and are basically producing content and messaging all day long, I think you can do something that’s a lot better and more intimate than just a feed of all your friends”.

Before you say ‘…and what that means, or feels like, is anyone’s guess…’, notice the social fact of a set of customers comprised of 2-3 billion people, imagine that any one of those customers could reach the AI-driven bot of said corporation, without having to hit an individual website, premises, or call centre. This was introduced in 2023. In Brazil, according to the report linked just above, 30-40% of Nissan’s sales come through WhatsApp. Before you say wow, notice also that this means that Nissan is now dependent on Meta for nearly half its sales in that jurisdiction.

What about us in all this? What about the ethics of this, what of its politics? “Is it good? Is it fair? Is it just? Is it right? Will it help bring about a better society? A better world?”.

What we know from our experience of two decades of Facebook is that social media, which promised to connect us with friends, induced an epidemic of loneliness, turning many people into “irritable toddlers”, and clearly breaking Trump and Musk’s brains, as Know Your Enemy and also Jaron Lanier recently noticed. “Before social media, the two had vastly different personalities: Trump, the socialite; Musk, the nerd. After, they converged on similar behaviors.”^[15] The more specific claim here is about Twitter; it was Twitter that broke Musk’s brain, Trump’s brain – the brains of a few people you know, probably, especially during and after 2020-1.

This may be true, but is it this all it has done to all of us? Tony Tula goes further in his satire, speaking as his character, B (who may/not be Tony Tula):

“It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face” (Rejection, 232).

The (so far, sofa) reality of chat apps is barer, baser – pared, compared to the socials. Unlike the ‘loneliness disguised as war’ that is a lot of Twitter, and more, Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp are actually describable as ‘social’: maybe this is the moment from which social media becomes real. Yet the chat apps also harness the actual need of humans to co-ordinate in private: this is why nearly all government groups use those three apps, across nearly all countries outside of China. In Australia, major political decisions appear to be cooked up when a politician has a Friday night brain fart, and their staffers become a Hyperactive Hive Mind in order to seventh guess what that means: many of the ‘decisions’ of our governments we are witnessing were cooked up in such group chats. Many, an increasing number, are not good decisions.

Surely this has a more to do with the culture of contemporary politics than the apps… but does it? Spare a moment for some hardcore technological determinism. In McLuhan, this is a cold medium, not hot – and it does things to people, no differently to the Broken Brain oligarchs Twitter has co-produced, and the Sky News Gippsland Qanon Uncles that Bannon and Cambridge Analytica helped normalise on Facebook (using data Facebook gave Bannon, which everyone… kinda blinked on…)

Chat apps also harness the incredible normative power of community, the near-compulsory, highly compelling force of OPDNC² (emanating ‘up’ from the banalities of parental duties and community service), AND and the irrepressible desire to gossip among ‘friends’, in what you believe to be a private conversation (precisely when a bad reply all or an iffy LinkedIn post can get you fired, and maybe soon disappeared).

And by dint of its near monopoly, it is Meta that now has a global grip on all these sets of OPDNCs – in which nine out of ten of us are enmeshed.

I feel like this is a problem, not only because of the pitiless moneypump indifference of Meta’s culture, but because in using anything they provide, we render ourselves exploitable. Collectively, we are handing ourselves over as an exploitable mass of a few billion and growing, and I find our denegation of this both dangerous and upsetting.

What I’ve encountered in trying to raise this is that almost no one has concern, let alone ‘shares my concerns’. This tone of indifference has a new and specific texture, one that’s different to the fetishist disavowal of the Insta or X addict. With WhatsApp, I am met with nonresponse. It’s as quiet as WhatsApp. Raising something about WhatsApp, in my experience, is like expressing a preference against flush toilets or drinking water: you seem weird, you seem a bit tinfoil, you seem touched. What I can’t say – which would seem weird – is that, to me, this is the nonresponse of people who have internalised the loss of control over their lives and choices that dependency means in the piped society.

We get angry at people online and feel lonely ‘with’ people online – but we never notice the pipe, and, socially, in this culture, it’s almost impossible to have legible anger at its grip on us. If information is a difference that makes a difference, then the current cultural atmosphere is an indifference that makes indifference.

We’re all collectively culpable here though. Living the ‘oh well’ of an OPDNC², sighing at the fact of dependency on the infrastructure of the piped society, in my view, is one part of the reason why there is no broad public resistance right now to a very shitty and deteriorating status quo. In sticking with The Standard Package, we remain dependent on an evolving – and now, with WhatsApp, rapidly monetising and automating – set of affordances that, in subtle ways, remove choice and entrench dependency, while creating a cultural atmosphere in which mildly depressed debility permeates everything that lassitude and ennui haven’t already tainted.

We have reached a new threshold for Mark Fisher’s reflexive impotence: in 2006, it was the ennui proper to neoliberalised university students in England. Two decades later, reflexive impotence is our unstated resignation to slow motion catastrophe. We’ve become ‘cool with this’, in the way we’re cool with lukewarm take away coffee, maxed out phones and SUVs, chain deportation, and aerial bombardment of ethnic Others. To be sure, we don’t ‘get’ to these horrors just from using WhatsApp: maybe you are just using an app, maybe I’m wrong. But do you really think so, or are you brushing off what your dispirited heart is saying too? Personally, I feel grossed out by this current cultural atmosphere, subsisting in the chicken-or-beef pseudochoice of Apple or Android, and the OPDNCs of Microsoft-Google, or Meta-Meta.

Quinn Slobodian is the only prominent commentator I know who has really called this bullshit out, so I want to close this post by passing him the mic.

“You know, I'm calling us all out. It’s not… like… we're facing the problem. We're swimming in the water that they have provided. And it’s very become impossible to imagine what life would be like on land instead of in water, because we’ve been in it for so long. But that is the kind of, I think, Copernican kind of shift in thinking that will have to happen to… get used to walking on land again after… enjoying the water or something. I don't know if total defection can work, or alternative platforms, blah, blah, but it’s… certainly a demobilized time in the United States. There’s none of the kind of popular anger and uprisings that were happening after the first Trump administration, or indeed during 2020 – biggest street protests in American history. Let’s not forget successfully diffused… attacked by the right and co-opted and.. removed of any purchase by corporations and institutions, and turned into matters of bureaucracy and compliance and signaling and token messaging rather than something structural. So I think it’s a real challenge. I think that if we pay with their money and we talk to each other with their money, and we spread our every last idea with their services, then it’s difficult to know how one can escape that kind of hegemonic capture”.

^[1] Although it remains as true it’s un-noticed that 80% of human activity is fossil fueled, and 90% of everything involves shipping – which, of course, is all now complexly digital.

^[2] Along with its janky, intrusive, productivity destroying two factor authentication system …which, in essence, penalises anyone who keeps their piped workspace away from their phone – meaning that all the potential interruptions of a phone have to be dialled down or otherwise managed by the individual.

^[3] By some estimates, Word still has 65% of the market share in word processing – a few months off its 42^ndbirthday. Excel, which turns 40 this year, still has 80%. Like Pepsi and Coke, the battle for word processing and spreadsheets is structurally duopolistic: essentially, Microsoft is losing market share to Google. So Windows 3.0 and 3.1 ear Word had >90% share of word processing at its peak, between the late 90s to early 00s, now it’s a two-horse race: everyone who’s not on Microsoft… they’re on Google. It’s worth pausing to think about how truly inescapable Microsoft and Google are. If you work through the American internet, you have no choice but to use Microsoft and/or Google.

^[4] Sting, famously, ‘chooses’ not to have one, and some very senior tenured professors and so on also have the exorbitant privilege of this choice, but if you need to grind and hustle, if you need to find a rental or a job or have a prospective employer call you back – you need a phone. Having an email address is no less 1:1 necessary for the function of welfare and taxation in this country, as in a growing number of others.

^[5] Or Huawei’s Harmony OS and Android, in China. In the latter case, we are back to Alphabet-Google again, a company that also holds over 70% of the global phone OS market share (Android), 67% of global navigation (Maps), and 89.73% of the global search engine market (94%, in Australia). YouTube’s market share of streaming is also staggering – between 73–92%.

^[6] Look on my maps, o ye mighty…

^[7] Or an American teenager: 87% of whom have iPhones.

^[8] As it’s built into iOS, cuz it’s encrypted, to keep out the plebs, so you buy an iPhone. This is typical of Apple’s MO of getting you in their walled garden and making you their forever bottom, in exchange for the smoother end user experience you’re totally habituated to. FWIW, I just got a newer reconditioned iPhone, so my eldest child could have my old phone, which is seven years old, and still totally works.

^[9] An interesting internet hypothetical: what if Apple and Google had co-operated in 2007 to generate an iMessage that worked between iOS and Android, and had the functionality of WhatsApp?

^[10] I’m old enough to have lived the agony of friends with cool games on the Amiga 500 that I would never, ever play on our home PC, while my friend had an Amstrad, that was ‘99% IBM compatible’, and wouldn’t load any of the Sierra Games we tried. It seems like it’s only in the past decade we see juggernauts like Minecraft and Stardew Valley available across nearly all platforms.

^[11] …in part, perhaps, it’s the human condition, playing out in Tony Tula’s two subtexts: ‘Look at me’ and ‘How dare you’, and the two sub-subtexts, ‘Who am I’ and ‘Save me’ (Rejection, p.217).

^[12] This was the approximate date when people in my circles switched over to WhatsApp (launched 2009-10), Telegram (launched 2013) and Signal (launched 2014).

^[13] Lots of people are, whether for buy/sell/swap and Marketplace stuff, whether as part of local-scale political action groups (save our golf course! Fuck that golf course!), or as part of the Qanon Sky News Uncles of South Gippsland &c &c. But I’ve noticed that no one expects it: it has actually turned back into an Ordinary Person’s Acknowledged Choice (OPAC).

^[14] In China, WeChat (which has many more features) occupies this role. Interestingly, WhatsApp is more popular than Telegram in Russia now, in spite of Meta’s other platforms being banned.

^[15] Interestingly, Zuckaberg appears ‘unbroken’ by his platforms: blank as he ever was. Tentative proof that it is designed for humans, and only works on humans?

n decade of quant easing, VC, blurred lines, and #metoo.

the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory.

‘What pandemic?’/It continues1.

Among the many subtle-profound effects of the pandemic’s first acute few years was the sudden and precious opportunity to be stopped and think; to reflect on what it is that we’d been doing (and with whom, and for whom, and ‘for why’); to ask one another how we’d been living, and how we might wish to live our lives; and to take those insights and transform them, from hope into a new and better modes of existence.

After the first chalk rainbows of the pandemic smudged in the winter rain of 2020, we promised: we will be better people – better partners with better partners, involving ourselves in new jobs and habits and commutes, ones we don’t loathe and that don’t grind us to dust. After the pandemic, we will know how to live.

This has been a huge lost opportunity. I do know of individuals who made important and meaningful changes by reflecting existentially during 2020-1. But collectively we have failed to think and feel our way toward a wisdom with a deep enough purchase on our souls that we would develop a new ethics of commitment – something resilient enough to withstand the accumulation and expansion of pre-pandemic dyanmics, all of which are now accelerating. Given the chance to be stopped in our tracks, to pause and think and change direction, or just slow down and stop careening into the traps of our lives, ‘we’ have ‘decided’ – what? We have decided to double down on the worst of our old ways. After 2020-1, we took a precious opportunity for positive change, and decided instead on… what we now see all around us. We decided to say ‘fuck it’, and max it.

There are small signs of this. Single use coffee cups and take away coffes stands out. Until the pandemic, there was some growing awareness of how needlessly wasteful the popular thirst for fast coffee was. With all due ironies2, re-usable coffee cups had become a thing. Yet as of 2025 in Melbourne, people grumble about coffee hitting >5 dollars3, but no one complains about the fact that single-use cups have become the de-facto choice: not only have they seen a resurgence, they’ve become the dominant and totally socially acceptable choice, to the point where baristas make it in a take away cup by default, and sometimes even only serve single use cups.

Before the pandemic, takeaways were a sign you were ‘busy’, commuting, didn’t have time to enjoy a coffee. You put up with the inferior end product as a trade off, becase you were underslept and addicted and needed the caffeine to function, and had five minutes until that class or meeting started.

During the acute phase of the pandemic, disposable cups and takeaways became a habit entrenched by public health concerns: it was a sad fact of our deprivation. Our inability to go to cafes meant we had to make do.

After the acute phase… people just got so used to take aways, they became the norm, the sector seemed to become driven by nothing but warm convenience itself, and most people forgot that, once upon a time, some people sat down and took the time to have coffee together – which was at least half the point of the whole thing. The 2020-1 habit of take aways didn’t eradicate covid, but it’s curious that it pretty much did in two notions: the small notion of a re-usable cup, and the larger notion that we might actually sit down and take five minutes to enjoy a coffee together, in porcelain or glass – and that, if we don’t have that five minutes, we could just admit that we never had enough time for a worthwhile coffee in the first place.

The small example of single use cups and takeaways adds up: you could fill a tram every half hour with the 50,000 of them Melbourne was producing in 2022.

It also points to a general dynamic I see in play in the physically bigger examples I’m about to turn to in this post. The cups show us the dynamic. Firstly, by needlessly generating landfill in this way (indeed, by ‘hitting the accelerator’ with this habit, by ‘aggressing’ on what we were doing before we knew better), we repress awareness of the pandemic’s ongoing existence, as well as awareness of the damaged and stressed ecology from which it emerged, and the urbanised, socially accelerated, aeromobile culture that propagated it so quickly and effortlessly. Zizek’s structure of fetishist disavowal is a neat fit here: ‘we know very well’ single use cups entrench the needless production of ecologically destructive waste (click the link above to see how), ‘and yet…’ cafés offer them and customers prefer them (or no longer know any different), walk around with them, bitch about paying over five dollars for them, throw them away, persist in this cycle4.

Basically, in 2025 we have found ourselves in a society that knows better, yet everywhere indulges itself in doing worse, wherever possible, perhaps as a mark of a kind of stubborn, regressed, defiant ‘privilege’. We don’t have a solid ecology or a stable geopolitics, but we sure as hell have every right to a huge warm coffee – and don’t let anyone take that away from you. In line with my 3S/3SD line, this is stupid and it’s surreal, and we appear also to be very stubborn about choosing to do it anyway. Single use take away cups maybe aren’t full-blown 3SD, because they’re not dangerous per se. As something stupid and destructive, it’s a novel synthetic compound: 2S2D=?

In the previous 3SD post, I pointed to the increasing popularity of TikTok and Temu as other signs of the dynamic I see permeating 2025. What I was also trying to indicate there was that, in a world of systems, the collective effects of ‘microchoices’ (like coffees and swipes and clicks) are recursive: we indulge in all these dumb or dangerous things, and as a consequence, we become more involved in them, demanding bigger doses, wanting more for our maw, wanting MOAHHH…. We should be off Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, because Suckaberg is now some kind of fascist; but we stay on his platforms, keep posting. We should stop talking about Musk and Trump, because they feed and grow larger, wealthier and more powerful by feeding on attention; but we are drawn into being reactive to their vortex and the spectacle of American disintegration anyway. This is dumb, dangerous and destructive, as well as surreal, stubborn, and stupid – it is full blown 3SD. But hey, that being true – fuck it, let’s do more of that! Let’s go to it gladly. And let’s do it harder, faster, bigger and louder than we were doing it a decade ago. Let’s blast it, let’s blast around blasting it; let’s max it out. It’s terrible (or just not very good), let’s put more in our maw in the name of MOAH; let’s max this, let’s do it.

In 2025, 3SD dynamics are starting to hit the very popular choice for maxing. We can see maxing at work in the aesthetic and material form of increasingly popular objects: smartphones, SUVs, and cruise ships. Interestingly, these were some key objects of the acute phase of the pandemics. Smartphones were the things we lived on; SUVs were the things that were unavailable; cruise ships were plague ships, full of stranded ill suburbanites and exploited lonely sailors. At this phase of the repressed pandemic, they are all for maxing – all the better to get a bigger dose of 3SD into us, on a brighter, faster screen, with more entertainment.

Smartphones have been on a maxing journey that is fifteen now. Like the teenagers on them, they’ve been getting bigger and heavier since 2010. But maxing probably won in 2023, when the iPhone Mini – designed to pack more camera, processor, battery life and screen resolution into a smaller package – was discontinued. By 2024, the iPhone Max was the top-selling smartphone. Apple’s maxed phone accounted for about a quarter of all Apple’s smartphone sales, in the year where Apple finally beat Samsung to reach #1 in the global smartphone market. By 2024, maxing won over small and sensible.

Given that an iPhone mini weighed 141 grams, and that Nokia is landing phones <100g, the size and weight of the Max is both a striking social fact, and a big sign of how maxing has les to do with utility, and more to do with sign value5 and consumption. It is also a cultural shift, one that shows how quickly we’ve become accustomed to things we found grotesque, silly, and superflous within living memory, like phablets. The first time the phablet attempted take off, around 2011-12, they were reviled as the kind of naff and daggy object that should apologise for its own existence, like a BMW X6 or SsangYong Stavic. The original Galaxy Note weighed 178g and was 146 x 82 x 9mm; the iPhone Pro Max is 229g and 159 x 76 x 8.25mm. The Max is bigger and heavier than the Note… but we no longer see its phablet-ness, many of us now see an object of desire, an object of more and MOAH. Where the iPhone Mini and current Nokia models – or the Suzuki Jimny – show how we can use technical innovation to create something smaller and lighter that uses fewer resources to make and consumes less energy – instead, most consumers want to Max it.

In Australia – especially since 2020-1 – people have also started maxing it with their cars: motoring journalists have even started referring to these massive vehicles as ‘full size’. Grotesque pickups and titanic SUVs have been the norm in the US for decades, but in Australia, although some enthusiasts bought them, there wasn’t a category – let alone a bestselling category – called ‘the SUV’ until the 2010s6. In a curious synchroncicity, just as phones embarked on their embiggenment, the SUV really took off here.

As of writing, the best-selling car in Australia is the Ford Ranger, a large SUV that, like the iPhone, has gone on a materio-aesthetic journey from large-midsized pickup/ute to its maxed apotheosis. The success of the maxed version of the Ranger has caused maxing responses from its segment competitors. As the Ranger has become more dominant, more American, more paramilitary, Hiluxes and Isuzus have responded by getting MOAH larger and MOAH ‘muscular’ and MOAH American looking, MOAHHHHH… RAM-like. Those veritable ‘phablets’ of the SUV category, the Dodge RAM and Chevrolet Silverado, have thus not only become popular in their own right, they have set the ‘model’ for the market leader to imitate. Just like all bodybuilders wanted to look like Ronnie Coleman in 2003 (with scary results), the RAM/US SUV/phablet-sized truck is the form that the Ranger imitates to make acceptable, and consumers go: coooool. And yet, only recently, the RAM appeared comically huge to most Australians7. Yet, like the Silverado, and like Toyota’s new competitor, the Tundra the RAM is a ‘valid’ choice now. They are almost always black, and seem to always be driven by guys who wear baseball caps8 and sunglasses, many of whom are white guys with beards9.

We should think about these post 2020-1 social facts really carefully: after the change to pause and reflect, Australia’s popular choices now are single-use coffee cups, maxed smartphones, and maxed Ford Rangers. This has happened over two decades when average television sizes doubled (while people only keep them half as long), while Australia now has the largest houses of any country in the world. At least we’re number one at something.

What it means, in this country at least, is that society is coming to be dominated by a preference for maxed objects (in maxed houses, with maxed TVs), necessarily designed with less regard for ecological impact, materials and energy use, necessarily a less appropriate, sustainable, other-regarding use of space. There is no way we can be buying a maxed take-away coffee, a maxed new phone, or a maxed American-style SUV and be thinking about the state of the world, or even just ‘our kids’, or trying to live in a way that might reduce our harmful impacts on other people, the environment, and the future. On some level, we have to be doing this to defy, spite and coax our own demise10.

– Adorno, History and Freedom

“The uncertainty of existing, and consequently the obsession of proving our existence, prevail over desire that is strictly sexual. If sexuality is putting our identity on the line (down to the fact of having children) the new are really no longer in a position to devote ourselves to this task, for we are too preoccupied with saving our identity to undertake anything else. What matters above everything else is proving our existence, even if that is its only meaning”.

– Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication

~

Something has shifted, but much is jammed. And jammed hard – into an unfunky place, at ludicrous speed. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’ve/we’ve entered the strangest moment yet lived through in human culture. 2025, the strained-est moment yet. Welcome to 2025, the new home of prolapsed credulity.

We’ve been drifting toward these zones for a while, perhaps since Gutenberg and Luther, at least since the 2007 launch of the iPhone (tragedy?) and the 2010 iPad (farce!). In this parochial corner of the cosmos, I can date its political inception to 2015, when the Prime Minister broke satire by chomping a raw onion on TV, apropos of nothing. It didn’t seem to bring tears to his eyes, yet, to me at least, the volatile organosulfur compounds seem to have wafted out, generating a global butterfly effect, triggering everything from Brexit to US government-funded gain of function research in the bat caves of Wuhan in the mid-late 2010s. Thus: all that has got us in a flap of collective madness was inaugurated by the crunching of an onion, ten years ago.

In politics, the breaking of satire is actually something that adds danger to the world. Alongside 3S, this breaking – by everything busted and cooked that unfathomably rich and powerful* people do (from the biting of the onion to Musk sieg heil-ing over his skis) – doesn’t just add dumb to the deep stupid, it is also dangerous and destructive.

It is 3D, as well as 3S. 2025’s new concoction is 3SD, the choice of a new generation.

The dangers of 3SD are numerous and unsubtle; 3SD can ruin your life, it’s ruining politics. The danger in chief is that we can’t take politics seriously anymore, can’t take what happens – whatever happens – seriously anymore. How could we? It makes no sense; it is fucking dumb, it is so stupid. We have moved from DFW’s Infinite Jest1 to infinite scroll and infinite lolz. As a consequence, although we are in a certain sense rapt and seduced by the obscene ecstasy of communication, we also look away, we also stop paying attention in a way that could count or make a difference – so they get away with it, and we sigh and shrug, and so it goes. This is deadly. Nothing matters matters.

I don’t think the 3SD of 2025 is just a ruse or an oopsie (though ruses and oopsies doth abound). I do think the destructively dumb surreal stupidity of it all is real and deep and surprisingly bad; worse than many of its designers and beneficiaries even thought it might be (all too late). A metaphysically deep and rich stupidity thrives and prospers in the prolapse of collective credulity; it truly is a deep stupid, and it’s real, and doing very well for itself, and doing real damage. The burn is real, and what burns never returns. And as surreal, stupid, and stubborn, it does set up an almost implacable as well as dangerous dynamic, as one of its integral side effects. The more we ‘take it’, the more obdurately it perdures; the more dangerous it becomes, the more we find it impossible to take anything seriously and pay good attention to anything. Nihilism, cynicism, bad faith, and fetishist disavowal spread and entrench; nothing is possible, everything is a bin fire, we roll our eyes, and keep scrolling. Doomscrolling is dumbscrolling; doomscrolling is dangerous, the style of dangerous that someone fucked from 3SD takes to be a normal pattern of life.

3SD is thus akin to a synthetic analogue comprising New Psychoactive Substances (NPS), made from signs, propagated as images, consumed as content2. These kindasorta compounds, cooked up at industrial scale, have been getting popular over the last decade (since 2015!) because – like cooked content – they’re available-accessible, legal-ish for consumption, available from grey outlets, and are akin to familiar drugs in their ostensible ‘gross’ effects, affecting our favourite neurotransmitters: serotonin, dopamine, Nora Ephron, GABA, and hardcore.

NPSs are popular because they mimic, they mimic the bodied feelings and mind-altered states people love about cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, LSD, and ketamine. But the mimic is also a pipik. NPSs pipik the ‘old faithfuls’ they mimic, because they are bad copies, evil twins, the iffy doubles of our street-tested friends that leave us cross-eyed and speechless. NPSs do many other gnarly things to our mindbodies and nervous systems, things we don’t know the short or long term effects of really, things which seem subtle on first dose but might be cumulatively neurotic toxic, or induce sudden psychosis and death. This might only happen if you keep hitting ‘em, or hit ‘em a bit too hard, or it might happen if you’re unlucky with a batch you buy. Like the effects of LLMs on global society right now, the fatal, fuck-you-up effects of NPSs are unstudied, unregulated, and freely available – they’re out there for you and me and everyone. In this post regulation world, where the shadows shade into ‘legit’ businesses and offerings and all the cows are grey, it’s left to us to find out if NPSs turn out to be stupid, or deadly, or stupid and deadly.

Stupid can always be deadly; stupid does not diminish deadly in any way. Trench warfare, cavalry charges into machine guns, eating raw onions on TV: very stupid, very popular at the time, very deadly. And yet, where the global media of signs is concerned, we’ve all been hoofing big gulps of 3SD – ever since Tone chomped that onion.

3SD is what you take when you’re not getting shredded quickly enough by creatine, Dodge Ram, Jet Skis and their integral accident …and the shred platforms. In what remains of this post, I want to riff on two prevalent, gangbusters popular ways I notice us dosing ourselves hard, amusing ourselves to death by hoofing 3SD, caution to the wind, planet be damned. My sense is that this is wrecking us in a way we have no way of reckoning with, and no desire to reckon with.

The ordinary psychosis of news media – now ramping up to shred levels

I notice 2025 3SD levels of shred in the ordinary psychosis of news media. A psychotic person senses and experiences things which are not there, not real, not true. We observe them as suffering delusions and hallucinations, but of course, psychosis is an observer-dependent reality, and if the culture or society is all mad, then the sane person is the one who appears crazy (as we know from The Sane Society, Great Apes, and They Live).

Often, we – our groups – take our unreality to be the uniquely real or true reality. Our madness is a Truth, something the rest of them can’t or don’t see – because they’re deluded. Popular psychosis is a madness ‘we’ lives by – a story worth dying for. Many-most religious world views, conspiracy theories, nationalist ideologies, and ordinary cultural practices (Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny) are psychotic. But in the psychosis of contemporary news media ramping its way up to 3SD shred levels since 2015, what’s been especially intense, at least to me, is the flattened juxtapositions of clickable images-and-assertions completely evacuated of context and relationality, co-assembled and put side by side. The following are ‘historical’; what we should notice is that, as phone users, we’re asking our minds to routinely transform these juxtapositions into a world that still coheres and makes sense. Consider the work of making these back into a sensible, sensical whole. Wow, no wonder we’re burnt out.

To the extent we are online – and most of us are so, so very online – we are routinely encountering this kind of arrangement of ‘meanings’. They are the sign language of the background of our online lives; we don’t even notice them, but they are a ubiquitous social fact. Every time we spy the world fed to us in this way, we’ve been getting a tiny hit of 3SD. Every time we click, or will our selves ‘down that rabbit hole’, we take a much bigger hit.

But in terms of dosage, this is nothing, absolutely nothing, compared to video-based scroll holes like Tik Tok, Reels, and whatever Tik Tok becomes once it’s bought/ sold/ pipiked by Silicon Valley to ‘Make America Grate – Again’ in the coming days/ weeks/ months. It’s worth clocking the shred Cal Newport noticed, as a millennial who had never been on TT before, then got injured and felt weak and had nothing better to do, and thought he’d better have a look (and write a New Yorker column out of having had a look):

“When I sign in for the first time, TikTok asks me to choose my interests from a long list illustrated by cheerful emojis. I select “Life Hacks,” “Science and Education,” and “Sports.” Then I’m off. The first video shows the Clemson University baseball team playing an exhibition game against the Savannah Bananas, a professional touring squad. The Clemson infield, for some inscrutable reason, starts dancing. I swipe up. A new video begins, showing someone selecting shoes at a store. The video is only ten seconds long; by the time I’ve finished jotting down some notes, it has already started replaying. I hastily swipe again. The next video plays tranquil music while a car slowly drives toward Yosemite National Park. The algorithm must have noticed that I lingered on the wintry scene: the next video shows someone sweeping snow off a porch with some kind of rotating broom contraption. Then the feed takes a darker turn, which makes me want to scroll even faster. I see a news story about a person being pushed onto subway tracks in Manhattan—swipe—a Trump video set to ominous music—swipe—“Top 15 Most Ghetto High Schools in New Jersey”—swipe—and someone making fun of a server’s accent in a restaurant. I shut down the app.”

This is a phenomenologically valuable description, because it shows how an articulate person – with a particular relation to digital media – clocks the shred, immediately, viscerally: swipe, swipe, swipe, GARGH – shut that fucker down.

Newport was also still self-aware enough to notice the following three things. Firstly, he noticed “the velocity of the clips and the rawness of their emotion is breathtaking”. Secondly, he noticed he immediately felt old. Thirdly, and most of all, he noticed “TikTok’s lack of obvious purpose”. There’s futility but no utility here. TT is a head shred scroll hole with no value add, offering only a ‘personally tailored’ seduction by the obscene ecstasy of communication3.

Tik Tok not only drips raw 3SD onto your open eyeballs – this is a shredding scroll hole that… has no real reason to persist, that adds nothing worth saving in a world that needs saving but isn’t being saved… because ‘swipe, swipe, swipe’. Late 2000s Facebook promised to connect the disconnected; early 2010s posting platforms promised to be the “locus of collective conversation”; early 2020s LinkedIn promises… business networking, and with it, the endless janky artificiality of stoking the fire of an online persona, made to seem a certain kind of appealing to a certain network of business contacts. This style of 2010s internet already produced a set of reliable symptoms, aggregating into systemic dynamics well captured by Tolentino in her pean to the 2010s millennial internet, Trick Mirror:

1) the internet is built to distend our sense of identity;

2) it encourages us to overvalue our opinions;

3) it maximizes our sense of opposition;

4) it cheapens our understanding of solidarity;

5) it destroys our sense of scale

But Tik Tok is just one person’s headfuck4: who needs your own Personal Jesus when you have your own personalised head shred? I’ll let you add your own speculative 5), 6, and 7) to Tolentino’s list; these would be the documentable effects of macrodosing 3SD at population scale.

~

To those outside TT and the like, this all seems like a very bad trade, and I would say it is.

To those habituated to it, based on an anecdotal collection of impressions from conversations, some can’t imagine getting off it (30-something colleague), or they’ve tried and it’s very hard to (several undergraduates), or they’ve finally managed to get off it, now wonder what the fuck they were thinking, and don’t miss it at all (one or two undergraduates). At best, TT is digital bobas, Warheads, Fanta, Pringles, or Takis, something we consume for the sensory impact, even though we know it’s ultra-processed junk that might give us the shits and lifelong autoimmune GI wreckage, in exchange for a moment’s mouth fun.

But Fanta and Takis, or even NPSs, (were) never made out like they were how we should engage with local, international and global politics. Junk food has had the decency to stay at the corner shop, and remain junk food5. This is the conspicuous danger of the parts of the political and civic mind – the whole culture of the common good – being shredded by TT’s huge doses of 3SD. TT has become a structurally normal way that huge numbers of people – especially young people – now navigate news.

A counterfactual is important to stop us harping on ‘kids these days’: is it worse than five decades of daily Murdoch tabloids and talkback radio everywhere you drive (when you drive everywhere), or Fox News on in the background all day every day? Is it worse than your rural uncle’s immersion in Q-zones Facebook for the last seven years? All surely have a profound effect on the people attached to each. But with TT, ‘somehow’, perhaps the bare majority of parents have given children as young as ten unfettered access to an unlimited supply of 3SD, and left it up to them to make sense of the high and the comedown, as well as get to know the wide world out there by navigating news, as well as mental health and neurodivergence6, on-and-through it.

The Chindogu-fication of low-res ‘stuff’: temu.com

If I’m browsing on any device, or even checking the weather app I use, another 3SD shread hole-realm that’s impossible to avoid is the ‘endless scroll chindogu’ of temu.com.

Leaving aside the well-documented stories of its horrendous factory conditions, including forced labour7, the insane ecological costs induced by the fact that temu.com is sucking up the price of air freight in order to gobble its way to huge market share (see below), and the fact that, like TT, it perennially leaves unanswered the question – ‘Why?’ – we should pay attention to temu.com’s astonishing popularity. Notice: Temu was the number one most downloaded app in the US last year; it knocked Tik Tok off its perch to achieve this.

We are a society that loves unboxing videos, prefers the largest and most grotesque smartphones and SUVs we can by, and has 0 problem with everything implied by Uber Eats and temu.com, as far as the labour of Others is concerned. This is what we have to look very squarely at: very stupid, very popular, very dangerous.

With the metadata my browsing patterns feed the ad broker, I tend to get images of buxom women in tight clothing, mechanical gadgetry serving some unspecified-hyperspecific purpose, and ‘wifey’ focused t-shirts and posters. My browser is telling temu.com it thinks I’m a middle aged married dude, I guess. Mea culpa. Sometimes though, the algo seems to shit itself, and serve up completely 3S things, like the two pictured, which I’ve deliberately blown up to show the ‘low res’ chindogu nature of a lot of what is on offer here.

Temu.com is a confluence of a number of trends.The first is the trend concretised and crowned by Amazon Prime, the idea that ‘we should’ be able to have whatever we want delivered to our door the next day (for low low prices), with no regard for the massive back end that maintaining such an obsequious front end requires. Let the world burn, and let young Chinese women work in slavery, breathing fumes: whatever and whatever, as long as I can have my stuff conveniently delivered to my door by tomorrow. Luke Heggie’s spot on Deliveroo from 2023 still captures the domination and moral indifference inherent in this very well.

The second trend is China.inc’s unbelievable, world historic ability to pump industrial volumes of anything you can imagine wanting and everything you didn’t yet know you didn’t need. Contemporary China delivers the goods, per Chris’ ‘Pac Man’ theory of dominance through mass manufacturing prowess.

The third trend is concretised by our prevalent uses of smartphones as devices used for shopping-as-entertainment, the way this removes friction from the ‘shopping experience’ while making scrolling and shopping into a seamless seepage of swiping and clicking.

There is huge mass and friction here. As Forbes recently reported, Temu and Schein “ship the equivalent of 88 Boeing 777 freighters of cargo worldwide every day”; the China e-commerce sites are now comparable to Amazon Prime. Notice, this isn’t ‘shipping’, this is air freight: “cargo ships generate approximately 10 to 40 grams of carbon dioxide per metric ton-kilometer traveled, far less than air freight, which emits around 500 grams per metric ton-kilometer”.

But it is all beyond the attentional purview of the consumer: put beyond, kept beyond, or just ‘beyond’ because most people don’t care to know right now. As the world burns, please tell your grandkids: we let this happen, because we were so munted on 3SD that global obsequiousness seemed like a good trade – for the living planet, and all its creatures.