This isn’t just a stew of reactionary race science and competitors for world’s most divorced man, though, but one could be forgiven for thinking that. No, this is the veneer of rationality chipping away to reveal the idiocy underneath. What we have here is the fruit of a deprived reason finally coming to harvest – the same reason that claims that the STEM fields are inherently superior to the humanities in the academy, but shuffles people into business school more than STEM, anyway.
Read MoreThere’s a lot of reason to feel gloomy about the world. It feels like we’re back where we started. This summer has been unprecedentedly hot and unpleasant in some parts of the world (the heat wave in the pacific northwest has been terrible, obviously – but some parts of Russia above the arctic circle recorded temperatures as high as 48 Celsius. That’s 118 degrees Fahrenheit.) What we see is that, throughout the world, but especially in North America and Western Europe, there is a dwindling of state capacity. We can see this in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, we have seen this in regard to climate change.
Read MoreThe term began on the left. This is easy enough to swallow, because the right has a hard time creating anything. They appropriated the term “libertarian”, they’re trying to appropriate furries, and Norse paganism, and metal, and they tried – and failed – to appropriate punk. They are succeeding in appropriating “Accelerationism”, primarily because there’s no consensus on the meaning of the term, because it took a back-channel from academia to the mainstream.
Read MoreThis began as a review for Cyberpunk 2077 and changed into something else. From the piece:
The real world didn’t copy cyberpunk, but it rhymed it, and then one-upped it. A novel set in the real 2021, that accurately reflects it, sent back to Gibson or one of his contemporaries, would be an incomprehensible trip: a hit of uncut psychedelia that would be both banal and mind-shattering (equal parts Dick and Ballard, shot as a documentary).
In an attempt to understand the world as it is, teetering on the brink of environmental collapse and under a constant barrage of information, the rogues’ gallery Sandifer portrays, along with their many followers, have instead chosen death.
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