The semester is winding up, so I don’t have much to say. Keeping my eyes focused on Gaza and New York City for the moment. Not a lot of room for anything else, but fiction helps. Fiction helps.
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There is no individual solution to the situation we find ourselves in. To say, though, that there are no individual components is a mistake. Every collective action is made up of individual actions: it requires that we all consider our situation and broadly take actions – individually and in coordination – that point in roughly the proper direction.
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This 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).
Sunday morning, Edgar sent me an article entitled “Grimes Responds To Zola Jesus Calling Her 'The Voice Of Silicon Fascist Privilege'” from Stereogum (a website I’ve never read anything off of, to tell the truth.) They sent me this article, because they know that I can’t resist reading something that I know will make me angry, especially in the morning because coffee is losing its edge and sometimes you need a shot of fight-or-flight to feel like a real human.
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But all of this is beside the point: the fact that we can pick out two dominant aesthetics in the visual media form of what is supposed to be a “literature of ideas” is a problem. It indicates, if anything, a lack of ideas. If our options are just a visual vocabulary iteration of the old Star Wars vs. Star Trek debate that no one but the people having it are interested in, we've got problems.
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