Living in the Burn Down

The world is burning down around us, and we’re going to work. We’re going to the grocery store and the laundromat and watching Netflix. We have no ability to productively imagine what we have to do in this situation, because the obvious option – taking to the streets, going on strike, making actual demands – are things that we have been conditioned not to do. We continue on as we have been, because the alternatives are either outright unimaginable or are the objects of horror and anti-fascination.

Time of Monsters, Written by: Cameron, PoliticalCameron SummersSeptember 30, 20202020 Presidential Election, Right-Wing Politics, Politics, Exterminism, Tacitus, The Battle of Blair Mountain, History, Historiography, Empire, Cahokia, Native Americans, Scatter Adapt and Remember, Analee NewitzComment

The Dumb Cyberpunk Present (Time of Monsters #4)

Cyberpunk predicted in the early 1980s that people would one day live in a world that looked very much like the 1990s. Its authors – led by William Gibson – did this primarily by taking the temperature of the world around them and just predicting the worst non-apocalyptic future they could. It was also the most successfully predictive science fiction movement ever.

Analysis, Time of Monsters, Written by: CameronCameron SummersJuly 29, 2020Cyberpunk, Jobsian Minimalism, Futurism, Mike Pondsmith, Bruce Sterling, William Gibson, The Matrix, Twee, Warren Ellis, Transmetropolitan, PoliticsComment

How Exhausting It Is To Live Through History (Time of Monsters, #3)

I’ve been thinking for a while that society is a machine for transforming the raw material of time into history. A way to process the steady drip of seconds and the slow slosh of the seasons into a record of things that have happened. Before we had history, we had legend and myth, but with the advent of written records we had history. Even as those written records have declined in importance and acknowledgment, they are still there, still produced by those who see the benefit of knowing what went on before.

Written by: Cameron, Time of Monsters, Political, PhilosophyCameron SummersJuly 22, 2020History, Historiography, Metaphysics, Time, Current Events, Portland, V. I. Lenin, Dark City, Deleuze and Guattari, China Miéville, Politics, Anti-OedipusComment

An Entitlement to Attention: On the Harper's Letter (Time of Monsters, Part 2)

These are people who have largely insulated themselves from outside critique. Over the years, though, due to social media and the proliferation of publishing platforms, the volume on these outside critiques has gone up more and more, until it finally reached the point where they can hear it.

Analysis, Time of Monsters, Written by: CameronCameron SummersJuly 8, 2020Dunking on Francis Fukuyama, censorship, Censorship, Laurie Sheck, Tom Cotton, Harper's Magazine, J.K. RowlingComment

The Media Has No Message (Time of Monsters, Part 1)

The “media”, if it wants anything, wants as much of your attention as it can effectively extract for the lowest investment possible. More than any conspiracy theory about bad actors, more than any lie about modifying people’s behavior, more than anything else, this should be recognized as the root of the problem.

Written by: Cameron, Commentary, Time of MonstersCameron SummersJune 24, 2020Current Events, News Media, ProPublica, Bellingcat, Antonio Gramsci, Grant Morrison, LocalComment