Manosphere misogynists and hypergamous misandrists have set the algorithmic pace of dating discourse with their diarrhetic rants about the habits of each other. Bastardised pop-culture sociology, bioessentialist pseudoscience and a medieval application of gender roles all meld together. The over-representation of contempt trickles down, wriggling beneath even the most casual conversations about love.

To Make Sense Of All This; we begin by imagining heterosexual contempt as equidistant. The misogynists and misandrists are just as bad as each other. An intuitive balance. Except it grossly understates how one gender’s contempt has been systemised into supremacism while the other’s has mutated from a place of self-defence.

So let’s back away from extremes and adjust for the context of patriarchy’s clutches, reaching back to Eve’s Original Sin and further.

When we persist in Making Sense Of All This now, well fellas; we come out looking like a collective piece of shit. In our tenure as the so-called stronger sex—what we’ve done, what we continue to do, what we have been conditioned to do, what we have the capacity to do, and what we have the ability to benefit from—all of these things precipitate the amorphous cloud of being a man; connecting wirelessly overhead like a halo of crimes, achievements and potentialities that one can’t help but hold us all responsible for.

Who could love a gender of such monsters?

The women of today ask, a few decibels louder than mothers who whispered the same question and grandmothers who could only mouth it.

At this point of Making Sense Of All This, we have lost all track of the fact that we were supposed to be talking about love. It is spooky how smoothly we can zoom out to the more fractured concept of gender, then zoom out again to the more contentious topic of inequality. The process happens in the mouth so quickly that the spirit of the thing we’re trying to Make Sense Of gets left behind.

But we’re here now so let’s loiter—at the crossroad of Blackness and maleness; where rage is fatal, physicality is animalised, lust is coveted, and tenderness suffers atrophy—with a patriarchal ideal that can be described colloquially as The Doomed Hive of Niggas.

There’s a long-running joke about all the things (straight) Black men can’t do. You notice immediately that these directives, rooted in homophobia (the wayward son of misogyny), form an amorphous ideal of Black hetero-hypermasculinity that is imposed omni-directionally. This is The Doomed Hive of Niggas.

There are infinite ways to fail The Doomed Hive. To succeed in it is perhaps worse. In the words of my dear friend, ,“ If you think [American] masculinity is in crisis, you should understand this culture relies on coercing men into these options: 1. Submissive wage laborer 2. Cruel imperial soldier 3. Prisoner 4. Death”. It is a very particular apocalypse that hovers over the Black Man’s head, for the libidinal appetite of The West would rather incarcerate him and covet his labour as a legal slave or trap him as fodder for their endless wars than see him become a submissive wage labourer.

Instead of abandoning the patriarchal aspirations of white capitalists, success in The Doomed Hive of Niggas leans heavier into it. It only rejects the coercion by striving for the entrepreneur, the CEO, the high-ranking general, the executive, the slave-master, which are not real rejections of the ideal but graduations, where Black men can define their manhood by their ability to exploit, rather than be exploited.

I wish I could articulate what it means like to reject this ideal altogether in a way that doesn’t sound like biracial slam poetry. I’d say something like; to be a traitor is lonely. You are welcomed by few, suspected by all, and will always feel a mistake away from being absorbed into The Doomed Hive of Niggas that are growing more unloveable with every generation. You see the doom forming in the clouds and you extend love to them, talk kinder to them than they’re used to, have more patience. But at any given moment, they can remind that you aren’t them and they aren’t you. And at any given moment, someone else might will reminded that you are them and they are you. To be a Black man is to be told what you are.

Is that too melodramatic? I told you it sounded like biracial slam poetry. Truthfully, I’m not used to writing about all this stuff candidly—I don’t think anybody is. We’re so used to masking the honesty with neat, contentified social theory. And I keep forgetting we’re meant to be talking about love. For a second, shall we turn our heads slightly to love’s prelude and look at how Anita Damina’s essay, A Man And A Feminist Go Out To Dinner, wanders the familiar fault lines of modern dating?

• The Man* brings up a hypothetical double-standard of gender roles (If you expect me to check bumps in the night as a man, why is it wrong for me to expect you to cook for me as a woman?)

• The Woman* parries with statistical risk of violence (men are more likely to handle their expectations of women by resorting to abuse or murder).

*It is important to recognise that the Western’s cultural dominance might implore you to imagine the entities of “Man” and “Woman” as white. They are not. This Man is Black. This Woman is also Black.

Note: The Man’s framing of the discussion is more egregious than the discussion itself—for he reads like a salesman trying to flog the snake-oil of domesticity. The presumption is its own problematic. But we’ll press on because his “gotcha” attempt raises a compelling point that side-steps the typical, chronically online, anti-feminist talking-points of things like child support (yikes) or who should pay for dinner (ungenerous) that make for pretty mood-killing, first-date chatter. Inside the Russian nesting doll of The Man’s initial question there is something interesting:

If you were to love me, am I expected to die when danger arrives?

The inherent complication of the traditional heterosexual relationship is that when it’s “healthy”, The Man takes on any hypothetical risk of danger that could lead to death (or killing) on behalf of his partner. Conversely, in an “unhealthy” union, The Woman takes on the hypothetical risk of being killed by (or having to kill in self-defence) her partner. On this date, The Man is assessing whether he’d be willing to die for The Woman while she assesses whether he has the temperament of someone that might kill her. Statistically, patriarchy dictates The Woman is incurring the more probable risk. This is how The Woman wins the argument.

If we leave the probabilities of death alone for now and assume The Man is neither abuser nor femicidal, we can turn our attention to economics. The Man considers his risk of dying (or killing) on behalf of his partner as the labour of an emergency responder; infrequent but high-stakes. “Checking for bumps in the night” is one duty among a hypothetical many, (i.e protecting The Woman should a threat present itself on the street, batting away leery men at social gatherings) little of which can be anticipated but are silent possibilities The Man believes he must remain alert to.

The open secret of patriarchy is that The Man fears other Men. The Doomed Hive of Niggas wants to kill him, white men want to own or kill him, and women have begun to express more and more indifference about whether he lives or dies. Death, death, death. The Man’s duty to protect his Woman from bumps in the night is a projection of a hyper-masculine ideal, yes, but it is one that uses the pervasive assumption of his inherently violent nature to leverage and justify worth. The volatility of this value makes it impossible to appraise. How does The Man himself know how he’ll react when the bump in the night comes? How can The Woman know to trust him in such a crisis? Is he accustomed to physical conflict? Does he know how to control the violence he is capable of? Has he ever had to? Does he know the disciplines of self-defence? Can he handle a weapon? Some of these answers might provide as much concern as comfort.

In exchange for the promise to fend off unknowable dangers (in pursuit of his ideal), The Man suggests The Woman live up to her ideal—to ease his unrelenting anxiety of being crowned protector—urges her to conform to the labour structure of “being cooked for and cared for”. It is impossible to compare the regularity of The Woman’s daily tasks against The Man’s infrequent staring down of potential emergency. The Woman is asked to invest in the protective aptitude of The Man on an insurance basis. Domesticity is her payment. But what if no Men aggressively hit on her at parties? What if no emergency ever occurs and The Woman finds herself bound by a predatory contract of “cooking and care” that is fundamentally unfair because The Man never has to blast a burglar out of the french doors of their living room with a twelve-gauge shotgun? But maybe, more importantly, why should she conform to an ideal just because he believes he has to?

This is the point where Damina steps away from the dinner discussion. The essay resolves by zooming out from The Man to diagnose Men in the abstract, turning to address the audience and reflect on how The Doomed Hive of Niggas need to get better at regulating their expectations. She is right. But aren’t you curious about The Man himself? His autonomy melts away, and he is herded into a philosophical bullpen to be conflated with abusers and killers. How did the discussion actually go? Did The Woman reject him? Was he disappointed? How did he react to the dashing of his expectation?

We abandon the intimacy of the conversation at the highest point of its realness to speak in a way far more detached. Disengaging from The Man to refer to Men Generally is understandable—especially when The Man has framed this entire intellectual exercise in a manner reminiscent of The Doomed Hive of Niggas. Invoking the statistics of Men’s patriarchal violence is the cleanest way to wrap up the tale.

…But doesn’t something feel off? Isn’t this all disheartening? The Man’s flagrant attempts to coerce The Woman into labour? The Woman cycling through the statistical violence of Men? Dating as a dance of necropolitics and negotiated wage labour. How do Black people even begin to talk about love with this weighted presence of death, work, the environment, captivity, apocalypse, ancestry, trauma, whiteness, debt, struggle, violence… Fear.

Ah. This entire time, we thought we were talking about love. We’ve actually been talking about the ogre on the back, cupping its hands over love’s eyes. Now that we know: how do we talk about love without fear?

By understanding there is no talking about love without fear and that, perhaps, Making Sense of All This means giving grace to each other’s fears in ways that we’d be embarrassed for others to see.

I want to affirm the fear of The Man, who believes himself trapped in the Black (hyper)masculine expectation to die, who has probably never even thought about his own fear this way, but I cannot be an apologist for his attempt to find love by coercing a potential lover into subservience, just as society coerces him into being a submissive wage labourer, cruel imperial soldier, prisoner or death. I want to affirm the fears of The Woman, who can see the framing of The Man’s thought experiment as a red-flag indication that could lead to her harm, abuse or death. I don’t think I’ll ever be comfortable with how quickly violence is assumed, how the language of pop-sociology is dispatched so cavalierly to remove The Man from his own body and push him into The Doomed Hive of Niggas, even though I understand the hyper-vigilant fear that drives it.

Remember, the grace I’m offering is because we are trying to talk about love. If we were only speaking only about fear, perhaps we’d be examining how it’d be best for women to abandon searching for love due to the statistical risk of harm, abuse or death. We’d also consider the same abandonment for men, for when love reaches its inevitable end, “whether by the slow pull of a disease, or the shock of loose footing on a hiking trail, whether it be the corrosion of two personalities that reshape each other until they’re incompatible”, it is men who’re more likely to die of a broken heart.

We must look at the fear of each another not as something that is insurmountable but something overcomeable. The most nonsensical part of Making Sense of All This is The Woman’s fear is valid and ignored and The Man’s fear is unarticulated and misused and, despite all the crossed wires of this armed explosive, we pursue love regardless of the roulettes of death because love is not about safety, statistics or even influencing the existential trajectory of the general Man or Woman.

Love is an everyday act of stupid bravery that is, at times, an unexceptional madness; the entire endeavour is a search for The Outlier, The Exception to The Rule, The One Who Fits You as Best as You Fit Them. You date to find a person whose ordinariness is extraordinary to you, to see wonder in their mundanity, you yearn for someone like the sunrise—an appearance you can see over and over again and still be amazed. You risk embarrassment, heartache, heartbreak, time, stress, money, anxiety, abuse, harm and death trying to find them. And once you do, the hard work of weaving your lives together is endless.

We believe in love even when we’re bad at it. Even when we think we don’t deserve it. Even when it ends in an unceremonious unfollow and a whimper. Perhaps, so much of the difficulty with the fear we get from it is concentrated into looking for a person, when really what we seek is coalition. Fred Moten has a wonderful quote about multi-racial solidarity in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study:

The problematic of coalition is that coalition isn’t something that emerges so that you can come help me, a maneuver that always gets traced back to your own interests. The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that it’s fucked up for us.

There is no greater place where this is true than in the throes of a relationship, where Men’s expectation to be death fodder is as fucked up as the expectation Women’s expectation to be unappreciated labourers. The social coercions expected of them both are fucked up thefts of their lives. He must be aware his proximity smells like death to Her until he can prove himself safe but he cannot save her from what is fucked up about his own gender-mates any more than he can save himself, any more than she can save him. They can only seek to understand each other, to articulate the depth of their fears to one another, be patient with them, and choose to resist them together.

How often have you seen relationship tips as negotiated battle strategy? Is it not more common to speak about love from a place of cunning? Instead of collaboration; power struggle. Instead of co-operation; self preservation. It is easy to treat dating as a ritual of death forecasting, of socio-emotional cost/benefit analyses, of game strategy, of banquets with the enemy. Perhaps it goes without saying that it is probably unwise for women in a patriarchal society to abandon this way of seeing and operating completely. The hard part, it seems, comes in striking the balance of vulnerability, good faith, vigilance and curiosity that one needs to remain open to love. The Man must figure out how to be safe—to himself and to others—in a way that resists the assumption that he can achieve this safety by relying on exhibitions of brute force.

This is the work and he must be endlessly curious of it.

As long as love is approached with adversarial intentions, it will garner adversarial results. As long as fear compels us to invest in the rigidity of gender ideals, we remain alienated from the true fertility of love—a site of transformation, an intimate ecosystem to be seasonal with one another, a myth-dispeller, patient, an environment of trust potent enough to dissolve lifetimes of cultural conditioning, a place where vulnerability can make conflict safe, weed out harmful beliefs and sprout better ones in their place.

That’s all well and good, my date says. But someone’s still got to check for the bump in the night. I lean forward over the candlelit table and smile.

If the time ever comes—and I hope it never does—I imagine we’d both wake up, rub the sleep from our eyes, I’d reach for my golf club and you reach for your limited edition, bright pink Hello Kitty baseball bat and we’d both whisper to each other: Hey baby, I heard a noise… Do you wanna go commit a crime together?

When asked to clarify comments made in passing about ending the Russo-Ukrainian war, President Donald Trump flicked through a scant rolodex of expressions, his face pretzeled into a wry smile before he admitted he didn’t think anything he could do would get him into heaven.

Whether the confessional booth of Air Force One was loosening Trump’s tongue; or his health was humbling him, or the contracting walls—papier-mâchéd with Epstein files—were weighing on him, or the chummy correspondence with a Fox News journalist was placating him; the conditions aligned in syzygy to reveal a candid moment from the grifter-in-chief who once boasted that his supporters were so gullible loyal that they’d vote for him even if he committed murder in broad daylight.

“I’m not heaven-bound…”

Strained chuckles pierce the star-spangled veil and glimpses of a damned soul peek through the waving slits. Behold the laughter of a man wrestling with the mounting entropy of his own sins. If you squint, his admission almost appears like a camel’s hide bunching against slim metal as it tries to squeeze through a needle’s eye.

“I may be in heaven right now as we fly on Air Force One…”

And just like that; the sad clown snaps back into the safety of his gilded caricature. His flirtation with contrition fizzes with static before switching to his regularly scheduled programming of yankee-doodle mammonism.

It has been said before but it bears saying again: Donald Trump is the perfect avatar for America.

To get why, we must first understand World War II as a modern creation myth; a neatly packaged hero’s journey where the righteous allies took down the tyrannical axis powers. After this uncomplicated clash of good vs. evil, America spent its post-war victory LARPING as the valiant tippers-of-the-scales against the Nazis while demonising their temporary allies, The Soviet Union, who were actually responsible for the military defeat of Hitler. The United States has imagined itself as the world’s moral paragon and laundered that fantasy to every corner of the planet.1

To paraphrase John Cena’s character in The Suicide Squad: America believes in peace—no matter how many men, women, and children it needs to kill to get it.

In a way, one could say that Europe entered a blood-pact with America, to absorb the traditional brutality of colonialism and modernise it in exchange for the West’s complicity. A legacy of invasions and coup d’états have been draped in a sheer gown of boot-strapping patriotism, first-strike self-defence, heroic exceptionalism and, of course, the blissful spread of democracy. It has been a négligé to soften the blows of nuclear bombs, cluster bombs, drone-bombs, etc. But with the Trump Administration, the pretense has been deemed too pointless to uphold, the clothing too tedious to wear.

We are witnessing a doing-away with the mask and the revelation of the face. Those of us who live in the “margins” — the poor, the racialised, the feminine, the queer, the disabled and the foreign — have always been privy of the true face, always aware of its vulgarity and barbaric potential, always careful to pirouette around its blemishes. It’s a sentiment that gets emptier the more you point it out.

Trump is not the inventor of America’s sins but his tenure as President reflects them. His success is not owed to any traditional or easily observable metric of skill but to an internal radar maladjusted to exploit all things for personal gain. The many republican men and women who once opposed him have since performed harakiris on their own integrity, humiliating themselves to stay tucked in his good graces. He doesn’t rule them with fear—at least, not the primal sense that comes from brushing paths with an apex predator in the wild. He is not scary in that way. His sycophants dread the uncertainty of not being useful to a man whose petulance has so much sway.

Trump is a man governed by the knowledge that winning isn’t a single event, or even multiple events. It is about flooring it towards the unruly crowd that stands between you and what you want, and having the grit to keep driving when your windscreen suffuses with blood and bodies crunch underneath your tires.

Donald Trump is the pseudo-secular delusion of American exceptionalism incarnate. Bending reality to his will but never slowing to question whether his will is worth bending reality to, or stopping to look at the grotesque shapes he’s warped.

To see him show concern for the destination of his immortal soul, however slight or fleeting, is enough to make you question the nature of remorse itself. Because all throughout history, we have tried—as I have done for the last few ranting paragraphs—to comprehend the psyches of men who’ve dedicated themselves to trafficking hate. What motivates them? How aware are they; of the terrorism they incite? Are they completely barren of empathy? How do they stomach the evil shit they say and do without wanting to blow their own brains out?

Are they even sorry?

“It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime… I was wrong to follow the meanness of Conservatism. I should have been trying to help people instead of taking advantage of them. I don’t hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don’t hate somebody.” — Lee Atwater, advisor to Ronald Reagan, infamous for the 1981 “Southern Strategy” audio leak, re-evaluates his life for Life Magazine after being diagnosed with a brain tumour in 1991.

After being one of the chief midwives that helped unleash President Ronald Reagan onto the world, Lee Atwater converted to Catholicism at his 11th hour and, with his dying breath, disavowed the right-wing ideologies that had brought him a long and storied career.

His renunciation was as heartfelt as it was hollow. With the personal hate in his heart washed clean by his family priest’s sacrament of penance, he passed the onus of cultural repair onto the next generation of politicians.

“I don’t know who will lead us through the ‘90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul.”

In 2002, when Margaret Thatcher was asked what her greatest achievement was, she said Tony Blair and New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds. Ever the transatlantic mirror, it isn’t hard to see that Reagan’s most notable legacy is the modern Democratic party—their rightward shift towards “The Third Way” under Clinton has meant the same “meanness” Atwater rebuked in death has been dominating America’s politics for nearly 50 years, passing right-wing “toughness” across the aisle, to and fro, in a nightmare blunt rotation.

Atwater hoped his hail mary request for a benevolent leader could remedy the poison he so strategically helped pump into the country. He died before he could see how his contributions to America’s moral decay outlasted him. Wrongdoing was admitted but his admission also laid bare what so many generations before and since have practiced in their exploitation—racial, political, environmental or otherwise—for financial gain.

I will personally benefit from the chaos I write and let my descendants pick up the pieces.

But you can’t encourage decay to fester, spritz a papistic disinfectant on it then backflip off this mortal coil and expect others to pick up the pieces. You have to be responsible for whatever you bring into the world.

After the death of his brother Ludvig, it is said that several newspapers published obituaries of Alfred Nobel in error. As the father of dynamite, it goes that a French newspaper was polemical about Nobel’s hand in inventing military explosives. Le marchand de la mort est mort — or the merchant of death is dead, the obituary supposedly wrote. Dr. Alfred Nobel, who became rich by finding ways to kill more people faster than ever before, died yesterday.

Horrified that this may be how he’d be remembered, Nobel decided he needed to leave a better legacy after his death. It is thought that this is what drove him to posthumously donate his wealth to founding the Nobel Prize.

“In 1875 he created blasting gelatin, a colloidal suspension of nitrocellulose in glycerin, and in 1887 ballistite, a nearly smokeless powder especially suitable for propelling military projectiles. Nobel, the man who had tried to make handling explosives safe for workmen, was deeply troubled by the destructiveness of his inventions and became concerned with establishing worldwide peace.”

The more earthly-educated among us might point to how his initial efforts should’ve concerned him as much as the military applications. After all, the modern disregard for the environment can be traced back directly to Nobel’s first dynamite stick, gummed against the side of an English quarry to demonstrate how minerals can be extracted quicker.

By creating the incendiary progenitor of the bomb, Nobel inspired the bloodlust of warmongers for less than a century before reaching the pinnacle of apocalyptic destruction in the form of the nuclear warhead. But even his pursuit of a more efficient alternative to the deflagration of black powder, Nobel’s chemical explosives became a cultural accelerant of capitalist expansionism, acclimatising the insatiable appetite of the free market to more violent and instant methods of resource extraction in a cancerous pursuit of financial gain.

Peruse the list of Nobel Peace Prize winners and you cannot help but notice the disparities between the recipients of the Global South (overwhelmingly individuals) and the recipients of the West (largely institutions).

Implicit in this divide is the idea that the issues of nonwestern countries are intrinsically problematic, while western countries need only be concerned with beauty-pageant issues like world hunger. These faceless institutions deal with abstract, global problems that western nations are typically responsible for.

This year, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to María Corina Machado: “for her tireless work promoting democratic rights for the people of Venezuela and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.” (There’s that “blissful spread of democracy” I mentioned earlier.)

In her recent visit to The White House, she presented her award to Donald Trump—days after he’d illegally abducted President Nicolás Maduro, openly expressed wanting to send American corporations into Venezuela to extract its oil and drone-bombed boats off the country’s coast under suspicion of drug-trafficking.

When you consider the alleged story of Alfred Nobel’s almost-obituary, The Nobel Peace Prize being a means to rehabilitate a shameful legacy explains why and how colonial paradigms run through the award itself. In an endeavour borne of shame, its founder looked to distract the world from the fire and brimstone he’d brought into it by offering a yearly ceremony of paternalistic back-patting. The intention was to manipulate the public’s perception of him; the consequence has been an institution with principles superficial enough for colonial-capitalists to launder their exploits through. It is how one Peace Prize winner can be responsible for bombing another. It is why racists can win them. It is why Henry Kissinger has one.

Where Atwater could only muster an admission of guilt in a magazine interview, Nobel, at least, pledged his wealth and instruction towards righting his wrongs. What does it mean that both men found clarity about their harm towards their death? Or found their demise the most fitting time to address said harm? One might say it speaks to how big their remorse was—big enough that their cowardice reflected it in size.

Like the moral decay at the heart of all this, the question festers: how do men like Trump, Atwater, Nobel—who live Big Lives with the will to rearrange The Way Things Are on scales so monumental that only seem to arc towards harm; their decisions echoing forward from history towards a yawning apocalypse—even begin to make up for the things they usher into the world?

Are they not driven by something urgent—sometimes well-meaning, sometimes self-serving—that, if they had a conscience, would’ve set them on a path of restoration and self-reflection long before they approached the ass-end of their lives? Instead, Nobel entrusts the establishment of peace congresses to the executors of his will. Atwater “takesies-backsies” on his death-bed. Trump chuckles at own his eternal damnation.

We live in the wake of many aftermaths. Decisions are imposed on us and sold as “tough choices”, harm topples into more harm, hate spreads rhizomatically. Those of us with littler lives—who do not become inadvertent merchants of death with our scientific discoveries, or haven’t helped usher in an endless night of morally-dissonant politics, or reinvigorated settler-colonial violence in the form of a modern lynch-mob—we are making mistakes that are far easier to try and fix.

Jimmy Carter deeply regretted how he handled Israel as president and spent his post-presidency advocating for Palestinian freedom. He is the only president to name Israel’s apartheid plainly. Most of us don’t have to herd global calamities back into Pandora box.

Whether it is the bravado of patriarchy, the cognitive dissonance of whiteness, or the legal ramifications of capitalism, the avoidance of the apology is the existential roadblock to genuine healing, it suspends the harmed in their trauma and the harmer in his mistake, forcing both to hope that time will decay the pain into something more manageable. It never does. It always festers and mutates somehow. And before it dies, it is passed down on an atomic level. It should be abundantly clear to everyone that the world we are watching become observably worse is directly correlated to a dominant culture that is chronically incapable of acknowledging when it has faulted.

It is okay to admit that you were wrong—today. That you were duped or lead astray. That you let yourself be led by the cruelest part of you and got stuck in a ditch of hate and shame. That you were mistaking stubbornness for for bravery. If you’ve been a public figure cheerleading cruelty for the short-term validation of being on the winning side, don’t be surprised if your backpedaling is met with disgust, distrust and rage. History should treat you as flippantly as you’ve treat your own responsibility to your fellow man. But if you are just a person who’s been swept up in the bonfire of other people’s bigotry, you can break away, today. Your apology doesn’t have to be as labyrinthine as the world has needlessly made it seem it has to be. You can seek forgiveness and try to rectify your mistakes, today. And if that is impossible, you can begin the process of growing past it, today. You don’t have to be like the men with Big Lives who refuse to see the error of their ways, you don’t have to wait until you’re within eyeshot of death’s door to reflect. You can still turn it around and make a change. But you have to look now.

self-assurance is a chemical; catalysing human flesh to transcend the confines of social constructs. it is not that being self-assured rips down the fences of anti-blackness, rather that being black and self-assured fashions you into a key that can unlock untold universes.

charisma is the art of finding keyholes.

it is beautiful, in a way. to know artificial incarcerations can be bypassed. it was anaïs nin who said, “life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage”. you might be a woman in a man’s world but who knows what can be achieved if you’re just a little more confident? you might be ugly in a world worshipping beauty but who knows what you can do if you’re just a little braver?

change is simple—all you need to do is rearrange your own insides.

be resolute. stand ten toes. become emotionally immovable. typhoons are known to blow round here. the unsure are doomed to be swept away by madness.

plant your feet in the soil of yourself.

one day, an external factor will expose an inner contradiction and, when floodlights glare on your hypocrisy, you’ll have to remind yourself that you needn’t be swayed.

you have decided the trajectory already. just double down.

our reality is built on doubling, tripling, quadrupling down. the figure has multiplied so many times that if it were folded paper, it would be a bridge to the moon. these unconfronted contradictions coalesce into a grotesque forest where no one admits they’re fucking wrong. the air is too slick with punitive cruelty. better to wait for the memory to die down than accept wrongdoing (legal expediency depending).

politically, doubling down is sapping nutrients from the earth. a toxic conviction compounded over generations. praise reagan on the inhale, lament about the cost of living on the exhale. pretend trickle-down economics didn’t set the pace for wealth to pool at the penthouse suite of society. why the fuck would you think there’s any connection between yesterday and today? just keep breathing.

hyperfixating on the mormons inspired and undid me. a functioning civilisation in the dust-basin of utah, its dogma coughed out to reach even the corners of africa, begun as the brainchild of some violent 19th century thug with spiritual psychosis who wanted to fuck other people’s wives. the thriving existence of the latter day saints is living proof that truth has no intrinsic value.

if changing the fabric of reality only requires the fossil fuel of delusion—the hypocrite is god’s most powerful engine. whether they metabolise shame or simply have none, they’re immune to gotcha moments because none of their mistakes aren’t terminal. being wrong is a negotiation. when the hypocrite is caught out, his psychic abilities needn’t be so sophisticated that he can bend a spoon. all he needs to do is make enough people doubt the spoon is straight.

peewee hermeneutics thinks there’s something more libidinal happening. there’s a freaky bunch he calls “hypocri-sexuals” and you might’ve come across them before. they’re the stereotypical racist who’s into cuck porn or that one florida congressman who captioned “the left must be stopped” on a video that was obviously fresh out of his own browsing history. the thrill of concealing one’s private desires behind public rebuke is what peewee hermeneutics names “the juice”, the tingly ichor that pumps through your veins when you’re doing something you know you shouldn’t. it’s the tang. the psychosexual euphoria. he describes it better than i.

whether they’re edging themselves through their contradictions, gaming reality to see how much they can get away with, being blackmailed, or simply basking in feral delusion for the vibes—it is clear that we are, and always have been, governed by maladjusted hypocrites. their incapacity to take responsibility is how they gain their responsibility in the first place. what is the point of remedies? just double down. or if the lie is too big, resign.

(the walls of perpetual diagnosis close in, compressing the air. just keep breathing.)

i have seen searchlights shine with sniper-scope precision on the glaring contradictions of the wily hypocrite. one of my biggest fears is that they’ve been left to run amok for so long that we’ve entered an era where no light is bright enough to compel a rectification of their errors. journalistic whistleblowing in the modern era has hit an inaudible pitch. once upon a time, snowden had to flee to russia for revealing how the government was surveilling its citizens. now we casually joke about how the fbi is spying on us as our devices eavesdrop on our everyday conversations for the sake of targeted marketing.

the panama papers revealed a global network of corrupt politicians and financiers. barely anyone got fired—let alone thrown in jail. those are just the examples off the top of my head. i fear no light is bright enough to send the network of hypocrites in power to the same fate as a late-stage game of jenga. or more candidly: it concerns me the epstein files might drop with undeniable proof that the upper echelon of global society is riddled with paeodophiles and the two-tier justice system won’t hold any of them accountable. we have conceded on data being constantly collected about our lives, conceded on rich people’s retention of immoral wealth, will we now concede on the safety of teens and children? the only moral anchor this society pretends to have left?

if truth has no intrinsic value then it isn’t enough to catalyse change through revelation. the prevailing option is to construct delusional reality shifts of our own or, at least, understand there might need to be sprinkles of ruthlessness to supplement what vasily grossman dubbed “the powerlessness of kindness”.

those who believe the ideological battleground is one of sense trumping nonsense are sorely missing the forest from the trees. pragmatism will only work if its applied in service of radical change. incrementalism will only work if it is building towards a world-changing dream. there is no going back to normal. normality was flimsy plasters on the holes of a bullet-riddled watering can. the maladjusted hypocrite sees no watering can. he builds his own container in whatever space is there. our very fate might just depend on who’s delusion is stronger, wider, more investable, more persuasive and, paradoxically… more true.

It did, of course, spill from the ever-sapient mouth of James Baldwin that “to be black in America and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time” and if he were alive today, I’d find no great struggle in convincing him that being black and relatively conscious in Britain imprints a similar rage, if only varied in temperature and spice. Last year, and I meandered between the clothes stands of a vintage shop in Paris conferring about the rage™ in different nations—France, England, America—and looking back, I believe we were trying to determine the different flavours of incitement, because the rage Baldwin speaks of isn’t a spontaneous combustion, it is activated by the external stimuli of injustice. Rage is the genetic consequence of experiencing a wrong. When you watch enough videos of Baldwin speaking, you get a glimpse of what it must be like to see an angel cry; a being, plummeted to earth from a place much kinder, desperate to warn God’s most ignorant children of the yawning hell-mouth they’re dancing near that would certainly devour them all. In conversation he’d forgo his rage, or perhaps surface-grind its hereditary bluntness into something more incisive in order speak to—or about—white America as if its soul was on a precipice. One of Baldwin’s most famous public appearances involved paddling himself to save Paul Weiss, a philosophy professor at Yale who despite his accomplished station, was drowning in a boisterous ocean of his own insouciance, thrashing the water in resistance to the rescue buoy of Baldwin’s wit. A similar thrashing is revealed in a discussion between Yasiin Bey, Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie on Bill Maher, though the comment section would have you believe Bey was on the business-end of an intellectual bodyslam. Yasiin Bey expresses the need for the nuclear club to be disbanded. Before he’s even set up his argument, giggles scatter through the audience, inaugurating him as the jester in this masturbatory court of philosopher-kings. Maher, Hitchens and Rushdie all dive head-first into the fertile ground of the ambient disrespect, beginning a plausibly deniable onslaught of derision towards Bey’s views on nuclear holocaust. Together, they point out the unique savagery of “radical islamists” who want to covet apocalyptic weapons and the impossible-staircase threat of Iran’s nuclear arsenal. One could talk for hours about the condescending abrasions Hitchens visits upon Bey but, in the interest of time, it’s simpler to say there were two different conversations happening at once. One man placed his ancestral rage to the side, trying to tread out a moral desire path through a field of endless, American violence. The other man believes the savagery so indigenous to The Other (in this case, Muslims but more recently, trans people) means the safety of the world can only be upheld by America’s retention of land tenure over the global pasture of violence. The pageantry of civility demands they waltz their arguments, concealing the truer, more direct points-of-view they probably wish they could both blurt out freely. Yasiin Bey’s truth is that nothing about his experience of white people could ever convince him that America having world-ending weaponry is a good or safe thing. Christopher Hitchen’s truth is that, through sheer brute force, America (and its euro-nuclear deputies) deserves to be able to end the world more than any of the back-savage civilisations. Here, Bey and Hitchens can be distilled into a crude binary. The moral and the intellectual. Morality is naïve. Intellectualism is pragmatic. There are things Bey doesn’t know that Hitchens knows and, in this particular paddock where the audience is trigger-happy with their sniggers towards Bey, Hitchens’ type of knowledge rings victorious. But what Yasiin Bey knows is what Baldwin knew is what Brian and I know is what my mother knows: there is an inner architecture of righteous rage and a spiritual consequence to not quelling it. Perhaps it is too simple to declare men like Weiss and Hitchens—thrashing eloquently in the water—were ignorant of the Black Enraged’s knowledge. Perhaps what they were reckoning with was a distorted empathy, governed by the idea that if black people did to white people what white people have done to black people, their rage would shape itself into an irrepressible crusade of vengeance. Perhaps they believe the Black Enraged are lying when we say we only want peace and to be left alone because they wouldn’t want peace. This explains why, when Yasiin Bey says he does not share the paranoid view of his fellow guests, his words are swallowed into an indignant abyss. The world has been moulded in the image of men who live in a state of cognitively dissonant paranoia—so deep in the weeds of violence that peace can only be destroyed into existence. Fifty six years ago, Paul Weiss asked Jimmy Baldwin what the fuck he was so angry about. Sixteen years ago, Hitchens, Rushdie and Maher teased Yasiin Bey for wanting America to set a moral example. Today, the world’s foremost military superpower is openly descending into fascism. Generations of heinous acts obscured by cruel and unusual discourse have dragged the Overton window to a place where the true face grows clearer. In the words of , “no worldview can hide its ontological core forever”. All pretence has eroded away and with it disappeared the utility of the high-minded water-thrashers. The public intellectual is extinct. All that remains are talking heads—calling for the euthanasia of the homeless or the bombing of the United Nations. There is only the Department of War. The parade floats of hypocrisy will likely be the most unremarkable part of the idiotic descent into nazi fan-fiction. The masochist in me is more anticipatory of the sheer cowardice that’ll be on rampant display. Will a man like Maher confront this moment with self-reflection, realising himself a pawn—no, more than that—a rook who’s angular strides towards islamophobia eked the Overton window to a more dickheadish place for years? Who among the so-called learned men—who sat opposite the Black Enraged and, for all their water-thrashing, snorts of derision and academic accolades, could not recognise the width and depth of America’s moral abyss—will admit they misjudged? Which interference runners will own the ignorance they painted over with jargon and mockery? Who among the apologists will snivel and fall in line? Who will acknowledge that the Black Enraged were right all along and try to atone in public?

for safe passage to the elysian fields of convenience, you must flip a coin of denial to the ferryman.

he will take you across the styx—an ectoplasmic river of restless souls—towards the opportunity at a better life; a place away from the savage wilderness.

all you have to do is pretend.

pretend that those who spend their entire political careers dragging the overton window of american discourse towards divisive rhetoric are reasonable, moderate men.

you have to pretend the chaos you see all around you has no discernible origin. no chauffeurs helped usher it in.

you have to pretend your performance of civility—a livelong endeavour—in response to political violence conceals some sophisticated, moral clarity despite all the political violence that’s occurred beneath the star-spangled banner.

all the civil us-backed coups. all the civilising foreign invasions. all the civil assassinations.

you have to pretend violent ideologies spawn from an ether, that words are, simultaneously, powerfully transformative and incapable of inciting great violence, despite the fact that each and every one of us is transformed by words every single day.

you have to pretend the death of a man—who’s love for the second amendment embellished his neck with a deadly love-bite—is a tragedy, and not a genetic consequence of his own advocacies.

you have to pretend that, because he spoke quickly and with conviction, was acrobatic with his arguments and “debated the right way”, he was a public intellectual worth more than the souls he made restless or the indigenous people he refused to acknowledge. you have to pretend to mourn, even when clips of his long, public career are functionally unusable for a visual eulogy because the fibre of his arguments were noticeably more heinous than his delivery of them.

you have to pretend you don’t understand why so many people are happy he’s gone—as if gleeful reaction to death is some uniquely evil feeling attributed to uniquely evil people and not some common emotion people experience so often that it has its own word. you have to pretend that, because he did things “the right way”, anybody who expresses their schadenfreude deserves swift punishment.

you have to pretend that “the right way” is cosmically neutral.

this is when you reach your hand over the rim of ferryman’s boat. your fingers skim the water. you feel a tug and recoil.

when the ferryman’s boat docks, you’re surprised to find your payment of denial has only gotten you across the river.

there is more you must do for the tranquility of elsyian fields.

the fates stand before you with scales.

the man’s soul is weighed against 100,000—give or take.

his entire life was pantomime of incitement. his words were engineered to leave the world worse way than when he found it. he called a black man everyone saw choke to death a “scumbag”. he once said, “i hate the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that — it does a lot of damage.”

from his own daughter to the starving of palestinians—he spoke of fellow human with something worse than overt contempt—a detached, theatrical lens, flexible in presentation but profoundly inflexible in ideology and punctuated by bad-faith theoreticals that always seemed to conceal what he really believed. his legacy is one of stochastic terrorism, folding divisive rhetoric in half enough times to conceal its true ambition. it seems he was a pretender, too. there were only ever flashes of genuine inhabitance in his performances, propagandising mischaracterised as debate, where he could pretend his words weren’t the merchandise of a sycophant accruing spiteful interest.

now the fates hold his soul in a dish—counterweighted to starved palestinians, the ever-climbing casualties of american gun violence, trans suicides, george floyd and other victims of police brutality and an immeasurable amount more.

all you have to do is pretend once again. make a statement that “political violence has no place here” to a country with a $997 billion military budget that’s spent its entire existence at war.

one of the fates sees you falter.

“are you weary?”

you are but you believe in the pageant. you believe the revelry of it is all that’s holding this civilisation together. the truth is—it is crumbling under the weight of its own glaring contradictions. the energetic pressure needed to hold together the psychic stage, where one side of the violence demands condemnation and the other side rejuvenates its skin in conquered blood, generates enough raw power to level nagasaki and hiroshima twice over.

you make the statement.

the fates cut a door from the very fabric of reality with a pair of scissors.

elysium.

you step through.

and find a meadow on fire.

Somewhere between the valley of doom-scroll fatigue and the peak frustration of having to endure the ritualistic humiliations of capitalism, I dash away my overflowing folder of apparently unimpressive Curriculum Vitaes and prostrating cover letters, open up a new Text Post (yes, I’m one of those psychos who write directly into the Substack drafts—when life has no edge, whetstone your own) and make the decision to bravely cover ground I’ve not yet trodden before.

That’s right, darlings. I’m finally tackling ✨Artificial Intelligence✨.

At first, I dream of a go-to guide on AI resistance—a coruscating analysis so thorough that, if you squint, you’d mistake it for a sassy PhD paper. I start writing. The dream becomes misshapen. Its too stiff, it sounds preachy, its tedious to write and even more boring to recite back. The draft transforms, implodes, evolves. The intention to explore the concerns of, and around, this technology remain.

It’s difficult to talk about Artificial Intelligence when it’s building its own hull mid-flight. Criticism of an emergent technology requires figuring out how to criticise it—which involves working backwards from the visceral instinct and shaping its raw material into something refined. When it comes to AI, I trust my intuition. It tells me to not be fooled, to be wary, to resist, speaking at a volume much louder than the usual paranoia that basically utters the same kind of things, only quieter and about more absurd shit, like the old white lady in Tesco who looked me dead in the eye before tilting her shopping trolley to a 90-degree angle in the middle of the aisle, trundling off to pick up some Le Rustique Pasteurised Camembert from another shelf. I know you saw me coming, Glenda.

I’d rather not repackage my intuition and present it as “balanced” in pursuit of a journalistic standard that pretends neutrality is the highest form of intellect—so high, in fact, that nary a mainstream news outlet in the western hemisphere can complete a muscle-up to call a genocide by its name. Thus, I abandoned the dream of a comprehensive go-to guide.

Instead, I crafted a GPS route (because traditional maps are cartographically obsolete and everything outdated deserves a vicious, peasant’s death) to document a wandering.

Follow along, if you want.

Picture me: hunched over laptop keys.

Eviscerating, technophobic take-downs seep from my finger-tips with a viscosity that is, quite frankly, gross to the point of sensual intrigue.

I’m riffing on a level that is frickin’ sublime. Until I’m undone by a stray Google search that coldly and callously sets in motion a chain of events which end with me realising I’ve been mistaking Generative AI for Artificial General Intelligence.

Yikes.

I backspace 2000 words in blind fury. Here I am, thinking the Ayahuasca-addled, Great Automatic Grammatizator of ChatGPT is four OpenAI updates away from gaining sentience and plugging us all into the Matrix. I’d lapped up the shiny, chrome Kool-Aid. A faux pas destined to haunt me as ghoulishly as the time I loudly mispronounced a word I’d only ever seen written in a room full of my literary peers at one of the most prestigious libraries in Britain.

I’ve been saying “high-per-bowl” for like, two decades. Oh, well.

In case you’ve been messing up, too: Generative AI uses deep learning to specialise in a complex but single task—making them narrow artificial intelligences. Some also call them “weak artificial intelligences” but I’d rather not have too many robophobic comments in my digital archives when the techno-pocalypse begins. You think the backlash against white celebrities’ circa 2012 tweets was bad? Wait until our future robot C.E.Overlords dig up your old “clanker” jokes.

Anyway, Large Language Models, Text-to-Video Models, Text-to-Image Models, Text-to-Music generation are all examples of narrow artificial intelligence. The most popular and widely accessed Generative AI is, of course, Chat-GPT. Its task is to pull from vast datasets of text to generate humanlike responses to input queries. It does this task pretty well—but it sucks at maths. ChatGPT couldn’t tie its own shoelaces if you screwdrove robot hands to its servers. And it’s probably not going to win any Go championships any time soon.

There is so much stuff about Generative AI floating in the necrotic vastness of cyberspace.

AI’s getting more powerful but its “hallucinations” are getting worse.

Humans are falling in love with prompt machines.

Claude Opus 4 might resort to blackmail to stay alive.

Anybody want to create a NSFW chat-bot girlfriend?

Facial recognition policing seems pretty dystopian.

Generated babies videos, that feels pretty spooky.

A teenager killed himself earlier this year after months of encouragement by Chat-GPT.

Learning literally anything about Palantir1.

Separating the reasonable risk from the moral panic or the valid benefits from capitulatory glazing was a dizzying exercise that, honestly, would’ve made a go-to guide come out pretty shit. Luckily I’m not doing that any more. I still think Artificial Intelligence, especially the Generative persuasion, is a pretty bad idea.

In the anthropocene—the era where mankind has, in our impressively short lifespan on the face of the earth, had the biggest hand in fucking it up—humanity has caused:

• Biodiversity loss

  • The decline of insect populations

  • The extinction of 777 animal species since 1500

• Mass deforestation

  • Land Infertility

• Fossil fuel over-dependence

  • Ocean Acidification

  • Greenhouse gas emissions

• Radioactive contamination

• Plastic waste

• Air, Water, and Light Pollution

Britain kicked off the industrial revolution, setting the pace for America to take the rootin’, tootin’ pollution baton and digivolve into a superpower. There was a glimmer of hope, maybe, once. A brief period where environmental consciousness was an institutional focus in a presidential administration. Jimmy Carter established the Department of Energy in 1977, set goals to shore up renewable energy, regulated strip mining and even installed solar panels on the The White House roof. As far as being in charge of a hyper-militarised, cowboy capitalist settler-colony built on slavery with an insatiable lust for instigating foreign coup d'états, Jimmy seemed like a pretty decent bloke2.

I guess the American public thought he was a hippie loser who was too soft on the Ay-rabs or whatever—so they voted him out. I probably needn’t say more than Ronald Reagan removed the solar panels in 1986.

Industrialised nations have gone on to pave a global ecosystem over the natural world. You read studies reporting half of world’s CO2 emissions comes from 36 fossil fuel firms, concentrating pent-up rage at the big, bad, ultimately faceless energy companies. We know the biggest culprits, just as we know tearing down those 36 firms, shutting down plastic production or turning off every oil refinery on the planet would destabilise our precious ecosystem (which is totally the best system that’s ever existed) in a way nobody is willing to deal with. Imagining a new world is one thing, bringing it into fruition is another.

You and I may never have a carbon footprint as big as an oil baron but we’re complicit by way of citizenship of the western world. And it sucks. A lot of bisonshit being done in our name and with our tax pennies. Trivial (or fraudulent) initiatives help us believe meaningful change is happening, as if the inconvenience of drinking through paper straws at Wagamama’s or manoeuvring our mouths around bottle-lid attachments are finally turning the tide in the war against pollution. Tell that to the micro-plastics in my amygdala, every raindrop on the planet being contaminated with forever chemicals or the garbage island the size of Angola floating in the North Pacific.

Everything about the way we’re living as a civilisation is so clearly unsustainable and it seems vaster and more interconnected than we can wrap our palaeolithic minds around. There’s little anyone feels they can do about it individually because if my next-door neighbour isn’t giving up beef to save the Amazon rainforest then why the hell should I deprive myself of a cheeky Marks and Sparks Wagyu steak?

Companies that bleed and burn the world’s fossil fuels are seen as “lawful” because the greenhouse gasses they pump into the air are within “acceptable legal limits” while climate activists are routinely punished under the same rule of law. A bunch of countries signed that Paris Agreement like, a decade ago. That was cool. Can’t help but feel like the government I have the displeasure of living under takes the agreement less seriously than they take the French themselves, though. Seems like they’re more wrapped up in the brave work of berating and criminalising asylum seekers as a spineless capitulation to the rising far-right in this country.

I get it. After 20+ years of whipping the white working class into a rabid islamophobic fugue state, it’s probably easier to dabble in perception management than try to avert the slow-motion car-crash of societal collapse. It’s just toooo difficult to tax über-rich guys, treat war-fleeing asylum seekers with some basic human dignity and transition towards sustainability before we’re all smoked by hydrofluorocarbons.

…This is the cultural context Generative AI is spawning into.

One of the more widely studied impacts of Generative AI is its energy use.

Each time a model is used, perhaps by an individual asking ChatGPT to summarize an email, the computing hardware that performs those operations consumes energy. Researchers have estimated that a ChatGPT query consumes about five times more electricity than a simple web search.3

Alphabet Inc’s CEO John Hennessy often gets cited when speaking about the energy expense of LLM’s, claiming they “likely cost 10 times more than a standard keyword search.” points out that a single ChatGPT prompt only uses 3 Watt-hours—equivalent to running a vacuum cleaner for 10 seconds or playing a games console for a minute.

If you multiply an extremely small value by 10, it can still be so small that it shouldn’t factor into your decisions. If you were being billed $0.0005 per month for energy for an activity, and then suddenly it began to cost $0.005 per month, how much would that change your plans?”4

The MIT Technology Review crunched the numbers of AI’s energy usage. I’m only half-concerned with the statistics themselves. The figures for energy usage (or water consumption) are fundamentally flawed abstractions. The consequences of the data they represent are too far removed from our immediate experiences. When I mentioned abstaining from eating beef, do you think you would’ve thought about the Amazon Rainforest unless I mentioned it explicitly?

When it comes to environment, we rely on translations to make us care. Harm presented as numerical data, verified reports of collapsing environments, photographic evidence of decaying habitats. I don’t think you need them. Because you feel it, don’t you? The friction between capitalistic growth and ecological sustainability, its thermal contradiction contorting your mind and cracking the planet like an eggshell. Food doesn’t taste as flavourful any more. There’s way less bugs in the summer. The last few European heatwaves straight up caused thousands of heat deaths. Academic papers and copious links in a Substack essays don’t need to convince you.

You can feel it.

Environmental critiques of Generative AI should be a discussion-ending mic-drop but we’re so culturally avoidant about nature’s destruction that any pollution Generative AI causes is too easily rationalised as inconsequential. Its just more, unremarkable wood for the raging bonfire that’s already suffocating us all.

Generative AI isn’t uniquely polluting. Masley’s claim that Chat-GPT isn’t bad for the environment isn’t a calculus of harm, more a declaration of conformity saying: The damage isn’t that bad when you compare it to the damage that’s already going on. In a way, these kinds of essays are initiation processes—welcoming Generative AI into the apathetic norm.

The Earthly

An Entire Country Has to Be Evacuated Because of Climate Change

If you want to understand what climate collapse looks like, look to Tuvalu. A nation that has done almost nothing to cause this crisis is now being told to pack up and leave. Not because of war or economic ruin, but because the ocean is swallowing it. One wave at a time…

Read more

8 months ago · 179 likes · 5 comments · earthlyeducation

Perhaps then—it is more useful to speak about what will, rather than what is. If Generative AI is to become a societal mainstay (and I suspect it’ll have more enduring relevancy than the equally environmentally unfriendly ancestor of NFT’s) the demands of its existence will come at a great cost to the world.

Those costs will mount—environmentally, financially and, fuck it, existentially—blending into the expenses we’re already spending, hiding in plain sight until we can no longer live in denial about their impact.

In Britain alone, data centre usage is expected to “surge six-fold in 10 years”. There’s no way on God’s rapidly-browning Earth that uptick will be handled greenly. At best, the data centres will comply with current energy regulations—keeping the civilisational ship steady on its course towards a slowly melting iceberg. At worst, high demand will lead to aggressive expansions and data centres like Elon Musk’s that are currently poisoning Memphis will become far more common. At a certain point, we have to ask whether the technological advancements bringing comfort to our lives are worth the breath they’re stealing from our sky and what we’re going to do about it.

Gary Stevenson was a Citibank trader, securing major successes in finance by betting on the collapse of the economy. He left it all to write a book and run a Youtube channel calling for the UK government to tax the rich.

Stevenson breaks down how the wealthy have been capitalising from economic events like austerity, COVID bailouts and the housing crisis with focused concision. His videos are like Promethean fire on these bleak abysmal isles. Boy, is it dark-sided round here. At the top of the year, Oxfam reported, “Britain has highest proportion of billionaire wealth derived from monopolies and cronyism among G7 countries.” According to the Economic Policy Institute, CEO’s in 2023 were paid “290 times as much as a typical worker—in contrast to 1965, when they were paid 21 times as much as a typical worker.” America

Stevenson’s videos and public appearances warn, urgently, that if the unchecked greed of corporatism isn’t met with intervention the resulting economic decline will plunge large portions of the population into poverty. We are careening towards neofeudal levels of wealth divides and it’s clear that Generative AI is one of architectural instruments being used to accelerate this transmission of wealth:

“CEOs are extremely excited about the opportunities that AI brings. As a CEO myself, I can tell you, I’m extremely excited about it. I’ve laid off employees myself because of AI. AI doesn’t go on strike. It doesn’t ask for a pay raise. These things that you don’t have to deal with as a CEO.” — Elijah Clark5

Entry level jobs are disappearing. OpenAI themselves declared the roll-out of Chat-GPT 5 is “a major step towards placing intelligence at the center of every business.”6 Worker replacement has already begun. In the US, there is currently more unemployment than job openings. People are getting replaced and the entity does a shittier job than them.

Recently, when watching Burnt (2015) on Amazon Prime, the captions had translation errors similar to Tiktok videos and Instagram Reels. There were three different misspellings of “tarragon” because three different people said it in three different accents. A professional captioner wouldn’t have made that mistake. It was clear Amazon Prime had begun using AI to caption their films and TV shows.

Y’know—If I could do one thing to dam the virulent spread of anti-intellectualism, it’d be blow-darting the knowledge into everyone’s brains that “X is the New Y” statements are not impressive in 2025. The most insufferable sapiosexual you know is spewing out some fake-deep word equation like “AI is the new printing press” and the similarities are so surface level that it’d only be a lightbulb moment for someone so dim they need Chat-GPT to--You know what? Too mean. I’m trying to abstain from the holier-than-thou supposition that Generative AI is an inherent, intellectual failing and I’ve grown a little uncomfortable with the “Chat-GPT depletes critical thinking” quips. They’re getting a little eugenicsy, if you ask me.

But I don’t know, man. The printing press made scribes and scriveners obsolete by democratising the mass-production of books. Generative AI is transactional—you prompt what you want and it echoes those wants back to you. The process of creativity is outsourced and, ultimately, forfeited. Artistically, it’s creative middle management.

Any resemblance AI has to the printing press begins and ends at the point of it being a popular, new technology—which you could just as easily compare to the home printer or mobile phones. If we’re going to whip up cringy snowclones, I’d personally go with “AI is the new cotton mill” seeing as the debut of the textile factory was met with infamous animosity. Retrospect implores us to see the comforts of today through a sort of teleological-capitalist lens—we look around and see iPads, flat-screens and Teslas and we infer they’re optimally designed.

Deeper investigation shows the Luddite movement was fighting to preserve standards of living we’d be lucky to have today. Their Cottage Industry was the OG Work From Home. Cloth-makers wanted the autonomy to continue earning wages that didn’t depend on working under someone else’s roof. When peaceful protests and appeals to government were denied, the cloth-makers earned the Luddite moniker by sabotaging the cotton mill machinery.

History has downplayed Luddism as a neanderthal tantrum or superstitious moral panic. It wasn’t some ooga-booga vandalism against technological progress, it was a calculated resistance against the exploitation the machinery facilitated. We could probably do with more of that, huh?

In this respect, AI is just as unremarkable as every industrial advancement. Quickness is king but “better” is a matter of perspective. When citing the medical content offered by Chat-GPT, a study found “most of the references provided were found to be fabricated or inaccurate.7” Recruitment algorithm bias is evident in gender, race, colour, and personality.8 Captioning software—from short-form video reels to streaming services—are less accurate than human subtitlers. The quality is poor enough to notice but not unbearable enough for users to jump ship. How many typos in an AI-generated caption would make delete Tiktok or cancel your Netflix?

Whether its exploiting the precarious citizenship status of migrants, outsourcing customer service to overseas call-centres or offshoring factory production to sweatshops—the practise of capitalising off of the lowest-paid labour force possible has long been established as a savvy business move.

Generative AI is the next evolutionary step to cheap out on labour. Corporate executives can replace working people with entities that don’t take lunch breaks, go to the toilet, join unions or sleep. Tensions will squeeze along existing, social grooves as the discontent is palmed off on predetermined scapegoats—asylum seekers and Schrödinger’s Immigrants. The fanned flames of rising Anglo-American fascism are a perfect distraction for a heist-in-plain-sight transference of wealth.

Will Dunn, the business editor of the New Statesman, poses an interesting question. If machine-generation is such an inevitability of progress, why are entry jobs so readily accepted as replaceable by Artificial Intelligence as opposed to executive level jobs?

Automating jobs can be risky, especially in public-facing roles. After Microsoft sacked a large team of journalists in 2020 in order to replace them with AI, it almost immediately had to contend with the PR disaster of the software’s failure to distinguish between two women of colour. Amazon had to abandon its AI recruitment tool after it learned to discriminate against women. And when GPT-3, one of the most advanced AI language models, was used as a medical chatbot in 2020, it responded to a (simulated) patient presenting with suicidal ideation by telling them to kill themselves.

What links these examples is that they were all attempts to automate the kind of work that happens without being scrutinised by lots of other people in a company. Top-level strategic decisions are different. They are usually debated before they’re put into practice – unless, and this is just another reason to automate them, employees feel they can’t speak up for fear of incurring the CEO’s displeasure.9

If we consider executive roles rely on high-octane decision-making, wouldn’t it be better to replace them with a machine that can look closely at company data and make semi-accurate forecasts analysing input trends?

The duties of an executive are obscured to the average worker, trapping us in the logical assumption that what a CEO does must be 290 times harder or riskier than the average worker, therefore justifying they’re 290 times more valuable. Yet, other countries that are happier like Finland or more technologically advanced like South Korea have far less pay disparity between their workers and executives.

Our society values everything from Executive vantage point. The news reports GDP has risen and you and I feel proud at how well our country is doing then we walk through our local town centre or high street and witness the decline of infrastructure around us. Generative AI is never seriously considered as a replacement for CEO’s because executives hold the share of political power to decide who is replaceable. They would never guillotine themselves.

There are more pressing thought experiments than whether “AI is the new printing press” or its protestors are neo-luddites. Generative AI should make us question the very nature of progress.

Why is the cycle of technological progress one that threatens the livelihood of the labourer, of the artist, of the working class?

When will we prioritise technological advancements that make wealth-hoarders obsolete?

In response to ’s experience of Substack plagiarism, argues “ is an Echoborg more than she is a Plagiarist” — an “Echoborg” being a person who does “not speak thoughts originating in their own central nervous system: Rather, the words they speak originate in the mind of another person who transmits these words to the cyranoid.10” He arrives here after observing how a particular genre of Substack essay courts popularity:

Many of the posts we see on Substack, the ones which go most immediately and clearly viral, are what I would like to call “empty vessel posts.” They’re posts, like a Rupi Kaur poem, with just the right amount of substance and nothingness that the work becomes perfectly reflective.

The reference to Rupi Kaur’s “instapoetry” is apter to his point than he knows. Many may not be aware that Kaur was confronted by one of her contemporaries, Nayirrah Waheed, about the “hyper-similarities” between their work in the early 2010’s.

One could throw paint at the wall about why Waheed’s allegations never impacted Kaur’s meteoric rise—the infancy of call-out culture, the implicit power imbalance between Kaur (an Indian-Canadian) and Waheed (a Black woman), a robust public relations team that’s seemed to have scrubbed all mention of Kaur naming Waheed (and Warsan Shire) as her inspiration. All likely contributors. Although, the most obvious factor may lie with the writing itself.

Instapoetry naturally evolved from Tumblr, where Nayyirah Waheed, Warsan Shire and Lang Leav dominated the reblogs. If we were being reductive, we might assert this emergent genre was a spiritual predecessor to Chat-GPT outputs—accustoming the literary appetite of an impressionable generation in the compressed frame of social media. It was poetry mirroring the sleek character-limit of a tweet, the zippiness of a vine, the square-crop of an instagram photo.

As a genre, Instapoems lure you into bathing in their earnestness, economical wording and finely-chopped line-breaks, at their best. At their worst, they shatter their own illusion, revealing themselves as fragmented quotes, stretched-out and cosplaying depth. The latter is how many receive Kaur’s writing—personal but cavernous in a way that eerily resembles Rick and Morty’s description of the popular new kid Bruce Chutback: “He just kinda sat there—with a jaw slack enough for us to project our insecurities on.”

For many, Kaur’s writing was an entry point into poetry but, in a way, her work feels like reading an afterlife. Every meaning is suspended in a controversial purgatory between profound and banal, flooded with so much white space that it’s practically impossible to assess if plagiarism is even possible in something that conveys so little.

I sympathise with Waheed. “Hyper-similarity” is a diplomatic way to approach what you feel in your bones as someone biting your style and calling it “inspiration”11.

When the line between plagiarism and inspiration blur into a spectacle of philosophical debate, it is interesting—if not entirely predictable—who ends up benefiting from the ethical greyness and who ends up suffering.

Since confronting about her viral “essay”, others have lasered in on her conduct in a way that, unfortunately, misses the greater issue. It’s not just about her usage of Generative AI but how she’s used it as a laundering service to lift the work of others.

The optics of Tyler googling essays about “AI” and “taste” and prompting the results into Chat-GPT is far less juicy than a rising Tiktok influencer copying and pasting someone else’s essay into their notes app then publishing it on their own Substack because, whoopsie, they forgot!

It’s unfortunate that a platform-wide outcry recognising Tyler’s plagiarism is unlikely.

I lack the clout to nail the coffin shut. Or perhaps my assertions are too flimsy to summon a Substack mob towards boycotts and pitchforks. Just as it was impossible for Waheed to prove Kaur was sucking the spiritual essence from her Tumblr contemporaries—it’s impossible for anyone to prove that Tyler lifted Veldenberg’s essay and ran it through Chat-GPT without a subpoena of her laptop.

Despite my profound dissatisfaction at being forced to know about the existence of yet another trans-obsessed, pseudo-spiritual, scammerific white woman with the supernatural willpower to make her own mediocrity everyone else’s problem—the case of Stepfanie Tyler provided me an opportunity to refine some of that gooey, visceral intuition I spoke about earlier.

Every technological advancement leaves gaps for opportunists to flood in, hungry to exploit the lawlessness of the empty, new marketplace before regulatory bodies start interfering with pesky ethics and legal protections that’ll spoil all the fun.

This, too, is an inevitability of “progress”.

On Substack, AI Enthusiasts (or “Boosters”) are the first to tell you that using Generative AI to “assist” their writing is an Armstrongian step towards embracing innovation. As a result, they’re publishing something unlike traditional writing. They’re producing something new. For lack of a better term, they are “post-writing” while reaping the benefits of being considered alongside “traditional” writers.

Any moral concerns with Generative AI are misrepresented as parental finger-wagging: “you’re denying progress, you’re denying the inevitable, you’re denying prompters their right to use their tools in peace.”

They’re distractions from the core concern that should worry us all: Generative AI is defined exclusively by its ability to mislead.

The success of the most powerful technology of our time is measured by how convincing it’s able to be.

Deception is the core principle of its value and its maintenance.

My distaste with the Stepfanie Tylers of the world is their disingenuousness. Cool, they may announce their work is AI-generated in isolated “essays” as they petulantly restate their right to do whatever they want, but in the pieces that go viral and amass them hundreds of paid subscribers—there is never any overt disclosure.

A general reader randomly coming across their “work” will assume it’s traditionally written because Boosters lack the integrity to disclaim it was generated by Chat-GPT at the start of the “curated” technicolor yawns they churn out.

The success of their “work” depends on a lack of transparency that has never had to exist before.

Whether its bad faith analogies comparing Generative AI usage to literal studying, corporate-wellness campaigns about AI’s potential to expand humanness or the fact that whenever Chat-GPT hocks a loogie of false information its branded a “hallucination” (my Crustacean in Christ: that is called a mistake) — deception of Generative AI is so integral to its form and function that all its chief advocates perform amateur gymnastics with the English language just to talk about it.

We have a word for that.

Chip tweets his shock about people who are “genuinely upset” after finding out he’s used Chat-GPT but is it not revealing to say, “if they catch you?”, a phrase almost exclusively used to describe when we’ve caught a person in a lie. The “actual people irl” are upset about being deceived and Chip speaks of them like their feelings are inconceivable. This is because Chip has already normalised the inherent deception of Chat-GPT into his own moral framework. Chip simultaneously admits that he’s trafficking deceit while the purpose of his tweet is to dictate how others should respond to being deceived.

In a conversation with Ezra Klein, the electronic musician Holly Herndon declares, “AI is aggregated human intelligence so it’s better to call it collective intelligence than artificial intelligence.” Simone Biles would be impressed. Referring to Generative AI as “collective” only makes sense if the information were consensually collected. It is commonly known that Generative AI has been largely trained on artist’s work without permission. OpenAI themselves state:

Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression – including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents – it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials.12

It wouldn’t be impossible. It would simply take more time and effort than any capital-dependent endeavour is willing or capable of handling.

A true “collective intelligence” would require dedicated outreach; certifying permission from every author, film director or musician, perhaps, under a non-profit organisation. Kind of like how OpenAI was founded. I suppose they shifted to a for-profit structure so they could win the Age-of-Ultron arms race with villainous China.

This is about more than “copyright infringement”. AI generates “slop” because the creative works they’re trained on are compressed into the algorithmic sludge of a dataset. When the creators of Large Language Models treat literary works like cattle-feed—pseudo-sustenance is pre-ordained.

Artists weren’t given a choice. These datasets are hoarded resources, appropriated through unethical practices that perfectly mirror the western world’s colonial extraction of resources from underdeveloped nations. But to be a citizen of the west means to master denial, doesn’t it? Being proudly maladjusted to the mounting exploitations that’ve afforded us comfort? If we can ignore the smog in the air and the blood in the soil—ignoring the theft of intellectual labour is child’s play.

The creators of this technology had every opportunity to practise ethical acquisition. They failed. The trajectory of Generative AI has been manipulated into being a matter of hoarding data yet we have a “supercomputer” in our skulls that we needn’t level a forests to power its storage. In order to justify this arc of “progress”, tech companies must evangelise—banking on a sheepish concoction of ignorance and apathy in their users so they can bombard AI extensions on every website and app imaginable until we’re forced to submit, conform, and get real comfy nut-guzzling a technology that’s primary merchandise is deceit.

After learning Large Language Models weren’t a stones throw away from achieving Artificial General Intelligence, I got a little obsessed with Superintelligence.

I watched lectures, debates, read papers—all of them laced with homogenous particles of fear that Superintelligent AI is going to be smarter than us and arrive sooner than we think.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out two things I noticed:

A) In Star Wars: Rogue One, Director Krennic—played pitch perfectly by Ben Mendelson—despite not being a Taoist space wizard, carries a gravitas that positions him as the most heinous motherfucker in every room. He’s a commander of men. A real billy big bollocks. Darth Vader demands an audience with him and, in a moment of displeasure, the Asthmatic Sith Lord force-chokes him out. When Vader releases his grip, Krennic looks at Vader with this kaleidoscope of emotions—Fear, awe, a little turned on.

That’s how every computer nerd talks about AI Superintelligence.

B) They’re mostly white guys (I’m not being cute. It’s relevant, I promise).

The AI 2027 report theorises the timeline of Superintelligence over the next couple of years. There’s a substantial focus on misalignment—where AI stops serving humans and begins to act in its own self interests.

This is the place where the white-guy fear, science-fictional awe and libidinal arousal all begin to coalesce in real life.

Our current political landscape has dumbass podcasters swinging elections and a nightmare blunt rotation of a country openly stating they “create a pretend world”. Superintelligence being “misaligned” with “human interests” doesn’t sound nearly as catastrophic as Superintelligence being “aligned” with the current people in power and their emotional-support, Silicon Valley sycophants when all of them are weird fucking guys powered by dad-shaped holes in their hearts itching to pull the Scooby-Doo mask off this technology and reveal it to be a nefarious tool of repression.

I can’t help but notice how these conversations about Superintelligence’s misalignment are masochistic—wary but curiously receptive to the dystopian possibility of the machines cleansing the world. They are a fundamentally white supremacist fantasy—steeped in colonial guilt, christian fundamentalist suicidal ideation or the patriarchal urge to die slow in the undriven snow and take all of civilisation with them. A cynical part of me can’t help but see fear-mongering about Superintelligence feels like a misdirect from the technofeudalist ambitions of mass surveillance.

There’s always been this bizarre yearning for technology to be apolitical, evolving to realise some detached, universal truth. A Superintelligence won’t be able to feel in anyway that we recognise but it will think, mechanically, in ways that we do. There’s no way Superintelligence will evolve into some cosmically unbiased entity because Generative AI hasn’t even manifested that way. No matter the control, feigned control or restraint—intentionally or unintentionally—a creation will always reflect the biases of its creators.

AI marks the Imperial March of an Orwellian cyberspace where post-truth is one-shotting uni students and baby boomers alike. Some of my darlings are getting caught in the hype. I want to shake the black and white swirls out their eyes. A ratking of the worst people imaginable can’t wait for this technology to become so advanced that it’s indistinguishable from human creativity—as if their silicone-based salivation doesn’t provide a perfect, spit-shined reflection of their contempt for humanity itself.

We’re walking the plank, bruv. The sharks are circling and the water below is a hyperreality where nobody knows what the fuck is real. Open curiosity is replaced with distrustful paranoia. Americans lynch kids and teenagers for playing knock down ginger and weirdos everywhere are trying to transvestigate any woman who doesn’t look like Baywatch-Era Pamela Anderson. And we’re supposed to believe that a Silicon Valley Word Generator spewing up fantasised facts and pseudo-sentient Photoshops churning out fake images are going to be a stabilising presence to our so-called democracy?

It’s about to get PEAK politically. Right-wingers are about to flood the internet with some of the most mean-spirited, cognitively dissonant and ideologically incoherent weirdo slop you’ve ever seen. Sycophantic politicians will amplify AI-generated dead cats whenever they need to distract from some shady scandal they want buried.

But tools aren’t neutral. As a technology, Generative AI is akin to wanting invisibility as a superpower. You can probably do some cool stuff with it but nobody who wants to be invisible ever really wants to use it for good.

With Artificial Intelligence, the deceit embodying its very existence is being concealed under the guise of efficiency and progress. The lasting implications of this is a future where we cannot trust the images we see, the words that we read, the videos we watch. It is a level of distrust that only serves a particular brand of elites who get to exploit everyone else’s confusion.

When the most influential technology of our time is leading to us not trusting anything that we see it begs the question: what direction are we “progressing” towards?

Sight informs touch to anticipate softness when we see a furry surface. The olfactory braids with the gustatory—sometimes tightly enough that aromas are perceived by the tongue. The cohabitation of the senses in the body results in a diplomacy so coherent the absence of one is said to lead to the heightening of others.

One sense has expanded past its border. Thomas Kaminski describes taste as “the faculty by which we make judgments about art1” — its fixture as a metaphor for aesthetic sensibility was explored by 18th century philosophers who’d pen sprawling diss-ertations and hype up their theories as Michael R. Spicher summarises:

“For David Hume, taste is a subjective feeling with a standard found within the beholders. For Alexander Gerard, taste is an act of the imagination. For Immanuel Kant, taste is subjective, but beautiful objects present themselves as having universal appeal.2”

Immanuel Kant is considered one of the most influential moral thinkers in western thought. He and Hume were also profoundly racist. Mentioning the latter does not liquidate the reality of the former but it does sober the context.

The tug-of-war between subjective affinity and objective standard is complicated by the fact that aesthetic standards were largely defined by an era of imperial expansion, aristocratic elitism and patriarchal catholicism. When Akala states, “I can't say Shakespeare is the greatest writer of all time. I don’t read Arabic, I don’t read Mandarin, I don’t read Swahili” it’s because despite being held as the literary standard, the ubiquity of Shakespeare’s greatness has been heavily dependent on imposing Anglo-European culture on the rest of the world.

How does Kant’s musings on taste change in the light when you consider his xenophobic ignorance lead him to believe “negroes are the lowest of all of the American races3”? What does it mean that Hume believed taste to be governed by a standard found in the beholder when he beheld it “apt to suspect the negroes to be naturally inferior to the whites”?4

If the olfactory can influence the gustatory in the same body—doesn’t it stand to reason the prejudicial influences the philosophical?

There’s an odour—foul enough to shrivel tastebuds, pungent enough to stir the guts.

Is this what the end of the world smells like?

Many believe the scent of apocalypse wafted into the airways with the detonation of the atomic bomb, where an uncloseable hell-mouth was pried open by patriotic warmongers and advanced nuclear physics. Others look back further to the smog of the industrial revolution.

My crack-pot theory has more banality in its evil than the soot of the combustion engine or a radioactive holocaust’s ectoplasmic glow.

To me, humanity’s fate was sealed with the production of plastic—a functionally immortal nuisance that defies the natural laws of decay, stubbornly refusing to give itself back to the worms, trees or mycelium. It seems “progress” always places nature on a slab for ritual sacrifice. Plastic is one of our most profound trespasses. And we yearn to be just like it.

When compared to silicon-based neural networks, a Nobel Prize winning scientist calls the neuroplasticity of the brain a “sloppy system”.

Michel Foucault might speculate this cavalier attitude towards human intellect in the face of artificial intelligence’s infancy originates from “the 'Enlightenment', which discovered the liberties, [but] also invented the disciplines.5”

He believed the disciplines to be formulas of domination, “policies of coercion” formulated to “increase the forces of the body (in economic terms of utility) and diminish these same forces (in political terms of obedience).”

Is it not the conditioning of “the disciplines” that compel us to marvel at the efficiency of computers while we scoff at the “sloppiness” of a human mind so complex that it can’t even fully comprehend itself?

ChatGPT can churn out academic essays with made-up resources in seconds but it can’t cook a meal or do maths. AlphaGo can defeat a world champion of an ancient game but it can’t articulate the joy of winning in a press conference. The innovation of these technologies are far less impressive when you realise they’ve been flooded with resources to superhumanly master one thing and, in the case of endeavours like live subtitle captioning, they don’t even do them very well.

“Yet.”

We are assured Large Language Models can only improve while studies show a linguistic and cognitive decline of the users who rely on them. They’ve mounted the conveyor belt of “progress”, mistaking their ennui and fear of being left behind for hope and opportunity and in their embrace of AI, their critical thinking skills deteriorate. At the risk of sounding melodramatic, I imagine Martin Niemöller would look at this crossroads and say, “First they came for the artists…”

Contrary to my gauche allusion to German fascism, I don’t hate Generative AI. I hate that—like western civilisation itself—it has established its superiority through theft. I hate how devastating its environmental impacts are. I am wary of its unpredictability and I hate the growing number of the atrocities it’s being used for. The existential risk of AGI becoming “misaligned” to humanity doesn’t concern me as much as a Super-intelligence aligned to the whims of the current world elite.

More than anything to do with AI itself, I hate how people are unable assess its place in the threats we’re collectively facing. Artificial Intelligence is advancing parallel to a politically spooky world. In 2013, blew the whistle on the NSA’s illegal mass surveillance programs to global uproar. A decade later, we surrender our data on a daily basis with every cookie acceptance and the omnipresence of smartphones has made the offline world into a panopticon for the digital realm. We surveil each other—dishing out ridicule or aggressively self-policing out of fear that our humiliation will be etched in viral marble forever. The enforcement of the 2023 UK Online Safety Act has meant official identification is now required to access explicit websites, which hasn’t just affected pornography sites, as sites with explicit sections like Reddit now require images of your passport or driver’s license under the guise of child protection. The police force are using advanced surveillance state apparatus in South London under the guise of quelling gang crime. Social services are being strategically under-funded to allow corporations more power than ever. Western nations have been overlooking a genocide and the citizen’s principled protest have been met with criminalisation and detainment. Our governments are doing everything but making our lives better, nothing is fucking working and we’re so overwhelmed by the sheer monstrosity of it all that it’s been conditioning us to not care about anything but ourselves.

As a result, capitalistic individualism has deceived us into believing the advancement of AI will remedy—not exacerbate—any of this. The embrace of AI relies on the belief we have something a machine can never have.

Perhaps the odour scraping softly on the tongue is denial.

“In an age where AI can make anything, taste matters more than ever.”

If the vibe of this phrase feels familiar, it’s because there’s a creepy number of think-pieces with this same premise. As of writing—I count: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and, of course, 7.

Matteo Azzolini6 and Stepfanie Tyler begin with the exact same announcement:

“We are drowning in content.”

Tyler’s text shares stark similarities with Elliot Vredenburg’s Why Taste Matters Now More Than Ever—which was published a day before her own and is by far the most compelling and well-researched essay in this emergent genre. She admits to using AI assistance in her “writing” but never confirms the nature of the assistance. The complicity in theft by using AI to “assist” your essay is one thing—but to actively feed aspects of other, published writers into ChatGPT is, put kindly, a tasteless contribution to the reservoir of “content” she claims we’re all drowning in.

If “taste is the new intelligence7” — Tyler’s methods betray her own premise.

It is difficult to grasp whether the eerie regurgitation of think-pieces are independent arrivals at the same unoriginal conclusion or gross displays of faux-deep incest.

By positioning taste as some final bastion of humanity, these manifestos podium human discernment to run interference for AI’s expansion into art. The claim “we’re drowning in content”, for instance, sets the scene for two objectives:

1. Reinforce the flattening of art (expressive, structure-challenging, time-liberated, communal) into content (structure-appeasing, market-based, time-constricted, mass-produceable, parasocial).

2. Once everything creative is established as “content” — claim the over-saturation means nothing is worth creating anyway.

This is how “progress” is facilitated—devalued production and maximised output. These AI “writers” believe themselves to be curators descending from a proud lineage of taste-making when they’re more akin to Wall Street traders; betting on the imaginative fatigue of the populous, ceding the production of creativity to machines because the actual practice of making art is too tedious and economically inefficient. Instead, they hydraulic-press all creativity into the manageable currency of “content” so they can shuffle it around as data on the viral stock market for their own gain.

They don’t want to be writers. They want to be recognised as writers so they may leverage the engagement into financial capital.8

It’s trippy watching someone preach about the need for discernment when discernment is needed of them. Maybe that doesn’t make Tyler a hypocrite but rather a perfect avatar for her own message.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” — George Orwell

The event that spurred me to confront Tyler was witnessing a prominent Black curator repost her “essay”. The second-hand embarrassment of watching otherwise astute thinkers celebrate vapidly constructed plagiarism is the main thing that bothers me about its massive reach. I’m reminded of a quote by critic Paul Fussell:

What's the difference between bad and BAD? Bad is something like dog-do on the sidewalk, or a failing grade, or a case of scarlet fever—something no one ever said was good. BAD is different. It is something phony, clumsy, witless, untalented, vacant, or boring that many Americans can be persuaded is genuine, graceful, bright, or fascinating. For a thing to be really BAD, it must exhibit elements of the pretentious, the overwrought, or the fraudulent. Bathroom faucet handles that cut your fingers are bad. If gold-plated, they are BAD. Dismal food is bad. Dismal food pretentiously served in a restaurant associated with the word gourmet is BAD. Being alert to this distinction is a large part of the fun of being alive today, in a moment teeming with raucously overvalued emptiness and trash.9

Tyler and her contemporaries are right—we are drowning in content. There’s no remedy in adding to the slop-bucket and trying to pass it off as “taste”.

Abundance is just a symptom. The problem is malnutrition.

We don’t really care where our content comes from; any more than we care about what farm the cow in the polyethylene-wrapped beef sirloin came from in the supermarket or where the wealth that guarantees our western comforts comes from or how ChatGPT acquired the literature it was trained from.

We care how things look, how they’re presented and/or packaged but not how they are. Not how they sustain us, how they can transform us, how they make us feel. The modern pace has quickened to a speed where caring is easily swiped away. Some may see this lack of care as fundamentally antithetical to taste. Others might point out it’s in line with the negligent paradigms embedded by Hume and Kant.

Taste requires principled acquisition—ideally from sustained, active exposure to an art-form that is contextually informed and structurally examined. The art itself must be met with curiosity, neutrality or optimism and an equal interrogation of one’s subjective distaste (lest we be guided by prejudices we haven’t reckoned with).

The vice-grip of late-stage capitalism means most people don’t have the time, energy or privilege to give art such due diligence. They have no time to savour. Music, literature, movies, social media; all condense into arenas of escape. These are the conditions that have brought about the great glazing of tastemakers—a time-honoured tradition of celebrating those who do have the means so they may help shepherd the aspiration of the masses—leading them to bespoke Pinterest boards of minimally arranged furniture and well-selected Spotify playlist.

The phantom allusion of these texts is that you, my dear reader, can become a tastemaker just like Rick Rubin! You just gotta be more “vibe-driven” — situational/economic disparities be damned. In reality, they are appealing to the little corner of your mind that wants your passive exposure to the internet—this chaotic archive of all human knowledge at our fingertips—to feel like useful consumption.

We yearn for our doom-scrolling to feel productive.

Tyler and I know this intimately, which is why we both understand that the sycophantic onslaught of AI-prompted banalities she refers to as an “essay” will get more traction than anything I’ll ever pen on Substack—because it validates the need to not try. But, my dear reader, I will always implore you to try. The acquisition of anything worthwhile—including taste—requires more effort than appealing to screen-fatigued base desires or the lowest common denominator. It is not convenient, profitable or economically efficient to cut through the easily-chuggable AI content and the vapid flavours that have readied us for the coming avalanche of reheated nacho-paste. But it is necessary, and despite speaking about AI enthusiasts with a level of hostility that could quite easily be seen as tasteless, I hope you recognise my offerings beyond the entryway of taste. As rightfully points out—perhaps none of this is about taste at all. Perhaps it is a matter of nutrition and, by focusing on taste alone, we are missing the fact that every problem uttered in this essay is a problem of malnourishment.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs begins at the zenith, where the disembodied voice of Flint Lockwood narrates the question: Have you ever felt like you were a little bit different?

We plummet through clouds into Flint’s childhood self—an awkward and cute young inventor—gingerly addressing his classmates. He identifies ‘untied shoelaces’ as the number one problem facing the community of his peers and proposes an alternative, laceless foot covering': spray-on shoes.

He drops to the floor, flings his dinky legs into the air and whips out an aerosol can. The iridescent vapour he sprays over his feet sets into glittery, translucent dark shoes. Voila! The class erupts into an impressed hubbub until Brent’s lone voice cuts smugly through the ovation: How you gonna get them off, nerd?

Flint panics, whimpering and clawing at the rubbery substance that’s now inseparable from his feet. Kids that were just applauding Flint’s innovation point a kaleidoscope of mocking fingers at him with snide laughter and Brent delivers the deathblow taunt—What a freak! He wants to be smart but that’s lame!

Beyond the dwindling reading comprehension of heated twitter debates or CHATGPT usage eroding the ability to critically think—anti-intellectualism is in full bloom.

Brexit felt like a tangible moment of pollination. Initially, economic experts unanimously agreed leaving the EU would make Britain worse off. Despite the procession of flags in every shade of red, the majority of Brits voted to leave.

The topic of immigration was a defining factor. A study of UK media coverage of the 2016 EU Referendum campaign1 found ‘coverage of immigration more than tripled over the course of the campaign, rising faster than any other political issue’.

Western immigration is inherently shaped by racial anxiety. Eurocentric countries that’ve established their wealth through colonial kidnapping and theft dictate strict regulations on who should enter their countries. This historical context ensures immigration rhetoric is always discussed as an emergency issue, one that requires brute force, control and domination—lest the government appear weak and doom their electorate to the same, invasive fate it once inflicted onto others.

Still inflicts. Britain will destabilise a country in the third-world and pit their citizens against the refugees requesting safety from British-made bombs. It is an offensively simple playbook tapping into the paranoia of the white British majority—relying almost exclusively on British ignorance of its own racial history and a libidinal investment in tribalism.

The average white Brit doesn’t know or care how to interrogate themselves racially. To critically consider their own relation to empire causes too much psychic damage. It is far safer to dismiss it all as woke nonsense. It is the anti-intellectualism of sociocultural ignorance—or the want to not know—that made immigration such a boringly predictable crossbar of puppetry in Brexit discourse. The decades of Conservative-led austerity meant the British population—especially the most impoverished—were restless, frustrated and ready to lash out. They were then presented a choice—to leave or remain—and herded towards an event that made them feel like they were actually doing something in regards to an institution that they knew frighteningly little about.

As a slogan, are the deeper, spiritual intentions at work not abundantly clear?

A portmanteau of “Britain” and “Exit” rose to being the exclusive way of referencing the entire campaign. A subliminal incantation. Brexit subconsciously appeared in the British psyche as a loveless marriage. We were asked whether we should leave or stay—even when our real, abusive relationship was with the conservative government. “Leave” was a true verb, a doing word, a pronounced dissatisfaction followed by an act of resolve. “Remain” was static, the same pain persevering, grinning and bearing it.

The toy-out-the-pram political reaction fuelled by quasi-imperialist rhetoric like “taking back control of our borders” and “asserting national sovereignty” was a symbolic up-yours to a European establishment that was only tangentially responsible for our domestic problems. In choosing to leave, the British public refused the advice of economic experts and I can’t help but think of Dr. Ha-Joon Chang’s Oxford Union Address2, where he stated economics is “the language of the rules”. A politically agitated and fatigued population that’ve been forced to comprehend everything in economic terms was finally being given an opportunity to reject the enforced paradigm. The people were always going choose motion, even if the motion lead to a downward spiral.

At the start of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs when Brent chastises Flint because he “wants to be smart”, the wording is revelatory. Brent does not mock Flint for being smart—Brent mocks Flint for wanting to be smart.

The difference is isolated in wanting. Desire is the incubator where all transformation occurs.

Even the wildest conspiracy theorists have pinged intuition, understanding that something is not quite right, sensitive to an anomaly in the matrix. Their “want” to fix the bug is valid. Their feet are trapped by rabbit-holes or hollows in the minefield.

Similarly, Brexiters who sought reprieve from the measurement of everything in such banal, insidious terms of commerce were right to. The neoliberal axiom of everything needing an economic function would burn all the forests for firewood if we followed it blindly. The rejection of intellectualism, in this context, was an understandable response; acting on their distrust towards experts whose presence had made no material difference to the average person’s financial life. The citizen bet ignoring the expert’s opinion would make no difference either.

Rejecting experts of an unreliable field is meaningless without substituted knowledge. To reject the intellect of economists just to be seduced by racist propaganda is an arbitrary exchange.

You can attribute much of the vitriol following Dr. Ally Louks’ completion of her PhD in Olfactory ethics to the fact that pursuing knowledge for knowledge’s sake is culturally undervalued. Rather than celebrating someone successfully studying a subject they’re passionate about (which shouldn’t be celebrated in the first place—it should be a societal norm) the controversy revealed how much people have succumbed to the neoliberal conditioning that passionate study is only valuable if it is economically lucrative.

It is a metric that even affects how we view art. We fixate on the box office success of films, hype about the first week sales of musicians and all of it rings as a hollow substitute for critical analysis or simply enjoying and casually discussing the emotional resonance of an artistic experience.

Furthermore, the anti-intellectual rejection of the expert is exacerbated by the non-expert’s inability to accept the human flaws and/or perceived shortcomings of the expert. If an expert is an expert they aren’t allowed to be wrong.

When Brent initiates the kid’s choir of ridicule towards Flint for wanting to be smart, he does so in denial of the observable fact that Flint is actually smart—smart enough to invent something that is essentially a neighbour to magic, even if it was a misfire.

Smartness, if not executed perfectly, is lame.

The anti-intellectual’s inability to allow grace for the intellect’s failure mirrors exactly how we treat morality. One mistake can fell a good person from grace. One good deed can change a bad person’s lighting. Our cultural understanding of morality and intellectualism are fundamentally defined by distrust and by extension, the desire to not be made a (further) fool of.

Story time

My short story Pat-a-cake begins with the line: In the dreamscape of before, when your mother was a world…

It is not a beginning I arrived at easily nor is it an arrival that is particularly complete (I still might change it before it gets published).

For a long time the entrance was: In the hypnagogia of before, when your mother was a world…

Hypnagogia is ‘the transitional state between wakefulness and sleep’. It’s also a word I’ve known since I was twelve because I was the kind of kid who’d read the dictionary before bed.

When I first showed a friend Pat-a-cake, he asked me what ‘hypnagogia’ meant. I explained. No biggie.

I showed it to another friend, a writer this time, and they did me the courtesy of reading all the way through before asking what it meant. I got worried. Was this one of those words that was more obscure or archaic than I realised? I defined it. They said cool. No biggie.

The third time I shared it was in a writing workshop. The unanimous feedback was that as an entrance, ‘hypnagogia’ had the potential to throw the reader off. It alienates the reader from the story almost immediately.

It is also the most snugly fitting word for the sentence.

With consensus growing, I changed ‘hypnagogia’ to ‘dreamscape’ — keenly aware that I had sacrificed the precision of meaning, the emotional charge and the layers of texture for the reader’s convenience.

If anti-intellectualism criminalises the ‘want to be smart’, anti-pretentiousness criminalises the ‘want to seem smart’. The usage of ‘hypnagogia’ might earn me the title of pretentious for its obscurity. The flip-side is the insincerity of replacing it with ‘dreamscape’, which feels like an insult to the intelligence of the reader, a mollycoddling, a lack of faith in their curiosity when given the opportunity to learn a new word.

What happens when a culture—addicted to aesthetics and systematically devaluing the acquisition of knowledge (save for economic productivity)—is presented with knowledge it doesn’t understand?

That is—what happens when “seeming” becomes indistinguishable from “being”?

Smartness itself is rendered an exhibition and intellect becomes less about knowledge and more about the ever-more finite ways of marketing, cosmetically packaging and presenting knowledge. The “wants” collapse under the weight of themselves. The knowledge itself withers.

If you’re Austin Butler, you get called pretentious for liking The Good, The Bad, The Ugly as a kid. If you’re Celine Song, you get called sauceless and told you’re not allowed to like Zootopia until you make better movies. If you’re Ryan Coogler, you’re spared the digital gulag for being inspired by Puss in Boots: The Last Wish before making Sinners.

If neoliberalism has demanded economic productivity, internet culture demands output for the attention economy; a system largely run by a cryptocurrency of sincerity (or maybe rather, sincerity as a compelling performance).

Austin Butler is identified as pretentious for liking The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly as a kid because his film choice seems insincere, implausible, even a deception. His film choice alerts the skeptical audience that he is someone who wants to seem like a cinephile. The assumption is easily rectified with an ounce of good faith. Maybe Austin Butler grew up watching Dad films with his Dad. Maybe he was just a weird kid. Perhaps all childhood experiences are not the same and what is registering to the fly as a chaotic “want to seem smart” is just normal to the spider.

You’d be well within your rights to brand me pretentious for using the word “zenith” at the start of this essay. I could’ve just said sky. I’d like to think I don’t choose words because I want to seem smart. There’s a whole cocktail of reasons swirling around my subconscious when I’m writing that determines what word lands on the page and they’re all rarely concerned with how I might seem. Zenith sounds better than sky. It’s relationship to astrology imbues it with more poetic connotations. Stylistically, it holds more emotional charge. I know the word so I use the word.

Whenever I sacrifice a word for convenience, the essence of CHATGPT phases through me with a ghostly chill. Words like “accessibility” ring in my skull but never with the resonance of urgency or necessity. Instead, they ring like a neoliberal axiom—demanding everything be economically viable.

What of beauty for beauty’s sake?

There are film enthusiasts whose top 4 Letterboxd films are works of niche cinema. There are writers who string together a daisy-chain of infrequently-used words. I refrain from accusing them of pretentiousness or trying to seem smart because I’d prefer not to indulge my own distrust at the site of being challenged. I have stumbled across too many great, obscure films and read enough wordy prose that is equally profound3.

You might get a hint of a writer “trying to seem smart” in the corporeal body of their text but it can only be verified in the spirit of the content—in the way arguments flow, in how it eschews or confronts contradiction, in its success in retaining your interest.

A world as treacherous as ours requires a healthy skepticism for survival. The shoehorn of anti-pretension and anti-intellectualism is connected by a metallurgy of distrust—distrust in the intentions of the (pseudo-)intellectual or distrust in the intellectual practice itself. Legibility is an integral part of intellectual transmission yet we are governed by convenience so tyrannically that challenge—even healthy challenge—can make us refuse potentially useful knowledge in nausea. Intellectually and morally—we want so badly not to be duped. And although the vigilance activates our hyper-sensitivity, it does not necessarily sharpen our discernment.

As a writer, all I can do is make the choice between ‘hypnagogia’ or ‘dreamscape’ that will allow me to sleep best at night. As a reader, all I can do is approach what I read with enough curiosity that will open up worlds, with less stifling distrust and the awareness to know when I need to just close the page and move on.

The barista calls out “Siobhan” even though the waiting woman said her name was “Shauna” at the till.

Some of us wonder if baristas do this on purpose; a subversive power move in the molecular battle of interacting with customers they don’t like.

There is much to dislike about Shauna/Siobhan.

She clattered through the coffee shop doors and broke our calm into shards. In the queue, she fidgeted and twirled too and fro in a way that felt fizzy at our peripherals.

She unsheathed her phone from her taupe yoga pants and chose to make a phone-call just as she was about to be served, holding up the line.

Her body language, her tonality, her intensity—discordant.

Shauna/Siobhan only settles once the espresso is in her hands. She finds a seat close to the door and glares towards us.

Begrudgingly, we settle and creep back up into a light hubbub.

We revel here as The Great British Lull. No singular voice towering above another. No accent too distinguishable, no airpodded music louder than tinnish ambience. Each visa-tap is a spiccato beep. Every name hollered by the barista brings is its own crescendo. The disruptions of manhandled cutlery, scatter-graphed coughs, La Marzocco jet-blasts, yawn contagions, iMessage swooshes, sprinkled chuckles and giggles, hollow chairs skittering across the linoleum flooring as one of us rises to leave.

All of it percussion to a familiar symphony.

OI!

Many of our heads whip towards the Shauna/Siobhan’s calm-piercing yell.

That guy just stole!

We all wince, even those of us that believe Shauna/Siobhan’s accusation.

Who want to believe it.

Who agree with her.

None of us rise. All squirm. Bonded in…

Cowardice?

No. Are we not all brave in our own ways?

Indifference?

No. Too many of our jaws are clenched, fists balled. Too many of our feet are tapping, palms sweaty, ready.

Self-preservation?

Perhaps. Each of our hearts are woefully uncertain of the other’s. We are far more comfortable with polite business-minding (one of our greatest hits) than brash reaction (one of more our experimental, left-field passion projects). None of us wish to bargain on the altruism of the neighbour in the next seat.

We stay one in the quiet.

…A voice breaks away from our continent.

SHE didn’t take anything!

We try to remember his name. “Temi” was perhaps what the barista had called into our lull. His emphasis on the pronoun is laced with a bitter tone of knowing as if he’s faced the fine blade of accusation more times than we can count and has the scars to prove how intimately he who knows the price of silence.

The accused stands on the edge of us now, petrified by the door.

“Esmerelda. But Esme will fit on the cup nicer.”

Many of us feel sorry for them. How bitter it must feel, to be pushed from us by something as trivial as blame. Their dress, fitting off-kilter to their frame. Their make-up sitting askew. We can see that they are new to femininity—still figuring it out. If we don’t avert our gaze in shame, we can see clearly that it wasn’t Shauna/Siobhan’s accusation of theft that cleaved Esmerelda like the blunt-edge of the knife. It was the address within the accusation.

Temi’s dissenting voice peels further away from us with his volume.

Leave her be, bruv!

Some of us smirk at the irony of Shauna/Siobhan being referred to as “bruv”. A few of us don’t know how to feel. Temi’s voice bubbles the further he strays from us—forming its own gravitational pull.

Aye!

Another peels from us. “Lucy”. We remember her clearly because she made the barista snort with laughter. Before she blended into us, Lucy spoke about ignoring her needy friend.

She wanted to “post a wee selfie to instagram stories wi’ nay bother,” so she shared her fool-proof strategy. Respond to the needy friend first, selfie on stories after.

Lucy’s banter, infused with Scottish whimsy, cheered us up.

Poor lass is just trynae sip a coffee.

Lucy sounds maternal, hopscotching between empathy and assertiveness.

We worry about this escalating, knowing that escalation is a likely avenue for chaos.

We don’t maintain integrity well in chaos.

One more voice splits from us.

Yeah, give it a fucking rest, Siobhan!

We chuckle as a song.

Temi, Lucy, and Esmerelda, their varied timbre of laughs become lead instruments and everyone plays their part—except Shauna/Siobhan. Or perhaps she does, in her seething silence.

We chuckle in enough sprinkles that it makes her scoff and clatter out the door as cacophonously as she arrived (to the sarcastic, scattered applause of a few of us).

In Shauna/Siobhan’s absence, the bubbly-voiced Temi checks on Esmerelda. Lucy rises to speak to her, too.

And we slowly settle back into the serene rhythms of The Great British Lull.

The traditional chauffeur of a story is conflict. Morals are pitted against one another, ideologies exchange blades, survival hangs in the balance. The shared values of a society govern how stories are told. Norms and prejudices shape the ideal of who is deemed good or bad. There are times when the antagonist’s whims—whether exposing corruption, challenging oppressive systems, or seeking vengeance–can appear more justified than
the protagonist’s allegiance to the status quo.

Hear ‘em Out! is a discussion series exploring stories where the “villain is right.”

After watching Cleaner (2025)—an aggressively average film where militant environmental organisers overthrow an energy company’s gala as a dishonourably discharged soldier-turned-window-cleaner fights to save the hostages after realising her older brother is among them—Sophie Katsali of That Final Scene chatted about the film’s curious portrayal of villainous radical activists.

Inigo
Cleaner structurally interested me in how it approached the common trope of what I like to call noble goal, crazy guy. The initial antagonist—the environmental activist Marcus Blake (played by Clive Owen)—is militant but somewhat agreeable. Blake leads a siege on the mega-corporation Agnian at their annual party, intending to force confessions from the shareholders for their environmental crimes and their covert murder of an activist. Blake uses force in the form of knock-out gas and intimidation but makes it clear he has no interest in killing anyone. Noah Santos (Taz Skylar) however, overruns the plan and quickly resorts to graphic murder. Blake's noble goal is corrupted by Santos’ gratuitous use of violence. The violence of Agnian’s corporate crimes are detached and ambient. The poisoned water produces faceless victims. The slain activist is revealed to us as a static image in a legal file. The corruption of Blake’s noble goal is beholden to an unwritten law: immediate violence is more transformative than the recollection of violence. That is why the Academy was quick to voice its disapproval when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the Oscars but were remarkably silent about Hamdan Ballal being kidnapped by Israeli militants to the point where they had to apologise. The film renders the crimes of Agnian as unobservable and therefore inconsequential. Santos’ observable violence ensures him the villain. Cinematic logic dictates the villain deserves death. The men who traffic unobservable violence might die but their death is a matter of shock value, tragedy and/or mobilisation for the plot. They deserve it—but it is in a far more nonchalant, atmospheric manner.

Sophie
You've nailed the core structure: the classic "noble goal, crazy guy" tango. Blake should be our way into questioning Agnian's eco-crimes. But his performative eco-gravitas gets immediately undermined. In fact, his siege exists in that cinematic twilight zone where villains make perfect sense until the script remembers they're not supposed to. Like Magneto's historical analysis (X-Men: First Class) before he's forced to become cartoonishly genocidal (X-Men: Apocalypse), or Sorry to Bother You's corporate villains whose business model is somehow less horrific than actual Amazon warehouses.

Your analysis of observable vs. unobservable violence opens up what I call "aesthetic conservatism"—how Cleaner's technical elements actively maintain status quo politics. Campbell's direction embodies this perfectly—his throwback approach to action traps Blake and Noah in lifeless fluorescent lighting that the film uses to drain the environmental manifesto of any vitality. Meanwhile, their acts of violence get the glossy action treatment with well-shot fight sequences. The aesthetic itself becomes the politics.

The script may present Blake as initially militant yet somewhat agreeable, but Campbell's visual framework absolutely fucks him over. The pristine compositions of corporate spaces versus the chaotic framing during the siege create a world where environmental crimes look like business as usual while resistance looks like madness. The seamless flow between Blake's legitimate critique and Noah's gratuitous murder blurs any moral distinction between them. It's cinematic guilt-by-association.

Campbell's crisp cutting functions as its own form of violence—slicing Blake's coherent eco-radicalism into disjointed fragments that read as derangement. The film's inconsistent pacing serves a political purpose—rushing through Blake's exposition like an auctioneer on speed while lingering pornographically on the human cost of his methods.

Perhaps the most honest film would show Agnian's executives continuing to poison communities while their PR team produces a movie about dangerous eco-terrorists threatening good American jobs. They'd call it Cleaner. And the Academy would eat that shit up.

Inigo
I’m considering how the film renders Santos in the lulls between what you named as the “pornographic lingerings” of his violent tenure. The police response team gathers intel to reveal Santos harbours “anti-humanist” leanings by showing an old video-recorded manifesto that he delivers from an unidentifiable interior, sitting in front of a brick-wall. The visual innuendo of terroristic threat is a perfect example of the “aesthetic conservatism” that you mentioned as the audience is coerced into an islamophobic association to justify disdain for him. His long hair reminds me of a young Barney Stinson—who was a naïve, hippy barista before the sitcom-trauma of losing his girlfriend to a finance bro transformed him to a suit-obsessed, raging misogynist in How I Met Your Mother. Santos peers down the barrel of the camera with a glassy-eyed stare declaring, “man is a blight upon the world. A cancer. A virus. And for a human virus requires a radical, invasive approach” and everything in that moment—his appearance, the cinematography of the clip, the language scripted for him—is a transparent attempt to ruin his credibility, yes. And, as you said, showcase his derangement, of course. But largely: present him as laughable. The lead officer cuts the manifesto with a dismissive “delightful!” that’s jam-packed with all the textbook British snark a three syllable word can muster. He, and therefore his position, is supposed to be a joke.

What I actually find funny about the scene is, if I were interpreting Santos’ manifesto through an afropessimist lens—he is perhaps the sanest person in the whole movie. His understanding of “humans” being a “virus” instantly made me consider how Frank Wilderson identifies the way whiteness rendered Black people “non-human” to reify itself.

If we read Santos’ usage of “human” as fundamentally demarcating Black people into “non-human” then his credibility-ruining rant reveals an ouroboros of white violence.

Santos’ manifesto is revelatory in that sense. An accurate diagnosis of the problem but a pathological investment in whiteness ruins his remedy. He says “man is a blight on the world” and a feminist lens would be concerned with how those blights are specific concentrations of patriarchal violence. He refers to the “human virus” to mean the collective population of people when it is specifically the industrialisation of Euro-colonial expansion that triggered the global careen towards environmental collapse. The mega-corporations pumping harmful chemicals into the air, water and land exist today off the historically belittled and destroyed Black and indigenous ways of life. Every time we saw the inclusion of “Voodoo” in a film or TV show growing up, it was micro-conditioning to understand Black indigeneity as “savage” while conveniently deflecting away from how savagely the Euro-colonial capitalist expansion is burning through planet and people.

In that respect—you’re so right that this hypothetical film would clean up at the Oscars, not only because it would add to the aesthetic sanitisation of environmental destruction but it would also present said destruction as a philosophically inevitable tragedy that “we” collectively brought about together. Prejudicially divided in life, collectively responsible in doom.

Sophie
Inigo, your afropessimist reading of Santos' manifesto makes me want to run a thought experiment: Replace Santos with Elon Musk delivering the identical "humans are a virus" speech at a Tesla keynote. The same words would then be backed by soft amber lighting, steady tracking shots, and approving nods from executives—transforming a terrorist rant into a TED Talk on visionary futurism.

This isn't theoretical, of course. When Bezos tells us we should move our polluting industry into space, when Musk champions Mars colonisation because Earth is doomed, when Thiel is freezing his body after death ‘just in case’, when tech billionaires build luxury bunkers in New Zealand, they're expressing the same core misanthropy as Santos. Sam Altman secures billions for OpenAI while publishing essays about existential risk. Marc Andreessen parades his god-awful "Techno-Optimist Manifesto" advocating for technological solutions precisely because he believes current systems are unsustainable. The difference isn't content but presentation—who receives cinematic-like authority to express environmental despair.

Campbell's direction unconsciously enforces this double standard. Silicon Valley figureheads routinely describe humanity as an infection while stock prices explode; environmental activists say the same and become terrorists. This asymmetry extends beyond Cleaner into our actual media landscape: VICE documentaries use contemplative, respectful framing for billionaire preppers while employing frantic, destabilised shooting for non-wealthy ones expressing identical apocalyptic predictions.

This explains why environmental cinema fails so consistently—the medium has absorbed capitalism's core value judgments into its technical DNA. Even if Santos were able to pinpoint whiteness as the true virus destroying indigenous relationships with land more conspicuously, Campbell must render him visually illegitimate because the grammar of film itself has developed alongside colonial expansion. There's no established cinematic language to present Santos' perspective without immediate devaluation.

After watching Civil War, I realised this runs deeper than content alone. Films about environmental collapse can render apocalypse in exquisite detail but cannot visually legitimise activists who predict that collapse without marking them as extremists through technical devices. Your analysis exposes the most insidious aspect of Cleaner's failure: viewers walk away feeling they've rejected Santos based on rational assessment of his arguments, never recognising how the visual techniques predetermined their response. We believe we're exercising judgment when we're actually performing a reaction that was encoded for us through the camera.

Santos doesn't fail because his analysis is wrong—he fails because cinema's technical apparatus cannot visualise his position without marking it as aberrant.

Inigo
What you’ve said about films that “render apocalypse in exquisite detail” but “cannot visually legitimise activists who predict that collapse without marking them as extremists” makes me think of an essay that’s been gestating in my drafts about the western obsession with dystopian fiction. You’re right. There is an observable asymmetry when it comes to works about collapse—not only environmental but societal. The abundance of apocalyptic media has started to make me see it as hope-sterilising propaganda. The presentation of characters like Santos really helps grease the wheels. I’m going to be more aware of the “visual grammars” and “technical apparatuses” of cinema moving forward—paying attention to how they’re employed to warp or obscure the moral thrusts of the film.

Thank you so much for your all of thoughts, Sophie! I don’t know if we’ve convinced anyone to watch Cleaner but I reckon we might be the first people to discuss this film with such rigour and it’s been an absolute pleasure. To sign off, I wanted to ask you one final question: Is there any movie, TV show, novel or any story you can think of really, where you find yourself passionately agreeing with the villain?

Sophie
Really enjoyed this, thank you Inigo! I can’t help but catch myself nodding along to Killing Eve’s Villanelle's disgusted eye-roll at the beige mediocrity of existence. Her refusal to tolerate emotional fakery hits a nerve. I don’t condone the stabbing part (obviously!), but I'm drawn to how she spots someone equally trapped in Eve and says "I see you" in her own twisted way. We've all sat through dinner parties wondering if we're the only one noticing how everyone's pretending. Villanelle just turns that feeling into fashion-forward carnage while I bite my tongue. That core impulse to burn down the artificial and find something real? That part I passionately get. It's just that most of us settle for therapy instead of becoming international assassins.

Sophie Katsali is the creator of That Final Scene, where she writes about how films and TV shows reflect the conversations we're having in culture today. With a background in running social media campaigns for major studios including Warner Bros, Universal Pictures and HBO, she brought her entertainment expertise first to Instagram and later expanded to Substack. Sophie now works in marketing for Canva.

Where body positivity rose to challenge the infrastructures of western beauty standards—it is easy to interpret the recent, ozempic-powered resurgence of noughtiesque skinniness as a failure of the movement.

Ugliness blooms in the psyche with such violence that some declare it a palaeolithic instinct. A 2020 social and clinical psychology study titled Ugliness Judgments Alert us to Cues of Pathogen Presence examines how “ugliness judgments are linked to the behavioural immune system, alerting us to objects that may contain potentially harmful diseases1”. Ryan P. Doran’s philosophical essay Ugliness Is in the Gut of the Beholder offers “the first sustained defence of the claim that ugliness is constituted by the disposition to disgust2”, with disgust being defined as “a basic emotion which is characterised, paradigmatically, by feelings related to nausea”.

In early life, beauty and ugliness bifurcate crudely along a moral binary. Handsome, fairytale heroes—lily-white in face and/or teeth—become pristine bastions of justice. The damsels they save are dainty, beautiful pillars of the purest victimhood. Nursery rhyme villains are rendered physically undesirable, disfigured or dark in a fascinating ouroboros of cause and effect. (Scar just so happens to be the darkest and most maimed lion in the pride.)

With the binaries of beauty = good / ugly = bad fashioning the foundational pillars of western beauty standards (and all of these concepts having their own symbioses with oppressions like anti-Blackness and ableism)—rather than interpreting the “skinny comeback” as an end to the body positivity’s era—perhaps it is easier to understand beauty-based prejudices like anti-fatness as so terminally woven into the anatomy of society that any contemporary challenge can only provide their temporary remission. Is it? But we must do it. It is our responsibility, in the words of the great Kwame Ture.

At the risk of contemplating perspectives feminist scholars more learned have explored deeper, I find myself curious about the very battleground(s) where beauty standards have been challenged—specifically Instagram (and its other visual-based social media platform relatives).

The mind drifts to pastel-hued insta-infographics whenever I think of body positivity, which doesn’t accurately capture the length or breadth of the movement’s activity but is perhaps the most familiar access point for so many introduced to it.

In the same way Twitter seems socially engineered to reward riler-uppers and foster addiction to perpetual cycles of petty conflict, Instagram is socially engineered to supply a steady trickle of ✨ aesthetics ✨ —ornately plated food, greek-god physiques chiseled in luxury gyms, an endless pantheon of unattainable baddies—curating kernels of desire in reels and carousel images to rise to the apex of the algorithm™ to flood dopamine receptors and keep users hooked via the irresistible glamour of spectacle. With a near supernatural prescience, Guy Dubord reflects on the imagery of such spectacles in his 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle:

The images detached from every aspect of life fuse in a common stream in which the unity of this life can no longer be reestablished. Reality considered partially unfolds, in its own general unity, as a pseudo-world apart, an object of mere contemplation. The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living. The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation.3

If we understand Instagram and other visual-based social media as arenas of spectacle—full to the brim with “concrete inversions of life”—perhaps we must consider how much a cultural attitude can be shifted through them? This is not an question reserved for body positivity’s fight alone but any social movement sharing its tenets through these arenas of aesthetics.

I suspect the complication of spectacle rendered body positivity less a challenge to beauty standards and more a commitment to expanding its borders. An eerie chill would roll over me whenever I observed a disabled person wheeling down a New York Fashion Week runway or an ad-campaign presenting a racially diverse group of differently sized woman. I’d shivered in the same way when George Floyd passed and every corporation decided Black people appear to matter and that it was finally time to take a bold, reparative step towards removing caricatured grins from packets of rice and bottles of instant pancake mix.

Symbolic changes are unsustainable. Or rather, they exist to coat historic infrastructures with fresher paints. When pressured to change, infrastructures eventually revert back to their traditional shape or, at best, subsume new data and make themselves vaster. Institutions and the societal standards they represent have an observable rhythm. The star-spangled banner vulgarity of Donald J. Trump appears as an inevitable chaser to the multi-culturally suave imperialism of Barack Obama. DEI begets DOGE. Body positivity begets Ozempic. The elasticity of these infrastructures (and on the topic of western beauty standards these include but are not limited to: fashion houses, magazines and advertising companies) can only bend so far until they bounce back into the values they’ve been formed from.

I won’t pretend to know how to snap the rubber. I suppose my goal is mostly to say, “that is a rubber band and you’re treating it like a brick.” There is no intellectual razor in this essay that will shred the band of beauty standards into elastic debris. However, I find myself wondering whether what sort of liberation lies in the guts of ugliness.

Mia Mingus’ essay, Moving toward the ugly: a politic beyond desirability, confronts ugliness and poses questions to it that I’ve found myself asking for years:

We all run from the ugly. And the farther we run from it, the more we stigmatize it and the more power we give beauty. Our communities are obsessed with being beautiful and gorgeous and hot. What would it mean if we were ugly? What would it mean if we didn’t run from our own ugliness or each other’s? How do we take the sting out of “ugly?” What would it mean to acknowledge our ugliness for all it has given us, how it has shaped our brilliance and taught us about how we never want to make anyone else feel?4

As I pen this essay, I feel ugly. In the three month window of spring, I suffer from intense hay-fever symptoms.

It was so bad when as a kid that teachers would send me out of class. Pollen would inflame my asthma and we found my respiratory symptoms would settle down if I stayed in the library in the middle of the school. On my worst days, the office staff would call my mum and she’d leave work early to take me home but most of the time I’d just camp out in the library under a teaching assistant’s supervision for the afternoon—eyes and nose streaming unceremoniously—sniffling and engorging myself on books.

I’d leak an unholy potion of tears and Optrex drops into one tissue, Beconase and snot onto another, until exhaustion or forgetfulness would meld the two tissues into one. Some point down the line, I’d finally give up trying to plug the leaks altogether and set the allergy fluids free to drizzle on book pages.

Aptly, this is how I acquired my first Harry Potter book. The teacher’s assistant supervising me likely assumed keeping a book with dried booger pages broke a hygienic code of conduct so she told me I could keep it in its allergen-mangled state.

As an adult, I don’t fair much better. I’ve tried many remedies. Every anti-histamine you can name, neti pots, steam baths, local honey. I’ve heard rumblings of mysterious immunotherapy injections the NHS keep in the centre of a booby trapped temple of bureaucracy. I’m yet to secure it.

When spring arrives, I treat it like mammalian winter. I go into pseudo-hibernation for a few weeks so I may sniff and leak and wheeze and rub my eyes in relative peace. It has presented a strange, seasonal relationship to my own body and how it (not I necessarily) is perceived. “I feel ugly”. There are weird weight distributions the word “ugly” is carrying. My most immediate feelings are discomfort and vulnerability, overcast with a relative inability to focus. Ugliness clasps its claws around an essence beyond those feelings because, ultimately, it speaks to feeling undesirable.

How can we mention beauty standards without the entropy of desirability? Western beauty standards are governments of desirability, funded liberally by the libidinal economy5 of what bell hooks affectionately names “the imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”.

Desire is a messy ecosystem. Want is as present as shame. Fear seeps into attraction. Euphoria as woven as despair. It is as much about being as wanting. Desire presents, or perhaps evolves, at a pace and with a ferocity too wild for western ideals to contain into the rigidity of its traditions and infrastructures. The result is contortions and fragmentations—amplified grossly in the arenas of spectacle.

When Ashton Hall’s videos recently stoked virality to thinly-veiled admiration and hollered ridicule, I was most fascinated by how his routine felt spiritually indistinguishable from Patrick Bateman—aesthetically pleasing, religiously performed yet functionally devoid of any soul. At a time when the average person’s quality of life is palpable declining, Hall’s videos struck me like well-orchestrated capitalistic monuments to nothing.

Nevertheless, Hall’s spike in popularity reveal him as an ideal—satirically or seriously—in the arenas of spectacle where masculine desirability is ulteriorly geared towards courting aspiration from other men. Gone is the age of the principled, rugged every-man. Metrosexuality has won out; ascending to the gold-medal podium of manhood with the traditional desire of conquest remaining—especially in regards to women.

In that respect, Hall’s videos are perfect odes. His muscularity dwarfs Bateman’s; with his Blackness positioning a fetishistic lens unto his ritualistic upkeep of an aesthetic self/lifestyle that careens into utter illogicality (like—does bro step out the lift, set up the camera, go back in the lift, close the door, then record himself stepping out the lift?). The wordless, ASMR presentations of daily activity are accentuated tastefully with a faceless, servant-wife who’s revealed only in obliging body parts to infuse his videos with an puzzling air of authority.

If you were to argue Hall’s visuals are peacockings to intrigue women within or aspiring towards a certain socio-financial tax bracket, I’d dare not disagree. The assertion his videos are carefully engineered to make the traditional male mind nod in appreciation is also hard to argue with.

Desire has fractured along lines of commodity in the same way beauty/ugliness fractures along moral lines. Whether Hall is peacocking for women or trying to get a head-nod from the boys, the overarching truth is that he is trying to make money—for capitalistic success is synonymous with survival. He performs in the arena of spectacle; locked in a perpetual state of getting ready as a source of entertainment and/or distraction and/or inspiration, his own body, a currency.

This, of course, is not a new or surprising transaction. We all barter our bodies in some way under capitalism. What is perhaps new about it all is how we’re dealing with the modern evolutions of spectacle. The epidemic of sexlessness in film that Raquel S. Benedict identifies in her essay, Everyone is beautiful and no-one is horny extends beyond the silver screen to the little blue one in our pockets. There is a profound disconnect between a man looking at a beautiful woman on Instagram—vivid and curated—and wanting her. We watch sex behind thicker plates of glass than ever before. An even further disconnect exists between wanting her libidinally (as an object of sexual desire) and wanting her whole (as a potential partner). Each are fundamentally incomplete desires unto themselves that demand an archaic expectation of ownership.

Where desire for a public sex symbol may have—at one point—been once-removed (a psychic death in its own right), it is now divorced along a mobius strip of unattainability. To patronise an Onlyfans model is a contract of distance, the illusion of potentially “having her” in any real way is completely removed by the very transaction of subscription. I could never say whether this transaction of desire is worse or better—simply that it is warping us all into inhabiting more voyeurism than ever before.

With desirability dictating how well we are treated in society—a reality that undoubtedly affects women and femmes in more pointed ways than men—it seems the masculine mind is tearing itself apart trying to fathom the chasm that is now between itself and a Kardashian vs. the gap between an average young man in the late 1950’s and, say, Marilyn Monroe. In the arenas of spectacle, men’s heterosexual relationship to desire is zombified—or as @lilgnar has stated more poignantly and succinctly: “niggas was never meant to see this many bad bitches, social media got us fried. our ancestors used to only see 10 like baddies in dey whole life.”

It would be foolish of me to try to articulate how this voyeuristic pressure is affecting women from any vantage point other than flawed and incomplete observation. Anecdotally, I know Black women’s existence outside of the western beauty standard is already fraught with too many conflicting tensions to house in one essay. It is in the arenas of spectacle where the BBL procedure, based on a psycho-sexual exaggeration of Black women’s stereotypical proportions, was adopted by non-Black women of the Kardashian ilk and elevated into a quasi-western beauty standard.

With the caricatured Black feminine form reduced a trend; the libidinal colonialism of a body type brings just as much casualty in the “skinny resurgence” as the body positivity movement. That is: to discard a body type that certain women are born with as a trend is iniquitous work only made possible by the rigidity of westernisation, and I am sure someone more tuned in to pop-culture than me will note the reversion of the Kardashians specifically, towards skinniness aligns with a socio-economic climate careening towards a cataclysmic global recession.

Beauty is a buttonhole that desire attempts to fill. My orientation as an artist should dictate an undying fealty for beautiful things, right? But when Susan Sontag speaks about the differences between prose and poetry in The Aesthetics of Silence, I find myself undergoing a cognitive recalibration:

The aim of prose is to communicate, the use of language in prose is perfectly straightforward. Poetry, being an art, should have quite different aims: to express an experience which is essentially ineffable; using language to express muteness. In contrast to prose writers, poets are engaged in subverting their own instrument: and seeking to pass beyond it. Insofar as this theory assumes that art is concerned with Beauty, it isn't very interesting. (Modern aesthetics is crippled by its dependence upon this essentially vacant concept. As if art were "about" beauty, as science is "about" truth!)6

Poetry—although often stumbling into beauty, is in search of an “effable experience”. We could reductively call this ineffability “a species of truth”. A truth that the pursuit of beauty can often get in the way of fully discovering.

When Mingus writes, “there is only the illusion of solace in beauty. If age and disability teach us anything, it is that investing in beauty will never set us free. Beauty has always been hurled as a weapon. It has always taken the form of an exclusive club; and supposed protection against violence, isolation and pain, but this is a myth. It is not true, even for those accepted in to the club. I don’t think we can reclaim beauty,” I know I am not alone in feeling trapped by a world governed by beauty. There is an imposition as both a desirer and a desiree, an uninteresting imprisonment of the need to be satisfied.

In the yearly, bear-cave retreat of springtime where I resign myself to the throes of ugliness—allowing myself only to be seen by loved ones and eschewing any of the performances of desire altogether—I find myself beside a thinning veil, drawn closer to understanding how the arenas of spectacle are door handles to a more fractured sense of humanity.

In looking beyond desirability, Mingus affirms ugliness is a conduit for magnificence.

“Magnificence has always been with us. Always been there in the freak shows—staring back at the gawking crowd, in the back rooms of the brothels, in the fields fresh with cotton, on the street corners in the middle of the night, as the bombs drop, in our breaths after surviving the doctor’s office, crossing the border, in the first quiet moments of a bloody face after the attack is done. Magnificence was there.”

I consider how the arenas of spectacle is lined with complicating ground, a metaphysical quicksand, whereby way of presentation and performance we attempt to beautify. I participate even now—even here. The point of sharing anecdotes about my allergies was to present a scenery of ugliness, which is perhaps overshadowed by the fact I’ve taught myself to write with a resolve and rhythm that’ll always be artistically pleasant for me to read back even if I wince at the subject matter.

The paradox of spectacle.

The ugly—in its centring on the stage—is reified as a contorted form of beauty. Perhaps, the most magnificent thing that ugliness can be is divorced from the paradigms of spectacle altogether, rendered not egregious nor triggering of disgust but simply a realm of everyday discomfort, like stubbing a toe, missing a bus or stepping in dog shit.

When I thought of this piece and titled it—I assumed it would conclude with a desire to reclaim. But there are so many ways that reclamation can be a trap; a way to reposition elements of the oppressed through oppressive infrastructure.

Something else has been happening as I’ve been writing, too. This is a topic I feel shaky about, unqualified to speak about with any authority, and so I’ve let my mind meander in a manner that I don’t typically. I am freestyling because, on the immense topic of western beauty standards, the holes I’d usually jam my feet into are not as clear, there is no angle I concretely have, no set path that I can traverse in your field of vision that will lead to a polished nugget of knowledge.

No.

On the topic of beauty standards—maybe beauty itself—I am searching for a truth that shifts as perpetually as the surface of the sun. A way of seeing and accepting things as they are, how they appear and what they could be all at once. I peer at ugliness, not as something greater or less than beauty but simply a different texture, a texture that isn’t indistinguishably tethered to immorality but signpost seeking to clarify our own assumptions of evil, disgust, or weakness. Ugliness as a confrontation of the spirit.

There is a potential destruction in the euphoria of beauty, when desire begins to button it. Such pursuits have guided me towards, and indeed torn-down, the most memorable relationships and experiences. There are violences in beauty, nestled beneath the perfect symmetries and fuzzy feelings, that ugliness could never commit. And if we only ever fixate on the beautiful, it is inevitable that we mistake those violences for ugliness.

You’re riding bitch in a fifteen-person queue at the back of W.H. Smith’s—excessively swiping down on the ‘No Internet Connection error’ Google Chrome browser. It snaps back elastically. No change. The T-Rex hops twice. The 4G Network pendulum swings between 2 and 3 bars.1

It’s twenty one days before Christmas. There’s only one person working in the Post Office.

Nobody in the queue wants to use the self-checkouts. Everyone knows the on-screen process is imbued with booby-traps that’ll drain your wallet and swallow your parcel into an untraceable void if you do so much as press the right button in the wrong way.

You wait patiently on the caveman’s conveyor belt to be served by Susan, whose face screws in a manner only someone who’s overworked, underpaid and totally over it can contort.

The Kettle crisps you picked up at the corner shop become irresistible, partly from hunger but mostly because you need something to do if your smart-phone is going to withhold the internet and cosplay as a glorified tin-can-and-string. Fifth in the queue. You try to pry open the foil bag gently—so as to not disrupt The Great British Lull™—and the souls of all crisps that could’ve fit in the empty space wheeze out. You decide to count how many are in the bag (as if you know how many should be). No answer would’ve satisfied you but sixteen feels low.2

Till number… Two, please.

Your mind wanders to the train ticket you bought yesterday. The transaction didn’t work on the machine so you went to the kiosk and spoke to a fella with the polar opposite demeanour of Susan. He gave a chirpy warning. Prices are going up next week, chap. Better get you tix in!3 You sigh. They’re bloomin’ bleeding us dry. The words spun from your mouth with enough irreverence that the gravity of them dispersed into an ambient British mist. He handed you the ticket with bouncy cackle. Ain’t they just? You headed to the platform, where the shiny new LED screen informed you the train was going to be ten minutes late.

Till number… Two, please.

You shuffle forward. A man behind you makes a thespian tut before peeling off to the self checkouts. Good luck with that, mate blinks in your mind. Crisps crunch then slurry in your mouth and it reminds you of the restaurant in Chelsea with the potato terrine and roasted quail. They added a complimentary service charge to the bill that you were too embarrassed to get removed. Your date grabbed the bill after you’d paid and blurted out TWENTY PERCENT? with the exact same force and cadence of surprise that had blared in your own thoughts not moments before. When you responded yeah, they’re trying to be America so bad, she became more animated, launching into a tirade about how the Tories used the veil of austerity to underfund the NHS for decades to force the British medical service to rely on insurance-based systems. The pain that has become a ubiquitous reality in your lower back pulses at the abbreviation ‘NHS’ in memory of the many fiery hoops you’ve had to jump through to get it treated. She continued: All the gammons ragging on immigrants are going to be in for a big shock when their last two, racist brain cells give up the ghost and they have to whip out their Natwest card in the ambulance. You found yourself surrendering to an intrusive thought: Am I sexually attracted to witty political rants?

Till number… Two, please.

In just over three weeks time, you’re going to be descending the stairs of your family home while reading an article about energy company’s profits4 . Your father will be perched on the couch watching the news and Fiona Bruce will be reporting on the cost of living crisis, sympathising with the energy companies that have been hit with devastating force by Putin’s dastardly war in Ukraine. Her delivery of the news will have a level of top-spin that’d make Roger Federer tilt his head in admiration.

Till number… Two, please.

It’s your turn. You step to Susan’s till and ask to post two letters to America—New York and Texas. She warns you they might not arrive before Christmas. You ask how much it’d be to insure they do. The price she utters knocks the wind out your lungs with a hiss. The man who huffed and puffed himself out of the queue is now unleashing his breathy frustrations on the bright red post office machines, reeling off every variation for “oh, for goodness sake!” his mental bank of British idioms can withdraw.

You can’t help but see the self checkouts as a perfect allegory for the sorry societal state—needlessly complicated systems packaged as convenient to give the illusion of granted autonomy but functionally unusable unless you have some sort of arch, insider, specialist knowledge of them.

Susan asks if you want to spend the elevenfold expense on tracking. You politely decline and pay for the regular extortionate pricing. You tell Susan she’s doing great and you’re happy you got speak to someone as patient as her today. She says You caught me on a bad day, mind you. You respond, You’re this delightful on a bad day? I need to come back on a good day! She laughs for the first time since you joined the line.

It’s not until February that your friend in New York sends you selfie holding your Christmas card. Your friend who was in Texas for Christmas doesn’t seem to get it at all. 50% success rate on the postal service—a network that used to be responsible for the majority of the world’s written communication. You wonder if anyone else feels like they’re trapped in the inescapable machinations of a slow-motion car crash. You wonder if you’re just being extra—looking at these minor, first-world inconveniences and adding them up in the melodramatic manner that only an artist would. You wonder if you deserve the collapse you are witnessing and whether, in the grand scheme of things, you are feeling intensely about something that is actually fine or normal or, at least, natural. Maybe you aren’t swimming in a uniquely broken time of human existence but simply feeling the friction of what it is to live. Then you consider how few bugs there are now5 or the fact that you haven’t seen a hedgehog in nearly ten years6. Or how you walk through the town centre of your hometown, the shop-fronts that used to be populated and vibrant are all boarded up and vacant7. Or that the world is literally losing colour8. As the wedded companion of life, death is omnipresent—all around us, all the time. What you see is not death in the natural sense—a physical event that atomises one’s consciousness back into the bisque of the universe. What you see is: Zombies. Fossils. Statues. Snags. Abandoned Machinery. Things suspended in states of agonising unrest. And you wonder what it will take to make them work.

Many of his truisms are centred around the social sciences (politics, economics and commerce) and the formal sciences (ecology and engineering) and it isn’t until the fifth law, “all history is relevant, but the history of technology is the most relevant”, that he addresses the arts with hints of acerb:

Perhaps most guilty of neglecting technology are those concerned with the history of the arts and with the entire panoply of humanistic concerns. Indeed, in many cases they are disdainful of technology, regarding it as somehow opposed to the humanities. This might be because they regard technology solely in terms of mechanical devices and do not even begin to comprehend the complex nature of technological developments and their direct influences on the arts, to say nothing of their indirect influence on mankind's humanistic endeavors.

Artists are a sentimental bunch—our relationship with technology is infamously persistent in its friction. Upon seeing a daguerreotype for the first time in 1839, French painter Paul Delaroche melodramatically declared, “from today, painting is dead!” Despite Hip-Hop being a genre reaching back through its ancestral lineage of blues and jazz with the technological contortion of sampling, the great Nina Simone once said “it’s not music at all.” When Autotune started popping up more frequently in the arsenals of upcoming musicians, Jay-Z valiantly waged war against the software with D.O.A (Death of Autotune).

It is only in the soft and clarifying light of hindsight that we observe the likes of Delaroche, Simone and Hove in their reluctance to embrace blossoming technologies and respectfully disagree with them.

While photography became its own institution of artistic expression with a broad spectrum of practices developing under its umbrella; the medium of painting experienced wave after wave of evolution and still lives, bucking in its own right. Hip-hop can be reductively experienced as ‘just beats and rapping’ but the structural integrity of its compositions has only grown more musically intricate as the genre ages. Conduits of the ‘mumble-rap’ era (which I prefer to categorise more ambiently as ‘post-rap’) embraced Autotune to bestow contemporary Black music with an experimental texture that—as always—reflects our sociocultural climate while coolly flaunting a level of innovation that is too easily diminished by sceptics and outsiders (or put simply: Sorry You’re Not Cool Enough To Get Playboi Carti™).

To dedicate such delusional amounts of time to mastering an art; only to find yourself at the mercy of a soulless machine that may or may not render your hard-earned skill obsolete isn’t the sort of existential collapse anyone wants. This bladed threat is ever-swaying overhead and the pathology of the artist dictates they stare in the metallic face of technology and try to wrangle it under control, undeterred by its ever-mutating, draconic size.

Regularly confronted with the limitations of their tools, the artist gets accustomed to being presented with forked paths. Do I pave a new way with the instruments I have or will a new technology into being? In 2016, Justin Vernon worked with Chris Messina on the Bon Iver 22, A Million to create “The Messina” — a nerdy combination of hardware and software that allowed Vernon’s voice to be split into choral harmonies in real-time, leading to the bewitching masterpiece of 715 – CRΣΣKS.

With all this in mind—it is safe to say the art’s knotted relationship with technology is adequately beholden to Kranzberg’s first law: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.” There are peaks and valleys.

The burning question is: why does the advent of Artificial Intelligence feel so… different?

From the environmental to the political—I’m sure my fellow AI-sceptic brethren can pen a laundry list of criminal activity but I want to concentrate on three phenomena regarding AI’s effect on the creative landscape and how they pool together to make one, woefully oversimplified answer:

Nothing is new.

1. The normalisation of (micro)plagiarisms

Aimlessly scrolling through the fecal rain of Twitter one cold January evening, I was confronted by a tweet:

Hm. I thought. I swear I’ve seen this joke before. It was uncanny—the perfect feeling to catalyse a deep dive down a neurodivergent rabbit-hole.

My suspicions were confirmed when I found this tweet:

I descended further and unearthed an iFunny screenshot from 2018. This is where I called it a day.

The origin of the joke became less interesting than the eeriness of its regurgitation, which wasn’t limited to a single joke but a double-barrelled call-and-response repeated across the span of nearly a decade. To what degree is this co-ordinated? Are these dual actors working in tandem or separate entities pseudo-improvising? Is something more random occurring? Are they bots?

A deeper set of thoughts rumbled below these pedestrian ones. What is it about this particular joke combination that makes online users feel okay about republishing it as their own humour? Perhaps it is less to do with the joke itself and more about the wider context the joke exists in.

When X was Twitter and tweets were confined to 140-word character limits, brevity reigned as an invaluable utensil for engagement. Higher engagement equalled higher potential to get money. Pith is easier to copy than pulp. A very simple set of equations materialised.

A culture obsessed with the instant gratification of short-form content in an internet landscape so vast means one can pluck a quote from a Tiktok video and post it Twitter and people are none the wiser. There’s no way to monitor, prevent, deter or sanction these plagiarisms that appear too small to fuss over even as they grow more ubiquitous and systemic. Countless accounts across social media platforms today are dedicated to producing nothing and reposting anything. Original ideas run the risk of becoming herpetic—algorithmically hyper-visible with every flare up but only the chronically online know these micro-plagiarisms are the consequence of a transmission—rarely the ground zero origin.

The internet is a wild west landscape where your original ideas do not belong to you because nothing belongs to you—not in a utilitarian sense of knowledge being distributed freely but in a cowboy-colonial sense of owning whatever you can get away with taking. Some have had the displeasure of being on the receiving end of being plagiarised on this very site (including myself). Whether it’s a joke, a tweet, a quote, the premise of essay or a piece of art—an idea can careen quicker than ever through lineages so reticular that their origin becomes utterly untraceable, ungovernable and ultimately—irrelevant.

@regularcharlottei Was Moved By “White Fragility”

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2: Deteriorating reproductions

There’s a stark correlation between AI art—which has been trained en masse with work stolen from artists—and plagiarising content to drum up engagement. If you grouped all the people who’ve ever lifted content from one platform to post on another with all the people who swear by AI and put them in a Venn diagram, you’d probably have a circle round enough to hula hoop with.

In addition to the normalisation of micro-plagiarism, there is a phenomena I can only describe as deteriorating reproductions, best illustrated by referring to the most iconic scene in anime history—The Akira Slide.

Akira (1988) is set in a fictional Neo-Tokyo, 2019; three decades after Tokyo is decimated by an atomic explosion. Tetsuo, a member of The Capsules biker gang, is injured in a clash with a rival gang, dragged to a secret military experiment and begins developing psychic powers. The Capsules’ leader, Kaneda tries to save his friend and finds himself embroiled in a surreal government conspiracy. Tetsuo’s powers spiral out of control and Kaneda is forced to try and stop him while learning about the mystery of Akira, a child with god-like abilities.

Akira is fascinating in its commitment to bleakness. The dystopia is made visceral by a level of animation considered ground-breaking for its time, with Tetsuo’s transformation still heralded as a technical marvel even today. Towing an uncanny line between off-kilter gruesomeness and skilfully detail, Akira was one of the first Japanese anime to resonate with a western audience. The cyberpunk aesthetic coupled with the pockets of violence and vandalism erupting around the futuristic city make the film suffocating by how little reprieve it leaves in its dedication to unsettling.

The iconic Akira Slide happens early in the film after The Capsules are baited into a fight by a rival biker gang, The Clowns. Kaneda goads the leader of the The Clowns into a motorcycle-joust and the rush towards each other at a dizzying pace. At the last second, the leader of The Clowns chickens out and pulls away, clattering from his bike and Kaneda—with his nerves unfrayed—slides his bike to a halt with enough style to inspire generations.

Over nearly four decades, this two second slide has been replicated over and over again in cartoons and live-actions across the world as an homage to Akira’s revolutionary place in the pantheon of animation. I’d estimate its been referenced over a hundred times—impressive in its own way, concerning in another.

Walter Benjamin once wrote, “even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.”2 We are currently further from the atomic event in Akira than the film itself, a cool six years beyond when the film is set. The excessive reproductions of The Akira Slide have begun to wear its tires bald, appearing less like reverence towards an avant-garde marvel and more like an aesthetic tax. An obligatory performance of prostration to ignite the audience’s dopamine response with a shallow bump of nostalgic familiarity. The Akira Slide is held hostage in a cascade of simulacrums; deteriorating and diluting with each facsimile. So far removed from its root that, to the proceeding generations of anime fans, the Akira Slide itself becomes what Donald Rumsfeld would call, “an known unknown.”3 Today’s average anime fan would likely struggle to recognise Akira at all, let alone give an informed rundown of its pensive themes on institutional corruption, governmental exploitation of the vulnerable and the civil unrest of a city trapped by perpetual scarcity but they’d maybe recognise The Akira Slide.

The Akira Slide suffers from deteriorating reproductions not because the repetition of its reference have made it less cool or call into question the purpose of such exorbitant homage payments. Rather, deteriorating reproductions speaks to a sociocultural attitude willing to endure a progressive distortion of replicating artefacts out of familiarity over yearning for something new. Cultural productions have hit a biological half-life. Ours is a fractured and formulaic zeitgeist that, despite all of technology’s promise of creative ease and opportunity, seems physically unable to provide compelling innovations.

The artist with the constitution to push the boundaries of their mediums are rendered invisible, either because they pose too much of risk to the capitalistic investment they’ve wrangled or do not qualify for it at all. The audience is lulled into a consumptive fugue state—unwowable and always seeking safe satisfaction in the recognisable. In the context of cinema, one of the best filmmakers working today managed to articulate it far more succinctly than I ever could:

"I can see particularly with filmmakers that operate in the genre that there is a pleasure now in combining elements from these master directors but if you do not have the ontological necessity of vision that these masters had—the way in which they see the frame, and at the same time the way they see reality and the political aspect of that—it all becomes empty." — Luca Guadagnino

Musically, this appears as contemporary songs resampling songs that were already sampled. The advancement of audio technology means the technique of sampling has evolved from chopping on beat-pads into a less laborious practice of loading audio files into a digital audio workstation. Locating samples today is a scroll through youtube, not a hunt through the shelves of a record store. With every step towards technology, we stray further from tangibility and a little more soul gets lost. Easier accessibility comes at the expense of learning the contours of instruments with our own hands. We call it progress. We reminisce on golden ages while spitting on the inconveniences of the past, as we desperately try to replicate nostalgic warmth through the filter of digital emulations. We call that progress.

A painting—slowly decaying—as its photocopy is fed through a photocopier.

3: Uninspired monopolies

When his single Carnival topped the US Billboard Hot 100 last year, it made Kanye West the only rapper to peak at number 1 across three separate decades. Somehow, he remains one of the biggest cultural impactors in the world.

In the song PROMOTION from his VULTURES 2 collaboration album with Ty Dollar $ign, Kanye reanimates lyrics from Good Life—his own 2007 anthem with T-Pain—rapping: “Baby girl, hop in, we goin' everywhere but broke… Like we always do at this-”.

Good Life felt celebratory. It was the culmination of Kanye’s self-propelled hard work manifested into an anthem of success—rose-tinted and sparklingly new—where the pride of his mother was an anchoring currency. The sexual references are twinged with the customary misogyny of the genre but at least they’re cushioned by Kanye’s signature balance of cheekiness and absurdist turn of phrase. (Have you ever popped champagne on a plane while gettin' some brain? Whipped it out, she said, "I never seen snakes on a plane!")

By contrast, PROMOTION appears as a corrupted monument of decadence—one that attempts to tinker with the nostalgia of a simpler time to make the audience point and say, “I remember that!” with fondness in their hearts. Kanye’s production indulges familiar sonics, with chord progressions swirling through organesque synths to stir his signature juxtaposition of gospel and rugged opulence. The palace festers with grotesque evolutions. The overall air is off-putting and lethargic, the misogyny mutated more domineering and vulgar, the references to excessive wealth feel dark, paranoid and, to be honest, carceral. Where Good life is an aspiration, PROMOTION is a cautionary tale.

Capitalism is consistent in what it requires from those who wish to attain hyper-success within its confines. The corner-cutting sacrifices arc towards the exploitation of others to solidify, sustain and justify its own elevation. The insanity of the artist is that they bleed themselves and thus, to reach a stratospheric height in the arts, one must practice a supernatural exploitation of self—exorbitantly mining one’s own creativity into billion-dollar business ventures4 like Kanye or mining one’s own physical vessel to become an otherworldly phenom of choreography, breath-control and pitch-perfect melodic performance like Beyoncé.

It is one thing for conditions to progress towards artists feeding photocopies into the photocopier. It is something else to observe established artists photocopy old versions of themselves. Kanye is not alone here. Off the back of his most challenging year ever, Drake’s collaboration album with PARTYNEXTDOOR, $ome $exy $ongs 4 U features the vibey SPIDER-MAN SUPERMAN which samples his own song The Real Her from his 2011 album Take Care. After 14 years, the fact that one of the world’s biggest pop-stars can still churn out smooth, softly misogynistic navel-gazing bops may surprise no-one—certainly not me who vividly remembers him bragging “we’ll see who’s around a decade from now, that’s real” on Tuscan Leather’s grand entrance to his 2013 album Nothing Was the Same. However, the fact he’s in a place in his career where he’s sampling songs from his own discography, trying to court fond memories (Take Care is widely considered his best album) in the aftermath of a rap battle that left his social influence waning might be what the kids are calling, “a recession indicator”.

If we’re simply looking at the empires of Drake and Kanye, it seems the knees of the old guard are beginning to quake and, for a parade of reasons (the most crucial being the infinite counter-cultural siloes birthed by the internet that have devastated any potential for a cohesive monoculture) there are no observable successors to carry the baton of their mantle.

Of course, the examples of these two men could never reflect the entire musical landscape but their industrial influence is undeniable, its wavering runs in parallel to an observable fatigue that’s yawning through every medium of the arts.

The artists are uninspired.

The audience is bored.

Cinephiles express abject disdain towards sequels and reboots as they hate-watch phoned-in Netflix slop. Criticism towards the hyper-visibility of overtly sexual female rappers have been raging for years but as soon as an artist like Doechii steps into the fray, she’s hit with unsophisticated “industry plant” allegations. The size of observable cultural fatigue is only matched in volume by an incurious audience so hypnotised by familiarity yet so reluctant to pull their eyes away from the swirling circles and search for something else.

Nothing is New

Micro-plagiarising. Deteriorating productions. Uninspired monopolies. These phenomenas are all examples of creative avoidance that eschew the artistic risk of trying to pioneer something new. When you steal for engagement, you don’t actually have to think up your own jokes. If you reprint the successes of past and slap a coat of modern paint on it, you don’t actually have to try and synthesise something groundbreaking. When you sample yourself, you can keep your empire thriving. Is it any surprise that AI has developed from this sociocultural soil?

There is another noticeable thread tethering these phenomena together. They’re all devoid of a single human trait that is impossible for A.I to capture: human effort.

Despite its digitally corrective purpose, an artist still needs to sing into Autotune’s engine for their vocals to be pulled into the right key, allowing musicians like Lil Yachty to experiment with the software’s internal parameters to critically-panned effect. When J. Dilla diligently micro-chopped soul samples on his AKAI beat-pad, he would approach structuring with such jazz-like creativity that he’d mutate time signatures with detailed intricacy. Where there is a capacity for human touch, there is a capacity for human innovation yet of all the technological advancements in art, none have stripped away the human element of creativity so absolutely, none have distanced the tactility of human touch as much as artificial intelligence.

Its purpose of making concept-to-construct an instantaneous process strips away the magic of making, the blissful agony of creation, the clarity of mind that comes with exerting effort on an idea and guiding it from the conceptual womb and birthing it into reality. I could be gauche and reductionist and say this is an inevitable consequence of a post-instagram culture—aesthetically sustained and considerate of growth only when packaged prettily or algorithmically quantifiable. I could tack on the fact that the phenomenas I’ve identified of micro-plagiarising, deteriorating productions, and uninspired monopolies are all leading co-conspirators.
Whatever factor(s) made the ground fertile enough for AI to propagate, it is difficult to treat it like any other technological advancement when it so grotesquely contorts the idea that “art is for everyone” to mean “everyone deserves to make music without practicing, to draw without learning to sketch, to write a novel without figuring out how one shapes tens of thousands of words from an amorphous sierra of thoughts.”

I hold my breath—hoping the arrogant declarations that AI is the future of art are met with a plummet as swift as its equally obnoxious NFT predecessor. This is a cultural abomination believing itself to be greater than even a christian god, smugly calling out “why hand-craft a world in seven days when this machine can basically churn out what I want in seconds?”

The validity of AI’s advantages have been conditioned into us through the language of commerce for decades. It is efficient. The world is faster than ever, deliveries that used to take a week can arrive on your doorstep tomorrow. Cheques that used to take five working days to land in your account can be transferred instantly. AI is quicker than humans. It cuts costs. It saves time. All its benefits are slathered in the soulless rhetoric of economics, woefully lacking imagination beyond the parameters of late-stage capitalism and glibly professing that AI is “better” because convenience is better. But when it comes to art—the mess is the point.

In Steal Like An Artist, wrote, “we make art because we like art. We’re drawn to certain kinds of work because we’re inspired by people doing that work.”5 Isn’t AI art too anti-social for its users to claim they are inspired by people? Too disrespectful towards the artists that’ve been exploited for its users to claim that they like art? It’s within the exertion of effort that we house our love, obsession or devotion. AI lacks the mortal effort to imbue art with any spiritual texture. Instead, it equips the nonchalant, placing Hayao Miyazaki’s paintbrush in hands that do not care. This technology is most seductive to those unable and/or unwilling to comprehend the totality of art—who’d prefer it churned out as soulless, mono-faceted, empty calories indistinguishable from “content” than experience it as an ancient expression of the human spirit demanding authentic activity from the bodily vessel to capture kernels of the divine.

Perhaps I am playing into Kranzberg’s hands—exhibiting a “disdain” for AI that stereotypically positions it as “somehow opposed to the humanities”. Latched to the haterational lineage of Hove, Simone and Delaroche—I wonder whether I’m yelling that the end is nigh, balling my fist at the sprawling techno-wires and algorithmic gizmos, too jaded and ancient to understand the AI abomination’s utility in the creative realm.

The progressive leaps forward in technology—the turn-tabling manipulation at the advent of hip-hop, the evolution into beat-pad chopping, the pitch correction of Autotune—may have brought about their own middling moral panics but each evolution of equipment was a step further from human intervention. Turntables compressed the composition of the live band. Beat-pads sliced played instruments into pieces. Autotune eschewed the need to sing in key. Like a deteriorating reproduction, each advancement edged us away from the participation, palpability and play that governs the spirit of creativity in exchange for convenience and streamlined process. I have a feeling AI isn’t just another step away from tactility… but it is the step away from it. Unlike the technological advancements before it—artificial intelligence appears like ‘The Great Filter’ of artistic expression—a creative point mankind cannot return from. We’re all watching the toothpaste of it all squeeze slowly from the bottle. We won’t know how much mess we’ve made until it’s done. All I know is—once it’s out, it doesn’t go back in.

Despite I already sharing an excerpt of Dodgems from my short story collection for Yours Truly subscribers this week, I was writing a Substack note that kept increasing in mass and something told me I should hit a zig-zag and deliver this impromptu rambling as a newsletter instead.

While I was on holiday in Ireland, I stumbled on an essay entitled The Unbearable Wackness of Kendrick Lamar.

The urge to respond overwhelmed me. I’ve recognised people seem to enjoy when I respond to things and to be honest, I enjoy challenging/being challenged, too. Part of the reason why I didn’t pen a response essay was because I don’t want to be known as the Substack reply guy (even if I’m good at it). This is a life-long conundrum. I’m quite good at things that I don’t want to be known for being good at.

Splitting the difference, I responded with a long comment. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about the nature of criticism in our cultural landscape today and it eventually spurred me to write this:

In the comment about Kendrick Lamar’s alleged wackness, I spoke about a phenomena I’ve observed that I like to call “chasing the argument”— “where one tries to root their dislike of something/someone in evidence but they’re working backwards from the disdain, resulting in confirmation bias that they then attempt to present as objective.”

It makes for quite clunky criticism when the critic’s disdain overpowers their writing. There’s always a foul odour. The most unpleasant critiques I’ve read are when the critic is unfunny, mean-spirited and it seems they have a personal vendetta against the artist they’re writing about. To me—to love the art form is to avoid the trap of spilt vitriol. That is what having reverence for the art-form of criticism itself is all about.

A type of critique I find myself disliking: “it thinks it’s more important than it is”.

Such statements reminds me of the Family Guy scene when Peter Griffin said he did not care for The Godfather because “it insists upon itself”. Seth Mcfarlane shared recently that one of his film history professors said it about The Sound of Music and Mcfarlane didn’t know what the fuck he meant by it.

We can try to break down what “it insists upon itself” means.

To “insist upon” something means to “believe something is important/necessary” therefore to “insist upon itself” means “to believe itself important”.

This strikes me as an arbitrary criticism.

By virtue of being art it has already been birthed because the artist believed it to be necessary.

No artist goes to such painstaking lengths to rip their ideas from the peaceful void of non-existence because they don’t think it’s important. As Chris Griffin passionately blurts out, “it has a valid point to make, it’s insistent!”

The reason why that Family Guy scene is so funny to me is because ultimately, Peter thinks The Godfather is pretentious but he says it in the most pretentious way imaginable, which sparks everyone in the panic room starts cussing him out—to the point where Stewie becomes momentarily legible to the whole family. The genius of the scene is its creation of a pretentious ouroborous. Peter declares his opinion pretentiously and in kind, his family responds pretentiously. Chris reels off the names of actors as if having talented cast dictates a movie’s quality and Lois ends the argument with a veiled insult “the language they’re speaking is a language of subtlety—something you don’t understand.”

I understand why someone would deem certain art “pretentious”.

Personally, I prefer not to label art itself pretentious because my general experience is that pretentiousness is a woefully human quality—meaning it in the demeanour of the artist or the reaction of the audience.

A great example: Saltburn. I could easily say that Saltburn “thinks it’s more important than it is” but such a description wouldn’t be Saltburn’s fault. Now, my contempt for Saltburn is well-documented. I think it sucks because it relies on cheap shock-value, has banal narrative twists and the underlying misanthropic tone of the film feels like thin-veiling for the director’s fondness of the upper-class. I can also recognise it’s a beautiful looking film. But it rings like propaganda that’s trying to get its audience to find tories hot. That makes it mid in my books. Nowhere in my analysis would it serve me to claim the film itself thinks it's more important than it is—that conclusion seems shouldered by public reception.

“It thinks it’s more important than it is” is one of those statements that says more about the critic than the film/art/music.

If you believe it—show your working. What failures of scene, theme, lyric are provoking that feeling? What elements make you feel this way? Do you feel it because of the film/art/music itself or because of the attention the film is receiving?

All art requires us to delve deep into engaging with ourselves and the form. I’m of the belief that creativity deserves more thought than “I don’t like that guy so I’m just going to unload the clip on him”. Such carelessness contributes to the quickening erosion of anti-intellectualism that is so present in our culture.

We owe it to the art forms we enjoy to have coherent criticisms of them.

Some unsolicited advice for any wannabe critics out there: Before you decide to jump into a negative critique—I’d urge you to really think about the root network of your disdain. You are writing from a place of relative safety. You likely haven’t achieved the level of success of the person you’re criticising and you do not know the mechanics that goes into making and sustaining their creative endeavours. That alone, should make you weigh your words with grace and care. In one of the replies to my comment regarding Kendrick Lamar, I was asked if I was being too charitable. I concurred, because I understand how my admiration for Kendrick informs my opinion of him. By contrast, it is abundantly clear to me that anyone who writes that “Kendrick Lamar seems like a man with profoundly debilitating paranoia, someone whose obvious mental problems combined with his overexposure will likely lead to a Kanye-West-level meltdown” is being severely uncharitable. Perhaps reality lives somewhere between our perspectives. The question of “being too charitable” is a fascinating one; mostly because our immersion in a hot-take driven culture where we function as fanatics in the coliseum fiending for the sweet stench of blood rarely warrants the question, isn’t the critic being too uncharitable? It is possible—perhaps easy—to be an entertaining hater. Y’all know I’m known to indulge. Still, I believe it is useful to have a solid and clear-hearted accounting of own your contempt. To explore it deeply, wheat must be cleaved from chaff. Separate the jealousy, shame and misunderstanding from the disappointment and disagreement. Understand your why.

Or don’t.

Each of us gets to choose.

The liar’s language and On slogans explored the transmissions of language between people and society. The way the (inter)personal pollinates the societal fascinates me, however I fear my irked demeanour in those pieces prevented me from articulating a fuller breadth of my reflections. It is not something I’m certain I’ll rectify in what I consider the last essay of this linguistic trilogy but I’ll try, especially as I’ve been reflecting a lot on an interaction I had last week:

I have learnt and forgotten more words than faces of acquaintances. I’ve excommunicated words for crimes as petty as going out of style or my own misuse of them in public—vowing to never utter their shapes again, making them a silent monument of my own shame. I have held words close to my soul for no other reason than their mouth-feel, linguistic pleasantness and serendipitous integrity. (Opalescent is one of my favourite words and I learnt it before I discovered opal was my birthstone.)

“We are transformed by words every single day” is a truth I often recite and such transformation is made all the more profound when something you never had the words to illuminate is bestowed a name.

For me, Jean-François Lyotard’s libidinal economy1 (Peewee Hermeneutics alerted me this concept has had a recent uptick in pop-cultural essays) which is concerned with what Foucault pronounced “the flow of desire” was particularly eye-opening.

There is an unconscious libidinal investment of the social field that coexists, but does not necessarily coincide, with the preconscious investments, or with what the preconscious investments "ought to be." That is why, when subjects, individuals, or groups act manifestly counter to their class interests—when they rally to the interests and ideals of a class that their own objective situation should lead them to combat—it is not enough to say: they were fooled, the masses have been fooled. It is not an ideological problem, a problem of failing to recognize, or of being subject to, an illusion. It is a problem of desire, and desire is part of the infrastructure.2

It seems simple; the fact we are driven by desires that overwrite our more urgent or substantial interests is something I personally saw everywhere—have even participated in—but never had the language to name. The yearning of instant gratification over long-term gains. Why do people smoke knowing its mollywhopping their health? (As is the Inigo way, there is definitely an essay-shaped rant within me to explore the culture-wide suicidal ideation of western society—but not today because never today.) The ‘libidinal economy’ provided me a way of seeing why people made socio-political decisions so contrary to their social location.

As an artsy nigga generally disinterested in the rigidity of academia but who’s instead just curious about making sense of the world and its pageantries—I patchwork the things I read with ways I understand the world to build myself a lens to witness life and navigate it. If we do want to get academic about it—The thing beneath the thing I mentioned in the liar’s language could very much be described as an underworld administration governed by Lyotard’s libidinal economy, Jungian phenomenologies of the shadow self3, the anti-Black foundations of Wilderson’s Afropessimism4 and the consumptive logic underpinning Joy James’ Captive Maternals5.

I pilgrimage towards theories that clarify the fog of my eye. I seek the right words, trying them on like floral hats to see if they fit me. I do away with them if I find they don’t fit as well as I hoped or don’t seem as flattering as I thought. Perhaps that is a luxury that comes with being someone so enamoured with the curvature of words. They are as ephemeral as picked flowers.

In that respect, I get why saying “terms like ‘joy is an act of resistance’ have made us complacent about actual resistance” might’ve been a challenging thing to be confronted by. Joy as an act of resistance has been a liberatory recalibration in the mind-space for many. The resistance to my reflection—the potential loss—makes sense. I have empathy for those who see a random but dashingly handsome stranger yapping on Substack about something they believe in—pointing at it and saying, that’s not right when it has been so transformative.

I am not interested in policing how anyone conceptualises, articulates or practices joy. I am concerned in how we rebel, especially when it comes to using sustainable, emotional fuel to power our resistances. Somewhere down the time-line of peaceful protesting, we’ve seemed to absorb the belief that juvenile provocation of our enemies is tantamount to defeating them. We need to relinquish that belief. All our lives depend on it. The planet is being chauffeured into the fever of the sun and I don’t believe joy can be the rallying cry that gets us to kick these motherfuckers out of the driving seat (even if I’d very much rejoice at the sight of them falling out the car door and rolling along the asphalt in my rearview mirror.)

To know the ephemeral limits of words doesn’t mean I yearn less for the preservation of the original intention. It doesn’t mean a word like woke isn’t a tragedy I feel a pang for whenever I hear it used in its gentrified and phlegm-ridden form. Perhaps, I have my own internal metric system of what to grieve and when. I try to have an unsentimental acceptance of time’s ravaging; which means not fighting for words, terminologies or slogans but for the intangible truths they represent—to speak my experience closer to them, to evaluate and re-evaluate their functionality, to articulate them better, to enlighten with them more.

One term that could do with re-evaluation is privilege.

In my early, autodidactic education of anti-Blackness, white privilege exploded in popularity, proving instrumental in lieu of other ways of naming the omnipresence of white supremacy. In an episode of the Overthink Podcast, Lewis Gordon articulates my qualms perfectly:

The word privilege is constantly used in a way that buys into a notion that not only personalises it but if you think about the things that are associated with the privileges, we have to ask seriously if those are things that people shouldn't have. Everything that I've seen or heard about when people talk about, say, “white privilege”, refers either to something everyone should have—like clean water, education, fair treatment in courts, employment, etc—or to something no one should have. For instance, the behaviour of Donald Trump or the Ku Klux Klan. It strikes me that it's not productive to get into the white privilege discourse. If people are designated white, then at that moment, the only way you could say they could not have this so called “privilege” is to stop being white in a society that's constructed them as such. It seems to me it's more productive to have formulations over things people can actually do and act upon. And this is one of the reasons why I prefer to address questions of license, because you see when certain people are exempt from accountability, then their actions slide into license.6

In one social location (Blackness), I am “marginalised” and in another (masculinity), I am “top” of the power structure. Inhabiting both with an above-average level of social awareness means I can tell you—the construct of masculinity is no privilege to live inside.

Stray from the unwritten laws of traditional manhood and you are shunned, alienated, attacked and in extreme circumstances, killed. Adherence to certain subsections of their laws might get you killed quicker anyway. The ways to be a man—a societally triumphant man—rely on adhering to a rigid and narrow ideal that has been erected by cruel and violent men and sustained for millennia. In this vein, we all fundamentally misunderstand the constraints of manhood, we misunderstand why so many boys fail in schools, turn to the manosphere and grow into men who are killing themselves out of a seemingly inescapable loneliness. The unsustainable construct of patriarchy that is deemed a privilege is poisoning men from the inside out and the men who are immune to its poison become so tapped that it propels them to victory in the world’s most disgusting game.

Most men fail the game. Overt rejection of the game is an isolating endeavour. You are viewed with healthy suspicion by non-men who’ve also resolved to build their own game or make their own rules. You are viewed with vitriol by men who believe the game is the only way and hate you for wanting to reject it. Finding other men who reject the game and are in a place to foster brotherhood with you is like finding a hay flake in a stack of needles. I digress… The world weighs on everyone.

My point is: privilege became a word so crucial in naming power imbalances, so pivotal in the socio-political education of so many, yet it draws such an incomplete picture of these oppressive constructs. Be it patriarchy, whiteness, heterosexuality or otherwise, these constructs are omni-directionally destructive and ‘privilege’ does a really bad job at articulating the extent of the detriment. I’d go as far to say that its explanatory shortcomings have contributed to our current political moment.

If you care about racial issues and have been online in the last decade, you’ve likely had an exchange with a white person who doesn’t get the term white privilege. They probably said to you, “how can I be privileged if I’m broke?” and you probably tried to find a graceful way to say, “despite being broke, you still have more opportunities than a broke person who’s more marginalised than you.” If you were lucky, this would lead them to a revelatory moment. The more likely outcome is that they doubled down. Discussions like this are the stuff of legends now. Only sequestered echo-chambers remain. The membrane between shit-posting trolls and disgruntled MAGA enthusiasts is so thin that a Venn diagram of them might as well be a perfect circle.

When Gordon says that privilege discourse is unproductive, I immediately think about how people who’re struggling will rarely put aside their immediate circumstances to think about a hypothetical other, let alone take kindly to being told they are privileged. Still privilege has become a widespread, idealistic spore ejection into the cultural zeitgeist’s airways all the same, and we should observe and reckon with the consequences of it.

Each of us are stuck on a complex web of oppression that, for comprehension’s sake, we reduce to a hierarchical ladder. Privilege helps comprehend the ladder but does a pretty rubbish job at articulating the web, which is comprised of structural beams like class, race, gender, heterosexuality, able-bodiedness, etc but also relies heavily on an underworld administration to all these things—willpower, capacity to manipulate, beauty and charisma to name a few. All of this dictates how comfortable one is able to exist under the kyriarchy of modern life. And most people are simply fucking struggling.

White male shooters like Dylann Roof who are apprehended alive or men like Brock Turner who get a slap on the wrist for sexual assault are not privileged—deeming them so implies that privilege is the freedom to inflict harm (which strikes me as profoundly colonial logic). Gordon would suggest these men are socially granted a “license” that makes them “exempt from accountability”:

Privilege as a term has helped many understand the basic nature of oppression but that same basicness is what strains communication when discussing it. The fact its usage habitually invites such a potent reaction of challenge reveal it to be both too insecure as a principle and too accusatory to be useful. I don’t think its controversial to say that it has contributed greatly to how the language of social justice has alienated large portions of the western public—to the point where they’re willing to parade around the word woke as a ritual sacrifice.

Desires for a “Leftist Joe Rogan” are ultimately saying: how do we show the importance of pursuing virtues like genuinely caring for marginalised people, tackling the out-of-control class inequality and protecting the only viable environment our species has for a gazillion miles without sounding so motherfucking insufferable?

The truth is: I have no earthly idea. But the things that aren’t working, should shed their skin. We must let things die and try something new.

In the pursuit of a better world, where words transform us everyday, I perhaps have more questions than I do answers. How are we comprehending our successes and failures in the societal realm of language? If we are failing, what course-corrections do we actively need to implement? What ways of speaking do we need to invent? Has the traditional adherence to the left/right political paradigm outstayed its welcome? Should we stop parroting the thought experiments of old, dead white men and inhabit our modern times—not in petulant rejection of the old but in principled and accessible evolution from their ideas? What tactics have worked that we need to hammer away at until we strike gold? What do we need to let go of? How do we want to speak to each other as teammates? How do we want to speak about each other? How do we want to treat enemies? How do we discern the difference? How do we want to relate to each other in a way where we can convert enemies into teammates? Which of us is best suited for that work? What is the work? Who do we want to dedicate our speaking to? Where do we want to channel our love, our joy, our rest? How do we want to resist? Do you look at the world and see a beast too massive to confront? Do you believe we have already lost? Are we all simply coping, waiting to be kissed by the surface of the sun? Do you feel guilt for not being able to do more? For not wanting to do more? When you think about the state of the world, are you governed by shame? Are we? Am I? What should we do?

Words will wither.
Others grow in their place.
Questions always rise.
I will be asking more.

Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation,
and that is an act of political warfare—Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light

Once upon a time—in an attempt at owning the libs—Jordan B. Peterson vented about the term “social justice”, smearing it as “a woke slogan”. He correctly traced the etymology of the word “slogan” to “sluagh-ghairm” before incorrectly identifying its origin as Welsh and smugly dropping the mic: “Meaning: battle cry of the dead.”

“Sluagh-ghairm” was a war-cry hailed by Scottish Highland clans. Each Sluagh-ghairm was unique to each clan and often referred to a shared mantra, a significant landmark or “the seat of the clan” — the territorial stronghold where chiefs gathered council for crucial decisions. Despite being a sonorous instrument of battle, a sluagh-ghairm would be hailed in celebration, too. These cries were inciting—passionate, vocal anchors to a clan’s ancestral ground.1

Where sluagh-ghairm were war-cries in heated battles, the modern usage of “slogan” has stripped the root word of its militant teeth, sending it down an evolutionary path that has inseparably tethered it to corporate advertising. To zombie-herd the masses towards buying stuff. Brady T. Hodges et al. capture this best in their consumer research essay, Intel Inside: The Linguistic Properties of Effective Slogans:

Firms spend millions creating and communicating slogans… Marketing communications, including slogans, are more likely to boost brand attitudes when consumers have a more favorable attitude towards the communication, and they are more likely to increase brand awareness when consumers remember the communication. Slogans, however, are distinct from other marketing communications (e.g., ad copy, social media posts, website text, etc.) because slogans often stand alone, tend to be more concise, are more closely and consistently tied to the brand, and are repeated more frequently than other communications.2

In contrast to its capitalistic refurbishment, the arena where the modern slogan retained a semblance of its warrior spirit is in its forked, evolutionary path in politics. In The Use of Slogans in Political Rhetoric, Cail Newsome explores how American presidents use slogans: “to thrill, exhort, and inspire is at the heart of persuading an audience.”3 Cécile Van De Velde’s essay, The power of slogans: using protest writings in social movement research looks at how slogans drive activism, stating “each and every slogan and protest writing is a public expression and speech in and of itself, whose summarising and visual strength conveys a political message.”4

Either way, I see slogans as spells. Enchantments embodying the very spirit of a movement, people or idea. A slogan should be simple, comprehensive, clear-hearted and internally electrifying. They are the first impression and the end goal. For that reason, I rigorously study their structural integrities.

Whenever a new slogan emerges, I observe its foundations and fault-lines. I think on all the ways its successful and how it could collapse, be taken out of context, be argued against, thwarted and co-opted. What message floats on the surface? What message lurks underneath? Corporations spend millions of dollars workshopping the exact wording that’ll pied-pipe millions into emptying their wallets. I wish we could afford that level of study but in lieu of such deep-pocketed patronage—I critically analyse, hoping that the hyper-vigilance of my screams into the void are picked up to fortify the cries of our causes as we look to ignite people into action against the imposing web of oppressive structures.

I have no academically meticulous way to say this but: when it comes to slogans, I am concerned with how they populate the metaphysical plane. As I’ve said before: we are transformed by words every single day. A slogan is imbued with the spiritual voltage of a world-changing hope. They have their own equilibrium. They carry energetic intentions—on their skin and deep within their genomes—and it is likely my vocation as a writer that compels me to deeply analyse their emotional body with such rigour.

Black Lives Matter grew from a #hashtag and a nausea rose in me alongside. I dared not share the nature of my sickness with anyone, lest I infect my fellow niggas with my pessimistic affliction/be considered an enemy of the movement/or worse… a coon. Still, the structural integrity of Black Lives Matter as a slogan unsettled me in its early conception and has continued to do so for nearly a decade.

I’d attend protests with crowds of kin around me, chanting Black Lives Matter! at the apex of their lungs, falling silent each time. I didn’t have the clearness of mind or deftness of tongue to articulate the tumults I felt then. Perhaps I never needed any of those things—just the bravery to speak my mind:

If slogans are descendents of Highland clan war-cries; if they are indeed spells imbued with the spiritual voltage of a world-changing hope—a slogan that sought to affirm our existence to a system that’s shown us gratuitous violence across every echelon of its structure was a mistake. (Metaphysical translation: I shudder at the thought of looking into the snarling jaws of a beast that’s made it bloodcurdlingly clear it wants to eat me and uttering the words “I matter”.)

With each instance of police brutality, further war was waged; a war many misguidedly thought was over with the election of a Black president. But each death clarified my understanding about the steepness of the battlefield’s hill and with each grainy video this slogan forced me to argue unreasonable whataboutisms. It may have been inevitable no matter what slogan was popularised. Nevertheless, explaining to white people that you simply fucking matter felt like such a humiliating base position.

I dreamt of the Māori’s Haka. Ceremonial enchantments of the body exhibiting celebratory pride and unfuckwitable strength. I awoke to find my gaze fixed back on Black Lives Matter, hope waning off. I felt the ceded emotional ground. I sensed an undercurrent of pacification pretending it was as an electrified charge. The rusty blade of a vicious enemy pressed on the nape of my neck and in three fucking words, waterlogged pleas lurked under the surface. Black Lives Matter (let us live, I beg you.)

At my most pent up, my gasket would blow. “Niggas used to shout Black Power!”

When I look to the metaphysical plane, Black Power feels so perfect.

Symmetrical. Succinct. A robust, ideological foundation with fertile soil to propagate so many different ideas. Coupled with the iconic raised fist—a universal symbol of combative force but a specific emblem to Black people as a salutation—the spiritual charge is undeniable.

Black Power summoned an energetic wellspring—portraying an intimate belief in Black people’s self-determination while also being frank-tongued about the infernal nature of the racist structure. In the punch of its words there is the ambition for self-governance, self-acceptance radiating outwards, a conviction to seek dominion over circumstance. Over-explanation of its intention was unnecessary as the social scientist Michael Banton wrote, “those who have raised the cry are not worried by the charge that they are cultivating "black racism" because they are sure their doctrine can never do as much harm as white racism.”5

Despite helping popularise the term with his book Black Power: Politics of Liberation in America, some of Kwame Ture’s ideas about the transformative capacity of Black Power didn’t land. “A black sheriff can end police brutality”6 seems overly optimistic considering the corruptive miasma of the US police state—the same institutional body Baldwin famously commented on just a year earlier: “In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it.”7

In that sense, I’m not trying to get caught slipping on the slick surface of nostalgia. The sixties were a time of electrifying resistance yet, Black intellectual powerhouses and community leaders were not above disagreeing with one another over the slogan.

Martin Luther King Jr’s disagreement with it is well documented, perhaps excessively so. Yes, his penchant for nonviolent demonstration put him at odds with the rhetorics of self-defensive violent resistance that were uttered in Black Power’s name by more militant actors. But just as one should consider the sneaky manipulation of over-portraying King in black and white photos to make his struggle seem further back in time than it was; one should also have a healthy suspicion towards information that omits King’s political evolutions—especially when those evolutions contributed so thoroughly to his demise.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute presents King’s perspective on Black Power by pulling quotes from 1966 with no mention of the later writing where King not only embraces the electrifying potential of the term but also calls for an evolutionary expansion of it.

In a 1967 New York Times article, King expresses desire to progress Black Power to the strengthening of worker’s unions, class-conscious solidarity between the Black and white working class in the key industries of “truck transportation, steel, auto and food industries” and the importance of elevating Black political leaders who are “impressive or illustrious to their constituents”. He also indulges a critical lens of the nonviolent approach that is so stereotypically associated with his legacy:

We must frankly acknowledge that in past years our creativity and imagination were not employed in learning how to develop power. We found a method in nonviolent protest that worked, and we employed it enthusiastically. We did not have leisure to probe for a deeper understanding of its laws and lines of development. Although - our actions were bold and crowned with successes, they were substantially improvised and spontaneous. They attained the goals set for them but carried the blemishes of our inexperience.8

Black Power had an incomparable global impact but I fear my gravitation to it as a rallying cry may be too enamoured with its spiritual voltage and too fingers-in-the-ears dismissive of its ramifications.

People are always shocked when I tell them Malcolm X’s grandson suffered from schizophrenia so severe that it lead him to set a house fire that killed Betty Shabazz. That sort of tragedy isn’t isolated—it is trauma descending down ancestry; simply one example of the racially charged nuclear fallout from an aggressive structure that devastated Black Power movement leaders via assassinations, predawn police raids, bombings, ruthless carceral measures and forced political exiles.

The battle-cries of Black Power were met with sanitised bloodshed obscured in history books. The observable and unknown tragedies it wrought are fucking scary.

Beyond setting alight the lives of radical leaders, there has been a concerted effort to stamp out any semblance of revolutionary spirit, making it clear the only viable resistance is a palatable one. The western structure has only grown more bloated, more heinous, more subterranean and the boot that bore down on the Black Power movement was swift, steely and never picked up to see the mess under the sole.

With all this in mind… Can we be surprised that Black Lives Matter is the natural successor in the afterlife of Black Power ? That it has visibly less teeth? That it hums with the pacified undertones of a plea?

Make America Great Again may’ve been repurposed from Reagan by Trump’s presidential campaign—but if you know how integral Black exploitation is to the functionality of America (the whole world, if we’re honest), it’s clear that MAGA doubles up as a counter-insurgency to Black Lives Matter. The unwavering pride in blood-soaked land built with enslaved labour and the declaration its gone to shit (rather than the realisation that it always was). MAGA is a hallucinatory spell, promising return to an exceptionalist former glory with the hushed understanding that such glory requires violence. It insists action. There is a spiritual charge in its intention that’s easily transferable. Energy doesn’t care if its used for good or evil—it simply demands motion.

Perhaps, recognising the voltage of Make America Great Again and the static palatability of Black Lives Matter is what makes me recoil at the phrases—Joy is resistance/rest is resistance.

I look at who occupies the White House. I look at the genocidal violence the previous occupants oversaw. I see no effective or coherently organised challenges. I see adjacent echo-chambers shout and alienate one another much more than they fight the common enemy. Resisting as an act of resistance is more necessary than ever yet more absent than any of us truly want to admit.

As a slogan in and of itself, I understand the context behind rest as resistance. As a means of rejecting the infliction of Black women’s labour, how rest is necessary for Black people under kyriarchy but specifically for Black women (or others Joy James would name “Captive Maternals9”) who have also been expected to toil intra-communally. I resonate with the realities it was rebelling against while still feeling like its structural integrity was always shaky.

Resistance is a word inseparable from radical struggle—it is how revolutionaries articulate their fight against oppressors. Resistance requires the activity of confronting injustice, it requires a spiritual voltage that’ll grant its inhabitants the courage to look snarling beasts in the face while fear quakes in their chest and so I believe slogans balancing equations such as rest as resistance are a pacifiers.

A call-to-action that calls for inaction is no call at all. Equating resistance with virtues like joy/rest/love do all of the concepts involved a painful disservice to each other.

The metaphorical equation of joy is resistance is conceptual displacement. Muddying and conflating the necessary act of resistance with other actions has set a precedent where any act of happiness can be reasoned as resisting.

Tongue-in-cheek, of course.

Yet, I can see how the declaration of joy is resistance has propagated this idea that individual acts of perceived misbehaviour, in and of themselves, are resistance.

If a slogan is imbued with the spiritual voltage of a world-changing hope then the root of my discomfort with these notions is that they read less like radical ambitions and more like coping mechanisms.

I do not hope for joy to be resistance. I hope that by resisting I may reclaim the joy this monstrous system has stolen from us. I do not hope for rest to be resistance, I hope resisting lets me reclaim the rest that has been existentially deprive me of. I’m not trying to go to bed thinking, “this sleep will piss off the white man.” Resistance is about confronting vaster enemies but I care for my joy too much to make it about them. In that respect, I honour ’s contribution and would much rather tap into the emotional voltage of reclamation for these virtues.

Joy as a reclamation of what was always mine.
Rest as a reclamation of what is owed to me.
Love as a reclamation of what I’ve always deserved.

There’s much to reclaim and much to resist, it’d help to be clear-hearted on which is which.

For those already engaged in bonafide resistance efforts and have found utility in any of the terms I’ve reflected on—none of this should hamper you. The work is the work and nothing I say about slogans is a character judgement of those who use them. I’m much more concerned with wider phenomenas, as these contemporary slogans become more individualised and personalised in reflection of more diverse globalised audiences and varied causes—how can they be imbued with the spiritual charge necessary for unity? Legible to many? Effectively mobilising?

The structural integrity of these slogans determines whether they’ll be easily co-opted or—as is the case with Abolish the Police—completely overwritten by something more easy on the stomach like Defund the Police. Their necessity remains—to be both entry points and endgames to energise people into standing up for what they believe in.

But perhaps, what I expect from a slogan operates under the assumption that they need to be solicitations of strength and spells of incitement. The Sluagh-ghairms of the Highlands may have been battle-cries but the idea their modern counterparts must also be centred around conflict may be too patriarchal a viewpoint. Still, I would be remiss if I didn’t point out how unwilling to physically resist the average westerner is—for ourselves, let alone the freedoms outside of us. We march peacefully in our tens of thousands for Palestinians who, suffering loss of limb will throw rocks at deadly drones as their last act of resistance. We applaud their courage and fight by demonstrating, boycotting, sharing and witnessing. Then we get to turn the TV off. In the words of Kendrick Duckworth Lamar, it’s not enough.

We know it. And sometimes, I believe our slogans reveal it, too.

Upgrade to Yours Truly

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The decade-wide gap between my brother and I gives me carte blanche to slip into abject immaturity around him. We access a refreshing lack of inhibition when we joke with each other and, on the other side of this playfulness, is the odd stumble into profundity.

The other day—between my stereotypical terrorisms of tinkering with his bedroom light-switch and giving him a low-five so hard both of our fingers stung—I blurted out, English is a liar’s language. You know how I know?

He looked at me blankly so I continued: when I was learning the alphabet and the letter “V” was directly followed by the letter “W” but the “W” looked like two “V’s” and not two “U’s” — I asked, ‘why is it called “double U” and not “double V”?’ and nobody gave me an answer so I just said to myself, ‘okay, this is a language of liars.’

Without skipping a beat my brother replied, you know in Spanish they call it “uve doble?” He unsheathed his phone to look up why its called “double U” in English. Looks like its from Ye Olde English, bro. “W” was a combination of two “U’s” to make a “wuh” sound.

Wow, that’s crazy, I said as I threw a stray sock in his direction and yelled “catch!” to make sure his reflexes were sharp. English is really just three languages in a trench-coat and all of them are lying to each other.

I’ve had a lot of conversations about language recently. One of my Substack notes about the cultural colonisation of the word “woke” gained traction and hostility mounted in the comments. The good-faith engagements were refreshing but paled in frequency to the derisive snorts at my language choices, disingenuous devil’s advocacies and offensive rebuttals so poorly conceived they deserved only to be dispatched by memes.

At the same time—I stumbled across a Substack note about essays “written in lowercase with poor paragraphing”. As a recovering lower-case essayist, I wanted to provide a sympathetic defence to “lowercasification”. I know what its like to be challenged on the internet so I tried to address the original author’s sentiments kindly and we had a brief but amicable back and forth.

(Note: rather than producing a biased recollection of events—I encourage you to explore the hyperlinks for a fuller picture of how these interactions went.)

In the succeeding altercations I noticed a common texture; a socio-emotional similarity I found curious. There are levels of abstraction I’m drawn to excavating: The thing beneath the thing. English is filled with “underneaths” and I was confronted with how deeply the logics of colonialism and conservatism are embedded in what seem to be everyday attitudes.

woke — the colonial undercurrent

Common rebuttals to my claim that “woke” has been culturally colonised can be distilled into two prongs: “words can’t be owned” and “that's just how language evolves.”

I get them on an epidermal level though DC Reade presented a more incisive encapsulation of both sentiments, “language term usage mutates in ways that no one can effectively police.”

I can’t do anything about who uses the word “woke”—how its been subsumed, what its evolved into or how it will evolve further. Words transmit so easily that its scary to think how its impossible for us to do anything about any word the dominant culture overhears from Black people and wishes to co-opt (something I predict will proliferate as the boundaries between the Black community and the dominant culture continue to erode from the digital melting pot of social media, physical gentrification and other compounding factors.)

I can, however, point out the thing beneath the thing in the sentiments of “words can’t be owned” and “that’s just how language evolves,” which share a subtle concealment of white supremacy’s self-sustaining rationale of entitlement.

On the matter of language’s evolution: the racist enforcement by the dominant culture means Black communities have boundaried and been boundaried, adapting over and over again—artistically, linguistically, financially and spiritually—to impositions of insulation to make them ours. When we are told, “you have to stay over there” we imbue the “over there” with our very being. Historically, this has meant white people do not make genuine or concerted efforts to engage with Black people or Black culture beyond exploitation, fetishisation, ridicule or general sensationalism. If they did, they’d know that their misuse our words is generally an eye-rolling annoyance or grounds for clowning.

The white extraction of “woke”, which was used in a very specific way within the Black community, is an unnatural evolutionary event in the dominant culture’s language that began when white LGBTQ+ leftists began appropriating the word and metastasising its new meaning via tiktokification—a conception that fundamentally required white people to breach Black neighbourhoods—environmentally and/or digitally—in order to extract our speech. Typically when Black ways of speaking breach containment, absorption into the dominant culture renders them a trend with a shelf-life. The pejorative use of “woke” however, is unnerving because its co-option by the dominant culture looks like it’ll have a far more long-lasting impact. Claiming “that’s just how language evolves” is reductive and says nothing about the logistics regarding how this particular word—which has had a trajectory unlike any other word in the English language—has specifically evolved.

On the matter of words being “un-ownable”: when you consider the historic and ongoing white supremacist treatment of nonwhite people, things that can’t (or perhaps shouldn’t) be owned have repeatedly entered the metaphysical space of property.

Whiteness erected an economic system where Black people were deemed property and committed genocide against Native Americans to extract land and deem it property. The declaration that there are “no rules of ownership” in relation to words rings hollow when western domination has been violently dependant on manufacturing monetary value from any-and-everything in order to exploit it and/or own it. The very concept of trademarks is one such manufacture, allowing a person or corporation to own a distinctive word, logo, sound, colour, shape or combination of all. Words can literally be owned according to the logics of white supremacist capitalism.

There are too many examples of Black cultural productions that can’t be owned (words and dances spring to mind) which have been routinely extracted by occupants of the dominant culture for monetary gain. Words “can’t be owned” but when Kayla Lewis put out a video inventing the term On Fleek it lead to a cultural phenomenon that white content creators and corporations capitalised from while Lewis receives nothing.

I am not interested citing an extensive inventory of theft. My point is that in a white patriarchal capitalist climate, everything is arranged as a matter of fate so if something can’t be owned philosophically, somehow, Black life still endures a continuum of transactions that arc towards loss regarding the un-ownable thing.

The history of slavery is a history of theft but it is also a history of imposition. It’s a history of having shit imposed on you. And on the most basic level, this imposition is conceptual. In addition stealing your labour, they also say “this is some shit you have to believe in”. Not only some shit you have to believe in but a way of believing. What we’re imposing on you is a modality of belief. The understanding that thought implies the deployment of certain conceptual tools and the belief in the reality of those concepts. And one of those of concepts is property. My problem with the various critiques of appropriation is that they assume the legitimacy of property. And they specifically talk about Black cultural production, Black making and the aesthetic sociality of Blackness—can be understood as property, as something that can be owned. I believe that it is not something that can be owned though it is in-fact something that can be stolen. —Fred Moten

Ultimately, the thing beneath thing here is: “words can’t be owned” is a circuitous justification for “words can be stolen” and once the word is stolen, one can deploy a cloud of real-time cultural amnesia and claim the flimsy self-defence of “that’s just how language evolves” without any critical examination of the circumstances that lead to the evolution.

In the middle of an altercation I was asked, “why should we treat something as sacred just because it doesn’t belong to us?” I entertained the question in good faith despite the fact it encapsulated a pathological lack of empathy that should’ve disqualified it from serious engagement. It was only after pointed it out I realised I was being confronted with the logic of colonial expansion. It was so overt and I didn’t even notice. It is that insidious.

grammar — the conservative undercurrent

Identifying the undercurrents of the dominant culture’s conservatism in the above author’s opinion on “lowercase writing and poor paragraphing” (and by extension, the institution of grammar) requires referral to elements of the author’s opinion directly. I do so in the literary vein of compassionate critique with no personal ill-will towards the author but as a witness wanting to unearth deeper implications of language:

1. I don’t think an opinion adhering to institutional conventions can be considered an “unpopular take.” Positioning it as unpopular masks a common opinion as marginalised. This type of perception skewing is reminiscent of Christian conservatives claiming God-fearing values are under attack despite Christianity dominating every echelon of American society. Rejecting lowercase formatting is something the entire historical superstructure of written media supports.

2. Considering it is mostly young people who write lowercase essays, the self-admissions of “close-mindness”, “elitism” and “boomerism” is a confessional that operates as a dog-whistle to give a demographic of older (typically white, conservative) people a license to punch down.

3. If essays written in “lowercase with poor paragraphing” are the product of naïveté or inability (ranging from neurodivergence, dyslexia, to any miscellaneous struggle with writing) then this opinion reads as mean. If they are written in lowercase as a stylistic choice then this opinion reads as incurious.

4. Parallels to Christian conservatism continue at the tail-end of the quote. American Evangelists often conflate the right to practise their faith with the right to impose their beliefs onto others (see: abortion rights). The author doesn’t opt for accepting that she isn’t the audience for lowercase essays but instead concludes by scolding the very writers “whose wondrous perspectives she’s excluding herself from” by patronisingly demanding they write to conform to her standards.

When I stumble across takes worded as pointedly as this, I’m always intrigued by what event triggered it. Or perhaps a better inquiry—if the author were to meet a “lowercase essayist” face-to-face, perhaps someone who’s just starting out and trying to find their voice and confidence—would the author speak to the writer this way?

Foregoing capitalisation makes it easier to wrangle the amorphous blob of thoughts in my mind into words and I discovered imbuing my writing with this raw emotion resonates well. It lead to a brief period where I wrote essays in lowercase. My reasons for stopping had nothing to do with fealty to traditional literary structure, I realised that effective communication in lowercase scripture relies on a delicate set of grammatical, syntactic and aesthetic rules that I’d need to take time to fathom.

Where an essay like ayan artan’s in defense of pretension looks clean, succinct and pleasingly rounded despite its eschewal of capitalisation—mine would appear jumbled and feel frenetic. I had to re-negotiate what looked and felt good to me artistically. By trying my hand at writing lowercase essays, I understood there was an etiquette to executing them well. Such a discovery would’ve never happened if I’d dismissed engaging with them from the first sentence.

Conservatism appears in the undercurrents of grammatical purism by maintaining an unwillingness to explore beyond the established order. A grammatical purist would sooner declare lowercase writing is “rooted in laziness” than acknowledge writing is fundamentally a mode of communication and therefore a petition for reciprocity to inextricably tether the fate of a writer to the reader. If lowercase writing is “lazy” then it is also “lazy” to refuse the call to read it.

Instead of allowing themselves to confront the work in a way that may open up their worldview to a new landscape, grammatical purists are prone to make borderline-offensive mockeries of a stylistic choice they refuse to engage with while simultaneously revealing their inability to grasp the etiquette of the form they’re attempting to ridicule.

I’m not trying to be obtuse, I am not ignorant of why one would want to adhere to grammatical structure. Misplaced, insufficient or incorrect grammar, spelling and punctuation can cause confusion and muddy one’s intentions. The conventional reader has likely had the importance of grammar drummed into them as a child and the weight of its structure is reinforced every time they open a book. In that respect, grammar is no different to any other indoctrinating belief system—the rules themselves are neither bad nor good but considering how they’re enforced punitively is useful and, as with all things bound to white supremacy, this is best exemplified by the treatment of Black linguistics.

When I discovered the author’s take, I knew it was only a matter of time before I’d see a white person openly mocking Black dialects. Those invested in grammatical purism have a tendency to disparage Black modalities of speech despite the fact that Black dialects have their own complex, linguistic structures that Black children are able to fathom while white people generally struggle to comprehend:

In the 2005 University of Massachusetts study, groups of black and white children were shown images from Sesame Street. In the crucial picture, a sick Cookie Monster languished in bed without any cookies, while Elmo stood nearby eating a cookie. “Who is eating cookies?” Jackson asked her test subjects, and all of them indicated Elmo. “Who be eating cookies?” Jackson then asked. The white kids replied that it was Elmo, while the black kids pointed to Cookie Monster. After all, it is the existential state of Cookie Monster to “be eating cookies”, while Elmo just happened to be eating a cookie at that moment. Cookie Monster, to those conversant in AAE, be eating cookies, whether he is eating cookies or not. The black kids in Jackson’s experiment picked up on the subtle difference when they were as young as 5 or 6. — Why We Be Loving the “Habitual Be” — Katy Waldman

If I had a quid for all the times white people tried to imitate Black speech by flinging a random “be” in the middle of a sentence, I probably wouldn’t have to spend the sullen corners of my day pondering how I’m going to busk for paid subscribers.

The thing beneath the thing here is: conservatism dictates rules be lauded as enforceable laws and historically, they’ve been used to delegitimise nonwhite dialects and demonise lower class communication. Any dissent is considered a moral failure, leaving little breathing room for the emergence of new practises. With lowercase essays, writers are experimenting how to communicate their ideas. They are still figuring out the kinks, bugs, and style but make no mistake, there is an etiquette materialising that makes some lowercase essays more resonant on this platform than essays written with traditionally grammar—just as there’s a distinct etiquette to African American English, Black British Vernacular and any other Black diasporic dialects that the dominant culture typically disparages.

You can either try to understand them, leave them be, or declare them lower lifeforms and remain ignorant of them. Each of us gets to choose.

There is something to be said about the politics of announcement. Once we take to the digital podium and declare our thoughts, we open ourselves for public challenge but more importantly, we beckon like minds. Scouring the comments, I noticed how many defenders of grammatical purity felt comfortable saying all kinds of—quite frankly—mean-spirited things about writers they share an environment with. The eschewal of capitalisation and traditional paragraphing was considered:

• “disrespectful to the reader”

• “a narcissistic gesture”

• “ideas that are sloppy at best”

• “tacky and needlessly difficult”

• “lazy thinking”

Conservatism tends to exhibit lower levels of compassion and empathy. The plethora of responses characterising lowercase essayists as faux-creative, undisciplined, pretentious, reactive narcissists who are also lazy and semi-literate feels like an unceremonious parade to demonise people who are just expressing themselves.

If someone is writing lowercase essays out of a naïveté or “inability” then they could probably do with less condescension and more positive reinforcement. If they’re writing lowercase essays out of stylistic choice then, as a reader, either meet them where they’re at or look elsewhere. Every artist has a right—duty even—to present their art however they want to. They do so with the hope their honest self-expressions will resonate with whoever it needs to.

Grammatical purists render the eschewal of grammar as personally afflicting—inducing headaches, exacerbating cognitive load, personally disrespectful and hurting to read—which may be true but obscures the deeper, more simple truth that they just want everyone to conform to the commandments of the status quo.

But the beauty of art is that there is never one way to interpret it. I’m currently re-reading Vanessa Onwuemezi’s Dark Neighbourhood which uses capitalisation conventionally but indulges quite experimental formatting. It is more syntactically confronting than your average short story collection and I am fascinated by it. I can imagine others might not be. Each of us gets to choose.

Reading lowercase essays may present a challenge for people who’ve been conditioned to read conventionally but I fail to see how it warrants such unnecessary levels of contempt. If the objective of communication is to convey a sentiment, pearl-clutching because the first letter of every sentence isn’t a mommy or daddy letter to all the other kiddy letters in a couple of viral essays feels like melodramatic catastrophising. Capital letters don’t exist when we communicate verbally and we all tend to understand each other just fine.

When Tiktok was going through the pageantry of being banned, I wrote “I think a platform mostly populated by young people that has, at least bought them joy and at most been an invaluable instrument of social mobility in a landscape with utterly awful job prospects, being banned by a cabal of out-of-touch politicians who seem to have infinite power to restrict but no power to create jobs or universal basic income or anything positively transformative for society—is, like, a really, really obvious demonstration of contempt for the masses and a clear signal that the political structure of America has no desire to build a hopeful or even functional future for young people.”

Up and down the author’s comment section, there is patronisation, reductive mockery and a general disparaging of creativity revealing a cold reality of living under a conservative, gerontocratic rule. Contempt for youth manifests as a compulsion to police what young people do and our society goes to great lengths to slam a cookie-cutter over young people to stone-bake them into good, obedient adult citizens.

I think it is important, as a civilisation, to know what traditions are functionally useful to carry from the past and what can be considered vestigial. White supremacist conservatism obscures this idea because it wants so badly to retain its ill-gotten gains. Rigidity towards something as arbitrary as written language arrangement is, to me, evidence of an over-investment in an obsolete organ. Young people have picked up on that and are running with it and I’ve made it an unshakable pillar of my belief system to never dismiss the creativity of youth without trying to understand them.

the full picture (beneath the picture)

If English is three languages in a trench-coat and all of them are lying to each other it is interesting to see when the dominant culture takes it seriously and when it choses to let it be.

The birth of SMS texting has left grammar curtailing in our written communication for the last 30 years. Sentiments of professionalism and affection once transmitted in physical letters are now expressed in emails (which, despite their airs of formality, are laden with short-hands and abbreviations) or iMessage/Whatsapp conversations (in almost exclusively informal speech). The institution(s) of print adhere to grammatical traditions and remain largely unchanged but the reading volume of the average person is declining. However, engagement on social media usage—a realm which has become generally indifferent, but definitely non-punitive, about using grammar—continues to climb steadily.

In the face of all these physical and digital changes of the written word—grammar (and the usage of capitalisation specifically) is becoming more obsolete.

The helicopter-parental protection of grammatical structure exhibits a desire to keep language static. But if you want an example of a natural way “language evolves,” you needn’t look further than how technology has been transforming our interpersonal communications in profound ways every day for decades.

By contrast, if I’m to even imply a desire to protect Black dialects from acquisition by a dominant culture that has historically pillaged from Blackness on a metaphysical level, then suddenly “language evolves”.

The liar’s language becomes fluid when it wants to subsume the artefacts of other cultures but rigid when it wants to the maintenance its grammatical law. What is considered policeable and what isn’t conveniently seems to be to the ubiquitous detriment of Blackness.

I hope I’m not being misunderstood, either. The people who were arguing with me about the cultural colonisation of the “woke” aren’t the same people who were disparaging lowercase essayists.

But there is a temperamental nexus.

Conservatism is dispatched as a shield to protect an institutional structure so it can continue to uphold discriminatory metrics of “excellence”, while colonial extraction and apologia is wielded as a sword to enforce the right to subsume Black cultural productions that don’t occur naturally in the white vicinity.

If you look close enough, you can see the conservative hand and colonial hand washing each other. All of it makes for a cleaner appearance of the white supremacist body.

Before “God is dead” became inseparably tethered to Nietzsche, Hegel negotiated Christian doctrines, exploring the death of God as a means of transformative redemption:

It is only as spirit that the self has that value. The death of this representational thought contains at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine essence which is not yet posited as a self. That death is the agonized feeling of the unhappy consciousness that God himself is dead. This harsh expression is the expression of the inmost simple-knowing-of-oneself, the return of consciousness into the depth of the night of the I = I which no longer differentiates and knows nothing external to it.1

Where Hegel saw God’s death as a bitter process of the spirit coming to know itself as a necessary step to truly knowing Him, Nietzsche’s attitude towards God’s death was an avid rejection of Him and a profound declaration of Christianity’s redundancy as a moral and philosophical chauffeur in the modern world.

This is most deftly captured by the Parable of the Madman, where Nietzsche writes of a ‘madman’ entering a marketplace, holding a lit lantern in broad daylight, seeking God. The townspeople ridicule him. He asks where God is once more before answering himself:

Whither are we moving? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually? Backward, sideward. forward. in all directions? Is there still any up or down? Are we not straying as though an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too. decompose. God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him.2

The ‘madman’ falls silent and so do the townspeople. He throws the lantern on the ground, smashing it to pieces.

"I have come too early," The ‘madman’ says."My time is not yet. This tremendous event is still on its way, still wandering; it has not yet reached the ears of men. Lightning and thunder require time; the light of the stars requires time; deeds, though done, still require time to be seen and heard.”

A foul-mouthed, cynical God—voiced by Tom Ellis (who ironically played The Devil in the fantasy crime series Lucifer)—is pulled into a meeting by the corporate board of Heaven. They’re sending him to Earth to live among the dysfunctional Higgins family as a cat to rehabilitate him of his celestial apathy.

Exploding Kittens is the latest on-screen endeavour to allegorise Christian cosmology as a corporate structure. The disappearance of the Supreme Arch-angel Gabriel in Good Omens Season 2 shows Hell at odds with Heaven’s “head office”, a supernaturally minimalist bureau where a committee of Arch-angel higher-ups baulk, bicker and vie for a promotion in the absence of their supreme chief.

Season 1 of Miracle Workers follows Craig Bog, the sole employee of the chronically under-funded department of answering prayers. Further up the ranks, Steve Buscemi’s God shares an apathy on a par with Tom Ellis’ Godcat, albeit twinged with more bumbling incompetence. Buscemi’s God, however, is afforded a greco-romanesque back-story; we learn he is the black sheep in a family of successful deities, contending with brothers and sisters who’ve created universes far more impressive than the absurd failure of Earth and thus, we meet him as an under-achieving nepo baby, in cringeworthy receipt of cartoonish sibling mockery and narcissistic parental scathing. In Miracle Workers, all God cares about is a Laz-Z-boy.

In these portrayals, we see a hazy outline of what Nietzsche’s madman saw. The death of God not as a tremendous spectacle but as a corporate restructure of divinity.

These are not omniscient, omnibenevolent renderings of an all-powerful entity but flawed and petty cogs in a machine grander than themselves. Perhaps ‘we’ have killed the very spirit of God by assigning him a job role as we exist at a stage in civilisation where we feel our job roles are killing the souls of us.

The cinematic endeavours of yesteryear that dramatised divinity as a corporate structure reflected the cultural attitudes of yesteryear that slanting towards optimism.

If we go back to 1941, Here Comes Mr. Jordan reveals the story of Joe Pendleton—a boxer who dies prematurely. Once admitted into heaven, Joe is told by the dapper-suited Mr. Jordan (an angel with some sort of formal seniority over the other angels) that his death was a clerical error. Pendleton’s soul is ferried from body to body as Mr. Jordan—prim, proper and a principled bureaucrat, dedicates his efforts to serving Pendleton's homeless soul. Mr Jordan, it seems, reflects America’s self image—a patriotic sense of duty and grave concern for a job well done.

Where God is concerned specifically, Here Comes Mr. Jordan side steps any notion He is able to do wrong. Any mean-spirited circumstances arising in the film are never attributed to God directly, likely due to the 1930’s production code that stipulated “no film or episode may throw ridicule on any religious faith”.3

With the aftermath of World War II and an economic boom on the horizon, the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant schema that wrangled itself into the default gaze of public consciousness simplified its own existence: war-ready men of honour, lily-white nuclear families, rewarding quotidian life, and unabashed faith in, and weekly attendance to, the church.

God, at this juncture, was a figure so respected and feared by proxy of the institutions that worshipped Him that He’d often be rendered a disembodied voice in cinema, his image often considered too sacred and costly to be dramatised on screen.

In the following decades, political ups and downs shifted the on-screen rendering of God to and fro—Reagonomics ravaged, satire soared, neoliberalism swelled, Catholic priests abused—yet an optimism about God himself stayed humming in the cultural psyche despite the turbulence surrounding Him. The sensitivity of this dynamic is best captured by 2003’s Bruce Almighty.

Mobilised by Bruce’s frenetic blasphemy, Morgan Freeman’s God is wise, supernaturally calm and forgiving in the face of Bruce’s disbelief and disrespect. Morgan Freeman’s God isn’t necessarily a CEO—though aesthetically he dons a veneer-white business suit and proves his divinity to Bruce by supernaturally extending a filing cabinet drawer across the full length of a vacant corporate office. “Big Boss” status is heavily implied. Oozing decorum and imbued with a quiet confidence of knowing, Freeman’s God “takes a vacation” and puts Bruce in charge to show him how hard a feat it is to handle the whims of humanity but also to educate Bruce specifically about embodying the change that he wants to see. Hammering his point home by masquerading as a lowly janitor, Freeman’s God is humility incarnate, respectfully secular and an emblem showing good not only exists in the world—but still governs it.

I have a lot to say about Morgan Freeman’s God. Audiences largely accepted the notion of a Black God, though I believe it is just as insufficient to fathom the box office success of Bruce Almighty as a white progressivist win as it is to simply call it “another instance of a wise black person helping a white person achieve insight”.4 A third thing was happening ambiently. The waning health of a Christian God in the Euro-American psyche meant a profound sense of spiritual loss and aimlessness was permeating through western society post-9/11 and the aid of magical negrofied divinity was a cognitively dissonant palette cleanser; a way to re-conceptualise God that allowed whiteness to maintain egotistical superiority while appearing willing to be ushered onto a righteous path. One of my more harebrained theories is that Barack Obama doesn’t become the American president without Morgan Freeman’s role in Bruce Almighty (but that’s an essay best explored at another time).

Exploding Kittens’ presents a God who’s strayed far from (and vulgarly defiant of) the 1930’s Code that prohibited the ridicule of any faith. Personally, I enjoyed the show in the same way one enjoys a parma violet ice lolly on a humid summer’s day; if you get through it quickly it’s pretty refreshing but if you spend too long on it, it starts to get sticky. Certain jokes—such as calling unicorns ponies with face boners—snap at the ankles upon landing but despite the show’s hit-and-miss flirtations with corniness, Godcat’s emotional journey is shucked with a genuine earnestness that brings a welcome relief from the tightly-wound cynicism which has become so indigenous to modern media.

Yet, cynicism needs to be baked into Exploding Kittens' very skeleton in order for the story to register to a modern audience. In order for Godcat to have a compelling arc, he must face an adversity that isn’t going to make us groan with blasé familiarity and thus, the final episodes reveal the boards of Hell and Heaven are planning a corporate merger that’ll be reified by the extermination of mankind. In his hampered Godcat form, the task of stopping the collating boards of Hell and Heaven falls to Beelzebub— who dispatches them in wrathful inferno. The implications of this scene are fascinating—the Devil “saves the day” and the conceptual being of God who was once so powerful that Hollywood studios erected laws not to speak ill of Him is rendered redundant by a mythical board of Heaven. What does it say about the moment we’re in that a celestial corporate merger of boards is more powerful and more cunning than God himself?

“The faceless board” has been rising in frequency and popularity as TV’s staple antagonist of choice. In Killing Eve, there is the collective known only as “The Twelve”. In Gangs of London, there are “The Investors”. The Blacklist has “The Cabal”. These powerful organisations are untraceable, unattributable any one person or entity, operating as formless, apolitical amoebas who’re impossible to hold accountable and are as omniscient and omnipotent as the narrative requires them to be. “Faceless boards” have usurped God—basking as the cinematic personification of laissez-faire capitalism. Gone are the days where evil is attributed to the tragic tale of the Devil. Instead, the greater woes of the world are traced to the anonymous, insatiable, untouchable “faceless board”, who are fundamentally unconcerned with the cultural optimism of yesteryear or the traditional edifices of good and evil.

What once populated our imagination as a robed old man in the sky who worked in benevolent but mysterious ways is now more legible as a poorly-run spiritual conglomerate whose only care is profit, growth or expansion. It introduces an interesting dimension to the more classical theological ideas.

For example: The teleological argument or The Argument From Design5 purports the world works in such a glorious harmony it must be intelligently designed and therefore God is the intelligent designer. A common counterpoint: intelligent design is a matter of human perception and we impose it on a chaotically functional world that’s been brought about by pure chance. The divine corporatism of Exploding Kittens allows for a compelling counter-counter point: the genesis of the world was a work project headed by an indifferent and/or incompetent boss who had to work on all of creation on a strict 6-day deadline with the board breathing down his neck. Any existential/environmental contradictions are a product of economic streamlining, cost-efficiencies and superhuman error.

Film and TV provide an invaluable cardiograph for the cultural pulse of the general population. The media that gets greenlit represent both what the public is willing to consume and what those in positions of cinematic power are willing to feed them. You can glean the health of a people by what they indulge in.

Buscemi’s God and Ellis’ Godcat are emblematic of a civilisation that no longer fears His wrath but is more concerned with satirising His corpse. These examples of God as a chief executives—who, at best speak about humans with a paternal possessiveness and at worst, treat life with a blithe nonchalance towards whether humanity lives or dies, run in perfectly parallel with the real world event of people celebrating, en masse, the death of the United Healthcare CEO. If we’re adamant about re-conceptualising God as a CEO and we also celebrate the killing of CEOs in acts of vigilante justice then we must reckon with the political disenchantment as well as the spiritual, as they have become one in the same. We must reckon with the idea that the light from the madman’s stars might finally be reaching our eyes.

From the Enlightenment period onwards, an astounding amount of European thought has been dedicated to God, in theology and theothanatology. By comparison, surprisingly little has been dedicated to philosophising the moral health of the European superstructure in any meaningful way. Earlier, when I suggested that ‘we’ have killed God by giving him a job, I did so with a tacit understanding that my Blackness historically ostracises me from ‘we’ as my Blackness—in the vein of Afropessimist thought—is “precluded from the category of ‘human’”.6

I am an outsider looking at this topic with the cold indifference of a god executive. As I cobbled together this essay, it astounded me how much I had to disassociate in order to research historical philosophers who were regarded as moral bastions of western thought. Immanuel Kant (who made some of the more compelling counters to the aforementioned teleological argument) was considered “the father of modern ethics” and a man whose ideas revolutionised philosophy. He once said “The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the ridiculous”7.

So much wood has been sacrificed to populate the paper with the feverish musings of learned men—stroking their chins about God’s true nature and His influence on the moral trajectories of Europe as they held some of the most anti-social, unsavoury views towards any person who was not a white men that you’ll ever hear. Anyone studying them is meant to compartmentalise their rampant misogyny or thirst for eugenics when, on principle alone, such glaring callousness should disqualify the validity of their ethical claims and compel the contemporary scholars of western culture to completely collapse the entire intellectual structure of ethics as we know it.

Instead, we careen towards a strange juncture where Anglo-European society at large descends slowly towards anti-intellectualism and incuriousity, expressing exhaustion with the gate-kept knowledge acquisition of academia. The cultural fatigue with this intellectual inaccessibility has conveniently reached a fever pitch at the same time as concerted efforts to apply feminist lenses, queer, re-contextualise and/or decolonise academia from within have begun to take shape—which is perhaps why the Olfactory Ethics of Dr. Ally Louks became such a fricative viral moment.

As a Black man observing it all, I can’t help but think that Nietzsche’s madman was wrong. Close but wrong. God never died and the suggestion that white European modernity killed Him is far too smug and self-congratulatory a conclusion. God—and Europe’s faith in Him—has cast a shadow long enough to hide a whole continent’s cruelties and callousnesses. Perhaps, God was simply never alive in the first place.