ted byfield

2026-08-04-pre-web flyers from 1980s nyc

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:51:00 GMT

2026-08-04 fun with corporation names

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 11:42:00 GMT

We’re reaching a point where it would be entirely justifiable to merge companies solely on the basiss of their names…

Before	After
America First + First Data + Data General	America First Data General
America First + First National	America First National
American Capital + Capital One	American Capital One
American Express + Express Scripts	American Express Scripts
American National + National Grid	American National Grid
Bank of America + America Online	Bank of America Online
Bank of America + America West	Bank of America West
Bank One + OneAmerica	Bank One America
Barnes & Noble + Noble Energy	Barnes & Noble Energy
Bed Bath & Beyond + Beyond Meat	Bed Bath & Beyond Meat
Best Buy + Buy Buy Baby	Best Buy Buy Baby
Canadian Pacific + Pacific Life	Canadian Pacific Life
Capital One + OneAmerica	Capital One America
Dollar General + General Catalyst	Dollar General Catalyst
Dollar General + General Dynamics	Dollar General Dynamics
Dollar General + General Electric	Dollar General Electric
Dollar General + General Mills	Dollar General Mills
Dollar General + General Motors	Dollar General Motors
Empire State + State Farm + Farm Bureau	Empire State Farm Bureau
Empire State + State Street	Empire State Street
Family Dollar + Dollar General	Family Dollar General
Family Dollar + Dollar Tree	Family Dollar Tree
First Federal + Federal Express + Express Scripts	First Federal Express Scripts
First National + National Amusements	First National Amusements
First National + National Grid	First National Grid
First National + National Instruments	First National Instruments
General Electric + Electric Boat	General Electric Boat
Great Western + Western Digital	Great Western Digital
Great Western + Western Electric + Electric Boat	Great Western Electric Boat
Great Western + Western Union	Great Western Union
International Paper + Paper Source	International Paper Source
Liberty Global + Global Payments	Liberty Global Payments
Liberty Media + Media General + General Electric	Liberty Media General Electric
Liberty Mutual + Mutual of Omaha	Liberty Mutual of Omaha
MassMutual + Mutual of Omaha	Massachusetts Mutual of Omaha
Navistar International + International Paper	Navistar International Paper
Norfolk Southern + Southern Company	Norfolk Southern Company
Norfolk Southern + Southern Union	Norfolk Southern Union
Party City + City National + National Grid	Party City National Grid
Republic Steel + Steel Partners	Republic Steel Partners
Rockwell International + International Harvester	Rockwell International Harvester
Toys “R” Us + US Foods	Toys R Us Foods
Union Pacific + Pacific Bell	Union Pacific Bell
Union Pacific + Pacific Gas & Electric	Union Pacific Gas and Electric
Union Pacific + Pacific Life	Union Pacific Life
US Steel + Steel Partners	US Steel Partners
Western Digital + Digital Equipment Corp	Western Digital Equipment Corp
Western Union + Union Bank	Western Union Bank
Western Union + Union Carbide	Western Union Carbide
Western Union + Union Pacific	Western Union Pacific

…which gestures in the direction of things like Great Western Union Bank One America First Data General Electric Boat.

2026-08-03-velvet underground interview third ear 1970

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 15:37:00 GMT

(OCRed PDF vu-interview-third-ear-1970-corrected-ocr.pdf)

THE VELVET UNDERGROUND

Interview from Thirdear magazine, 1970

Thirdear: Is your new album out on Atlantic yet?

Lou: No, it won’t be for a long time. (To Doug) You should get over here ’cause it’s not going to be an all-Lou interview. I ruined my voice in the studio the other day, that’s why it sounds so funny.

Thirdear: Is the new album finished?

Lou: No, won’t be finished for a while. It’s fantastic.

Thirdear: The second set you did last night, you told me all that was going to be on it.

Lou: Yeah, right.

Doug: Yeah, all those.

Thirdear: That’s about what, six or seven songs you did?

Doug: Was it that?

Lou: Yeah, we did seven songs.

Doug: Seven?

Thirdear: Seven?

Doug: One of them ran together, two songs ran together.

Lou: We do lots of songs, it’s really weird.

Doug: That was all new, new stuff. We have new stuff we haven’t recorded yet that we’ve been doing almost a year — over the period of the last year it’s been gradually worked in. Like new stuff that’s just been written, like in the studio before we recorded.

Thirdear: Is the atmosphere better now working with Atlantic?

Lou: It’s fantastic. Can’t say enough for it. One is a record company… you know… great studio… great producer…

Thirdear: Who’s producing?

Lou: Adrian Barber. He’s also the engineer so that…

Doug: …cuts out that…

Lou: …five or six people there. It’s really nice… we’re doing… uh, writing a lot of stuff while we tape the songs going.

Thirdear: Are the songs generally long in length?

Doug: No.

Lou: No, all short.

Doug: Offhand, everything’s under five minutes. As long as it takes to get the song across — got a lot of two- and three-minute ones.

Lou: It’s just fantastic because we’ve never made a record like this before. All our records we made in one or two days, you know, and we kept the tape running, sort of cut them live. We didn’t do that for this one — you know, all our albums sound like basement tapes. So it’s a new experience and it’s fantastic, it’s really fantastic.

Thirdear: The music you’re into now — can you relate that back to, say, the first album?

Lou: Yeah, you could tell it’s us. There won’t be any difficulty spotting it.

Thirdear: It’s easy to place in the progression?

Lou: Oh yeah. Everything’s got its own time. But I like this best. This is the closest that the reality ever came to matching the concept, because what we’re hearing in our heads is finally coming out on record — one thing that never happened before, ’cause nobody understood how to make a record and we never had any producers who understood what we were talking about, so we always did it ourselves, and since we didn’t know what to do we just let the tape run. We were happy if it just got on the record.

Thirdear: Can Barber relate to what you’re doing, or is he just the man they chose to do it and he’s doing a good job?

Doug: No, once we got used to each other — like we had these songs and he didn’t hear them like we did, so we sang them for him, then he heard it and then he could go ahead and help us make it work — we just had to get him to understand.

Lou: He has to translate through the machine. It’s more than just somebody being assigned… all we’re doing is really simple things, it’s been very difficult for us to find somebody who understood us in the studio.

Thirdear: Lyrically, how do the songs compare with your older material?

Lou: They really are rock and roll songs… more so than ever before.

Thirdear: I noticed in a couple of your songs there were some chord changes that you wouldn’t expect to find in a regular rock and roll song.

Lou: We’re always toying with — you know, me and Dougie — the idea of doing symphonic rock and roll songs without being tacky about it. So, you know, if you were conducting an orchestra and you went ba-ba-ba-baaam, you know, well how could you do it with guitars? We’ve got a couple of those things in there. They come across sounding simple and they are kind of, but if anybody decides to track down what we’re actually doing they’ll have a hard time. The whole idea is to make the thing sound easy so that anybody can listen to it — they’ll not get caught up thinking it’s complicated — and the same with the lyrics.

Thirdear: Did you find yourself turned off by the fact that a lot of people tied you in with the heavy scene in New York?

Lou: Not really. Just a lack of information. But it was mainly our fault — I mean, from the information that was given to the people, that’s what they thought and that’s what anybody would think, you know, with the information that was available.

Thirdear: Based on record sales, did you find that more people were showing an interest in what you were doing, by buying your albums as time went on?

Lou: They’ve always sold, for some reason.

Doug: They sell very steadily. Consistently. As opposed to some albums that sell a tremendous amount for a few months and drop off. They just keep selling.

Lou: The first one’s been selling a long time. We don’t get played on the radio and we haven’t had a record out in a year and a half now.

Thirdear: Do you think you’ll pull a single off this one?

Lou: We’re not going to pull one off. We’re specifically making one. We’ve never made a single. This time we’re making a single specifically to be a single. It’s so dynamite, it’s unbelievable. If you heard it you’d just shit.

Thirdear: I heard the set last night and that was tremendous… except for that little confusion on the drums that one time. [Bassist Doug Yule had taken over for drummer Maureen Tucker, who was sick.]

Doug: I was practicing the other afternoon and I got carried away.

Lou: The stuff is just tremendous. And for the first time it all sounds like we want it to.

Thirdear: Do you think people will accept that after hearing three Velvet Underground…

Lou: Well, there’s a whole new audience around…

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: …one that doesn’t even know about the other three albums. As for the other people — most of them hated the third album. People who would have liked the third album didn’t buy it because of the first two, and people who bought the third because they liked the first two felt burned. So — which really didn’t affect us as far as we were concerned. But the new one is right where it’s supposed to be and it’s so much fun. The new one’s really fun. Yeah, ’cause we were so involved in all that and it just got a little too serious for our taste, and being a rock and roll group shouldn’t be too serious. We realized that we had to do what we were doing ’cause someone had to do it. We had vast objections to the whole San Francisco music scene.

Thirdear: On what basis?

Lou: It’s just tedious, a lie, and untalented. They can’t play and they certainly can’t write.

Thirdear: Is that the top groups you’re talking about?

Lou: Yeah.

Thirdear: The Airplane, the Dead?

Lou: The Airplane, the Dead, all of them, with the exception of Creedence, who I like a lot. Like he’s doing this incredible link-up between that old force and he’s still got a contemporary feel — he’s right there.

Thirdear: The amazing thing is they all feel the same. They’re different lyrics and they’re different riffs, but they all feel the same.

Lou: That’s one of the problems…

Doug: They lose track of where the music comes from… they start thinking it instead of playing it. Especially the Dead. Now, I saw the Dead when they just started and they were just a bunch of scuzzy kids just having a ball playing rock and roll… they were a lot of fun. But then they started thinking about what they were doing too much.

Lou: I can get off understanding the kick it was to play “Love Light”… anybody who was in a rock band knows, like when you get out there, what a goof it is. Then on the other hand there’s the professional — now we’re not an amateur, and, like, to me they’re amateur, like our whole thing, I like to think we’re professional. I like to think the definition of an amateur is doing it purely for love — well, I think the definition for professional is you do it purely for love, but you don’t have any of the excuses of an amateur. I mean, if you’re going to do “Love Light” you’ve got to cut Bobby “Blue” Bland or else you’ve got no way to do it.

Thirdear: Right.

Lou: Or else you’ve got no, no way to do it. Now they’re playing for — on the other hand, you say they’re playing for the whole audience — that would not get to hear it and all. They can’t play, they can’t play. He’s not a good guitar player. I mean it’s a joke, and the Airplane is even worse, if that’s possible.

Doug: Jerry — like he’ll play a solo for like half an hour, but if he’d done it for like two minutes… literally, he plays the same notes over and over again.

Lou: You listen to the Beatles, or you listen to “Gimme Shelter” by the Stones, and Keith isn’t playing many notes, but the notes he’s playing are so thought out, so perfect — you know, maybe he doesn’t think them out, maybe it just happens, but whatever occurs there, there’s not that many and what’s there is perfect, just perfect. And you know, you just admire them, no end. The Stones are just… just so good. And you just can’t take other groups seriously.

Thirdear: Yeah, but don’t you think a lot of people get off on something like the Dead because it’s so loose? That’s the way a lot of people are — they are so loose that they get these notes in there that don’t belong in there, they just ignore them.

Lou: They’re settling right now, it’s what people are settling for… like they’re getting third-hand blues and all that. It’s just a fad.

Doug: Back when the Beatles were just beginning, when they were really big — how the people, the vast numbers, that really got involved and just had such a ball, screaming and yelling and everything. And nobody does that now.

Lou: No one learned the lesson of the Beatles, which was that within two or three minutes you can do all you have to do, and if you have a groovy guitar thing there’s no reason it’s got to go on forever. You know, some of these people into drugs — like they can’t go on straight and that’s it. So a lot of people are putting out records literally for heads, and forgetting about everybody else — about the people who aren’t heads. And you shouldn’t have to get that way to get into a record — a record should get you right off. You shouldn’t have to work to get into a record. That’s why I love AM radio.

Thirdear: You love it?

Lou: Love it, I adore it. ’Cause on FM radio, to hear one decent cut I have to listen to six bad ones plus the DJ coming on as my hip friend. And I’d much rather hear AM radio, which is really honest — like I love the jingles and I love the songs being played real quick and the fast-talking DJ, I like it. AM radio is what it is; FM radio is coming on with so much nonsense, you know…

Doug: There’s one good FM station in New York, which is CBS, ’cause it’s almost an AM station.

Lou: I’m the same way — when a record’s really popular, if I like it, I like to hear it a lot. Bill Drake’s programs are fantastic, and I like “Spirit In The Sky” and I never hear it on FM. They never play the groovy AM hits, like they just don’t play anything, and some things are just tremendous.

Thirdear: I think it’s because most of the people who are FM disc jockeys are hip, but they’re not heads.

Lou: They’re not hip, they know the words — they’re not hip.

Thirdear: Yeah, they know the words.

Lou: I don’t think anybody’s hip, I think the AM guys are much hipper. You know, I like it when they say “WABC loves you.”

Thirdear: Have you ever met any of them?

Lou: No, we don’t move in the same circles.

Thirdear: Yeah, right.

Lou: But it’s… I know where they are on AM.

Thirdear: They’re very obvious about it.

Lou: And I like where they are on AM. And I know where they are on FM too, and I don’t like it. I’ve met a lot of FM DJ’s who are really nice, and then there are a whole mess who aren’t — but on the other hand, there’s a lie going on… like I’d rather hear a Therablem commercial, ’cause a Therablem commercial is what it is, a Therablem commercial.

Doug: Right.

Lou: You know, and some of the DJ’s will really goof you, but on FM you start getting a whole explanation — when they sit there explaining… turn it off…

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: …just turn it off. And those who play us too, they play us for all the wrong reasons. We get played for supposedly being a drug group. We’re not representing drug culture, we’re just a rock and roll group. That is why I thought the third album totally ended all that — it was so obviously from the other side.

Thirdear: Is there any symbolism in, say, progressing from the drug thing into the Jesus thing?

Lou: No, except that’s where we were at. You know, you always amplify things you’re reflecting. So, you know, I was thinking things seemed so negative — things that we were putting down were rough, but it was what it was really about. You know, all the time everybody was running around saying flowers, we were saying “are you crazy, look at what’s going on, look what’s going to happen” — and then it did happen. How many years after we put all that out — but to show the other side on the third album, which is all the way on the other side. It just seems normal, you’re not going to stay in the same place.

Thirdear: You were saying last night that you enjoyed doing the old songs because they were good and everything. I was thinking today of things like “European Son” and “Venus in Furs” — things like that, from when John [Cale] left…

Lou: We’ve done those, well, not recently… just got tired of those… didn’t really like them that much.

Thirdear: Did they lose the effect without John’s playing?

Lou: No, not especially. I personally am much happier with the way it is now.

Doug: It’s like you can’t live in the past. Those were good for something to do then, but I wouldn’t want to stay there, I wouldn’t want to stay in the state of mind that was represented on those albums, and so we didn’t.

Thirdear: Are your songs now as honest as the songs you used to do?

Lou: Now that’s a silly question.

Thirdear: No, like uh… like when you did uh…

Lou: That assumes I could do something dishonest.

Thirdear: In other words, are you satisfied with them.

Lou: Oh sure. The whole album should speak for itself.

Thirdear: I haven’t heard anything about — you know, heard the new album, or haven’t seen a set, so I don’t…

Lou: No, but three albums of everybody being up front, you sort of figure that the fourth album would be the same. Those albums are over a period of five years. We only did one a year.

Thirdear: John Cale produced Nico’s albums, right?

Lou: Yeah, right.

Thirdear: Yeah, that’s right.

Lou: I don’t like that esoteric stuff. Like, we’ve never wanted to be that far out, even though people thought we were.

Thirdear: It’s just that they were so far in that where you were appeared far out to them.

[Here the interview was overwhelmed first by police sirens and then by two German Shepherds who insisted on singing second and third part harmony to the sirens’ lead.]

Doug: It sounds like the hounds of Baskerville.

Lou: I like stuff that you can sit and listen to — like I think Joni Mitchell’s album is kind of nice, but, you know, I can’t listen to that stuff very long, because when all’s said and done I’ll put on the Stones ’cause that’s the power. That’s what rock and roll’s all about. Lyrics that get too complicated, you know — Dylan gets on my nerves.

Thirdear: Yeah?

Lou: If you were at a party with him I think you’d tell him to shut up. Anybody who’s been around knows how easy it is to do that whole thing, you know — it’s like fucking the people on a mass level. And I don’t think you should fuck the people on a small level, much less on a mass level, you know, ’cause it’s just mind-fucking. And, you know, listen to “Blowin’ In The Wind” — you know, that just makes you go stale. I mean, you know, “How many miles must a seagull fly before you call it a bird?”

Thirdear: Very poetic.

Lou: Lyrically, I think Jagger’s tops.

Thirdear: Jagger.

Lou: I’m much more intrigued with what he has to say.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: I mean, anybody who knows anything knows what he’s talking about. He’s up there havin’ fun. More yet, he’s doing it for you as a goof, you know — like, he’s lettin’ you kind of know where it’s at on his side, and that’s tremendous. In, uh, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” — I’m much more intrigued with what he has to say. I’m intrigued, I am, I’m interested. You know, like if I had to pick my top ten, they’ve got at least five songs… “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Gimme Shelter” is just unbelievable. Like an intellectual, I sit and listen to the Kinks and that stuff and really get off, then I just get bored after a while, can’t listen to it for too long. The Beatles are, like, on the other side.

Thirdear: Have you heard the McCartney album?

Lou: It’s very smooth, very… boy, you can hear where a lot of Beatles’ stuff came from.

Thirdear: Right.

Lou: Really incredible, but just oh so smooth. It’s, uh… he’s a great songwriter. We were listening to… we were hearing this original tape of the original GET BACK album before Spector, and it’s really fabulous.

Thirdear: Like the bootleg copy?

Lou: Yeah. Like the single that got out — the stuff was overdone.

Doug: Well, you should hear the album.

Lou: They just make the songs — bing, bing, bing. They have to be the most incredible songwriters ever, I mean, just amazingly talented. I don’t think people realize how sad it is that the Beatles broke up.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: That literally means there’s not going to be any more Beatle music.

Thirdear: Yeah, but you listen to McCartney, you get a good chunk of it there.

Lou: Yeah, but it’s not the same — you see, you don’t have those Beatle harmonies.

Thirdear: Like ABBEY ROAD.

Lou: Even if it’s just knowing that it’s not the Beatles. Even if, literally, the way it really was with the Beatles, as Paul would sit down and do one whole thing and then John — just knowing it’s not the Beatles changes it.

Thirdear: That was a major mindfuck.

Lou: Very sad. Like for me — I liked them. Really, there’s nothing like sitting around here listening to those songs.

Thirdear: Do you think Spector’s going to pervert their sound?

Lou: If the one released is any indication, Christ, it’s got tons of violins.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: I wish the Stones would put “We Love You” on their “hits” album. I love to hear that.

Lou: It’s like “Old Black Shoe.” Nobody turned over their [Beatles] single it was on. It’s on the album and everybody’s diggin’ it. It’s on the HEY JUDE album.

Lou: That’s the incalculable damage done by low-lifes like Zappa. I think audiences are finally understanding what they were paying money to see — which was somebody that had the gall to be putting down an audience.

Thirdear: Right.

Lou: You know?

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: You know, audiences are fabulous.

Thirdear: What do you think of his music?

Lou: I think he’s probably the single most untalented person I’ve heard in my life.

Thirdear: Really?

Lou: He’s two-bit, pretentious, academic, and he can’t play his way out of anything. And the thing is he can’t play rock and roll — like, he makes fun of “Louie, Louie,” but he can’t go up there and really do it. Like, it’s one thing to make fun of “Louie, Louie,” but try and actually do it. You know, like nobody’s ever cut the Kingsmen’s solo — you know, so, you know, it’s so easy to make fun of these things, but you know, try to do it for real. Like, you know, make fun of the Beatles, try to do a song, try to do a really pretty song they did.

Doug: That’s the hardest thing in the world to do.

Lou: He can’t do that ’cause he’s a loser. And that’s why he dresses up funny. He’s not happy with himself, and I think he’s right. [laughter]

Thirdear: Have you ever heard anything of the 13th Floor Elevators?

Lou: Yeah, I didn’t like them. They’re just sick. People take drugs and go off and they think anything they’re playing is tremendous, you know — electronic effects and…

Doug: If you can’t get up on a stage and be absolutely straight and get off on what you’re doing — literally, and move an audience — then you’re no good, then you can’t do it.

Lou: There’s nothing higher than actually playing. And that’s why, if just the sheer thing of playing doesn’t do it for you, then you’re really in serious trouble. You know, because there’s nothing like getting up there knowing that you’re just there on IT, you know — no outside stimulants.

Thirdear: Is there a time in your music when you had to be wrecked to do it?

Lou: No — when you’re wrecked, you play bad. It’s more of a setback, really. ’cause I’ve gone on stage just a little bit — a little bit drunk, or a little bit high or something — and you don’t know what you’re doing, literally, and, like, you lose track of things. We’ve done it together for such a long time and know everything so well that we, you know, really avoid anything like that happening ’cause, one, you want to be able to depend on everybody being a hundred per cent and you don’t want them hearing funny things on a funny level. They get very self-indulgent, you know, people like that get into hearing these things, well, the audience isn’t hearing them. You know, like who cares, you know, you’re just playing for you, and that’s not what you’re up there for, you’re up there for them. They’re the ones who paid the money.

Thirdear: Do you get the feeling when you play that you’re playing for a bunch of people who came to see four junkies?

Lou: No.

Doug: No, not anymore.

Lou: ’cause I know a lot of people…, well…

Doug: Every now and again you get one…

Lou: All the people that would have done that have seen our show and just don’t come back because it’s so obvious we’re not. They used to show up but they were so disappointed they left.

Thirdear: How about when you play a place for the first time? You’ve been here several times.

Lou: It’s very interesting what happens then ’cause they yell out they want to hear certain things and we say no. So, usually, they hang around, they hear the music, they fail to understand the intelligence in back of it, you know, I was telling him [Mike] before, “Heroin,” you know, the kind of person singing that, which, you know, really isn’t us, you know, I’d hate to think that was really totally where I was at. But, you know, it’s sophomoric, and it’s kind of hostile, and it’s not much fun, but that’s the way people take it, the audience, a certain segment of it. But it’s not us ’cause if we were really that way there wouldn’t have been a second album.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: Same thing with “Sister Ray,” if that’s the way we really were there wouldn’t have been a third album.

Thirdear: Is that just a riff, just a — I mean, when you listen to it, it’s heavy, but when you think about it later it’s…

Lou: It was supposed to be a musical novelty, like, it had characters and…

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: We, you know, hang around a very funny scene ’cause it’s New York City and all, you know. You know, we just had to get certain things out of our systems and we did. And we feel there were certain things happening somebody should say something about — so we did, and got killed for it.

Thirdear: Yeah, do you identify less with what’s going on in New York now?

Lou: I don’t identify with anything. I identify with myself.

Thirdear: Didn’t your music at first identify with that?

Lou: No, it identified with us. That was us… who happened to be going through whatever we went through in New York City.

Thirdear: It was just you relating the impressions and experiences made on you through your music.

Lou: We don’t lie, that’s the whole thing. All those other people are lies, untalented lies, I keep telling everybody and nobody cares. We used to be quiet, but I don’t even care anymore about not wanting to say negative things ’cause things have gone so far that somebody really should say something. Just look at people like Jefferson Airplane, Grateful Dead — all those people are just the most untalented bores that’s ever come out. Just look at them physically, I mean, can you take Grace Slick seriously? It’s a joke, it’s a joke. And the whole thing is the kids are being hyped on this on the FM radio. All… well, now it’s finally dead, the whole San Francisco thing is dead. Like you know what was really funny about it? The first Moby Grape album I thought was good and then they got sucked into the whole thing and you know…

Thirdear: Do you consider the Springfield’s music honest?

Lou: Buffalo Springfield?

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: They were pretty good. As groups they were really right up there. They did some really nice things.

Doug: But they didn’t have the background to hold it together, you know, just to stay…

Lou: They all seemed like soloists… you know, loose people, folk singers who just went out and did their thing.

Lou: You know, having a group is really hard. Like that song “Helpless” by Neil Young is just tremendous.

Thirdear: Young has a great understanding of almost everything.

Lou: I don’t know if he understands, I don’t really like the lyrics, but I love the chorus. Like, I like the whole song and I switch off his lyrics in my

(An illustration for a “Fresh Air” head-shop advertisement fills the lower portion of the left column here.)

(right-hand column, same page)

head, but that’s the level I can’t get off on. Like, ideally, you should be able to not have to switch off any level. Listening to most people I switch off everything except the drums. With those and other people, lyrically I turn them off, because I don’t want to be embarrassed for them. ’cause the level they’re always talking about is on the bottom looking up. And I’m not very much interested in hearing, I’d much rather hear it from the top, you know, or just someone who doesn’t even see a top or bottom. If you can, see if you can interview Zappa tonight.

Thirdear: Pardon.

Lou: You can even interview Zappa tonight, he’s in town. You know, if there’s one more rock and roll group that starts saying well, Stockhausen… you know, did these people ever listen to Stockhausen? That’s the most boring shit in the world, you know, who are you kidding? That’s why rock and roll’s so fucking great, ’cause it’s right on target, you know, it’s the most amazing thing. You know, a room full of people and you put on a single and they’ll do the same thing, almost everybody. It’s pure magic.

Thirdear: Do you think your new sound will catch on?

Lou: I think it’s going to be phenomenal.

Doug: If you’d heard what we’ve been doing in the studios you wouldn’t even have to ask that.

Lou: You know, we’re pretty cold with ourselves in the studio, you know, pretty objective — like this is the first time I ever thought an album would sell.

Doug: You know, when you can write a song and then record it and sit and listen to it played back over and over again for four and five hours or more and still not get tired of it — then you know, beyond a doubt, you’ve got something.

Lou: They’re just phenomenal, in the nicest way.

Thirdear: How many cuts are going to be on the album?

Lou: Probably around ten or twelve.

Thirdear: Really, that many?

Lou: Yeah, we got tired… we started long songs and we like to think we ended them. We got in there first and left early.

Thirdear: Just from talking to you I can see that you’re probably one of the most misunderstood groups going down, you know, coming from the first three albums.

Lou: Only around a certain group of people, see, most people never heard of us.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: So we’re not misunderstood at all.

Thirdear: But everybody who does hear you, like all the junkies have “Heroin” and they play it, and if they come to see you they would be coming to see four junkies.

Lou: But on the other hand, there’s not that many people like that around. There are some places in the United States where people are so unaware they don’t even know we’re around yet. And they won’t even know about it unless they discover it and then you’re going to have to set four albums that cover a spectrum of experience that beats anybody else on the scene.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: They’re all about what really’s going on. “Tommy” is such, Jesus, how people get sucked into that, so talentless, and as a lyricist he’s so profoundly boring to say the least, you know, like that new record “The Searcher,” “I ask Timothy…” — I wouldn’t ask Timothy Leary the time of day, for cryin’ out loud.

Thirdear: Somebody said it was a step backwards for them.

Lou: Who cares what Timothy Leary has to say. Who cares what any acid person has to say. If you play our three albums chronologically it’s an opera, it could be staged as a musical thing ’cause it covers the growth of us as people from here to there, and in there is a tale for everybody else in case they want to know what you can do to survive the scenes…

Thirdear: Do you see the four as all parallel or just the fourth one like a step up?

Lou: One hopes, you hope to get better. I think we’re better than when we started. It’s not like we’re technically that much better.

Thirdear: No?

Lou: It’s not like we really can play that much better than when we started, although we certainly can, but that’s not the thing — instead, as people, I think we’ve gotten better, like just, in relation to each other. You know, we’re not the same people we were, and, you know, next time we won’t be the same people you’re talking to now. And that’s always a lot of fun ’cause with us you always find it out on record. Everytime we’ve gone these changes we’ve had a year to think it over and then put what represented on the record.

Thirdear: Well, before — with the first couple albums, the first three — uh, not having been noticed, nobody was writing you up or bothering to interview you, and, like, all they had to go on was the information put out in your albums, and they got their interpretation from that and made their judgements, and nobody could tell that it was…

Lou: There’s more somebody can write about us being interviewed ’cause our natural history, starting like Bill Graham, who’s another low-life — I mean, you know, helping him with the Fillmore, you know, a lot of people don’t have principles. Like they say Bill Graham’s a shit, but they work for him. We don’t. Like they say he’s a shit and we don’t work for him. That eliminates Frisco and New York. That means, uh, these people don’t want to do that.

Doug: They’re not willing to take chances.

Thirdear: Do you think the media has ever understood you?

Doug: They haven’t had a chance, it’s not their fault, it’s our fault.

Thirdear: Through the records?

Lou: Well, we didn’t… they didn’t have enough information to work with. People say our early albums are scary and I understand what they mean, and I can see why they’d say that — now, listening to them, you know, I understand what they mean. We reproduced things so accurately we made it scary. There’s a story in there someplace. But, uh, you know, that used to be — when we played, when we talked, they were scared of us.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: You know, and there might have been a real good reason. You know, audiences are really shrewd — you know, I really just think audiences are fantastic. Audiences can make you go higher than you ever thought you could go.

Thirdear: Yeah, good response.

Lou: First of all, a group can make you go higher than you ever could go alone. Then a group in front of an audience — an audience can make the group go higher than the group could go by itself. Like when you’re in the studio, the machines are the audience and you play to them and you try to recreate the thing. Like, we’re tremendously naive in studio technique, about all these things. But what we try to do is — is like we’re really trying to do the songs. You know, the beginning, the middle, the end, the lyrics — you know, that’s why it sounds so good. And the one thing everybody’s been trying to get out of us is philosophy and all of that, and that’s the one thing we don’t do. And, you know, that’s — I know everybody wants on the next album, and that’s exactly what they’re not going to get.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: Because nothing could be more boring than to hear our ideas on

(An illustration fills the lower part of the left column here.)

these subjects. Who cares what we think about politics. All we are is we play rock and roll. And, you know, the rest of our opinions — I don’t understand why they need them, although I know people ask rock people everything.

Thirdear: Do you think you can relate better to the audience now than you could before?

Lou: Much.

Thirdear: It’s a two-sided thing.

Doug: Yeah.

(right-hand column, same page)

(A “Maximus!” underground-supplies advertisement — Washington, D.C. — occupies the top of the right-hand column here. The interview resumes below it:)

Lou: It took us a long time to understand being on the stage. You know, we were nervous ’cause we were getting hassled in so many directions. And at one point we were so centered in the scene, you know, and all these things were happening to us and we didn’t understand what was happening. The main thing is we sat around and realized we really wanted to be a rock and roll group, you know, if God showed up tomorrow and said what do you want to do, I’d say I want to be in a rock and roll group, yeah, if he showed up tomorrow and said what do you want to do, I’d say I’m doing it. Do you want to be president? No. Do you want to be in politics? No. Do you want to be a lawyer? No. What do you want? I want to be a rhythm guitar player.

Thirdear: Do you think you could have made this step with the old label?

Lou: No. We needed to be recorded, you know, to have a record. You know, a record should not be a tape of people playing live, which is like all our three albums were. They were not produced the way you would normally think a record would be produced. They just… we just played it just the way we did live and left. ’cause we had no producer and we had no time. No choice.

Thirdear: Did, like, the strength of the new material almost require a change of labels, you couldn’t do it properly with…?

Lou: We, as people, required a change of labels, we were getting so soundly trounced at that other place.

Doug: When we were there they were extremely — everybody, nobody knew what was going on.

Lou: I understand it much better now. I mean they had no ideas, they didn’t care, they weren’t interested in anyone, they, you know, noone was there to help us, I mean, you have to understand, we didn’t know anything about recording. And we didn’t know who to ask: We don’t know people in the music business. And we don’t hang around with anybody, we don’t go to parties. So, uh, you know, people who are supposed to be very sophisticated are suddenly in a very, very naive situation. You know, just us having our songs and arrangements, you know, what the hell are you supposed to do with them. And then you get a couple of days in the studio and just try and put them down and that’s what happens. Now is the time, I feel, that now we deserve to make a record the other way because there’s enough that people can get familiar with, to be able to follow us into the next album — they’ll be able to follow it, and not have that distance. The whole thing is audiences — audiences are just so smart. They really can tell, I mean, they can tell a lot of things. That’s why I just despise Frank Zappa, in front of audiences, telling them they’re stupid.

Thirdear: He’s insulting.

Lou: Audiences aren’t stupid. They have certain information you give them, and on the basis of that information they go as far as they can go. If you want to change it, you have to give them different information.

Thirdear: Does the rock media relate what’s really going on, in the proper way?

Lou: Things don’t move that quickly, and when you’re talking about everybody, you’ve got to include everybody — not just freaks, or longhairs, or weirdos — everybody, everybody. Not too slow, not too fast — for some people it’s too slow, so that’s where it is. It offends almost everyone, so that means it’s going right through. You can’t speed things up, you can’t slow them down either, you know.

Doug: People also need something to look up to, and right now there’s not very much to look up to. Like the Beatles have been floundering and they don’t really know, like sort of searching themselves, and when you see someone you thought knew — everybody said, like, the Beatles, you know — and then they found out that the Beatles weren’t sure. So, uh, that left a lot of people in the lurch. So now people want something to look up to, to something positive.

Lou: Like you had with the Beatles — like, on top of the world, all this money, all that, everything — turning around telling everybody that they were so unhappy.

Doug: Right.

Lou: Now, what about the average guy beating his head… they’re unhappy… what about the poor guy working nine to five in a job he hates and knows he can’t get past that? You know, you’ve got some other character telling you it’s awful up here. So, you know, then what — okay, you know — like, I think, you know, I really can’t tell — if you got up there and it really is terrible, you should lie, it would make a lot of people happy. Groucho Marx has this great song — that Maureen sang — “show me a rose to leave me alone,” and absolutely…

Thirdear: That line in itself…

Lou: That’s all there is to it. And, uh, everybody’s trying to do it in their own way and they don’t need other people telling them what to do. That’s the last thing in the world anybody needs. We just play some rock and roll and people dance and get some rocks off to it. Fabulous! That’s enough, that’s enough. You know, few bands do it — more of them have heavy philosophies than… anybody who was a hunchback would have to write like that. Is there a parallel to emotion in music?

Doug: Ah, who cares, you know.

Thirdear: Does the way the audience related to your music before help them along with what you’re into now?

Lou: Well, we have — I mean, they knew we weren’t kidding, and we knew we weren’t kidding. And the only way to go through something is to go right into the middle of it and push hard enough, and you should come out on the other side. And what’s happened to a lot of people is they didn’t really go into the middle — they went to the side of it, and so they’re still there… they never came out on the other side. The only way to do it is to not kid around. Storm coming — you go right through the center and you may come out alright. Most other people don’t even know there’s a center.

Thirdear: Or they have the wrong people showing them where the center is — getting it from Leary and people like that.

Lou: Well, they’re taking people like Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman. It’s really sad if you have to choose between Judge Hoffman and Abbie Hoffman. They’re both deplorable, you know.

Doug: Neither is positive.

Lou: It’s a shame that some of the things you might believe in, and the people who are leaping about and yelling it, are just as bad as the other people. You know, I’m in favor of everybody trying to straighten themselves out. Leave your neighbor alone. He’s got his own problems. If he’s trying to do something for you, help him out. There are a lot of old people really kind of worry me — people being hostile toward me, instead of understanding. Definite lack of compassion on the side of the law, plus the violence and the destruction — and all that is going to create violence and destruction on the other side. You can’t be violent and expect the other side not to be violent.

Thirdear: Too many are followers ’cause the radicals organize the movements and the people can dig the idea of the movement, but the radicals have ulterior motives.

Lou: They’re the leaders on top of everything else, you know, nobody’s talkin’ for me — that’s for sure, you know, I don’t want anyone talkin’ for me.

Thirdear: How do you feel if someone forces their politics on you?

Lou: How can they do that?

Thirdear: I mean these really heavy radical rappers that come up to you and attempt to maintain complete control over your mind, just, you know, babbling forcefully into you.

Lou: That doesn’t have any effect on me.

Thirdear: Yeah.

Lou: If people want to go along with these things, go on and go. If they don’t, that’s all.

Thirdear: Weird.

Lou: It’s really a weird country when you think about it. Very big, young, neurotic country that’s gone through a lot of stuff. What other country would televise all these things, report all these things, absorb this incredible stuff, spew it back out — you know, and it’s all very confusing, really, really confusing. I can’t imagine people wanting to follow Jerry Rubin or those people.

Thirdear: Blind faith.

Lou: Yeah. I could even understand an extreme reaction, it’s just, you know, the left deserves the right. Now watch what’s happening — this phenomenal polarization, you know — it’s fascinating to watch what happens, it really is. I just know that I don’t know enough, I just know enough to stay out of it. ’cause, uh, unless I want to make it my whole life.

Thirdear: Right.

Lou: You know, and I don’t know — I personally don’t know how to go about going about that. All I know how to do is be in a rock band, and that I can do pretty good — and, you know, nothing that great, but pretty good — and so that’s it, you know.

Thirdear: Have you ever had someone approach you and demand you do something else?

Lou: Sure, they say, why don’t you do a benefit? We’d say no. And why not? We don’t believe in it, and I don’t do anything for free. I really believe in people paying for things.

Thirdear: Yeah, otherwise they’ll expect it.

Lou: Exactly.

Thirdear: That’s true.

Lou: Everybody wants immediacy, wanting it right now — and, like, you know, we’ve been working on this thing five or six years and we haven’t gotten any immediate thing back out of it, outside of ourselves, turning ourselves on ourselves with an audience.

Doug: We have to wind it up so they can put the animals back up here.

2026-07-29-peeling in the years

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 09:03:00 GMT

The guy needs to be flayed and plasticized — the only question is in what pose. For inspo, we could look to the humiliating mutilations mentioned in some similarly transgressive-y pop phenomenon, say, Game of Thrones or Narcos; and for a setting I’m sure we can find some suitably peaceful place, like a Superfund site. There’s no reason any of this should bother his ‘loved ones,’ right? And we can charge the cost of all this to his estate, which shouldn’t object to paying such a small sum to suitably inter him.

(If you enjoyed this post, you can tip me by admitting that — when you peel away a few layers, so to speak — you’re really as “bloody-minded” as I am. Personally, I think of this kind of thing as a form of restorative justice.)

2026-06-26-democratic centrists, antisemitism, signal, noise

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 11:03:00 GMT

…and in Michigan, McMorrow is running around the airwaves trying to pin the West Bloomfield synagogue attack on El Sayed. It doesn’t take much effort to see which way the Dem “leadership” — which in practice means armies of fund-raisers and consultants — will be dragging the coming midterm elections.

There are categories of people whose daily and nightly lives involve objectively higher risks of violence because of their demographic status: employees in certain kinds of public-facing jobs (cue the dopey Waffle House jokes), women, African Americans, LGBTQ+ers and in particular trans people, latin@s, homeless people, sex workers. Jews are not one of those groups.

There are all kinds of nuanced quantitative and qualitative debates to be had about how one constructs the relevant stats, but none of those debates will conclude that nearly half of the Jewish men in the US have been dragged into the carceral abyss, that Jewish women in particular need to cover their drinks in bars for fear of sexual violence, or that ICE invaded and occupied Kiryat Joel for months on end. The vast majority of antisemitic violence is discursive, not physical. That doesn’t make it any less real, serious, or frightening than physical violence; but it definitely doesn’t make it more real either — in part because physical violence is always discursive.

Yet here we are heading into another crucial round of elections, and what’s the Dem establishments squawking about? Sexual violence? Nope — if anything, they’re debating how much farther to bend on women’s health care. Racial violence? Nope — on the contrary, they’re debating how much farther to bend on “welfare reform” and “policing.” Are they debating how to demobilize state-funded paramilitaries and how to punish them for their pogroms? Nope — the best we get is the “problem” of “immigration.” Go down the list, nope nope nope. Instead, the specter of antisemitism is mysteriously appearing as the defining issue of the coming midterm elections.

And, to be clear, this constellation is crystal fucking clear. The same political forces that have spent the last few years attacking “DEI” and “woke” culture in education — basically, attention to and advocacy for and with people whose daily and nightly lives have involved objectively higher risks of violence because of their demographic status — have been using ginned-up allegations of antisemitism as cudgels to beat universities and levers to pry them open.

Everyone with eyes and ears in their head has figured out by now that, since our war against Iran began, Netanyahu has systematically tried to subvert peace prospects by launching new attacks. (Yes, pro-Israel peanut gallery, I know — shut up.) But here’s the thing: that isn’t new. He relied on the same MO in 2024 to provoke pro-Palestinian activists and modulate the presidential election. (So, yes, lefts, he played you — so you shut up too.)

Please, let’s not do this again. Understand well: the overwhelming majority of discussion you see and hear about antisemitism is tendentious, overinflated bullshit intended to divide and conquer. But not all of it, and that matters in a big way. So try, really try, to tune out the noise and listen for the signal.

2026-06-26-victual-signaling, or makin the white folks feel safe

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 10:57:00 GMT

[orig to FB]

“No two countries with a McDonald’s have ever gone to war,” sophisticated pundits need to get out more “by talking to people at Applebees,” and any Black man — even Republicans — who wants to run for governor in FL needs to make the white folks feel safe by making it clear they read Cracker Barrel menus not Malcolm X. We need a name for this river of semiotic pink slime coursing through our body politic. I propose victual-signaling or, for the folks back home, vittle-signaling.

See also: neological things

2026-06-19 on Ehud Olmert on ethnic cleansing

Fri, 19 Jun 2026 12:14:00 GMT

Ehud Olmert in Haartez: Israel Is Conducting a Systematic Campaign of Ethnic Cleansing and Crimes Against Humanity in the West Bank

Lots of people will share piece this and shout SEE?!?!? SEE?!?!, but they shouldn’t, because it’s a tapestry woven from a dozen kinds of ambivalence. My read: OT1H, Olmert is working through the five stages of grief; OT2H, he’s trying to chart a new and better course — not just for himself — in a context where everyone who politically matters can be assessed on a scale that runs from directly complicit to guilty ‘af.’ If you read his essay that way, as an exploratory rather than confirmatory text, you’ll see that the majority of it is devoted to a scholastic exercise in finding guilt without assigning it. Why? Because he’s trying to give a crazy quilt of conflicting constituencies face-saving ways to moonwalk out of the corner Israel has painted itself into. That’s a Good Thing, and if your political beliefs are so “absolute” that you can’t acknowledge it as such, then you live in a fantasy land and have no business imposing your views on a world where nothing is ever absolute.

2026-06-17 a more or less complete Abdullah Ibrahim playlist and how I made it

Wed, 17 Jun 2026 17:32:00 GMT

More and more I’ve found myself wanting complete-ish chronological playlist of this or that artist — most recently, for Abdullah Ibrahim, who passed away a few days ago. (Sean Jacobs has written a beautiful piece about him in NYRB — link below.) But those playlists are often hard to come by, so I thought I’d try my hand at some vibe-coding. Result:

a pretty complete chronological discography for Ibrahim on Spotify
the same thing in JSON format
a basic toolkit in Python for turning any discography in JSON format into a Spotify playlist

Sean’s piece on Ibrahim, [which I really recommend.](https: //www.nybooks.com/online/2026/06/07/songs-of-liberation-abdullah-ibrahim/) (‘archived’ version here).

Share and enjoy!

Note: I’m not a Spotify fan at all, but all the alternatives I’ve tried seem fatally flawed.

2026-06-14 Latin American cybernetic projects

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 17:57:00 GMT

When Geert Lovink shared a recent interview with Anna-Verena Nosthoff on nettime, he wrote:

Nosthoff describes the historical legacy of cybernetics as a non-disciplinary meta-approach. Neither a method nor a school, cybernetics refused to establish itself as a universal science. In the end, it was unable (or unwilling?) to assert itself. During the post-war decades, criticism still had an object to relate to in the form of books, journals, conferences, and meetings, when cybernetics was still reasonably well embedded in the academic milieu; this was no longer the case later on. From the moment computers became ‘personal,’ the only thing critics could deal with was the impact, a force so strong and omnipresent that it disguised its original principles (and the earlier debates about its premises). In the phase after the mid-1970s, cybernetics criticism lost its object and was forced to reorient itself. It is remarkable that there is no clear transition phase—with the exception of the Stafford Beer/Chilean Cybersyn episode in the early 1970s, so brilliantly brought back to life in Eugene Morozov’s podcast series. [my emphasis]

For reasons both political and personal, I rrrreally don’t like it when men actively take or passively accept credit for women’s work. (And — full disclosure — I have a beef with Geert over the fact that for he both actively and passively took credit for my own work, with Felix Stalder, as one of nettime’s two consistent moderators — for twenty-five years.) So I sent a polite intervention to the list:

Geert, since you put some effort into praising Morozov’s work on Cybersyn, it needs to be said that there’s a pretty messy history behind it.

The first time Morozov wrote about Beer and Cybersyn was an October 2014 piece for the New Yorker. In that piece, about a third of the way through, he mentioned Eden Medina and her book Cybernetic Revolutionaries, which MIT had published a few years earlier. Her work was quite well known by the time of his piece: she had published an excerpt in Cabinet, which got lots of attention, and her manuscript had won a few prominent history awards and been nominated for at least one more.

In his New Yorker piece, Morozov mentioned Medina only once, when he patronizingly described her book as “her entertaining history of Project Cybersyn.” But the majority of his own piece book was little more than a stylish retelling of Medina’s work, so he got quite a bit of flak for being so glib, especially from some historians affiliated with SIGCIS (Special Interest Group for Computing, Information, and Society).

Morozov dismissed the criticisms in ways that ranged from dismissive to trollish. For example, on Tumblr he variously defended his piece from blunt accusations of plagiarism by arguing that it “a book review essay, and I do mention the book under review” (well then!). But he undermined that defense when he wrote (also on Tumblr) that “In a sense, I was lucky because there’s an excellent — and yes, entertaining — history of Project Cybersyn. It’s Cybernetic Revolutionaries by Eden Medina.” On Twitter, he shared a photo of a few research files on a cart, saying “The Stafford Beer archive says ‘hello’.” When asked about how he kept track of his sources, he replied, “I am afraid I am old school: most of is in my head and occasional notes in OpenOffice. I am blessed with good memory.”

That debate got pretty hot, but I know of another instance when some SIGCIS people went on the warpath against another writer, Brian Dear, over perceived gender issues in his book about the early time-sharing PLATO system, The Friendly Orange Glow. In my view, Dear was solidly in the right and his critics went waaaay overboard. The fact that Morozov was accused doesn’t mean he was guilty. But it seems like the general consensus is that his behavior in and around Cybersyn was really shitty.

His podcast was a good opportunity to set things right, but — unless I missed something — he burned through ten hours of audio without mentioning her even once. So, if he won’t acknowledge the importance of Medina’s work, the others ought to.

Pretty obligatory stu f, but then came a legit astonishing reply from an actual specialist in the field, José-Carlos Mariátegui, whose

His current research projects include extensive original research on key breakthroughs in cybernetics which occurred in Latin America between the 1950s and early 1980s, a period of intense creative, technological, and political changes, which also provided a platform for interdisciplinary communication and international exchanges. He is also researching, based on a comparative study, the impact of digitalisation in both media organisations and memory institutions, taking into account the management of information and the preservation of digital archives.

He wrote:

Ted:

Medina’s “Cybernetic Revolutionaries” (2011) is definitely a substantial account of Cybersyn, built on years of archival work and extensive fieldwork and interviews with the people who were actually involved in running the system. However, Morozov’s “The Santiago Boys”, besides the 10 hours of audio storytelling, was also a product of years of original research: more than a hundred interviews, alongside fresh archival work. And it is unusually well-documented on its website (the-santiago-boys.com), including a substantial bibliography, transcribed interviews, and a good deal of the archival material the series draws on (for some reason, it seems that the website is currently “under maintenance” and the material is unavailable right now).

But I won’t say it’s Morozov or Medina when we mention Cybersyn. We need to widen the lens. Well before 2011, in 2007, Chileans Enrique Rivera and Catalina Ossa had been recovering Cybersyn from inside Chile — reconstructing the operations room chair (part of the ZKM collection), interviewing/recording surviving participants, and assembling an unusually rich body of material around the project (link). On the other side of the Atlantic, Andrew Pickering had already placed Beer and Cybersyn as a substantial part of his analysis in his book “The Cybernetic Brain: Sketches of Another Future Book” (2010).

Besides that, I want to zoom out a bit and mention that Beer’s Latin American work didn’t end with Cybersyn: there was URUCIB in Uruguay, and his engagements in Venezuela, Colombia and Mexico, none of which have received close to the same attention (I tried to systematise part of that history in this article and URUCIB is documented extensively in a book written by its project head, Víctor Ganón. And beyond Beer and Cybersyn altogether, the wider and original development of cybernetics across the Latin American region remains poorly documented and scattered across archives, languages and articles.

I think these clarifications are important because Nosthoff says in the interview that there is “no clear transition phase” in the slow disappearance of cybernetics with the exception of the Chilean Cybersyn episode. It seems that Cybersyn stands alone as the single “exotic exception”. But this was not the case. It was one node in a vast number of continental cybernetic projects in the Latin American region that, for roughly two decades, provided ideas on feedback, planning, and modelling that were directly incorporated into State-baked and think-tank projects. A few coordinates:

In Argentina, Manuel Sadosky’s Instituto de Cálculo at the Universidad de Buenos Aires turned computation into an instrument of public planning (1960s).

Oscar Varsavsky was already using numerical experimentation to model alternative “styles of development”, treating the computer as a way to rehearse models for societies in Latin America that did not yet exist (1960s and 1970s).

At Fundación Bariloche, Latin American World Model answered the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth by insisting the limits were not physical but political, and built a model around the satisfaction of basic needs rather than LtG’s management of scarcity (1970s).

…there are lots more….

But what happened with all these projects? They did indeed disappear by force: the Chilean 1973 military coup, the Argentine, Uruguayan and Brazilian dictatorships, Operation Condor, among others. Then in the 80s the Washington Consensus recoded its central terms: Planning became inefficient, autonomy became protectionism, and society was transformed to markets. Chile was taken over as a laboratory by The Chicago Boys for neoliberal reforms which followed a series of “structural adjustments” in most of Latin America and that program destroyed alternative economic, political and social imaginaries. In that sense, Nosthoff rightly argues that we need to cultivate a different sociotechnical imaginary that involves the perspectives of those most affected. In that sense, histories from Latin America have much to offer and may guide us to new sociotechnical imaginaries.

In an offlist email, he also shared the following links:

notes for Morozov’s podcasts, via Internet Archive
interviews for Morozov’s podcasts, via Internet Archive
José-Carlos Mariátegui, “Hidden Histories of Technology and Cybernetics in Latin America” (2026-02-04)
———, “How to Non-Organize,” e-flux Architecture (September 2025)

2026-06-07-angelus novus sorta

Sun, 07 Jun 2026 21:42:00 GMT

So…Partner and I went to the Jewish Museum today to see the Klee show — really enjoyable except maybe for the wall texts, which, as always now, are committed to reducing all art to veiled didacticism. But one thing perplexed me: Klee’s Angelus Novus was there. You know the one: a so-so cartoon that’s been elevated to the Mona Lisa of Modernity because Walter Benjamin wrote about it in “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” I have a thing about this, because my mentor Morton Smith did his dissertation at Hebrew U with Benjamin’s BFF, Gershom Scholem. before he fled Paris, Benjamin gave the print to Bataille, who gave it to Adorno, who gave it to Scholem right after WW2 — when Smith was studying with him.

Learning about that living connection in the mid-’80s, when Benjamin was going platinum in theory circles, was the kind of thing that changes how you read a ‘text’ — like his Theses. And a few years after I graduated I was working freelance for Pantheon / Schocken and because of that relationship got handed a life-changing project: the manuscript of the Correspondence of Benjamin and Scholem, with the plea to “fix it.” The translator, I was told, had farmed it out to grad students, who bungled it up six ways from Sunday. I spent the next few months poring over that thing, trying to salvage it, and judging by the reception it seems I succeeded. So the Benjamin–Scholem connection is very vivid thing for me.

These were the years of high Reaganism and Bush 1, a time when the humanities were busy politicizing everything, which in practice often meant redefining politics so it was more at home between the covers of journals like October than on the streets. That was the context in which Benjamin’s famous passage about Angelus Novus became a left-critical anthem, and that shaped how I read it — with more emphasis on Rezeption than Produktion. I felt then, and still feel, that the passage became popular because it served as a mawkish fetish that academics identified with to excuse themselves from engaging in serious political struggle.

…which brings us back to today at the Jewish Museum. I mean, OMG, here it actually is, a print that passed through the hands of Klee, Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem. It’s practically the font and origin of Benjamin’s theory of aura! They should be handing out solar eclipse sunglasses to protect viewers from the piece’s blinding aura, right?! Nope. Near, far, left, right, sitting, standing — no aura. Walk around and look at the rest of the show, come back. Still no aura. OK, self, you’ve ‘seen’ it so many times, try to unsee it, right? What better place to do that than a Klee exhibition: more than almost any other artist, he taught us how to see, unsee, see anew, see differently… No dice. I probably have a few postcards of that print with far more aura.

How can that be?! How can it be such a dud? Well, it turns out the Angelus Novus on display is an “authorized facsimile” — a fake. The real one was supposed to be on display but isn’t. The wall text says (a bit too discreetly, imo) that “Due to current conditions affecting international transport“ — that’d be the war of choice that Israel and the US co-launched against Iran — ”the shipment of the original artwork has been temporarily delayed.”

On second thought I have a theory: the copy on display has a different kind of aura, a distinctly 21st-C American one: an aura of fakery, of absence, of euphemism, all of it intertwined in some strange way with war that’s both emptily false and brutally real.

Either way, though, that Benjamin passage? Not anymore.

2026-06-05 ai and collectivism

Fri, 05 Jun 2026 10:01:00 GMT

Today’s Imma-up-this comes from my friend and hero, Tomislav Medak, on the question of rejecting AI, sparked by a convo about freedomlibertyandhiphop / frihedlighedoghiphop:

The problem is that the outright rejection leaves us short in collectivising its use against a couple of behemoths driving its development atm. The subscription model makes it an individualised consumer good — and the internet had just the opposite starting point — so that collectively making it work for progressive ends comes hard.

This. THIS. This is such a crucial point, and not just in regard to AI. We can hear echoes of it across the disciplines — for example, in debates about genetic engineering (say, gain-of-function or GMO research like so “golden rice”), about NIMBYism vs YIMBYism in environmental planning, about the appropriate uses of the explosions of data that technocultures generate, about the shifting logic and impacts of gender freedoms as people grow from children to elders, and most of all all about how we should address climate disruption. Everywhere you look where there’s an ethical debate, you’ll see a tug-of-war between a constellation of fundamental distinctions — individual vs collective, optimism vs pessimism, reward vs risk, profit vs loss.

The way we glue these questions together is the essence of political economy. The dominant model now, neoliberalism, relies on a narrow, heads-I-win-tails-you-lose illogic: individual / optimism / reward / profit versus collective / pessimism / risk / loss.

It doesn’t have to be that way. We can also see the systemic challenge that “AI” poses — to naive ideas about individual achievement (which we know are problematic), about our relationship to the collective legacies of civilizations, about how we gain and apply our own and others’ knowledge and skills — as an opportunity for fundamental change. But only if we actively, deliberately, and critically engage with it on every level.

And, again, not just AI. This is everything.

2024-06-04 Israel and the Columbia Law Review

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 10:50:00 GMT

[orig to FB]

I rarely read the Intercept these days, because over time its various agendas and tendencies seemed to become more and more tangled. Their story about the Columbia Law Review suffers from a bit of that, but it’s well worth reading (paywall-circumventing link in comments).

tl;dr: a Palestinian legal scholar, Rabea Eghbariah, has been trying to publish an article arguing for “Nakba as its own legal concept in international law…a legal framework…similar to genocide and apartheid, which were concretized as crimes in response to specific atrocities carried out by Nazi Germany and white-ruled South Africa, respectively.” Harvard Law Review agreed to publish it last fall, so it went through the full editorial process, but they spiked it at the last minute. Columbia Law Review “solicited a new article from the scholar” that “significantly expands on Eghbariah’s argument for Nakba as its own legal concept in international law,” and put it through a similar process. Then things get…complicated.

OT1H: “the text was more widely circulated among a greater number of people” than any article before. OT2H, the editorial process was unusual (understandably, imo): one editor said, “there was some additional work put into it, but in general, it was the same steps of production” — editors are normally randomly assigned but in this case were it was “volunteer-based…given the fraught nature of the subject matter”; drafts “were only available on a drive shared between the opt-in committee directly working on it, rather than all editors.”

Whether the article actually, formally passed muster isn’t clear from this story, and the Intercept article dances around whether the final steps of the editorial approval process were normal: “The students who spoke with The Intercept said that in their time at CLR they had never received a request from the board to distribute the text of an article to the entire membership of the review.” That may be because (a) the story is badly written, and/or (b) the process was unusual (I have a theory…). Either way, when the “opt-in” editors feared the article’s text had been leaked, they decided to run it.

When word leaked that they planned to do do, they were met with a serious pressure campaign. Some editors were told to resign from the law review’s editorial board (which for law students is a big deal); and two heavyweights on the review’s Board of Directors (one prof “who also serves in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel,” another who’s a “former Assistant to the U.S. Solicitor General Ginger”) tried to, at the very least, impede publication — first, by insisting the entire editorial board should see it, and then that the review’s entire 100+ member Board of Directors see it. They may have been motivated by scholarly diligence, but anyone who’s risen to such heights knows perfectly well that those requests are the federal equivalent of an offer you can’t refuse: if you comply your project will go nowhere, if you don’t you’re in trouble.

Rather than comply, the “opt-in” editors ran the piece on the review’s website; and when the Directors found out, they asked the editors to pull the entire May issue. Unless they were arguing that every article in it was fatally flawed, that approach — collective reprisal — was obviously an effort to hide their intent, which was to suppress Eghbariah’s article. Not a good look, as they say. And when the editors said no, the Directors pulled the plug on the review’s entire website, archives included.

Having spent years street-fighting in alleys like this, I assure you the path that process took is both crooked and straight: it runs straight through the president’s, general counsel’s, and dean’s offices, and it’s crooked in the sense of corrupt, a pure power play. Given the context — not just the university that set the template for using police violence to quell student dissent, but that university’s law school and indeed even its law review — that indiscriminate approach to censorship is astonishing.

If I said it’s the editorial equivalent of Israel’s approach to Gaza, some will react by dismissing that as bombast. Sorry, people, that analogy is not just precisely and substantively correct, but it also drives an important point home. This war is driven by the criminal Netanyahu, whose policies in turn are driven by Israel’s extreme right, which itself is steeped in criminality. That in itself is problematic enough, but when those policies extend to international efforts to (a) suppress historical and legal analyses of those policies, by (b) mobilizing power networks in ways that undermine scholarly and civil institutions abroad, that’s a whole other level. I’ll say it again: What Israel is doing in Gaza is ethnic cleansing, but what it’s doing outside of Gaza — systematic, sustained, and often sub rosa campaigns to suppress free expression and debate about the histories, theories, and possible futures of Palestinians and Palestine — is arguably genocidal.

In much the same way that everything Trump touches turns to shit, everything Netanyahu does backfires. His pandering to sociopathic settlers has put Israel in an untenable position. His sustained support for Hamas as a “strategic” alternative to the PA created, we’re told, a definable existential threat to the country. His reaction to 10/7 has done more to legitimize the Palestinian cause than decades of advocacy. And these efforts to meddle in and control debates abroad have turned entire generations against Israel.

In case it isn’t obvious: suppressing scholarly debate like this is corrupt, foolish, and dangerous.

2026-06-04 Israel and US elections

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 08:11:00 GMT

[Orig to FB]

In the run-up to the last presidential election, it was my strong sense that Netanyahu’s government was carefully modulating its war effort specifiucally to stoke conflict among US Dems / libs / progs / lefts. Put plainly, in my view, he used ethnic cleansing and genocide as a lever to punk the US ‘left’ into the internecine warfare that contributed to Trump’s election. I think that’s happening again this election season, with the aim of minimizing the risk that the Dems win both houses. Netanyahu himself can’t be seen as doing this right when Trump is ripping him a new one over the phone, so instead we saw (1) an astonishingly large group of ultra cabinet ministers and Knessest members at NYC’s Israel Day parade, (2) ginned-up media outrage over Mamdani’s principled choice not to attend, and (3) low-level background noise about whether this or that US politician knew in advance which genocidal lunatics would be out in front — all signs of a state visit without all the statery. The implication of this view is that Israel’s ultra-aggressive incursions into Lebanon are driven in part, possibly in large part, by their political reception in the US: the worse the reception here, the better for Israeli fascists. If so, ideas about “complicity” that have been so faddish on the left for the last few years, are mostly backwards: the louder you yell GENOCIDE, the more likely Netanyahu and Crew are to actually do it. They want to do it anyway, they benefit from the collapse of the civility that makes debate possible, they kneecap the universities they see as factories of anti-Israel sentiment, and they hobble the left-leaning segments of the Democratic Party.

2026-06-03 on birthdays

Wed, 03 Jun 2026 09:33:00 GMT

[orig to FB]

A bunch of really great birthdays today in my corner of the internet these days, mostly people I would have lost were it nor for FB. Lots of people say the birthday thing is one of the few legit great things about this swamp, and I agree, but it often leaves me thinking that something’s wanting — why?

Wishing someone happy birthday is easy, as we see every day; but telling them how or why they mean something to you can involve a bit more resistance. Don’t believe me? Try it! 😹 Maybe you’ll have more luck than me, but I often hear a little voice whispering that sounds like that smarmy Insta-Etsy performative ‘gratitude’ bullshit . And that, my friends, is the dialectic that’s sapping us of everything, an empire of alienation, with each new layer of cynicism mortared together with cringe.

I’m in the middle of a personal Jacques Tati film fest, and again and again I find myself mourning the loss of that exquisitely delicately naiveté — not just Mr. Hulot’s but that of Tati, too, who trusted that that our collective well of humanity was clear enough to care for everyone, down to the unseen drivers of all those other cars.

Telling people how and why about how and why you care about them, care for them, care with them, is one way to restore a bit of that, if only for a moment. Debord put it well in the title of one of his films: on the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time. That’s all we have.

2026-05-23-two films — comments by Pier Luigi Sacco

Sat, 23 May 2026 09:20:00 GMT

[orig to FB, by Pier Luigi Sacco]

Two films land in American cinemas within a week of each other this May.

One: The Mandalorian and Grogu. Budget around $165m. A property born in 1977, owned by Disney, extended through five decades of corporate stewardship, returning to the big screen after a six-year absence. The Economist last week called it the moment Star Wars went “from space opera to soap opera.”

The other: Backrooms. Directed by Kane Parsons — twenty years old. At sixteen, he began uploading found-footage shorts to YouTube using free Blender software, building on a 2019 4chan post that consisted of a single image and a one-line caption. A24 picked it up; James Wan is producing.

Same week. Same medium. Opposite production logics.

The Economist’s diagnosis of Disney’s predicament is right, but partial. The cultural industry, lavishly equipped with generative tools, capital, and distribution, has lost the capacity to manufacture genuinely new narrative universes. It can only refurbish ones it already owns. The Star Wars saga is a 49-year-old idea on increasingly elaborate life support.

Meanwhile, the most vital cosmologies of the last decade (the Backrooms, the SCP Foundation, analog horror, the whole liminal-space aesthetic) have emerged from distributed, anonymous, often teenage authorship. No greenlight committees. No franchise bibles. No earnings calls. Just open-ended worldbuilding by thousands of contributors who could afford to fail because nothing was at stake except attention.

This is not a story about taste. It is a story about generativity.

The industrial logic of contemporary cultural production (IP custodianship, capital markets allergic to subscriber churn, algorithmic greenlighting that rewards the legible past over the speculative future) selects against the kind of risk that makes new universes possible. The bottom-up logic of the open internet inverts every one of those constraints. Costless contribution. No IP gatekeeper. No penalty for failure. A combinatorial worldbuilding capacity no writers’ room can match.

The poetic justice is that Hollywood now has to buy its novelty from the margins it cannot replicate. A24 absorbing the Backrooms signals an industry that has begun outsourcing imagination to its own audience.

The real question, for studios and cultural policymakers alike, is whether the industrial pipeline can learn to commission novelty rather than capture it once it has already happened elsewhere.

Because the Backrooms is not a one-off. It is a working prototype of a different cultural economy.

And it opens one week after the Mandalorian.

[Again, this was written by Pier Luigi Sacco, not me.]

2026-05-15 Peter Willett on the NGO origins of the net

Fri, 15 May 2026 10:34:00 GMT

I’m filing this in public to get it off my hard drive: In this talk, given at UCL on 26 Oct 2009, Peter Willett challenges the story of the internet’s military origins and argues, instead, that it emerged from civil society. The page for the original video talk is long since gone. It reminds me of my friend and colleague Joe Karaganis’s book Shadow Libraries (OA, of course: downoad link), the result of an SSRC-sponsored longitudinal comparative study of copy cultures in several countries. tl;dr: Sites like Library Genesis, Anna’s Archive, Z-Lib, and Sci-Hub can trace their origins, in different ways, to the underground lit-sharing networks that grew up in repressive regimes — the USSR, South Africa, Brazil under repressive regimes, and so on. But that’s a broad-brush structural argument; Willett’s talk is well a listen for the specifics — and he’s a great speaker, too

2026-05-13-bbc on gordon pask

Wed, 13 May 2026 10:23:00 GMT

A short (3’43”) BBC spot doc on the cybernetician Gordon Pask (🎩 Paul Pangaro). His closing line — “I mean somebody with the with and the guts to go and do and create — and that, I believe, is what education is all about” — has stuck with me since the first time I heard it.

2026-05-13 Brian Reffin Smith: 43 dodgy statements on computer art

Wed, 13 May 2026 09:09:00 GMT

Brian Reffin Smith, first sent (I think) to the CAS (Computer Arts Society) mailing listno later that 15 April 2010 — maybe much earlier:

The sadness of most art is that it does not know its future. The sadness of computer art is that it does not know its past.
Constraint is liberty; reduce to the maximum.
If it looks just like, you know, ‘art’…it probably isn’t.
Using state-of-the-art technology merely produces state-of-the-technology art.
Those who use computers to make art need to understand art as well as computers.
Most participative art is deeply authoritarian.
The computer is best characterised not as an information processor but as a general-purpose representation processor.
Marshall McLuhan, at least as filtered through his sound-bites, was often wrong. The medium is not the message, which is more often determined socially and psychologically by the recipient.
If your system costs 10 000 € and mine 30 000 €, it does not follow that my art is thrice as good as yours.
In an ideal world, New Media institutions would employ at least one non-technological artist.
Are you pushing the frontiers of computational representation, or of contemporary art? Confusion rarely leads to success.
99% of computer art is meretricious nonsense. But then 99% of everything is meretricious nonsense.
Self-imposed formal requirements are not inhibitive of expression.
Post Modernism has never said that everything is of equal value, just that the contexts in which we identify or attribute value should be open to analysis.
You know your amazing new computer art, rich in metaphors and analogies? It’s been done. Years ago. Without a computer.
We lose dimensions and scale. The computer in art is immediate and almost always, however “global”, local. Just as no well-found art school would be complete without computers, so every such institution should have a telescope and a microscope, connected to the computer or not.
Making computer art too dangerous to sponsor would be a good way to go.
Just as everyone has a novel inside them, many believe they have an artwork. The purpose of a good art school is to seek out these people and stop them.
Using a computer merely to access the web is like using a Bugatti Veyron to deliver the papers.
Many people think that graphic design is art. Art is undertaken for art-like reasons, graphic design for graphic design-like reasons. There may of course be overlap. There should never be confusion.
Making the (arts) information revolution consists not only in enabling the control of the means of computer art production by art workers, but also in being kind, non-gouging and relatively honest. Without the latter, one may doubt commitment to the former.
The best interactive art always makes you look at the participants.
There is only one thing worse than studying art for the budding computer artist, and that is to study computers. Or vice versa.
Art is not craft.
What would be pretentious or nonsensical if one said it oneself does not become more worthy when spoken by a computer-generated avatar.
Seen in the light of Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle”, computer art is very spectacular indeed.
Beware of computer art as farce repeating itself as history.
There is no “normal” computer art, in the Kuhnian sense. It is in constant revolution, hence constantly evading scrutiny.
When the first solitary Metro station was built in Paris, where could people travel to? They just admired the station.
Bugs are good; as with fireflies, the fertile ones shed light.
The Prix Pierre Gutzman, 100 000 Francs, was offered by the Institut de France in 1906 to the first person who could establish contact with extra-terrestrials; except with Martians, which would be too easy.
‘All that is solid floats into air’ is not a celebration of virtuality, but Marx ‘n’ Engels’ prediction for late capitalism.
A half developed Polaroid photo is different to half a digital photo. A half-finished pen-plotter drawing is different to a half-finished inkjet print.
When art processes happen near-instantaneously, doing art becomes synonymous with correction and selection, later with celebration; rarely with creativity.
Art is visual philosophy. But computer art is not visual computer philosophy.
Revolutionary modes of interaction between humans and normative structures do not a revolution make.
‘i’, the imaginary square root of minus 1, is to the real numbers as the computer is — or should be — to art.
The purpose of the computer in art is to render it difficult and problematic, not easy.
We do not admire Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s The Third of May 1808 solely because of the techniques used, yet we are often invited to admire computer art for just that reason. Art that is deliberately content-free is one thing. Art that is accidentally, lumpenly content-free is another.
Computer artist: the unemployable producing the unsaleable for the uninterested.
Of course computers and other devices will never fully understand flowing, allusive conversation. But they won’t care.
Many of the ‘objects’ of computer art are instances, illustrations, of some less tangible, invisible process. But it may be that the waveform should remain uncollapsed, the artwork staying undecideable, problematic, unobjectified. Lucy R. Lippard described the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ nearly 40 years ago.
Never throw away any computer or peripheral equipment that is more than 15 years old. You may well come to need it.

2026-04-22 endangered millenialisms

Wed, 22 Apr 2026 10:12:00 GMT

Seen on FB, this “collection of endangered millenialisms from the internet”:

Pupper, doggo, smol, boi, birb, chonk, chonky, snek, floof, floofball, blep, mlem, boop, snoot, henlo, hooman, fren, friendo, adulting, peopling, humaning, can’t even, I’m dead, literally dead, all the feels, the feels, right in the feels, hubby, wifey, preggo, preggers, kiddo, littles, fur baby, fur babies, plant baby, plant mom, plant dad, wine mom, boy mom, mama bear, she-shed, hubster, bae, squad, tribe, yaas, yaaas queen, it me, big mood, living my best life, I’m obsessed, totes, adorbs, amaze, amazeballs, cray, cray cray, deets, whatevs, noms, nom nom, sammie, sammich, veggies, nuggies, chicky nuggies, breaky, din din, yummy, yummo, le sigh, le tired, epic, epic fail, winning, nailed it, crushed it, killed it, doing the thing, because science, because reasons, all the things, give me all the things, shut up and take my money, just sayin, sorry not sorry, amirite, asking for a friend, but first coffee, coffee is life, wine o’clock, it’s wine thirty, retail therapy, self care, treat yo self, smol bean, cinnamon roll, precious, must protect at all costs, we don’t deserve dogs, 1 did a thing, the struggle is real, hacks, life hack, hack, wanderlust, foodie, bromance, mancrush, ladycrush, brekkie, presh, ridic, obvi, perf, gorge, delish, vacay, staycay, sesh, feels trip, truth bomb, mic drop, boom, that happened, this is everything. I’m not crying you’re crying, who’s cutting onions, ninja onions, doggo did a heckin, heckin, heck, oh heck, bamboozle, bamboozled, danger noodle, trash panda, sea flap flap, murder mittens, toe beans, sploot, tippy taps, zoomies, grabbies, chömk, absolute unit, in awe of the size of this lad, long boi, thic boi, goodest, bestest, goodest boi, doing me a concern, doing me a frighten, doin a blep, bork, big bork, smol bork, woofer, sub woofer, yapper, pupperino, floofer, cloud, walking cloud, the audacity, whole entire, whole entire man, whole entire mood, vibes, good vibes only, positive vibes, no bad vibes, sending good vibes, manifesting, manifest, speaking it into existence, energy, that energy, big energy, chaotic energy, protect your energy, match my energy, boundaries, setting boundaries, space, holding space, intentional, intentionality, lean in, pivot, curate, curated, aesthetic, that aesthetic, so aesthetic, vibe, what a vibe, cozy, cozy vibes, cozy season, hygge, nesting, self-partnered, conscious uncoupling, journey, my journey, healing journey, glow up, level up, show up, show up for yourself, do the work, inner work, growth mindset, vulnerable, being vulnerable, brave, so brave, centering, centering myself, grounding, grounded, mindful, being present, gratitude, grateful, blessed, so blessed, thankful, giving thanks, passion project, side hustle, girlboss, boss babe, mompreneur, solopreneur, creative, I’m a creative, maker, maker space, community, found family, chosen family, authentic, authenticity, my truth, speaking my truth, live your truth, unapologetically, unapologetically me, fierce, fiercely, own it, slay queen, queen, king, kween, yas kween, work, werq, hunty, bish, basic, basic bitch, pumpkin spice, PSL, avo toast, avocado toast, brunch, brunch is life, rosé all day, rosé season, wine not, will run for wine, need wine, mommy juice, sippy sippy, drinky, cocktail o’clock, happy hour vibes, cheers to that, same, so much same, this, all of this, louder for the people in the back, say it louder, preach, facts, hard facts, truth, hard truth, real talk, legit, literally, figuratively literally, I literally can’t, dead, I’m literally dead, deceased, screaming, I’m screaming, crying, ugly crying, happy tears, the ugly cry, sob, full on sobbing, wrecked, gutted, shattered, broken, I’m broken, put me back together, glue me back together, Jesus take the wheel, send help, halp, plz, pls, kthxbye, bai, okurrr, oof, big oof, yikes, big yikes, cringe, secondhand cringe, eww, gross, ick, that’s the ick, welp, meh, whatevs forever, zero cares given, zero effs, adulting is hard, why is adulting, can I just not, I just can’t today, today is a lot, that’s a lot, it’s a lot, spoons, no spoons left, emotional labor, mental load, burnout, so burnt out, need a nap, nap queen, nap life, sleep is life, bed is life, introvert, introvert problems, introvert life, recharging, social battery, peopled out

This kind of spontaneous mass coordination — voluntary linguistic standardization — suggests that one way of understanding the first decades of the internet as the primitive accumulation phase of AI. In that view, “AI” is better understood as a historical period rather than a technology sector.

2026-04-14 marco rubio meme compilation

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 13:24:00 GMT

[ADDED 2026-05-10: Megan McArdle, “The hilarious Marco Rubio meme is putting American division on hold,” formerly known as the Washington Post (10 May 2026)]

[Related

OK enough of this rubbish

2026-04-11 what counts as a concentration camp

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 10:50:00 GMT

(Orig to FB)

Andrea Pitzer’s video piece What counts as a concentration camp? isn’t too long (24 mins) and is really interesting — in part for how it’s edited, which feels like the video equivalent of a rough cut of an academic essay. Like most tendentious exercises in applied neoplatonism, the debate about whether Trump & Co are building “concentration camps” is tiresome, artificial, and unnecessary; and arguments that they aren’t are starting to smell increasingly suspect. Pitzer’s history of CCs, One Long Night, is very good, and it’s hardly the first of its kind. Sid Mintz’s history of plantations, Sweetness and Power, traces a similar trajectory of how that form was developed through experimentation over centuries. There is no fixed, clearly bounded model of a CC. On the contrary, as Pitzer argues, CCs are best understood as a process.

There was a time (and, arguably, reason) to assert that certain words and phrases — notably concentration camp and genocide — had particular origins and associations that discourages using them widely. Under Netanyahu and Co, Israel has pissed away the last vestiges of that exceptionalism; and those of Israel’s supporters who’ve failed to responsibly criticize its excesses have relinquished any right to claim some sort of ownership of those terms. Those claims, well past their sell-by date, appear under a new sign, as efforts to control discussion and debate — and, as such, are part and parcel with efforts to intimidate, silence, and persecute effective critics of Israel’s policies and practices.

2026-04-08 luftgründer

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 11:57:00 GMT

Luftgründer, lit. “air-founder”: (1) a Silly Valley–style aspirational “Founder” with unrealistic expectations about the sheer mass of effort it takes to maintain anything — say, like a government. (2) A more accurate name for “libertarian.”

Context here, prompted by the NYT purporting to out [Adam Back as Satoshi](https: //www.nytimes.com/2026/04/08/business/bitcoin-satoshi-nakamoto-identity-adam-back.html)(?!?!).

2026-04-07 forensic dystopianism

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 15:10:00 GMT

Another phrase I’m surprised hasn’t been thoroughly hashed out: “forensic dystopianism.” I’m not a fan of Substack at all, but so many people are; and I’ve wasted too much time on self-marginalizing high-minded refusals — so that’s the name I chose to dump my occasional thoughts over there.

2026-04-07-klaus gnomi

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 09:12:00 GMT

Apparently, pretty much no one has ever typed the phrase “Klaus Gnomi” before, so here it is and I’ll reserve it — maybe for a pet name, maybe a Halloween costume, maybe a stage name, TBD.

Also, since I’m here and it’s 2026, here’s an AI slop rendering of Klaus Gnomi:

2026-04-06 now the whole earth is a bit more whole

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:05:00 GMT

Give this moment the time it deserves

2026-04-06-the fog of war is very thick

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 07:09:00 GMT

(Orig to FB)

This war is opaque to a degree I would never have thought possible. I’m amazed by that, but even more amazed by how few people seem to recognize that fact as such. The clearest expression of it I’ve seen is scattered people half-joking that Iran has become a more reliable source that the US government.

This opacity is understandable in Iran, a country run by religious fanatics. It’s harder to understand in Israel, which — even under attack — seems like it should be a more open society. It both is and isn’t surprising that various Gulf States have gone so quiet. But it’s much harder to understand in the US, because Trump & Co have only had a year to bludgeon our institutions into submission.

Basically, we have no idea what’s going on. Even very basic info about events, casualties, the scale and location of accumulating destruction, the conditions of our own and others’ armed forces, and the war’s impact on cities and peoples have all been relegated to the rumor mills of social media.

It’s as if “the media” we took for granted for most of the last century has ceased to exist. And if the nearly universal failure to note that disappearance is any indication, it has ceased to exist where it matters most — in the public’s mind.

small notes

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

2026-03-31: meet Proton Meet

2026-03-31: people are injecting “cadaveric adipose tissue” a/k/a corpse fat

2026-03-31: “neurodivergent supremacy” (🎩 Gizmodo)

2026-03-31: Scot Nakagawa, “How Democracies Win” (paint me skeptical)

2026-03-31: Aaron Regunberg, “What Are Your Obligations When Your Country Is the Villain?”

2026-03-31: Guardian review of the UK series Boom Box

2026-03-31: Blind Willie Johnson’s lyricless “Dark Was the Night”

2026-03-31: one of those elusive songs: Sade’s “Killer Blow,” on the Absolute Beginners soundtrack

2026-03-31: AJAM MC, Demilitarize the Indian Ocean (🎩 CH1)

2026-03-29: Comic Strip of the Day (CSotD)

2026-03-29: The elusive SNL “Bel Airabs” skit

2026-03-28: Todd Field’s Tár according to Wolfson, Millman, and Kearns (all 🎩 MB)

2026-03-28: Ben Wolfson reads Philip Larkin (from 2005! — 🎩 MB)

2026-03-27: [Trump gave Iran a sanctions regime against the US](Trump just helped Iran to impose a sanctions regime on the US.)

2026-03-27: Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

2026-03-27: Sarah Schulman’s list of useful Iran-related resources for 27 March

2026-03-27: Track AIPAC

2026-03-27: Naghmeh Sohrabi, “The Catastrophe That Has Befallen All of Us” (🎩 JK)

2026-03-27: Error 417 Expectation Failed, the newsletter

2026-03-26: Will Davies: the UK’s “Labour-Conservative-Liberal Democrat cartel”

2026-03-25: Richard Seymour, “The illusions of Machtpolitik” (🎩 JG)

2026-03-24: Pankaj Mishra, “The Authority of Thought” (🎩 RW)

2026-03-22: RIP Agosto Machado

2026-03-20: Bari Weiss shuts down CBS News Radio

2026-03-20: “NATO Mission Iraq posture adjusted” (translation: we’re outta here!)

2026-03-20: Christian Kerez car parks in Bahrain facing demolition (more)

2026-03-20: the vile Lis Smith argues “We Don’t Need More Lawyers in Congress” (NYT 🎩 PA)

2026-03-20: Mack Hagood, Oral Residue: A Zombie Media Theory Rises Again

2026-03-19: Why Some Catholics Want Peter Thiel Burned at the Stake

2026-03-19: the Scully Effect

2026-03-19: “the city owns no roads, land, or buildings”

2026-03-19: How can Canadians unite in their own defence?

2026-03-19: The 49MB web page (🎩 IRR)

2026-03-19: Rough Trade’s 50th anniversary: Essential: Post-punk

2026-03-18: neological things updated: rereification (credit: Eric Hoffsten)

2026-03-18: Snowflake Cortex AI escapes sandbox and executes malware

2026-03-18: Fotopoulos on “Iran, the Western Left, and the ambiguity of allies”

2026-03-18: How to shoot a screen using a board of keys (MacOS)

2026-03-17: still kinda horrifying after 25 years: Jon Haddock’s isometric historical events

2026-03-17: every name the money touched

2026-03-17: Iran Resources

2026-03-17: Renee Reizman, “Mail Art Takes On the World’

2026-03-17: Charles P. Pierce, “The Next Democratic President Better Be Merciless”

2026-03-17: T. J. Clark, “A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle”

2026-03-17: A Russian esoteric sect goes west

2026-03-17: Cade Diehm, ”Who Will Remember Us When The Servers Go Dark?“

2026-03-17: Brian Reffin Smith, “On Pedantry: A Cultural History of the Know-it-All”

2026-03-17: Natan Dubovitsky’s (a/k/a Vladislav Surkov’s) short story “Without Sky” (🎩 FS)

2026-03-17: Why do cultural execs go mad?

2026-03-17: gone (almost) phishin’

2026-03-17: couldn’t see that coming… “crappy luxury”

2026-03-17: U+237C ⍼ RIGHT ANGLE WITH DOWNWARDS ZIGZAG ARROW

2026-03-16: Sirantos Fotopoulos: two ways to disappear a people

2026-03-16: Perry Anderson, “Arms and Rights” in NLR (2005)

2026-03-16: dark money lobbying for age-verifying OSes

2026-03-16: Hamid Dabashi’s unsentimental take on Euro philosophy: “ethically bankrupt”

2026-03-16: Trump insider thinks Israel May use nukes (I agree)

2026-03-13: jigsaw puzzles invented by a cartographer (and by a woman earlier, ofc)

2026-03-13: the whole zodiac is off

2026-03-13: the Great Wall of Memes

2026-03-12: [Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence](decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence)

2026-03-11: “I built a spy satellite simulator in a browser”

2026-03-10: support the Bivens Act — for starters

2026-03-10: RIP Tony Hoare

2026-03-09: Post-War Prosperity to “Lifeboat Economics”? (🎩 RP)

2026-03-09: a tribute to Sylvère Lotringer (2022, 🎩 MW)

2026-03-09: “second hand zero-day” is not a phrase we want to see

2026-03-07: S&P “stealth correction”

2026-03-07: Claude solved a graph theory problem so Knuth rethinks AI (🎩 DM)

2026-03-07: the new Swiss non-exploitative LLM, Apertus (🎩 DM)

2026-03-06: Ervand Abrahamian, “Iran Under Fire”

2026-03-03: Apple’s Pages UI 2009–2026 just gets worse and worse

2026-03-03: “The law firms opposed the motions to withdraw the motion to dismiss.”

2026-03-02: Who loses from the Anthropic fight? Maybe Elon Musk and Alex Karp

2026-03-02: The Man in Seat 61 is said to be an A+ source for train travel

2026-03-02: “forensic dystopianism”

2026-03-01: In edus, AI isn’t the real threat. It’s just the mirror

2026-03-01: Russian vs Ukrainian army modernization

2026-03-01: the parlance of hyper-online misanthropes

2026-02

2026-02-25: the 80% bill

2026-02-24: NBER working paper, “Building Pro-Worker Artificial Intelligence” (🎩 TU)

2026-02-24: autocorrect the autocrats with the Times New Resistance font

2026-02-24: Varvara Nedeoglo’s “La petite mort des filles russes en terre libre” in TQR

2026-02-24: x86 CPU made in CSS (🎩 IRR)

2026-02-23: Byte magazine visual archive (🎩 KH)

2026-02-22: Poseidon taking chocolate from Mexico to Europe

2026-02-22: a bluntly old-school cover-up in the UK

2026-02-22: amazing explanation for why Trump sent a hospital ship to Greenland

2026-02-22: Kenneth Lonergan’s 3’6” director / extended cut of Margaret (2011) (🎩 JH)

2026-02-22: the actor Stellan Skarsgård was a teen pop sensation

2026-02-22: Wesley Willis’s outsider Chicago landscapes (🎩 MM)

2026-02-22: the wit and wisdom of Artforum

2026-02-22: Telegraph (India) reviews Amitava Kumar’s Social Life of Indian Trains

2026-02-22: Letters to the Grauniad about men shoving women

2026-02-22: Rodney Graham’s inverted portraits of trees

2026-02-21: How the LA Review of Books destroyed itself

2026-02-20: Institute for the Study of War’s Russian Offensive Campaign Assessment

2026-02-20: Toney Karon asks if a proper World Cup is even possible in the US in 2026

2026-02-19: Marcin Wichary blog on software craft and quality

2026-02-19: Epstein Helper

2026-02-19: Mamdani unpolicing advisor Alex Vitale’s review of David Garland’s Law and Order Leviathan

2026-02-18: Paul Krugman: “Now Trumpists Are Menacing Economists”

2026-02-16: worth reading: defunding is what’s ‘really’ killing the humanities (🎩 EW)

2026-02-13: a miners / Sandinista football jersey mystery 🎩SS)

2026-02-12: Will Manidis takes down Schumer’s “something big”

2026-02-12: Gary Marcus takes down Schumer’s “something big”

2026-02-11: RIP Byte mag illustrator Robert Tinney

2026-02-11: Mamdani hired 39 people out of 80K applicants

2026-02-11: How liminalism became our defining aesthetic

2026-02-11: updated! images

2026-02-10: Lit Crit in the Age of AI (🎩BB)

2026-02-10: “most of us barely noticed there was also a sports event” (🎩RW)

2026-02-10: The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher (🎩JP)

2026-02-10: For Cubans, surrender is not an option 🎩BB)

2026-02-10: Dominic Pettman on the first lady and historian of the robocene

2026-02-10: “How Close did we Come to Teaching Jeffrey Epstein?”

2026-02-09: RFK Jr’s heroin voice

2026-02-09: Jim Biglan, artist (🎩 CH1)

2026-02-09: 👉🏼 The Journey and Return of Elizabeth Fisher (🎩 JP)

2026-02-08: “trauma-ridden vessels who least resist inhuman economic forces”

2026-02-08: “the most overwrought AI legal filings you will ever gaze upon”

2026-02-07: Epstein / Kubrick/ Led Zeppelin / Baldessari

2026-02-07: Why your university has so many administrators

2026-02-06: Marco Rubio was the acting archivist of the United States?!

2026-02-05: Joohn Choe’s predictions for how the next election will unfold

2026-02-05: Turkish m-reduplication

2026-02-05: anti-phonetic alphabet ca. 2000 (🎩 ST)

2026-02-04: The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public (🎩DL)

2026-02-02: Simone 0914 Flagship Store (🎩 FiG)

2026-02-02: Neural review of Marina Hassapopoulou, Interactive Cinema: The Ambiguous Ethics of Media Participation (U Minn Press, 2024)

2026-02-02: ABC — Australian one — on the neoliberal Atlas Network

2026-02-02: the missing chapter from Alvy Ray Smith’s The Pixel

2026-01

2026-01-28: The Intercept’s guide to ICE patches

2026-01-28: older man who watches construction, gives unsolicited advice: umarall

2026-01-28: Linux running in a PDF

2026-01-27: a very smart approach to AI in education

2026-01-27: CERFI – Analysis Everywhere. Militancy, Research, Architecture and Psychiatry

2026-01-26: Ruminations on that DHS Penguin Tweet

2026-01-24: Bellingcat’s online forensic toolkit

2026-01-24: Chronicle of Higher Ed reviews new Bryan Alexander book Peak Higher Ed

2026-01-24: Steven Heller interviews graphic novelist Jarrett Dapier about Chicago Public Schools Persepolis ban

2026-01-23: best indy / community radio stations in the US

2026-01-23: poli-sci syllabus sourced from random internet posts

2026-01-23: AI bots are incompatible with democracy

2026-01-23: satisfying lost-and-found story of a Harry Bertoia sculpture

2026-01-22: F/LOSS CLI tool for “optimizing” Macs (incl. TouchID for sudo!): mole

2026-01-21: “the real reasons new yorkers’ groceries cost so much” (🎩JK)

2026-01-21: Redditor says MMS patch brought Verizon down (🎩IRR)

2026-01-21: End of an era: Gmail dropping POP3 support (🎩IRR)

2026-01-20: sage, nomad, demon — just not an assistant (🎩RL)

2026-01-20: # ASCII characters are not pixels

2026-01-19: Scavenged Luxury on Tumblr (🎩TM)

2026-01-19: same actress, same play for forty years

2026-01-19: poetics of the periodic table

2026-01-18: interview with the graffiti artist Sluto

2026-01-18: David French on the normative vs prerogative states

2026-01-14: “Why I Will Not Cast My Electoral Vote for Donald Trump”

2026-01-14: The China Syndrome and American decline

2026-01-13: Times Square FB group

2026-01-11: gently brutal NYRB review of Douthat’s doorstop

2026-01-10: historian of Venezuela AMA on FB

2026-01-10: automating medieval manuscript transcription

2026-01-09: VZ: The cash waterfall is upstream of sovereignty itself

2026-01-08: neatocal for planning an entire year

2026-01-08: alleged Berlin group manifesto: deDOTindymediaDOTorg/nodeSLASH565575

2025-12-23: RAM price skyockets thanks to OpenAI

2025-12-16: Jaro on Longfellow-ZK

2025-12-15: private equity is setting rural America on fire

2025-12-10: AAUP on AI

2025-12-07: Cyber Ciani

2025-12-03: Dictionary of Non-notable Artists

2025-12-01: the best font ever

2025-11-29: Poor Theory (🎩 SXW)

2025-11-26: Hyman Rickover’s rules for govt management

2025-11-26: how’d I miss a walking city block?

2025-11-26: epic list of journal RSS feeds on Github

2025-11-23: framework for combining geospatial resources

2025-11-22: Github > allaboutrss

2025-11-20: a much-needed homage to Martha Wilson

2025-11-18: Seemingly legit tool for sandboxing attachments

2025-11-14: first AI-orchestrated cyber espionage

2025-11-09: # The Rise of Parasitic AI

2025-11-08: Sam Altman’s pants are totally on fire

2025-11-07: Wordle in 1973

2025-11-07: oldversion.com

2025-11-06: Altman’s Long Goodbye movie poster

2025-11-06: news.kagi.com

2025-11-06: high-quality Mamdani t-shirt

2025-11-06: visual/video search engine for Reddit

2025-11-03: Tony Karon’s blog

2025-11-03: Chi-town saying no to predatory stadium financing

2025-10-31: [Cop Sculpture](1993–94 > Cop Sculpture) is on IG

2025-10-31: wtfjusthappenedtoday

2025-10-31: “Human Only Public License” (🎩 US)

2025-10-10: Bill Ayers on “sewer socialism” and free buses (🎩 JB)

2025-10-06: Dollar General Carl Schmitt, Curtis Yarvin, has “think realistically about how to flee the country”

2025-09-26: Complete History of the Soviet Union, Arranged to the Melody of Tetris

2025-09-26: De l’émancipation des toons

2025-09-26: “raw, unfiltered takes from everyday people on the topics that matter most”

2025-09-25: Jacobin as “the politics of demoralization in service of the Dem Party”

2025-09-25: Teen Vogue on rapture ideology

2025-09-25: a pretty sharp AI video about MAGA

2025-09-15: kitsch is central to MAGA (🎩 AO)

2025-09-14: bsky thread on climate disruption narratives

2025-09-12: chopstick sleeve exhibition

2025-09-12: Kirk was killed by a meme

2025-09-12: FARK bans misogyny

2025-09-06: “Nothing comes without its world” (🎩 CS)

2025-09-05: Counterfacto, a tool for analyzing Xitter search results “to highlight counterfactual statements on certain topics”

2025-09-03: Western Cell Division, “Opening Gaps and Filling Them Up…WESTERN CELL DIVISION and You” (Baltimore, MD: Dialectical Immaterialism Press, 1987)

2025-08-13: David Dayen sheds more light on the fund-raising machines that dominate the Democratic Party — this time in California

2025-08-11: a great Michael Tomasky column on Trump, Putin, UA, and UE

2025-08-10: Charlie Stross thread on a proposed interstellar travel design (🎩 KD)

2025-08-08: Al-Jazeera on Trump’s “fascist anti-psychiatry”

2025-08-08: Glyn Morgan’s belated review of Arthur Goldhammer’s 2012 novel Shooting War

2025-08-08: the Ursus Books (NYC) mailing list never fails to amaze (signup link)

2025-08-08: “GIRLS OWN THE VOID”: Nina Power on the supergenius Audrey Wollen (2017) 2025-08-08: https://archive.ph/20250808131031/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/04/technology/rationalists-ai-lighthaven.html mentions this [techno-volkish wannabe anthem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aB3uTV5Pyz0

2025-08-08: A+ explanation of the sinking market for US bonds

2025-05-30: high school graduation hit with fake ticket DOS attack

2025-05-25: “I Was Targeted by a Hostile Crypto Spambot Swarm That Revealed How X’s Algorithm Has Been Truly Broken”

2025-05-14: the Big Boy graveyard on Google Maps or scene from The Matrix?

2025-05-14: [a letter from concerned Palantir alumni to the tech workers of Silicon Valley](https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/25930212/the-scouring-of-the-shire.pdf

2025-05-14: Apparently, Robert Macfarlane (not sure which one) said “Despair is a luxury and hope is a discipline.”

2025-05-14: big props to The Verge’s for using “supposed” and “putative” to describe Trump’s minions who were named without qualification or process to replace people who were illegally fired

2025-05-08: find who owns a publisher from a book’s barcode (🎩 NTT)

2025-05-08: poem “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”

2025-05-07: this guy says John Fetterman’s always been a mess (🎩 RP)

2025-05-01: an exoplanet whose “atmosphere is thick with clouds of vaporized metal, and it rains liquid sapphires and rubies” (🎩CT)

2025-05-01: click whither: [a random website generator](https://randomgenerate.io/random-website-generator

2025-04-30: “five nuns fled a northern Italian convent after the abbess was sacked amid ‘grave vicissitudes’”

2025-04-08: Dan Goodin quoting Matthew Green and Matt Blaze is a pretty good working definition of trust

2025-04-08: “YOU HAVE NO REAL FRIENDS AND WILL DIE ALONE”

2025-04-08: “the tariffs are another tool for Trump to compel loyalty from industries in the US”

2025-04-06: amazing rundown of Trump’s penchant for cheating at golf

2025-04-06: Russia: “an ideology without principles’? (🎩 FC)

2025-04-03: Perry Anderson on “Regime Change in the West”(of which McKenzie Wark says, “It takes forever to get Marxists to embrace a new concept, and then they never ant to give it up.”)

2025-04-03: Public Domain Review — one of the best things on the net — on perfect animals

2025-04-02: Princeton has a better idea than hiding: selling bonds

2025-04-01: Facebook seems to be f*ing with Heather Cox Richardson’s daily posts(additional report by Mark Lemley)

2025-04-01: Laura Kipnis on the history “weaponization” of federal funding

2025-03-30: The Rutgers faculty senate did what faculty senates everywhere should have been doing — passing resolutions demanding positive, collective action from the admin

2025-03-30: The architect Kazys Varnelis drops an excellent neologism: Ghiblification

2025-03-29: # John Zorn’s Hermetic Cartography

2025-03-29: # Dean Blundell on Canada cutting ties with the US

2025-03-29: a powerful statement about Vance and the 1968 Broken Arrow B-52 crash in Greenland

2025-03-27: Rolux’s Vectorisation(s) Du cinéma (2020)

2025-03-26: Interesting syllabus “about the representation of the city across media and disciplines” by Fabrizio Gallianti

2025-03-25: “Turd Reich” images for download

2025-03-24: Letter to USC on edu transparency re natsec risks posed by Chinese nationals in STEM

2025-03-23: For those of a certain age, this clock design is a work of unsurpassed candor, wit, and genius. For others, its meaning will be lost, like tears in the rain.

2025-03-23: a brilliant takedown some new book called In Covid’s Wake: How Our Politics Failed Us

2025-03-21: Michael Ignatieff, who headed up CEU in Budapest, on what US edus should do 2025-03-21: I was sure that Tesla coined the fabulous word “embrittlement,” but it was far more popular in 1967 and 1983

2025-03-16: I’m probably more familiar with arbitration than most people from spending several years following ICANN, but even so the International Centre for Dispute Resolution’s “Emergency International Arbitral Tribunal,” sounded a bit dystopian.

2025-03-13: MFA Houston’s page for Alexey Titarenko’s photographs

2025-03-11: Marian Zazeela and La Monte Young’s Music and Light Box on display in NYC Mar 27 – Apr 12

2025-03-11: Columbia’s own James Schamus on Trump’s attacks on the university

2025-03-11: every US citizen should read Malcolm Nance on Trump’s plans for Canada

2025-03-11: AFA-CWA’s promo video for its C.H.A.O.S. approach to striking is 🏆 (background here)

2025-03-11: Starship 8 blowing up in the Bahamas is gorgeous — Musk should do it more often

2025-03-10: I didn’t realize the great Onethingwell started up the stopped again

2025-03-10: this still isn’t happiness

2025-03-10: This U Chicago AAUP statement is good. But they had to publish it on Wordpress because, apparently, faculty can’t speak as the university in the same way that administrators can — which is strange when you think about it.

2025-03-09: FB’s explicitly blocking access to Gil Durán’s Nerd Reich because it “addresses topics like the ‘Network State’ concept and critiques of tech industry figures

2025-03-09: Mike Masnick on “Why Techdirt Is Now a Democracy Blog”

2025-03-09: Nina Burleigh (a/k/a American Freakshow) on [MAGA’s Heart of Darkness](https://www.americanfreakshow.news/p/magas-heart-of-darkness

2025-03-07: “the empathy exploit” is quite a phrase

2025-03-06: Timeline of Technological Buffoonery in the DOGE Era

2025-03-06: “We think it perspicacious to note” that if CRMEP’s philosophy students want to win this fight — and they should — they’ll need to find better copy-writers.

2025-03-06: “life-size chocolate Guernica” should be a mid-’90s punk band, not an actual life-size chocolate Guernica

2025-03-06: “# “Space focused on technology, new media and artistic research”

2025-03-04: Columbia U (my alma mater and neighbor for deacdes) keeps on screwing up its handling of the pro-Palestinian protests

2025-03-04: Dictionary.com doesn’t know how to pronounce the singular word interstice

2025-03-03: not enough people understand that Musk’s goal is to exterminate multitudes — and Trump is cool with that because that’d make him a Great Man

2025-03-03: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Journal of Architectural Education pulls its call for an issue about Palestine (2025-03-10: the board resigned en bloc — good for them!)

2025-03-03: Gregg Gonsalves gets warmer than most — the Trump admin wants to destroy universties — but his analysis still focuses on science, which is a mistake.

2025-02-27: Steve Vladeck notes Big Law partners worry “they could jeopardize their economic future by protecting the rule of law” 🎻 🔬 😭 🌊

2025-02-26: a super obit for a fascinating guy, Chistopher “Sandy” Jencks (🎩 LF)

2025-02-26: an awful squib about N5N1 killing sand hill cranes in southern Indiana

2025-02-26: on Christian support for Trump and liberal denialism (🎩 Mike McG)

2025-02-24: 40% of the glaciers in Central Europe melted between 2000 and 2023

2025-02-24: Peter Sellers’s 1975 ads for TWA are brilliant (this one especially), but the meta-ad he made is next-next-next-next level

2025-02-24: Wankpanzer vs Pinto according to a hobbyist stats blog that looks great

2025-02-22: CPAC as gonzo politics

2025-02-22: Paul Prudence has a really sharp aesthetic

2025-02-22: Kagi, the privacy-oriented subscription search engine, is doing some interesting things

2025-02-22: ABC: “US cyber agency puts election security staffers who worked with the states on leave” — I don’t understand why this get so little attention

2025-02-22: I wrote a Bsky thread about Trump’s attacks on higher ed

2025-02-21: WiReD has a razor-sharp take on the fashion shift among broligarchs: “everyone missed that they were dressing for the job they really wanted”: emperors.

2025-02-21: Ithaca’s Lavender Hill Commune, “home away from home in the 1970s for many displaced members of what is now known as the LGBTQ+ community, has been officially listed in the National Register of Historic Places.”

2025-02-21: Marc Greif on the threat of fascism: “The risk of overreaction is trivial compared to the risks of accommodation.”

2025-02-21: In a time of unprecedented crisis, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries [is promoting his “vividly illustrated book — the perfect holiday gift to inspire the whole family!”](https://bsky.app/profile/unraveledpress.com/post/3linkppo6ls2j

2025-02-20: this Xitter thread is unusually dense with smart observations (e.g., fascism is “a counter-revolution against a revolution that never took place,” and “the only mode of moral argumentation you ever see from a reactionary is whataboutism”)

2025-02-20: A phrase we’ll see more of, I wager: “the shallow state”

2025-02-12: Lucian Truscott offers a preview of blue-on-blue violence

2025-02-12: Chris Newfield gives a masterclass on why the proposed change in NIH funding would be a systemic catastrophe for US higher ed

2025-02-12: Jeff Sharlet explains why faculty must be open with students about that threat

2025-02-12: Trump wants to cancel 50% of the office space leased by the federal government

2025-02-10: Feb 10 is the anniversary of the first (reported) collision involving an active and a dead satellite

2025-02-10: Why doomscroll when you can eduscroll? a 🏆 to aizk for their brrrrrilliant TikTok-like interface for Wikipedia

2025-02-10: Microsoft’s copilot “loves the creativity” of my shocktwerps neologism for Musk’s übermunchkins

2025-02-10: 404media, an excellent news outlet, on “AI Company Asks Job Applicants Not to Use AI in Job Applications”

2025-02-10: “First they came for the cokeheads and I did not speak out because I was not a cokehead…”

2025-02-10: “far center” seems like a useful political category, and this piece on that op-ed pest Pamela Paul is hilarious ~

2025-02-05: Yessssssss a Facebook skullpaper meme generator!

2025-02-05: Gil Duran’s Nerd Reich on the blueprint for Musk’s coup

2025-02-05: Canada’s tariff list included “Unmanned aircraft…Designed for the carriage of passengers” (8806.10.00), “Fitted cases for church bells” (4202.99.10), Catgut (4206.00.10), Burial shrouds (6307.90.10), “Pointe shoes or block toe shoes, for professional dancers employed by full-time dance companies which meet Canada Council standards of professionalism or for ballet students in full-time attendance at a ballet school which meets Canada Council curriculum standards” (6403.59.10), and sugar tongs (8215.10.10)

2025-02-05: Carl T. Bergstrom and Jevin D. West “spent the last eight months developing the course on large language models (LLMs) that we think every college freshman needs to take”, called “Bullshit Machines”

2025-02-05: Newly minted AG Pam Bondi issued a rule that requires spies to be caught doing “more traditional espionage” (tiny cameras and hand-cranked radios?), which is literally like saying that thieves have to be caught wearing a black-and-white striped shirt and carrying a canvas bag ovr their shoulder

2025-02-01: James Fallows offer the kind of high-level, well-informed context for the DC plane crash we need more of

2025-02-01: Someone named Danyelle Thomas on people who “were counting on a status quo election where [they] could make a morally superior protest vote without serious consequence” and “expected enough voters to do the heavy lifting of a pragmatic choice that would defeat Cheeto Christ Stupid Czar while [they] get to say [they] voted morally”

2025-02-01: Today in Tabs on Krugman on Krugman leaving the NYT

2025-02-01: the PPRuNe (Professional Pilots Rumor Network) thread devoted to the DC crash

2025-01-29: Really interesting Bsky thread](https://bsky.app/profile/dorsaamir.bsky.social/post/3lglw6iefus2g) on the whether the Müller-Lyer illusion is culturally informed

2025-01-29: “During 1965–66, Mad magazine attempted a French edition and hired [Melvin] Van Peebles as editor-in-chief during its run of only five issues.” (Wikipedia)

2025-01-29: Paul Krugman’s piece of how and why he left the NYT is, in a quite way, a jaw-dropping account of how that paper has degenerated into, basically, Fox News for the NPR set (🎩 Ina B)

2025-01-29: Over at Aaron Rupar’s excellent newsletter Public Notice, David R. Lurie (who describes himself as an “occasional writer about the law and related matters”) shows us what proper journalism looks and sounds like

2025-01-29: “Raging Misogynist” Now Federal Government H.R.’s Top Lawyer” is [quite a headline

2025-01-24: Why do “AIs” default to the condescending voice middle-school textbook Q&As, like this Anne Franke bot?

2025-01-24: I don’t understand how this is possible, but I also don’t understand how it would be impossible — Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day substack will become more relevant to more people with every day that passes

2025-01-24: a new issue of The Diagram is out!

2025-01-16: Matt Stoller’s Jan 13 issue of his anti/trust-related newsletter “Big” has a jaw-dropping list of the regulatory issues “Meta” faces (does anyone really believe in that name?), i.e., why Zuck is groveling up a storm at Mar-a-Lago

2025-01-16: Jim Henson’s muppets weren’t always so peace-loving

2025-01-16: Steamed buns (yes, those ones) are helping Chinese weapons engineers “turn the angry king of explosives into a beautiful queen”

2025-01-16: a site with zillions of links to English-language literary magazines, with short excerpts of pieces recently ran (🎩SB)

2025-01-11: Las Vegas Cybertruck bomber Matthew Livelsberger’s two “minifestoes,” less than a page each, basically advocate exterminating half the US population (guess which half!)

2025-01-11: Dennis Cooper has put together a pretty epic set of images on his blog

2025-01-11: my love of primates doing human stuff transcends all words, but this might just be the greatest monkey video ever

2025-01-11: Paolo Gerbaudo has coined one of the most useful phrases I’ve seen in a long time: “vintage theory”

2025-01-11: Meta’s internal MAGA memo uses a slippery phrase we’ll be seeing more of, I think: “cognitive diversity”

2025-01-11: Robert Luxemburg’s unnverving video “UNTITLED (2025-01-08)…”

2025-01-11: Will Stancil’s Bluesky thread on our “massive information infrastructure which privileges conspiracy theories, demagoguery, bigotry, lies, and hysteria” is well worth reading (as is his whole feed)

2025-01-04: Via the amazing FIG Projects on Facebook, an intriguing site on Housing Standardization

2025-01-04: “Meet The Blind Birder Reimagining Accessibility In The Outdoors” (Science Friday)

2025-01-04: Trillium Domes geodesic dome kits and plans

2025-01-04: The Map Room blog’s list of notable map books published in 2024

2025-01-04: Melton and Wallace, The Official CIA Manual of Trickery and Deception (2mb PDF)

2025-01-04: Simon Meier-Vieracker, “Uncreative Academic Writing,” in Schreiber and Ohly, KI:Text Diskurse über KI-Textgeneratoren / AI:Text: AI Text Generator Discourses (De Gruyter 2024)

2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s “Classic TV Commercials” repo

2025-01-04: Joe Frank on the net

2025-01-04: OSINT Dojo resources for open-source intelligence

2025-01-04: Bellingcat’s auto-archiver for archiving links to vids, images, and social media from Google Sheets

2025-01-04: “A curated directory of 1000+ Mac menu bar apps”

2025-01-04: Internet Archive’s snapshot of my father’s crazy-but-smart solution for funding healthcare

2025-01-04: Achille Mbembe and Milo Rau on “The Paranoia of the Western Mind” 2025-01-04: “The Cagots of France,” persecuted for centuries then utterly forgotten (La Piccioletta Barca)

2025-01-04: MIT Tech review on how to pitch them

2024-12-13: Nathan Newman](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Nathan-Newman-6) on “The Crisis of Elite Indifference to Corporate Mass Murder,” complete with a “modest proposal” (i.e., a parody) to “[l]icense no more than ten CEO murders per year.”

2024-12-13: The Grauniad’s piece on synthesizing “mirror microbes” is moderately terrifying.

2024-12-13: As usual, Astra Taylor is right.

2024-12-13: This new book on diagrams in anthropological discourse is both interesting and ‘‘interesting’’ — the kind of coy, artsy rhetorical style feel verrry late ’80s / early ’90s, and not in a good way.

2024-12-13: NYU declared Andrew Ross, one of its finest faculty members, persona non grata after he was arrested at a pro-Pal demo.

image stream

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

See also:

2026-03-18 sirantos fotopoulos on israel and iran

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 11:31:00 GMT

These two short essaylets by Sirantos Fotopoulos are probably the sharpest, densest commentaries I’ve seen yet on Israel and Iran. I know nothing about him except a few short bios. Triple Ampersand says he’s a “political activist based near Seattle, Washington and has worked on a variety of political campaigns over the past 20 years including with Ralph Nader and current Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson. He regularly posts at: facebook.com/sirantos.fotopoulos.” What. a. gift.

(1) 15 March 2026

There are two ways to make a population disappear from political discourse, and the Western anti-imperialist Left has, with a consistency that cannot entirely be attributed to accident, managed to deploy both of them simultaneously against the people of Iran. The first is the campist method: you absorb the country into a geopolitical schema so totalising that its actual inhabitants — their strikes, their insurrections, their feminist movements, their dead — become noise in a signal about imperial rivalry, inconvenient data points that complicate the preferred conclusion and are therefore, with a discipline that any intelligence agency might envy, quietly omitted. The second is the liberal method: you make the suffering so visible, so aestheticised, so available for consumption as a spectacle of violated humanity, that the people doing the suffering are transformed from political agents with demands and analyses and a specific class position into a kind of permanent victim-class, objects of indignation rather than subjects of history, whose liberation is always being prepared by someone else and perpetually deferred. Both methods arrive, by different routes and with different vocabularies, at the same destination: a politics in which the Iranian working class and feminist movement cannot appear as what they actually are — the protagonists of their own emancipation, in direct and chosen antagonism with a specific capitalist state formation, requiring from their allies not pity and not geopolitical calculation but the elementary recognition that their struggle is real, their analysis is serious, and their dead deserve to be counted.

This is a failure of political legibility — and that failure is not incidental to the theoretical traditions I am examining but structural, load-bearing, produced with something approaching deliberate craft. A framework that cannot integrate rights discourse with class analysis cannot see an uprising whole. It sees either a human rights violation — which is the liberal register, innocent of class, innocent of the question of whose interests the repressive apparatus serves, whose accumulation it protects — or it sees a geopolitical maneuver, a piece repositioned on the board of imperial rivalry, whose relationship to the actual human beings conducting it is treated as essentially incidental, a matter of atmospherics rather than substance. What it cannot see, in either mode, is the thing that is actually there: a working-class and a feminist movement in direct, chosen, conscious antagonism with a specific capitalist state formation, demanding simultaneously the end of theocratic repression and the transformation of the class relations the theocracy was constructed to protect. This is not a complicated thing to see. It requires only that one look — and that one be willing to accept what looking reveals.

Nicos Poulantzas developed an account of the capitalist state not as a unified instrument of class will descending from above, not as a simple executive committee managing the affairs of the bourgeoisie, but as a condensation of class forces — a terrain of struggle on which different fractions of capital and different class alliances produce, at each conjuncture, the specific form of state power that corresponds to their relative strength and their specific accumulation requirements. The state, in his analysis, is not a thing that a class possesses. It is a relation — a crystallisation of the balance of forces at a given historical moment, traversed by contradictions, capable of producing outcomes that no single class fully intended and that can only be explained by examining the specific configuration of forces that produced them. This is a theoretical instrument of considerable practical consequence, and its consequences are as uncomfortable for the campist Left as for the liberal rights tradition, which is perhaps why both have preferred to ignore it.

For what Poulantzas makes immediately and irrefutably visible is that you cannot read a state’s relationship to the classes it governs from its geopolitical alignment alone. A state’s posture toward American hegemony tells you something about one dimension of its existence — its position in the global system, the specific fractions of capital whose interests are served by that posture — but it tells you nothing necessary, nothing logically entailed, about its relationship to the workers and women and political dissidents living under its authority. The Revolutionary Guards simultaneously resist American hegemony in the region and operate one of the most significant accumulation regimes in Iranian economic life, extracting surplus from industries spanning construction, telecommunications, energy, and finance, disciplines that surplus through the suppression of independent labour organisation, and uses the apparatus of the state to protect that extraction from challenge. The Bonyad networks — massive, state-affiliated foundations in Iran, controlling roughly 20% of the country’s GDP — simultaneously represent a form of anti-Western economic nationalism and function as instruments of patronage, extraction, and the systematic disciplining of class forces that might otherwise cohere into an organised challenge to the existing order. These are not contradictions requiring explanation. They are, on the Poulantzian analysis, precisely what you would expect: the unified expression of a specific class formation whose interests include both the maintenance of geopolitical sovereignty against external pressure and the suppression of the Iranian working class’s capacity for autonomous political action against internal challenge. To treat the anti-imperial posture as evidence of progressive class character is not an error of emphasis. It is a categorical confusion — the conflation of two independent variables that Poulantzas demonstrated were independent.

But it is precisely here that the liberal rights tradition must also be brought before the same analytical tribunal, because it arrives with its own evasions, and those evasions are, if anything, more difficult to dislodge because they wear the costume of moral seriousness. The liberal human rights framework — the framework of reports and resolutions and special rapporteurs and solemn declarations — is, on the Poulantzian analysis, a politics that has systematically refused to ask the most important question available to it. It can register, with admirable precision and genuine moral courage, the torture in the cells of Evin Prison. It can document the floggings, catalogue the executions, name the prisoners, count the dead. And then, having done all of this, it arrives at conclusions about individual violations and institutional remedies that leave entirely intact the class relations that produced the prison, the accumulation regime the prison protects, and the condensation of class forces that makes the Islamic Republic’s specific form of state violence not an aberration but a structural necessity. A rights politics that cannot ask — in Poulantzas’s terms — which class forces are condensed in the repressive apparatus, which fractions of capital require that apparatus to function as it does, and what transformation of the balance of class forces would be necessary to make it function differently, is a politics that can produce testimony but not transformation. And testimony, however necessary — however indispensable as a record of what was done and to whom — is not the same thing as a politics capable of ending what it describes.

The task, then, is not the synthesis that eclectics propose — not the genial combining of the two traditions in the hope that their respective blind spots will politely cancel each other out, that the class analyst and the human rights lawyer will pool their deficiencies and arrive at adequacy. It is something more rigorous and less comfortable: the recognition, forced by the Poulantzian analysis, that a rights politics without class analysis is systematically incapable of addressing the structural conditions that produce the violations it documents, and that a class analysis without rights discourse is systematically incapable of specifying the concrete harms inflicted on concrete bodies by the condensation of class forces it describes. The flogging of a dissident in an Iranian prison is simultaneously a rights violation that any adequate moral framework must register and a moment in the reproduction of a specific class relation — the enforcement of the Islamic Republic’s accumulation regime against those who challenge it — that any adequate political framework must analyse as such. Poulantzas gives you the second. He does not give you the first. The task is to insist on both, not by averaging them but by showing that each is incomplete without the other and that their integration produces an analysis qualitatively different from, and more adequate than, either tradition operating in isolation.

The concept I want to place at the center of this integrated framework is political legibility — the condition under which a social struggle becomes visible, nameable, and therefore claimable as an object of solidarity within a given political framework. Legibility, as I am using the term, is not empirical visibility. The Women Life Freedom uprising was visible to anyone with a mobile phone and an uninterrupted internet connection, for as long as the connection lasted before the state severed it. The 2025 protests were visible in flashes before the blackout descended and the killing proceeded in the darkness that the Islamic Republic had constructed specifically to enable it. Visibility is not the problem. The problem is interpretability — whether a given framework possesses categories adequate to what it is seeing, categories in which the struggle can appear as what it actually is rather than as something more convenient, more manageable, more compatible with conclusions already reached before the first shot was fired. The campist framework, lacking the Poulantzian distinction between geopolitical alignment and class character, cannot read a genuine popular insurrection against a state it has positioned on the correct side of its map — it can only recode it as provocation, as manipulation, as the long arm of the American intelligence and military apparatus reaching into the streets of Tehran. The liberal rights framework, lacking the Poulantzian account of the state as a condensation of class forces, can read the dissident insurrection as a human rights event but cannot read it as a class event — cannot see the Iranian working woman removing her headscarf as anything more than a victim asserting her dignity, when she is simultaneously, and more importantly, a political agent challenging a specific configuration of class power whose stake in her subordination is material, structural, and fully analysable.

Against both these forms of illegibility — the campist erasure that cannot see the insurrection at all, and the liberal spectacularisation that can see only its surface — I want to propose what might be called immanent or innate solidarity: solidarity whose grounds are found within the actual, specific, historically constituted relations and struggles of a given conjuncture, grounded at every point in the Poulantzian question of which class forces are condensed in which state apparatuses and what transformation of their balance the struggle in question is capable of producing. Immanent solidarity takes seriously the specific class character of the state being resisted — the Revolutionary Guards as accumulation regime, the Bonyad networks as disciplinary apparatus, the morality police as the enforcement arm of a specific configuration of patriarchal and class power — not as background color but as the central analytical question, the thing that determines both what kind of transformation the struggle might produce and what kind of solidarity would actually serve it rather than merely expressing the solidarity’s authors’ moral preferences. It takes seriously the specific forms of harm the repression produces as symptoms of specific class interests and specific accumulation requirements. And it takes seriously the specific conjunctural position of the struggle — its transformative potential at this moment, in this configuration of forces — without subordinating that assessment to a predetermined hierarchy of contradictions that relieves the analyst of the obligation to actually think.

The question of prioritisation cannot be wished away, and a theory that pretends otherwise is practicing a dishonesty of its own. Political actors operate under constraints of attention, organisational capacity, and resources that make the claim of equal solidarity with all struggles at all times a rhetorical gesture rather than a political commitment. Some form of political judgment about where to direct solidarity, and when, and how, is inescapable — and the question is not whether to make such judgments but on what analytical basis. The campist answer — subordinate solidarity to geopolitical alignment, treat the state’s posture toward Washington as the measure of its progressive character — has been demonstrated by the nearly five decades of Iranian history to produce a politics useless to the people it claims to represent and actively harmful to the movements it purports to support, precisely because it commits the confusion that Poulantzas spent his career systematically dismantling. The liberal answer — measure the severity of rights violations against a universal standard abstracted from structural position — produces a politics of perpetual emergency, capable of moral clarity about individual cases while remaining, by design, incapable of the structural analysis that would allow it to ask whether its interventions strengthen or weaken the class forces capable of transformation. The answer that the Poulantzian framework makes available is conjunctural: the assessment, at each specific historical moment, of which configuration of class forces creates the conditions for a genuine rupture in existing relations of domination, and what solidarity practice would most effectively support and extend the capacity of the subordinate forces to press that rupture toward transformation. This is not a formula. It is a demand for the actual exercise of political thought — thought that takes its categories from the analysis of the conjuncture rather than from the prior commitments of the analyst.

There is a further demand embedded in this conjunctural method that the campist tradition has been particularly, one might say constitutionally, resistant to acknowledging: the demand for revision. A conjunctural assessment describes a configuration of class forces at a specific historical moment, and it is obligated to update when that configuration changes — or when the evidence reveals that it was never what the assessment claimed. The Iranian working class and feminist movement have, across the Green Movement of 2009, the uprisings of 2017 and 2019, the Women Life Freedom movement of 2022, and the nationwide protests of 2026 suppressed under a communications blackout while thousands were killed, demonstrated with whatever clarity history is capable of demonstrating anything that their struggle represents precisely the kind of conjunctural event that the Poulantzian analysis demands be taken seriously — not because it is sympathetic, not because its participants are admirable, though they are, with an extraordinariness that shames the comfort of their Western commentators, but because it represents a working-class and feminist challenge to a specific condensation of class forces whose transformation would have consequences for the balance of power across the region and beyond. The campist Left has failed this analysis not because the evidence was unavailable but because making it would have required revising conclusions that function not as political assessments but as dogma — and dogma, by its very definition, is the place where thinking stops and repetition begins.

The Iranian working class and feminist movement have provided, across forty-seven years of extraordinary courage sustained against extraordinary and meticulously documented violence, a remarkably precise answer to the question of what they actually require from their putative allies on the Western Left. They do not require to be instrumentalised — absorbed into someone else’s geopolitical narrative as evidence of imperial aggression or, in the liberal mode, aestheticised as evidence of universal human dignity violated and then filed away. They do not require the solidarity of people who discover them only when they become useful to a predetermined argument and misplace them when the argument moves on. They do not require to be told, by people whose understanding of the Islamic Republic derives from position papers rather than from living under it, what their struggle is really about, which foreign intelligence service is really directing it, and what theoretical conclusions they ought to draw from their own experience. What they require — what the Poulantzian analysis makes clear they are fully entitled to require — is to be seen as what they actually are: political agents engaged in a struggle against a specific condensation of class forces, with their own analysis of that condensation refined across decades of inhabiting it, their own demands about its transformation, and their own claim, requiring no external authorisation from any Western theoretical tradition, on the solidarity of anyone who takes seriously the proposition that the liberation of the working class is the act of the working class itself. A Left that cannot offer this recognition has not made a theoretical error, though the theoretical errors are real, are serious, and have been described above in some detail. It has made a political choice — to organise its solidarity around its own ideological convenience rather than around the interests of the people whose liberation it spends a remarkable amount of time discussing in their absence. And the people in the prisons, the people in the streets, the people who conducted their struggle under communications blackouts while the Western Left was debating the finer points of anti-imperialist doctrine in conditions of complete personal safety — they are living, and dying, with the consequences of that choice, and have been for longer than most of those making it have been paying attention.

(2) 17 March 2026

In the 1980s the Islamic Republic of Iran — which had come to power branding Israel “the Little Satan,” the imperialist outpost of American domination, the Zionist entity that Khomeini declared must be erased from the map — was purchasing, through back channels and shell companies, American-made fighter jet components, tank parts, advanced missile systems, artillery ammunition, and helicopter spare parts. The seller was Israel. The transaction was, in the strictest theological and ideological sense of the Iranian revolutionary government, an act of collaboration with the enemy of God and mankind. And Khomeini, when informed by one of his generals that the arms they desperately needed were Israeli in origin, paused for exactly two seconds and said, in effect: if you don’t have to ask who sold it, don’t ask.

That anecdote, recounted by Trita Parsi, who interviewed Khomeini’s close adviser directly remains the most rigorous accounting of this clandestine triangle. The anti-imperialist, anti-Zionist identity of the regime was not an incidental rhetorical flourish. It was the regime’s founding legitimating claim, the substance of its mandate. And Khomeini dissolved it in two seconds.

The Israeli side is no less extraordinary. Israel’s strategic doctrine — the so-called “periphery doctrine” — held that the Jewish state’s security depended on cultivating alliances with non-Arab states at the margins of the Arab world: Iran, Turkey, Ethiopia. This made a certain cold-blooded geopolitical sense during the Shah’s era, when Tehran and Jerusalem shared intelligence services, oil pipelines, and a common dread of pan-Arab nationalism. But by 1980, the Iranian partner in that peripheral alliance had just declared Israel a satanic abomination, had severed diplomatic relations, and was conducting, at full volume, a political theology in which the liberation of Jerusalem was a sacred obligation. Israel’s response to this was to sell that same regime tens of millions of dollars in arms in 1981 alone, rising to an estimated half a billion dollars annually by the mid-1980s, financed in substantial part by Iranian oil. Ariel Sharon — the then Defense Minister of the Jewish state — went on American network television in 1982 and openly admitted it, justifying it on the grounds that Israel wanted to bring Iran back into the Western sphere of influence. He said this while the Iranian government was funding movements committed to Israel’s destruction and while Israeli citizens were being told that Khomeinism represented an existential civilizational threat.

What this reveals, beneath the surface absurdity, is something clarifying about how states actually operate versus how they narrate their operation. The performance of ideology — the “Death to Israel” chants, the Little Satan rhetoric, the Israeli security cabinet language about the Iranian menace — is not simply lying, though it contains lies in generous measure. It is the production of a political reality that serves domestic legitimation needs, coalition maintenance, and regional positioning, and it operates on a track that runs parallel to, rather than intersecting with, the track on which actual material transactions occur. The ideology is for the population. The arms deals are for the state. The genius of the arrangement — if genius is the right word for something so morally squalid — is that the population and the state can both be correct, simultaneously, about entirely contradictory things, and neither track need acknowledge the other’s existence.

When the Israeli arms sales began leaking into the Iranian press, at least one person who had disclosed the information was killed. The theocratic state did not merely suppress the information — it liquidated the act of disclosure. This is not the behavior of a government embarrassed by a compromise. It is the behavior of a government that understands, with perfect clarity, that its legitimating ideology cannot survive contact with its own operational reality, and that the distance between the two must be maintained by whatever means necessary, up to and including the elimination of the witnesses.

On the Israeli side, the suppression took a different and perhaps more institutionally revealing form. The covert operation managing the transactions had to be relocated when it became apparent that even the Reagan administration’s comfortable tolerance for Israeli embargo violations had limits. A network of private arms dealers, shell companies, South American cargo airlines, and Mediterranean transit points was constructed not primarily to evade Iranian scrutiny — Iran was the willing buyer — but to maintain deniability within the Western alliance system and to manage the optics of a self-declared Jewish state arming the government that had just called for its destruction. As Parsi noted, the Israelis were acutely aware that their strategic utility to Tehran rested on their unique access to American weapons. They were selling weapons in violation of American sanctions to a regime that America considered a terrorist state, while simultaneously presenting themselves to Washington as its most reliable regional partner. The audacity of this arrangement was profound.

And then there is the true irony, which resists easy moral resolution: Israel’s arms sales to Iran were partly motivated by the desire to protect the tens of thousands of Jews still living inside the Islamic Republic. The same government calling for Israel’s eradication was, in effect, holding Iranian Jews as a tacit bargaining chip, and Israel was purchasing their relative safety with weapons that the regime then used to prosecute a war in Iraq which half a million people died. The humanitarian rationale, the strategic rationale, and the commercial rationale collapsed into a single transaction.

What this says about the relationship between declared enmity and operational reality in Middle Eastern geopolitics — and, by extension, in geopolitics generally — is worth stating with some precision. Declared enmity is a resource. It can be produced, maintained, and deployed in ways that are entirely compatible with material cooperation, provided both parties share an interest in keeping the two tracks separate. Iran needed the weapons more than it needed the theology of anti-Zionism to be operationally consistent. Israel needed the strategic buffer against Saddam and access to oil more than it needed the public performance of confronting Khomeinism. Both states were willing to sustain their respective ideological performances for their respective domestic audiences while conducting, in parallel, the business that the ideology declared impossible. The mullahs chanted death to Israel while their air force flew on Israeli-supplied parts. The Knesset debated the Iranian threat while the Defense Ministry sent monthly weapons lists to Tehran. Both performances were sincere yet fraudulent. This combination is not a paradox — it is the normal operating condition of states that require their populations to believe things that would make governance impossible if true.

The tragedy is that this relationship, which Parsi has described as a “missed opportunity,” was in fact not missed so much as structurally precluded from the beginning. The very mechanism that made the arms trade possible — the parallel tracks, the ideological suppression, the execution of the person who broke the silence — made genuine diplomatic normalization impossible. You cannot build a sustainable relationship on a foundation that requires both parties to publicly deny the relationship exists. The arms trade was real. The enmity was also real, or became real, because it had been so loudly and consistently performed that it eventually constituted the actual political reality it had begun as cover for.

By 1992, when Saddam had been defeated in Kuwait and the Soviet Union had dissolved, the geopolitical conditions that had pushed Israel and Iran into their clandestine embrace evaporated entirely, and what remained was the ideology that both sides had been performing for a decade. Israel pivoted toward Arab normalization and the Oslo process. Iran pivoted deeper into Islamist regional projection — Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the so-called axis of resistance. The arms trade left no institutional memory that could be drawn on, because both sides had been so diligent in ensuring it left no institutional memory. The cover-up was so successful that it covered up the possibility of anything else.

Which brings us, with a grim and rather clarifying logic, to the present moment — to the sustained Israeli military campaign now underway against Iran, to the strikes on Iranian territory, to the killing of senior Revolutionary Guard commanders and, today, the assassination of Ali Larijani, to the systematic degradation of Iranian air defense infrastructure, to what amounts, in effect, to an open war between the two states that once cooperated on a clandestine arms relationship.

The historical irony here carries a diagnostic weight. The Israeli weapons sold to Iran in the 1980s helped the Islamic Republic survive its most existential military crisis — the Iraqi invasion that might, had it succeeded, have strangled the theocracy in its infancy. In a very concrete sense, Israel helped build the regional power it is now attempting to dismantle. The Hawk missiles, the F-4 components, the artillery shells that kept the Iranian military operational during the grinding war of attrition against Saddam — these contributed to the survival of a state that would spend the subsequent four decades constructing the very threat matrix that Israel now cites as justification for preemptive war. There is a word for this, and it is not irony. It is blowback, and it arrives, as it always does, with accrued interest.

But the deeper point — the one that the current war forces into view with particular sharpness — is what the arms relationship of the 1980s reveals about the nature of the conflict now. If two states can conduct a half-billion-dollar annual arms trade while simultaneously maintaining a public theology of mutual annihilation, then the ideology on both sides was never, in any straightforward sense, the cause of the conflict. It was the instrument. The actual drivers — oil, strategic depth, nuclear ambition, the architecture of regional hegemony, the question of which state would emerge as the dominant power between the Levant and Central Asia — these were always material, always reducible to the logic of competing state interests dressed in whatever theological or civilizational costume the moment required.

This matters now because the current Israeli campaign is being framed, on all sides, in the language of existential necessity — of a civilizational struggle between democratic Israel and theocratic Iran, between modernity and medievalism, between the open society and the closed fist of religious absolutism. The civilizational framing is, to put it with appropriate bluntness, selective — and the selectivity is not accidental.

What the 1980s relationship ultimately demonstrates is that the conflict between Israel and Iran has never been, at its core, about what either government says it is about. It is about power — specifically, about which state controls the strategic architecture of the Middle East, about nuclear capability and deterrence posture, about the survival of the Iranian theocracy as a functioning regional projector of force, and about Israel’s determination to prevent the emergence of any regional peer competitor capable of threatening its military supremacy. These are the only concerns that have been operationally consistent across the entire history of the relationship, from the Shah’s oil pipelines to Khomeini’s missile purchases to the current campaign of open war.

The people who will pay the price for the resolution of these concerns, as they always do, are not the strategic planners in Jerusalem or the Revolutionary Guard commanders in their hardened facilities. They are the Iranian civilians living under a regime they cannot remove, who are now absorbing the material consequences of a war between states that spent a decade negotiating weapon sales while calling each other Satan.

And yet, if there is any salvageable principle to be extracted from this decades-long carnival of cynicism, it is precisely the one that neither government has ever been willing to entertain — that the populations conscripted into this performance have interests that are not only distinct from those of their respective states, but actively opposed to them. The Iranian worker who has watched the Revolutionary Guard consume the national wealth in the service of a regional empire he never voted for, the Iranian woman who has spent forty years negotiating the distance between her own body and the theocracy’s claim upon it, the Israeli citizen who has been told, with remarkable consistency, that permanent war is the price of permanent security and who is only now beginning to ask who exactly is collecting that price and where it goes — these people are not, in any meaningful sense, each other’s enemies.

They are the shared victims of governing classes whose power depends, structurally and absolutely, on the maintenance of a mutual enmity that the arms trade of the 1980s demonstrated was never more than a management tool. The liberation that is actually worth the name — not the liberation delivered by F-35s and targeted assassinations, not the liberation promised by a theocracy to a region it intends to dominate — is the liberation that begins when people on both sides of a manufactured frontier recognize that the madmen running their respective countries have been, for decades, running the same con on all of them simultaneously. That recognition has no air force. It has no Revolutionary Guard. What it has, and what no amount of ordnance has yet succeeded in destroying, is the stubborn, unglamorous, and entirely serious insistence of ordinary people that their lives belong to them and not to those who treat war as a game.

2026-03-11 kessler syndrome

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 12:58:00 GMT

A friend writes:

A hundred years from now when humanity is locked out of all space access for the next ten thousand years due to Kessler Syndrome, and people ask “why did Americans launch a million vanity satellites in the 21st century?” and the answer turns out to be “billionaires were mad about pronouns in bio.”

The film Gravity can be read as an allegory for how culture works, and actor–network theory is just another name for Rube Goldberg.

2026-03-09 leonard cohen mark rowland interview 1988

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 17:36:00 GMT

OCRed version of Mark Rowland’s fascinating interview with Leonard Cohen, published in the July 1988 issue of Musician magazine.

LEONARD COHEN: NERVOUS BREAKTHROUGH

By Mark Rowland

(Musician magazine, July 1988)

“I THINK IF I HAD ONE OF THOSE GOOD VOICES, I WOULD HAVE DONE IT COMPLETELY DIFFERENTLY,” LEONARD COHEN RUMINATES. “I PROBABLY WOULD HAVE SUNG THE SONGS I REALLY LIKE RATHER THAN BE A WRITER. WHEN I WAS A KID I ALWAYS HAD THIS FANTASY OF SINGING WITH A BAND. WE’D HAVE GET-TOGETHERS AND I’D SING ‘RACING WITH THE MOON,’ STUFF LIKE THAT. I JUST DON’T THINK ONE WOULD HAVE BOTHERED TO WRITE IF ONE COULD HAVE REALLY LIFTED ONE’S VOICE IN SONG. BUT THAT WASN’T MY VOICE. THIS IS MY VOICE.”

Leonard Cohen has written two novels, eight volumes of poetry and nine albums, the latest of which, I’m Your Man, is as sophisticated and drolly incisive as pop songwriting gets. Ask any fan about Cohen, though, and invariably the first point of reference is the man’s way with a song. The pitch is deep if not particularly resonant, dynamic shifts are seemingly verboten, his phrasing deceptively flat. On “Tower of Song,” a tune from the new album, Leonard even makes a crack about it: “I was born like this, I had no choice,” he explains in that distinctive warble. “I was born with the gift of a golden voice.”

But he’s not entirely kidding, either, or at any rate he shouldn’t be. For Cohen’s voice is very much the witting instrument of his songs — dark, knowing, romantic, bummed. He’s the reigning auteur of folk noir, the godfather of doom ‘n’ gloom. Over in England, where pop ennui has become something of a cottage industry, Cohen is treated with near-regal respect. Popsters from Nick Cave to Echo & the Bunnymen’s Ian McCulloch credit his inspiration; the Sisters of Mercy even took their name from one of his early songs. Cohen’s last record, Various Positions, sold 300,000 copies in Europe. In the U.S., it was not even released.

Of course existential despair has never been a hot ticket in America; to an audience that admires R.E.M., Cohen’s elegant lyrical turns probably don’t count for much. But dismissing him as a terminal groaner (and unless you’re a member of his substantial cult following, chances are good you’ve thought along those lines) only underscores Cohen’s constancy. At 53, Leonard still dresses in black, his shoes are shined and his pinstriped jacket well-tailored. He has style, in other words. Not the sort that cops Grammy awards or Top 40 airplay, as Cohen has survived 20 years in pop music without either. But it’s an honest style, singular and uncompromised — which may be why he’s managed to survive at all.

He grew up in Montreal; his father was an engineer and sometime clothier who died when Leonard was nine. At McGill University he began writing poetry and played in a country and western trio, the Buckskin Boys. He also became part of a literary “underground” that, as Cohen recalls, “didn’t have any subversive intentions because even that would be beneath it.” With the help of a grant, Cohen began traveling through Europe, eventually settling on the Greek island of Hydra. He stayed seven years, wrote two highly-regarded novels, The Favorite Game (1963) and Beautiful Losers (1965) — the latter itself the subject of a book by the Canadian critic Dennis Lee — and lived with Marianne Jenson, later celebrated in one of Cohen’s more popular songs (“So Long, Marianne”), and the mother of Norwegian novelist Axel Jensen.

“It was a very intense group of people who were passing through the island at that time,” Cohen remembers. “People who were going to make their mark on the culture — Axel, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, the Swedish poet Goran Tönnström. A very curious meeting of people, and that was very much a part of why I stayed.”

It was a scene Cohen finally abandoned, however, along with his romance and his career as a novelist. He returned to the United States with the idea of becoming a country singer, eventually settling near Nashville. Before that happened, though, “Suzanne” was covered by Judy Collins, and he was signed to Columbia by that label’s great talent scout, John Hammond. Songs of Leonard Cohen was an immediate success, several of its selections later comprising the soundtrack to Robert Altman’s classic film McCabe and Mrs. Miller.

With his minimalist melodies, chiaroscuro croak and a poetic sensibility that suggested fin-de-siècle fatigue, Cohen seemed to have as much in common with the late-’60s counterculture as an undertaker at a carnival. But they clicked. Partly it was Cohen’s stance, so determinedly unfashionable (“to change my name or go for an image would have felt sneaky, underhanded — that was Hollywood”) as to be irresistible for a culture hooked on novelty. Part was the power of truths, however unpleasant, to insinuate and endure. With Songs from a Room (1969) and Songs of Love and Hate (1971), he became a mordant prototype for a new breed of confessional, and increasingly popular, singer/songwriters.

But as the ’60s waned, so, ironically, did Cohen’s appeal. Another lengthy romantic liaison (Cohen has never married) produced two children, Adam and Lorca, and for a time a measure of personal stability. But Cohen’s music foundered. Always fascinated by religion, some of his themes grew mystical to the point of becoming opaque. “I thought I was one of those men that sang about his predicament, and that somehow everybody would connect with it,” Cohen admits. “But I lost my way and began involving myself with speculations that I knew deep down were not really public concerns. The world was no longer attracting me. It wasn’t very entertaining.

The record industry seemed to feel the same way about Cohen. Despite continued success in Europe, his albums went out of print here, and he didn’t tour the U.S. for 10 years. A few months ago, Columbia Records tried to airbrush its past policy of benign neglect by presenting Cohen with its Crystal Globe award, representing over five-million sales by an artist outside their native country. Accepting the award at a sparsely-attended ceremony, Cohen remarked that he had “always been deeply touched by the modesty of [Columbia’s] interest in my work.” Even when surrounded by corporate hype, Cohen is a very reliable witness.

“I don’t care whether they like me or not, or whether they think I’m a great poet or not. I shiver every time they use the word ‘poet,’” he notes dryly. “It means I’ve never been shut down. \ [But] I consider it a friendly gesture that they remembered that I had sold these records. And if they think I’ve produced a record that can sell, I don’t want to say anything that’s going to change their minds.”

The surprise success last year of Jennifer Warnes’ album of Cohen songs, Famous Blue Raincoat, hasn’t hurt his commercial prospects, and with the release of /’m Your Man, Cohen’s songwriting career may be finally coming full circle. Meticulously crafted, and for once not so’s you’d notice, the songs mesh the direct lyricism of his earliest work along with the toughened emotional fiber of a guy who’s been around the block a few times since. It’s a black comedy, and an entertaining one; “Ain’t No Cure for Love,” “Everybody Knows” and “I Can’t Forget” even have what you might call hooks. Were it not for the polished production values, occasional oud lick, or those angelic female harmonies — by now a Cohen trademark — you’d think he was finally making his country-western debut.

Cohen likes the record too, but mostly he’s glad it’s finished; as the following interview indicates, its three-year gestation was unusually tortured, even for him. Tortured enough at least to lead Cohen to re-examine his life, his worth as an artist and his place in the world. Now he’s a happier man. “But I think that’s because I just heard that the record went to number one in Norway,” he admits. “Then I heard it was going toward number one in Spain, and I began to reach higher states of ecstasy and bliss.”

We conversed one evening in Cohen’s Los Angeles apartment, a few days before his octet departed on a 65-concert tour of Europe. It was a clean, well-lighted place, though virtually devoid of furniture. Whether rummaging through his refrigerator or his own fertile mind, Cohen graciously shared the discoveries — an ear of corn, a forgotten poem, grape leaves, funny stories. For all his reputation as a bard of despair, his manner seemed elfin, his bleakest observations peppered with self-deprecating humor. Leonard Cohen is an artist, all right, and something else at least as valuable: He’s a character.

MUSICIAN: Do you think your music is coming back in vogue?

COHEN: People like the stuff again; I guess that means it’s a good time. Other musicians are treating me like Beethoven. Younger groups are recording my songs, some of them in subterranean caves in Iceland. I’m always gratified when extremist groups are attracted by my work.

I look at it more or less like it’s the Middle Ages, or the Dark Ages. There’s a flame here or there. Someone lifts a torch. Sometimes it’s in Warsaw, sometimes Reykjavik. It takes a certain amount of perseverance.

MUSICIAN: Is that a problem for you?

COHEN: I did not go into this for the short haul. I understood that about myself a long time ago. And then, you’re not even aware as the years go by. It’s not that one wakes up every morning and says, “I must reconsecrate myself in this great mission…” Also, P’’ve had examples in my life of men who’ve grown older in the harness and kept producing remarkable work. My friend Irving Layton, who is probably the best Canadian poet alive today, is on maybe his fiftieth book. That’s inspiring. There’s no concession to old age.

MUSICIAN: You’re referring to writers and poets. In terms of pop singer/songwriters, though, you haven’t had many role models.

COHEN: That’s true. But I’ve been sustained by people responding to my work though the marketplace does not celebrate it. So I never got the sense that “it’s over.” Maybe I should have — there was ample evidence from certain points of view.

MUSICIAN: Most of your following is in Europe. Do you think your songs, your world view, attracts or plays to what’s considered a more European sensibility?

COHEN: I think the public world in Europe is not as powerful as the public world here, so there’s still an inner space that’s not so much under assault. There’s still some remnant of nineteenth-century culture. In America there is no vacuum. Everything is public and the commercial institutions are now the landscaping of this public world. There’s nowhere else for you to exist. There’s a few libraries, a few second-hand record stores — the archives. But unless you are in the system here, you don’t exist. I’m not on the side of the cultivation of inner space, though. I don’t have anything vested in the position my life has given me. I’m happy to make a living. I don’t consider myself scorned, and I never design my songs to be outside the mainstream.

MUSICIAN: But you have often positioned yourself as an outsider, particularly when you arrived on the pop scene in the late ’60s.

COHEN: I always find it interesting when people designate me as a figure of the ’60s, because I certainly never bought the [’60s] point of view, and I’m on record in book after book. I think there’s one called The Energy of Slaves which came out in ’73 and ends with this line: “Welcome to this book of slaves

which I wrote during your exile, you lucky son-of-a-bitch, while I had to contend with all the flabby liars of the Aquarian Age.”

**MUSICIAN: But in the late ’60s you were in a community of folk singers who played together, sang each other’s songs—

COHEN: And everybody went for the money. Everybody. The thing died very, very quickly; the merchants took over. Nobody resisted. My purity is based on the fact that nobody offered me much money. I suppose that had I moved into more popular realms, I might have surrendered some of the characteristics of my nature that are now described as virtues.

MUSICIAN: That must have made you feel a little odd.

COHEN: It made me feel a little poor. [laughter]**

MUSICIAN: Do you feel limited by your voice?

COHEN: There’s no question; there are lots of things I wouldn’t try. But I don’t think that has anything to do with delivering a song. A song, a message, a laundry list, a salutation — there’s a way to deliver the thing so that it touches the person you’re speaking to. Now there are lots of good singers who couldn’t do my stuff — couldn’t penetrate it, would have no interest in it. I can do my songs better than most people. Very rarely someone like Jennifer Warnes comes along, who has all the emotional equipment and can bring musical qualities to the song that I can’t even approach. This superb sound that issues from her throat. Now maybe that can get in the way of a song too.

Most music criticism is in the nineteenth century. It’s so far behind, say, the criticism of painting. It’s still based on nineteenth-century art — cows beside a stream and trees and “I know what I like.” There’s no concession to the fact that Dylan might be a more sophisticated singer than Whitney Houston, that he’s probably the most sophisticated singer we’ve had in a generation. Or that Tom Waits’ whole personage is incredibly classy and chic, much more so than anybody around, mostly.

MUSICIAN: Is that something you take to heart?

COHEN: Well, I’m actually talking about myself. People talk about me being a primitive, they use “folk singer” as a way to put people down, things like that. I’m a folk singer, okay, but I mean, some folk singer wrote the melody to “Greensleeves.” How primitive was that? Nobody is identifying our popular singers like a Matisse or Picasso. Dylan’s a Picasso — that exuberance, range, an assimilation of the whole history of music.

**MUSICIAN: What’s great about the best folk and country music is the clarity, the removal of anything extraneous from the point, And listening to I’m Your Man, I hear that in your own writing again, those succinct narrative and musical qualities,

COHEN: That’s what I’ve been working on for the last few years. I think “The Book of Mercy” (from Various Positions) was the final statement of the mystical, religious being. I don’t have to talk about religion anymore — it’s gone underground. I don’t think popular music is a good place to explore a lot of those ideas.

The song that is going to survive in this landscape today has got to have a certain kind of power, of strength. You don’t put your philosopher at the head of the army. This is a time for a very strategic position — to the marketplace, and to the whole psychic landscape. Muscle is indicated, a kind of phalanx. A lot of other things have to be put behind the front line. If your heart has really been threatened with cynicism — one’s own, I’m talking about, not CBS’. [laughter] With the greed, the skepticism, the general devaluation of all spiritual currency that faces us today, a position has to be taken that is appropriate in the face of this real assault.

MUSICIAN: You found yourself having a change of heart?

COHEN: I found myself getting wiped out, over and over again. I found myself breaking down, in not very pleasant ways.**

I wasn’t making [songs] as strong, I wasn’t paying enough attention to the foundation, the casting. I had good ideas, and sometimes I made a frail thing whose frailty was so alarming that it could endure, like the song “If It Be Your Will.” It has its own disarming life and can survive in this landscape. But mostly, no, they can’t.

MUSICIAN: Are you speaking in terms of music, or the craft of writing those songs?

COHEN: I’m speaking in terms of a position that embraces those things but also embraces the mode that we order our food in a restaurant and approach our friends and our lovers, just the style of operation today.

MUSICIAN: This may be something of a stretch, but do you think that your attitude in the ’60s, which was then something of a corrective to the excesses of the era, ultimately became corrupting and disfiguring for yourself?

COHEN: Well, my retrospective chops are pretty rusty; I don’t have that kind of mind. I remember that I was enflamed in the ’60s, as so many of us were. My appetites were enflamed: to love, to create, my greed, one really wanted the whole thing. And I remember feeling at a certain point that this was not working. You’d wander around the East Village in New York, there’d be a paper called the East Village Other which seemed to indicate there was some kind of community. Only you’d walk the street and there’d be no evidence of any such thing. The evidence started to accumulate that nothing was happening. Someone observed that whoever marries the spirit of their generation will be a widow in the next. I never married the spirit of my generation because it wasn’t that attractive to me. And I’ve since moved further and further from any possible matrimonial commitment. As you get older, I think you get less willing to buy the latest version of reality. Mostly, I’m on the front line of my own tiny life.

MUSICIAN: It’s remarkable that you’d written two well-received novels before becoming a professional songwriter. After that much struggle, why did you abandon a career as a novelist?

COHEN: Many times in the last few years I’ve thought I should have stayed with writing. Then maybe life would have been a little easier. I would have shipwrecked less dramatically. From my point of view.

MUSICIAN: You think it’s a less difficult life emotionally?

COHEN: As I remember it, for the writing of books you have to be in one place. The regime is just completely different. It usually involves a certain type of stability. You tend to gather things around you when you write a novel. You need a woman in your life. It’s good to have some kids around, ‘cause there’s always food. It’s nice to have a place that is clean and orderly, where this light comes in.

MUSICIAN: You had gathered these things?

COHEN: I had those things and then I decided to be a songwriter. I don’t know what it was, something to do with money. Although I was being affirmed in certain circles, I couldn’t pay the rent. I’d always written songs, so it was more like an emphasis changed rather than a venue. But I still don’t know how I got so deeply into it. It started to engross me — and also, I had enormous success at the beginning. That’s always a trap; you think, “I can repeat that.” This seems like a wonderful way to live. Everywhere you go people seem delighted to have you around. It seems to be more lively.

But…it wasn’t. I found myself mostly alone and that all the flaws of my nature were aggravated and written large. And I found myself mostly alone in cities that I didn’t know very well, trying to find a date for dinner.

That’s really what I found. What I left, which was an intimate relationship and a beautiful house on a Greek island, was obviously something I couldn’t stand either. So I don’t know, but it certainly didn’t work out very happily over the years. It’s taken me a long time to come out of the shipwreck of 10 or 15 years of broken families and hotel rooms. And some kind of shining idea that my voice was important, that I had a meaning in the cosmos. Well, after enough lonely nights you don’t care whether you have a meaning in the cosmos or not.

But you don’t know what to change to. When we’re young and we’re standing in front of this buffet table, you can pick and choose from the vast range of generality. The older you get the more specific your life becomes, and you can’t say, “I could be a forest ranger” or “I could be a brain surgeon.” When all the while you’re this songwriter living in L.A. It takes a long time to know it, and to say, “Well, okay, that’s what I’m gonna be.” Or even, “That’s who I am. Now I’m going to be a good one.”

Now I know what I am. I’m not a novelist. I’m not the light of my generation. I’m not the spokesman for new sensibility. I’m a songwriter living in L.A., and this is my new record.

MUSICIAN: It sounds like there were times you felt pretty close to going under.

COHEN: It’s just a matter of how prone you are to real mental disorder. It’s true that certain suffering is educational. It’s true that experience is important. That artists have an unstable psychic nature and sometimes it’s valuable. All these things that you’ve heard about writing, about the artist, are true. But a lot of people spend most of their life in acute pain. And it breaks some people. I was no stranger to depression and many distressed kinds of states, but at a certain point it really wasn’t funny. And at that point you have to start being what the Christians call “born again.” You’ve got to recreate your personality so that you can live a life appropriate to your station and predicament. And having illusions makes it very difficult to create an appropriate self.

MUSICIAN: I’d imagine it’s also a catch-22, since so much of your best music seemed to spring from that sense of despair.

COHEN: I can’t tell you how many letters and phone calls I’ve gotten over the years from people in mental hospitals who say, “You know where we are, and the fact that you’re on the outside and we’re inside gives us great hope.” It’s tricky, because I have been in real dangerous places, and I don’t like them.

MUSICIAN: Where you worry that you can’t trust yourself?

COHEN: Where you worry about jumping out of the window. You worry whether you’re gonna get from one moment to the other. I don’t want to spend much time there. I know my voice can speak from time to time to people who have been there. Whether I’ve helped somebody or bound them to their predicament, I don’t know. Affliction and suffering are mysterious.

MUSICIAN: But you speak as if you’ve had a more recent change of heart, or will.

COHEN: For the moment I seem to have. I think it may be because my record is number one in Norway. [laughter] I’m not sure; it might be that.

I listen to the radio, and I like all kinds of music, you know. But I do like to hear from people who have been there, that’s just my personal taste. Now, Hank Williams has been there.

MUSICIAN: Yeah, he died there.

COHEN: You want to hear a guy’s story, and if the guy’s really seen a few things, the story is quite interesting. Or even if he comes to the point where he wants to sing about the moon in June, there’s something in his voice…when you hear Fats Domino singing, “I found my thrill on Blueberry Hill,” whatever that’s about, I mean, it’s deep.

MUSICIAN: Do you always know what your songs are about?

COHEN: There’s a lot of songs that lose their meaning, you forget. I’m finding that out now, rehearsing the band. There are some songs I just can’t get behind. Some are surprising me, songs I really thought I could sing, like “Bird on a Wire.” I’m not sure it’s necessary to say, “I swear by this song and by all I’ve done wrong that I will make it all up to thee.” Either I’ve done that, or there’s no point in making that promise again if I haven’t. It’s very hard to get behind certain lines. The new songs I’m not having any trouble with.

MUSICIAN: It’s been three years since your last album. How did this one come about?

COHEN: Well, I hope I don’t have to write a record like this again. I’ve always been slow, but this was very slow and tricky and it broke down a lot. And I had to leave it many times and I spent a lot of money and my judgments were all wrong. In the middle of the recording I realized that the lyrics were all wrong, and they’d already taken a year or two to write.

For instance, “I Can’t Forget” has that limpid kind of language that doesn’t twist your arm at all. It’s a dead, flat language that I like. But that song started off as a song about the exodus of the Hebrew people from Egypt. As a metaphor for the journey of the soul from bondage into freedom. It started out, “I was born in chains but I was taken out of Egypt / I was bound to a burden but the burden it was raise / Lord I can no longer keep this secret / Blessed is the name, the name be praised.”

It went on like that for a long, long time, and I went into the studio and tried to sing this song about how “I was born in chains and I was taken…” But I wasn’t born in chains and I wasn’t taken out of Egypt, and not only that, but I was on the edge of what was going to become a very serious nervous breakdown. So I hadn’t had the burden lifted and the whole thing was a lie! It was wishful thinking.

And this song, “Taken Out of Egypt,” took months and months to write. Nobody believes me when I say these things, but I have the notebooks, and I don’t fill them in an evening. And there were many of them. So it wasn’t as if I had an endless supply of songs: I had to start over. And I was saying to myself, “What is my life?” and that’s when I started writing that lyric: “T stumble out of bed / I got ready for the struggle / I smoked a cigarette / And I tightened up my gut /I said this can’t be me / Must be my double / And I can’t forget / I can’t forget / I can’t forget / But I don’t remember what.” That was really true.

MUSICIAN: That’s quite a switch. The first version is such a big-screen technicolor production.

COHEN: Yeah: “I was led to the edge of a mighty sea of sorrow / Pursued by the armies of a dark and cruel regime / But the waters parted and my soul crossed over / Out of Egypt, out of Pharoah’s dream.” Pretty good — it’s DeMille! [laughs]

MUSICIAN: It must have been hard to let go of all that imagery.

COHEN: This happened with almost every one of the songs. “First We Take Manhattan” began as a song called “In Old Berlin,” which was an inquiry into the nature of evil. “I’m Your Man,” that started off as a song about “waiting for the miracle.” It had some funny lines in it like “waiting for the miracle, there’s nothing left to do / I haven’t been this happy since the end of World War II.” But I couldn’t sing it. I wasn’t waiting for the miracle, or maybe I was and I didn’t like the victimized position. Then it became a song called “I’ve Cried Enough for You,” where I was talking to myself, you know, “I’ve never seen the sky so blue the grass so green the day so new / I can’t believe it but it must be true / I’ve cried enough for you.” And that didn’t work.

Cause what I was really trying to say was, “I’ll do anything for you.” But it took two or three more writings and recordings of the song to get to “I’m Your Man,” which is just a perfect little song. It was hard to get to those truths.

MUSICIAN: It sounds like this album was like your personal psychologist, where you go in and say, ‘This is what I’m feeling,” and the therapist says okay but keep talking, and ultimately, you discover that your real feelings are completely the opposite.

COHEN: Right, right. The true position is not a Sunday school position. It is not the platform you thought you had developed to present yourself as the guy you want people to know about. But the thing is, it is the way a guy feels when he’s trying to get a girl back. [laughter]

MUSICIAN: All these songs started out as grand themes, and ended up as something very basic.

COHEN: Yes, as I myself was a grand theme when I started the record a few years ago, and that grand theme evaporated.

MUSICIAN: Are you sad to lose that?

COHEN: I’m happy I lost it! The whole idea of a grand theme made my life very unhappy.

This mad period started with Various Positions. I remember writing this song “Hallelujah”; I filled two notebooks with the song, and I remember being on the floor of the Royalton Hotel, on the carpet in my underwear, banging my head on the floor and saying, “I can’t finish this song.” After I wrote the one version [for Various Positions], I wrote another lyric which I’m doing now, which goes like this: “Maybe I’ve been here before / I know this room, I’ve walked this floor / I used to live alone before I knew you. / I see a flag on the marble arch / But love is not a victory march / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah. / There was a time when you let me know / What’s really going on below / But now you never show it to me do you? / I remember when I moved in you / And the holy dove was moving too / And every breath we drew was hallelujah. / Maybe there’s a God above / But all I ever learned of love / Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you. / It’s not a cry you hear tonight / It’s not a mystic who’s seen the light / It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah.” That was the prototype of the defeat.

I won’t tell you how many times I did “Ain’t No Cure for Love.” That started out as a song—

MUSICIAN: About the SALT Treaty?

COHEN: Actually, one of the things on my mind was that I was very pissed off at Band-Aid, this moment in musical history where everyone took care of “we gave at the office.” It was very nice, but first of all, I hadn’t been asked by anybody to sing. [smiles] So the song started off “from the heart of man to the heart of God the ladder’s been removed / And there ain’t no band-aid big enough to cover up this wound.” That idea.

I’ve always had this very scroogie point of view. When people demonstrate against nuclear weapons, I think, “These people think that if they eliminate nuclear weapons, they eliminate death.” It promotes something like “eternal peace.” But we’re not going to live forever; maybe I think, basically, that nothing really changes. I’m not attached to that opinion, though. I don’t even care if it’s true. When you’re banging your head against the dirty carpet of the Royalton Hotel trying to find the rhyme for “orange,” you don’t care about these things.

But I had this idea that “there ain’t no cure for love” in every sense of the matter. If you do have [love] it’s a kind of wound, and if you don’t have it, it’s worse. And this is what Christ is about: Christ had to die because there ain’t no cure for love. You can’t change this world. And Christ, especially, understood this. So I wrote the whole song on those terms.

MUSICIAN: What terms?

COHEN: Theological terms. And then I thought, “I’m never gonna get behind this, either.” But Jenny heard part of the song and she liked it. So I started writing a lyric that would have these ideas somewhere way, way, way back and no one would have to bother about them but me. It’d just be this love song about a guy who’d lost a girl.

“Take This Waltz” was written deep into the nervous breakdown. It took me 150 hours to do the translation of the poem [by Federico Garcia Lorca]. It was hard to adapt so you could sing it in 3/4. The official translation — well, you couldn’t sing that. So I had to get permission from the [Lorca] estate to do my own translation. And I was sorry that they gave it to me because when I started the thing, I didn’t realize I had taken my first step on a walk to China.

MUSICIAN: You must read Spanish pretty well.

COHEN: No, I don’t. I met a Costa Rican girl who helped me with it, and I had other translations that people had done, but they weren’t rhymed. His poem is rhymed. Then I went to Paris to record it, then I broke down and went to a monastery in New Mexico for two months. I thought, “I don’t have to do a record anymore, I’ll be a monk!” It’s good to have these places to go. When I came out I started the record again.

**MUSICIAN: I think I’m beginning to understand the meaning of “Tower of Song.”

COHEN: I was sitting at this table when I began that song, in 1985. I’ve got lots of verses. I wanted to make a definitive statement about this heroic enterprise of the craft.

MUSICIAN: And at the end you’re just kind of locked in a room. [laughter]

COHEN: Right. That’s when it became clear to me that I was in the “Tower of Song.”

MUSICIAN: You’ve mentioned every song on the album except “Jazz Police,” which, musically at least, is really an anomaly.

COHEN: I met a young musician in Montreal, Jeff Fisher. He arranged “First We Take Manhattan,” which had that Sergio Leone quality that I wanted — otherwise the song would have been laughed out of the world. I said to him, “Why don’t you write something? Let’s do a rap song.” I had this song, “Jazz Police,” from going around with the fusion group Passenger. There was this standing joke that if I caught them playing augmented fifths, or even sevenths, I’d call them on it, because I’ve always gone for a certain kind of sound. So I was the ‘jazz police.” The lyric, I’m not sure what it was about. The idea was to take a premise and let it collapse into a joke, or an absurdity. But — I hated it. I hated the whole thing and I think I still do. I was going to let it go, but then all these other songs started breaking down, and it moved back on the menu.**

It caught the mood of this whole period I’m describing, though — this kind of fragmented absurdity. I was living that, so I let it stay, and also, I didn’t have much to choose from.

MUSICIAN: The vault was empty?

COHEN: The vault was empty. To put together another couple of songs for this record — it would have been another year! And I realized things were hospitable for me in Europe. If I waited, I’d be starting from scratch again.

This is as tough as it’s ever been for me, just in terms of working. I had a pretty rough time with Beautiful Losers, but I didn’t know it. I broke down after it was over.

MUSICIAN: When you say “broke down,” what do you mean?

COHEN: Well, when I finished Beautiful Losers I was living on Hydra. I went to another island and when I wanted to come back I hired a boatman to get me to another, bigger boat that was headed that way. It was about 110 degrees, very hot sun. The fisherman said to me, “You’d better come in under the tarp.” I said no. He said, “‘Sea Wolf,’ huh?” When I got back to Hydra I couldn’t get up the stairs to my house. They got a donkey and took me up. I went to bed and I couldn’t eat for 10 or 15 days. They finally called a doctor and I was hallucinating and going crazy and went down to 116 pounds and, you know, a breakdown of some kind. But that seemed right: I’d been working pretty hard and taking speed. I’d had a sunstroke, obviously. And I’d just finished this book.

The day the storks came to the island was the day I recovered. They stop over and land on their way to Africa, or maybe coming back from Africa; they nest on the highest buildings, which are usually churches. So there’s a curious feeling; they come in and sit on the churches and leave the next morning. They just spend one night. And the morning they left I recovered, I stood up and I addressed the people of my family and it was a miracle. The miracle of the storks. [laughter] So that wasn’t like this: This took two years of disintegration and then putting it back together in some way. But I think I recovered because my song went to number one in Norway…

MUSICIAN: That wasn’t too long ago.

COHEN: No, I’m newly recovered.

MUSICIAN: For someone who’s Jewish, your music often seems obsessed with Catholicism. Why?

COHEN: I grew up in a Catholic city, and all through Quebec the church is very strong. And I had an Irish-Catholic nanny; because my father was sick and my mother was usually at the hospital taking care of him, I was brought up part Catholic in a certain way. The figure of Christ touched me very early in my life. My radical Catholic friends were very angry at me for this Christological infatuation. Because they had really been oppressed by the church. To me it was romance. And there were many georeligious ideas I could speculate on. For one thing, I could see Christianity as the great missionary arm of Judaism. So I felt a certain patronizing interest in this version of the thing. I didn’t have to believe it.

But I was talking today to a friend of mine, and it came to me that Christ’s image is just the perfect symbol for our civilization. It’s a perfect event for us — you have to die to survive. Because the personality is crucified in our society. That’s why so many people collapse, why the mental hospitals are full. Nobody can survive with the personality that they want, which is the hero of their own drama. That hero dies, it’s massacred, and the self that is reborn remembers that crucifixion. And we’re doing that every day. This Christian myth at the center of our society is very good. It’s workable.

MUSICIAN: It’s interesting that you moved from Montreal to Greece, since the Greek Orthodox church is kind of the link between the Roman Catholic liturgy and Judaism.

COHEN: There are many things about Greece; the most important is the climate. I came from Montreal, I had never been warm before. I remember laying on a rock after I’d been there two months and feeling some interior sliver of ice melt from inside my bones. I thought, God… the universe is benign. I was drawn mostly by the sun.

MUSICIAN: I understand that somehow during the course of your travels you ended up in Cuba during the Bay of Pigs invasion.

COHEN: I don’t know why I did any of these things. I do remember that Fidel Castro used to be laughed at in America. He’d make these five-hour speeches — apparently he speaks beautifully — and he’d say, “They’re going to invade us,” and people thought that was a big joke. But I thought they were going to invade them.

So I went down there and immediately found myself accurately described as a “bourgeois individualist poet.” I said, “That’s right. Suits me to a tee.” I wrote a poem in one of my early books: “The only tourist in Havana turns his thoughts homeward.”

I was walking on the beach in the middle of one night and was suddenly surrounded by about 11 guys with Czechoslovakian submachine guns; I was an American who didn’t speak Spanish, and they thought I was the first guy off the landing boat. I was the first guy arrested. It was a bit tricky to sort this thing out. But they happened to be very gracious. Wherever they took me, by the end of the night we were drinking toasts to each other and “the friendship of the people,” and they let me go.

A little later it hit the newspapers in North America that the airport had been bombed. I’m in this little seedy hotel in Havana and somebody knocks on my door and says, “You have to go down to the Canadian consulate right away.” They don’t like the look of me there because I really do look like a Cuban revolutionary — I had a beard and wore khakis. Finally I’m brought in to one of the secretaries of the consulate — I’m pretending to be pretty tough. And he says to me, “Mr. Cohen, your mother is very worried about you.”

MUSICIAN: Speaking of missions, you also collaborated on an album with Phil Spector [Death of a Ladies’ Man]. What was that like?

COHEN: Phil didn’t like to go out very much at the time [1975], but he came to the Troubadour when I played there. He liked it very much so he invited me to his house. Then he locked all the doors. He wouldn’t let me leave. So I said, “Well, let’s do something interesting, ‘cause it’s mighty boring here, Phil.”

It was like one of these classic Hollywood moments: We sat down at the piano and started writing songs. And over the next month we wrote some very good ones. The execution on the album was all wrong, though. I think Bill Medley should have sung them, or somebody else produced them, or something. The recording was a nightmare. I hear Phil is very calm these days, very happy. And he’s a delightful man in any case, one on one. But in the studio he was different. It was very stressful when he’d approach you at three in the morning with a bottle of Manischewitz in one hand and a .45 in the other. And he’d put his arm around my shoulder and shove the .45 under my neck and he’d say, “I love you, Leonard.”

There were a few moments like that. It’s a good story, isn’t it? In retrospect.

MUSICIAN: Now that they’re teenagers, what do your kids think of your music?

COHEN: I just spoke to my son — he’s 15 — on the telephone and he said, “Dad, I’ve just been listening to Various Positions and I want you to know I really respect your writing.” It was pretty nice. I gave him a cassette of I’m Your Man before it came out and both my children recited all the lyrics to me.

MUSICIAN: So they’re fans.

COHEN: They’re very judicious. They understand I’m not Depeche Mode, but I think they take the measure of it. My son has started to write lyrics, so he knows what some of the problems are.

MUSICIAN: Does he want to be a musician?

COHEN: I don’t think so, but he happens to be gifted in that realm, so there’ll always be that temptation. He’s a very good singer — I mean, a real singer. His pitch is good, he could do it.

MUSICIAN: He could sing your songs.

COHEN: He could, but I don’t think he’s interested in the business, in a career in showbiz. I never was. I never thought I was in showbiz until I had the revelation that I was a songwriter living in L.A.

MUSICIAN: And now you’re getting adjusted to it?

COHEN: Yeah, I like it.

2026-03-07 Russian techno-aesethetic manifesto of the day

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 14:17:00 GMT

Originally posted to FB (and, I’m sure, more). Machine-translated English (by Kagi) followed by the original Russian:

Alexei Shulgin

Art Within the Interface. A Curator-Operator Manifesto

The Vertical Explosion: Meaning in Service of Code

Reels are not just videos; they are a tectonic shift in the visual paradigm. We are witnessing the birth of a new language, where an extreme concentration of meaning is packed into the rigid corset of a 15-second timeframe. This is art born from the dictates of the 9:16 format. On one hand, it’s an incredible energy, the “cinéma vérité” of our time, capturing the nerve of reality. On the other, it’s the triumph of the interface, where every edit and every sound effect is dictated by the logic of attention retention. This is beauty emerging from digital noise, where an author’s statement fights for survival in an endless stream of content.

The Collector as a Filter in an Ocean of Data

The history of art has always been a history of separation: distinguishing the important from the trash. But today, the figure of the collector is radically transforming. By clicking the “bookmark” icon, you cease to be a mere spectator. You become a digital curator and, simultaneously, a database operator. In an era of information overload, collecting Reels is an act of resistance against entropy. By extracting “gems” from the chaos, the user legitimizes new talents, turning a random click into a conscious gesture of recognition. This is a new mission of patronage: to save aesthetics and meaning from the jaws of the algorithm.

Bookmarks: A Personal Archive Co-Authored with a Neural Network

Your collections of Reels are a unique symbiosis of human intuition and software protocol. This is a space where your deeply subjective taste enters into a chemical reaction with recommendation systems. Your collection is not just a file repository; it is a dynamic self-portrait, co-created with AI. It reflects your hidden desires, cultural codes, and the evolution of your perception. It is a living archive that is simultaneously your mirror and the result of the platform’s manipulation. We don’t collect videos—we collect states of our “self” in the digital space.

The Museification of the Stream: A Dialogue with the Algorithm

A museum exhibition of Reels can be seen as an attempt to extract them from the wild element of the smartphone and place them in the sterile tranquility of the “white cube.” It proposes to see in this “fast media” a full-fledged artistic medium.

Искусство внутри интерфейса. Манифест куратора-оператора

Вертикальный взрыв: Смыслы на службе у кода

Рилсы — это не просто видео, это тектонический сдвиг визуальной парадигмы. Мы видим рождение нового языка, где предельная концентрация смыслов упакована в жесткий корсет 15-секундного тайминга. Это искусство, рожденное из диктата формата 9:16. С одной стороны — это невероятная энергия, «синема-верите» нашего времени, фиксирующая нерв реальности. С другой — это триумф интерфейса, где каждый монтажная склейка и каждый звуковой эффект продиктованы логикой удержания внимания. Это красота, возникающий из цифрового шума, где авторское высказывание борется за выживание в бесконечном потоке контента.

Коллекционер как фильтр в океане данных

История искусства всегда была историей сепарации: отделения важного от мусора. Но сегодня фигура коллекционера радикально трансформируется. Нажимая на иконку «закладки», вы перестаете быть просто зрителем. Вы становитесь цифровым куратором и одновременно оператором базы данных. В эпоху избытка информации коллекционирование рилсов — это акт сопротивления энтропии. Вычленяя «жемчужины» из хаоса, пользователь легитимизирует новые таланты, превращая случайный клик в осознанный жест признания. Это новая меценатская миссия: спасти эстетику и смысл из пасти алгоритма.

Закладки: Личный архив в соавторстве с нейросетью

Ваши коллекции рилсов — это уникальный симбиоз человеческой интуиции и программного протокола. Это пространство, где ваш глубоко субъективный вкус вступает в химическую реакцию с рекомендательными системами. Ваша коллекция — это не просто склад файлов, это динамичный автопортрет, созданный в соавторстве с ИИ. Она отражает ваши скрытые желания, культурные коды и эволюцию восприятия. Это живой архив, который одновременно является и вашим зеркалом, и результатом манипуляции платформы. Мы коллекционируем не ролики — мы коллекционируем состояния своего «Я» в цифровом пространстве.

Музеефикация потока: Диалог с алгоритмом

Музейную выставку рилсов можно рассматривать как попытку извлечь их из стихии смартфона и поместить в стерильный покой «белого куба». Она предлагает увидеть в этом «быстром медиа» полноценный художественн.

2026-02-23 the worst pandering to the worse

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 12:06:00 GMT

Todd Alcott posted this with the caption: “Open the palace gates, Charles.”

So far I’ve liked pretty much every meme-ish type thing involving this photo of The Former Prince Known as Andrew except for one: that stunt involving putting it in the Louvre (video here). I don’t know quite how to define or demarcate this clearly, but my gut feeling is increasingly that “interventions” in museums are a bad idea and should be discouraged, even by self-styled radicals of whatever strips. It’s not that the institutions, what they do, what they have, or what they represent is so great — they aren’t. The problem is that, in aggregate, people are worse. Yesterday (so to speak) these interventions were almost done all by tiny handful of sophisticates, today it’s a growing stream of provocateurs, and tomorrow it’ll be armies of idiot influencers. It’s OK to just say no. Am I being arbitrary? Yes. Incoherent? Yes. Inconsistent? Yes. Elitist? Yes. Sue me. At least museums still cling to some image of the best of humanity; the influencing biz is an arms race of the worst pandering to the worse.

2026-02-23 one sick sailor

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 10:46:00 GMT

The US has nearly twenty nuclear subs, each of which spends about 65% of the year at sea. To give you an idea of the magnitude of distance their travels add up to, the US Department of Energy bragged last year that, since Hyman Rickover spearheaded nuclear power for naval uses — “naval reactors maintains an outstanding record of over 177 million miles safely steamed on nuclear power.” I think something like 75% of that has been submarines. Submariners are about as “top gun” as navy personnel get, and the mind-numbing circumstances they face — extremely stressful work, unbearably close quarters, submerged for weeks or even months at a stretch, and relying on extensive recycling of water and air — ensure that they’re among the most medically scrutinized and managed across all the US armed forces. Got it?

OK, so: How often have you ever heard about submarine personnel with a health emergency needing a medevac to a nearby port for treatment? Never. So has it never happened? Of course it has. So what’s the difference this time? Is it definitely and only that this happened on Trump’s watch — and that it happened to happen near Greenland? And is the definite and only reason we know about it the fact that Trump ‘truthed’ some bizarre fantasy involving sending an entire hospital ship to Greenland? So is the “real” explanation definitely and only that, faced with a trivially awkward international situation that could easily have been kept quiet — a single sick sailor — this matter rose to the level of the president’s office, amnd that it presented such him with such a dliemma that he felt compelled to actively disseminate a plainly ridiculous cover story for sending an entire hospital shit to pick up a sailor? One sailor? Even if it’s the CO (basically, the “captain”), there’s an entire hierarchy of senior staff rigorously trained to maintain clear, effective control under the most extreme circumstances.

Paint me skeptical. Even if you exaggerate every aspect that to account for Trump’s madness, Hegseth’s stupidity, Gabbard’s whatever (as DNI she’s head of the NSA, which plays several key roles in nuclear sub operations), and more, this story just doesn’t add up neatly. My guess: something much more serious happened on that submarine. If, as I think, the claim that it’s “really” just one sick sailor is itself a cover story, it doesn’t seem like it’d be covering for a systemic failure of the ship. Instead, the focus seems to involve the crew. 🧐 🤔 And I think Trump gave away the game at the beginning, as he always does: I think there may be many sick people — US sailors — in Greenland.

What kind of “sick” is anyone’s guess.

2026-02-22 an epidemic of pseudo-suicides

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 10:21:00 GMT

IBT asks Who Is Kyle Bassinga? Missing Atlanta Man Found Hanging From Tree in Cobb County Park

There’s an epidemic of young African-American men being lynched across the south, and another, intimately related one of police denying it. One conventional response would be to speculate about whether police are knowingly, deliberately lying and covering up or, instead, their purported “caution” is an impersonal manifestation of structural racism. I reject that kind of framing, because I don’t think the subjective state of those who contribute to oppression is matters very much. There are all kinds of reasons for that:

focus: we should center the victim’s state not the perp’s
method: we can’t know someone’s mens rea
process: outcomes outweigh techniques
appeal: there’s always another forum that’ll hew to convention

But the one that matters most is consequence: a regime that focuses on mens rea creates incentives to not “know.” That feedback loop contributes heavily to the endless rivers of passive “mistakes were made” language, all the smarmy “I was only kidding” pseudo-denials, the trollish bad-faith appropriations of progressive language, and so on.

When it comes to criminality, the spaces of subjectivity are heavily weighted toward those whose crimes mesh neatly with the structural and systemic violence of the state and para-state. That’s why we should disregard it.

That may sound abstract but, I assure you, it’s very concrete. Why? Because it demands that we treat the failures of the police, whether passively negligent or deliberately malfeasant, as crimes as grave as what they claim to investigate. And that, my friends, is a Big Fucking Deal.

2026-02-20 two thoughts on ethics

Fri, 20 Feb 2026 11:28:00 GMT

Two related snippets I wrote this morning:

(1) On the question of whether the US has laws against misconduct in office, the charge on which former prince Andrew was arrested (🎩 BRS, link):

We don’t have such laws. Why? The short version is that law in the ‘old world’ was culturally rooted in monarchism and tended to preserve a principles-based orientation, whereas in the ‘new world’ juridical thought lost that orientation and became more rules-based. Our growing inability to enforce our laws, or indeed any laws, is a sort of rococo phase of that tendency: rather than comply with laws in principle, we play word games to redefine them, fence them in, and sidestep any restraints.

(2) On AI (🎩TU, link):

The best summary I’ve seen is this (🎩 DM): AI slop is less a criticism of the tools than it is of the people being sloppy with them. The cure? Be less sloppy. How? Teach people to be less sloppy, nurture and reward being less sloppy, and discourage / deter being sloppy. People will object but that’s impossible! No, it’s not impossible, it’s ethics. If we’ve given up on ethics, we might as well just give up. And that has nothing to do with AI per se.

2026-02-19 question of the day

Thu, 19 Feb 2026 11:35:00 GMT

From U.S. District Judge Sunshine Sykes’s 18 feb 2026 ruling in Lazaro Maldonado Bautista et al. v. Ernesto Santacruz Jr et al. (see. e.g., Reuters)

The US is supposed to be a nation of laws grounded, ultimately, in the Constitution. The government has been taken over by a group of people who don’t just break laws — they’re aggressively and systematically violating the most basic Constitutional principles, procedures, and protections. So how should the nation address this group? Normal judicial procedure isn’t enough, because — again — they aren’t merely breaking this or that law, they’re deliberately demolishing the foundations of law itself. You can define this group however you like — maybe Trump, maybe his family, maybe a few members of his Cabinet, maybe ICE, maybe DOGE, maybe some oligarchy, it doesn’t matter. What matters is this: If you acknowledge (1) that such a group exists, and (2) that their actions transcend simple law-breaking to become a form of activity far more dangerous, how should the nation address this group?

2026-02-15 when does policy become conspiracy?

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 10:12:00 GMT

NPR reports “the State Department has ordered certain public libraries nationwide to cease processing passport applications, disrupting a long-standing service that librarians say their communities have come to rely on.”

This move fits hand-in-glove with the SAVE Act, of course. The point isn’t that every precinct will demand that every person show a passport. Instead, it’s the kind of thing will introduce enough noise into the system that Trump’s DOJ can “curate” where to intervene in order to achieve the desired outcomes: GOP domination.

Has anyone made a serious effort to analyze how policy coordination (which we expect from government) mutates into conspiracies? I doubt it. I can’t imagine any field where those categories would be seen as commensurate. What policy wonk or serious poli-sci type would say policy ≈ conspiracy? Or, coming from the other direction, what “conspiracy theorist” (gawd I’ve hated that category for decades) does serious policy or, even better, administrative law?! 😹

So this mutation, from effective governance to organized criminality, will be missing the kind of theoretical attention we desperately need. Not OECD-style quant studies “measuring” this on imaginary axes, I mean: describe, define, and explain the boundaries between policy and conspiracy. My guess: no one’s doing this.

The reason for that failure is pretty simple, imo: Academia won’t reward that inquiry but it will definitely punish it. How? What field would you do this in — history, poli sci, sociology? What divisions would allow it — public policy or law? What research path could take anyone from “policy” to “conspiracy” without every responsible mentor warning them away? What job openings would allow it? What search committee would invite it? What funders would encourage it? Nope nope nope nope.

These aren’t abstract questions for me, I’ve been pondering them from the early ’90s when I wanted to do a PhD on how the idea of the “conspiracy” emerged and became the dominant default mode of popular political critique. I’ll never forget when I went to my old mentor David Damrosch with that idea. He loved it but said — this is verbatim — “they will never let you do it…” I was like WTAF?! He laughed and said: it’s a PhD — you only get to do 5 years, not 500! 😹

And yet here we are: Trump & Co have transformed much of the federal government into an extortion racket, and they’re pursuing coordinated strategies, tactics, and plans to subvert the midterm elections and buy more time to end the US’s “actually existing” democracy.

The social formation that has a serious theoretical stake in this — the US left — won’t say much either, but for different reasons: it *can’t because of how it’s dis/organized.

(1) The extreme vs moderate distinction: The left more or less measures itself by one’s commitment to viewing society as a whole as corrupt. if you cynically think it’s all just capitalism, you probably see yourself (as Musk put it) “extremely hardcore” — and won’t bother much with policy. If you optimistically see society as flawed but redeemable, you probably see yourself as progressive — more likely to engage with policy, less likely to think (let alone talk) about “conspiracies.”

(2) The theory vs practice distinction: If you’re an academic, you’d do well to avoid anything that could give others grounds to mock or malign you, like talking about “conspiracies”; and if you’re a pragmatic advocate or organizer, you’ll avoid them for different but equally solid reasons.

There are other distinctions, too: general vs specific, gender, period vs theory, class, cultural register, etc, etc. Each, in their own way, contributes to a cultural / social / political context where it’s very hard to think about how policy morphs into conspiracy. It’d be easier than it would have been when I was starting out, except (wait for it…) US academia is falling apart because a criminally conspiratorial government is trying to subvert and destroy it.

So, since the experts won’t help us out here, here’s the question: What “bright lines,” as law and policy types like to say, can we use to structure questions about how policy becomes conspiracy?

This question isn’t “academic” or “theoretical” at all. It couldn’t be more concrete or practical. And if we can’t answer it, we’ve lost. I might even argue that failure is the loss.

2026-02-11-the mycology to epidemiology to media theory to public policy pipeline

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 08:02:00 GMT

There’s been yet another spate of mushroom poisonings in California, and the NYT’s coverage seems a bit, let’s say, AI slop–esque:

Of those poisoned, 60 percent spoke Spanish as their primary language. The outbreak has also affected people who speak English, Mandarin Chinese, Mixteco, Russian and Ukrainian.

The department has made fliers warning about the dangers of the mushrooms in several languages and is asking people to post them in community spaces, such as stores and libraries.

Those who are accustomed to foraging in their home countries may mistake poisonous mushrooms in California for ones that are safe where they are from, the department said.

That would be quite the epidemiological coincidence, wouldn’t it? Native speakers of, say, Ukrainian, Mixtec, and Mandarin all making the same mycological mistake at more or less the same times. 🤨 🧐

There’s a better hypothesis, which I pointed at a few years ago: social media. People aren’t mistaking death caps because they “resemble mushrooms found in grocery stores,” they‘re being influenced, directly or indirectly, by sketchy videos — maybe machine-translated, as so much English-language content is for so many people in the world — that proffer nonsense about how to make Amanita-genus mushrooms edible.

Are there laws against generating content that ‘stochastically’ leads people to harm themselves and each other? Presumably this and that jurisdiction might have a few things on the books that could be tortured into some elaborate and tenuous basis for prosecution. But what are the chances that (1) a spate of seemingly unrelated poisonings (2) would result in a fruitful investigation, (3) culprits would then be identified (4) who are apprehended and (5) charged then (6) tried and convicted by a jury then (7) given an effective sentenced by a judge and (8) forced to serve it (9) without getting off on appeal? Nil. And we haven’t even touched the “free speech” dimension.

Bruno Latour opened his book We Have Never Been Modern with a remarkable passage that gestures at a certain kind of conceptual chaos that permeates “media”:

On page four of my daily newspaper, I learn that the measurements taken above the Antarctic are not good this year: the hole in the ozone layer is growing ominously larger. Reading on, I turn from upper-atmosphere chemists to Chief Executive Officers of Atochem and Monsanto, companies that are modifying their assembly lines in order to replace the innocent chlorofluorocarbons, accused of crimes against the ecosphere. A few paragraphs later, I come across heads of state of major industrialized countries who are getting involved with chemistry, refrigerators, aerosols and inert gases. But at the end of the article, I discover that the meteorologists don’t agree with the chemists ; they’re talking about cyclical fluctuations unrelated to human activity. So now the industrialists don’t know what to do. The heads of state are also holding back. Should we wait? Is it already too late? Toward the bottom of the page, Third World countries and ecologists add their grain of salt and talk about international treaties, moratoriums, the rights of future generations, and the right to development.

The same article mixes together chemical reactions and political reactions. A single thread links the most esoteric sciences and the most sordid politics, the most distant sky and some factory in the Lyon suburbs, dangers on a global scale and the impending local elections or the next board meeting. The horizons, the stakes, the time frames, the actors — none of these is commensurable, yet there they are, caught up in the same story.

On page six, I learn that the Paris AIDS virus contaminated the culture medium in Professor Gallo’s laboratory; that Mr Chirac and Mr Reagan had, however, solemnly sworn not to go back over the history of that discovery; that the chemical industry is not moving fast enough to market medications which militant patient organizations are vocally demanding; that the epidemic is spreading in sub-Saharan Africa. Once again, heads of state, chemists, biologists, desperate patients and industrialists find themselves caught up in a single uncertain story mixing biology and society.

On page eight, there is a story about computers and chips controlled by the Japanese; on page nine, about the right to keep frozen embryos; on page ten, about a forest burning, its columns of smoke carrying off rare species that some naturalists would like to protect; on page eleven, there are whales wearing collars fitted with radio tracking devices; also on page eleven, there is a slag heap in northern France, a symbol of the exploitation of workers, that has just been classified as an ecological preserve because of the rare flora it has been fostering! On page twelve, the Pope, French bishops, Monsanto, the Fallopian tubes, and Texas fundamentalists gather in a strange cohort around a single contraceptive. On page fourteen, the number of lines on high-definition television bring together Mr Delors, Thomson, the EEC, commissions on standardization, the Japanese again, and television film producers. Change the screen standard by a few lines, and billions of francs, millions of television sets, thousands of hours of film, hundreds of engineers and dozens of CEOs go down the drain.

Latour wrote that around 1991, just months before the commercialization of the internet supercharged this kind of illogic, fueling an almost Moore’s Law–like acceleration in the production of sense and nonsense. And here we are

a world

in which

warehouses literally full of GPUs are springing up like mushrooms after a hot summer rain

the surreal opening of Vernor Vinge’s near-term sci-fi novel Rainbows End

In effect, we’ve constructed a Rube Goldberg of systems — cultural, technical, social, mediating. forensic, judicial —

Decades ago, when Financial Times was my daily, I was fortunate to tune in to a basic distinction in their global coverage — between the rules-based approach to accounting of US-style accounting and the principles-based approach that more and more of the world is adopting (Wikipedia is pretty OK on this).

2026-02-09-go and see come and see

Mon, 09 Feb 2026 10:51:00 GMT

Still from Klimov’s 1985 film Come and See

NYT, “A Raid in a Small Town Brings Trump’s Deportations to Deep-Red Idaho” (dek: “Wilder, Idaho, prided itself on comity. Then federal agents stormed a racetrack outside of town in October, and the reverberations are still shaking the community”; alt link here):

Nikki Ramirez-Smith, an immigration lawyer in nearby Nampa, began receiving panicked calls.

When I answered, it was someone crying,” she said. “The only thing I could understand at first was, ‘They’re here. It’s ICE.’”

Eventually, everyone there was herded to the end of the track. Most adults, including parents caring for toddlers, and many teenagers had their hands bound. Mr. Carter said he saw federal officers pointing guns at people simply for asking questions, and young teenagers being zip-tied, including Mr. Carter’s 14-year-old daughter.

People like to post memes with, like a nazi pointing a gun at a kid and an ICE agent pointing a gun at a kid and say SEE?!?!?! Yes, I see a meme that asks nothing of the viewer but delivers that sweet, sweet caveman grunt IT SAME ME RIGHT. Who doesn’t love that feeling? I sure do. If you do too, maybe try something a bit more demanding like watching Klimov’s film Come and See, Pasolini’s Salò, or maybe something about the Troubles in Ireland, like Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (it’s even got a young Cillian Murphy!) or Steve McQueen’s Hunger. Finding them used to take grit, but now they appear at the click of a button. Even if you’ve seen them before maybe try again. As the waters of fascism rise around us, those scenes — villagers hiding in the morning fog on an island in a bog, the insipid and inbred riche making teenagers bay and bray, gauntlets of cops beating naked prisoners — will bring what more and more people are experiencing right now, all around us, among us, in those cryptic spaces and places we told ourselves were hidden but never really were.

And with this your daily reminder: If you aren’t yet thinking and speaking openly about how the Trump regime can and must be brought to justice, you’re starting to look an awful lot like one of those Good Germans. They were very real and utterly imaginary, an apparent paradox that US culture is starting to grasp more clearly. But it isn’t really a paradox. We see the tides that brought in so many of them rising around us. They’re the sophisticates who scoffed at warnings that Trump & Co would build camps but won’t own up to their mistakes, the centrists who drift along dreaming that institutions heal themselves and last forever, the concerned who quote the only line they know from Santaya or Niemöller or Arendt or Gramsci. Most of all they’re the ones who think the pens of “future historians” will defeat the swords of the present.

2026-02-04 a brief history of coalie

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 09:50:00 GMT

Kate Yoder at Grist has exhumed a brief history of “Coalie,” a US Dept of Interior’s new-not-entirely-new mascot for “Beautiful, Clean Coal.”

As it happens, I just started Benson Bobrick’s Labyrinths of Iron: Subways in History, Myth, Art, Technology, and War (NYC: Morrow, 1981), which so far is great: a bit florid maybe, but the scope of his research is amazing, and his writing is quick, vivid, and surprising to the point of astonishing. Everyone know Blake’s phrase “dark, satanic mills,” which has become an obstacle to having any realistic sense of just how monstrous the second Industrial Revolution was. Bobrick’s Chapter 3, “At the Brink of Chaos,” does a solid job not just of fixing that but of pursuing it back in time:

Three thousand years before Christ incessant copper and tin mining had exhausted the forests of Egypt’s Fertile Crescent, leading one modern historian to conclude: “The price of maintaining a culture built on metals is high: it means, eventually, complete collapse. The depletion of the timber range upsets the natural balance, and the land that began as an arboreal abode for foraging men and beasts finishes as a useless wasteland scourged by the sun and scoured by floods, with an interesting past but no future. To eat the apple of metallurgical knowledge is a sure way to close the gates of Paradise.” By the mid-sixteenth century this process was being repeated in Europe. Georgius Agricola, in his account of metal mining in Germany, foresaw the full extent of the threatening disaster: “…when the woods and groves are felled, there are exterminated the beasts and birds, very many of which furnish pleasant and agreeable food for man. Further, when the ores are washed, the water which has been used poisons the brooks and streams, and either destroys the fish or drives them away.”

And into the future as well:

Indeed, it is a large question whether this is not, after all, the critical fact in our story: that as life above came to resemble life below, modeled on the mine, it became possible for people to reconcile themselves to living in the Underworld. With our late twentieth-century toxic wastes, vehicular fumes, and threatened nuclear fallout, we still maintain this sad psychological adaptation, though its original cause has by now almost vanished from memory.

Reading this lends new depth to Marx and Engles’s famous line all that was solid melts into air. I’m still looking for an economic way to express my twentieth-century corollary about the rise of aviation and its impact: all that was air becomes solid will have to do for now.

So… Coalie. Coalie? Debates about coal (to the extent there even are any) end up like most such things in US culture: straddling an arbitrary divide between two artificial tropes, in this case sooty Appalachian coal miners and a radiantly clean future. As of 2025, there were about 35,000 coal miners in the US, which is about halfway between gun suicides (27,000) and car deaths (41,000) — clearly not a number the US bothers itself with much.

The Grist article traces how “Coalie” morphed from a tongue-in-cheek mascot whose intent was to make the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement (read that name twice) a bit more accessible. Under Trump, like so many government employees, Coalie is being repurposed to push the retrograde, revanchist fantasies of an ambecile whose cultural-cognitive framework froze around the same time Coal Miner’s Daughter was in movie theaters — that is, a time by which coal mining had already become as much nostalgic fiction as practical fact. That compound nostalgia — Making America Great Again by pining for the last time we tried to Make It Morning in America Again — might account in part for how elusive it all feels this time around.

Coalie’s quick evolution, from 2018’s pre-gendered lump of coal with googly eyes to 2026’s man with two qualities — insipid, watery eyes and safety wear — tells parts of that story in the same way many “funny little men” (or FLMs) do: by melding workers with the products they make and by investing those products with NPC-like vitality.

It should come as no surprise that there’s a counter-history to that capitalist confusion, featuring public service mascots who advance ideas rather than objects: Reddy Kilowatt (1926), Smokey the Bear (1944), Mr. ZIP (1964), Officer Yuk (1971), Vince and Larry the crash-test dummies (1985), and so on. That’s all a pretty crude formulation of the problem, but that’s better than nothing. And considering the mind-bending cultural impact of mascots and other FLMs have had for several generations, that’s how much attention they’ve gotten: nill. That fact is curious in itself, as are the reasons for it — which, as Ambrose Bierce might have said, I shall attend to shortly.

2026-02-03-redaction aesthetics

Tue, 03 Feb 2026 12:22:00 GMT

(Orig to FB on 2025-12-19)

So…about that Epstein-related 120-page grand-jury document that was entirely redacted. The US has been through this, and we know how to do it — so please share this widely.

In the early 1970s, two government whistleblowers, Victor Marchetti (CIA) and John D. Marks (State Dept) wrote a book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. The story of the legal scuffles around it are a bit byzantine, but the outlines are pretty simple:

For the first time ever, I believe, the federal government asserted complete prior restraint. The CIA convinced a court to issue a permanent injunction against Marchetti “requiring that anything [he wrote or said], ‘factual, fictional or otherwise,’ on the subject of intelligence must first be censored by the CIA” (1974, 1st ed., xiii).

When Alfred A. Knopf signed the book, they sued the government to lift the injunction, causing the CIA to scale back its demands considerably, to around 350 sections. Each section was then adjudicated specifically. Knopf won most of them, but what they did next was brilliant — and should be seen as a high point in the history of book design. Passages the CIA won were left entirely blank: as you read the book, the text just stops, sometimes for pages. But passages the CIA lost were set in boldface.

The way forward here is to sue Bondi specifically over every. single. word. — including every if, and, and but. No court would agree to such a ridiculous waste of time, so the first thing they’d likely do is tell the DoJ to get serious and choose wisely.

The key here is that there’s a great deal to be learned from the process of prying these documents open. As we start to see less redacted versions of these documents, the changes will give us a clearer sense of what Trump, Bondi, and their minions are trying to hide. And that, in turn, will provider a better roadmap for journalists and other investigators to bring these scoundrels and conspirators to justice.

I’m way too young to have worked on Marks and Marchetti, but a few decades later I had the privilege of working for the New Press on a series of books by the National Secuity Archive. Like Marchetti and Marks, those books took an entirely novel approach to publishing materials — about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran–Contra, and US South Africa policy — that the US government had worked hard to suppress. Those books presented facsimiles of the original cables, memos, and reports along with critical introductions. At the time, that design-oriented approach was unheard-of, but it was a clear intimation of what we’ve since come to expect: direct access to documents. I mention this now because just last week, Bill Burr, a key figure at the Archive, passed away (link in comments).

2026-01-27-how to punish ice

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:41:00 GMT

Sooner or later, the US is going to face a serious choice: either (1) we accept that ICE agents were “just following orders” and therefore can’t be punished, or (2) we punish them for following orders. You can dress that up with whatever sophistries you like, but that’s what it boils down to. If we don’t punish them, you can be sure this will become a new normal — maybe here, maybe there, maybe soon, maybe later, but it will.

Only by making it plainly clear with concrete consequences can the US ensure that people will think twice before trying this again. Centrists and liberals — people whose politics are an ouroboros of learned helplessness — will argue *but if we do X, they’ll do Y!” ICE has already done Y: they’ve impose a dirty war on the US, complete with death squads and (as more people will learn soon) torture centers.

The fundamental aim of legal proceedings against ICE agents should not simply be to punish individuals, it should be to systemically ensure that evil is never repeated.

Investigating, charging, and prosecuting these people on an individual basis will not work and, frankly, would be a staggering waste of public resources. And affording them the presumption of innocence and due process — the precise things they violently denied to so many others — would be a waste of time of goodwill. Instead, we should treat short-term employment by ICE under Trump as (1) ipso facto incriminating and (2) an aggravating factor in any criminal proceedings, like the use of a weapon. But that’s not an analogy, it’s exactly how they’re abusing their protected status as federal employees.

At a bare minimum, everyone who was gained employment by ICE under Trump should face these civil penalties:

they should be stripped of all job-related benefits (e.g., no pension)
all compensation should be aggressively clawed back (bonuses, pay, and expenses)

Those two measures will address a fundamental principle, that the public should not be forced, as it’s said, to pay for the bullets used to execute it.

A more forward-looking measure aimed at containing the damage would be:

a lifetime ban on employment in any position related to public law enforcement or private security
treatment of short-term ICE employment as the equivalent of a serious felony conviction

Violations of that prohibition should be treated not just as crimes but as felonies; and it should be standard practice to investigate as well any employer that violated it.

We should assume for now that DHS, CBP, and ICE}s leadership will actively seek to destroy as many records as possible in order to insulate themselves, their employees, and their political project. For that reason, criminal proceedings — whether by public or private parties — against short-term ICE employees cannot be vulnerable to the absence of specific records. Instead, the normal assumptions and procedures of criminal prosecution should be inverted. Defendants should be assumed as a class to be guilty and given the opportunity to demonstrate their innocence — for example, through the production of location-based records that prove they were not present at a specific action, even, or setting.

Serious voices (or at least voices claiming to be serious) will argue that this approach is anathema — because it violates the Constitution, because it offends all sense of decency and decorum, because it will breed resentment and cause a backlash, and so on. These arguments all forget that the defendants (1) actively and aggressively violated the Constitution, (2) showed contempt for any standard of decency, and (3) are already fueled by resentment and engaged in a backlash. Scrupulously granting them all the normal protections afforded by the Constitution and the US legal system won’t change that, but it will — like the scrupulously cautious handling of J6, which turned out to be an utter failure — ensure that the risk becomes more serious.

2026-01-27 Alex Pretti and guns

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 09:05:00 GMT

My respect for the people of the Twin Cities knows no bounds, so this is in no way intended to cast any doubt on what they’ve achieved at a terrible cost, but we may be telling ourselves the wrong story here. I think Trump & Co are pulling back in large part because Alex Pretti was armed. That fact has forced the administration into a contradiction too incoherent even for them. They can’t victim-blame Pretti without acknowledging his gun: if it wasn’t a factor then ICE had no reason to murder him, but if it was a factor then their talking heads have to explain how and why. The alternative would be to argue that carrying a gun has no effect at all — which would put the lie to the right’s fetishistic fantasy.

And there’s no contradiction at all between crediting the people of the Twin Cities and this analysis. Pretti was a nurse whose beliefs led to his commitment to veterans, a strong 2A supporter, and Midwesterner through and through: born in Chicago, raised in Green Bay, studied and worked in Minneapolis. The subtext of his life seems to have been, at his core, a rejection of victimhood. He should be honored on those terms, and one way to honor it is to seriously address the role that guns played in his life, in his death, and in their consequences.

2026-01-27 do trees cause forests

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 08:29:00 GMT

Corey Robin asked on FB:

I realize I’m swimming in other people’s seas here, but I need a life preserver, or two, if I’m going to survive my passage through a strait in Stuart Hall’s essay, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance.”

About two-thirds of the way into the essay, Hall finally starts explaining his terms, though he does so by invoking metaphors, which is something, I should confess, that always triggers me (see my many complaints about the film The Big Short: if you’re going to explain complicated financial instruments, using metaphors really doesn’t help.)

After writing that articulation “is a metaphor used ‘to indicate relations of linkage and effectivity between different levels of all sorts of things,” Hall says that “the unity formed by this combination or articulation is always, necessarily, a ‘complex structure’: a structure in which things are related, as much through their differences as through their similarities.” And then he’s off to Althusser.

So here’s my question, and why I’m raising this point from Hall. In Sven Beckert’s book on capitalism, there is always this move, in dealing with non-capitalist forms, to say that capitalism destroys those forms, capitalism incorporates, and even exacerbates, those forms, capitalism creates those forms. Using the language of Hall, we’d say capitalism is a complex structure in which non-capitalist things are related to capitalist things as much through their differences as through their similarities.

While this all has an abstract plausibility, at the level of theory, it just takes a book like Beckert’s to see how fantastically maddening it is as history. Everything becomes part of capitalism, either by destroying what’s not capitalist, by incorporating what’s not capitalist, by creating what’s not capitalist. Find a non-capitalist entity, and it’ll either serve as a temporary refuge or resistance from capitalism, get overwhelmed and replaced by capitalism, or be incorporated into capitalism and even be exaggerated in its non-capitalistic elements, by capitalism, for capitalism.

What notion of causality is at work here? How can we evaluate whether it’s actually true? Yes, Hall cautions that “the mechanisms which connect dissimilar features must be shown—since no ‘necessary correspondence’ or expressive homology can be assumed as given.” But anyone who’s written anything in empirically informed social theory knows that it’s not terribly difficult to draw a picture in which mechanisms connecting dissimilar features are portrayed. That doesn’t make it accurate, or correct, or true.

My take:

This is really interesting, and remarkably articulate — so much so that it misses the forest for the trees, imo. The spirit of modern leftism lies precisely in its attraction to ever-more diffuse forms and relations of involvement, the intuition that there are always (more) mechanisms that we don’t understand that shape their context. The central dialectic of leftism has been and remains the struggle to articulate that ‘moreness,’ which is always relational, always N+1. That elusive quality is itself the dream that fuels the left’s ethics, and articulating it through word and deed (hence woolly words like “practices”) is how transgression becomes the norm. And that’s also the downfall of a ‘pure’ leftishness, because the results becomes increasingly incoherent. So, yeah, sure, go ahead and ask what the causal mechanism is, but understand that much of what the left has achieved over the last few centuries has been — again, precisely — to continually transform the meaning and bounds of “causality” itself.

2026-01-26 postmature antifascists

Mon, 26 Jan 2026 12:27:00 GMT

I sent this to nettime in response to a pointer to an opinon piece in The Guardian, “America feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover,” by Francine Prose.

Just a few minutes ago I wrote:

The same fools who enabled this catastrophe with their interminable [arendtsplaining](neological things) and pedantic denialism expect us to attend to their interminable babbling about how wrong they were. They should step aside and give their bully pulpits to people who were right when it mattered.

These postmature antifascists, as I like to call them, are a dime a dozen and best ignored. Francine Prose is a reasonably distinguished person, deeply intelligent and clearly of good faith — she plays on our team, so to speak. But anyone who’d write now that the US “feels like a country on the brink of an authoritarian takeover” should be read with some skepticism, because the US is far past that brink.

We’ve watched the prestigious institutions of one sector after another — national governments abroad and government entities at home, national and even transnational corporations, mighty universities, major media outlets, pillars of civil society, and on and on — quailing before Trump & Co. It’s perfectly understandable why they’d do so, and even a rational choice; I’m not one of those left-identified bombasts who naively believes the president of Harvard should risk the entire university’s existence for the fleeting glory of “speaking truth to power.” But even so, to spend the last year watching this happen and then argue the US is “on the brink”? WTF criteria would the country need for even the most prudent person to say we’ve gone over the brink?!

Prose’s own words are “our country is on the brink,” but The Guardian’s editors changed that to “feels like” for their headline out of journalistic caution. But that subtle shift, from fact to subjective impression, is in keeping with Prose’s own piece. It spends more time on the space cynical sysadmins used call PEBKAC, for Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair. If you read her essay, most of it‘s concerned with phones screens, snow, media, robins, etc — novelistic detail that puts us in the shoes, and chair, of a Serious Person.

My comment above about pedantic denialists was prompted by a piece by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic — “Yes, It’s Fascism,” with the subhead “Until recently, I thought it a term best avoided. But now, the resemblances are too many and too strong to deny.” He too spends much of his time maundering on about his subjective process, then he conjures up one of those ‘best practice’–style lists cribbed from a melange of Authorities on Authoritarianism — Snyder, Eco, Paxton, etc — of criteria needed for anointing something Officially Fascist. He introduces the list with a choice bit of rhetoric that doffs its hat to some sort of ‘methodology’ but ultimately affirms his own capricious authority: “Fascism is not a territory with clearly marked boundaries but a constellation of characteristics. When you view the stars together, the constellation plainly appears.” A decade too late, but who’s counting?

Well, I am, actually. Not so much the exact number of years have passes since I argued that Trump would need be forcibly removed from the White House (ten), but more the qualitative sense of time that permeates people’s thinking and enables their passivity. When you say we’re on the brink, you’re saying it hasn’t “really” happened yet, which justifies passivity. Arguing it isn’t “really” fascism achieves the same effect by slightly different means, by focusing on discernment. Saying of something evil that “this is what _______ looks like” — fascism, authoritarianism, whatever, it doesn’t matter because it’s all just content for a mad lib — does it as well, but with a semiotic twist: it may or may not not actually be _____ but it “looks like” it. And, of course, protestation like “this isn’t who we are” and “we’re better than this” do the same, but in still other ways. The list of these rhetorical sleights of hand could go on and on.

I have to make clear that the people saying these things should be assumed to be acting in good faith, caring for the public interest, and all those other warm-fuzzy things. I don’t mean to speak poorly of them as individuals. But as a class they’re pretty problematic, because the sum total of their efforts is to postpone the venerable question what is to be done? And in much the same way that they are, by their own admission, postmature antifascists, we should assume that, given the chance, they’d be among the first to prematurely declare victory over the fascists — because that’s when liberals would have to ask the much rougher question what is to be done with these fascists?

2026-01-24 things fall apart

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 13:29:00 GMT

You can learn a lot about how things are made when you look at how they fall apart. That applies not just to objects but also to institutions — for example, governments, media, universities. As the intellectual historian Peter Galison argued in his brilliant essay “An Accident of History”) aviation accidents are — or at least are inseperable from — institutional history. I’m glad he’s made this available on the net, because its original publication (in Galison and Alex Roland, eds., Atmospheric Flight in the Twentieth Century: Archimedes New Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology, [Boston: Springer Dordecht, 2000, pp. 3–43) was, let’s say, a bit obscure.

Photos of an F-111 “Aardvark’ fighter jet after striking a pelican.

2026-01-20 viruses are people too

Tue, 20 Jan 2026 11:10:00 GMT

(Orig to FB)

If you’ve spent enough time with medieval scholastics like Thomas Aquinas — and, like, no one has — you’ll begin to understand how important they were. Until then, the emphasis in most retrojectively “western” philosophy had been exemplary in the sense of archetypes. The scholastics brought a more systematic approach, mainly in two ways: OT1H by fleshing out the details, so to speak, OT2H by exploring limit cases — questions that were so extreme that they stress-tested the foundations on which they were built. This is how modern law works in the US (and note well: scholasticism reached a historical point when it stopped working), and — not coincidentally — it’s also how a lot of humor works. Like the Onion, for example. The idea of granting personhood to viruses is both completely ridiculous and also the logical conclusion of a major stream in leftist thinking. If trees are “people,” if rivers have “rights,” and so on, you can kick the can down the road, but sooner or later you’ll have to ask ans answer whether viruses are “people,” have “rights,” and so on. And, in truth, when the biological research establishment insists that we need to preserve specimens of the riskiest viruses — poxes, hemorrhagic fevers, and the rest — for research purposes, we’re farther down that road than we want to admit.

2026-01-19 making an example of the twin cities

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 19:50:00 GMT

(original to FB)

Trump & Co’s theory was that if they made an example of the Twin Cities, the rest of the country would cower in fear, but that isn’t working out at all. They can’t do this to the whole country, or even to more than a few mid-sized cities at a time. And with each repetition, the country learns more about these pathetic fascists and how to fight them. There aren’t many more escalatory steps Trump & Co can take before they open fire on an unarmed crowd, and I think they’ll do that soon. They probably hope that will be the opening gun of a civil war, but instead it’ll decisively mark the end of Trumpism — and the beginning of bringing this scum to justice.

2026-01-16-lowering the bar in FL etc

Fri, 16 Jan 2026 11:11:00 GMT

This is much more serious than 99% of the daily provocations the left-leaning half of the US consumes daily with relish and ketchup.

tl;dr: The Florida Supreme Court just amended a rule requiring that “law school graduates will no longer need to graduate from a law school accredited by the American Bar Association” (USA Today). The ruling “create[s] the opportunity for additional entities to carry out an accrediting and gatekeeping function on behalf of the Court.”

USAT helpfully notes in its dek (i.e., subheadline) that “[t]he Sunshine State isn’t the first to move away from the American Bar Association.” True, it’s the second — after Texas, a bastion of liberty whose legal system is led by that gangster Ken Paxton, which did the same thing last week (following a “tentative opinion” in September). Ohio and Tennessee are also known to be considering the same rule change. Notice any patterns? It’s safe to assume that other states, maybe many other states, are now or will soon be considering similar rule changes now too.

How could citizens know? It’s not easy. The Florida case was issued “per curiam, on its own motion,” meaning there was no real plaintiff or defendant. Bloomberg News reported that Tennessee “issued an order soliciting comments from the legal community and the public” last (wait for it…) in September. In Florida, the process was led by an SC-appointed “workgroup,” which was appointed last March after Trump’s DoJ (led by the Floridian lawyer Pam Bondi, of course) attacked the ABA for “subject[ing] law faculties and law students to unlawful race and sex discrimination under the guise of ‘diversity’ mandates,” and demanding that “that policy must be repealed immediately.” The ABA refused, which led the forces behind this to shift their focus to the state level. And the more states that do it, the more it’ll become ‘normal.’

The Florida “case” (which isn’t a real case) means that, from now now, the Florida SC will require nothing more than “(1) a programmatic accrediting agency recognized by the United States Department of Education to accredit programs in legal education…or (2) an institutional accrediting agency recognized by the United States Department of Education to accredit institutions of higher education, provided the institutional accrediting agency is also approved by the Court.”

Even that potpourri of legalese and academese can’t mask the underlying smell, though. Trump & Co have mostly demolished the federal DoE, utterly politicized what remains, and made clear that they plan to terminate it. Just not before its authority to “recognize” entities — a low bar, which can mean nothing more than acknowledging the existence of something — has been transferred to some other agency.

Now, I happen to love this kind of byzantine bureaucratic stuff, but most people don’t, so let me explain in clear terms what this all means. The fascists are trying to sideline the ABA’s from having any role in supervising legal education — and create “the opportunity for additional entities” to do it. The intended result would be to flood the zone with bullshit, except that in this case the zone is our judicial system. As anyone who’s driven across the country knows from the failing business of billboards, the US is already the Land of Better Call Saul. If this movement succeeds, it’ll become far, far worse: a country overrun by legally empowered microfascists — armed with AIs, botnets, and the other affordance our Broligarchy has given us.

So… Boring? AF, as the kids say. And yet it matters, vitally. Like all professional organizations, the ABA is structurally conservative, so it’s no great shakes. But it’s far, far better than a world where digital diploma mills are handing out JDs “certified” by a witches’ brew of MAGA spoor (think # Lindsey Halligan), Christian Dominionists, assorted influencers and cryptobros, and miskellaneous krackpot konspiracy types.

Links:

FL: [SC ruling](https: //www.documentcloud.org/documents/26484103-opinion-sc2025-2064/), [Tallahassee Democrat](https: //www.tallahassee.com/story/news/state/2026/01/15/florida-supreme-court-ends-aba-gatekeeper-role-for-law-schools/88197039007/), [Inside Higher Ed](https: //www.insidehighered.com/news/quick-takes/2026/01/16/following-texas-florida-drops-aba-oversight-lawyers)

TX: Sep 2025, Jan 2026

TN: [TN Bar Assoc](ttps: //www.tba.org/?pg=Articles&blAction=showEntry&blogEntry=131441)