RIP little car

RIP little car (?1997 – ⚰️2019)

I think that the 20th century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway. Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction.

What is the real significance in our lives of this huge metallised dream? Is the car, in more senses than one, taking us for a ride?JG Ballard

You were my first and will be my last. Inherited you from my mom. When the tow truck got you today an old neighbour walked over to me and said: “Now yet another piece of your mother is gone.” Loved the pathos and the sad cyborgish ambiguity of that. I also felt a bit sorry for that neighbour because in those words also resonated the slightly bitter note of being reminded of her own transcience. There was an ounce of truth in that sentence: You always kept feeling like the car I just borrowed from my mom for a while. I never would have bought a car for myself but I was a big fan of having one available.

I loved all those long relaxing rides, those long roads, especially when on my own and feeling at peace, listening to audiobooks and the sweetest music or just the humming of the motor and the wheels on asphalt. Oh, the old sin of taking pleasure in car cruising. Sorry, future generations but we had so much fun with it, we all felt a bit like an Imperator Furiosa when we first hit the road in our own car. It was one of the best rites of passage, not because of motor and steel and design fetish but because it was geographically liberating: Suddenly you could independently cover bigger distances away from your home.

Oh, that breeze of fresh air I felt in my chest when I hit your gas pedal and headed onto the motorway, for a holiday, to shows, to dj gigs. The quiet late night rides back from other cities, when the others fell asleep and it was just you and me keeping them safe on the road home. I’ve always enjoyed the luxury of a room of my own, sealed off from others, having your own steel cabin to ride. No fellow train passengers who could bother you with disgusting smells or desperate efforts to chat you up. No train schedules, no airport security checks, you could leave whenever and stop and go whereever you wanted.

As nice as it was: Like so many other burning-oil-things cruising in you, little car, hasn’t aged well. The last couple of years I have already used you less and less and tbh you gave me an environmental headache, dear. Good-bye, little car, good-bye another piece of the 20th century. The 21st will move from oil and steel and plastic and highly visible machines to be all about air and hidden machines and machineries and machinerettes.

P.S.: I like that this seems to be the only picture of you that I got.
(It’s monster heads for an Otto von Schirach + Talibam + Shitmat show back in 2010.)

 

Vernon Subutex 1 by Virginie Despentes

I love starting a book without any before knowledge, as I have done with the audiobook of Vernon Subutex 1 that I have just finished. For a while it got me cringing and going “geez, why are you doing this to yourself?! Just turn it off.” At first it sounded like yet another deeply cynical story of yet another old straight white man who can’t handle a society becoming more diverse. Also the fallen music nerd/hero in the post-digital era thing hit quite close home for me – she could have written him from quite a few Subutexes I know IRL and they do not make me happy.

In short: At first it seemed all very Houllebecque (no typo, I don’t want his name to be searchable) and I find him boring with his tired pseudo-taboo-breaking provocations. Trying too hard.

Thankfully Virginie Despentes does so much more here. She has written a sharp and cruel but also a compassionate tale of a precarious, post-digital, polarized and individualized society. It’s a journey to the noughts in France with MP3 killing the record store and music critic stars. Despentes brilliantly cruises through perspectives of different classes, genders, religions – the physically violent husband, the transgender immigrant from Brazil, the fascist, the homeless woman, the muslim daughter who choses a veil against the will of her liberal father. Prejudices and stereotypes get deleted or confirmed in unexpected ways, only one thing is sure: It’s complicated!

Subutex is the main protagonist and he is anything but the one you would wish to accompany on his journey from music scene fame to the rock bottom of society. He is the one we deserve though. Subutex is something like the opposite of Loudermilk, a tv show about a dry alcoholic ex-music critic whose social music capital has no worth in our post-digital time. Loudermilk is trying hard to do and be good and overcome his cynicism, he still believes things and people can get better. Subutex might be in a similar situation but is nothing like that. He simply tries to survive, he has no dreams left, he judges even his rare moments of compassion and his own fall with cold sarcasm. He is brutally self-aware, aware of how he would have perceived someone like himself from a better off position. As many of the characters in Virginie Despentes novel he is a test for your empathy.

Vernon Subutex 1 is a rich uncomfy novel that does a great job in capturing the dynamics that are at work in today’s polarized societies.

P.S.: About the audiobook: If you – like me – listen in short bits with days inbetween I would rather recommend the print book, as it make it easier to go a few pages back to refresh something about a character. The audiobook is well-done though, so if your habit is to listen in longer bits – go for it! I will switch to reading for the other two books in the series.

Kill All Normies – a problem of fascination

A german version of this post has been published here and tl;dr version will be published in print, in Analyse & Kritik.

“this is not a book about the alt-right. It is an anti-Left polemic.”
Jordy Cummings

“‘the centre’ – as a proclaimed area of shared, sensible assumptions about the values, needs and possibilities of a political community, defined against threatening ‘extremes’ – is a frequently remade fiction, masking specific ideological commitments and positioning“
Tom Crewe

Pretty late, but I can not not write a few words about Angela Nagles Kill All Normies. I am tired of people scapegoating “left identity politics” just like the far right wants them to, and I find it hard to believe that there are still new articles being published that treat this book like a standard reference without any criticism. Though, to be fair, sometimes these articles stick the word “controversial” to Kill All Normies as a kind of magic spell that signals that the author is aware that criticism is due but that at the same time exempts the author from applying any. Seeing how widely known Kill All Normies has become by now, I would rather wish for this book to be just as critically discussed and dissected as the Sokal (Squared) Hoax. This is my little contribution.

No source citations, spiteful and sloppy style

A first obvious reason why her work should be questioned is Nagles “sloppy sourcing”: There are no citations in this book. Not only does it make verification hard, it is also almost impossible to contextualize statements. Libcom have taken it upon themselves to search for possible sources and have found that there are passages that have similar wording as Wikipedia entries. Well, if work this way, it can happen that you accidentally use use a fascist’s self-description: In Kill All Normies’ case it is Aleksandr Dugin’s description of his own book. Charles Davis gathered similarly problematic references, for example that Nagle describes incidents based on news articles that she doesn’t cite while simply leaving out the parts of the articles that do not support her argument.

Her snarky tabloid press style, quite a few misspellings and an overall writing style that shows in what a rush this text has been written also deserve criticism. Apparently there was little editorial effort. Maybe all this is acceptable for a blogger like me who has not much time for writing, does not write in her first language and has no editorial background and resources. For a published book though, and for one that by now has been translated into several more languages and is making the rounds in a greater extent and that is even used by people with an academic background as allegedly reliable source, all this is a no-go. I can only assume that the publisher, Zero Books, hoped such a sensationalist work would sell even in such a sloppy version. And it has worked. Clickbait in book shape.

Jules Joanne Gleeson files the book rather aptly under “travel writing for internet culture”, thereby pointing out its exoticizing aspect: “Kill All Normies provides a string of curios and oddities (from neo-nazi cults, to inscrutably gendered teenagers) to an audience expected to find them unfamiliar, and titillating.”

Rejection of the feminine, internalized misogyny

Rejection of the feminine is woven all through Nagle’s book. She is noticeably annoyed by feminists and it feels as if she wants to be “one of the guys”, a “cool girl”. It downright smells of internalize misogyny.

Even in small details she sets a subtle mood against people, mostly women, she sees as part of “tumblr-liberalism”, an example: Jordy Cummings observes that Nagle doesn’t use titles for those (e.g. Judith Butler) but uses titles like “doctor” or “professor” for people she deems worthy.

She seriously thinks it helpful to write this about Gamergate, one of the initial events in the origin of the Alt-Right:

“Gamergate itself kicked off when Zoe Quinn created a video game called Depression Quest, which even to a nongamer like me looked like a terrible game featuring many of the fragility and mental illness-fetishizing characteristics of the kind of feminism that has emerged online in recent years. It was the kind of game, about depression, that would have worked as a perfect parody of everything the gamergaters hated about SJWs (social justice warriors).
Nevertheless, her dreadful game got positive reviews from politically sympathetic indie games journalists, which turned into a kind of catalyst for the whole gamergate saga.”

This quote should also give you a taste of her style. As Noah Berlatsky remarks: “Not a single word about that Zoe Quinn “actually has depression, and the fact that her game is about sadness and fragility—and is therefore coded feminine—is precisely why Gamergate saw it, and Quinn, as convenient scapegoats to rally against once Quinn’s abusive ex stirred up the mob.” (Quinn was one of the women who suffered the most massive misogynist attacks in Gamergate.) Nagle often sounds so disdainful about openly showing one’s vulnerability that I almost waited that she uses the insult “snowflakes” herself.

When she writes about the alleged weakness of a woman like Zoe Quinn, Nagle implicitly writes herself as tough-minded critic of feminism and any kind of showing of vulnerability, and: as very conservative if it comes to gender politics. While she does describe the ugliness of right propaganda on the web, again and again she sounds as if she has a tiny bit too much understanding for the Alt-Right and the sexists of the manosphere. As Donald Parkinson points out, “she concludes in her chapter on the manosphere by saying that the ‘sexual revolution’ has led to a ‘steep sexual hierarchy’, the decline of monogamy creating a ‘pecking order’ amongst men. … they develop an ideology around the hatred of women and resentment, blaming ‘cultural marxist feminists’ for talking away this idealized past. The idea that these men just can’t get laid and are therefore doomed to be this reactionary just feeds exactly into the ideology of reddit incels.” It is hardly surprising that Nagle also is not very critical of Jordan Peterson, someone famous for suggesting compulsory monogamy as solution for misogynist violence last year.

The little good I see in this little book is that it introduces people who don’t know anything about it to how the right US scene presents itself online, with a look at quite a few subscenes. But that has been done by others and with a more sober look. Nagle’s nerdy fascination tilts to one side. She writes about Pat Buchanan and Milo Yiannopolous in great length, quotes them directly and uses their theories about an alleged autoritarianism of the left, but her description of the left? Wow. Drastic simplifications and mood-setting descriptions. She uses vocabulary like “hysterical”, “sensitive”, “absurd” etc., which is language that degrades by feminization, just like the Alt-Right uses it. She uses omissions to create the undifferentiated and inaccurate image of a self-contained omnipresent hypersensitive pc-censorship left that she needs to underpin her theory.

Construction and demonization of an imaginary left: “Tumblr Liberalism”

One example of the intentional omissions that Nagle uses to present the “left” as anti-free speech movement becomes obvious when she writes about the protests against Milo “feminism is cancer” Yiannopolous in Berkeley. She describes it as attack on freedom of speech but does not mention with any word that the main reason behind the protests turning out as drastic as they did was that Yiannopolous had announced that in his speech he would call out immigrants without papers by name in order to deliver them to deportation. He also his fans to do the same. As Andrew Stewart writes, this was “an attempt to incite violence against the most vulnerable individuals in our society,” and the concern of protestors was to radically stand up against this, to stand up for people who were actually threatened. To leave that out when describing what happened simply is distorting.

Angela Nagle is taking side for free speech absolutism and even worse: Although this also is a core topic of right propaganda, she sets up this position as reasonable status quo without discussing the arguments against it. There are more examples of how Nagle uses omissions for her lopsided descriptions of campus conflicts as “anti-free speech” censorship instead of political protest with actual arguments. You can find them for example in Richard Seymour’s “The negative dialectics of moralism”.

Nagle uses a similar way of leaving out more complex contexts whenever they do not fit her theory when she lumps together concepts of a progressive left, identity politics that are focussed on working against everyday discrimination and neoliberal diversity tactics and many more into what she calls “Tumblr Liberalism”. She constructs it out of mostly falsifying reduction, out of extreme examples. Hypersensitive call-out culture is her pet point. She can not deliver any substantial proof that it really is characteristic for the major part of the online left and that it is not only a small while very noisy part of it.

While she works out in detail how incels and alt-right came to be, it is kind of impressive how she blocks out nagging invisible everyday experiences of discrimination that are a big part of the roots of “identity politics”. Racism, antisemitism, homo- and transphobia – Nagle has kind of a blind spot for those. According to Kill All Normies her nebulous Tumblr Liberalism was born out of an emotionalized irrational sensitivity that Nagle tries to sloppily trace back to the ideals of the hippie movement that became mainstream culture, ignoring racism, ableism, antisemitism etc.

As I have mentioned before, I find it fascinating how in Kill All Normies Nagle writes up herself as distant voice of reason, a kind of common sense of bothsideism, and by this implicitly targeting readers who also need and want to care only little about experiences of marginalization and discrimination. To position herself as neutral, such a presumption of objectivity, sadly is not a rare move of bourgeois centrists, playing themselves as the balanced average of society. Or of white western thinkers trying to shirk their being intertwined in power relationships and a history of discrimination. Also what is (self-)described as the Intellectual Dark Web (Jordan Peterson, Sam Harris, Eric and Bret Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, Jonathan Haidt etc.). Jonathan Haidt (of Righteous Mind and Coddling Of The American Mind fame), of course gets mentioned by Nagle. He stands for this kind of populist scientism that pitches “reason” and “logic” against “social justice” and “inclusion”, toughness against vulnerability. A man who manages, as Moira Weigel notes about Coddling Of The American Mind, his book with Greg Lukianoff: “they can write hundreds of pages about what’s wrong with contemporary higher education and not mention debt or adjuncts.”

Anyway. Another example for Nagles construction of her left bogeyman is ridicule for ideas of gender theory that she gives a lot of room. It speaks for itself that she gives a whole two pages of her – on more than one level – slim book to a list of gender terms by “gender-bending Tumblr users”, only to signal “look at these weirdos lel” to her readers. To use this list as allegedly representative example is absurd. As there are no citations and as Nagle did not react to their request, Libcom have done some research themselves: “ it appears that either this list was taken from a clearly labeled ‘list of poorly-attested nonbinary identities’ with insufficient sourcing or evidence that the listed genders were claimed by anyone, or it was sourced from a forum thread on the alt-right hub /pol/ where posters mocked the list.” But who cares if it fits the theory one wants to feed?

Another example is her cold mockery of spoonies. “Spoonies” is a term with which people who live with a chronic illness self-label. It is mainly used with focus on those whose illnesses are invisible to the public eye, like people with chronical pain. If you want to know more, Amanda Hess has written about people using the spoonie tag on social media to share experiences and support each other. These often are people who do not know anyone else who shares their experiences with Crohn or Lupus etc. In the past there were only offline self help groups as possibilities for exchange. Today it has become easier to find others, thanks to social media. This helped bringing about a more offensive way of dealing with it instead of shamefully hiding the illness. From misery to the building their own subculture. The spoon became a symbol and got printed on mugs, stickers, jewellery or shirts. A symbol from which those-in-the-know can recognize each other – as used often in the solidary history of marginalized people.

Nagle does not write anything about positive aspects but only describes spoonies as a “cult of suffering, weakness and vulnerability”. She even suggests that they could lie about their illnesses, once more using negative extremes to sustain her theory: “Young women, very often also identifying as intersectional feminists and radicals, displayed their spoonie identity and lashed out at anyone for not reacting appropriately to their under-recognized, undiagnosed or undiagnosable invisible illnesses or for lacking sensitivity to their other identities.” idk, somehow she often sounds like the cliche of some old bitter man on a park bench, cursing the youth of today. Or, as Josh Davies writes a bit more soberly:
”Nagle’s focus on the way things are said, and her reluctance to think about the politics and processes behind what is being said leaves her seemingly adopting a similar stance on gender to that of many of the conservatives she is critical of: gender non-conformity is something strange, esoteric and frivolous. The way her argument is presented here seems little different to the transphobic ‘I sexually identify as an attack helicopter’ meme regurgitated across the internet by edgy defenders of heteronormativity.”

Donald Parkinson points out: “Fans of Kill All Normies point to the negative reaction to the book from ‘social justice tumblr and twitter’ as proving the book’s point. All it really proves is that leftists aren’t a fan of conservative gender politics and mocking disabled people, which is correct and rightfully so. The reason tumblr ID politics exists is that people experience real oppression in their daily lives, and a lack of collective solutions leads people to individualistic methods of coping with this.”

That parts of this culture bears toxic behaviour can not and should not be denied but you get negative extremes in any other political culture and mostly it does not get criticized with such a spitefulness that makes me ask myself what this criticism actually is about.

Also: To simply absorb and accept the right myth that this so-called Tumblr Liberalism is “the ruling elite” and that the right only has gotten so radical in self-defense, is totally blind to the fact that – as Donald Parkinson writes too – that it has always been a tactic of the right to call out extreme examples to demonize concerns of the progressive left. When she uses their jargon and line of argument, Nagle plays right into the hands of the far right that through her manages to throw a line and hook to the centre of society. Here is another example from Kill All Normies:

“This anti-free speech, anti-free thought, anti-intellectual online movement, which has substituted politics with neuroses, can’t be separated from the real-life scenes millions saw online of college campuses, in which to be on the right was made something exciting, fun and courageous for the first time since… well, possibly ever. When Milo challenged his protesters to argue with him countless times on his tour, he knew that they not only wouldn’t, but also that they couldn’t. They come from an utterly intellectually shut-down world of Tumblr and trigger warnings, and the purging of dissent in which they have only learned to recite jargon.”

Is this still ‘rational’ criticism of the left or already marketing for the Alt-Right?

What Nagle does not mention is the diversity of the progressive left and liberal left, the countless extensive and controversial discussions that are so typical for most of the left online subculture practice and from which approaches get (re)developed further and further. Also “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog”: She does not consider that – even if probably no dogs – there is a very diverse group of people behind her examples and what gets so easily subsumed under “the left”. Kids who mix fanfic and memes with cultural and political theorizing, self help groups that are there to help each other with practical and psychological problems, people without academic background discussing complex theory work and trying to put it into help for political practice in actual everyday life, and of course also academic political discourse and so on. Steamroller Nagle levels all those diverse and lively scenes down into some kind of totally homogenous dogmatically-stuck irrational tribalism, a left bogeyman.

That neoliberals commodify a lot of progressive, constructive and nuanced ideas, and watered them down into buzzwords, like as in marketing of anything from political parties to products, doesn’t mean that those ideas and approaches can not still be justified and useful in their more radical form. It is worth differentiating. If anything is typical for the left then it is a hivemind ever re-reflecting, discussing, criticising, discarding and advancing how a better future for everyone can be attained. Nagle however does not seem to care about solutions. For example, as Andrew Stewart writes, she “never mentions that there is a class-based intersectional feminism that can effectively oppose the alt-right.” Josh Davies concludes: “ Nagle’s sweeping generalisations not only obscure their differences but foreclose any discussion of the history and politics of each of the amorphous ‘Tumblr liberalism’’s constituent parts. For a book that focuses so much on the left’s supposed inability to generate and challenge ideas, it often reads as an invitation not to think.”

Kill All Normies often reminds me of the – hopefully never to be translated – german queer essay collection Beißreflexe, a book that is demonizing identity politics in a very similar way: constructing an image out of particular and extreme cases and overall more interested in an acidic takedown than in solutions. Floris Biskamp wrote a great analytic review of that book, structured into seven points, fallacies and mistakes, with which the bogeyman gets constructed. Those would fit for Kill All Normies just as well: Generalization of the particular, alarmistic exaggeration, the effects of standardization, invisible power and ignored capacity to act, misunderstood criticism of privilege, suppressed criticism of racism, pathologization of the others. This review already getting longer than I wanted it to be, I do not have time to go further into this but it is surprising how similar these books, and indeed an international anti-”left identity politics” dispute is structured.

No critically and historically contextualizing look at the Alt-Right

After Kill All Normies Nagle has published a text called ‘The Left case against Open Borders’ in which she plays working class and immigrants off against each other and equates a left idea of globalization with its neoliberal distorting mirror. (The difference if you really need to have it pointed out, maybe is best put by a line from a Die Goldenen Zitronen song: “I could cross your shitty Western Sea – if I were a sneaker” (english version of the song).)
With this essay Nagle was invited for an interview on his show by White Nationalist Tucker Carlson in which she let herself be instrumentalized and celebrated by the right. I do not know if she is as naive or ignorant as to take the racist, antisemitic, sexist and nativist ideology of the right not seriously, or if she simply does not mind playing into their hands, Querfront, so to speak (Strasserite? I think that’d be the political equivalent in english).

It is not just that essay though, Kill All Normies also has not exactly covered itself in glory: A book on the far right that misses out on racism as a topic? Hm. As Jules Joanne Gleeson points out, it also does not connect the Alt-Right with “earlier and on-going trends in the Anglophone right. For instance there is no evaluation of the English Defence League, or older groups such as the Orange Order. Even National Action (a recently banned British group unambiguously part of the ‘nipster’ wing of the Alt-Right, while drawing on the legacy of earlier British neo-nazi tendencies such as ‘Rock Against Communism’ and Combat 18) are not mentioned, despite their aggressive and innovative internet presence.”
Nagle also does not write about the Alt-Right’s international connections with groups like Greece’s Golden Dawn, France’s Génération Identitaire, Putin’s troll army or Hindutva. What about overlaps to the Counter Jihad movement that also had a strong online presence? And Gleeson explicitly criticizes: “Unfortunately, another of the book’s greatest failures is the lack of dedicated treatment of anti-semitism.” And Gleeson also sees Nagle falling for tactics of the right: “Nagle is reliant on a schema produced by the Alt-Right itself: the division between the Alt-Right proper (hardcore national socialists and white supremacists) and Alt-Light (who mostly avoid overt racism, instead deploying a more ‘civic’ western chauvinism). Nagle fails to note how this distinction has been used instrumentally by the Alt-Right itself.”

She does not analyse tactics of the Alt-Right as such and does not point out that next to the demonization of gender theories and feminism and to the distortion of left criticism as censorship, another big propaganda topic of the Alt-Right is its effort to fuel a revival of the American commie-panic. They do that as well by heating up the (antisemitically connotated) agitation against “cultural marxism” as they do it directly by stirring a fear of a communist revolution, as Red Scare revival. This is neither new nor specific for the internet but it needs historical contextualization. As Jack Smith IV sums up: “Renewing the language of the Red Scare equips the right with the talking points they need to delegitimize the rising tide of left-wing populism. The rhetoric is antiquated, but its purpose remains the same: to portray protest as subversion, to undercut the struggle for civil rights and to prevent the left from expanding the boundaries of what’s possible in America by policing the boundaries of what it means to be an American.”

It is remarkable that, as Donald Parkinson mentions, in her narrative of how the alt-right came into existence Nagle uses “a methodology that itself has more in common with liberal cultural theory” than with the “marxist materialism” she claims to use. Kill All Normies sticks to an analysis along her transgression theory, there is nothing about class and economy. (Which adds a hint of irony to the left materialists’ love for Nagle’s book.) Nagle’s analysis is restricted to online discourses and as Parkinson notes too: “Her primary problem with identity politics seems to its ‘oversensitivity’ and ‘extremism’, not their failure to adequately address exploitation and oppression in a materialist manner.”

Digital Dualism and no analysis of digital platforms

Limiting her reflections on online presence (and propaganda stunts) leads Nagle to a chapter title like “The joke isn’t funny any more – the culture war goes offline”. She seems stuck in the thinking of digital dualism, separating “real” offline world and “virtual” online world, when using expressions like “spills into real life”. Her theory seems to be: First there was a “leaderless internet revolution”, then bad left “identity politics” rose and as reaction to that the “irreverent trolling style associated with 4chan” and some point the web was so full that it overflowed and spilled from Tumblr to the IRL campus etc. Maybe someone should put a plug into the Alt-Right parts of the internet so all their hate would stay in there.

By ignoring offline aspects of the right Nagle overlooks important connections and underestimates their danger and cause-effect relationships. Donald Parkins notes this weakness of Kill All Normies: “… ideologues like Richard Spencer and Kevin MacDonald have been organizing their think tanks and affinity groups for quite some time, and as proven by events in Charlottesville they are quite willing to take their ideas ‘to the streets’. There is a lack of information about the actual alt-right as it exists in the [offline] world. … Nothing is said about the efforts of white supremacist organizers like Identity Europa or the Traditionalist Workers Party to organize frats or rural workers and what kind of visions these groups have (a balkanization of the US and the create of an all-white “enthno state” is a common one). Rather Nagle pretends the alt-right is only an online phenomena, when these people have been trying to promote these politics for years.”

Maybe it is the lack of this wider context that makes Nagle neglect how tactical the recruitment and radicalization gets applied online. It is not just an automatic response to “political correctness gone mad.” Even if I were to overlook that she does not relate to the offline organisation and effects of right groups, from a book that limits its analysis to online presence of right groups I would expect at least one little chapter about how attention economy, social metrics, virality etc., in other words how the specific structures and mechanisms of the prominent platforms for online communication and networking contribute to radicalization. There is no space dedicated to this topic in Kill All Normies.

If you are interested in this, here are two reading tipps (I am copy-pasting this from my Matrix And The Manosphere talk script) but – content warning: Both texts are not as sensationalistically written as Kill All Normies.

1.) In her essay “Counter-Creativity” in ‘Sociotechnical Change from Alt-Right to Alt-Tech’ Julia Ebner mentions three tactical goals: “they have leveraged the digital space for three different types of campaigns to reach their key audiences: radicalization campaigns targeting sympathizers, manipulation campaigns targeting the mainstream, and intimidation campaigns targeting political opponents.” In their networks they share instructions, strategic documents on how to start chats with strangers, how to build trust and use widespread grievances, and how to adapt your language to the person you want to reach with your ideology.

2.) Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis also cover this in their great reader Media Manipulation And Disinformation Online. They explore how an amalgam of conspiracy theorists, tech-libertarians, white nationalists, MRAs, trolls, anti-feminists, anti-immigration-activists and bored young people use the techniques of participatory culture and the weak points of social media to spread their beliefs. They intentionally use the possibilities of internet platforms that are optimized for attention economy (because they are financed by advertizing) to specifically use weaknesses of the news media eco sytem.

Both readers are available as free downloads.

Back to Kill All Normies failure on this topic, as Richard Seymour points out: “what one needs then, surely, is not the increasingly hokey attacks on a straw ‘identity politics’, but a political (and psychic) economy of social media. What one needs is an account of how attention is engaged, retained, bought and sold; how online platforms are structured and structuring in their effects on users; how existing social and cultural tendencies are selected and accentuated by these technologies and their corporate organisation; and so on. … What this book does, sadly, is circle around the familiar, well-trodden terrain, not only in terms of its theory, but in terms of its unreflexive ‘backlash’ anti-moralist moralising. It perpetuates the dynamics that it purports to anatomise, scold and shame.”

Transgression as culture of the mainstream and its problem of fascination with the right

The central point that Nagle wants to make is that the culture of transgression had long belonged to the left but today has been taken over by the right. She argues that because the mainstream culture has become a kind of political-correctness-gone-mad of a Tumblr Liberalism that she has carefully constructed herself. The people that did no longer want to put up with it could hardly do anything else but react with an anti-political-correctness move and radicalize themselves into the Alt-Right.

Counter culture, non-conformism, the whole idea of small subcultures with all their codes is disgusting for Nagle, this oozes from every pore of this book. Neocons on the other hand almost get her enthusing: “intellectually equipped and rhetorically gifted”, “smart”, this is how she describes them and Milo Yiannopolous is a figure that clearly fascinates her (he gets a full 71 mentions on her 247 pages and tbh: her take of the Alt-Right sounds just taken from the self-defining text he posted on Breitbart a couple of years ago. Of course she is not the only one who lazily took that over instead of analyzing it but that is no excuse. Actually it is part of the problem and sustains the Alt-Right.)

One point on which Nagle bases her rejection of transgressive culture is that it is not popular, not for the masses but inherently elitist and thereby working against the working class. As rebuttal Jordy Cummings recommends the lecture of Brian Palmer’s Cultures of Darkness:

“Palmer asserts, with tremendous, terrific and big league historical backing, that it is in these transgressive spaces – from pre-20th century Freemasonry to late nights at the DJ booth, from kink culture to tarot cards, to late night union socials and drunken, stoned revelry – that revolutionary and emancipatory ideals are formed through genuine comradeship beyond the meeting room and picket line. … throughout the history of capitalism and its accompanying history of working class struggle, one would be hard pressed to find any social movement against capitalist social relations without finding it rooted in one form of transgressive counterculture or another.” How powerful transgressive culture can be in strengthening a feeling of solidarity and how encouraging it can be, often gets misunderstood and denounced as mere “identity politics” instead of seeing it as an integral part.

And, just as a side note, let me be clear: No matter how understandable and even necessary some criticism of extreme aspects of the so-called identity politics are: They became necessary because the problems of marginalized people were forever dismissed as “Nebenwiderspruch”, as side contradiction, and discriminating and excluding structures were maintained even in progressive left circles. For many people it was the Tumblr-Queerfeminism-&-Crip-&-Antiracism-&-Spoonie-etc. activism that showed them politics as something that has an effect on their everyday life and that they can actively contribute to at all. It has opened room to talk and contribute for many people who were marginalized even in left scenes. That is something the whole white / cis-male / heterosexual / able-bodied dominated political groups have not managed with their endless complex and isolated theory discussions or in their folk politics around working class revolution, revolving around themselves. Hello, this desire for political participation absolutely should be taken up thankfully, discussed friendly, developed further, brought closer together and encouraged, and not sarcastically bashed!

But back to transgression: I would like to wildly guess that the problem has not been transgression as cultural technique of a however disposed left, just as little as the right is “the new punk”, but that the neoliberal bourgeois centre has taken up transgressive culture long ago and turned it into mainstream, alongside a radicalization of capitalism.

Transgression, irony, breaking of taboos – that this grew as mainstream techniques of politics, brands, media and marketing, until the cynical borders of what was acceptable to say and to show were so wide open that the ideology of the right just needed to take up its lose ends because nothing felt “extreme” or “surprising” anymore, seems to be a bigger part of the problem to me. “Disrupt Everything” as society’s, as social consensus. The removal of taboos and of solidarity have been mainstream even before the Alt-Right. This radicalization of the mainstream has made it so anything can be said, any criticism has been countered with free-speech absolutism since many years. And today, in Germany of all countries you get talk shows discussing “Germany for the Germans” on public service television and the right still complains that it gets censored by the “lying press”.

The culture that is consistent with mainstream transgression is not that in a small youth club a group of queer people do not want to let white people with dreadlocks join their zine crafting group. It also is not “I’m drinking male tears”-memes commodified into cups and shirts by white feminists of the media or creative class. No, the consistent culture to go with the middle class and mainstream transgression is the unrestrained shaming and stigmatizing of groups of people who are off worse in talkshows and the tabloid press that had already started years ago. The endless shows and articles that are supposed to make women or poor people “better” and/or ridicule them. Stigmatization of the unemployed as lazy, presentation of young mothers as freaks, humiliation of migrants as asylum cheaters, makeover shows that make “real men” out of “losers”, etc. The list of losers of the late meritocratic hypercapitalism is endless and they can be mocked uninhibitedly, anything else would be censorship. Ethics are censorship in today’s mainstream tabloid logic. Humiliation of people in the media normalizes the accompanying austerity politics that have been built into a huge humiliation machine for the poorest and weakest members of society via overbureaucratization apparatuses that make Kafka look fun, all instead of a welfare state. If all of this has nothing to do with the transgression that Nagle thinks is so central for the rise of the right then I don’t know what has.

I agree with Nagle that the problem can be found in the so-called mainstream, the centre, but I do not accept the right narrative that some kind of “Tumblr Liberalism” is what defines this middle class bourgeois centre. The right is just as present there. As are many others. There is not one elite whose views rule over everyting – not a liberal snowflake social justice warrior one, not a nativist racist sexist one but a wide variety of positions. Donald Parkinson sums it up: “The very notion of a ruling elite should be thrown out, for we live under the power of a ruling class. Furthermore, the ruling class is not homogeneous and competes within itself. So it is hard to say that there is one monolithic ruling class ideology, but rather there are different competing ideologies that are often contradictory. So while liberal multiculturalism is part of the ruling ideology, so is white supremacy. Bourgeois society isn’t one unified bloc.”

Fox News exists side by side with Teen Vogue, sexism sells as well as anti-sexism, Buzzfeed and Dove are centrist extremism, just as VICE and Breitbart are. The commodification of the social struggle needs more of the same: As long as I make my living from turning the struggle against misery into content that I can sell I can not seriously be interested in collective solutions because the constant outrage and emotions work so much better in an attention economy. But it is also the other way round: If I do not experience any other kind of help, when I feel politically powerless and have no social web to catch me, then I commodify what I have and sell the discrimination or whatever misery that I suffer. Patreon instead of politics, competitive individualistic life support instead of social revolution.

The experience that counterculture hardly ever helped to bring about big changes was followed by the experience that counterculture had become impossible at all, by all-pervasive product scouting that cut off any emerging subsubsubscene. We rather have a problem with commodification police than with p.c. police amirite… Where was I? Oh yes, rambling about Nagle’s Kill All Normies, the book the propositions of which get adopted so uncritically by so many, even if the book just amplifies a narrative of the right, thereby fuelling the “culture wars”. No surprise the right likes the book too, as Josh Davies points out: “Prominent US fascist Richard Spencer has endorsed Nagle’s book on his Instagram, noting that it ‘gets’ his movement and that its criticisms of ‘the Tumblr left’ are ‘useful’. It should go without saying that such an endorsement — for an ostensibly left wing book on left and right-wing online cultures — ought to give pause. Apparently not.”

Kill All Normies does not mention that transgression has dug itself deeply into everyday life in a far more dangerous way by an individualizing “disrupt everything” and “commodify everything” startup culture that ultimately would love to do away with any state control. Guess because it does not feed into the narrative of the “culture wars”. From hot take to hot take though: This is a bit thin for a wannabe-”materialist marxist”. Donald Parkinson also mentions: “Nagle also completely ignores the role of Ron Paul libertarianism. Anyone who understands the alt-right knows there’s a connection between libertarian politics and the alt-right, and that many people disappointed by the failure of Ron Paulism turned to the alt-right. … Libertarianism, an ideology where all morality is based on property rights in a country built on a foundation of slavery and segregation attracts racists. Libertarianism’s emphasis on competition can lead its followers to embrace Social Darwinism and explore ideas related to race realism. This creates a connection between white identitarians and libertarianism. … There is a sort of vulgar positivism to libertarian ideology that bides well with race realism. … Seeing markets as more democratic than any kind of state institution, free market liberalism is itself is critical of all that is egalitarian and democratic and therefore in its most extreme variants biding well with the ideology of the alt-right.”

For Nagle both, “Tumblr Liberalism” and the 4Chan-Alt-Right, are extreme efforts to create a counterculture, “transgression”, to rebel against a common sense status quo. That is why she sees no difference between a left concerned with solidarity and openness, and a right filled with racism, sexism and nativist-nationalist separation. Ultimately Nagle is all about a classic bourgeois rejection of extremisms. It is a deeply anti-solidary book. Her bashing is a lack of empathy dressed up as reason, alarmingly conservative. Hence her focus on the inefficiency of transgression: She does not want anything to diverge from the norm, then everything is going to be alright. She has no alternatives to offer, just as Josh Davies criticizes: “This refusal to reflect is compounded by the book’s lack of a sense that there’s anything that can be done. There’s much criticism of the political practices of those opposing the far right but little sense of what Nagle suggests in their place.”

That despite all these shortcomings there are so many people taking Nagle’s book as a serious resource shows most of all one thing: That we have a problem of being fascinated with the right.

Instinct, or, why rather go watch Cabaret on the youtubes

I have recently rediscovered my total fangirling love for Alan Cumming via being the latest person on this planet to watch The Good Wife. I now have cringed my way through Instinct, his latest show, in which he plays Dr. Dylan Reinhart. It has Naseem Andrews (Lost, Sense8) and Whoopi Goldberg in it, too, so what could go wrong? Well, basically almost everything but the suits.

Also it’s Sunday and I’m in a mood for writing.

Instinct’s basic concept is fine, if not a little bit… well, over the top:

☑️ Take a secretive ex-CIA paramilitary officer who still has his connections, all very serious and dangerous and potentially involved in unethical gov actions.

☑️ Take a a quirky psychology professor with an immense knowledge base and phonographic memory who likes to challenge his students and they admire him in his lectures on Abnormal Behaviour and he just loves teaching.

☑️ Take a famous writer with writer’s block, with a bit of a rockstar ego but also very vulnerable and very late with his next book. And you get Whoopi Goldberg playing his editor who regularly keeps kicking his ass.

☑️ Take a loving emotional happy gay husband – the first gay main character in a US network drama. A gay couple that even starts thinking about adopting a child, you know, the kind of gays, who show how *normal* gay people can be. Just like everyone else. Aaaw, look at those cuddly cute safe non-sexual gays.

☑️ Take a sensitive son with father (figure) problems going on, with John Doman (The Wire, Rizzoli & Isles) playing an FBI agent who has never forgiven his son for – no, not what you think: it’s not about being gay, lol, but for leaving the CIA. Which he thinks was his son’s true calling.

All these men are combined into a Sherlock Holmes character when he becomes a police consultant.

The Sherlock and deduction script makes you wonder why the series is called Instinct. I haven’t found out yet.

While the BBC Sherlock has mostly managed smoothing complex storylines, sharp and funny dialogue and a complex as-loveable-as-loathable main character into a tasty cocktail, Instinct is the example of how to fuck up the same thing. It’s painful to watch how the storylines just don’t click together, how the building blocks show. The makers don’t even really seem to know in depth what and how they want their main character to be.

Now, not everything has to be a new Sherlock and Instinct could be at least “Elementary meets Rizzoli & Isles” entertainment and somehow they are, but if you go for “brilliant and quick-witted”, you got to deliver on dialogue. Half of the dialogue of Instinct pushed my eyebrow game on levels almost as high as Cumming’s because it is not just bad but lame. When it should be “witty” it is more like “[look, here we insert something witty lel]”. It’s too busy glueing all the things it wants to be together, to get into a coherent flow. The main character has no time to become someone because he comes hopelessly overloaded and overexplained.

You get what it tries for and you get to watch it fail.

I guess, why I even care is because this really could and should work, it should be a fun series. That’s what always pisses me off most: When you feel that something has potential but it crashes into basic mediocrity because of creators being this certain mix of too careful, of trying to please too many, and of wanting too much at the same time. As Instinct is, Cumming sadly has not much to play with and his suits can hardly save this mess.

Or maybe I’m just not the target group and the show’s incentive is to sell a gay main character to a Rizzoli & Ice audience? See, I’m even trying to find excuses for it, so hard have I tried to like this.

Anyway, the reason why Instinct still is worth watching, is fashion. Have I mention Cumming’s suit play?! Fashionwise – wow, I approve, give me season 2! It even made me regret that I threw away my pinstripe suit a couple of years ago. ^^

I’m already sorry for typing this down because thing is: No matter how ranty my mood after watching this mess, I can’t write a blog entry that only disses something with Alan Cumming. You just can’t do that to this living breathing embodiment/brand of kindness and charm. I mean, seriously, this man even has a totally sweet and unsarcastic Urban Dictionary entry when I thought that was a virtual impossibility.

So allow me to finish this post with a big recommendation: Go and watch Alan Cumming’s Cabaret performance. (Thankfully the whole thing is on youtube.) It’s timely, it’s brutal, it’s sexy. Best watch it in an eternal loop. Cabaret with its (not so sub-)plot of the Nazi’s rise has become a politically and emotionally relevant watch again anyway and Cumming as The Emcee is the cruelly best in bringing out the darker tones. If you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, maybe at least watch the opening and final scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW5eFCFnW9c&list=PLrBEhoLJ_TN_rXUUxU_47xp4ErgbD7d1H

And I’m off to watch After Louie next. IF I’m fangirling mode, I’m doing it right.


Oh, and as a little P.S. while I’m blogging here again after such a long pause:

Some personal words, too:

This year, with our venue-shift to the Kantine, somehow has turned out far more stressfull than I had expected. Or maybe I’ve lost my power moves and am finally getting old. Naaaah, joking. I’m totally not ready to accept that yet. I love my life being a steady rollercoaster of getting worked up about and working in music in oh so many ways, emotionally and organisational and theory-spinningly, of working in a group of very loveable and fierce human beings that constantly reinvents itself, of my workaholic office routines, and of getting my intellectual cravings fulfilled from reading, writing and doing talks, and of course: of excessive partying! And usually, if I may say so, I’m rather good at this rollercoastering. But. Now I seem to be becoming also good at breakdowns. And not in a good glamorous drama queen way but in a painful and isolating way. So, well, I am aware that I can get too passionate about things and overwork my schedule but how couldn’t I?! There are so many exciting possibilities and friends and maybe-soon-to-be-friends with whom to make plans for new exciting projects – where to stop? I don’t know, but as of this autumn, my stupid body has already made the decision for me twice and stopped me from doing anything at all for a couple of days, in that weird mix of diffuse mental and physical symptoms that only bodies can think about as a cool way of showing you how much they care about you, while honestly, – hey, you listening, body? – it’s just scary and makes you feel isolated and smol and fall into silence. I’m not too stupid to see that I am not worth much pity as it is all about stretching my limits too far myself and I have to live with the consequences, but hell, being reasonable is so damn boooring! So if I’m honest, my hopes that my resolutions to tread a bit more carefully will last very long are not very high, so welcome, my new personal era of constant fragility.

Language keeps us locked and repeated – or does it? EMBASSYTOWN by China Mieville

What a book! A book about language, understanding, about individuals and collectives, about colonialisation, how hierarchies rise and fall, about a living city. It took me a bit to get into Embassytown by China Mieville but then I didn’t want it to end.

By exploring how an alien language could be different from ours, China Mieville makes our language become alien, makes it become one possibility in many. But it’s not just how Mieville plays with ideas of language that make this world you get to explore so weird. It is also the insectoid aliens, the Ariekei, und their “biorigged” technology: a mix of biology and technology that produces buildings that are alive in a way. And human’s culture has changed too, for example there are new concepts of family.

Embassytown is a city on the planet Ariekei that is right on the edge of the third iteration of the “Manchmal” (Mievielle uses quite a few german words, this one meaning “sometimes”), the edge of an explored universe. The book’s world is based on a cyclic universe model in which there’s an “Immer” (german word for “always”) – my understanding: it’s where all the different cyclical universes overlap, like all dimensions at once. Only some people can travel through this Immer and Avice Benner Cho, the main protagonist, is one of them. The novel starts with her returning home with her fourth husband, Scile, who is a linguist who wants to explore the Ariekei’s “Language”.

Humans have colonized Ariekei and coexist with the “Hosts”, the indigenous species, the Ariekei. The shortest description of them is “insect-horse-coral-fan things” and it’s wonderful how Mievielle breathes life into them and into that whole world. He does so by describing some things in great details, other he only suggests, and he also work with a lot of neologisms that give you a vague idea of what it could be. With this he manages to create a world that you can’t but slowly explore and grow to understand. And while you are in that process of fitting pieces together to paint your picture of this world it changes with the unfolding plot.

The Hosts, the Ariekei, have two mouths that speak from one mind. They don’t recognize it as language when a single human is speaking to them. They also don’t understand artificially generated language, so the communication problem can’t be solved technologically. The humans have found a way though: They have genetically-engineered identical twins known as “Ambassadors”: They are conditioned to think and speak as one and they function as translators. But then techies do as techies do: They send a new kind of Ambassador that uses a technical shortcut and all hell breaks loose. The Ariekei get addicted to his weird version of their Language and what follows is a weird futuristic play on the role of mind-altering drugs in colonialisation. A version in which even the bio-technically engineered buildings of Embassytown show signs of addiction and grow ears to hear more of the new Ambassador’s words. The situation soon slips into a full civil war and it is Avice Brenner Cho who starts to learn that she might be the only one to even have a possibility of stopping what soon turns into a full collapse and mass slaughter. The city’s bio-tech, being linked to the Ariekei, starts collapsing into chaos when the Ariekei’s Language-drug-distorted minds slipping into chaos.

The universal translators don’t work for the Ariekei’s “Language.” It is a strictly literal one, a pre-De-Saussure one, if you like: Ariekei can only speak what is empirically there. They can’t speak and think abstractions, lies, future. The signifier *is* the signified. To expand their Language to the use of similes they have to enact what they want to talk about. Avice Brenner Cho – it sure is no accident that the acronym of her name is ABC – is one such simile: “The girl who was hurt in the darkness and ate what was given to her.” At one point, near the end, in her desperate efforts to stop the war, she exclaims to the Ariekei: “I don’t want to be a simile anymore, I want to be a metaphor.” She, a character that kind of stands for living evolving language, gets on a mission to get radically different beings to overcome their barriers of language, physical differences and culture and start communicating with each other again, which afford embracing change. A quest to make both, humans and Ariekei, learn to understand each other’s radical differences and maybe coexist.

It sure is a good book to read in a time in which Social Media has fractured societies by showing people who were used to think the whole world shares their perspective on things that even in their closest neighbourhoods exist people with radically different lives and ideas. Those who call it the “end of facts” overlook that facts never have been much more than compromises and approximations in our efforts to make sense of the world. Mieville starts out early in the book to show some of our most basic compromises in their arbitrariness in how he lets Avice explain how the concept of time and family have changed. the 24 hour day doesn’t make much sense when the wole of humanity is scattered throughout the universe, so they now count time in kilohours. There are a lot of varieties of families, Avice grew up in a shift-and-nursery family with a lot of shiftsiblings and shiftparents but not with her “bloodparents”.

Mieville tries to get to limits of language, to the edge of what it can explain. I love how he shows that lies – and fiction is but lies, as in “counterparts of facts” – can help understand where facts are barriers. Embassytowns tells a story of how lies can bring us closer to truths.

As a sidenote: It also has made me especially sensitive for the use of language barriers in Vikings (which really is a much better tv show than I had expected).

Well, I already know that I will read this novel a second time to fully savour it. For once, it’s one I’d even love to have a reading group for.

I’m breathing Carla today

? Carla’s new album.

“We can say that Quieter began when Carla lost her hearing “completely (temporarily) in 1 year” on tour in 2014. She describes the state as “strange,” “every nite like falling,” “and boy, it was freaky,” “QUIETER,” “very like thrashing through the air.” Quieter, for instance, than her own sound, but so as to be closer to it; quieter is then the sound of distance erased in soft, intimate touch. Quieter is the blurring of sound with its source.” Evan Coral for tinymixtapes
my, i feel this. sudden hearing loss is quite an experience. i had it once as a child and once again after my mom’s unexpected death. once hearing nothing at all, once like walking through a snow landscape where every sound, every thing sounds muted, muffled, every human being sounds so far far away even when they stand next to you. world feels far away. my physical loss of the ability to understand held the mental one in a cold embrace and both didn’t want to break the hug as it felt at the same time scary and strangely safe. cold but safe. the second hearing loss changed my whole relationship with music (and people) in ways i still don’t fully understand. a dear friend that betrays you of course leaves its traces and what else is sound to me. the beauty of watching thin white cracks spread over a dark blueish green lake’s frozen surface and of course you don’t turn back because you are suddenly sure that it’s only there and when smoking that one cigarette too much at the end of a night that was filled with loud music and with people that you can breathe freely. i like this album very much.

ORCHID at Zentralcafé: This is our last dance.

ORCHID poster by eve massacre

I have made you a poster for the last ORCHID at Zentralcafé.

Being driven out, driven underground, out of the eyes of the casual visitor, has a bitter taste for a queer night that has celebrated loud and fabulous visibility of all kinds of queers in the very heart of this city for 10 years now.

I am heartbroken to have to give up this room that is so much more than just a venue. It is a challenging, living and breathing social safe space for citizen culture. A space in which you can experiment, a place in which people have each other’s backs, help each other out to make ideas become real.

To push a collective that focusses on giving weird and critical, noisy and silly, wild and feminist, hard-rocking and tender-hearted, urban and marginalised pop culture a platform, like Musikverein im K4 does – ORCHID thanks you! -, well: To push this kind of culture out of the heart of K4 / Künstlerhaus two floors down under ground *is* nothing less but a cultural-political decision. It is a decision against our visibility and against low barrier access to our kind of culture.

In this it is an act of marginalization that is not to be excused by technical pragmatism. It is a decision that I find especially hard to forgive in times when the conservative current and the noisy far right scum have grown louder once more and would love to make us disappear from public space, if not from the face of this planet.

Nevertheless: We will party on, we will be seen and heard! Let’s make our goodbye to the Zentralcafé the loud and fabulous night this special place deserves! Glitter on, babes: This is our last dance.
?  ? ? ? ?

ORCHID poster by eve massacre

Blade Runner 2049: The umbrellas don’t glow no more

In 2049 the world of Blade Runner has lost the gritty but beautiful vagueness of 2019. It no longer allows for ambiguity and the smudgy room inbetween things. To keep you from conjuring up ideas, it even comes with an extra of not one, not two, no: three short films that explain what has happened between the two movies. Nerdy overexplanation much? When I went to see the old Blade Runner Final Cut a week after seeing 2049, the ticket had an accidental question mark in the film title and I was all: „OMG yes exactly!“

That said, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Blade Runner 2049 has turned out a nostalgic conservative dystopia, maybe you could even call it dark enlightenment as science fiction. Villeneuve had said in an interview: “Cinema is a mirror on society. Blade Runner is not about tomorrow; it’s about today. … The first Blade Runner is the biggest dystopian statement of the last half century. I did the follow-up to that, so yes, it’s a dystopian vision of today. Which magnifies all the faults.” In a way, yes, the movie indeed mirrors our time, the future shock, the mood of existentialist angst in the face of fast-paced changes in technology and society. It kind of peaked in 2017. It speaks to today’s prevailing sense of constant crisis. Blade Runner 2049 but also all the other tech dystopia movies and tv shows that have come out in the last few months give me a nostalgia for the end of the world, for all those apocalypse stories that came out around 2010, like Melancholia, Take Shelter, Another Earth or Perfect Sense. By now a proper apocalypse is starting to look better than what we have now: An neverending doom-capitalist “things can always get worse lel”. (Basically The Walking Dead. But that’s a different review.)

A future on the edge of an apocalypse that never seems to arrive

So let’s take a look at this world: The 2049 future of Blade Runner still is pretty rainy and people still use umbrellas but their umbrellas don’t have those glowing sticks anymore like they used to have in 2019. It is a bleaker future, it is a future on the edge of an apocalypse that never seems to arrive. As Aaron Bady put it: “Blade Runner 2049 shows us a world which has achieved, by horrible necessity, a dystopic form of sustainability: as in Snowpiercer, humanity’s vermin-fueled continuance is somehow much worse than extinction.” The Earth’s ecosystem might collapse soon, nature has gone barren but the Wallace corporation (that also has replaced the Tyrell corporation in being in charge of replicants in 2049) has found a synthetic way of food production to save humanity. Corporations seem to be just as powerful as the government, it has the feels of a police state. There is a hint of a steampunk Kafka in the bureaucratic office part of this world – the police headquarters, the archives. His name and the baseline test the main character, the replicant cop Joe / K, has to pass after each mission also can be read as a play at Kafka’s Joseph K.: a man living in a constant trial.

So what even is a “replicant”?

So what even is a “replicant”? It is a genetically engineered humanoid being made of organic substances. Replicants – so far – come to life fully grown-up, hatching from transparent body bags, just like the “sleeves” in the tv show Altered Carbon (which by the way I liked more than I had expected. Its biggest neglect is the emotional, ontological and ethical questions, the “how does it feel?”, the intimate sensation, the “how does it change my self when I switch my physical body?” Even Doctor Who was more dedicated to explore that part of body switching.) Blade Runner 2049 iz serious movie, Blade Runner 2049 hasn‘t got time for LOLs and feelz.

Psychologically replicants are said to have less empathy than humans. There are three product lines: Nexus-6 by the Tyrell Corporation, with a limited four year lifespan. Those were the replicants that were hunted in the original Blade Runner movie, where the premise had been that if replicants live longer than four years, they would have made so many personal memories that they develop proper emotions and it you can hardly tell them apart from humans anymore. Nexus-7 is the last model Tyrell has made: Rachael is Nexus-7, the replicant with whom the replicant hunter Deckard falls in love in the first movie. It’s only in Blade Runner 2049 that we learn that Rachael was a new type of replicant that was built to be able to give birth.

In 2049 then, the standard is a new Nexus-8 line of replicants, made by Wallace corporations. It has an open life span, is supposed to have no will of its own ever. Or at least so Wallace has convinced the officials in a rather brutal way, shown in one of the pre-BR 2049 shorts, Nexus Dawn. It is a slave race, especially produced for work in the off world colonies. The Nexus-8 replicants can be very unpoetically identified by an ID number on their eyeball when they “look up to the left”. (I guess that’s not meant as a political metaphor but seeing how blunt some other metaphors are, I’m not even sure.)

The Tyrell corporation that had built the old 2019 replicants went bankrupt: They were considered dangerous and were banned and hunted down. As we learn in the short prequel film Blade Runner Black Out in 2022 replicant rebels used an electromagnetic pulse to cause a blackout in order to wipe out all data about them. That has not only made it harder to hunt them down but it also has destroyed a lot of other data. See, those are the dangers of everybody using cloud storage provided by the same few tech corporations!

The Blade Runner world in both movies vibrates with hauntology: It looks to ghosts of the past to evoke a future, a specific kind of past. Just take Blade Runner 2049’s story of The Blackout; it brings the Great Blackout of 1965 in the USA to mind, which also echoes in the flickering same-era Elvis hologram in the remains of Las Vegas and even in the housewifey persona that Joy, the personal hologram assistent of K, puts on when we first get to see her. The post-”something terrible” mood also rings in the post-war Frank Sinatra hologram singing ‘One for my baby’. Villeneuve could have picked anything, but that we get Sinatra and not Miley’s ‘Wrecking Ball’ adds to the dusty (and this movie really is pretty dusty, or rather: half very dusty, half very wet – all climate extremes) kind of nostalgia this movie conjures up: A future nostalgia for an idea of a more conservative past in which real (white) men still were real (white) men.

Maybe that’s why in Blade Runner 2049 we also don’t get the playful decadence of the old movie’s Tyrell corporate building. Its delusions of grandeur were nods to a diversity of histories and cultures, just like replicant designer J.F. Sebastian’s flat was. Tech in the first movie was dark but it still was associated with possibilities, with play. Cruel play, if you think of Sebastian’s toy creatures that reminded me of old travelling circusses with their cruel freak shows. It was not explicitly said if his creatures had feelings or not but some of them sure had a desperate look in their eyes, like being caught in their toy bodies.

The Tyrell building’s interieur had lots of detail, from lush candle holders to art deco wall ornaments. There were pillars like in ancient temples that made even an owl seem quite at the right place. It was a weird orientalist steampunk pyramid that has always reminded me of the Institute Du Monde Arabe in Paris (built in 1987) in its combination of high tech and old orientalist patterns. Très multi-culty. The Wallace corporation building in 2049 then doesn’t look back, it is more of a brutalist (another hint evoking the ghost of the post-war 1950s) now and forever, all clean lines and no frills. Playtime is over, baby. Alice Sweitzer points outt though, Villeneuve got brutalism all wrong though because “it is a brutalism stripped of all sociality, and stripped of its most important element: people. In that sense, it’s not really brutalism at all.” What’s left then, is a barren brutalist form of architecture as a manifestation of power of the few over urban landcsapes. The counterpoint in Blade Runner 2049 are the even more barren desert landscapes.

Spaghetti, anyone?

While I agree with Aaron Bady that this Blade Runner is no regular western anymore – K strives to frontiers to find them brutally barren and desolate: the farm, the factory, the casino, the sea – I first wanted to write this review about Blade Runner 2049 as a post-anthropocene (instead of post-war) spaghetti western. There are multiple scenes of K/Joe riding into lawless desert ghost towns (when he hunts down Sapper on his farm, when he tracks down his wooden horse in the child labor factory, when he finds Deckard in the saloon ruins of Las Vegas) that reminded me very much of spaghetti western. It’s in a certain focus on big images, like Sapper’s hand hovering over the holster (a holster, that carries a medical bag though). It’s in how somehow everyone is an outlaw, the whole “a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do” ethos, in the lonesome hopelessness. I’d still really like to read a piece about Blade Runner 2049 as political spaghetti western. Or Zapata western but I don’t know enough about them to write this myself. You could Deckard as whiskey priest and that would fit in too. In one of the Blade Runner 2049 prequel short films, ‘Nowhere to run’, Sapper gives Graham Greene’s ‘The power and the glory’ to a girl. It’s a novel in which an unnamed whiskey priest gets hunted down. In the main movie then you get a scene where the hunted down Deckard is all “I got a thousand bottles of whiskey”. In the novel the whiskey priest also has a daughter. See, the sad thing with all the references and allusions that are planted within Blade Runner 2049 is that it is not satisfying to find them because it feels like you solved a crossword. As Claire Napier writes: “it is so itemised that one becomes a relay service rather than a reviewer.”

It is a sad soldier tale, too. Joe, the replicant soldier who kills other replicants without asking questions, just wants to live a simple happy life with his holo-wife Joy when under a barren tree he finds remains of a replicant woman. An examination shows that she has given birth – a sensation as it’s deemed impossible for replicants to reproduce. Joy, circling and fluttering around him like a Tinkerbell, does what women do in conservative stories: She tempts Joe, tells him she always knew he was special, so he starts thinking he might be the one, the born-not-made son of a replicant. (And of course temptation gets punished, both are not special, both die.) The viewers that got used to Villeneuve’s use of metaphors already knows K/Joe is not really the chosen one when a wooden horse becomes the object that sends K/Joe on his search: Trojan horse, barren wood, we get it. He was not even the only replicant who had the memory of the wooden horse: Sex worker replicant Mariette of the Replicant Freedom Movement, recognizes the wooden horse when she sees it at K/Joe’s flat and says that it is from a memory. In the end he seems to be okay when he finds out he is not a self (isn’t he?) but only a tragic soldier who at least can chose whom to serve so he sacrifices himself to unite father and child, the real naturally born replicant: Ana, the child of Rachel and Deckard. Joe/K dies happily, tears in the snow, having not only learned about the importance of being born-not-made but also about the idea of family as core unit of society. Yay!
Not.

Oh, how much I missed characters like Roy and Pris from Blade Runner 2019 when watching this bleak monster of a movie.

A Frankenstein who hopes to have found the Adam and Eve of a reproductive slave race

In Blade Runner 2019 empathy was the thing that distinguished replicants from humans. There was the Voigt-Kampf test, a psychological interview as empathy test, but as it was used to tell whom to kill it clearly was an absurdity, a kind of paradox. In 2049 it has become even more clear: Empathy is not exactly humans’ strong point. “Just think of the children!” – here they are, labour slaves in an industrial desert. Wallace thinks of his creatures as children, too, but he is more like the new master of puppets and has no empathy at all for them. They are but the tech that can help him get more power. He is a blind man (both metaphorically and really, ORLY YARLY) whose God delusions are all over his monologues. His personal slave soldier species are referred to as angels, just like the soldiers of the Sons Of Jacob in Handmaid’s Tale. A Frankenstein who hopes to have found the Adam and Eve, Deckard and Rachael, of a reproductive replicant slave race he wants to rule – a race that’s stronger and build in what he sees as perfection but also easier to control than humans. Here ring AI tech dreams.

They are disposable material to him as long as they can’t bear children, which is shown to us in a special scene filled with aestheticised violence, in which he kills a newborn replicant woman after finding that she is not able to bear children. It is a pretty long aesthetic violent scene. I guess, just in case else we might not get it, as if it was such a brandnew idea that women are worth nothing if they can’t bear children. Thanks, Villeneuve. So, not empathy, no, the bland right-wing/conservative vision this movie caters to is the idea that birth is what makes humans full humans. The same ancient idea that is behind battles about abortion rights: men’s highly irrational and merciless fear of what women would do if they were to have full freedom to decide over their bodies. In the movie humans are scared that it would tear society apart if replicants could replicate and Wallace keeps them under cruel control while playing with this danger.

In a text about (ro)bots being given mostly female names, Laurie Penny quotes Donna Haraway not about replicants but about similarly feared creatures: “The main trouble with cyborgs, of course, is that they are the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism. But illegitimate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins. Their fathers, after all, are inessential.” Penny continues: “The rueful paranoia at the heart of these visions of the future is that one day, AIs will be able to reproduce without us, and will summarily decide that we are irrelevant. From Metropolis to The Matrix, the nightmare is the same: if androids ever get access to the means of reproduction, nothing’s going to stop them. This is, coincidentally, the basic fear that men have harboured about women since the dawn of feminism.”

The battle over the power of reproduction, whether with forced sterilization or by denial of abortion rights, has a long tradition and it is a tough choice to place this topic at the center of such a big mainstream movie. It is not just in Wallace’s breeding efforts, the main story arch is not just Pinocchio all over: The marionette does not just want to become a real boy. His idea of becoming a real boy is tied to being born, not made. Biology, the past, not memories or actions and interactions define the self in Blade Runner 2049. Just like in Handmaid’s Tale, where in S1E4, Offred’s Commander talks about “biological destiny”: “Children. What else is there to live for?” It is this idea that the movie mostly revolves around, authenticity by birth.

Thankfully the movie has at least one character who is not obsessing over authenticity: old Deckard, aka Harrison Ford who plays the role as if he was Sean Connery playing his (Indy-Ford’s) father in Indiana Jones’ god-knows-which-sequel. He is the only one from whom we do not know if he is human or replicant. Even Joi, the hologram woman, longs to be a “real girl”. Deckard though, sticks to “knowing” what is “real”: It is something everyone, even his whiskey-slurping doggo, gets to decide or to feel for themselves.

The whole focus on born replicants is such a disappointing step back from Blade Runner 2019 which rather suggested that memories and social interaction are what makes beings human. It was musing about what makes you self-aware. As Sasha Geffen observes: The rebel replicants “were perfectly docile until the knowledge of a robot birth glitched out their systems. The idea that they might reproduce of their own accord makes them believe they are deserving of rights and freedom, that they are even, as one puts it (echoing the tagline of the Tyrell Corporation), ‘more human than human.’ Their sapience and self-awareness is not enough to make them want a life of their own, as it was for the original film’s replicants.”

One must imagine the dying Joe/K happy for not being these rebels’ Neo

Honestly: One must imagine the dying Joe/K happy for not being these rebels’ Neo. This focus on being defined by birth is what makes this movie look like a dark enlightenment wet dream. No multiculturalism, no co-existence, no liquid inbetweens, no cyborgism, but a “who’s the best race” transhumanism. So binary, too! No 3D for gender. If it wasn’t for Madame. But then, Joshi is more about becoming “one of the guys” male in order to get a man’s job, even with a hint of workplace sexual harassment against a subordinate. All the fluid, queer, transgender elements of Blade Runner 2019 are gone: masculinely athletic Zhora, and of course Pris and Roy, both stunningly camp replicants – they wrestled the last drop out of their lives, they were all about the anarchic life-finds-a-way life and make those new rebel replicants look like mere shadows.

As Geffen also quotes Haraway: “The cyborg does not dream of community on the model of the organic family.” Sadly the rebel replicants in Blade Runner 2049 do. Even the holograms do. Even the sex scene for which Joy hires a sex worker to give Joe/K a more authentic experience reminded me more of the Handmaid’s tale sex ceremony than of two artificial life forms getting sexually playful. It’s a visually and conceptually interesting scene but does not carry more than a tech novelty charm. It is about Joy faking it for Joe. Joi was constructed in a way that all her pleasure is pleasing him and all the “she’s an AI breaking free” reviews can go fuck themselves for their “born that way” logic and their reinscriptions of docile women roles. If I would have to pick a character to stand for this whole film it would be Joi though. Like the Kamala metamorph in Star Trek TNG’s ‘The perfect mate’ she is a being at whose core it is to do everything to please men. Other than Kamala though, the character Joi is an AI, a designed being. Designed to be what some men dream of in women.

Both, this movie and the Handmaid Tales series, refer to the biblical story of Rachel, the wife of Jacob who was barren but forced her maid to have intercourse with Jacob and act as vessel for his children. In Blade Runner 2049 Wallace says that replicant Rachael was named after the biblical Rachel. Whereas in the old Blade Runner Rachael became human by becoming self-conscious and by falling in love, Villeneuve turns her into a mere vessel, defined by giving birth to Ana Stelline, a figure that is mainly a vessel for others to project their ideologies and fears on. She’s a fragile and kind innocent child-woman figure, a kind of counterpart to the gloomy father figure Darth Wallace. She is working for his corporation without him knowing that she is the born-not-made one. She lives isolated in a cage due to an immune system sickness, in a dome where she creates memories to be planted into replicants to structure their personalities. Which is presented in a way that gives her the air of a mother when she dreams up children at a birthday party or when she tells K “there is always a bit of the artist in all of their creations.” Which does not really hint at the power of art but at her implanting some memories of her actual childhood into replicants.

Why the Volk – replicants could just seize the means of reproduction and live happily ever after

The women who lead the Replicant Freedom Movement, just as Joi, the holographic wife, again remind me of The Handmaid’s Tale, just think of Serena Joy, the Commander’s wife who has planned the men’s right revolution with him. It’s like with women (or gays) in nazi movements who happily plot against their own liberty – they get downplayed as ironic detail, which often prevents seeing their important contributions within those groups. Something that Handmaid’s Tale gets. There, it was even Joy who’s idea it was to center the new world around the message “fertility as a national resource, reproduction as a moral imperative.” Sounds like the rebel replicants’ goal too. At best aside from biological reproduction they seem to strive for a hive mind (remember the bee hives that Joe/K just dips a hand in but draws it back, remember the shared wooden horse memory of Mariette and Joe): Interlinked. Not the individual counts but the swarm, not a diverse open collective but a born-not-made people, the future of the Volk.

The enforced family as core idea, being part of a “better” group by birth – it’s that stuff that Villeneuve also is playing with. Let me ask again: Why the hell would it matter to replicants whether their children are born or made? Why the Volk – replicants could just seize the means of reproduction and live happily ever after sparing themselves all the gendered battles over women’s bodies. This utopian idea might be far too queer for Villeneuve who instead has turned Blade Runner in a horribly conservative vision of a future and I don’t buy the movie as a warning of what today’s politics could lead to. Villeneuve’s plan to film “a dystopian vision of today” does not work. He indeed magnified exceedingly that women can reproduce or they get killed, and also the idea of belonging or not belonging to an elite group with special rights by birth. But does he show both as a bad idea? Not exactly. Killing non-reproductive women is shown with a cruel lust and belonging-by-birth is the new rebel hope. If you leave out any progressive movements, if you leave out hope, and do what Villeneuve has done, you shouldn’t be surprised if your viewer turn-out is 70% male and 86% older than 25 years (as it has been with Blade Runner 2049) and you have alt-right dudes jerking off to it. Like I said: designed for certain men’s taste.

Joe/K as the self-sacrificing soldier-hero and protector of the family, well, do you want to know what the far right makes of him? Here you go:

“powerful message that the audience can take away from the film: Family is the bedrock of civilization- INTERLINKED- and one’s nation must be simply one’s extended family to feel – INTERLINKED – otherwise you get a dystopia of individual – CELLS- … We are all technologically connected, but we all feel estranged from one another, even vapid MTV stars make songs about wanting to feel – INTERLINKED – but the only way to do that is to have a shared culture, shared values and shared race – INTERLINKED. K finds himself in that dystopian hellhole when he discovers a cause worth fighting for. In this case, the Replicant Rebellion. He becomes a soldier, a literal Nietzchian superman on a rescue and destroy mission. … K the Replicant exemplifies the Aryan warrior ideal. And I’m sure I don’t need to remind you, but there is a rebellion brewing in the Current Year as well. In short, its a film about us, we band of atomized brothers who found meaning in a cause greater than ourselves.”

Nice, isn’t it?

Pretty barren for a movie so obsessed with fertility

I would still say Blade Runner 2049 is worth watching. If only for the visual side – it is aesthetic, sometimes aesthetic even and for a while it feels good that it is moving forward in a rather slow pace, somehow hypnotic. At some point though you realize that the story just is not very good and the slow pace draaags on. Sometimes a film’s length is what it takes to make it epic but in this case it does the contrary. While the stunning visuals suggest something epic, at the end of the movie you don’t even really care anymore if K/Joe lives or dies, you just want it be over and cringe at the hints that there might be a sequel with some boring Matrix-style revolution. For a movie that is technically and in its allegories obsessed with perfection, it is suprisingly clumsily structured: you travel from spot to spot with K/Joe, learn something, visit the next spot, get more info, and so on. A bit like a mediocre computer game structure. All the carefully planted references feel more like easter eggs (or like stuff you need to unlock to get to the games next level) than like something that makes your film experience richer or that even adds much to the story. That it’s such an old white male canon with Elvis, Nabokov, Sinatra and Greene, doesn’t help. Instead of widening the picture the cultural references mostly just fall into place when you decode them or even make the Blade Runner world feel smaller. A poem as baseline test. Villeneuve has turned it into a world that can be thoroughly explained without leaving room for thoughts to nest and grow. No room for glow umbrellas, no room for… the magic of a poetic ambigue way of thinking? Villeneuve pinned down the Bladerunner world like an entomologist pinning down a butterfly. Blade Runner 2049‘s relationship to the original Blade Runner is more that of a nerd‘s movie than that of a fan‘s movie. More about dissecting it and getting it right than about daring to dream it further, to explore possibilities. It is pretty barren for a movie so obsessed with fertility. It is not a critical take on the world of today, it is aesthetisizing proto-fascist dystopia, it’s retro in the worst senses: It longs for not just a conservative but an authoritarian past-future and this is in the blood, in the very veins of this film. It is not just in the story, it‘s also in its structure, it is in how it deals with an understanding of the world.

My impulse to write a Blade Runner 2049 review was the anger that filled me when I stepped out of the cinema after watching it, an anger I couldn’t pin down at first. Now I know I am not just angry about this movie because of the world it has build but even more for the world it hasn’t.

Made a song for IVDR

I have made a track called “Hollow” for friends’ label compilation: IVDR on VERYDEEPRECORDS
Limited edition double tape.
Now I got a tape, even two tapes, and no tape player. Oh, these analog kids today, tsk.
Good that today it’s released online too! Listen here:

“Hollow” was made in and is about the shaky dark state when you slowly work your way out of a depressive phase and the repetitive work of convincing yourself that everything will be alright while you know exactly that it never will be…
Erm… enjoy!

And those of you in Nuremberg: The Verydeep boys Philipp and Steffan will be doing a little release celebration at Zentralcafé’s Rauschen tonight! Just some cozy bar djing and drinks and chats. Come over!

missing friction

This ‘making of’ of Burial’s Untrue takes me way back. Soundforge, Fruity Loops and Wavelab – loved them. What they couldn’t do and what was hard to do with them was were the creative process started for me. Took me years to realize and accept it and not see it as failure and deficiency of mine. Using software that restricts you was exactly my thing. Even before I went digital: Not the perfect dozen of effect pedals but one mediocre effect pedal and making music fighting against its restrictions. Same with software. Ableton Live’s endless possibilities made it so much harder and more boring for me to make music. Which is the problem with so much frictionless, seamless design. It kills certain creative spots, you can’t rub against it, it’s less sensual, everything slides into place so easily. It’s that battle against the “right” way of using something where things get interesting and you can set a foot and build / find your way. Using tech against what it was intended for, at least in smol ways, this ‘how not to do it’ has become harder with new tech. Wish there was more rough design out there. Maybe I should start using beta or alpha versions of everything. ^^