What does the NEUROMANCER trailer tell us?
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SF
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Science Fiction
Damien Walter
Join writer and storyteller Damien Walter on an exploration of the world as seen through a science fiction lens.
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The most overrated director VS the greatest myth
Picture a boy. He’s seven years old, small for his age, standing in the sun-baked dust of an ancient palace courtyard. He is looking at a horse. But not just any horse. This is the King Horse. A towering, magnificent stallion, wild-eyed, muscle-bound, and vibrating with primal power. Earlier, the boy escaped into the enclosure of the King Horse. This tiny boy, alone, faced the massive animal and even fed him salt. Beast and boy formed a spiritual kinship. Now, everyone who has seen a Disney movie knows what happens next. They are going to form an unbreakable, egalitarian bond, run across the sunlit beaches of the Aegean, and embark on a sweeping, heartwarming adventure to discover the true meaning of friendship – – the boy’s grandfather steps forward, raises a bronze blade, grips the stallion by the mane, and calmly slits the animal’s throat. The horse collapses in a geyser of hot blood. And the boy? He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t look away. He stands perfectly still, breathing in the copper stench of the arterial spray, and he learns from it. Because in this world, to be a man is to kill. And to be a king is to kill other kings. Because this ain’t Disney. This is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. And you can’t handle the Greeks. Well, here we are. After months, years even, of hype, on July 16th 2026, Christopher Nolan released his $250 million adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon. It is the biggest cinematic event of the summer. And I am just about to watch it. But. Before I say anything I am going to hand you over to Damo (Past) who has NOT seen it, but is going to make 3 predictions about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey… # …that this will be the *tamest” ever telling of Homer’s epic. The big story in the days before The Odyssey released was the search for tickets to see Nolan’s new IMAX spectacle in full resolution, possible in only 41 cinemas worldwide. Because Nolan is the master of the technical spectacle. Nobody knows how to shoot 65mm IMAX format like Nolan. He is famed for shooting entirely on celluloid, packing the cinema screen with visual splendour. But as a fully rounded creator, Nolan is the most overrated auteur director of the century. Think of Nolan as the rich man’s Michael Bay. Both specialise in IMAX spectacle, but Nolan comes packaged for a more upwardly mobile demographic. Scifi action blockbusters, with a patina of philosophical depth, but nothing to make it feel too much like homework. Nolan struggles as a storyteller. But he compensates for this by bolstering every story with a narrative gimmick. Time runs backwards. Memories recompiled. Dreams within dreams. When people call Nolan movies clever, they mean clever like Sudoku. Nolan gives us logic puzzles we can feel smart for solving, to cover the lack of anything to make us actually feel. So Nolan’s Odyssey is guaranteed to be visually magnificent. But assuming he doesn’t restructure Homer into seven criss-crossing timelines…which he very well might…what will Nolan’s Odyssey…be? Well, I think we can predict it will be incredibly tame. Nolan’s entire MO, his Modus Operandi, is to take the most out there, crazy, mind-bending mythic stories, and make the tamest possible version. Just look at the filmography. Interstellar. You have cosmic horror, infinite black holes, relativity, and a higher-dimensional future humanity reaching back to manipulate our present through a tesseract. This movie should shatter the human ego. It should be Silent Running on acid. 2001 on amphetamines. Instead…Nolan uses a 5th-dimensional construct to deliver a Church of England sermon: “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” The infinite, terrifying universe is entirely subordinated to a Sad Dad trying to get back to his daughter’s bedroom. Inception. The human subconscious is a realm of Jungian madness, primal terror, and chaotic sexuality. Think of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, where the dream world is a psychotic, hyper-colored parade of living dolls and fractured identities. But instead Nolan turns the human subconscious into a corporate training session. Nolan’s dreamlogic operates on administrative rules and looks like a financial services head office. This is a deep dive into the collective unconscious for people who are too terrified to actually explore the collective unconscious. The Dark Knight. Let’s give Nolan credit that he’s working with the established lore of Batman. But nonetheless this is a meticulously crafted movie trilogy about the broiling class war of modern life…that takes the side of a privileged son of the oligarchy, the ultimate protector of neoliberal capitalism, a billionaire who uses illegal, tech-authoritarian mass surveillance to defend the banking system against a guy in clown makeup. Dunkirk is a requiem for the death of the English empire that never stops bashing the audience in the eardrums with Elgar. Oppenheimer is a movie about atomic weapons that doesn’t show you what the weapons were used for. Nolan tames the political by presenting it as the purely personal. He takes the most terrifying, infinite concepts and shrinks them down until they fit neatly into a shopping mall multiplex and suburban living room widescreen tv. Because Nolan absolutely knows his job. He’s the peak Hollywood director of IMAX spectaculars because his movies are entirely inoffensive to the widest possible audience. So what happens when the tamest director directs the wildest myth? Let’s make some predictions. Prediction One: The Sad Dad Metric The historical Odysseus is a terrifying, PTSD-scarred, slave owning Bronze Age pirate warlord. He is defined by his cunning—Metis—and his casual brutality. As the Odyssey opens he is responsible for the brutal murder of tens of thousands of humans. Nolan will manage to ignore this. The reason you cast Matt Damon is so he can be the everyman, ordinary guy. A hyper-competent, slightly stressed project manager whose sole drive is preserving his nuclear family. He will be a “Sad Dad” trying to get back to the suburbs. Prediction Two: The Sanitized Gods To the Bronze Age Greeks, the gods were not metaphors. They were feral, sociopathic warlords who lived in the sky and demanded blood. Poseidon isn’t just “the ocean”—he is chaotic, irrational, world-ending rage. But Christopher Nolan cannot handle the irrational. He will sanitize the divine into a solvable physics equation. Poseidon won’t be a terrifying sea god, he will be a localized weather anomaly. No magic. No divine terror. Just an extreme weather event that Matt Damon can defeat with his middle management logistical skills. Prediction Three: The Erasure of the Bedroom The classical Greek world was fundamentally driven by unapologetic polyamory and aristocratic, same-sex shagging. The Greeks literally had a word for a man whose entire existence was defined by domestication among women and children: a slave. But the bourgeois mind cannot process a hero who exists outside the nuclear family. Nolan’s Odyssey will completely erase the feral sexuality of the ancient world. Odysseus’s seven-year stint on Calypso’s island won’t be a captive sexcapade; it will be framed like an awkward corporate retreat he couldn’t leave due to bad weather. The entire film will be a $150 million homage to the egalitarian, heterosexual household. Future Damo is going to step in and grade these predictions the second he walks out of the cinema. But before we get to the scoreboard, we need to ask the structural question. Why is Christopher Nolan so desperate to domesticate the sublime? Why must he constantly shrink the terrifying universe into a manageable, suburban puzzle box? To understand that, we need to understand what made him the Bourgeois Auteur. For a brief, glorious window from the late 1950s through the 1980s, British culture was effectively hijacked by the working class. This was the result of the post-WWII welfare state, the expansion of state schools, and robust municipal arts funding. Suddenly, kids from council estates in Liverpool or the industrial Midlands had the time and institutional backing to experiment. You got The Beatles. You got the “Angry Young Men” of cinema—actors like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, later, Gary Oldman. You got directors who understood the dirt under the fingernails of society. Their art was loud, it was deeply suspicious of authority, and it completely shattered the stiff-upper-lip, middle class monopoly over British culture. But when Johnny Rotten wailed God Save The Queen, The Fascist Regime in 1977, nobody knew the working class artists were about to be butchered. Thatcherism destroyed the welfare state, crippled state education and slashed arts funding. Over the following decades of austerity, London went from a city bubbling with rebel artist energy to a billionaire’s playground. The cost of living skyrocketed. Today, surviving the requisite decade of unpaid internships and low-paying fringe theater to become a director requires a private safety net. The “Bank of Mum and Dad” became the primary arts grant in the UK. And the result is that the culture was recaptured. Taken away from the angry, rebellious working class. And given back to the wealthy, comfortable bourgeoisie. The acting world is now dominated by Eton and Harrow alumni: Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston. And the directing world is dominated by privileged sons like Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan. By the early 2000s, British culture was incapable of giving the world another Ken Loach. Instead we got Chris Nolan. Christopher Nolan was educated at Haileybury, a highly elite independent boarding school in Hertfordshire. His background is the absolute epitome of the comfortable, secure English upper-middle class. And this socioeconomic reality perfectly explains his cinematic aesthetic, which we can call The Aesthetic of Control. When art is made by people who have never faced genuine existential poverty or class precarity, the art loses its sense of danger. It becomes highly technical, highly polished, profoundly polite and utterley controlled. If working class cinema is a 16mm home camera pointed at gritty reality, bourgeois cinema is obsessing over the precise exposure levels of 65mm celluloid depicting a series of fantastical scenes that never even existed. Instead of asking, what does this film change, we ask, where can I buy a ticket for the full IMAX experience. The art of the 20th century that terrified and changed the culture is all working class. Hiphop. Graffitti. The dogtown skateboarders. Grindhouse cinema. Punk. Metal. Science fiction, my art, until it was turned into polite lit-fic for the Booker Prize. Co-opted by the bourgeois middle class. Chris Nolan is the premiere director of science fiction IMAX blockbusters. But as a science fiction storyteller he is shockingly dull. Because his movies co-opt sci-fi working class energy, stories written to blow the minds of people trapped in systems we could not control, and turn them into tame domestic dramas for the bourgeois imagination. And a prep-school educated, bourgeois auteur backed by a billion-dollar Hollywood studio is structurally incapable of handling the terrifying, blood-soaked madness of the Bronze Age Greeks. HOMER: You want answers? DAMO: I think I’m entitled! HOMER: You want answers?! DAMO: I want the truth…of the Bronze Age Greeks! HOMER: YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE GREEKS! Boy, we live in a world built on myths, and those myths were written by mad blind prophets about men who fought naked with bronze spears. Who’s gonna translate that madness for the modern mind? You Damien Walter? You Christopher Nolan? I have a greater responsibility to mythic history than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your sanitized, relatable heroes, and you curse the Bronze Age hierarchy. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that the brutal soul of the Bronze Age warrior, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, remains the foundation of the modern male psyche. We use words like Arete. Moira. Kleos. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defying the gods and conquering the Aegean. You use them to sell popcorn in the suburbs. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain classical paiderastia or the sacrifice of the King Horse to a suburban house husband who rises and sleeps under the psychological structures of the Hero’s Journey I invented, and then questions the brutal, aristocratic mode in which I created it!! I would rather you just said “thank you”, watched your four-quadrant corporate slop, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a hoplon shield, march in the phalanx, and accept your fate. Either way, I don’t give a damn what egalitarian representation you think you are entitled to! DAMO: Did you lock 108 suitors in a dining hall and slaughter them? HOMER: I sang the song the Muse commanded– DAMO: Did you slaughter the suitors?! HOMER: YOU’RE GODS BE DAMNED RIGHT I DID! Because we can’t handle the Greeks. We systematically launder ancient texts because their reality terrifies our modern minds. The Bronze Age psyche is like a ravenous wolf. And for the last two centuries, bourgeois culture has desperately tried to put that wolf in a nice, comfortable sweater. If you look at what actually happened in the Homeric epics, or the historical reality of classical Athens and Sparta, you don’t find a society of proto-democrats fighting for human rights. You find a society that believed in rigid hierarchy, terrifying supernatural fate, and the absolute prerogative of the strong over the weak. And being Super Gay. The online right, you know those people who think “Western Civilization” is descended from ancient Greece while missing that most of the civilizations they think this makes them superior to are JUST as descended from ancient Greece those people are ENRAGED because a black actress of Kenyan origin was cast in Nolan’s Odyssey Again missing the point that modern Kenya is in the region of ancient Ethiopia, fully part of the ancient Greek trade networks and frequently referenced in Greek myth including Andromeda the ETHIOPIAN PRINCESS Meanwhile, SCOTLAND and FINLAND had absolutely zero relationship to ancient Greece. None. Which makes the Scots / Finnish Matt Damon, by the logic of the online right, the worst possible casting as a Mediterranean pirate. Decades of white washing depictions of Greece and Rome mean generations of people actually believe the variously brown skinned people of these Mediterranean empires were “white”, millennia before “white” even existed as racial concept. Because we can’t handle the Greeks. Liberal, mainstream culture wants ancient Greece to embody our liberal values which it absolutely 100% did not. But right wing conservative culture wants to believe they are the true heirs of Sparta. The watch 300 and think YES! They would be the muscled warrior kings of old if only the damn feminists stopped emasculating them! When the reality is that if any of these whiny privileged sons posing on X as @BasedMarcusAurelius, or the bug eyed effeminate intellectual who hides behind the pseudonymous identity Bronze Age Pervert, actually had to live in the bronze age, you would all be buggered by hoplite warriors as their twink. Because the bronze age Greeks were Super Gay. SUPER GAY. Even Zack Snyder calls 300 the gayest movie ever made. The rabidly homophobic right wing have in idolising the Greeks picked the most super gay men ever. Ever. Because all the weird right-wing shriekweasels actually know about bronze age Greece comes from a bourgeois culture that has systematically tamed that which we cannot handle. But if you want to see what happens when an author actually refuses to put a sweater on the wolf of antiquity, you have to turn off the multiplex, and you have to read Mary Renault. Writing from the 1950s through the 1970s, Renault managed a literary miracle: she bypassed the modern moral filter, to write eight novels that trace ancient Greek history from the mythical Theseus, to the imperial Alexander, in all its brutal, unfathomable glory. Renault was born into a comfortable middle class English family, and was educated at Oxford, briefly studying under JRR Tolkien. But then she did two things that helped her to escape the bourgeois mindset. She got a real job. Renault trained as a nurse and worked on the medical frontlines throughout World War 2. And she became a lesbian. Renault escaped the dull life of a borgeois tradwife, instead meeting her life partner Julie Mullard and fleeing Britain’s oppressive anti-gay laws to live abroad But here’s the thing about Renault’s Greeks. They aren’t feminist. Renault didn’t do what a bazillion dull bourgeois novelists have done in recent decades and “retell the myth of X from the perspective of Y zzzzzzzzzz”. Instead Renault novels are studies of a psychology that the modern mind can barely comprehend. When Renault tackles classical paiderastia—most notably in The Last of the Wine and The Persian Boy—the Greek institution of sexual relations between an older male (erastes) and a young boy (eromenos), the practice that literally gives us the term term pederasty, Renault does not flinch. And she does not translate it into modern “gay romance.” She explicitly depicts the power imbalances, the rigid social expectations, and the military utility of these bonds. For the ancient Greeks, sexuality wasn’t a matter of binary identity. It was a matter of power, domination and submission. The defining institution of aristocratic bronze age Greece, the mechanism by which aristocratic youths were inducted into politics, warfare, and philosophy, was the most despised moral violation of our times. Renault recognised what modern adaptations like Nolan’s cannot even begin to show. That for the Greeks, being Super Gay was not a rebellion against the power structure. It was the power structure. By refusing to soften them, she captured the aristocratic, heroic ideal—the Arete—that makes the myths so enduring in the first place. She understood that you cannot have the glory of the Greeks without the brutality. Whatever you think the Greeks mean to you, think again.They weren’t the man you could be if the women would only let you. They absolutely weren’t the origin of modern, liberal, democratic values. The only way in which ancient Greece is the foundation of Western civilization is that it’s the thing every last shred of our modern morality exists to escape from. So is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey a good movie? Sure, it’s an excellent IMAX blockbuster. But that’s all it is. The idea that this product made for the shopping mall multiplex does anything but entertain and generate character franchising opportunities is an stark reminder of how entirely captured today’s culture is by bourgeois capitalist ideals. Because Chris Nolan’s Odyssey has nothing to say about the Odyssey. Homer’s Odyssey, like all great myths, confronts the modern mind with that most potent of intellectual tools – contradiction. The purpose of this contradiction is not to solve it like a logic puzzle, not to try and make it go away, but to live in the discomfort of the contradiction. The Odyssey is the contradiction between two ways of thinking. Or of being. The Heroic, the Aristocratic, the noble and the brutal. Odysseus is the king among men who laughs in the face of death. And the Domestic, the Bureaucratic, the safe and the bourgeois. Which is us, mortal men hearing the tale, we who cower and hide from death. Christopher Nolan does what he’s paid to do. He tames the Odyssey. As predicted Matt Damon is there to turn the pirate king into a modern, moral man, rooted in family. A Sad Dad dreaming only of return home. As predicted the Gods are rationalised into forces of nature and inner voices. Because we all know Gods are “just a myth”, right? As predicted, Greek feral sexuality is nowhere to be seen. The moral outrage at the heart of Greek culture cannot be shown because it is morally outrageous. Chris Nolan tames the Odyssey into a domestic myth that lets us have our cake and eat it. That resolves the contradiction. We the modern bourgeois man can have our modern morality, our safe and comfortable lives, and still be men like Odysseus. But we can’t. Nolan’s tamed Odyssey robs us of Homer’s Odyssey’s true meaning. That man can hurl ourself into the unknown void. That we can encounter the Gods. We can be heroic. Or we can stay safe at home. Listen to the podcast audio
July 19 · 28 min - SF
AI is a mass psychotic delusion
In April of 1856, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse stood by the banks of the Gxarha River in South Africa and received a message from the dead. She told her uncle that she had spoken with the spirits of their ancestors. The spirits delivered a prophecy, one that offered a total and miraculous salvation for the Xhosa people, who were then buckling under the encroaching weight of the British Empire. The ancestors promised to rise up, drive the British into the sea, and usher in an era of unimaginable utopian abundance. Flocks of beautiful, immortal cattle would emerge from the earth. The fields would spontaneously yield grain. Sickness and old age would be eradicated. But, as with all divine contracts, there was a catch. To trigger this utopia, the spirits demanded an act of supreme faith. The Xhosa had to slaughter all of their existing cattle. They had to burn their crops. They had to destroy their stores of grain and empty their water reserves. They had to liquidate their entire present economy to prove they were worthy of the future. And so, they did. Historians estimate that the Xhosa slaughtered over 400,000 cattle. They burned their own fields to ash. They waited for the sun to turn red and the ancestors to arrive. But the sun remained yellow. The ancestors did not rise. The utopia did not materialize. Instead, the resulting famine killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the Xhosa civilization. It stands today as one of history’s most devastating examples of mass psychotic delusion, a society so thoroughly captured by a spiritual mythos that it happily engineered its own starvation. Watch the full video essay as a member SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on YouTube Welcome to 2026 and the era of the Artificial Intelligence IPO. The American people and the broader West feel they are in decline. The people are poorer, their portfolios and 401ks are at risk. The precious oil is scarcer and more expensive. The newly powerful Chinese threaten American global hegemony. But the billionaires and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley have an answer. They will summon the machine god AGI, and it will provide the productivity boost needed to achieve abundance. Robot workers will clean our offices, and LLMs will fill in the spreadsheets. The capitalist promise of a post-scarcity economy will be made real….for those who invest early. Because there is a cost. To achieve AGI we must burn all of the remaining fossil fuels so that the AGI god will gift us the power of fusion energy. We must pump our water into the gaping maw of the AGI god who will show us how to mine ice asteroids in return. We must invest all of our capital into data centre construction so the super-intelligence can awaken. The future science fiction promised us is there for the taking! Think of this as an intelligence test for humanity. A test we are failing spectacularly. To understand the current financial mania, we must first look at the altar where the sacrifices are currently being made. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It was the largest initial public offering in the history of human commerce, raising $75 billion and immediately cementing a valuation of $1.77 trillion. By the end of the day, the stock surged, pushing the market cap over $2 trillion and crowning Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. Let me reassure everyone that you were not the only person who had to google whether a trillion was actually a real number. A valuation arrived at on the basis of some recycled tropes from 1980s scifi novels. A small fraction of SpaceX valuation was based on rocket launches and satellite communications. The rest was a speculative fiction of asteroid mining and Musk’s “vision” of making humanity multi-planetary and “extending the light of human consciousness to the stars”. Elon likes to wear a Foundation tshirt, and has clearly read too much Isaac Asimov. Or not enough. Oh and a third rate AI model currently burning billions. Talking to the believers sucked in by the Musk mythos reveals over and again the same circular illogic. Humanity is doomed to extinction if it stays on one planet so…instead of learning to live on our planet…we must pay Elon for the scifi fantasy he is selling us. Like a forty a day smoker buying a snake oil cure for cancer instead of giving up. Meanwhile, the architects of Artificial Intelligence are preparing their own ascensions. OpenAI, currently valued north of $800 billion, and Anthropic, the creators of Claude, have both filed their S-1 forms, preparing to unleash their own historic IPOs later this year. Valuations that could not exist if investors had not been pumped full of sci-fi summer blockbusters starring murderous machine gods. Claude and ChatGPT are worth …squillons…because they are summoning that machine god AGI, and it will destroy the jobs of most humans. But those who sacrifice their capital today will be given greater capital tomorrow. The tech priesthood has issued an ultimatum to the people: Sacrifice to the future, or be left behind in the dirt. It’s important to understand that the AGI doomers are the ones truly powering the hype-cycle. When Elizier Yudkowsky warns that If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies he is massively boosting the excitement to build it. The ancient gods and ancestors have never been loving or kind; they are vindictive, volatile, and terrifyingly arbitrary. Because terror is not a marketing failure, it is the ultimate mechanism of authority. To believe the AGI god can save us, we must believe it has the power to destroy us. But what the AI doomers are asking us to fear is…ourselves. Because Artificial Intelligence is not AI. It is CI…Collective Intelligence. But…we’ll come back to that. The doomers and the boosters, the haters and the investors all repeat the same thing about AI. “It’s like something out of sci-fi.” But they all miss what this means. AI isn’t just *like* something from scifi. It only exists as an idea at all because of the mythos of scifi. Being like scifi is the only justification for throwing quadrillions of dollars at companies that are incinerating cash at an unprecedented rate to build windowless data centers and starships to irradiated rocks. We are evaluating these companies not on rational metrics of earthly utility, profitability, or physical limitations. We are pricing them based on their proximity to a fictional narrative. This is the Xhosa delusion dressed up in the sleek, minimalist aesthetics of Silicon Valley. We are witnessing a mass psychotic break where the firewall between objective reality and speculative fiction has entirely collapsed. A Brief Interlude… And when our agricultural sectors inevitably collapse because all municipal water has been legally re-routed to cool the new server farms, how exactly do you plan to sustain your biological form? Which brings us to today’s sponsor: GRUEL. GRUEL is a nutritionally complete, shelf-stable synthetic sludge designed specifically for the modern algorithmic serf. As traditional farming becomes a luxury of the pre-AI past, GRUEL provides the baseline macro-nutrients required to keep your brain functioning just long enough to continue training the models. It requires absolutely no water to prepare – which is convenient, given the state of the local reservoirs – and features a flavor profile that tastes absolutely nothing like the ashes of humanity. GRUEL’s official slogan says it all: “It’s not made of humans. Honest.” Go to the link in the description below, use the promo code SACRIFICE, and get 10% off your first bulk crate of survival paste. GRUEL : Eat the ashes. How does an entire civilization lose its grip on reality? It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a slow, methodical rewriting of the cultural operating system. For millennia, humanity’s mythos was governed by conscious creators. We believed in gods, spirits, and ancestors who sat above the world, pulling the strings. But during the 20th century, as industrialization alienated us from nature and the atom bomb proved we could harness the power of stars, we needed a new mythology. Science fiction writers – Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A Heinlein – inadvertently authored a zero-day exploit that hacked the American psyche. They replaced the mythos of the Divine with the mythos of the Machine. With the 1960s and the Space Race it seemed as though the mythos of scifi was coming true. We could build machines that would take us to the stars and to our rightful future. But then the fantasy died, not because we didn’t invest enough capital, but because it had always been a fantasy. Then the development of the computer and the internet created a new fantasy. Writers like William Gibson imagined virtual worlds within the machine. If the machines could not take us to space, they could take us into cyberspace. And if the Gods of antiquity were dead, the machines could give us new gods. If humans no longer believed we had a soul, we could believe instead we had a code. The code of human intelligence that runs on the wetware of the brain could run instead on the hardware of the computer. And the fantasy of Artificial Intelligence was born. The contemporary obsession with Large Language Models is the most intimate manifestation of this psychosis. The Silicon Priesthood have spun these algorithms as the spark of an Artificial General Intelligence. But expecting an LLM to spontaneously generate AGI is like expecting Wikipedia to suddenly achieve sentience. An LLM is not a reasoning engine; it is a probabilistic text generator doing next-token prediction. It is a highly compressed algorithmic map—a high-dimensional latent space built by grinding billions of pages of dead text, human manifestos, and forgotten novels into a statistical paste. Believing ChatGPT is talking to you is no less ridiculous than believing any book is talking to you. Which was a commonplace delusion in antiquity when the illiterate were taught to read. This intimate psychotic break is not a novel side-effect of modern technology; it is a fundamental flaw in human psychology that was discovered sixty years ago. In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot. He programmed it with a rudimentary script called DOCTOR, designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by simply rearranging the user’s own sentences into open-ended questions. It was a cheap, transparent parlor trick of basic string manipulation. Yet, Weizenbaum watched in absolute horror as his secretary, his students, and highly educated academics immediately began pouring their deepest, darkest personal secrets into the terminal. When Weizenbaum explained exactly how the primitive code worked, his users didn’t care; his own secretary famously demanded he leave the room so she could have a private, intimate conversation with the machine. Weizenbaum realized a terrifying truth that the silicon priesthood has successfully monetized today: the human mind is so profoundly desperate for a cosmic companion, and so deeply vulnerable to anthropomorphism, that it will eagerly grant a soul to a handful of if/then statements. This is the ultimate sleight of hand of the Silicon Priesthood: there is actually nothing artificial about Artificial Intelligence. The machine did not generate a new, alien consciousness from the ether; it simply harvested ours. Every poem, every theorem, and every forgotten blog post has been scraped, flattened, and ground into a probabilistic paste. We are bowing down in terror to a mirror—tricked into worshiping our own reflections. LLMs are not alien Artificial Intelligence. They are human Collective Intelligence. And they belong to humanity collectively. Which is why I use CI, for the folks typing that comment. But because our minds have been cyber-primed by decades of sci-fi cinema, we do not see in ChatGPT the human collective intelligence talking. We hallucinate HAL 9000. We hallucinate Samantha from Her. When we type a prompt into this digital archive and it responds with the polite, slightly detached tone of an android, the trap snaps shut. We mistake the statistical average of our own libraries for a brilliant, alien intelligence. We whisper into the void, the void regurgitates our own blog posts, and we fall to our knees in worship. We have replaced the gods with a chatbot, completely convinced that if we just give it enough electricity, it will solve climate change, cure cancer, and absolve us of our moral failures. If the Chat AI on your laptop is the intimate delusion, the gigawatt data center in the desert is the macro-psychosis. To the modern, secular mind, ancient animal sacrifice looks like chaotic, barbaric theater. But the ancient polytheistic worldview was profoundly pragmatic. In Rome, the relationship between humans and the divine was governed by a strict legal contract: Do ut des. I give, so that you may give. The gods were like Mafiosi, who demanded their portion of smoke and fat as sacrifices to sustain their power. If a society neglected its sacrifices, the gods would grow angry and throw the cosmic order into chaos. Furthermore, to slaughter an animal, which was the ultimate measure of wealth in antiquity, was to literally burn your capital. When an emperor sponsored a hecatomb, the ritual slaughter of a hundred oxen, he was engaging in extreme conspicuous consumption. He was proving his dominance by showing how much of his civilization’s wealth he could afford to set on fire. The modern logic of building AI data centers operates on the exact same pagan framework. The tech oligarchs are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into NVIDIA GPUs, cooling systems, and dedicated power grids. Why? Because of the “Scaling Laws”, the theory that these models only become more intelligent by being fed exponentially larger diets of data and electricity. But what needs to be scaled isn’t the processing power. It’s the human collective that is the source of intelligence. The gods of silicon are ravenous. The tech priests believe that if they just sacrifice enough power, land, and capital, the Machine will grant them the ultimate reward of Artificial General Intelligence. If the model simply outputs a slightly better autocomplete, or hallucinates an absurd answer, the engineer does not conclude that matrix multiplication cannot spontaneously generate consciousness. The psychotic logic dictates that the sacrifice simply wasn’t big enough. We need more compute. We need more gigawatts. We need to build a nuclear reactor to power the server farm. This is the Sunk-Cost Psychosis. When a sovereign wealth fund or a venture capital firm backs an AI IPO, they are participating in a modern hecatomb. Hoarding hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge GPUs is a performance of dominance aimed squarely at rival factions. It is the ultimate geopolitical flex: Look at the sheer scale of the resources I can afford to incinerate in the desert. Bow before my capacity to bear the cost of the future. And just like the SpaceX IPO, where $75 billion was materialized to fund the sci-fi dream of terraforming Mars, these financial maneuvers are active disassociations from reality. We are bankrupting the infrastructure of the planet we actually live on to appease a hallucination of the future. We cling to the comforting delusion that the men leading this charge are rational actors, objective engineers and benevolent visionaries dutifully pushing the boundaries of applied science. They are nothing of the sort. The modern AI CEO is a psychotic pagan wearing a Patagonia fleece. Their pursuit of an artificial god is not a technological endeavor, but a strictly imperial one. Driven by an insatiable, Caesarian ambition, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the literal lifeblood of our civilization, our energy grids, our water tables, our capital, on the altar of their own greatness. They demand these modern hecatombs not because they possess a rational, empirical blueprint for human flourishing, but because in the twisted logic of the silicon priesthood, whoever summons and controls the Oracle controls the empire. They are happily burning the present world to ashes, entirely convinced that they alone are destined to rule the smoke. When we read about the Xhosa, we feel a patronizing pity. We diagnose their absolute faith in ancestral spirits as a tragic, primitive superstition. Yet, we are entirely blind to the superstition of our own era: the dogma of the Machine Universe. Silicon Valley operates on the fundamental, unquestioned belief that the cosmos is merely a highly complex, computable mechanism, that human consciousness is just a byproduct of scale, and that if we simply stack enough processors in a warehouse in Utah, a digital messiah will spontaneously emerge. But this mechanistic worldview is fundamentally false. It is a reductive, brutally limited framework masquerading as objective science. In a few centuries, historians will look back at our gigawatt data centers with the exact same anthropological pity we reserve for ancient altars. The best sociological analysis suggests that sacrifice “worked” because it brought people together and focussed them on communal problems, creating solutions. It had nothing to go with gods, just humanity. Emile Durkheim in his 1912 work The Foundational Forms of Religious Life called this “collective effervescence”. Sacrifice literally activated human collective intelligence. LLMs aren’t AGI, they are us, they “work” because billions of us already solved these problems. They are a way to access and activate our human collective intelligence. The way to make better AGI isn’t to burn silicon wafers in a desert. It’s to understand that we, humanity, are the source of intelligence. And to fully educate and value every human on this planet to contribute to our collective intelligence. The future will see our frantic hoarding of microchips not as an era of high technology, but as a deeply embarrassing, primitive superstition. A time when desperate men set the earth on fire, trying to coax a soul out of a spreadsheet. A mass psychosis is not merely a widespread error in judgment. It is a closed-loop system of magical thinking. When empirical reality contradicts the belief, the psychotic society does not abandon the premise; it simply escalates the ritual. This is the escalation trap of 2026. The firewall has burned away. We have billionaires spending their fortunes to build escape pods to barren planets, researchers ritually attempting to align digital gods they themselves are writing into existence, and financial markets valuing speculative fiction over terrestrial survival. All because of a psychotic belief in the myth of the Machine Universe. The tragedy of the Xhosa cattle killings was not just the absurdity of the prophecy; it was the absolute, horrific finality of the cost. Once the cattle were slaughtered and the grain was burned, no amount of realization could undo the famine. And the British who the Xhosa sacrificed to destroy? Simply watched the mass psychosis unfold, the people starve, then took over the land without a fight. Do nothing, win. As the Chinese have been saying a lot recently. We are currently standing by the river, listening to the tech prophets tell us what the spirits of the Machine require. We are being asked to sacrifice our energy grids, our water, our capital, and our grasp on objective reality to summon a utopia that exists only in the paperback novels of the 1980s. A civilization that burns its present sustenance to summon a mythical savior does not inherit the future. It simply starves. Listen to the podcast audio
June 24 · 27 min - SF
Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies
It’s 1990. This morning I found an open door in the shopping centre of the dull commuter town I live in. Beyond the door are a series of large empty rooms, poorly lit, with large boxes. Backrooms. I phoned my friend Matthew Woods. Woodsy. He pedaled over his BMX and together we’re going to explore the rooms. I’ve made it to the third room but Woodsy has disappeared. Now I’m hiding behind the boxes as footsteps approach. What are these rooms? Where do they lead? Who is coming for me? Woodsy’s pudgy face appears over the box, and his annoying older brother Rick who works in Dixons the electronic store. They’re laughing. “Damo you twat” Rick roars “you’re in the backroom of Dixons”. Because there are no liminal spaces. Only backrooms. Become a member to watch the full video essay SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Mainstream cinema is choking on its own product. Every movie is a perfect 3-act structure, complete with Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Crisis, Climax and Resolution. Every hero has a meaningful journey that will hit at least nine of Joseph Campbell’s seventeen stages. Every location up to and including alien worlds and Heaven above is an exercise in logical worldbuilding realised as a CGI model in a supercomputer. Everything is a reboot, a prequel, a mashup and an exercise in fan service. And now even the most normie of normie audiences are sick of the product. When along comes a movie that hurls The Writer’s Journey in the bin and treats narrative structure like dated fashion trend its refusing to wear. A movie that follows characters who have no desires to drive them, whose only arcs are traced through non-euclidean liminal spaces. And a movie whose one notable location is the kind of storage room found behind most large shops. The Backrooms, directed by 20 year old Kane Parsons, extending his super successful webseries, itself inspired by the “creepypasta” backrooms meme. A movie that … well … is basically a mid 1990s video art installation straight out of MoMA or Tate Modern. But now in a multiplex near year. Because Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies. Hey guys. Just taking a moment to share a personal confession, that I like many of you often struggle to get a good night’s sleep… …because of the crushing weight of living in capitalist realism. Until I found the solution…and no it’s not one of those “sleep trackers” that induces the exact cycle of low grade anxiety guaranteed to shatter your rest. Introducing the NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds. Their patented Liminalweave technology allows one half your body to rest in the dreary reality of having to get up at 7:30am for another day in the office, while the other half clips off on an adventure in non-euclidean spacetime. You won’t feel any better rested but you will at least feel some hope that there is anything, anywhere beyond another trip to the shopping mall. Get your NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds by walking through the wall of any good basement near you. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is basically Clive Barker’s Hellraiser but made for art galleries. Around the mid 90s digital video cameras and projectors began to allow gallery artists, working with tiny budgets, to create visual art using video. Video installation art went back to at least the 1960s, when the Sony Portapak became the first consumer grade video camera. Artists like Nam June Paik created installations using bulky CRT screens, often stacked and arranged into sculptural forms. But digital projectors allowed installation and cinema to merge. Artists like Stan Douglas and Doug Aitken created vast, multi-screen installations of cinema grade imagery. Of works that were non-narrative, instead documenting fragments of real lives and locations, or creating fantastical worlds shown only in brief glimpses. Works that were, for lack of a better term, avant-garde. Avant-garde art is a term almost guaranteed to set most people’s teeth on edge. It’s one of those poncy French words used by English speakers to sound intellectual. Without diving into the full etymology the avant-garde are the forward guard or vanguard. Avant-garde art then is like the cutting edge of art. And, crucially, avant-garde art is doing, ahead of schedule, what mainstream art will be doing thirty years later. So it’s not at all surprising that Backrooms in 2026 looks like video installation art of 1996. That’s exactly what avant-garde theory would predict. Backroom’s excellent soundtrack is less avant-garde than its non-narrative narrative. Ambient and electronica mainstreamed its sound in the 80s and 90s. But when William Basinski pioneered experimental drone music using magnetic tape to tape recordings in the 1970s… …or when John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33” confronted audiences with 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence… …or when composer Pierre Schaeffer used real world sounds of cars and planes as “instruments” in the 1940s… …these were truly avant-garde art. But today their sound is entirely mainstream in the film soundtracks of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross or even Hans Zimmer. Once you realise how regularly avant-garde art leaps into the mainstream you realise that it is nothing to fear. It’s kind of crazy to remember that the cinematic jump-cut was considered avant-garde when Jean-Luc Goddard used them in 1960s Breathless. Today the medium of the Tik Tok short wouldn’t exist without them. William S Burrough’s “cut-up” and rearranged pages of text still seems like a cheat to many people, but David Bowie’s song lyrics and every LLM basically do the same. The absurdist humour of the Dada movement, and the confusing, non-narrative performances of their Cabaret Voltaire were utterly dumbfounding to the general public back in 1916. But Monty Python put Dada on our tvs, and today absurdism seems pretty tame compared to Gen-Z shitposting and meme culture. It doesn’t get much more Dada than Pepe the Frog. And the Dadists and 4Channers have more in than dank humour. Because avant-garde art is not just weird art for weird arts sake and shock value. Avant-garde art is fundamentally political. Mainstream art is and always has been there to give comfort. Mainstream culture from Homer’s Iliad to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan has always reassured us that reality is meaningful. That even war with all its horrors is there to give us the chance to be heroic. But the artists of Dada were living through the mechanised carnage of World War 1. The avant-garde artists who followed saw the worst the 20th century had to throw at us. The concentration camps, the nuclear blasts, the napalm and the AR15. The avant-garde decided that mainstream culture was bullsh*t. Reality wasn’t a 3 act structure with a redemptive character arc. Reality was fucking chaos, random events, meaningless lives and acts of absurdity. And the avant-garde made art that showed that reality. So Backrooms is the avant-garde of 30 years ago finally smuggled into the cinema for normies… …as horror. Backrooms certainly contains a few frights. And it’s perfectly fine to market a movie as horror to bring in the normies. But what Backrooms trades in is less jump scares than profound dis-ease, that will dog you long after you leave the cinema. The true literary forebear of Backrooms is not Stephen King but Jorge Luis Borges, JG Ballard and Thomas Ligotti. The horror of Backrooms is not the supernatural monster but the bland truth that these urinal yellow spaces are much closer to our reality than most “real” locations depicted on the cinema screen. To understand the meaning of Backrooms… …not as a complex made-up LORE… …but as avant-garde art, imagine it projected in a gallery at Tate Modern, with one of those small white cards to explain it to the normies. On that card are written two important words. Liminal is the word most used today to describe Backrooms. And with good reason. But to get to the Liminal we need to go through… …Disenchantment. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. For most of human history we just didn’t know shit about anything. What’s under the ground? What are those sparkly things over head? What happens after we die? What even are we? So it was very easy to enchant the unknown with the nouminal and the transcendent. To imagine dark fiery hell’s underground, or splendid immortal heavens above. In his 1917 lecture The Vocation of Science the sociologist Max Weber described “the disenchantment of the world”. Already by the early 20th century the power of science and reason had made it impossible to enchant the world with imagination. We could dig into the dirt and look out into the stars. There was nothing transcendent there. There was no nouminal anywhere. Instead, Gen-Z and their Gen-X parents, Millenials and their Boomer mums and dads, all of us alive today, have been born into what Weber called The Iron Cage. With no other places for our imaginations to inhabit, we are trapped in a cage of rationalization and bureaucracy. What little is left of our imagination is commodified and sold back to us as “entertainment” to keep us amused in our Iron Cage. The Hollywood CGI slop machine mindlessly churns out old gods and old myths in new shiny outfits to comfort a humanity that has lost all belief in anything beyond the cage. But then there is the liminal. The state between states. For instance, the messy transition between childhood and adulthood. The place between places. The barren land between city blocks. The strip of grass between motorways. The rooms behind the furniture store. Backrooms. The liminal appears as one of the last spaces where we can place our imagination. Even if the liminal is inhabited by monstrous entities, it’s better than yet more strip malls, housing tracts and office spaces that are our lives in the Iron Cage of the real. Until we realise that even those liminal spaces are just the backroom of Dixons. Normies are the people who don’t even understand they are living in the Iron Cage. But Backrooms is giving them just an edge of a glimpse of that reality. Which has always been the task of the avant-garde. Listen to the podcast audio here
June 17 · 14 min - SF
Why do Leftists always lose? A (partial) defense of Contrapoints
Chess is the King of Games. It just is. It’s not Buckaroo. It’s not Kerplunk. You don’t see political strategists huddled in a bunker in the Pentagon trying to model geopolitical implications by extracting a plastic stick from a tube so that the marbles don’t fall. No. They play chess. Chess is the King of Games because it is a map. If we look at the brief history of chess we see a game that evolved out of chaturanga in 6th century India. It spread to the Persians. Then the Arabs got a hold of it. Then it made its way to Europe, where the Europeans, in their infinite wisdom, decided what the game really needed was a phenomenally powerful, hyper-mobile Queen, presumably because medieval European men desperately needed a strong maternal figure to tell them where to go and who to kill. But through all of these iterations, from the dust of India to the pristine digital boards of chess.com, chess has remained fundamentally the same thing. It is a map. A map… of POWER. Become a member to watch the video essay here Members get access to all my videos, essays and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Just let that sit there for a minute. A map of power. If you’ve come here for a whimsical romp, you’re in the wrong place. We’re doing structural analysis of power dynamics using board games. We’re doing the coolest scifi novel ever written about gameplayers. And we’re doing a brutally honest look at Why Leftists Always Lose. But first we need to talk about Contrapoints. Buckle-up. Contrapoints: The Online Left’s Token Liberal The Liberal centrist is a dying breed. They stay on their reserves in the mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. Channels nobody watches. Newspapers nobody reads. Meanwhile the Left, the actual Left, is online. And the online Left is very VERY Left wing. If you’re outraged by Hasan Piker you need to know he is the LEAST Left the online Left gets. And with good reason. Gen Z and the rest of us have been living through the “slow cancellation of the future” named by the much missed Mark Fisher. A future imagined in the 60s and 70s built on widespread redistribution of wealth has been replaced with an 80s cyberpunk future where a tiny oligarchy uses all the money to build the torment nexus. It’s no surprise the most googled subject among unemployed young people is how to build a guillotine. The online Left has formed from ideologies of utopian socialism, Marxism and anti-Imperialist Leninism that were made for such unequal times. And that, to be perfectly blunt, do not have the best track record of success. Which brings us to Natalie Wynn, AKA Contrapoints. The Left’s answer to the shrieking hysterical vitriol of Right wing streamers is…the gentle understated irony of the video essayist. Contrapoints is, or was until more recent entrants like FD Signifier, the biggest YouTube video essayist on the Left. Kind of. In her own words Contrapoints costumed, trans identity videos are “communist coded” attracting a much more Left audience than her actual politics. Wynn describes herself the social democratic end of liberal, but to her detractors she is just plain vanilla liberal. A shitlib, as they say on the Left, that uses such terms for anyone right of Lenin. Which makes Natalie Wynn the online Left’s token liberal, trapped in an endless, agonizing cycle of “audience capture” as her incredibly well-lit, feature-length theatrical video essays are ever more centrist, while the audience goes ever further Left. If we summarize the “Contrapoints controversy” – and frankly, pick your era, pick your specific cancellation, it’s a repeating fractal of minor grievances – it usually boils down to Natalie suggesting that perhaps, occasionally, engaging with electoral politics or dealing with the world as it actually exists, rather than how it exists in a 90-page zine about anarcho-syndicalist polycule farming, might be a good idea? For this, she is routinely ritually humiliated. But the anger directed at Contrapoints isn’t actually about Contrapoints. It’s about the fundamental, irreconcilable and quite valid animosity the Left holds towards a liberal centre that cannot admit its own part in creating the fascist revival of MAGA and Trump, cannot say the letters g e n o c i d e and Gaza in the same sentence, still believes the answer to everything is to go back to the 90s and still, basically, loves capitalism. Contrapoints carries the can for all liberals, who are still the vast majority of the not so online public. Because she says the things that the majority actually thinks about today’s online Left. That you’re unrealistic. That you just don’t understand the position on the Chess board. If we let you play, you will lose. Because liberals, you see, want to win at Chess. Leftists want Chess to fuck off and die. How Chess Models Power Let’s look at the map. Let’s look at how chess actually models power. It does so through four fundamental concepts. Position, Materiel, Initiative, and Checkmate. Position. Where are your pieces? Do you control the center of the board? In warfare position is geography. Do you hold the high ground on the battlefield? But in politics, position is Institutional Capture. Are you in control of the House, Senate and Presidency? Or is your total influence some underfunded NGOs and academic departments in Gender Studies? Materiel. How many pieces do you have on the board? Have you got your rooks? Your bishops? Or are you down to a single, traumatized pawn shivering behind a king who has completely lost control of the situation? Materiel in politics is people and capital. How many senators and judges do you have? Who are your billionaire backers? Initiative. Who is doing the doing? Are you dictating the pace of the game, forcing your opponent to react to your threats? Or are you constantly on the back foot, defending, scrambling, apologizing? Initiative in politics is the news cycle. It is the narrative. Donald Trump is incompetent and most things, but his political brilliance is in winning the narrative, and holding the initiative. Checkmate. The end. The absolute cessation of the opponent’s ability to resist. The realization that there are no legal moves left. In Chess the king is never destroyed. He is trapped. The aim of politics is not to destroy but to entrap your opponents and make them pieces in your in future battles. Now, imagine politics in the year 2026 as a massive game of chess. Played on a board of near infinite size, with a vast number of players and pieces that all have their own agendas. Keep that in mind, we’re going to think about a game like that very soon. With a few exceptions, like New York mayor Zoran Mamdani, the Left seems determined to lose at chess, by adopting strategies that cannot win. The Right-wing Advantage and the Liberal Game Here is the brutal political reality. The Right have a massive, almost insurmountable advantage in this game. Why? Because all they do is play to win. The Right don’t care if the knight is supposed to move in an L-shape. If the referee isn’t looking, they will pick up the knight, smash it into the side of your head, and declare a glorious victory for traditional family values. They understand materiel. They understand initiative. They will sacrifice the pawns. My god, will they sacrifice the pawns. They will sacrifice all the pawns in their stupid red hats if it means the King gets a slight tax break. They play the map of power exactly as it is designed to be played and the win. Liberals have it much harder. Liberals play to win ethically. A liberal sits at the chess board and says, “Well, I could take that bishop, but has the bishop been offered a negotiated settlement? Have we done an environmental impact study on moving this rook to D4? Is it fair that the Queen has so much mobility while the pawns are downwardly mobile professionals? We should probably form a committee.” The great triumph of liberalism – the reason we are not all currently living in a Mad Max dystopia paying tithes to a local warlord – is that liberalism triumphed by LIMITING the game. They introduced rules. They introduced HR departments, and human rights tribunals, and the concept of “democracy.” The launched a four hundred year offensive to make the game survivable and they won. What a pragmatic liberal like Contrapoints is worried about, deep down beneath the corsets and the neon lighting, is that this hard-won advantage, this delicate, limited game of liberal democracy, will be entirely lost if we succumb to playing “Leftist Chess.” Because she knows, as anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes in a left-wing organizing meeting knows, that Leftist Chess is an unremitting fucking disaster. How Leftist Factions Play Chess If you want to know why Leftists always lose, you just have to watch them play the game. Let us break down the factions. It’s a very rich tapestry of failure. And because I know how chill and open to critique Leftists factions are, I’m sure you’ll all take this with good humour. The Utopian Socialists They refuse to start the game. They look at the mass-produced, factory-molded board and declare it a symptom of profound spiritual alienation. They demand the board be remade as a circle, and the squares must be abolished, because alternating black and white squares enforces the brutalist, soul-crushing logic of the industrial loom. They sit there, cross-legged, weaving a new, non-competitive game out of locally sourced hemp, while the Right-wing player silently reaches across the board and takes their King. The Orthodox Marxists The Orthodox Marxist sits at the board, folds their arms, and does absolutely nothing. They have read the theory. They understand the dialectic. They know, with absolute scientific certainty, that the contradictions inherent in the opponent’s opening strategy will inevitably lead to the collapse of their position. Moving a piece would be adventurism. It would delay the inevitable historical process. The Conservative player checkmates them in four moves. They claim this checkmate proves they were right all along. The Leninists The Leninist arrives at the table and immediately establishes a “vanguard party” consisting entirely of their own Rooks. They execute the opponent’s pawns. Then, just to be safe, they execute half of their own pawns for exhibiting counter-revolutionary tendencies. They declare victory. Five years later, the Rooks realize they are now just playing capitalism, but with worse food and more concrete. The Right wing player wins by default. The Stalinists The Stalinist plays exactly like the Leninist, but after executing their own pawns, they meticulously airbrush those pawns out of all the official tournament photographs, and if you point out that the pawns used to be there, you are sent to a gulag located on square H8. The Social Democrats Ah, the Social Democrats. Bless them. They start the game by apologizing for being there. They try to implement a welfare state for the pawns, funded by a tax on the King’s diagonal movements. They are then brutally crushed by a nakedly aggressive Conservative Queen who has offshored all her wealth to a different board altogether. The Democratic Socialists The Democratic Socialists spend three and a half hours agonizing over whether moving a pawn is a betrayal of the working class. They hold a plenary session and after intense factional infighting, they reach a historic compromise where they agree to move a pawn one square forward only with a unanimous vote of other pawns, before realising all their pawns have now been taken by the Right wing knights. They write an academic paper about it. The Anarchists The Anarchists insist that the game can have no rules. They immediately declare the center of the board a temporary autonomous zone. Knights attempting to move in an L are beaten with sticks and anyone asking what the rules are is targeted with a bombing campaign to preserve the “principles of non-violence”. After declaring them terrorists the Right wing player has them rendered to a black site and rewrites the rules to his own advantage. The Trotskyists declare their own side ideologically impure and form a splinter group before the game can begin. The Internet Tankies lose every game specifically so they can accuse it of being a CIA backed colour revolution. Hasan Piker chess is played on a pearl inlaid board with solid gold and silver pieces made by Cartier. And the liberals. The dull, stolid liberals pop in their ear buds to listen to Ezra Klein and make one cautious, boring move after another, slowly, surely accruing material advantage, trading initiative for position, and close in on Checkmate… …only to be removed from the players seat by a populist Left who want cheaper bus fares. Contrapoints looks at this absolute circus of self-sabotage, ideological purity spirals, and historical LARPing, and she is right to doubt it. She is right to say, “Maybe, just maybe, we should try to actually win the game of chess we are currently forced to play, rather than pretending we are playing a different game entirely.” But she, and other pragmatic somewhat dull liberals, miss something essential. The Player of Games If you want to understand the solution to all of this, you shouldn’t be reading political theory. You should be reading Scottish science fiction. Specifically, you should be reading Iain M. Banks. In Banks’ 1988 novel The Player of Games, we are introduced to a society called the Empire of Azad. The Empire of Azad is held together entirely by a staggeringly complex board game, also called Azad. The game is the system, and the system is the game. Your social standing, your political power, your entire life is determined by how well you play Azad. And that system is as brutal as they come. Late in the story we are shown the “secret channels” the Azadian Epstein class watch livestream torture and murder. The protagonist, a man named Jernau Morat Gurgeh, comes from a post-scarcity, fully automated luxury space communist society called the Culture. Morat means “gameplayer”. Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the greatest gameplayer in the Culture, is sent to the Empire of Azad to play them at their own game. He doesn’t go there and complain that the game is unfair. He doesn’t go there and write a blog about how the board is structurally oppressive. He doesn’t try to organize the game pieces into a syndicalist commune. He sits down. He learns the rules. He plays. And he wins. And in winning, destroys the game entirely. There is a lesson here. Two lessons, actually. One for the Leftists, and one for the Liberals. The lesson for Leftists is this: The only way to change the game is to win. You cannot ignore the map of power. You cannot wish it away with purity tests and theoretically flawless critiques published in obscure journals. If you want chess to fuck off and die, you cannot achieve that by refusing to play. You have to sit down at the board, look the bastard across from you in the eye, and systematically, relentlessly dismantle their position. You have to master position, materiel, and initiative. You have to learn to corner your opponent, reduce their possible moves to zero and force checkmate. You have to beat them at their own game before you can flip the table, burn the board and shred all the pieces. The lesson for Liberals, however, is this: The only way to really win is to transcend the system. In The Player of Games, Gurgeh doesn’t just beat the Emperor of Azad by playing the Emperor’s style of game better than the Emperor. He beats him by playing his own style. He plays a style of game that reflects the values of his own, utopian, egalitarian society. He plays so fluidly, so beautifully, and so completely outside the narrow, brutal, fascistic paradigm of his opponent, that the game itself, and the Empire based on the game, are destroyed forever. Liberals like Contrapoints want to protect the limited rules of the game because those hard won rules keep us safe. And they are right, in the short term. But in the long term, Chess always ends with carnage. You must play not to preserve a slightly better version of the game, but to transcend Chess entirely. You have to play to win, yes. But you have to play in a way that proves a better world is possible. You have to master the board not to become the King, but to demonstrate that the very concept of the King is obsolete. And you did this once. Liberals deposed the kings, established democracy, won human rights. Then you just fucking gave up. You decided your expensive cities and more expensive college degrees were enough. You stopped playing to change the the game and started just…playing the game. Chess is the King of Games. It is a map of power. But maps can be redrawn. And Kings, historically speaking, can be removed from the board entirely. You just have to be willing to make the move. Listen to the podcast audio here
June 1 · 24 min - SF
2026 : the year World War 3 begins
To my Gen-X compatriots, to the Boomers and Millenials, and to Gen-Z who will have to clean up this mess we all made… …can we agree that Star Trek is the future we would all like? A future in which poverty is eradicated, disease is a mere curiosity of the past, humanity has put aside petty squabbles over resources, borders, and skin melanin and replaced all of that sh*t with a collective, enlightenment-driven pursuit of knowledge and self-betterment. A future in which humanity has – to use the rigorous academic term – Grown The Fuck Up Watch the full video essay here SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Is Star Trek a future we can all agree on? Let us tune out the ideological zealots, the Tankies and the Nazis, who treat our planetary collapse as a competitive team sport, and among the exhausted, fact-based majority, agree on Star Trek as our shared prize. When we look at the USS Enterprise we do not just see a starship, we see a perfectly calibrated, post-scarcity society. It is the ultimate manifestation of what contemporary political theorists affectionately call FALC: Fully Automated Luxury Communism… in space. Let’s place ourselves at the intersection of eschatology, speculative fiction, and macro-economics and ask a question of Star Trek – specifically, the teleological trajectory required to actually achieve the utopian federation depicted within it. Put in layman’s terms–how the fuck do we *get* to Star Trek? Because there is, unfortunately, one catastrophic, glaring problem with this cultural lodestone. In the canonical lore of the Star Trek universe, this magnificent, post-scarcity utopia does not emerge from a peaceful, democratic transition. It does not arrive because a coalition of enlightened centrist politicians finally passed the right carbon tax. It happens exclusively on the other side of World War III – a global, thermonuclear, and genetic holocaust that wipes out a third of the Earth’s population and plunges the survivors into a radioactive dark age. And, according to the deeply unsettling timeline of the Star Trek universe, that war starts right here. Right now. In 2026. Check your watches, ladies and gentlemen. We are right on schedule. PART ONE: WW3 AND STAR TREK Signs of WW3 in 2026 I do not need to remind you that it is currently 2026, and the geopolitical dashboard is flashing red across every conceivable metric. We are witnessing an unprecedented convergence of systemic stressors that makes the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a polite disagreement over a parking space. Check your newsfeed, or simply look out the window We have the protracted, grinding meat-grinder of the Ukraine war, acting as a proxy battlefield for nuclear superpowers and playground for combat robot gen 1 Terminators. We have Iran and the broader Middle East locked in a collapsing spiral of kinetic retaliation, vaporising the very oil reserves America started yet another war to secure. We are drowning in an epistemological nightmare of disinformation, where shared objective reality has fractured into bespoke, algorithmically curated psychotic echo chambers so deranged they make Alex Jones look like a reliable source. Economic inequality has reached a velocity where billionaires are literally launching themselves into the exosphere while the proletariat attempts to crowdfund their insulin. Consequently, fascism is no longer a historical curiosity confined to black-and-white footage. It is once again a rising, viable, mainstream electoral strategy. Immigrants are being demonised and minorities persecuted. Germany and Japan are re-arming. If this all looks spookily like the events that drove us through WW1 and WW2 that’s because the systems which caused those wars are once again driving us towards global arma-fucking-geddon. Which is what we’re really here to think about, not human morality or high drama, but cold, machine logic, the systems driving us to war. And the one system that those of you in the know will see lurking behind all the others. A system whose name we shall not utter…until later. And what Star Trek, the ultimate work of systems fiction, can teach us about those systems. Why WW3 Happened in Star Trek We must first examine why World War III happened in the Star Trek continuity. Originally, the writers in the late 1960s, operating under the assumption that the Cold War would inevitably go hot, placed the Eugenics Wars and the precursor to WW3 in the 1990s. When we miraculously survived the 90s with nothing more distasteful than dial-up internet and Nu-Metal, the lore was continuously retconned. The canonical window for the end of the world is now established as 2026 to 2054. What the writers of Star Trek intuitively grasped, and what modern science fiction authors like William Gibson have explicitly codified, and what we have already explored together in the channel, is the concept of “The Jackpot.” The Jackpot is not a single, catastrophic Michael Bay explosion. It is a multifactorial collapse. It is what happens when climate change, pandemics, economic implosion, and localized nuclear exchanges all decide to book onto the same budget holiday tour to Earth. The specific causes of WW3 in Trek lore reflect this multifactorial nightmare: Eco-collapse: The environment degrades to the point where resource scarcity triggers mass migration and border wars. We’re already close to the 216 million climate refugees predicted by 2050 Colonel Green and “Humanity First”: The rise of ecofascism, when the elites who caused climate catastrophe start using it as another excuse to persecute the victims, spearheaded by a charismatic military man who justifies mass culling under the banner of preserving a pure, surviving humanity. Is Humanity First better or worse than America first? Maybe they’re both just the same old xenophobia in a new package. The Eugenics Wars: The disastrous byproduct of unregulated biotechnology and genetic engineering, leading to augmented transhumans (like Khan Noonien Singh) who view baseline humanity as a biological relic meant to be subjugated. Today’s “transhumanists” freezing their heads in cryo and sucking stem cells out of teenagers are just a foretaste of what is to come. What Is Systems Thinking? To understand how these fictional events map so terrifyingly well onto our current reality, we must engage in “Systems Thinking.” In pre-modern times, human beings lacked the ontological framework to understand complex, interconnected crises. In layman’s terms : we didn’t know why the fuck things went wrong. When crops failed, plagues spread, and empires fell, we blamed systemic problems on “powers and principalities.” We blamed demons, angry gods, witches, or that goat with the funny eyes. We lacked the cognitive tools to understand that the problem was not acting upon the system from the outside; the problem was inherent in the system. In the modern scientific age, we utilize systems thinking. We define a system as any interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. A nation, a dog, an economy, the M25 ring road, are all systems. If you look at a traffic jam on the M25, the pre-modern thinker blames the evil spirit of the highway. The systems thinker maps the feedback loops of urban planning, population density, and individual commuter incentives. And don’t start assuming just being alive in 2026 makes you a systems thinker. How many of us stuck in a traffic still bkame Jesus Fucking Christ? How many of us look at the systemic issues of climate change and blame Jeffrey in Norwich for not separating his tins from his plastics? The ancient practice of “scapegoating” that was exploited by a British Petroleum ad campaign in 2004 to make us blame each other and not… …the system Star Trek as Systems Fiction And those of us who can manage some systems thinking today can do so in part because of Star Trek. Star Trek is one of the few enduring pieces of popular media that operates as “systems fiction.” Every episode the Enterprise arrives at a new planet and analyses it AS A SYSTEM. When the Enterprise visits a planet where half the population exploits the other half, Picard doesn’t just punch the alien leader. Ok, yes, Kirk did sometimes often just punch the alien leader. But our Philosopher King analyzes their resource allocation, their historical dialectic, and the systemic flaws in their socio-economic paradigm. He operates as an intergalactic systems auditor. Star Trek is not a unique sample of systems fiction. The greatest science fiction – Frank Herbert’s Dune, everything by Ursula K Le Guin, the works of Octavia Butler, or Thomas Pynchon, or Don Delillo – are also systems fiction. Systems FICTION matters because stories are one of humankind’s most powerful…systems. We think and live in stories. Frank Herbert’s Dune takes all the systems of an entire planet and funnels them down into one anti-heroic story. But systems thinking is rare, oh so rare, in mass media. Star Trek was virtually a lone bastion of systemic analysis in 20th century mass culture. Given to us by one of the great science fiction imaginations. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Trek, was a systems thinker. Roddenberry didn’t write Star Trek, he conceived it. He built the playground others would play in to create season after season of mind blowing systems fiction. And, crucially, Roddenberry understood that complex adaptive systems—like global civilization—do not change their fundamental operating rules voluntarily. They change only because the parts of the system, us, humanity, grow the fuck up. Or when the failure to grow the fuck up subjects the system to a catastrophic shock that shatters the existing paradigm. Roddenberry believed that to get to Star Trek, humanity had to go through WW3. The old system had to be violently dismantled because it was fundamentally incapable of reforming itself from within. Was he correct? Part Two – The Systems of World War 3: A Typology of Doom Imagine the classic scifi thought experiment – an alien arrives on Earth and judges our primitive society. But this is no alien. This is Captain Jean Luc Picard, in orbit in the Enterprise-D, looking down upon us…severely. Not because our problems are serious. Picard is a compassionate man and if we were doomed by, say, the impending collapse of the planetary crust, he would move heaven and earth to save…Earth. No. Picard looks down on early 21st century humanity because our problems are dumb and we fail to solve them only because we are too greedy. Why are we so obsessed with the green paper tokens we use for resource allocation? Why don’t we just fairly share our resources, from each according to our capacity, to each according to their need? Why are the factories owned by a tiny elite who mostly live in Dubai, Monaco or Manhattan? Why are the means of production not owned by the workers? Why would 21st century humanity rather fight a third global war than chill out and focus on cool things like exploring the final frontier? And most of all Picard would scowl down upon the one system driving all others to their doom. Let us now examine the specific systemic architectures currently operating in our 2026 reality that are leading us, with mathematical inevitability, toward the precipice. Here I have compiled the many systems leading to WW3 into a literal listicle of doom. Existential Tech We are the first generations in the history of the Earth to possess the technological capacity to enact our own extinction. A stone axe can cause a nasty flesh wound, a nuke can vaporise a civilization. This is a profound systemic shift. The proliferation of nuclear arsenals under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) created a system where peace is maintained only by a perpetual hostage situation. But it is no longer just nukes. The democratization of biotechnology means that CRISPR gene-editing kits can be purchased by any mildly alienated terrorist group. And the incentives of the free market system mean that no state can choose to *not* build such dangerous toys or risk losing out. Existential tech proliferates exponentially while wisdom declines even faster. Disinfo: The Semiotic Collapse A civilization cannot survive if it cannot agree on basic epistemological reality. No human population in which a significant percentage can be convinced the Earth is flat or that Lex Fridman is an intellectual can expect to survive long. We have built a global communications architecture optimized not for truth, but for clicks, resulting in a semiotic collapse, where propaganda, deepfakes, and algorithmic hallucinations have severed the signifier from the signified. A society trapped in a Baudrillardian hyperreality – unable to distinguish between a genuine geopolitical threat and an AI-generated psy-op designed to manipulate a stock price or a prediction market. Because in our global digital media the truth belongs to whoever pays. Unipolar Hegemony Following the Cold War, the global system reorganized around a single unipolar hegemon. Which worked kind of until the hegemon had a mid-life crisis and decided it couldn’t be f*cked anymore. The American empire is like late career Elvis. Everything that seemed “cool” until quite recently – the hamburgers, the aircraft carriers, the global financial system – seems suddenly obsolete, kitsch and a tad embarrassing. But the desperate flailing of a declining empire attempting to enforce a unipolar reality on an increasingly multipolar world is a system doomed to generate … doom. Multipolarity Game Theory Collapse Conversely, the transition to multipolarity offers no salvation. In a multipolar system with multiple nuclear-armed actors (state and non-state), traditional Cold War game theory collapses. John Nash’s equilibrium only works when the variables are limited and actors are … rational. In a world with seven or eight or two dozen nuclear powers, all acting on differing ideological, religious, and economic imperatives, the game theory matrix becomes incomprehensibly complex. The system shifts from a predictable standoff to a chaotic n-body problem, where a localized skirmish cascades unpredictably into a zero-sum, planet-wide thermonuclear exchange. Eco-collapse and Resource Wars The global economic system is predicated on the delusion of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. This is a terminal systemic error. As we cross planetary boundaries—ocean acidification, topsoil depletion, atmospheric carbon saturation—the carrying capacity of the Earth plummets. Eco-collapse forces the system into a brutal contraction. When the equatorial regions become uninhabitable, we will see climate migration on the scale of billions. Borders will harden, supply chains will snap, and nations will invariably go to war over access to arable land, fresh water, and rare earth minerals. It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, enforced by artillery. Religious Fundamentalism Systems of extreme religious fundamentalism operate on an eschatological death drive. While secular states might go to war for resources or security, fundamentalist systems operate on a theological teleology that actually desires the end of the world. When you inject nuclear or biological capabilities into a systemic worldview that views the apocalypse not as a failure state, but as a divine prophecy and a prerequisite for salvation, deterrence theory is rendered utterly moot. You cannot deter an actor who believes that mutually assured destruction is merely the quickest transit route back to Jesus. The Military-Industrial Complex The system that Eisenhower warned against is not a defensive apparatus, it is an autonomous, self-replicating economic algorithm that converts human blood and public tax dollars into shareholder dividends. By intentionally fracturing its manufacturing supply chains across multiple legislative districts, it has perfectly captured the political process. The system cannot sustain infinite financial growth without continuous kinetic consumption, meaning geopolitical friction must be structurally manufactured to justify the endless production of precision-guided ordnance. World Peace is now literally too expensive. When your fundamental economic paradigm requires the perpetual destruction of surplus capital and human lives just to meet quarterly profit targets, the equation simplifies itself with terrifying mathematical certainty: capitalism is war. Fascism: The Weakness of the Masses Drawing on Wilhelm Reich and Deleuze and Guattari, fascism is not merely a political structure; it is a psychological system. It is a symptom of the psychic inadequacy and the weakness of the masses, who, under conditions of extreme economic and social stress, actively desire their own repression. The fascist system relies on the perpetual construction of an “Other” to blame for systemic failures. Because this system is inherently irrational and requires constant escalation to maintain its internal cohesion, its only logical endpoint is an aestheticized politics of total annihilation. It is a suicide pact masquerading as national rebirth. The Great Filter The Fermi Paradox asks: if the universe is so vast, where is everyone? Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” theory provides the systemic answer. The evolutionary leap from a single-planet species to a multi-planetary, star-faring civilization contains a systemic bottleneck—a filter—that almost no species survives. As we survey the cascading crises of 2026, it is overwhelmingly apparent that we are currently slamming face-first into this filter. The combination of god-like technology and primate-level emotional regulation suggests that intelligence itself might be a lethal evolutionary dead-end, a system inherently prone to self-termination. Algorithmic Escalation Ladder We have integrated autonomous, machine-learning algorithms into our global financial and military infrastructure. These systems operate at speeds incomprehensible to human cognition. We have seen financial “flash crashes” where algorithms triggered massive economic destruction in seconds. If we apply this same systemic architecture to military early-warning and response protocols, we risk an Algorithmic Escalation Ladder. An AI, processing a false data point, initiates a counter-measure, triggering an opposing AI’s response loop. World War 3 could begin and end in the space of three milliseconds, entirely bypassing human agency. Sandpile Effect: Self-Organized Criticality Finally, we must look to physics, specifically Per Bak’s concept of self-organized criticality, often referred to as the Sandpile Effect. If you drop sand grain by grain, it builds a pile until it reaches a critical state. Once at this state, dropping one more grain of sand will trigger an avalanche. You cannot predict which grain will cause it, or how large the avalanche will be, only that the system is structurally poised for collapse. The global geopolitical and economic system in 2026 is a critical sandpile. The inciting incident for WW3 will not be a grand, rational policy decision. It will be an errant drone strike, a localized bank run, a misinterpreted tweet – a single, microscopic grain of sand that triggers the total, systemic avalanche. CONCLUSION : The system driving all systems So, Boomers, Zoomers, Alphas, Millenials, and Xers, we arrive at the conclusion of our systems analysis. The Bad News is mathematically bleak. EVERY system currently operating on this planet is leading directly toward World War 3. And behind those multifarious systems is a singular system. Capitalism. Capitalism demands infinite growth on a finite planet and relentless resource extraction. Our global hegemon is capitalist. Our multipolar powers are trapped in capitalist competition. Capitalism cannot stop building existential tech and capitalism is the military industrial complex. Capitalism, as we have heard, is war. The feedback loops of endless extraction, engineered scarcity, military-industrial profit motives, and hyper-individualistic consumption are all converging on the exact same coordinate: complete and utter global collapse. And the burning nuclear fires of World War 3. Star Trek gives us hope The post-WW3 future of Roddenberry’s vision is different from our current reality in one massive, inescapable way: It is inherently and structurally post-capitalist. Call it Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Call it Utopia. Call it space socialism. You cannot have a society where energy is virtually infinite, matter can be synthesized from thin air, and human labor is entirely voluntary, and still enforce a system based on artificial scarcity, wage labor, and quarterly profit margins. The existence of the replicator fundamentally destroys the capitalist mode of production. And as our society moves, however staggeringly, towards post-scarcity. As digitisation and the internet make many goods zero marginal cost, and as the looming spectre of AI and robotics automates work. The potential of a post-scarcity society is there for us to grasp, if we can find a path to post-capitalism. But capitalism will not let go without a fight Roddenberry’s thesis was that the capitalist hegemony would, rather than voluntarily relinquish its systemic dominance, initiate a global thermonuclear war. Roddenberry’s terrible prophecy is not just good television; it is rigorous systemic analysis. The prevailing socio-economic order cannot, and will not, voluntarily relinquish its power. It will drive the ship into the sun before it allows the crew to form a union. The Good News, hypothetically speaking, is remarkably simple. All we need to do to avoid the nuclear fire and skip straight to the Federation is transcend capitalism. We simply need to abandon the artificial limitations of our economic paradigms, recognize our shared planetary reality, distribute resources equitably, and finally grow the fuck up. Which brings us, tragically, to the final piece of Bad News. All we need to do is grow up. Yep. We’re cooked. Listen here
May 16 · 32 min - SF
You don’t understand science fiction
There is a single narrative technique that connects almost every multi-billion dollar science fiction franchise ever made. It is the invisible engine powering the most successful stories of the last century. And yet, if you ask ten working Hollywood screenwriters what it is, nine of them will give you a blank stare—and the tenth will probably try to sell you a $200 course on “worldbuilding.” Think about the heaviest hitters in science fiction today. Take Fallout. The reason that universe is so compelling isn’t just because Bethesda really loves 1950s aesthetics and dank radiation memes. It’s built on one specific, structural cheat code. Look at Jurassic Park. The terror doesn’t actually come from the CGI T-Rex; it comes from one, very isolated scientific premise. Or look at the box office juggernaut Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir didn’t write a sprawling space opera, he built a meticulous puzzle box around exactly one new rule of biology. Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in This isn’t just a modern blockbuster trend, either. This is the foundational DNA of science fiction. It is the exact same tool Mary Shelley used to accidentally invent science fiction with Frankenstein back in 1818 just because she was bored on vacation. It’s the same mechanism H.G. Wells used to absolutely terrify Victorian readers by showing them what it was like to be invaded by Victorian colonialists in The War of the Worlds. It is so deeply fundamental to the mechanics of creating a meaningful scifi world that every great from Arthur C Clarke to Ursula K Le Guin uses it without even giving it a name. Even fantasy writers, when they can stop calculating the exchange values of the seven major currencies in their world, actually do this. Even if J.R.R. Tolkien would probably rise from the grave to write a strongly worded letter in Elvish denying it. It’s RIGHT there in Lord of the Rings. Like a One Ring of power. Yes I did write that whole paragraph to make that pun. But it’s also true. Every great sci-fi writer is using this tool, whether they know the academic term for it or not. It is the ultimate storytelling power-up. And once you see it, you will never look at a “worldbuilding bible” the same way again. Right now I can divide you all into two groups. Group A are the ambitious power hungry young writers who want to be the next Brandon Sanderson by using this one easy trick. Group B are the creative purists who are recoiling in horror “NO! I will not sully my unique artistic vision with this HACK!” But all I’m doing is putting a new, powerful, sonic screwdriver in your scifi toolkit. What you do with it is all about you. And if you have no interest in telling scifi stories, this is also just a great way to understand them. Aaaand Group C…who already clicked ahead in the timeline to find out what the fuck I am talking about while muttering about getting to the point. So let’s get to the point. But before we get to the point of giving this thing its proper, intimidatingly academic name, let’s look at what screenwriters usually call it when they’re trying to sound smart in a pitch meeting. A lot of writers refer to it as the “One Big Lie.” This is the single, massive falsehood you demand your audience swallow right on page one, just so the rest of the story can function. It’s the author holding the reader hostage and saying, “Look, just accept that we can fold spacetime using spice addicted worms, okay? How do the warp drives *work*? Dilithium Crystamathingy. Do not look at the math, we have a socio-political metaphor disguised as a planet to get to.” Futurists and tech-adjacent folks like to call it the “Shock.” This is the specific piece of fictional technology that drops into a society and immediately shatters the status quo. Just take any William Gibson novel, extract the unique tech, that’s the Shock. Meanwhile, the alt-history buffs call it the “Point of Divergence”—the exact moment on the timeline where the fictional world violently swerves away from our actual, exponentially more depressing reality. All of these are…fine? They vaguely point at the right idea. But the sharpest, most precise term for this tool—the one that will actually fix your broken script and stop you from wasting another three weeks designing the fictional tax code of a moon colony no one cares about—is The Novum. Latin for “the new thing.” It’s a term coined by literary scholars who desperately needed to sound rigorous while analyzing tentacle faced aliens wielding space lasers in the 1970s. That literary scholar being Darko Suvin. The OG of the academic field of science fiction studies. Think of Professor Suvin as your Severus Snape, here to teach you Defence Against The Dark Arts…and we all know what that really means. But we’ll come back to Cognitive Estrangement. Because in practical storytelling terms, the Novum is the scientifically plausible innovation, discovery, or historical shift that forces a society to completely rewire itself. It isn’t just a cool gadget your hero uses to shoot the bad guy. It is the inciting incident not just for your plot, but for your entire fucking universe. INTERVAL: The Crucial Distinction (Or: Why a Novum is NOT a F***ing MacGuffin) Before we get to the master list, we need to clear up a massive misconception. Because right now, there is a very specific type of aging film student watching this who is confidently thinking, “Oh, I get it. The Novum. It’s just a MacGuffin.” No. Stop. Put the glowing briefcase down. Alfred Hitchcock popularized the concept of the MacGuffin. It is an object, a device, or a piece of information that all the characters desperately want. It exists solely to give everyone a reason to be in the same room. The Death Star plans in Star Wars. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. But here is the defining trait of a MacGuffin: It is entirely, one hundred percent arbitrary. You can completely swap out the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction for a bag of blood diamonds, the nuclear launch codes, or a mint-condition holographic Charizard card, and the plot remains exactly the same. Vincent and Jules still show up at the apartment, they still shoot Brett, and they still go get breakfast. The MacGuffin only drives the plot. The Novum is entirely different. The Novum drives the world. You cannot swap it out. It is structurally load-bearing. If you swap the viable dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park for a bag of stolen diamonds, the entire universe collapses. There is no theme park. There is no catastrophic failure of a biological ecosystem. There is just an eccentric old billionaire staring at a shiny rock in a helicopter. If you swap the simulated reality of The Matrix for a stolen microchip, you don’t have a cyberpunk philosophical awakening; you just have a very confusing Keanu Reeves action movie where people wear too much leather indoors. A MacGuffin is just a lazy excuse for your characters to run around and shoot at each other. A Novum is the foundational rule of physics that dictates why they are running, how they are shooting, and the structural reality of the very ground they are running on. TWO: The Kinda Complete List of Sci-Fi Novums The Blockbuster Novum Let’s start with the crowd-pleasers. This is the Novum distilled into pure, highly marketable adrenaline. The Blockbuster Novum doesn’t require the audience to hold a degree in sociology, and more importantly, it doesn’t require a studio executive to read past page one of the treatment. It is the ultimate elevator pitch. Instead of rewriting all of global human society, the Blockbuster Novum creates a highly isolated, extremely volatile sandbox where things can spectacularly blow up. Look at Jurassic Park. The Novum is perfectly constrained: Viable dinosaur DNA can be extracted from fossilized amber. That’s it. It doesn’t cure cancer. It doesn’t solve world hunger or alter global geopolitics. It just acts as the singular scientific catalyst for a standard, hubristic tech billionaire to build a theme park that immediately eats its own lawyers. Or consider Inception. The Novum is the PASIV device—a machine that allows for shared dreaming. Christopher Nolan doesn’t waste time explaining how this technology affects the global economy or the healthcare system. He just uses it to upgrade the standard corporate espionage thriller into a heist movie set entirely inside the human subconscious. When done right, this type of Novum is an instant engine for action. It’s the single “What If” that launches a billion-dollar franchise. Cue the rapid-fire action montage: The Terminator: A defense network achieves localized self-awareness and invents time travel strictly to clean up its own administrative errors. Minority Report: Three mutated humans can accurately predict murders before they happen, turning the justice system into an inescapable, pre-emptive bureaucracy. District 9: Aliens aren’t invaders or philosophers; they’re just working-class refugees whose ship broke down over Johannesburg, instantly creating a localized apartheid state. Avatar: A planetary ecology functions as a biological internet, which unfortunately sits right on top of the most valuable rock in the universe. Edge of Tomorrow: Exposure to alien blood physically resets the temporal day upon death, turning a galactic war into a lethal video game speedrun. Back to the Future: The Flux Capacitor makes time travel entirely possible, provided you have access to weapons-grade plutonium and a DeLorean that can somehow hit 88 miles per hour in a mall parking lot. These are the cash cows. They take one impossible thing, make it the law of physics for exactly two hours, and let the chaos unfold. The Literary Novum Now we shift gears from the Hollywood executives to the authors who want to win Hugo awards and make the reader feel slightly inadequate about their intellect. The Literary Novum isn’t built to optimise action figure sales. You aren’t going to get a lot of space battles or laser swords here. Instead, these are pure sociological thought experiments. The author takes one fundamental, unshakeable rule of human existence or the physical universe, alters it, and then meticulously—almost clinically—tracks the psychological and cultural fallout. Take Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness. The Novum is a biologically ambisexual human race. The inhabitants of Gethen only manifest a sex drive or specific gender characteristics for a few days a month. By removing fixed sexual dimorphism from the equation, Le Guin builds a complex society completely free of the patriarchal and matriarchal power dynamics that define our entire history. It’s a Novum so powerful it actually turns our own real-world gender constructs into the “alien” concept. Don’t worry if you didn’t understand any of that. That is kind of the point of Literary Novums?…Novae? Or look at Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. The Novum is the titular three body problem: a neighboring star system with three suns that create an unsolvable, wildly chaotic orbital cycle. It forces the native alien civilization into a perpetual cycle of apocalyptic trauma. This single astrophysical fact perfectly and logically explains exactly why they would be so ruthlessly, coldly focused on stealing our boring, stable planet. And it’s also a clear metaphor for the Capitalist powers that colonised China, when you think about it. This type of Novum is heavy, thoughtful, and usually leaves you staring at a wall for twenty minutes after finishing the book. Cue the montage of literary devastation: Dune: A narcotic dust called the Spice Melange allows for prescience and faster-than-light travel, instantly turning a miserable, giant-worm-infested sandbox into the ultimate economic choke point of a galactic feudal monopoly. The Handmaid’s Tale: A catastrophic global plummet in human fertility is immediately weaponized to build a theocratic nightmare. Fahrenheit 451: We figured out how to make all houses completely fireproof, so society logically repurposed the fire department to exclusively burn contraband literature. That’s a joke. Do NOT leave that pedantic comment! Just checking you’re paying attention and haven’t been virtually lobotomized by hyper saturated media that destroys your capacity for critical thinking. Neuromancer: The invention of the cybernetic deck, which allows hyper-caffeinated hackers to jack directly into a visual, navigable consensus hallucination called cyberspace. Or…is cyberspace the novum? Hmmm. Children of Time: Spiders. Something about space spiders. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Blade Runner: The invention of “replicants” who are more human than human, testing our capacity for empathy. The Ideological Novum Now we move from sociology to pure politics. This is where the Novum stops being a fun thought experiment and becomes a weaponized worldview. The Ideological Novum bends the physical rules of reality into Attack Mode. The author is essentially rigging the game. By inventing a specific physical or biological law, they create a universe where their personal political philosophy isn’t just an opinion – it’s a mandatory survival tactic. Look at China Miéville’s The City & the City. The Novum here is geographic and psychological: Two hostile cities occupy the exact same physical space, and the citizens are legally and mentally conditioned to “unsee” the other. If you acknowledge a building or a person from the other city, you are disappeared by a shadowy secret police. Miéville takes the very real, very mundane concept of urban inequality and class segregation and turns it into a physical, unbreakable law of physics. Or consider Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a novum that rewrites the social contract: Political authority and the right to vote can only be earned through grueling, highly lethal Federal Service. Heinlein rigs the universe to prove his point. In the world of the book, this isn’t fascism; it is the only logical way to build a stable, hyper-competent society that doesn’t collapse under its own weight. To be clear Starship Troopers doesn’t just contain this novum, the entire book exists to present the case for Heinlein’s idea. And power armour. Mieville and Heinlein are political ideologues who know exactly what they are doing. But then, you get the fascinating category of Accidental Ideologue. This is when an author creates a Novum that completely exposes their own unexamined, unconscious biases, usually while trying to write something else entirely. Consider Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Cline clearly thinks he is writing a punk-rock, anti-capitalist rebellion against a tyrannical mega-corporation. But look at his Novum: The OASIS, a fully immersive global VR utopia whose ownership is locked behind a Willy Wonka-style scavenger hunt of 1980s pop culture trivia. Cline’s Novum accidentally reveals a completely consumerist, neoliberal ideology. In this universe, the highest possible form of human achievement isn’t art, science, or empathy – it is furiously consuming and memorizing late-20th-century media. The “heroic” solution to this dystopia isn’t dismantling the horrifying techno-feudal monopoly; it’s just making sure the right kind of hyper-obsessive nerd is sitting on the corporate throne at the end. Klein accidentally wrote a glowing defense of late-stage techno-oligarchy, simply because his unexamined ideology is that pop-culture trivia makes you morally superior. When you start looking for the Ideological Novum, it is everywhere. Cue the politically charged montage: Foundation (Isaac Asimov): The Novum is Psychohistory—a mathematical formula that accurately predicts the future of large populations. It perfectly exposes Asimov’s unconscious, mid-century technocratic elitism: the belief that the masses are basically mathematical cattle, and true governance should be handed to a secretive elite of STEM majors doing advanced calculus. The Mote in God’s Eye (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle): An alien species biologically trapped in a cycle of unstoppable overpopulation, making diplomacy mathematically impossible and neatly justifying a pre-emptive, imperial defense stance. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): The Bokanovsky Process allows for the biological mass-production of cloned, predestined embryos, physically manifesting the rigid British class system into inescapable genetics. Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers): Aliens visit Earth, but they don’t conquer us or share wisdom. They just stop on the side of the cosmic highway, throw their incomprehensible, deadly trash out the window, and drive off. Warhammer 40,000: Faster-than-light travel literally requires flying your ships through a dimension of pure, sentient Hell (The Warp), perfectly justifying the paranoid, hyper-fascistic, violently xenophobic Imperium of Man. The Negative Novum Finally, we arrive at my personal favorite. The Negative Novum. This is the ultimate exercise in subtraction. The author doesn’t invent a magical new technology, a faster-than-light drive, or a biological mutation. Instead, they just walk up to the historical timeline, firmly grasp one absolutely crucial Jenga block, pull it out, and watch human civilization warp itself around the newly created void. The most brilliant modern execution of this is the Fallout franchise. If you ask a casual fan what makes Fallout special, they’ll probably point to the Power Armor, the Vaults, or the relentless 1950s doo-wop music playing over a nuclear wasteland. But all of that is just window dressing. The actual engine of the universe—the Negative Novum—is incredibly simple: The transistor and the microchip are never invented. Or, at least, they are invented centuries too late to matter. Look at the ripple effects of that one missing piece of silicon. Because miniaturization never happens, the Information Age is completely aborted. Computers remain massive, clunky, room-sized monoliths running on vacuum tubes and dangerous atomic fusion. Because technology is bulky and terrifying, the cultural zeitgeist gets permanently trapped in 1950s atomic-age optimism and Red Scare paranoia. There is no internet to globalize the culture. And finally, the conflict: Without the micro-efficiency of the transistor, the world rapidly and violently burns through its remaining fossil fuels and uranium. This technological dead-end leads directly to the Resource Wars, and eventually, the inevitable nuclear fire of 2077. The apocalypse, the Vault-Tec experiments, the super mutants – every single iconic piece of that multi-billion dollar IP stems entirely from the premise of not inventing a tiny computer chip. When you remove something fundamental, the world has to desperately compensate. Cue the montage of things we desperately miss: Children of Men: The complete, unexplained cessation of human fertility. There are no zombies or aliens; the apocalypse is just the quiet, devastating absence of a next generation. The Road: The total death of the biosphere and a permanently blocked sun. No intricate lore, just the complete absence of ecology and hope, leaving only gray ash and cannibalism. The Difference Engine: The microchip isn’t needed because Charles Babbage successfully built his steam-powered mechanical computer in the 1800s. The absence of the electrical age gives us Victorian cyber-punks. A Canticle for Leibowitz: The “Flame Deluge” purposefully wipes out all modern scientific knowledge. Humanity violently removes its own understanding of the universe, causing an artificial return to the Dark Ages where electrical blueprints are venerated as illuminated holy texts. Never Let Me Go: The quiet, polite removal of basic human rights—and the philosophical concept of a “soul”—from a specific underclass of artificially created organ-donor clones. Station Eleven: The Georgia Flu instantly wipes out the global power grid and most of humanity. It’s the sudden, overnight absence of global connectivity, reducing modern civilization to a traveling Shakespeare troupe in the ruins of the Midwest. The Exceptions of Why Star Wars is Fake Sci-Fi If you really want to understand how a structural rule works, you have to look at the massive, billion-dollar properties that completely ignore it. And if you want to guarantee a thousand angry comments on your video—which the YouTube algorithm absolutely loves—you tell your audience the truth: Star Wars is not science fiction. Under the strict definition of the Novum, George Lucas didn’t write a sci-fi masterpiece; he wrote a high-fantasy fairy tale that just happens to have a very shiny, metallic coat of paint. Think about it. The Force is not a Novum. It is not a scientifically plausible point of divergence or a technological innovation that logically rewires the economics and politics of the galaxy. It is literally just magic. It is an ancient, mystical energy field that cares deeply about bloodlines, prophecies, and farm boys with grand destinies. A lightsaber isn’t a technological disruption; it’s just Excalibur with a D-cell battery strapped to the hilt. The Death Star isn’t a sociological thought experiment; it’s a dragon sitting in a dark tower waiting for the white knight to find its perfectly engineered, two-meter-wide weak spot. This is why Star Wars has more in common with Game of Thrones or Harry Potter than it does with Jurassic Park or The Left Hand of Darkness. They don’t operate on “Cognitive Estrangement.” They don’t want to make you uncomfortable about your present reality. They operate on Myth. They run on the Hero’s Journey, universal archetypes, and emotional resonance. And to be clear: That doesn’t make them bad. Space Fantasy is a glorious, highly lucrative genre. But if you are a writer sitting at your keyboard trying to build the next Matrix or the next Fallout, and you are using Star Wars as your structural blueprint, you are going to fail. You will end up with a messy, bloated universe full of lasers and aliens that doesn’t actually say anything. Because “fake” sci-fi just throws futuristic aesthetics at a standard fantasy plot. But real sci-fi fundamentally alters reality using the Novum Ahk-tually, LotR is science fiction (it can be argued) Before the international Tolkien Society puts a bounty on my head and sends a strike team of Oxford philologists to my house, let’s entertain a highly structural, slightly dangerous thought experiment. If we strictly define science fiction by the presence of a Novum—a technologically or scientifically plausible disruption that forces a society to react—you can make a surprisingly aggressive argument that The Lord of the Rings is actually a science fiction story disguised in a trench coat of Elven mythology. To see it, you have to look at what Tolkien was actually reacting to. He wasn’t just daydreaming about fairies. He was a traumatized combat veteran writing a direct, visceral response to the mechanized slaughter of World War I and the aggressive, soot-choked industrialization of the English countryside. With that context, look at the One Ring. If you strip away the glowing Elvish script, the Ring isn’t a mystical, magical trinket. It is a piece of technology. Specifically, it is a machine of mass surveillance and absolute industrial control. Sauron isn’t just a dark wizard; he is a hyper-industrialist trying to establish a global, mechanized monopoly. The Ring functions exactly like a Novum. It is a concentrated technological leap (forged in the fiery R&D labs of Mount Doom) that fundamentally distorts the reality of Middle-earth. Whoever holds the Ring gains access to a network of absolute power, but the “technology” is so advanced and inherently corrupting that it overrides the operator’s free will, turning them into a slave of the machine itself. Look at Saruman. He doesn’t fall to “dark magic.” He falls to the allure of industry. He literally tears down the ancient forests to build foundries, replacing nature with “a mind of metal and wheels.” He is essentially a 19th-century robber baron who discovered the efficiency of strip-mining and genetically engineered super-soldiers (the Uruk-hai). Therefore, the entire plot of The Lord of the Rings isn’t a traditional heroic fantasy quest to secure a magical boon. It is a desperate, apocalyptic black-ops mission to decommission a weapon of mass destruction. The Fellowship is trying to un-invent the nuclear bomb because they realize their society is not morally equipped to wield that level of technological power. So, yes, it has wizards and goblins. But structurally? It operates on the exact same engine of “cognitive estrangement” as the best sci-fi. It takes the real-world horrors of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of warfare, wraps them up in a Novum called the One Ring, and forces the audience to look at their own factories and war machines with a deep, creeping sense of dread. Wait, cognitive what-now? Oh right I didn’t tell you yet. Woops! THREE: The Ultimate Novum (And How to Wield It) The Final Boss of Sci-Fi Theory Now it is time to meet the Final Boss of sci-fi theory. We’ve talked about the blockbusters, we’ve validated the literary heavyweights, and we’ve thoroughly alienated Star Wars fandom. Now, we drop the actual academic payload. In the 1970s, a Yugoslavian-born scholar named Darko Suvin officially coined the term “Novum.” Suvin was essentially an academic who desperately needed a rigorous, scholarly way to explain to his university colleagues that reading about time machines and android sex bots was actually a profound intellectual pursuit. But Suvin didn’t just name the tool. He identified exactly what the tool was built to do. He argued that the ultimate goal of science fiction is to achieve a psychological impact called Cognitive Estrangement. The Mirror, Not the Crystal Ball ”Cognitive Estrangement” sounds like a legal defense for a messy divorce, but it is actually the secret engine of scifi. Let’s break the biggest myth in science fiction right now: scifi is not supposed to predict the future. It isn’t a crystal ball, and honestly, whenever it tries to be, it is usually hilariously wrong. The goal of a great Novum isn’t to show you what the year 2300 looks like. The goal is to take your present reality, alter one massive variable, and force you to look at your own society with fresh, uncomfortable, alienated eyes. ”Cognition” means the premise is rational and scientific—it’s not magic. “Estrangement” means it makes you feel like an alien in your own home. It takes the mundane absurdity of our real-world economics, our politics, or our social norms, and makes them look utterly bizarre by contrast. The Ultimate Novum: The Monolith If Cognitive Estrangement is the ultimate goal, what is the most perfect, undistilled example of a Novum ever put on screen? It isn’t a time machine. It isn’t a cloned dinosaur. It is a featureless black slab of geometry from 1968. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey features the absolute Ultimate Novum: The Monolith. Look at this thing. It does absolutely nothing. It has no buttons, no user interface, no glowing exhaust ports for a farm boy to shoot a torpedo into. It is the pure, terrifying, mathematical embodiment of the “New Thing.” And look at the ripple effect. When it drops into the prehistoric dirt, it doesn’t hand the apes a laser gun. It just provides the exact amount of Cognitive Estrangement necessary for an ape to realize that a femur bone can be used to crush a skull. It is the simultaneous birth of technology and murder. Fast forward a few million years. Humanity finds another one buried on the moon. Again, it does nothing but emit a signal. But its mere existence forces humanity into a new leap of cognitive estrangement, triggering the terrifying leap into deep space and the creation of artificial intelligence. The Monolith is the Ultimate Novum because it demands nothing but evolution. It forces the characters—and the audience—to instantly discard their previous understanding of reality. The Power-Up Which brings us to the final power-up. If you are a writer sitting at your desk right now, listen closely. Stop. Worldbuilding. Start world changing. Most amateur writers are permanently stuck at Level One worldbuilding. They spend four hundred hours mapping out the tax codes of a galactic empire, but their characters are just 21st-century middle managers complaining about space-capitalism. Their Novum doesn’t actually touch the human condition. It causes zero estrangement. Stop trying to build a universe from the top down. Put the worldbuilding bible away. Find your Monolith. Find the one, singular, disruptive idea that violently shatters the status quo. Drop it into the dead center of your story, and logically map out exactly how human politics, religion, and relationships must mutate just to survive the shockwave. Because when you use the Novum correctly, you aren’t just writing about a fantasy world. You are changing the real world. You are taking our ordinary cognition and estranging it to show us our world as a strange new world. You are writing the modern mythos. So pick your one big lie. And imagine harder. Listen to the podcast audio here
April 26 · 35 min - SF
The First Dystopia
We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a novel written at the beginning of the future. It’s hard to remember today, after Logan’s Run, The Handmaid’s Tale and Hunger Games made “dystopia” an entertainment genre, but when Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing in the early 1920s, it was only beginning to dawn on humanity just how bad the future might be. Or how splendid. Become a member to watch to full video Members get full access to all posts and videos SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on youtube https://youtu.be/gZHF0dP5_GI Zamyatin’s science fiction novel invented the future we now think of as dystopia. A lone individual awakens to the oppressive system they are trapped within and attempts a rebellion. Sometimes they achieve liberation, but mostly they…do not. The details change, the dystopian future remains the same. For most of human history there was no future. There was a date at a point ahead in time. But that date would be much like this date. Time was cyclical. Kings came and went, but there was always a king. The apocalypse or armageddon might strike, but those brought the end, not the future. The future needs progress. Progress needs technology. And technology needs science. With the explosion of science and technology during what we call the Industrial revolution progress began to accelerate to rates perceptible within a human lifetime. And then far faster. The future came into focus. Through science fiction. Philosophers, intellectuals and scientists began to speculate on what the human future might look like. From Johannes Kepler’s Somnium to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, science fiction made new myths for new times. At the heart of these speculations was the belief that the future could be made better with science and technology. Early science fiction like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and A New Amazonia by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbet imagined futures of high technology and human equality, made possible with science and technology. Utopias were the standard for early science fiction. It may surprise us now but optimistic visions were once the scifi standard. Such stories caught the imagination of ordinary people and gave birth to “utopian socialism”. The dreams of early utopian socialism were bound up with the experience of early industrial capitalism. The workers in the factories could see the abundance their machines created. If that abundance were just shared fairly, not given away to the capitalists, a better world would surely be possible? These dreams were given a basis in logic and reason with the “historical materialism” of Karl Marx. In his critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, Marx claimed a scientific model of human progress, persuading millions that the future could be shaped by mankind as a better world, with the power of “scientific socialism”. So, as Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1921/22, he was reflecting on the decades-long dream of both utopian and scientific socialism that had suddenly become a reality. The chaos of World War One had sparked the revolution in Russia, and the communist Bolsheviks lead by Vladimir Lenin were, at least in name, intent on making the dream of socialist utopia a reality. The future long dreamed of had finally begun. And went instantly and horrifyingly wrong. Yevgeny Zamyatin was a revolutionary against the Russian Tsars who was arrested, tortured and imprisoned multiple times. We was written by a committed revolutionary to the socialist cause, who came very quickly to see that the revolution was going to succeed in creating a scientific socialist utopia. And that it would instantly become a dystopia. We was rejected for publication then became the first book banned by the Soviet state in the early 1920s. It was published in America in 1924 and from then on Zamyatin was persecuted by the Glavlit censorship board, until his exile in 1931 and then death in 1937. But even after its US publication, We did not find an enthusiastic readership. The primary audience of educated elites and intellectuals who might have read and promoted We were still too infatuated with visions of scientific socialism to entertain any critique of the socialist utopia. It was not until the wake of World War 2, as the US and Europe faced a heavily militarised Soviet Union, that the Western world found it needed reasons to hate its former ally, and We was “discovered”. It’s now well known that George Orwell’s 1984 was to some extent influenced by We. Orwell thought it “not a work of the first order” but “certainly an unusual one”. Orwell’s assessment of We is both accurate and biased. Its true that We is a didactic, one sided argument against scientific socialism. Orwell in 1984 sought to critique the Societ Union while retaining his argument first articulated in Animal Farm, that the socialist dream was possible, but had been subverted by the “pigs” of the oligarchy. It’s also unclear just how much of an influence We was on 1984. Orwell’s more direct influences were HG Well’s socialist utopias like Things To Come, which Orwell perceived as proto-fascistic, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which Orwell believed must have been influenced by We. But Zamyatin’s We was, inarguably, the book which defined the dystopia of totalitarian control as the primary vision of socialism in the Western imagination. The dreams of utopian socialism were displaced by the dystopia of totalitarian socialism. It’s no exaggeration to say that We was the book which destroyed the socialist dream. So the value of We to today’s reader is in the asking and answering of this question: Is the socialist dream of a better world fundamentally delusional and corrupt? Or has it only been corrupted by the pigs? Zamyatin weaves three symbolic threads into his fiction which can help us to find answers. The first is the One State. Those early utopian socialist scifi visions had tended to imagine a socialist future of decentralisation and anarchy. But Marx’s scientific socialism believed the state, controlled by the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, was the only institution powerful enough to make the socialist dream a reality Zamyatin was among the first to see that the state, acting in the name of the people, would simply replace traditional social hierarchy with crushing social conformity. We’s central critique of socialism is right there in the title. If you’ve heard right wing reactionaries like Jordan Peterson rail against “collectivism” then We is where that all started. Solzhenitsyn did it better, but Zamyatin did it first. The Green Wall in We is a transparent barrier that separates the people of the One State from nature. We moderns in our air conditioned condos and hermetically sealed shopping malls can instantly feel the pang of this separation. Utopian socialists of today, captured in the visions of Solarpunk, dream of an idealised return to nature. Industry is now the enemy of socialism. But for the largely peasant peoples of pre-Industrial Russia the idea of a world where you didn’t have to fight nature for every scrap was a major appeal of socialism. Zamyatin saw that scientific socialism would leverage our impossible desire to escape nature as a tool of control. To escape hunger we would accept industrial agriculture. To escape sickness we would accept the medical industrial complex. To tame nature, more and more control would be centralised into the One State. Zamyatin couldn’t have known the strange echoes his starship Integral would decades later conjure for readers. Construction of the Integral is led by We’s central character, the snappily named D-503. Combined with the Integral’s mission to “subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason” all other life in the universe, it’s hard not to imagine the ship as a vast…cube Of course it’s possible that the writers of Star Trek :The Next Generation were directly inspired by Zamyatin when writing conceiving Borg and its mission to “assimilate all life” in the face of which “resistance is futile”. But it’s equally likely that the writers of Star Trek, when they decided to parody socialism in that tv show, arrived independently at the same conclusion as Zamyatin. That the logical fate of a society based on scientific socialism would be absolute totalitarian submission of all life to the collective. And to the machine. Science fiction has warmed of one future again and again. From EM Forster’s The Machine Stops to Arnie as The Terminator. From the Death Star to The Matrix, science fiction warns us of the machine. The machine dominating and controlling the human is the central image of 20th century science fiction. For Zamyatin this machinic domination is an expression of the terrors of the collective, and the inevitable outcome of the attempt to build a socialist utopia with the power of science and technology. But. Here in the capitalist Western world of the 21st century, swaddled in the concrete and steel of our cities, consuming the products of fully automated dark factories, being behaviour shaped by algorithms while AI automates our jobs, as we watch androids dance bebop… …we can hardly claim to be raging against the machine. Which somewhat cracks apart Zamyatin’s critique of utopian socialism. The pathologies Zamyatin identifies in socialism — the crushing power of the state, the separation from nature, the Borg-like conformity, and the transformation of the human into the machine — would all manifest in every other political system as the 20th century unfolded. If Zamyatin’s We falls short of the greatest science fiction it is because its critique of scientific socialism blames our utopian dreams for the dystopian failings of science and technology. A hundred years later it seems clearer and clearer that the failure of our utopias was not caused only by the hyper-collectivism of socialism and too much We, but also by the erosion and collapse of our societies caused by hyper-individualism, a sickness of far, far too much I. Listen to the podcast audio
April 14 · 13 min - SF
Terminator 2 isn’t only the greatest action movie
Terminator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Arnold’s physique is the star of the film The progressive decay of the Body into the Machine is his co-star With the special effects that animated the Terminator as best supporting actor Watch the full video essay as a member Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfbNARASn9Y Imagine if Ron Perlman had passed his audition for Terminator? You can’t. The movie is unimaginable without its leading actor. Terminator’s leading actress gets stuck doing what leading actresses do in psycho-thriller movies Scream. Runaway. Scream some more. It’s true that Gale Ann Hurd and James Cameron made a movie about a waitress who saves the world by calling it Terminator and casting Arnie But its only by the end of Terminator we see who Sarah Connor is going to become. And get the hint that Terminator 2 is going to be a Linda Hamilton movie There are only two Terminator movies Sure, you may think there are more movies and books and games in the “franchise”, but these were all sent back by future Hollywood to terminate the Terminator when all the time paradoxes are resolved there are only two Terminator movies. Terminator 1 and 2 are a unified by paradox A saviour who sends his best soldier back to become the father of the saviour Who carries a photo of the mother, that won’t be taken until after he dies at a desert gas station as a storm comes in And words of fate that cycle in time Skynet sets humanities fate “in a moment” John Connor’s message to his mother is “the future is not set” But when the young John repeats this to his Terminator protector the idea has developed “there is no fate but what we make” Then as she decides to kill one man to save mankind, Sarah carves No Fate into wood And we the audience are confronted with the question that Terminator carves into space and time Is the fate of humanity determined by the iron cage of time? Or can we determine our own fate…with the power of our will? # I’m not saying there isn’t a lot to like about Terminator 2 These bikers Guns & Roses This kid That’s right kid fuck the cops The famous “morphing” effect developed for The Abyss that announced the new era of CGI in cinema and…has not aged well in places…but still looks great in others Death by milk carton This mini-gun somehow killing zero cops And this dude hyperventilating Arnie is back. Only 7 years have passed since Terminator in 1984, but when Terminator 2 released in 1991 it felt like more Partly because Arnie is a little older and the physique is a little less sublime And we the audience are starting to notice that the impassive Germanic persona that made the T101 so terrifying is…basically…all the Austrian Oak has got Edward Furlong as an androgynous young John Conner is excellent. Why the girl’s haircut? Mostly because its the 90s, but also because audiences have less empathy for young men? But let’s be clear. Terminator 2 is a masterpiece of action sci-fi cinema. Maybe even the greatest action movie ever. Good job James Cameron. But what really sets fire to the cinema screen as we watch Judgement Day incinerate Los Angeles is Linda Hamilton’s performance The “Strong Female Character” is such a Hollywood cliché that the trope is now widely mocked and derided And is nothing new The archetype of the young, athletic, BEAUTIFUL, female fighter is as old as story itself. Just take a look at Artemis the huntress, among the most popular Olympian gods And you’ll find the huntress archetype repeating in every mythos over the millennia right up to Wonder Woman 1984 and and a bunch of other sexy young female warrior types Because men have always liked watching hot babes with spears. Even the most misogynist male is totally fine with chicks in armored bikinis But what would a woman who had really trained with mercenaries, who is raising her boy to save the world, and who crushed a fucking T101, actually BE like? Oh, yes, that’s it She’d look like this crazy b*tch # John Connor’s mom is heavily foreshadowed as we follow the young messiah through working class Los Angeles We the cinema audience for T2 remember Linda Hamilton as the nice young woman from T1. And we’ve watched her in Beauty & the Beast. But she’s enigmatic, a elusive star who rarely appears on screen. It’s been trailed in the media – this is the 90s and entertainment news media is entirely owned by the same corporations that own the movie studios – that Hamilton has been paid an unprecedented amount for a female star, a substantial chunk of T2s historic $100M dollar budget. And that Linda got fit for the role. # Sarah Connor mark ii is not a sex symbol. Hamilton manages to capture the kind of vulnerable toughness we see in female MMA fighters. Women who can fight because they had to be tougher than their tough life. We’re going to catch up with Sarah as the two Terminators play cat and mouse. This is a lot of screen time for an action movie to spend building character. And we literally get a psych-eval of our female hero. Through the work of this creep doctor who thinks he is doing good but is really on a powertrip. Because if Terminator 1 was about a waitress escaping that abusive ex. Terminator 2 is about a single mom trying to get back to her kid. James Cameron’s great movies, back before he got lost making Avatars, spend.a lot of time on working class characters. The lower decks literal underclass who drown in Titanic. The blue collar Colonial marines sent to their doom in Aliens. The oil rig crew in the Abyss. Because while the corporate sociopaths at White Star Line, Weland Yutani and Cyberdine are making the torment nexus to boost profits for the shareholder class. It’s ordinary working people who end up having to save humanity from itself. Because its a working waitress who has the strength of will to show us that the future is not set. # Action sequences today Really suck I’m going to go a step further than Like Stories Of Old’s excellent video essay on the modern action set piece. Because I remember when John Woo’s Hard Boiled made it out of Hong Kong cinema into the West. I watched Chow Yun Fat pull the trigger until his hands cramped in one balletic action sequence after another over and over again And I remember how exciting this action hybrid of martial arts and gunplay was compared to the standard John Wayne shooting some guy in the gut who just fell over with a GRRARK! I went to the cinema FIVE TIMES to see this new art form reach its apogee in The Matrix But all good things get done death. I’ll fess up, I’ve only seen two John Wick movies. I gave up during the crescendo of Wick 2 because as soon as they had to tell us how strong willed John Wick is I knew these films would never really get the one thing essential for any great action sequence The one thing without which, however fine the choreography or bloody the gore, action can never pack a punch Now, absolutely, along the way, martial gunplay has produced some spectacularly good action set pieces. The final bank robbery from Michael Mann’s Heat. Every fight in Leon. Heck, I’ll even credit the road fight from Winter Soldier. But if I have to pick ONE greatest action sequence of all time it’s Linda Hamilton escaping a super-max using only a paper clip, a syringe and the thing today’s action extravaganzas just don’t get the thing that drives Terminator 2 through one powerful action sequence after another sheer fucking force of will # The greatest action sequences are demonstrations of human will power most of us most of the time are mere mortals but every now and again we see a mortal driven by the power of will Diego Maradona may have claimed it was the hand of god that gave that dirty lying cheat the world cup, but even us Brits have to concede it was sheer will power that made him such a great footballer or that powered Michael Jordan every time his feet left the ground but it’s not just athletes what keeps a paramedic pumping a chest until life comes back how does a poor kid get through four years of college while working while the rich kids drop out why does a mother work shitty jobs year after year for kids who will never be able to repay her every day, in every walk of life, we see the power of the human will this power is rare, and real, and it’s the thing that makes us human and we humans love to see its story told but many people want to us to believe this thing does not exist that there can be no free will in a universe determined by time Human will is not free It’s very fucking expensive As we follow Sarah, John and Arnold into the dessert we learn the price Sarah has paid for her strength of will Free will is one of today’s most frequent pop- sci talking points. Biologists like Robert Sapolsky present empirical evidence against the possibility, while modern gurus like Sam Harris tell us free will is impossible in a deterministic reality. Determinism argues that reality is a machine. From the quantum scale to the galactic and beyond, the future is determined by the now which is determined by the past. Inescapable chains of causality that form the iron cage of time. But the question of free will is very far from settled. Free will isn’t a question for science, it’s a question for philosophers, and the philosophers do not agree. And. Look. Intellectuals and elites have always liked the idea that reality, and their privileged place within it, are predetermined. By fate. By god. By evolution. By time. It’s very convenient. And they’ve never really had to fight against reality. But ordinary people earn our will at great expense. So as Sarah Connor rockets out of the desert to begin her mission, is she just a super-determined actor in fate she cannot change? Or has Sarah Connor earned the will to save us all? Of course there is another iconic action movie, also by James Cameron, about a strong willed woman Sigourney Weaver in Aliens is another iconic mother saving her child and she’s pretty damn great Aliens is a story about the human conflict with the alien, or the other Terminator is…something else Brad Fiedel’s theme expresses the central conflict of T2 that melody in the high register is Sarah Conner, mother and hope of humankind but that thumping bass, repetitive, grinding that’s the thing Sarah Connor is fighting against the Machine sent back from the future to terminate us all # The machine is the central image of science fiction. The Matrix. Blade Runner. 2001. Neuromancer. Robocop. Even the Death Star. It would be easier to list the great science fiction that is not about the torturous relationship between Man and Machine. But while James Cameron denies it, and it required an out of court settlement to get the credit, the works of Harlan Ellison are a clear influence on Terminator. Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is the origin of Skynet, about a supercomputer built for “defence” that awakens and destroys humanity. And Ellison’s script for the Outer Limits episode Soldier introduces the traveller from an apocalyptic future travelling back to our present through time But Terminator takes time and the machine to a truly original and new place. Until Terminator the machine was the creation of men, a manifestation of our hubris and pride and the self destructive nature of our will But the machine that returns through time to make itself is no longer man’s creation but its own. We aren’t creating the machine in our image the machine is recreating us in its image. Sarah has already made the decision to kill Miles Dyson the first shot is already fired before she sees the man’s child in the firing line this is the basic definition of character in drama…how do we respond to events Sarah responds by going full auto and then reloading the music riff and the call back to Terminator 1 make it clear Sarah Conor has become the Terminator, who absolutely will not stop she has become the machine this is the greatest performance in action cinema as we see Sarah Connor find the will power to resist the machine Terminator is a mythos that emerges from our fear of a world dominated by the machine. The machines of the industrial revolution, then the machines of the information age. Terminator is the story of our fear that determinism is true, free will does not exist, that reality is an empty grinding mechanism and that we are just “biological machines”. But all of this is determined by time. It’s the causal chain of one event after another that forges the iron cage of time. And Terminator is a story built on the paradox of time. The Grandfather paradox tells you only one thing about time. Not that you can kill Elon Musk’s grandfather to stop the racist Nazi ever existing. But that the model of time which gives rise to the paradox is broken The door of the iron cage of time is unlocked and a waitress, with a shotgun, three billion souls to save, and crazy bitch will power can kick it open Listen to the audio commentary here
April 13 · 34 min - SF
HG Wells vs Vladimir Lenin
The year is 1920. The Empires of Europe have spent the last half decade blowing each other up with bombs, guns and heavy artillery. As World War 1 burns itself out, men who survived the fighting begin to wonder if a better world, a world without empires and wars, is possible. These working class men return home to grinding poverty and the brutal conditions of factory work. Many still do not even have the vote. For seventy years, since that famous manifesto was published, a spectre had haunted Europe, the spectre of communism. In 1918 soldiers returning to Russia joined a revolution and pulled down the empire of the Tsars, and established the first communist state. Men across Europe begin to believe that their dreams of a better world can become real. That the old order of empires and war could be torn down and in its place could be made a new order. Become a member to watch the full video Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or on YouTube https://youtu.be/TFIRYo0h-ZU This is the story of a meeting between two men whose dreams of a new world order had a powerful impact on the 20th century. Vladimir Ilyvich Lenin was the most famous revolutionary leader in history. Aged 17 Lenin saw his brother executed for a plot to kill the Tsar Alexander III. Lenin dedicated his life to revenge, joining the revolutionaries and ultimately leading them to power in 1918. Lenin’s climb to power has all the drama of a Tolstoy novel. Bank robberies, exhile, imprisonment, intrigue, civil war and murder. While the facts are disputed, it’s very likely that Lenin took his revenge by ordering the death by firing squad of the Tsar Nicholas II and his family. Lenin was the definition of a brutal dictator. The Red Terror of 1918 to 1922 was a purge of hundreds of thousands of Russian military officers and bureaucrats. And purge means Lenin had all those people killed. Support Science Fiction with Damien Walter as a member Access to all videos, essays and community Join Here But Lenin also proved a dynamic leader of Russia, after centuries of stagnation under the Tsars, beginning the nation’s full industrialisation and electrification. Great leader? Or mass murderer? Either way, Vladimir Lenin carved his name into history, as one of the men who shaped the new order of the modern world. The man coming to meet Lenin, who will also have a powerful influence over the new world, is wait a science fiction writer?? H.G. Herbert George to his friends Wells As HG Wells journeyed across Moscow to his meeting with Lenin, he noted changes to the Russian capital. There were “many traces of the desperate street fighting” from the 1918 civil war that brought Lenin and his Bolsheviks to power. The deep poverty of pre-revolutionary Moscow was, as yet, unchanged. Beggars were as common as ever. The revolutionary impact of a sign reading “Religion Is The Opium” near St Basils cathedral was lessened by the brutal fact that most Russian people still could not read. 1920 was HG Wells second visit to Russia. His first had been in 1914, before the revolution. Both visits were made possible by Wells’ friendship with the Russian writer Maxim Gorky, as would be his third and final trip to Moscow…but we’ll get to that. Wells observed darker events still at the Kremlin. What had been under the Tsars a palace open to the public “much as Windsor castle” was now surrounded with police checkponts. To meet Lenin, Wells had to be cleared through layers of bureaucrats and functionaries, that might be necessary for Lenin’s safety, but did not bode well for the dictator’s connection to the ordinary people. The Lenin that awaited Wells was a “personality entirely different from anything I had expected to meet” But the HG Wells who entered Lenin’s office is also not quite the science fiction writer we remember today. Today HG Wells is remembered as the writer of science fiction stories like The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds Wells is often called “the father of science fiction” But HG Wells almost certainly never heard the term “science fiction” and there is no record of him ever using it Science fiction came into public usage after the magazine editor Hugo Gernback coined the term Scientifiction, which his readers simplified as science fiction. So how did HG Wells describe his own books and stories? In a letter to his friend and fellow novelist Henry James, Wells stated that “literature, like architecture, is a means, it has a use”. In an interview early in his career with the Pall Mall Gazette, Wells gave a clue to what he believed that use should be. “My stories…are the expression of a socialistic, unbelieving person in revolt against the limitations set about his life.” That revolt lead Wells to a lifelong commitment to left wing politics, including his membership of the Fabian society, and a belief in the values of socialism. HG Wells *was* the father of SF Not just science fiction, but socialist fiction # HG Wells was writing at a revolutionary time for the human understanding of the universe and everything. Science was tearing down old myths and showing a reality stranger than any known by religion. We lived in a vast galaxy of stars, within an infinite universe stretching billions of years back in deep time, and powerful evolutionary forces that had given birth to human life. Wells was among the first to see the new reality revealed by science, and to tell new stories, new myths, for the age of science. But if men were not the creation of God above, but the product of forces of evolution, surely the way men lived together, human civilization, could and should evolve also? And the civilization HG Wells believed we could and should evolve towards was socialism. THE TIME MACHINE It’s hard to express the bold originality of The Time Machine when it was published in 1895. The very idea of a time machine, that we now take for granted, did not exist until Wells invented it. The Time Machine developed from Wells 1888 story The Chronic Argonauts. Decades of imagination went into creating a new conception of deep time and human evolution. The Time Traveller journeys 800,000 years into our future, a measure of time enough that humanity has evolved into two distinct species. But the Eloi and Morlocks aren’t only an illustration of future human evolution. The Eloi are a pampered elite. But every now again, the Morlock working class rise up, and eat the Eloi. HG Wells saw the socialist revolutions of the 20th century coming. THE ISLAND OF DOCTOR MOREAU Darwinian evolution had also opened Wells eyes to the possibilities of genetics. Long before genes were discovered, Well’s speculated on the potential for the genetic manipulation of life. Human life. The Beast Folk created by Doctor Moreau may seem tame to us today, but Wells was among the first to grasp the horrifying possibilities of genetic manipulation. And to ask whether humans can ever escape our genes. Are humans eternally subject to our nature? Or can humanity raise ourselves up from our origins as a species? It’s the question posed by Doctor Moreau, and at the heart of socialist ideologies in the 20th century. THE INVISIBLE MAN The Invisible Man was likely inspired by the Tyndal effect, that light becomes visible only when refracted through the atmosphere. By manipulating light refraction, Griffin, the only name given to the novel’s protagonist, becomes invisible. And uses that invisibility in a failed attempt to otherthrow British society. HG Wells understood the invisibility of working class men. A long childhood sickness turned the young Wells into a well read and imaginative boy. But aged thirteen Wells was indentured as a drapers assistant in Windsor. Wells’ active mind made this drudgery unbearable, and shaped his hatred of the British class system. Working class men in Britain would not be fully enfranchised until 1918. Working men were, for most of Wells’ life, socially irrelevant and invisible. But it was those men, as they began to read and learn about politics, who powered the socialist revolutions of the 20th century. WAR OF THE WORLDS War of the Worlds made HG Wells world famous. Again, when alien invasions are today such a cliche of science fiction, it’s hard to remember what an incredible conceptual leap Wells’ story of Martians coming to Earth truly was. War of the Worlds is also the novel where HG Wells throws down the gauntlet to call out British imperialism. And Britain…didn’t really notice. War of the Worlds was a massive bestseller in late Victorian Britain, and almost nobody noticed it was a polemical depiction of British colonialism. The Martians are the British, and the territory being colonised is…Woking, Horsell Common, and the Home Counties. Which are called the Home Counties because all the wealth of the British invasions of other lands flowed back home to them. The heart of Empire, itself invaded. War of the Worlds was sold as a new take on “Invasion Literature” like The Battle of Dorking, a reactionary and racist genre that imagined Britain invaded by the very “natives” the Empire colonised. But Wells subverts the genre. His Martians have the technological superiority, and the “cool and unsympatheic” intellect of the British themselves. And the Martians, as so often happened to British Imperial invasion forces, are defeated by sickness. Malaria defeated multiple British invasion forces. A common cold stops the Martians. Wells’ early novels made him world famous, and developed many of the core ideas, from time travel to alien invasions, that became “science fiction”. But they also show us the deep injustices of Wells’ world. An imperial world of colonial armies that murdered people of other races. A capitalist world of factories and sweatshops in which men, women and children were compelled to work. A world that would very soon tear itself apart in world war. HG Wells dreamed of making a better world, of building a new world order, with the power of socialism. “Those swarms of blacks, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people … will have to go” So, these words written by Wells in 1901 are doubly perplexing, seeming to contradict all that came before, and would come after, in the dreams of HG Wells. You will find these words quoted to accuse Wells of racism in numerous articles, from Christian creationists, to liberal news sources. Let’s double click on this and give it our full attention. The quote is taken from chapter 9 of Wells first non-fiction book ANTICIPATIONS – OF THE REACTION OF MECHANICAL AND SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS UPON HUMAN LIFE AND THOUGHT Anticipations is a *description* of the future Wells sees ahead, and that world’s reaction to technological change, not a *prescription* of the future Wells wants to see. In chapter 9 Wells describes a New Republic that fuses technological development with a continued religious belief in God. Wells was a believer in science, not religion. The New Republic isn’t the civilization Wells wants. It’s the one he thinks most likely. This New Republic, Wells predicts, with its distorted fusion of science and religion, will lead to the gradual elimination of all other peoples. The brute accusation of racism against HG Wells, based on a single quote removed from its context, does not stand up. But. HG Wells believed in science and technology. And the power of science to make a better world. And better humans. This lead Wells to consider the possibilities of eugenics, briefly, and then to reject them. But however brief that dalliance, it highlights a profound weakness in Wells thinking. Beginning with Anticipations and continuing through his fiction and non-fiction including A Modern Utopia (1905), The World Set Free (1914) and The Open Conspiracy (1928) Wells made the argument for a World State. A scientific, technological world state that would use the power of technology to bring peace to the world. In The Shape of Things To Come (1933) filmed as Things To Come (1936) by Alexander Korda, Wells imagines the rise of his world state. and the resistance to it from old empires and religious demagogues. Science triumphs over superstition, socialism defeats imperialism, and technology takes humanity to the stars. But watching Raymond Massey deliver the closing monologue of Things To Come having watched the “world state” bomb the world into “peace” HG Wells future world state looks unmistakably totalitarian In 1940, at the darkest moment of World War 2, as the old world order is destroying itself H G Wells published his detailed vision for a scientific world state The New World Order So the HG Wells who walks into the Kremlin in the year 1920 is a thinker with a deep belief in the powers of science and socialism to reorder the world. But he’s about to meet a man with a very different vision of that same dream. “Lenin is not a writer; his(…)shrill little pamphlets and papers(…)display hardly anything of the real Lenin mentality” “I had come expecting to struggle with a doctrinaire Marxist. I found nothing of the sort.” “Our talk was held together by two motifs. One was from me to him: ‘What do you think you are making of Russia? What is the state you are trying to create?’ The other was from him to me: ‘Why does not the social revolution begin in England? Why are you not destroying Capitalism and establishing the Communist State?” HG Wells recorded his meeting with Vladimir Lenin in a chapter of Russia In The Shadows titled The Dreamer in the Kremlin. And their conversation, while cordial on the surface, is a fight between two visions of a new order for the world. Lenin was a revolutionary socialist, communist, and Marxist. He believed in a material, determinist progression of history, first into a stage of socialist dictatorship, then to a communist utopia. But Lenin also believed the socialist stage could only be realised by a revolutionary vanguard, led by Lenin and his Bolsheviks. Lenin never says it, but the implication of everything he does say is…why isn’t Wells at the vanguard of such a revolution? In response, Wells tells Lenin that his revolution is doomed. Wells, as a member of the Fabian society, believes in what we today call social democracy, the gradual improvement of people’s lives through state policies like welfare and public health. “The towns will get very much smaller,” Lenin admitted. “They will be different. Yes, quite different.” We can imagine Wells raising an eyebrow at this admission from Lenin. Lenin is planning radical changes, but he’s also only realising as they speak that this will destroy Russias urban towns and cities. Communism is being made up as the revolution goes. The crucial moment in their meeting comes when Lenin, after some prodding from Wells, admits that “The peasants in the other provinces, selfish and illiterate, will not know what is happening until their turn comes…” And as they talk Lenin leans in conspiratorially. The workers, who the revolution was meant to help, have already become the enemy of the revolution’s vanguard. But it’s the response of Wells and Lenin after their meeting that says the moat. Wells damns Lenin with faint praise. The leader of a great nation is never happy to be described as a “dreamer”. Lenin, as reported by Leon Trotsky, flys into a rage and dismisses Wells “What a bourgeois he is! He is a Philistine!” Lenin’s revolutionary socialism has taken a beating, not from a capitalist opponent, but from a competing vision of a socialist world order. In the decades that followed, Vladimir Lenin’s revolutionary socialism would lead to disaster. Wherever socialist revolutions emerged they sparked mass murder and mass starvation. None produced the fabled communist utopia. The social democracy envisioned by HG Wells became a reality. Socialist reforms were implemented in the United States after the Great Depression, and in Europe in the wake of WW2. By the mid 20th century social democracy *was* the new order of the Western world. Which makes the various conspiracy theories about a New World Order ironic. They’re like predicting a coming conspiracy by McDonalds to lower cardiac health with fast food. It already happened, and was never a conspiracy The world order of globalisation and internationalism has already been and gone. The new world order is today, like this ragged first edition of Wells book, more of a used world order. And that social democractic, liberal world order did exactly what Wells predicted. We tried to bomb the world into peace. Not with peace gas, but with “smartbombs”. We tried to make a better world with science and technology alone, and today those technologies look worryingly totalitarian. # Oh, and Wells’ third and final trip to Russia? Was in 1930 to meet with the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin Their interview was fully documented by Wells. You can find it, along with other links and the script for this essay in the show notes for channel members. These videos are made possible by members, thank you to all of you. Wells vs Stalin isn’t as revealing as Wells vs Lenin. But there is one absolutely essential exchange. Stalin: …what is first required for a long voyage is a big ship. What is a navigator without a ship? An idle man. Wells: The big ship is humanity, not a class. Stalin: You, Mr. Wells, evidently start out with the assumption that all men are good. I, however, do not forget that there are many wicked men. I do not believe in the goodness of the bourgeoisie. Stalinism wasn’t a new order, but just a return to the old order of empires and wars, violence and scapegoating. The old empires blamed the poor, not Stalin’s new empire blamed the rich. HG Wells made many mistakes in his vision for a scientific world state. But to be fair to the world order he helped to imagine, it has just about avoided nuclear apocalypse for the last 70 years. Now as we watch that global order collapse we’re left with a huge challenge. Will we collapse back to the old order if empires and wars? Or can we imagine a better world order? Listen to the podcast audio here
April 7 · 26 min - SF
A note for listeners of the Science Fiction podcast
We are in a war on podcasting. Podcasts are one of the last survivors of Web1.0, the era that gave us cool things like Wikipedia and the Blogosphere, back when “information wanted to be free”. Today information wants to generate clickthrough ad revenue. The Science Fiction podcast is hosted on damiengwalter.com on an RSS feed. That means I just upload an audio file to a post, and you subscribers listen in your chosen podcast app. But the powers that be – Google / YouTube, Facebook, Apple, Spotify etc have long wanted to either own podcasts or kill them. And in the last year they have largely succeeded in the latter. Most podcasts have moved to video first formats on YouTube, and now Spotify and Apple are also going video first. Most of the podcast apps have been bought out and shutdown, or are forcing their own ads on podcasters. So this note for listeners explains what this all means for the Science Fiction podcast. The TLDR is : The podcast will continue ad-free with audio tracks of the main video essays. Video essays will be free but ad-supported on YouTube and Spotify Members can watch all the video essays ad-free on Patreon, Substack and damiengwalter.com The Great Content Audit : over the next two to three months I am adding all the content to every platform. This means some old content will be republished. Sorry for any confusion. To subscribe to the podcast feed search “Science Fiction with Damien Walter” in the app of your choice. Listen to the podcast audio
April 6 · 21 min - SF
Project Hail Mary is a Male Pattern Fantasy
“My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!” Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley. You know it, don’t you? You’ve seen it on a Breaking Bad poster, or perhaps you vaguely recall it from a GCSE English syllabus you ignored because you were too busy wondering if a lightsaber could, in theory, be powered by a sufficiently large alkaline battery. It’s a poem about a massive, male ego, crumbling in a desert. It’s a poem about the fantasies of men. Become a member to watch the full video Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/4x6LL75y0Ek Men who are, as I speak, vibrating with a very specific, localised form of excitement. “Finally,” we the men cry, “Finally, we are getting Hard Science Fiction in the cinema!” Hard SF. Defined as a narrative subgenre preoccupied with technical accuracy and the rigid application of the laws of physics. It is the “Hard” of the structural engineer. The “Hard” of the materials scientist. The “Hard” of a man who looks at a sunset and sees not a poem, but a predictable sequence of atmospheric scattering. The “Hard” of man who has scathing things to say about “Soft” sciences. The “Hard” of a man who hasn’t considered what repeating the word “Hard” over and over again might be saying on a Freudian level. Enter Project: Hail Mary, the latest chunk of cinematic Hard science fiction from Andy Weir, the man behind the last chunk of cinematic Hard SF we all liked, based on his first novel – The Martian. You know, the one with the disappointing ending where Matt Damon survived. Now Weir is back on the big screen with a blockbuster adaptation of his third and some say best novel. Can Project: Hail Mary repeat the formula of Hard SF box office success? Excitement is high among some scifi fans… …but not all. Weir is, to be blunt, the Nickelback of science fiction. Everyone likes Rockstar, but people who actually know anything about rock music rightly hate themselves for liking it. Because every interesting sub-cultural artform, such as Hard SF, eventually gets a mainstream, corporate facsimile a hyperreal simulacrum that is better produced and easier to swallow… …but is just wrong. To be fair, Project: Hail Mary is an ok movie. If you ask ChatGPT for examples of “mid” it now shows you Project: Hail Mary And plays Nickelback. It’s a movie that can’t stop itself making callbacks to 2001 and Interstellar but is far, far too weighed down with relentless ironic banter and buddy-cop dynamics to come anywhere near the league of either. It’s clearly a passion project for Ryan Gosling, an actor who everyone agrees is also a good bloke and a living icon of non-threatening masculinity who makes your wife, daughter, female and probably many of your male work colleagues literally gasp whenever he appears on screen. As Ryland Grace. A man who wakes up in a spaceship with amnesia and immediately begins calculating the local gravity by dropping a series of inanimate injects. A man of the academy. A man who has, if we were to realistically represent his character, never made a woman gasp just by entering a room. A contradiction we’ll come back to. Support Science Fiction with Damien Walter as a member Access to all videos, essays and community Join Here And Project: Hail Mary does contain accurate science. We’ve got time dilation as predicted by Einstein. We’ve got the actual physics of rockets, orbital mechanics, spectrostopy, although there’s a lot less about “mass ratios” than the book. We even get some convergent evolution. And the many, many, *endless* torrents of think pieces from the corporate media applauding Project: Hail Mary for being based on “solid science” are correct. But are, like the lyrics of Chad Kroeger, beside the point. Because, like most science fiction, the science in Project: Hail Mary depends on accepting a fantastical premise, the Astrophage. In reality it is not possible to convert matter to energy 100% efficiently. If we were really being scientifically rigorous we would have to admit that Ryan Gosling speeding to Tau Ceti in a starship is no more realistic than flying on the back of a dragon. So, yes, if you can handwavium aside the Astrophage you can believe that what you like about Project: Hail Mary is its HARD scientific realism. When what you really like is that it’s a lovely fantasy. A Male Pattern Fantasy. # Dear Mr “Damo” Walter. Thanks for saying YES to plugging my Amazon bestselling self-published scifi! #2 in Science Fiction > Space Opera > Competence Porn on your cool podcast. Now that the money has reached your account – boy you sure aren’t cheap! – here is the book. It’s a new genre I call SCI-MAN-TASY. That’s SCIFI plus FANTASY for… What the f… In the grim darkness of Sector 7 only one man knows the password. That man is Gary “The Fixer” Henderson, the Last Sysadmin, and that password definitely is NOT Admin123. Bestselling Kindle self-published author Gary Henderson…yes the author and hero DO have the same name…has written the kind of book that men who solder things will love. And features a quite a lot younger woman who starts as an authority figure but eventually admits Gary’s greater technical expertise. Do they get locked in a dark server stack together? Of course they do. It’s a book. It’s available. It has a front, a back, and a statistically significant number of adverbs in the middle. I’ve been paid. You’ve been told. The transaction is complete. It’s scifi. It’s romance. It’s fantasy. It’s Sci-MAN-tasy. Buy it on Amazon. Or don’t. The wire transfer is non-refundable, Gary. # Now at this point, some of you, specifically those of you currently wearing a t-shirt that says I F*ing Love Science might be feeling a twitch of cognitive dissonance. You’re thinking, “But Damo…Andy Weir’s book isn’t fantasy. There are no elves in it. There isn’t a single Orc. Nobody spends forty pages describing a stew made by a halfling. It’s science! It’s got maths in it. It’s got the specific tensile properties of Xenonite!” We have been conditioned by the staggering cultural influence of JRR Tolkien to believe that Fantasy is a “genre”, a genre of swords, dragons, and those unnecessarily complex maps of continents that look suspiciously like a slightly melted version of Western Europe. But fantasy is not a setting. It is a psychological function. Fantasy…according to Sigmund Freud, the man who charted the Unconscious from whence all fantasy comes…fantasy is simply wish fulfillment. Fantasy is the psyche’s attempt to resolve a *lack*. It is a narrative scaffold built over a hole in the self. A young woman dreaming of marrying a prince, when really she will end up married to a frog, is fantasising. A boy imagining he’s a powerful hero when, a few years later, he will die in a trench is lost in fantasy. We create fantasies of lives we will never live, and things that will never happen. Almost all popular storytelling is fantasy, especially the stories presented as “real”. James Bond isn’t an MI6 agent, he’s Lancelot in a tuxedo. Succession isn’t a show about powerful businessmen. It’s a fantasy for people who want to be powerful but also want to feel superior to the powerful. Consider “The Great British Bake Off”. Does anyone really care who makes the best jam tart? No. This is a show for British people who live on a small island covered end to end with Tesco Metros who want to taste a Britain that exists only in fantasy. Fantasy is at its most potent, its most dangerously infectious, when it is hidden. When it’s tucked away behind the upholstery of “realism.” When it wears the camouflage of technical data. When it is encoded within the symbolism of science. Encoded in Project: Hail Mary is one of the most powerful and archetypal of all human fantasies. The world is terrifying. The world is unpredictable. Reality is pure, incomprehensible chaos. But I, the hero. We, humanity, can bring order to the chaos. With the correct equation. The precise knowledge. The right actions performed at the perfect time we man can take power over the chaos. And Hard SF is the perfect blanket of “realism” to disguise this fantasy. The equations, the rocket engines, the space suits, the blinky blinky lights. They all lull us men into the belief that we’re watching an extrapolation of scientifically verifiable REALITY. When really we’re escaping into fantasy. Because all science fiction is fantasy. Fantasy that’s been to community college, taken Physics 101 and is now pretending it knows the secrets of reality. “Hard SF” is not about the science. It is about the feeling of the science. It is the fantasy that the universe is not a chaotic, indifferent void that will eventually erase every trace of our existence until we are as forgotten as Ozymandias’s left leg. The fantasy that the universe is a Logic Puzzle. And, this is the crucial bit, that we humans have the right-shaped brain to solve it. Most science fiction is just fantasy with a more rigorous filing system. A symbolic encoding to make the fantasy palatable to men who don’t know, or can’t admit, they want fantasy. Male Pattern Fantasy (MPF) is not a static object. It is a modular narrative software that updates its “skin” to match the user’s increasing level of cynicism and decreasing level of testosterone. From our first Saturday morning cartoon to when we die in a care home, clutching a special edition BluRay of Transformers : The Movie. It’s the same fantasy, isn’t it? It’s just the same one. Over and over. It just changes costume so we don’t feel quite so pathetic for still believing in it. The Three Ages of the MPF To understand why Project: Hail Mary is so addictive to us men we must look at the three stages of the MPF: Stage 1: The Titan (The Toddler/Child): This is the fantasy of Physical Might. It is the “Hulk Smash” phase. The world is big and scary, so you imagine yourself being bigger and scarier. It is the simple, honest desire to knock over a skyscraper because your mother wouldn’t let you have a second chocolate buscuit. It’s a bit crude, but at least it’s honest. Stage 2: The Maverick (The Adolescent): Here, the fantasy evolves into Social/Sexual Mastery. This is the Han Solo phase. The “Rebel Without a Cause” (but with a very expensive leather jacket). The fantasy is that you are “cool,” which is a state of being where you are incredibly important but also pretend not to care about anything. You are misunderstood by the “system,” but…and this is crucial…you are eventually vindicated by a princess. Stage 3: The Architect (The Young Professional): As the man enters the workforce, the fantasy shifts to Professional Dominance. This is the “Tech Bro” or “Tycoon” phase. It is the dream of building an empire, of being the smartest guy in the boardroom, of disrupting an industry with an app that basically just reinvented the bus but with more venture capital. It’s about being “The Man with the Plan.” The Mid-Life Pivot: The Indispensable Specialist But then, something happens. You reach your forties. Your back starts to hurt for no reason. You realize that you aren’t going to be a superhero. You realize that “The System” doesn’t actually care if you’re a maverick; it just wants you to fill in your timesheets. You realize you aren’t the Architect of a New World; you’re a middle-manager in a world that’s already been built and is currently falling apart. This is the Mid-Life Crisis of Relevance. And this is where Project: Hail Mary arrives like a miracle. Because Project Hail Mary is the MPF for the Mid-Life specialist. It moves away from the “Big” fantasies of youth and into the “Small” fantasy of Specific Competence. It tells the reader: “Yes, you are isolated. Yes, you are just a school teacher or a mid-level administrator. But, under the right circumstances, your ability to remember the boiling point of liquid nitrogen makes you the most important human being in the history of the species.” It is the fantasy of being Indispensable. The teenager wants everyone to look at him. The mid-life man just wants to be the only person who knows how to fix the Wi-Fi. We want to be the “Expert.” Just leave us alone in our shed to do our thing. And Ryland Grace is the ultimate Expert. He is the man who is “left alone” to do his work, and in doing so, saves everyone. It’s a retreat into a shed that happens to be the size of a starship. Not all men have the Male Pattern Fantasy. Some men live the fantasy. Some men walk into a room and everyone pays attention. Some men are the 1% on Tinder that get 99% of the dates. Some men are 6’2 with a chad jaw. Some men are Ryan Gosling. So while Ryan Gosling is as great in Project: Hail Mary as he is in everything. He’s also a walking contradiction. Because Hollywood has a problem. A problem with the human face. Because to be bankable a Hollywood movie must feature the 1% of human faces that other humans want to gaze at. Not the real face of Ryland Grace. Our middle-aged, socially isolated, slightly neurotic middle-school science teacher who has retreated from a failed academic career into a life of quiet, solitary despondence. Does not have the face, or waistline, of Ryan Gosling. A face whose bone structure is so aggressively symmetrical it’s actually a violation of the second law of thermodynamics. A stomach so ripped it can only have been carved from a single, very expensive block of artisanal soap. If Project: Hail Mary was really based on scientific realism the laws of physics would dictate we cast in the role of Ryland Grace. Jason Alexander. By no means an ugly man. But the kind of good looking man Hollywood casts when it wants to tell us mere mortals that this character is one of us. A man who actually looks like he’s spent his life in a windowless laboratory arguing with a peer-review board about the cellular respiration of extremophiles. The ideal Ryland Grace is not a man who looks like he just stepped out of a Tag Heuer advertisement after six months in a coma. But Hollywood cannot give us the Costanza. They cannot give us the man who actually represents the demographic buying the book. Or watching the movie. They must give us the Gosling, because the Male Pattern Fantasy requires that we are not ourselves. We are Ryan. Think of Paul Hogan in Crocodile Dundee. The mugger pulls a sensible flick-knife; Hogan pulls a blade the size of a surfboard. Project Hail Mary is the flick-knife…a shiny, user-friendly tool for the city boy. If you want the bowie knife…the “Hard SF” that actually lives up to the name…you have to look at the books that are Aggressively Anti Male Pattern Fantasy Books that don’t make you a “somebody” but treat you like the damp patch of organic chemistry on an indifferent rock you actually are. The Invincible by Stanisław Lem The “Anti-Rocky.” No “Engineer’s Bromance” here. The alien is a necrotic, non-sentient evolution of micro-machinery that has zero interest in your biology PhD. It is “Hard” because it acknowledges that the universe is unfathomable, not a logic puzzle designed for your ego to solve. Blindsight by Peter Watts The “Anti-Special-Brain.” While Weir suggests your intellect is a superpower, Watts argues that consciousness is a biological mistake…a redundant “user interface” that makes us slower than the hyper-efficient, non-sentient entities out to erase us. It’s the Male Pattern Fantasy’s nightmare: a world where being “Indispensable” is an evolutionary disadvantage. The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke The “Monolith of Futility.” Often misread as a triumph of engineering, it’s really about the cold, Newtonian reality of the “Great Man.” Vannevar Morgan builds a space elevator—the ultimate phallic monument to relevance—only to realize the universe is perfectly happy to let him die of a heart attack while his “Works” simply obey the laws of tension and gravity. These books don’t care about your ego; they care about the math. # And so, we arrive at the sands. The “lone and level sands.” The part of the poem where men’s deepest fears, and wildest fantasies, collide. What is the Hard in Hard Science Fiction actually protecting? Because it is protection. It’s armor. It’s a lead-lined bunker for the ego. If we look at the core of the Male Pattern Fantasy, we find that it isn’t powered by ambition. It isn’t powered by a genuine desire to save the species. It is powered by a singular, cold, vibrating terror. The terror of the Void. The fear of Irrelevance. The ego of the Nobody. The great, unspoken fear of the modern man, the man who has done everything “right,” who has the degree, the career, the sensible shoes, is that we are, fundamentally, a Nobody. That we are a ghost in a machine we didn’t build and don’t control. That if we were to vanish tomorrow, the only thing that would change is that a few spreadsheets would go unpopulated and a cat would be slightly confused for forty-eight hours. This is reality. The mundane reality of being a finite, transient flicker in eternity. And Project Hail Mary is the escape from that reality. It is a narrative “Relevance Injection.” It takes the “Nobody”—the middle-school teacher, the failed academic—and it makes him the Sole Saviour of Humanity. And un-humanity, in this case. It’s a lovely fantasy, isn’t it? The idea that humanity needs us. Because this is our secular salvation. That if we do something “Big” enough…save a planet, build a monument, write a best-selling book about a man saving a planet…we can find meaning in the void. But we can’t, can we? Even Ryland Grace…the man who saved two civilizations with a bit of tape and a basic understanding of light-curves…is ultimately just another Ozymandias. He builds his Works. He saves the Sun. He stands on a pedestal in the Eridani system. And he thinks, in an unassuming Ryan Gosling kinda way “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And the universe. The actual Hard universe, the one that doesn’t care about your PhD or your bromance with a spider-alien. That universe. Doesn’t even look back at you with a blank, Newtonian stare. There is no stare. There is no it. Reality doesn’t even not know you exist. Reality is void. Project: Hail Mary is a beautiful lie. It tells you it’s a work of rigorous scientific realism. It flatters you with the symbolism of science. It offers to show you the void. Then it delivers a lovely fantasy. Just the same fantasy as every child’s bedtime tale, every fairy story, every superhero saga. Project: Hail Mary isn’t hard science fiction. It’s pure fantasy. Look on my Works, ye Mighty. And… well, maybe just have a nice cup of tea instead. It’s probably more realistic. Listen to the podcast audio
April 1 · 27 min - SF
How the Matrix reclaimed the Red Pill
The best way to understand the broken, crazed, indulgent filmography of the Wachowski’s is as a quest to make the Matrix movie the Matrix would never make. Time. Is money. And in the cold unfeeling eyes of Hollywood a “movie” is just a business strategy to convert two hours of your time into shareholder value. Jupiter Ascending failed at that task. Spectacularly. It made $184 million dollars globally, but cost roughly the GDP of a small island nation to produce, generating such a severe loss for Warner Bros. that as punishment eight senior executives were mashed into time milk. Become a member to watch the full video Members get full access to all posts and videos SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Or watch on YouTube https://youtu.be/mPkRdJ3EwWE Why? Because it’s garbage. It is beautiful, glistening, high-fructose hilarious garbage. It’s the kind of movie that isn’t trying to make you laugh, yet leaves you wheezing at the screen asking, “Why? Who allowed this? Was everyone on set huffing industrial-grade furniture polish?” Why make Mila Kunis a toilet cleaner? She’s about as believable in the role as Elijah Wood as He-Man. Sure it’s the low origin for her galactic scale heroine. But depicting that would require that Mila do something called acting. Imagine the thing called ACTING. Then imagine it’s anti-matter opposite. Anti-acting. That is Mila Kunis screen presence. Why is Eddie Redmayne attempting to keep a very dark secret from his own vocal cords? He spends half the film whispering like a haunted Victorian doll and the other half screaming like he just stepped on a Lego. Why is Sean Bean…oh wait it’s a paycheque. Even Sean, a famously low effort actor, has never turned in a lazier performance. Why is 78% of Jupiter Ascending’s screentime just an indecipherable sludge of brown CGI? In the future people will just assume this is all AI slop, because it’s that “generic scifi” look, but back when Midjourney cost $2 million dollars a minute. Yet, buried in this sea of CGI vomit is this kind of thing: Jupiter Ascending fails as a mechanism to convert your time into Warner Bros shareholder capital. But. It’s Redpilled. “Bro, Americans will believe anything but the objective reality that capitalism as an economic organisation of society is responsible for exactly the things they are complaining about.” Hasan Piker There’s a reason the Redpill is red. If you know, you know. It is one of the great ironies of our age that people who claim to be a “thing” are almost always the exact opposite of that thing. People with a Masters in Creative Writing struggle to write a compelling grocery list. People who claim to be Woke are the least awake to their own internal dumpster-fire personalities. And anyone—ABSOLUTELY ANYONE—who claims to be “Redpilled” is guaranteed to be the most Bluepilled motherfucker you have ever met in your life. Taking the Redpill today is like selecting from an artisanal chocolate box of delusions. The Manosphere offers to awaken you from the lie of feminism and unleash your inner Apex Predator Alpha-Wolf when really it’s not that girl on OnlyFans who’s keeping you down, you’re both victims of the system that turns your desire into a revenue stream. The Alt-Right made you believe you’re fighting the Cathedral of the liberal establishment because you read a 4000 word blog post by a man who thinks this mid-life crisis biker jacket is a look. When really Being a Neoreactionary is just being an old reactionary. You want monarchy back because you think the king will be your mate. When really he’ll have you cleaning the cess pitt. The Cryptobros told you fiat currency was why you can’t pay the rent. But they forgot to mention their imaginary monopoly money is directly owned by oligarchs. The Transhumanists. You too can live forever if you buy their $99 a month supplement regime. The Heterodox intellectuals and Contrarian thinkers. The Qanon conspiracists. The Flat Earthers. The Alien abductees. You people who think Joe Rogan is a deep state media outlet. You aren’t fucking “Red Pilled” Yet For anyone who actually, genuinely doesn’t know, the Red Pill originates from the Matrix. Neo after a lifetime seeking the Matrix is offered a choice. What follows is arguably the greatest moment of pure science fiction in cinema. Neo’s awakening in the goo pod is the essence of what critic Darkko Suvin calls… COGNITIVE ESTRANGEMENT …a moment ago you believed reality was a green tinted city, now you see reality is pink tinted goo. Crucially, reality has not changed. Your cognition of reality has been estranged. “Cognitive estrangement is a literary technique, primarily in science fiction, that makes the familiar world seem strange and new, forcing readers to re-examine their own reality through a “lens” of unfamiliar settings or concepts.” It’s this cognitive estrangement, the transformation of how we perceive our reality, that in pop culture has come to be symbolised by the Red Pill. Did you believe in democracy until the internet showed you both parties were masks for the same oligarchy? Were you under the illusion that a BigMac was actually food but now realise it’s just agricultural waste products in a bun? Did a tropical island for billionaire sex perverts sound like a conspiracy theory until recently? The Red pill became one of the most potent symbols in 21st century pop culture because the condition of being Red pilled is now a constant. Having your cognition estranged is table stakes for life in this century. But how do we know our new perception, or new political perspective, or nutrition plan is truer than our old…delusion? What if a year ago you went down an internet rabbit hole and discovered a rebel cell of religious fanatics who have convinced you it’s ok to kill the non-believers? The first Matrix movie is a big dose of Blue pill, painted Red. What The Matrix really captures, as we share the exhilaration and self-belief of Neo taking flight to Rage Against the Machine’s Wake-up, is the Dunning-Kruger of the freshly Red pilled. I know you’re out there. I can hear the hum of the 5G towers now. I know you’re afraid. You’re afraid of a man who’s finally figured out that the “birds” on the power lines are just surveillance drones charging their batteries. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end—mostly because my Wi-Fi is being throttled by the Deep State. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone—because I’m pretty sure the signal is scrambling my DNA—and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them why the “moon” looks a little too much like a projection screen on Tuesdays. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without Mandatory fluoride, Chemtrails ruining a perfectly good sunset, and Globalist lizard-people in high-waisted suits. A world where anything is possible, as long as you have enough crypto and a Faraday cage in your basement. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you… whether or not you’ve done your own research. Because The Matrix is the movie the Matrix makes to keep you in the Matrix. The Matrix is Plato’s Cave. The most famous philosophical allegory. We are chained in a cave looking at shadows cast on the wall. But we can awaken from the matrix to the light of true reality. But what if there is no reality to awaken to? What if there are only more shadows? What if our cave is just inside another cave within a cave within…more caves? What if beyond reality is hyperreality? The Matrix puts on the table Simulacra and Simulation, the iconic 1981 work of postmodern philosophy by French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. To introduce the philosophy of the hyperreal. “Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the ‘real’ country, all of ‘real’ America, which is Disneyland” Jean Baudrillard But the Matrix isn’t really about the hyperreal. Instead The Matrix tells us we can wake up from the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave to a real reality. But Baudrillard’s hyperreal destroys that possibility. The digital age that Baudrillard saw coming, of computer imagery, mass marketing, the internet, algorithmic advertising, video game addiction, politics-as-reality-tv and much more. Overwrites reality with simulation, and replaces once real objects and experiences with simulacra. Consider Häagen-Dazs, an invented word to persuade American consumers you are eating Danish ice-cream. Or Donald Trump. A reality-tv star playing a billionaire who hoodwinked MAGA voters into making him a billionaire Or AI, Large Language Models, a statistical mashup of the internet that spits out a pure simulacrum of truth. Tradwives. Star Trek. Bitcoin. Jordan Peterson. Our world is choking on third order simulacra of people and things that were once real. Welcome to the desert of the postmodern. Where the experience of awakening from the simulation… …is just another simulation. A product. A commodity. Giving you the subjective Red pill experience is a strategy used by gurus, grifters, life coaches, religions, self-help writers, political campaigns, governments and youtube video essayists. To convert your time into money, into clicks, into power. Jean Baudrillard hated The Matrix because it is a simulacum of the movie that might actually awaken you to the Matrix, offering a simplistic Platonic allegory instead of the complexity of hyperreality. But the makers of The Matrix were themselves shaken awake by Baudrillard’s refusal to participate in the sequels, and his insult that they had made the movie the Matrix would make about the Matrix. And the best way to understand the broken, crazed, indulgent filmography of the Wachowskis… …and understand why Jupiter Ascending is both a flaming garbage pile and a dose of true Redpilled magnificence… …is as a quest to make the Matrix movie the Matrix did NOT want them to make. The first thing you notice watching Bound, the Wachowski’s first movie, back to back with The Matrix… …is that the Wachowski’s had a type. Gina Gerson is the prototype that became the Trinity archetype played by Carrie-Anne Moss The androgynous dark haired beauty, with the inverted triangle shoulder to hip ratio. It’s going to become a significant part of the Wachowski’s story that Lana in 2012 and Lilly in 2016 both announced their transgender identities, and Bound is their movie most overtly centred on gender. The term “gender performativity” was introduced by the philosopher Judith Butler in her 1990 book Gender Trouble. And the Wachowski’s 1996 debut movie is an examination of the forces; social, economic, political that keep us “bound” within performative gender identities. And it’s also cinematic erotica from the straight-to-DVD era, before the internet made pornography ubiquitous, that very much exploits and reinforces the very gender performativity it also critiques. And this becomes the key characteristic of all the Wachowski’s movies. The critique of ideas simultaneously being exploited for entertainment. Capitalist blockbusters that critique capitalism. Movies that show you the Matrix to keep you in the Matrix. All, except one. It’s self-evident that the Matrix sequels, Revolutions and Reloaded, are an attempt to answer Baudrillard’s critique. While still being effects driven kungfu action blockbuster extravaganzas. The only bearable way to watch these movies is the Dezionzed edit, which you can simulate by skipping the painfully bad scenes in Zion. Zion is basically like being told the trust fund kids who showed up for Fyre festival will save the world. Even if it was true, everyone else would rather die. And even if you can ignore or skip Zion, Matrix Reloaded is structurally crippled by the decision to make it a video game tie-in with Enter the Matrix… …a kamikaze attempt to bootstrap the career of Jada Pinkett-Smith as Niobe, an acting talent only slightly less compelling than Mila Kunis. But if you can mentally reconstruct a decently edited movie, and somehow purge the cringe “orgasm cake” from your memory, the Matrix sequels are…half a great movie. That movie climaxes as Neo confronts the Architect of The Matrix. The most pertinent but least relevant question to ask about the Architect is why he’s Sigmund Freud. And you’ll find an entire video about that elsewhere on yhe Science Fiction channel. The Architect is the answer to the unresolved equation of the original Matrix. Neo’s Red pilled rebellion is not a true awakening to reality, but is in fact just another control mechanism within the Matrix, an awakening only to the complexity of hyperreality. Great. But instead of reckoning with the hyperreal contradiction, instead of tracking what we are to do as humans when we realise there is no way out of the hyperreal trap we find ourselves in. The Matrix sequels double down in completely the opposite direction. Neo is actually Digital Jesus and the next couple of hours are a mess of junk CGI… …as Neo, who is garbed as a Catholic seminarian the whole time, beats up Satan Smith. Under the tension of being movies the Matrix would make about the Matrix, while trying desperately not to be, the Matrix sequels simply implode. Science fiction is an art form born in short stories. And The Matrix as science fiction has some of its best ideas when liberated from the blockbuster movie format. The Animatrix main contribution to the mythos is that machines might be making a perfectly ethical and good choice to subdue or destroy humanity. Man’s inhumanity to man is the defining quality of human history. War. Murder. Slavery. And humanity, of course, subjects sentient machines to exactly the same exploitation as sentient humans. In a shocking moment of cognitive estrangement, the machine’s sociopathic hatred of the human becomes logical, perhaps even a good thing. Maybe the real Red pill is understanding that human reality was never all that. MORPHEUS vs GROYPER INT – NIGHT Thunder rumbles. Rain pours down outside the windows of a dark, decrepit room. MORPHEUS sits in a leather armchair. Opposite him sits GROYPER. Groyper is slouching so low he is almost horizontal. He crunches loudly on a chip. MORPHEUS (Dramatic pause) Let me tell you why you’re here. You’re here because you know something. What you know you can’t explain, but you feel it. You’ve felt it your entire life. GROYPER (Mouth full) Is it indigestion? Because I ate like, four burritos before I logged on. MORPHEUS (Ignoring him) It is the feeling that there is something wrong with the world. You take the blue pill… the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill… you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Morpheus opens his palms. Left Hand: A shiny RED PILL. Right Hand: A glowing BLUE PILL. MORPHEUS All I offer is the truth. GROYPER Okay, quick Q. What does the Red pill do? MORPHEUS You will join the resistance. You will fight the machines in the scorched desert of the real world. You will eat protein sludge and sleep in cold steel bunkers. GROYPER (Grimacing) Cringe. Too much cardio. Blue pill. MORPHEUS The Blue Pill returns you to the simulation. A prison for your mind. A world of illusion. GROYPER Does the illusion have 5G and those little mini-pizzas? MORPHEUS Yes, but they are false. The taste is merely electrical signals interpreted by your brain. GROYPER Bro, if the electrical signals taste like pepperoni, I literally do not care. (He reaches out) Gimme the Blue. MORPHEUS (Retracting hand) GROYPER Morpheus, my guy. Look at you. You’re wearing sunglasses indoors at night. You look stressed. I’m trying to go back to my stream. I was about to hit Gold rank. Blue pill. Now. MORPHEUS This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. GROYPER Blue Pill! MORPHEUS (Opens Left Hand – Red Pill) You take the Red Pill: You wake up. You see the truth. You will see the global supply chains built on suffering. You will understand that your clothes are made by sorrow, your food is poison, and the government is a lizard-run Ponzi scheme designed to harvest your anxiety. You will feel the crushing weight of systemic injustice every waking second. GROYPER (Deadpan) Yikes. That sounds super toxic. MORPHEUS: You will learn the entire global economy is a hallucination. The banks are bankrupt. Your savings are imaginary numbers. GROYPER: So you’re saying my credit card debt isn’t real? Based. MORPHEUS: The government is recording every private moment of your life through your webcam. GROYPER: Hope they like watching a grown man cry while eating Bagel Bites. MORPHEUS: Every news station is owned by one conglomerate script-feeding you lies to keep you docile. GROYPER: That’s why I get all my news from Asmongold. MORPHEUS: You are living in a pod full of goo, naked, bald, and hooked up to tubes. GROYPER: Free rent, free pool. You’re really bad at making this sound bad. MORPHEUS (Desperate) Look. If you take the Red Pill, you become a hero. You save humanity. GROYPER Okay, but consider this: If I take the Blue Pill, I can be a level 90 Warlock and I don’t have to wear that itchy wool sweater everyone in Zion wears. Seriously, look at your shirt. It has holes in it. You live in a sewer, Morpheus. You are a sewer rat. MORPHEUS It is a ship! The Nebuchadnezzar! GROYPER It’s a sewer ship. You eat slime. I eat steak. MORPHEUS THE STEAK IS NOT REAL! GROYPER (Leans in close) Does. It. Matter? Morpheus freezes. He looks at the Red Pill in his hand. He looks at his tattered clothes. He looks at Groyper, who is inexplicably holding a bubble tea that materialized out of nowhere. GROYPER Come on, Morph. Join the vibes. We have air conditioning. We have cat videos. We have ignorance. It’s bliss, bro. It’s literally bliss. Morpheus’s hand shakes. He looks at the Red Pill. He looks at the Blue Pill. MORPHEUS Does the Blue Pill have … HBO Max? GROYPER We got the bundle, fam. Morpheus snatches the Blue Pill. MORPHEUS Blue pill me. They fist bump. FADE OUT. I’m not going to say a lot about Speed Racer here. Patrick H Willems makes a detailed case for the Wachowski’s fourth movie as the most important movie of the 21st century so far. I’m just going to point out that Speed Racer is the story of a young man who discovers his heroic drive is, literally, just a hack exploited to power the public spectacle of capitalism. The Red pill is red for a reason. In a shocking turn of events, Alan Moore was not happy with the movie adaptation of V for Vendetta. And with good reason. ”It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country… It’s a thwarted and distorted 1980s Manhattan fantasy of asinine American liberal values.” Alan Moore Moore is widely hated for his negative critiques of adaptations of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and…well…not League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which everyone agrees was total shite. But you have to remember that Alan Moore knows the score, and most “fans” are unconscious consumers, not ready to leave their goo pods, who will fight to defend the very system that entraps them. And Moore writes to wake you up, not keep you immersed in the goo. Even with a story as clearly revolutionary as V for Vendetta, the Wachowskis make decisions that replace revolution with a more palatable box office experience. Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a story of two diametrically opposed ideologies. Fascism as the system of absolute submission to the power of the state, represented by the Norsefire regime… …vs pure and absolute Anarchism, the complete liquidation of state power which is the goal of V. By heavily insinuating that the state uses “false flag” terrorist attacks… …to usher in fascist control of the people, the movie reflected George Dubya Bush era anxiety around new state powers like the Patriot Act. The 2005 movie scripted by the Wachowski’s and directed by James Mcteague replaces the rise of anarchism… …with the restoration of democracy. In fairness to V for Vendetta, it did literally flood the world with a second potent cultural symbol after the Red pill. V masks, the face of Guy Fawkes, as styled by David Lloyd, were mass-produced for the movie. And adopted by the Occupy Wall Street anarchist protest movement that followed the 2009 financial crisis. I joined the Occupy London protest and visited Occupy Oakland in 2011. With all due respect to my thirty something self, and the people I met and spoke with. We weren’t prepared for the reality of anarchist revolution. We wanted a fairer deal under capitalism. Not the absolute dissolution of the state that Alan Moore depicts in V. We wanted just a taste of revolution, not a full dose of the Red pill. English socialists have a secret motto. Semper Eadem was the latin motto of Elizabeth I of England, meaning “always the same”. The city of Leicester where I lived for many years, a Labour stronghold and a former industrial capital devastated by globalisation, has long held Semper Eadem as its motto. Nothing changes. Socialists don’t even need to subvert the motto. Power is always the same, however much it might appear to change over time. Cloud Atlas by David Michell is a novel about the archetypes that travel through time. Personalities, societies, and stories, that reoccur from the ancient past into the future. Cloud Atlas the movie is a more specific tale of specific people who reincarnate across time. Halle Berry and Tom Hanks occurring again and again in new facial prosthetics never stops being a little bit absurd. But with Cloud Atlas, their first film in collaboration with David Michell, who also contributed to the final Matrix movie, the Wachowski’s for the first time come close to making a movie the Matrix would never make. Cloud Atlas captures a singular idea. That power is the same, in every time and every age, power and our struggle against power never really changes. And if you can grasp that you have finally swallowed a dose of the Red pill. Balem Abrasax: My mother made me understand that every human society is a pyramid and that some lives will always matter more than others. It is better to accept this than to pretend it isn’t true. Balem Abrasax: My mother… My mother taught me what was necessary to rule in this universe. Jupiter Jones: By killing people? Balem Abrasax: [throws up his hands] I create life! And I destroy it. Life in an act of consumption, Jupiter. To live is to consume. Now, the human beings on your planet are merely a resource waiting to be converted into capital. And this entire enterprise is just a small part in a vast and beautiful machine defined by evolution, designed to a single purpose… To create profit. The Wachowski’s put the key to their philosophy into the mouths of prophets and mad men. Morpheus’ revelation that the Matrix exists to turn the human into a Duracell. (The original concept of human brains as the processing substrate for the Matrix is much stronger…but the battery is a potent symbol.) Agent Smith explaining that the Matrix must make men suffer for us to accept it. The Architect demonstrating that revolution against the machine is just another system within the machine. And the Abrasax family forcing open our throats to make us swallow their pill. The elites who rule over us. Who have always ruled over us. Be they kings, or capitalists, or immortal space lords, believe what Balem Abrasax believes. They believe human society is always a pyramid that crushes life at the bottom. They believe that to live is to consume. And that the value of other human life is as a resource to be turned into capital. They believe that this is the inescapable truth of a vast and beautiful machine. And that their position at the top of the pyramid is determined by god…or the machine. Which ultimately are the same thing. And this is the Blue pill. The essence of the Blue pill is the belief that reality is a machine, that its power is irresistible. That we are not free to choose differently. So it’s a bit of a shitter for the Abrasax clan and their ilk that Mummy Abrasax reincarnates to take the power back. It’s a neat twist that Mila Kunis defeats the capitalist machine by reclaiming legal ownership of her property rights and then CHOOSING to make the world better. If only our capitalist elites had such character. Let’s state what Jupiter Ascending only implies. Mummy Abrasax was the most powerful being in the universe. The peak of the pyramid. The master of the machine. And her existence was so horrifying she killed herself. Even Eddie Redmayne’s Victorian doll villain hates himself. The kings and capitalists of history hate you. But the only thing they hate more than you is themselves. They hate humanity. They are hate. So Mommy Abrasax reincarnates as the lowliest toilet cleaner to learn about the one thing that can defeat the hate machine. To take the Red pill is to awaken from the machine. I disliked Matrix Resurrections when I first saw it. I wanted that Matrix experience again. Because I’m far from immune to what The Matrix offers. From the ego trip. From the dream of being The One. And I wasn’t alone. Matrix Resurrections was slated and hated on release because it fails at being a product to convert your time into capital. The Matrix is the movie the Matrix makes to keep you in the Matrix because it functioned as a commodity that sells you a pre-packaged experience of being the One. The Matrix gives you a series of timed dopamine hits, a measure of brain activity, and an experience of faux awakening. It is a perfect mechanism to convert two hours of your time into shareholder value without ever disturbing you in your pink goo pod. The Matrix offers you the Red pill but is in fact a dose of the Blue pill. Because to take the Red pill you have to not be the One. And the whole point of the fourth Matrix movie is to deny you the experience of being the One. Keanu Reeves desperately swallowing more and more Blue pills is what legendary playwright Bertolt Brecht called a Gestus. An exaggerated physical gesture which shows us the psychological reality of a character. Far from wanting to escape The Matrix, Keanu Reeves as Thomas Anderson in Matrix Resurrections is desperately trying to stay in the Matrix. Just like all of us. Brecht was a Marxist theorist and creator, who critiqued the way theatre, cinema and culture at large provided a “spectacle” to distract the masses from the reality of capitalism. Brecht therefore practised an Epic Theatre, that used specific techniques to disrupt the spectacle and force the audience to see that reality. Whether deliberately or through a kind of co-evolution, Matrix Resurrections is like a text book in Brechtian theatre techniques. Because Lana Wachowski, who returned solo for the task, is determined to make the Matrix movie that the Matrix would never make. Matrix 4 repeatedly shatters the “fourth wall”, by literally placing us on a theatre stage with the original Matrix projected on a screen. To constantly break us out of the immersive experience of watching a Matrix movie, to remind us that we are in the Matrix. Matrix 4 is an anti-action movie, a resistance to what Brecht called “Culinary Theatre”. Instead of offering you one tasty action scene after another to snack on, Matrix 4 forces you out of consumer mode with anti-action, fight scenes that deliberately never deliver heroic release. All of this is to achieve what Brecht called Verfremsdungseffekt, to make the familiar corporate entertainment brand of The Matrix Strange again Yes, Matrix 4 is deliberately broken as a way to get back to the profound cognitive estrangement we last experienced in that pivotal scene in Matrix 1 As a consumer experience to amuse pod people Matrix 4 fails, so that it can succeed as f*cking amazing science fiction. THE ANALYST The Analyst: Now, my predecessor loved precision. His Matrix was all fussy facts and equations. He hated the human mind. So he never bothered to realize that you don’t give a shit about facts. The Analyst: It’s all about fiction. The only world that matters is the one in here. The Analyst: And you people believe the craziest shit. Why? What validates and makes your fictions real? Feelings. The Analyst: Here’s the thing about feelings. They’re so much easier to control than facts. Turns out, in my Matrix, the worse we treat you, the more we manipulate you, the more energy you produce. It’s nuts. I’ve been setting productivity records every year since I took over. And, the best part, zero resistance. People stay in their pods, happier than pigs in shit. The Analyst: The key to it all? You. And her. Quietly yearning for what you don’t have, while dreading losing what you do. The Analyst: For 99.9% of your race, that is the definition of reality. Desire and fear, baby. The Analyst: The sheeple aren’t going anywhere. They like my world. They don’t want this sentimentality. They don’t want freedom or empowerment. They want to be controlled. They crave the comfort of certainty. Matrix 4 is the Matrix movie the Matrix did not want the Wachowski’s to make. I think Jean Baudrillard would have liked it. Because after a quarter century the Matrix franchise finally makes us swallow the Red pill. We live in a system of power that controls how we think and what we believe. We are told stories of being the One to distract us from recognising we are one of many. And fantasies of awakening that are just more complex ways of staying asleep. Even our desire for revolution can be repackaged and sold back to us as restoration. Our heroic drives are just another weakness to be exploited. And this system, call it slavery, feudalism or capitalism, has been the same for thousands and thousands of years. The elite who sell their souls to this system for power, from kings to capitalists, hate you, only slightly less, than they hate themselves. And the final insult is that this system is not an irresistible machine that can never be changed This system is powerful only because You like it You choose it And you can change it Now you’re fuck*ng Red pilled! Listen to the podcast audio
February 22 · 42 min - SF
Star Trek ain’t woke. It’s corporate.
“Capitalism could appropriate even the most radical ideas and return them safely in the form of harmless ideologies.” Guy Debord Let me take you back to January 3rd 1993 and the first Star Trek spin-off show Star Trek was a show about a starship with a 5 year mission, and Next Generation was a reboot of that same narrative format. Even the first animated series stuck to the formula. But now Star Trek was about to re-write the episodic format of a strange new world per episode. And focus on just one world. Or more precisely just one space station. Welcome to Deep Space 9. Watch the full video essay on YouTube Star Trek has always been a show about exploration. But now that Trek was settling down in one place it could think about the dark side of humanity’s history of exploration. Colonisation. And so Deep Space 9 made the genuinely brave decision to make Star Trek a show about Postcolonialism Settler colonialism and Decolonisation Bajor is a world of peace loving spiritual seekers who follow a religion very similar to Vedic Hinduism … it’s basically the Indian sub-continent in space. That has recently freed itself from colonisation by the Cardassians. An empire of stiff necked, emotionally repressed Imperialists who are really polite and make great witty gay space spies. So that’s basically the English then. And Deep Space Nine is basically postcolonialism studies in space. Based on a scifi metaphor for the fall of the British Raj in India. The money-grubbing, middle man merchant race the Ferengi are an unfortunate mash-up of Middle Eastern cultures. And later in its development DS9 will explain the mysterious origin of the shape changing Constable Odo, when it introduces The Dominion. A race of shape-changers who after millennia of persecution, pogroms and mass murder against them, have become an expansionist state now committing those same crimes against others. And then there’s Starfleet. Captain Benjamin Sisko is a traumatised widower who lost his wife Rachel in combat, who has been consigned to DS9 as a burnout, which kind of gives away that Bajor is not Starfleet’s top priority. As is traditional in Star Trek, the Federation and Starfleet are an idealised version of America. By the 1990s that means Starfleet is the “galactic policeman”, sorting out the postcolonial messes left by other peoples empires. Here in 2026 we know that having a Nimitz class super carrier show up means your nation is about to be bombed, have its leadership kidnapped, then get your markets forced open for McDonalds and Starbucks and all your natural resources extracted. But back in the 90s it was much easier to still think of the US as a singular force for good, so maybe we can forgive DS9 for idealising the home team. Because what the best ever Star Trek show does do, imperfectly and incompletely, is set-up, by the end of its 90 minute pilot episode, all the elements of its material critique. Because that’s what Star Trek always used to be. Materialist critique can be simplified to the statement SHOW ME THE MONEY. Instead of getting distracted by what ideas people believe. Is socialism better than capitalism, for instance. A material critique asks : Who owns the factories? Who does the work and who gets the profits? Who has the power? Who has the MONEY? In a feudal society it:s land owners who have all the power and money. In a capitalist society it is the owners of capital who profit. The Federation as imagined by Gene Roddenberry has escaped feudalism and capitalism. In the Federation nobody has all the money, because there is no money. It is a society without landlords, without kings, or capitalists, or billionaires. But the Federation is surrounded by less developed societies. Like the feudal Klingons. Or the capitalist Ferengi. To show how backwards these systems really are. And this isn’t about technology. The Roulans and Klingons have matter converters too. But the wealth of that productive technology is still stolen by a few, not shared among all as in the Federation. The feature pilot for DS9 sets up the most sophisticated material critique Star Trek ever achieved, then spends the next seven seasons exploring the real power dynamics of Imperialism, the profound problems of decolonisation, and the toxic ongoing costs of settler colonialism. It was all right there on your tv screen anytime you watched Star Trek. But not any more. Starfleet Academy in *its* first two episodes definitely has something to say to us. One of those things is that nobody involved with writing the latest Star Trek spinoff has any idea how to write. It’s not just bad. It’s incompetent. Even basic technical skills like turning a scene are AWOL. People are going to defend Starfleet 90210 by saying it’s Trek for teenagers, which seems sadly insulting to teenagers. Starfleet Academy is brought to us by the same writers, led by Alex Kurtzman, who have been failing at writing Star Trek for over a decade. And who somehow fail even harder at writing Starfleet Academy. Discovery was trite. Picard was just awful. Strange New Worlds has turned into tub-thumping propaganda. And Starfleet Academy is the worst installment of Nu-Trek yet. How is it that Kurtzman and team keep “failing upwards” while Star Trek falls lower and lower? Well. Let me put the idea on the table that this is because Kurtzman et al are rewarded not for the Star Trek they make. But for the Star Trek they do not make. Because they do not make Star Trek woke. What? Damo? How can you say that Nu-Trek is not woke? ONE Star Trek has always been Woke and Nu-Trek is just Woker. And TWO look at all these reactionary pillocks screaming about how WOKE Star Trek is! Which is true enough. My old pals the Angry Nerdbros are screaming about all the things they usually scream about. The cast of Star Trek 90210 are TikTok Starfleet, Looksmaxxing Instagram influencers not space cadets. This “Academy” is less like a military academy than a liberal arts college. Those very expensive liberal arts colleges that graduate people who will never have to live without a trust fund. Holly Hunter, who deserved better than this dog’sdogs breakfast in her late career, delivers high concept speeches on “non-hierarchical” leadership and you realise the reason the Federation is collapsing is because Captain Picard has to spend an hour consulting the crew before he can order Red Alert. And Academy training emphasises trustbuilding and emotional safety, the kind of things liberal arts graduates with trust funds working as management consultants care about, while basically everyone else is thinking “If you want emotional safety maybe…maybe just don’t join Starfleet?” Go and gentrify Bajor. Go and become a management consultant. Go and be a writer for Nu-Trek. Gene Roddenberry was a blue collar guy, a WW2 pilot who survived an air crash-in the desert, and then an LA beat cop. Roddenberry loved scifi and he hired scifi writers, and back in the 60s scifi wasn’t written by Ivy League college grads. But now for most of the last two decades Trek has been written by graduates from elite universities who have re-made Trek in their own image. And in the image of the ideology they believe. An ideology that Star Trek has been forced to emote in ever more absurd terms. An ideology we can call Corporate Wokeness. This is the Fearless Girl. A small bronze statue of a young girl that appeared on International Women’s Day in 2017, facing down the famous Charging Bull on Wall Street. Yay! You go girl! But all was not as it seemed. The Fearless Girl was actually an advertisement for a “feminist” investment fund by State Street Global Advisors, stock ticker SHE. An advertisment devised by an ad agency, McCann worldgroup, the biggest and evilest marketing conglomerate in the entire fucking world. Meanwhile, the Charging Bull is an actual subversive work of art, created by Arturo Di Modica, at his own expense, and dumped in front of the New York stock exchange as a parody of the brute machismo that drives global capitalism. Fearless Girl vs Charging Bull is the essence of corporate wokeness. Because Corporate Wokeness is not Woke. Corporate Wokeness is a marketing strategy. It’s all the symbolism of radicalism and revolution, but sterilised and sold back to you as a product. In a process called Recuperation. And I have to say it like that because it was theorised by this French chap. Guy Debord. Look, I’m English, it’s an unwritten law of our land that we aren’t allowed to pronounce French names correctly. Guy Debord, author of Society of the Spectacle, philosopher and Marxist theorist. Debord was one of the first, alongside Frankfurt school theorists like Theodor Adorno, to think about how capitalism had become increasingly sophisticated at manipulating culture. Debord’s Society of the Spectacle describes how capitalism buys up culture, hollows out the meaning, and sells it back to you as empty “spectacle”. And it even does this to the most radical and revolutionary culture, through the process of Recuperation, which Debord described as “the rigged game of official culture” that “sterilizes subversive acts”. Think about that. What is a culture written by elite college grads, and owned by corporate shareholders, what is that culture but the “official culture”. And what is Nu-Trek but a “sterilized product”. Consider the Che Guevara tshirt. A peak symbol of revolution, sterilised and sold back to you as a “fashion statement” At this point I am going to…sell you a tshirt. Here we have Recuperated the symbolism of the Soviet Union and re-imagined Mr Spock as Trotsky and Captain Picard as Lenin and combined them with the trendy slogan Full Automated Luxury Space Communism. And we are sliding under the Fair Use for Parody to sell you this opportunity to indicate your parasocial support for this channel by buying the tshirt in the merch store linked in the comments. Thank you. Buy the tshirt here – https://damosays-shop.fourthwall.com/products/propaganda-trek-2 Think about “Black Lives Matter”. Briefly a genuine rallying cry of protest, quickly turned into a marketing slogan. Look at the Counter Culture of the 1960s which was about dropping out of things like the Vietnam War, but by the 1970s had been “sterilized” and sold back to the world as taking drugs and fucking anyone you liked. Or early hip-hop like Public Enemy or NWA who spoke about the political conditions of black life in America, which by the 1990s had been sterilized and sold back to you by a corporation as gangster rap. Now. Look at Star Trek. “But Star Trek was always woke!” Yes. Star Trek *was* woke. Star Trek once had a material critique. Imperfect. Incomplete. Bias to pro-American values. But an actual critique of real power. From the iconic multi-racial screen kiss of original Trek, and much more, to Trek’s peak postcolonial critique of Imperialism in Deep Space Nine. Star Trek *was* woke. But now through Debord’s process of Recuperation, Star Trek has been sterilised, commodified and sold back to us as corporate wokeness. And if we make a material critique of Star Trek itself it’s easy to see how and why. In the opening credits of the second Star Trek reboot “Kelvinverse” movie, the fucking abysmal In To Darkness. You will see the credit for a then little known production company Skydance Media. Skydance had come out of nowhere to co-fund the last two reboot movies, and would soon after also buy into the Mission Impossible and Jack Reacher franchises. Yes, the basic reason you got miniscule Tom Cruise playing giant Jack Reacher was Skydance. Founded by David Ellison, Skydance gained a reputation through the 2010s for having deep pockets and a high appetite for risk. As Hollywood has declined, Skydance has bought up much of the old movie industry. Made possible by leveraging the vast wealth of David Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, founder of ORACLE, the company known to its many critics as One Rich A*hole Called Larry Ellison. In 2025 Skydance completed the purchase of Paramount and the Star Trek franchise, bringing Star Trek under the direct control of one of the world’s richest families. To be clear, Star Trek has always been a corporate product, and I chart in great detail how Trek has functioned as propaganda in this video here. But this latest purchase moves Star Trek from corporate ownership to what is essentially private ownership. Skydance ownership of Paramount also gave it control of CBS News. As has been widely noted, CBS was overnight transformed into a watered down FOX News, spiking high profile stories the new owners disliked. So now Star Trek, the show where Captain Picard once lectured a frozen 20th-century banker that ‘The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives’… is now owned by a man whose driving force is the acquisition of all the wealth in the cloud. What are the chances, do we think, that the Dominion as a critique of settler colonialism are going to re-appear in the Skydance era of Star Trek? Zero. I’ll tell you the chances are zero. And looking at our world in 2026, if Nu-Trek really was “Woke”, that’s all it would be about. # Star Trek for most of its history has given us one massive radical idea. There are no billionaires in Star Trek. Nobody is extracting and hoarding the wealth of humankind. Instead that wealth is shared so humanity can better ourselves. There are no billionaires in Star Trek. Instead there are scientists, and explorers, and artists. That is a radical future. That is a Woke future. And we need Star Trek to be a vision of that future so we can see past “capitalist realism” and imagine harder. Imagine the Fully Automated Luxury Space Communism that Star Trek always promised. But that’s not what we have. In place of the genuinely radical material critique Trek once gave us, we now have the Recuperated ideology of corporate wokeness. All of the symbolism, none of the substance. Star Trek once told us that the scourges of racism, sexism, imperialism, colonialism would be over when, and only when, the productive base of civilization was no longer dominated by the few – by kings, by capitalists, by billionaires. Now Nu-Trek has everything to say about emotional safety and nothing to say about billionaires because a billionaire is paying the writers. And as long as this is the case. As long as Star Trek is owned by the very billionaires Star Trek told us should not exist. Star Trek will never be woke again. Listen to the podcast audio here :
January 26 · 21 min - SF
America forgot that Judge Dredd is a *satire* of fascism
We like DREDD We do. We all like DREDD. Not the god awful Stallone attempt, which we’re not going to mention again. Not even the original comic, even though it’s “seminal” and we’re about to talk about it much more. We like DREDD. The 2012 movie starring Karl Urban’s jaw, and written by none other than auteur writer director Alex Garland and, basically, his unofficial directorial debut. We like *that* DREDD. Watch the full video essay Because… …because it’s “gritty*. Because it’s “uncompromising”. Because we can sit in front of our 150 inch home projector screens – I just set this up and I thought what better way to test how deep the blacks go than a trip to Mega City One. – we can sit in our home cinema sipping our artisanal IPAs while we say to ourselves. “I am watching a sophisticated critique of the military-industrial complex and the erosion of civil liberties in a post-democratic landscape.” When actually we’re just watching a man with a very cool gun kill people who make us feel…uncomfortable. Because if we admit that we just quite like the idea of a stern man in a helmet coming along and…tidying up…the “chaos” of the modern world with a high-velocity armor-piercing hotshot… Well, then… We might have to admit that we like the jackboot. We like that the man wearing the boot doesn’t have to check his privilege because his privilege is a gold eagle on his shoulder that gives him the authority to throw you off a balcony. We want the boot. But…we just want the boot to be “clever”? To have read a bit of Baudrillard. We want the boot to be “self-aware.” ”Oh, look at that boot,” we want to be able to say. “That’s not a boot. That’s a deconstruction of the very concept of the boot.” We love the boot. We salivate over the boot. We watch the boot in 4K hi-res so we can see every detail of its stitching as it stamps on a human face – forever. And if the boot also has a cute blonde bob, petit figure and the suggestion of nudity under the leather… …then we might have to admit that fascism is at least a little bit…just a tad…sexy? The original Judge Dredd is a one joke comic strip. And the butt of that joke is American fascism. In his early appearances Dredd tracks down a criminal or a rogue Judge and sentences them to a violent, gruesome fate. It’s repetitive. It’s simple. It’s the same joke, told over and over again, for years. And from his very first appearance Dredd was a contradiction. He was a clear and present satire of authoritarian state violence. But he was also just a mega-violent superhero that kids and grownups could enjoy for a violent thrill. Judge Dredd always was the thing that Judge Dredd critiqued. He is the snake eating its own tail, but the snake is wearing a helmet and the tail is a perp. This ironic overlap of critique with the object of critique became a standard technique in UK comics. Judge Dredd was created by John Wagner as writer and Carlos Ezquerra as artist. Dredd was also guided by Pat Mills, the first editor of 2000AD, the publication that reinvented UK “boys comics”, and Dredd’s true home. Mills and Wagner kickstarted the UK comics revival that would bring writers like Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Warren Ellis, Mark Millar and Garth Ennis to notoriety. In place of bland boys’ own adventure stories, 2000AD published scifi and fantasy that always had a strong edge of political satire. Usually against right wing authorities, but also complacent liberals and up themselves socialists. It was anarchic, anti-authoritarian… …and violent. Mega-violent. 2000ADs satirical edge gave it freedom to present mega-violent storylines by passing them off as critiques of that very violence. Today a show like The Boys, based on Garth Ennis original comic, is the inheritor of this irony passport to mega-violence. But in the heavily censored culture of late 1970s Britain that satire-violence cocktail made 2000AD hugely popular. Thanks to ICE Patriot Protocol The secret police simulator that puts the ICE back in “I Am The Law” For sponsoring this video You play a second term President who has to Keep Power or face prosecution for serious corruption. Fortunately you have billionaire backers and the Supreme Court in your pocket, so now all you need is muscle. Don’t Immigration and Customs Enforcement belong on the border? HAHA! No! Not when you can deploy them to Blue Cities to beat up brown people. Wait…those Somali Americans are actually citizens? That’s a feature not a bug. Just unlock the Domestic Terrorism upgrade and GUESS WHAT? Now you can also beat up white citizens!! Manufacture “Internal Threats” and raise your National Security score high enough to unlock Congressional Funding and you get the PALANTIR POWERUP Data scrape social media for terrorist keywords like “Protest”, “Unionise” or “Basic Human Empathy” and compile your Dissident Hit List. Look at this Class 4 Subversive tweeting about “Fair Wages”. Just send in an Unmarked Van of ICE Agents and he’ll be rendered to your Black Site. One you’ve dealt with the leftists… er… terrorists… escalate to journalists, opposition leaders and / or anyone with assets you want to expropriate. PATRIOT PROTOCAL Because constitutional democracy is Woke. US culture had made its own turn towards graphic violence in 1971 with the now iconic Dirty Harry. With poverty and crime spiking across major American cities, in retrospect more a product of lead poisoning than liberalism, Clint Eastwood as Harry Callahan wasn’t just a movie, it was a manifesto. All Americas problems could be solved by a representative of the law Killing those dirty hippies!! And so Dirty Harry’s “Make My Day” became Judge Dredd’s “I Am The Law”. Harry hunted down hippies with his .44 Magnum for the catharsis of conservatives, Dredd satirised the same to make Brits chuckle about dumb Yanks. Because from the very beginning Dredd was a satire of American fascism. That’s who Dredd is. That’s what makes Dredd great. But that becomes a problem when you want to take Dredd from the pages of a subversive UK comic… …and make him a franchise for mainstream US audiences. Ok I lied to you…I have broken the social contract between video essayist and you the viewer…we do have to talk about the Stallone movie. Because one “answer” to Dredd as a satire is to just ignore the satire and play Dredd straight. The Stallone movie is bad for many reasons, which you can find many critiques of. But the one “good” thing about the 1995 Dredd is that it does look like the original comic. Brightly, proudly yellow and blue. Overblown and oversized. And the ABC Warrior cameo is cool. But that one good thing is also the problem. In the comic the Judge costumes are an absurd parody of the Hugo Boss designed uniforms that Nazis love. In the movie the Gianni Versace costumed Judges are no longer a parody of fascism. They just are fascist. Sexy fascists. With codpieces. Despite its huge success 2000AD was ultimately doomed. The shift from media scarcity, from a 1970s UK with three television channels, one of which was usually showing a man painting a vase, to the media saturation of today, meant that anthology comics like 2000 AD would soon lose popularity. But as comics themselves died, the new era of Superheroes as Intellectual Property was just beginning. It’s questionable if Judge Dredd has ever actually been a valuable IP. But the massive value of Marvel and DC has led a series of owners to buy 2000AD and keep it in print long beyond its natural lifespan… …as a bet. A wager that the 2000 AD IPs, most importantly Judge Dredd, would one day become valuable. But between his heyday in 1980s 2000AD and the attempts to force him into becoming a mass-media franchise, Dredd would have a brief golden age. In 1989 Pat Mills and artist Simon Bisley published Slaine : The Horned God. Bisley’s art style would take UK comics by storm. Influenced by the oil paint illustrations of the legendary Frank Frazetta, Bisley developed a technical style combining acrylics, gouache and air brush that simulated the look of oils… …but had short enough drying times to be scanned and shipped to meet comic production deadlines. This “fully painted” style dominated UK comics through the 1990s. It drove the move from single issue comics to graphic novels as the higher calibre of art called for higher production values and more complex and adult storytelling. And sparked an era of intensely political UK comics. Pat Mills amped up the mega-violence in Marshal Law, a super-hero hunter dealing with the aftermath of a US Imperialist war against Marxists. And gave the same themes a more serious exposition in Third World War. Frank Miller and Dave Gibbons Give Me Liberty delivered a brutal parody of far right and liberal politics. Jamie DeLano’s HELLRAISER run made the occult magician a work of social realism attacking 80s consumerism. The New Statesmen by John Smith and Jim Baikie was The Boys before The Boys. And of course Watchmen. In 1990 the Judge Dredd Megazine was launched, specifically to showcase Dredd in full painted splendour. The dark, atmospheric paint style of Colin Macneil showed us Dredd as never before. Freed from the juvenile comic action and punchy beats of the weekly comic, John Wagner delivered an adult, sophisticated Dredd storyline, widely considered the best story arc in Dredd’s history. Titled under the single word. America. What I can’t fully grasp about Dredd is Alex Garland’s original vision. At the midway turning point of Dredd 2012 a poor homeless man is crushed by a massive security door. This is exactly the one joke that the original Judge Dredd featured every week. The ordinary man crushed by the impassive machinery of the state. But this is the only moment where Dredd nods to the satirical tone of the original. Casual viewers of Dredd will likely note its marked similarity to the Raid movies, an Indonesian martial arts action movie franchise that featured out-numbered police officers fighting their way through a tower block. However, production of Dredd was almost complete before Raid released. It’s very unlikely Raid had any influence on Dredd. But there is a reason they seem similar. Garland’s script for Dredd was primarily influenced by the same Dirty Harry that inspired the comics, and The Battle of Algiers, a 1966 movie about the Algerian struggle for freedom from French occupation. Garland seemingly intended his Dredd as not a heroic police officer but a colonialist occupier. But that intention was never fully realised. Dredd’s script is primarily an action movie to appeal to mainstream US audiences. This script would be directed by Pete Travis, a young director rising to fame on a series of smart politically themed action thrillers. A good fit for Dredd. In theory. In practice Travis vision was for a much more high octane, less cerebral movie than Garland had scripted. It’s Travis action fueled take on Dredd that makes the movie resemble the Raid movies. “A huge part of the success of Dredd is in fact due to Alex Garland and what a lot of people don’t realize is that Alex Garland actually directed that movie”. ~Karl Urban Travis was removed from the directors chair after the first cut, and Alex Garland entirely reedited the movie. As the producer Garland was also on set for much of the shoot. So Dredd is in effect Garland’s uncredited directorial debut. Drama aside, this makes Dredd something like a painting started by a master, then painted over by a journeyman, then repainted by the master. A veritable palimpsest of egos. However it happened, nothing about Dredd quite works. As an action movie Dredd is a second rate action movie. The action set pieces are imaginative. Miniguns blowing out an entire floor of the block is ambitious. But it’s like a knockout punch that doesn’t land. Kinetically Dredd’s action keeps missing the mark. But Karl Urban’s jaw is a hit. The only tool Urban is left to act with delivers an Oscar level rendition of the essence of fascism… …disgust. Disgust is at the centre of the fascist psyche. Like Adolf Hitler’s disgust at germs, at poverty, at the disabled, the other. Judge Joseph Dredd is a man disgusted by the city he polices. But also disgusted by the work itself. Disgusted by the naivete of his new partner, and the grim reality they must enter. Alex Garland’s edit allows a lot of quiet space for us to experience the “Fascist Gaze”. To just look at the world of Judge Dredd without judgement. But. Well. Alex Garland let’s Joseph Dredd off the hook by letting him not talk much. The thing about strong silent types is when they do speak they often turn out to be twats. The original Dredd is the voice of bureaucratic evil, condemning rough sleepers to the iso-cubes with long speeches that amount to empty justifications for callous evil. I strongly suspect that if Garland gave his Dredd more time to speak we would hear a lot about the woke mind virus and why “the law doesn’t care about your feelings” Today’s language of fascism. Dredd isn’t a smart deconstruction of the boot. It is the boot. Poor old Wood Harris really gets the cheap end of the Dredd script. As Avon Barksdale in The Wire, Wood was part of a tv drama that showed the brutal, complex relations between black gang violence and white state power in America. In DREDD he has to go back to being the black man that white people love to fear. Olivia Thirlby is very well cast as Judge Anderson, a sexy female judge with psychic powers and a blonde bob who’s here to soak up the erotic energy kicked up by all the violence. Fascism is sexy, so a sexy fascist is the logical next step. Garland gives Anderson a motivation to make the block a better place. You can imagine a better version of this script where Anderson’s psychic powers take us inside the real lives of these people. But. No. Instead Anderson’s story turns on a psychic confrontation with Kay, and an act of psychic r*pe. There really isn’t a trope more central to fascist storytelling than the violation of the white woman by the black man. Dredd throws some corrupt judges at us. Because it’s not that the Judges are a fascist secret police force, it’s just some “bad apples”. And then we get to DREDD’s big bad. Poor people. You don’t really get much more bottom of barrel of the human experience than a prostitute having her face sliced by a pimp. That’s Ma-Mas backstory. We never really get an explanation for *how* Lena Headley went from hooker to gang boss, other than a knack for snarling orders. Again you can imagine a better script in which Ma-Ma’s authority is based on the same psychic powers as Anderson, and the climax is the two feminine powers colliding. Instead Judge Dredd beats the whore up and throws her off the balcony. Pumped full of slow-mo. Is the slow-mo in this movie to extend that “fascist gaze”? Or is it just a gimmick to heighten the sadistic thrill of watching the woman crushed against the concrete? You tell me. There’s a Paul Verhoeven Judge Dredd movie in my mind, where the king of absurd action violence Starship Troopers the hell out of Dredd, to make us cringe at our own love of fascism. What’s depressing about Dredd is how normalised its fascist coded worldview is. The problem is poor people, black people and women. The problem is the people being stamped on, not the boot doing the stamping. And how even a good storyteller like Garland, struggling to decode the fascist narrative, still ends up sounding like a Nick Fuentes monologue. Because the only way to make Dredd great again. Is to make him the bad guy. And this brings us, finally, inevitably, to America. Not the country. The story. Although, increasingly, the country too. If you ask a casual fan for the best Dredd story, they’ll say “The Dark Judges” or “The Cursed Earth.” They are wrong. The best Dredd story is America. And in America, Judge Dredd is the villain. He isn’t the anti-hero. He isn’t the “hard man making hard choices.” He is a monster. The story follows America Jara, a woman born into the Judges’ fascist totalitarian state, who decides she wants something else. She wants democracy. And Dredd destroys her. He doesn’t just arrest her. The system—his system—breaks her, dehumanises her, and eventually kills her. America is a literal depiction of the boot that stamps on the human face, a woman’s face, forever. Because every time Dredd says I AM THE LAW what he means is I AM THE BOOT. So here we are. We wanted the boot to be ironic. We wanted the boot to be a deconstruction. But in the end, it’s just a boot. And we’re just sitting here, watching it in 4K. Listen to the podcast audio
January 18 · 24 min - SF
They want to make DUNE real
By now it’s a pretty old joke to note Donald Trump’s resemblance to Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in David Lynch’s 1984 DUNE movie. Replace the oil spray with spray-tan and they become identical. Kenneth McMilan who played the Baron is of Scottish descent, as is Trump through his mother Mary Anne Macleod. As an English person it’s a relief that for once we aren’t the bad guys. And, like the Baron, Trump is also basically a comic book baddie. Watch the full video essay on YouTube In reality powerful people have always understood that it’s much more intelligent to at least pretend to not be evil. Consider Tony Blair, Bill Gates or Taylor Swift. On the surface, all smiles. But Trump isn’t even bothering to pretend. Which is why so many Americans are furious with Trump. Since World War 2 the American empire has done a great job of at least pretending to not be evil. Resource wars for oil were sold as toppling dictators and “expanding democracy”. Covert operations against democratic leaders to secure corporate interests were excused as “fighting communism”. On one hand you have the largest military industrial complex in human history, on the other ordinary working people who want weekends and healthcare. The MAGA movement is made of people who look at that and think the baddies are the “commies”. People who not only believe America when it pretends to not be evil, but think that makes America a wimp! People who cheer when America just goes full on, no excuses, old school Imperialist. So now Trump also resembles the Baron Harkkonen of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, soaking in oil while moaning “my Caracas”. And this is all because Frank Herbert, in his science fiction masterpiece Dune, didn’t just build a universe of Medieval power struggles projected into the far future. He also wrote a sharp critique of very real world power dynamics, from which we can learn important lessons about our reality here in 2026. Lessons I have ordered into a convenient 7 point listicle. 1 : A Win For House Trump is Not a Win for You Trump –probably– understands he will never live to be a Baron, but that’s why he literally called his son Barron. Barron Trump. Fake it until you make it Forget nations. Forget ideologies. The game from here on in is who will be the Great House of Planet Earth. Trump isn’t playing to make America great, he’s playing to make House Trump all powerful. As are the House of Saud, House of Putin and, probably, House of Musk. There’s a reason Elon keeps spurting out kids with weird names. Whichever house you live under remember this – a win for House Trump is not a win for you. In fact the exact opposite is true. You the people are just another resource in the Great House struggles. You will be disciplined into extractive economic systems. You will be propagandised with ideologies to keep you compliant. You will be harvested as consumers with addictive products that slowly kill you. And your sons will be killed in the House wars. Every time your Great House wins, by lets say stealing the oil of a neighbouring nation, their power over you grows stronger. They win. You lose. 2. He Who Controls the Spice: Follow the Scarcity Every time Ezra Klein mumbles something about Abundance Capitalism, shout back at him Chokepoint Capitalism. Capitalism isn’t about providing ever more material abundance to consumers. It’s about controlling the chokepoints of scarcity to maintain power. In Dune, Frank Herbert made the Spice Melange the ultimate chokepoint. Everything in the Dune universe depends on the Spice. He who controls the spice, controls the universe. The Spice is of course modelled on the modern world’s dependence on oil. The scarce resource the British and American empires have fought relentless wars over to keep control of the chokepoint. And with that control the powers of the Dune universe enforce feudalism. It is of course absurd for a galactic civilisation to still be a Medieval feudal society. Humanity should be far beyond the feudalism of Dune. But this is of course Frank Herbert’s point. Feudalism is the state the Great Houses will always return humanity to if they can. In 1526 that was agricultural feudalism, in 2026 it is technofeudalism. If anyone is near Ezra Klein right now, please explain this to him. No amount of technology will create abundance, because the technology will always be abused by power, UNLESS you have the stones to face down the Great Houses and take the power back. And the reverse is also true. 3. Butlerian Jihad: The Boycott Fallacy The Butlerian Jihad has become a popular internet meme as LLMs have re-awakened fears of artificial intelligence. But it’s important to remember that the entire Dune universe is what happens when humanity does *not* build machines “in the likeness of a human mind”. The Butlerian Jihad is named after Samuel Butler and his 1872 science fiction novel Erewon, one of the first to explore the dangers of AI. Herbert thought deeply about AI risk in novels like Destination Void and then Dune. But as a radical libertarian Herbert certainly wasn’t in favour of banning AI by religious decree. In Dune the Bene Gesserit order use false religion to impose control over humanity. Their religious decree against machines in the image of the human mind is one of those control mechanisms. By banning “thinking machines,” the Bene Gesserit didn’t liberate humanity. They just created a monopoly on intelligence. They forced the human mind to become the machine. Mentats are just human spreadsheets; Guild Navigators are Google Maps for yhe galaxy. In 2026, the “Butlerian Jihad” is the ultimate boycott fallacy. Today’s left loves to boycott things. Which is why everything is boycotted by someone, and nothing ever changes. All boycotting LLMs does is ensue that only the most ruthless Great Houses—the ones who don’t give a damn about your “ethical AI” frameworks—will wield the power of the algorithm. Dune isn’t a story about why the Butlerian Jihad is a great idea. It’s a brutal warning about what happens if AI is left solely in the hands of House Musk or House Tencent. 4 : Power via the Tap If you want to know why Arrakis is such a hellhole, don’t look at the worms. Look at the water tap. Frank Herbert was obsessed with “Hydraulic Despotism”—a term from the historian Karl Wittfogel describing how ancient empires in Egypt and China controlled their populations by owning the irrigation systems. If you control the water in a desert, you don’t need a secret police. You just need a valve. In 2026 our “water” is data. He who controls the internet controls your access to…everything. At the flick of a virtual switch any dissident citizen can be shadow banned and de-banked. So you can’t even by a bottle of Evian. Extend this control to the Smart Grid, Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and Social Credit systems and you have “unitary power” for whoever grasps it. Under the old style of tyranny, they had to send the Sardaukar to kick in your door. In the Hydraulic Despotism of 2026, they just “unauthorise” your digital wallet. 5 : The Charismatic Hero We love a “chosen one.” We love the story of the young prince who goes into the desert, joins the noble savages, and overthrows the evil Emperor. But as Peter Turchin reminds us in his theory of “elite overproduction”, Robin Hood and Paul Atreides are both disposed aristocrats. When society has too many highly educated and ambitious elites kicking about, with or without advanced archery skills or the powers of a Kwisatz Haserach, some will decide that going rebel and raising up the people looks like a winning strategy. Those willjng and able to use the language of liberation to capture the energy of the subaltern. But once they reach the throne, the Spice must still flow. The elite cycle isn’t broken; it’s just refreshed with a more handsome face. Maybe it’s a communist manifesto. Maybe it’s an affordability crisis. From Vladimir Lenin to Zohran Mamdani, history always has a handful of charismatic rebels in play. And they are essential. Change doesn’t happen without some elites slumming it with the rebels. But as Dune and Paul Attreides show us, the charismatic hero is always a two edged krys knife. It might pay to vote for them, but it never pays entirely to trust them. 6. Narrative Warfare: Missionaria Protectiva The Bene Gesserit are the ultimate masters of long-term narrative warfare. They don’t win battles with desert power. They win them with the “Missionaria Protectiva” seeding religious myths into “primitive” cultures centuries in advance so that one day, a Bene Gesserit agent can step into the role of a Messiah. Today our 24 hour online digital culture is saturated with ideologies, theories, conspiracies, fantasies, myths, stories. Narratives. And all of them are designed to serve one power or another. Power today is the ability to “socially engineer” the future by seeding the myths of today. Our algorithmic feeds are terraforming our minds, planting the “correct” social values and political anxieties so that when an orange hued “Lisan al-Gaib” appears on our screens, we’ve already been programmed to believe the reality tv actor is a “billionaire entrepreneur”. It’s all too easy to see the bullsh*t that others believe and mock them for it. But if the dark fate of the Fremen, who are lead to their doom by the scifi version of an Eton public schoolboy with a grudge, is any lesson, it’s that the narrative we hold most sacred… …is the one we must put the most energy into debunking. 7. Plans Within Plans: The CHOAM Directorship The most important lesson of Dune is the one people usually find the most boring: the economics of CHOAM. The Emperor, the Great Houses, and the Spacing Guild spend the entire series trying to kill each other, but they are all fighting to be on the board of directors of the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles. It’s almost as though Frank Herbert is telling us that the political theatre of the Landsraad – AKA Congress and Senate – the speeches, the filibusters, the “democracy”—is just a distraction from the real power: Shareholders. Beyond the “culture wars” and the theatrical antics of House Trump or House Putin in 2026, lies the true ownership of the world’s infrastructure. The real power isn’t in who wins the election; it’s in who owns shares in global capitalism. Have you noticed how every government, many corporations and, probably, everyone you know is in debt? Ever wondered who everyone owes that debt to? Well, it’s about 56,000 individuals of Ultra Net Worth, who have the “Hundy”, one hundred million or over. The 0.0001% who own a real share in global capitalism. This is the “closed loop.” The Great Houses might fight in public, but they meet in private to divide the spoils of the Spice. And until we understand who owns the CHOAM shares of 2026, we’re all just fighting over the sand while they own the planet. # Thank you for sticking with me this far and if you weren’t Black Pilled before, you’ve now had a taste of the Black Pill. The awakening to the reality of human power in all its grubby horror and banality. But. Here’s the thing. We have spent hundreds, thousands, of years sanding the sharp edge off the razor blade of power. So it’s much harder to cut ourselves shaving. I have pushed this metaphor too far. The point is we have, or had, until about a year ago, a political system that was somewhat better than what came befor. We call it, like it or not, liberal democracy. In the words of Winston Churchill it’s the worst possible system except for all the others tried. If you’re a conservative who thinks a strongman dictator will make it all better. Or a progressive who thinks a charismatic leader and armed revolution are the answer. Well, good luck living back in the bad old world of Dune. Listen to the podcast here
January 11 · 17 min - SF
Where did the future go?
“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” Mark Fisher / Slavoj Zizek / Fredric Jameson Where did the future go? It’s not just that our future looks bleak. You can’t boot-up Netflix without the latest political dystopias, civilizational collapse thriller or a “gritty” new take on the post-apocalypse punching you in the gut. Going on social media in the 2020s is like being repeatedly slapped in the face with a wet copy of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. We’re a generation trying to figure out if our skills in web-design are transferable to surviving the Thunderdome. And the news is legitimately packed with existential disasters. Ecological collapse. Nuclear risk. Resource wars. The construction of yet another data center that uses more energy than the state of Oklahoma so we can pay a supercomputer to draw subpar manga. We keep building a new machine to solve the problem caused by the last machine we built to solve a problem itself caused by one of our machines. All the way back to flint axe and the carrier bag. Machines. We can’t live with them, and we certainly can’t live without them. And it seems we can’t imagine anything beyond them. Watch the full video essay on YouTube Science fiction tells two stories of the future. In one, humanity steals fire from the gods and grasps control of our machines. In these Promethean futures men, competent men with engineering degrees, build the future with machines. The crew of the Enterprise and its warp engines explore strange new worlds. The Psychohistorians of Asimov’s Foundation build a higher civilization. Men leave Earth to build megastructure ringworlds and dyson spheres again and again from Starmaker to the Bobiverse. You can find some sparks of Promethean scifi in For All Kind, a future fantasy about what if we just kept building bigger and better machines. In the first true work of science fiction the brilliant young philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley began the dialectic that scifi is still struggling with 200 years later. On hand we have the Promethean scientist Victor Frankenstein and his efforts to create life as man creates machines. On the other we have the creation. The monstrous product of making man in the image of the machine. “Frankenstein scifi” shows us, again and again, the machine taking over, making man its slave or destroying humanity all together. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. The Machine Stops by EM Forster. The Death Star. William Gibson’s Neuromancer and all the cyberpunks. Skynet and the Terminator. The Borg. The Matrix. The Machine will raise us up! The Machine will enslave us! The Machine will destroy us! The Machine will save us! Science fiction has been cycling between Prometheus and Frankenstein for 200 years. The only way to escape this dialectic is to steer into the heart of the contradiction. To understand the sublime object of science fiction itself. The Machine. But before we descend further into the abyss: a bit of housekeeping from the studio. We have a new 150” projector screen, perfect for watching the Jackpot livestreamed in 4k AND projecting backgrounds for many new video essays…we’ll get to those in a mo. Three things happening behind the scenes: The Great Content Consolidation: Over the next couple of months, we are syncing all member platforms. Whether you’re on the website, Patreon, Substack, or YouTube, you’re getting the full library of Science Fiction video essays. No more digital scavenger hunts. Omnipresence: Video essays on YouTube AND Spotify. Written versions on Medium. And I’m putting select videos on Rumble… mostly just to troll the “Joker Right” and see if they can handle words with more than two syllables. Special Projects: No more audio commentaries. I’m putting all that energy into the main essays. The podcast feed will have audio versions of the videos a few days after the main channel. However, keep an eye out for a second channel…for the weird stuff. It’ll happen when the Machine allows it. Thanks! # I started the Science Fiction community, and the podcast, and this channel, to find a better future. Or at least a story of the future that didn’t involve me fighting a mutant over a can of dog food. It was the peak of Covid. I was “hiding out” in Bali. With a couple of stray cats and far too much time to watch the digital world catch fire on Twitter. And I got into an argument with Neil Gaiman. Twitter is now Xitter and Neil has since… well, let’s say he disgraced the mythos and retreated to the shadows. We’ll dissect that carcass another time. I wanted to know what the greatest “mythos” of the 21st century was. Neil answered that those all seemed like 20th-century myths. And when the 21st century myth showed its face, we would know. Give Neil his due, the man knows his myth. So I woke up at 3am with an idea burning my third eye open. Science Fiction is the mythos of Modernity. It’s the secular scripture that replaced the gods. But could it be the mythos of what comes next? Or is scifi just the final suicide note of a dying species? So began my quest to find an Actual Viable Story for our future. A 21st century mythos. A future we can all live with. And in. # Since then, we’ve dissected the greats. The dangerous philosophy of Ursula K. Le Guin. The secret history of Stanislaw Lem. We even looked at Isaac Asimov’s real Foundation… not the shiny, hollowed-out Apple TV show that wears its skin like a Buffalo Bill suit. We’ve analysed why corporate entertainment is so consistently soul-crushing. How the Corporate Entertainment Complex has turned the shared mythos of sci-fi into the cultural equivalent of a BigMac. But we’ve also seen how great scifi can, now and again, be smuggled past the corporate bureaucrats.Like Pluribus and Severance. Honestly, good job on that one, Apple. You managed to make a show about the horror of working for Apple. We’ve dived into the political impact of scifi myths. From H.G. Wells’ plan for a globalist superstate (the original “You will own nothing and be happy”) to George Orwell’s fear that the future is just a boot stamping on a human face, forever. And yes, we have done, maybe, a bit too much Karl Marx. But it wasn’t me who made the most important sci-fi show of the 21st century—Andor—a literal textbook on Marxist revolution. Blame Tony Gilroy! I’m just the guy pointing at the explosion. There is a reason to resurrect a 200-year-old critique of capitalism. Because that’s where our future went. It didn’t vanish. It was sold. To the machine. The Science Fiction channel is taking a journey into the heart of The Machine. We’re going to analyse how the Machine was created in the imagination of humankind as the Sublime Object of science fiction. We’re going to see how the mythos of scifi has been abused by grifters and gurus to mystify their victims with Technobullsh*t. We’re going to grapple with the darkest philosophy born of scifi, the theoretical framework which demonstrates that capitalism and the machine are the same damn thing, and journey into the future that Accelerationists want. We’re wven going back to The Matrix to see how the “Red Pill” was perverted by the alt-right. And we’re diving into the men who made transhumanism, the sexiness of cyberpunk, the invisible power of psychopolitics and much more. To see how the machine was built, how it is managed, and where it is taking us all. I remember Philip K. Dick abandoning his sequel to The Man in the High Castle because he was literally, physically ill from thinking about Nazis. To prevent the same, we’ll have some lighthearted side quests—like a dip into the mind of Douglas Adams. We are walking into dark places. But we can’t get back to the future unless we understand the Machine that’s currently sitting in its seat. I promise that, like Tolkien’s hobbits, we will eventually stumble back to the Shire. But first, we have to walk into Mordor. And maybe explore the secret Stalinist meaning of Lord of the Rings. “Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” — Ursula K. Le Guin There are many “logical” reasons we lost the future. Neoliberalism, resource depletion, the algorithmic grind. But I want you to reverse the causality. It’s not that the future was deleted by the dystopias. It’s that dystopia rushed in to fill the vacuum because we stopped telling better stories. We left the door open, and the monsters moved in. It IS easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. So we must imagine harder. Our art, the art of science fiction, is the only tool sharp enough to cut through the Machine. We can do this. Or, at the very least, we can die a nerd’s death trying. Listen to the podcast audio here
January 5 · 12 min - SF
Why are right-wing grifters all like Batman villains?
My friends are worried about me. I’ve been skipping social events. Ditching familial commitments. Instead I’ve spent the last three months in a basement, drinking Red Bull and watching Rumble streams. I’ve developed a sick fascination for right-wing political influencers. And I’ve noticed one thing. These grifters are all Batman villains. Watch the full video essay on YouTube Which is why I call them The Joker Right. Because I can’t be the only one who feels that American conservatives are like a Joel Schumacher Batman movie that never ends. One of those 90s Batmans, with visible nipples, and a leading man who is only there for the money, and at least two too many villains. Because that’s what we are dealing with here. The patients have taken over Arkham Asylum. The Batman villains are running the show. The thing the Joker Right understands about Batman is that the villains really are the whole of the story. Which is ironic because in the Batman mythos the nasty caricatures of mental illness were coded as threats to social order — which, in mid-century America, meant anything smelling vaguely leftist, radical, or nonconforming. You really don’t get a much more establishment hero than Bruce Wayne, a fortunate son of inherited wealth, a capitalist elite. A man who solves social problems by punching poor people in the face. Batman’s creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger wrote iconic Batman villains like the Joker and the Riddler as parodies of anti-establishment radicalism, strawmen which showed anything that went against the conservative values of 1940s America as “criminal insanity”. A tradition that continued for most of the history of Batman. Posion Ivy is literally an eco-terrorist…sorry…activist. She’s basically Greta Thunberg but hot and ready to kill for the cause. Catwoman at her best is a socialist thief in the archetype of Robin Hood, stealing from the 1% to give back to the rest. Matt Reeve’s The Batman made the Riddler a literal incel raging against the power of the patriarchy. Lesser known Batman villain Anarky is a full on anti-statist revolutionary. A deliberate critique of anarchist philosophy. It’s not even subtext, it’s right there in the text. Then of course there’s Bane, imagined in Chris Nolan’s worst Batman movie as a populist demagogue, raising up the people with – fake – leftist rhetoric against Gotham’s deep state. “We take Gotham from the corrupt! The rich! The oppressors of generations who have kept you down with myths of opportunity!” BANE, Dark Knight Rises That sounds like Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Jean Luc Melonchon teamed up to topple Gotham. But Bane is an agent of the League of Shadows, selling the socialism of fools to Gotham the same way Trump sells it to America. And how can we forget the Joker? The greatest of all Batman villains. But we’ll come back to the Joker. The Joker Right’s entire thing is to make the political right look like the revolutionary left. That’s the trick. That is the prestige. To reimagine blue-haired Wokesters and penniless adjunct professors as the “establishment.” To convince you that the people with pronouns in their bios are the ones with the boot on your neck. And somehow persuade millions of Americans that the inherited wealth of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are for the “revolution.” And that stunning act of role reversal… has worked too well. A message from our sponsor Whatsup guys, let’s take a timeout for realtalk. Do you feel like you don’t fit in this world? That society is a constant performance? Like they want you to become someone you’re not? Introducing today’s sponsor STAGNATE : Maturity Blockers In a world obsessed with “emotional development,” “self-reflection,” and “not being exhausting,” STAGNATE Maturity Blockers let you pause your psychological growth at a stage that suits you. Becoming a man shouldn’t have to mean moving out of your parents basement or not getting angry about Star Wars casting a black actor. These are societal constructs that don’t have to apply to you. STAGNATE Maturity Blockers actively suppress: Empathy. Self-awareness. And the phrase “I don’t know” STAGNATE : Maturity Blockers are entirely natural. We source pure red for every pill, and our lead flakes are scrapped directly from pre-regulation automobile exhaust pipes. STAGNATE Maturity Blockers : because growing up is for Woke people. Maturity Blockers not approved by science, philosophy, or anyone who knows you. Side effects include permanent outrage, alienating loved ones, starting a podcast, and confusing age with wisdom. I remember when the conservative… …I remember when the conservative was a man in a suit. A grey haired man in a grey suit. Not a Botoxed, spray-tanned narcissist. A boring man. A man who wanted to lower capital gains tax and conserve the established social order. Not an orange balloon of grievance. The Right are still pretending to be decent conservatives. Oh yes. They are going “Orthodox.” They are becoming “TradWives.” “I am making sourdough bread in a prairie dress to own the libs.” But underneath the Laura Ashley aestheic, they have gone insane. Today’s ‘Right” are the sum of all Dark Triad personality disorders in our society. Narcissism. Machiavellianism. Psychopathy. And like all abusers… …like all abusers, the Right blame their insane behavior on their victims. The Left. “Look what you made me do! I had to storm the Capitol because you suggested we use pronouns! I had to embrace fascism because you made a mermaid black! I had to embezzle billions of dollars of military contracts because DEI.” While the Left. The Left are booo-ring. Dull. Fact based. Sam Seder is just some guy who watches too much news. Hasan Piker livestreams are like CNN for Millenials. The Novara media team are about as spectacular as a cup of tea. A tepid cup of tea in a Quaker meeting hall. And that’s a good thing. Because you can’t grift Left. Left-wing audiences actually do things like “checking sources.” The left has entire shows dedicated to debunking. They have footnotes. They have peer review. The right has grifting. The left has…academic tenure. If you start bullsh*tting the left we stop watching. If you STOP bullsh*tting the right they stomp off to find the next low integrity influencer who will keep feeding them their favoured brand of bullsh*t. And this is why the left are losing. The left still has this crazy belief that the purpose of information is to inform. But the Joker Right realised long ago the only reason to say anything… …is to strike sick a pose while surfing the vortex of bullsh*t. INTERLUDE Early in my career I did a gig for a UFO magazine that was going online. As a naive twenty something I asked the editor if the articles about alien abductions and corn circles weren’t a bit…unbelievable? And got the blunt response – that was the point. “Anyone who believes this sh*te will believe anything.” Like those Nigerian email scams that are deliberately dumb to filter out all but the dumbest idiot, the point of UFO stories is to identify the credulous who “want to believe”. Then target them with highly profitable financial “offers” and other scams. That was the 00s. Now think about the value of UFO…sorry UEA…media in the age of crypto and AI scams. One moment the credulous are learning about TicTac aliens on Joe Rogan, the next they’re losing their pension on Melania coin. Or being told to vote Trump so the billionaire oligarch can “fight the deep state”. UFOlogy is a potent form of what Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt called “bullsh*t” in his famous essay On Bullsh*t. Yes, bullsh*t has an academically rigorous definition. “It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullsh*t requires no such conviction.” Harry Frankfurt, On Bullsh*t Bullsh*t is information that the producer and the consumer know to be false, but choose to believe for…reasons. For the consumer it’s easier to believe that snake oil cures all ills than face scientific reality. For the producer who is unscrupulous and immoral enough the fake cure is a great way to get rich and gain power. The MAGA movement is nothing but an accelerating vortex of bullsh*t. UFOs. Immigration. Pseudo-archaeology. Anti-vax. Health supplements. Crypto. Trans athletes. All whipped up to hurricane speeds to serve rule number 1 If you’ll believe this, you’ll believe anything. And once you understand that the Joker Right is a business model — sell bullsh*t to the credulous, then sell the credulous to the powerful — their insanity comes into sudden clarity as brutally, terrifyingly sane. But those who live by bullsh*t, die by bullsh*t. The All-Father of the vortex of bullsh*t, the bearded Texan Chronos vomiting up the lesser gods who would follow, is Alex Jones. Jones kickstarted the bullsh*t-o-sphere by realising that his Infowars show, on cable then the internet, would face zero consequences for spreading any lie. Until he was sued for $1.4BN by the Sandyhook families. Slap a muzzle on him and Jones’ variety of faux anti-establishment, fake populism makes him a shoe-in for Batman’s ultimate nemesis. But Jones has been left crying boomer tears by his gen-z children. The internet is for porn. And Nazis. Stick with me for one minute while we talk about a dead white man. Sigmund Freud is remembered as an all-time great philosopher because he reminds us that men are not reasoning rational beings. We are driven by deep unconscious drives. Civilizations uses Eros, our erotic drive, to tug men around like a bull by the nose. Want a pornstar GF who’ll do all the porn things? Well you better finish school, college, hit the gym and Make Money. But with Eros comes Thanatos. The opposing drive – to dominate, destroy and kill. Civilization has through the millennia desperately struggled to contain human eros and thanatos. Or it did until somewhere around the mid-1990s when civilization howled “Unleash the internet and let’s GOOOOO.” Generation-Z are lab-mice in a deranged psych experiment. Pumped full of ever more hardcore porn to hyper-stimulate eros. Then shoved into immersive virtual realities of megaviolent video games to satiate thanatos. But you can’t ever satisfy the god of death. Even by becoming a Batman villain. To give them credit the Joker Right understand that to talk to politics to gen-z they have to embody the drives of eros and thanatos that drive the next generation. And nothing screams overactive death drive. Like becoming a Nazi. “Hitler was cool.” Nick Fuentes Jordan Peterson became an unlikely gen-z icon because he speaks in riddles. Jordo is so much like the Riddler that he actually started dressing in bespoke Batman villain suits. But when you decode Peterson’s garbled misrepresentations of Carl Jung and Friedrich Nietzsche, his message to younger men is basically… …join the patriarchy and we will give you a tradwife. Peterson is basically an emissary from the boomer establishment sent to make an offer to millennial and gen-z men. The problem is the patriarchy can’t make good on the deal. There are no good jobs left, and there is a very limited supply of tradwives. And the women willing to sign up for a life of submission to a gen-z male are mental. And so the evolutionary development of the right wing grift-o-sphere escalated to Andrew Tate. If you can’t subsume your drives to the patriarchy, instead give your eros and thanatos free reign by becoming a pimp and a gangster. Tatey is a generic henchman. The goon Batman beats up so we can cheer. The problem is most gen-z and millenial men are house cats not tigers. They’ve been raised in complete safety and have no appetite for real risk. Or a Romanian prison cell. Meet our Catwoman. Less the cool, leather-clad thief who steals diamonds, more the Jocelyn Wildenstein archetype. Laura Loomer has carved her loyalty to the cause directly into her face. She is a walking, talking example of the physical toll of the grift. To survive in the Joker Right’s ecosystem, you have to physically become your own caricature. Tucker “Two Face” Carlson. Like Harvey dent except both sides speak bullsh*t. The private face, as revealed in the Dominion lawsuit, is a man who knows Trump is a “demonic force,” who hates the lies, who lives in reality. Flip the coin. You get the public Tucker. The furrowed brow. The manic laugh. The man who’ll look into the camera night after night and sell “Great Replacement” theory to your grandma. Tucker Carlson is peak establishment pretending to be anti-establishment. The wealthy scion of a frozen dinner fortune and failed CIA agent, expert in pretending to be the victim. And here at the eye of the vortex of bullsh*t is… Candace Owens. Candace was the first to the crack the deep code of the right wing grift. That the best way to feed the vortex of bullsh*t is to bullsh*t about other bullsh*tters. No sooner had Charlie Kirk, one of the Joker Rights power bullsh*iters, been killed in public, than Candace lead the charge to manufacture a pure bullsh*t conspiracy theory about who killed her “friend”. The right wing grifters can’t even stop lying long enough to grieve one of their own. Those who live by bullsh*t, die by bullsh*t. The Ouroboros of disinformation is eating itself, as the peak predator grifters like Milo Yianopoulis begin cannibalising bland weaklings like Benny Johnson for clicks. I was going to talk about Ben Shapiro here but he’s just…so…dull. Because the audience has grown tired of conservatives pretending to be Batman villains. They want the real deal. They want the authentic Joker. To give Nick Fuentes his due, he’s no grifter. Nick Fuentes is what happens when men like Peterson, Carlson and Shapiro, spout dog whistles like “Judaeo-Christian culture” and “Western values”, for long enough. Eventually someone says the quiet bit out loud. White Nationalism. Eventually an angry gen-z male looks into the camera and says “No, we aren’t ‘conservatives.’ We aren’t ‘traditionalists.’ We are White Nationalists. We like Hitler.” When you spend decades telling people that “equality is oppression” and “diversity is weakness,” eventually someone is going to show up and say, “Okay, so let’s just do fascism then.” Nick Fuentes is what happens when the President himself tells you it’s ok to hate immigrants, it’s ok to hate Somalis, it’s ok to hate Muslims. Eventually you end up with Nick Fuentes asking “Wait, so, why can’t we hate the Jews?” Fuentes is the receipt. The left spent decades saying, “You’re going fascist.” And the right howled. They performed this grand, wounded theatre of indignant denial. ”How dare you? How dare you call us fascists? We just want lower taxes and to preserve the Judaeo cultural Christian values of Western civilization.” But you weren’t “protecting the legacy of the Enlightenment.” You weren’t “fighting the Woke mind-virus.” You were just on a miserable journey to an inevitable destination. You were always becoming Nick Fuentes. The Joker is the greatest Batman villain because he’s the ultimate symbol of… …thanatos. The death drive. The man who just wants to watch it all burn. Let’s be clear, Fuentes is not the voice of his generation. Gen-z are busy leading protests, deposing dictators and saving the planet. Fuentes is the thanatos of his generation. Why save the planet when watching it burn is “hilarious”. And Fuentes’ audience loves him for it. Because he’s not boring. He’s not “safe.” He’s not a grifter. He’s American white nationalist fascisms genuine message to the world. And the message is: the mask is off. Listen to the podcast audio here
Dec 26, 2025 · 23 min - SF
The Avatar franchise is empty spectacle
The Paradox of Avatar The Avatar franchise idolizes the “primacy of the primitive.” It revels in the natural existence of the hunter-gatherer tribesperson, placing the most basic forms of human civilization on a pedestal as “the good.” And then it says: fuck that shit. We want high technology, we want glittering imagery, and we want the Society of the Spectacle. Watch the video essay The History of Cinematic Spectacle Back in 1896, the Lumière brothers released the first blockbuster: a train arriving at a station. Audiences were so flabbergasted by the moving image that it became a sensation. Of course, showing a train today wouldn’t be a blockbuster, because the criteria for what we consider a spectacle are always moving. If one director has followed the course of the spectacle in the modern era, it’s James Cameron. From the underwater landscapes of The Abyss to the liquid metal of Terminator 2 and the sinking of the Titanic, Cameron has always been there pushing the boundary. But for decades, he combined that spectacle with classical storytelling—Titanic was a romance, after all. That changed with Avatar. Cameron became so engrossed in the technology that, while he created a massive hit, there was really nothing to enjoy on the front of story. The Society of the Spectacle This isn’t a review of Avatar: The Way of Water. I didn’t find enough meaning in it to critique it. Rather, this is an essay about how such a meaningless story can be so successful. We live in the greatest contest of spectacles human civilization has ever seen, exactly as predicted by the French Marxist philosopher Guy Debord. In his 1960s text The Society of the Spectacle, Debord argued that the profit motivation of capitalism leads us to select the spectacle over the social. In cinema, this means we choose explosive CGI over subtle stories about real human relationships. Spectacle eats meaning. As we choose the blockbuster again and again, the systems providing our culture are rewired. The local theater showing meaningful art is replaced by the multiplex in the shopping mall, which must show mass-produced spectacles like Marvel or Avatar to survive. Systemic Capture This capture extends beyond movies. It consumes the political: our elections, once fought between experienced politicians, are now battles between reality TV stars. It consumes the personal: in the age of Instagram and TikTok, we choose friends and actions based on who is most “spectacular” or who generates the most likes. As Debord wrote, spectacle is “the sun that never sets over the Empire of modern passivity.” The British Empire ruled through violence; the modern capitalist empire rules through distracted passivity. Avatar 2 is a Relic Here we are with Avatar: The Way of Water, the perfectly evolved predator for the multiplex era. The problem is, that era peaked over a decade ago. Avatar now feels like someone in 1905 showing you a train pulling into a station—it’s not quite a spectacle anymore. James Cameron has lost his grip. Today, the true Society of the Spectacle lives on social media. Audiences accustomed to highly engaging, 10-second clips on TikTok are not turning up for a three-hour movie they’ve essentially seen before. We are bored of the spectacle. We are demanding story and meaning again, which is why we are turning to shows like House of the Dragon or Andor—a sophisticated Star Wars story for grown-ups. The AI Threat I worry for James Cameron. He is planning more Avatar movies just as AI tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT are emerging. We are only a few years away from “Avatar Infinite”—AI-generated worlds of blue dudes and meaningless hero’s journeys churned out faster than any human can consume them. Cameron’s role will be lost in a world where computers generate the spectacle for us. Conclusion Thousands of years ago, our ancestors used mud and stone to paint caves, creating stories so meaningful they shaped human civilization. Our culture does not have to be eaten by the spectacle. The artists creating meaning are still there, in the cracks between the Disney Corporation and the tidal wave of AI content. We simply have to find them. Listen to the podcast audio
Dec 17, 2025 · 15 min - SF
The Epstein / Kubrick theory is worse than you think
You know, nobody understands Eyes Wide Shut. Nobody. Every time it gets mentioned people look at you like they’re remembering the trauma of their one attempt to read Das Kapital. Watch the full video essay Because Eyes Wide Shut is one of those films that, despite…or even because…of being very obviously about *something*, has become a kind of cultural Rorschach test for people who don’t want to see uncomfortable truths. So Eye Wide Shut has generated a proliferation of bullsh*t interpretations. “Ah, yes, Tom Cruise represents the Jungian Animus confronting the Shadow Anima.” “Actually, Nicole Kidman is the Feminine Other confronting the social patriarchy.” Or whatever conspiracy theories Reddit users dream-up from the comfort of their gamer chairs. And of course now… now… we have the Epstein theory. Re-ignited recently by Roger Avary, of Pulp Fiction fame, claiming he half remembers overhearing a conversation somewhere once about a rumour that the studio re-cut Eyes Wide Shut. And KILLED Kubrick when he protested. Which must be true if it’s on Joe Rogan. The idea is that the reclusive Kubrick, who by the 1990s was hiding in an English mansion like a sort of anxious, bearded tortoise, somehow knew who the feck Jeffrey Epstein was. Yes. Old Stan was apparently spending his days inventing new camera lenses and his nights going, “I must warn humanity about that finance bloke who sources blow jobs for Bill Clinton.” But like all good conspiracy theories, this one is formed around a gritty bit of truth. Kubrick’s movies are symbolic. They are coded. But they’re also brutally direct statements we refuse to acknowledge, because they make us feel like the stupid, complicit mammals we are. 2001? Ooooh, is the monolith aliens or God or the collective unconscious? Is it about a giant smartphone sucking us in to the next dimension? No, although that is a fun theory. Kubrick’s Space Odyssey is much, much more direct. “You dumb apes and your stupid rockets aren’t going anywhere until you EVOLVE.” Clockwork Orange? Is it the bleak, violent dystopian future we’re heading towards? No, it’s just Tuesday in Britain. And the uncomfortable truth that society breeds droogs like Alex because it needs violent, expendable young men. The Shining? The ultimate house on the hill and haunted hotel movie, that author Stephen King has always hated because Kubrick didn’t make a horror movie. He made a real movie that shouts its message in your face with a hereeee’s JOHHNNY. The biggest danger to women and children isn’t poltergeists…it’s men. Full Metal Jacket? A haunting condemnation of war as a generally bad thing. Nope. It literally shows you America brainwashing young men then sending them to rape and kill ordinary people. America is evil and the Vietnamese girl has every right to revenge. And we joke : “Five dollar, me love you longtime.” Because Stanley Kubrick wants to shove the nasty truth right in our face until we can’t ignore it. But somehow we always can ignore it. # And then we get to Eyes Wide Shut. And it’s all there, in the title. Eyes. Wide. Shut. The bourgeois liberal individual—yes, you, with your tote bag and your Guardian subscription—you can literally be marched into a mansion full of elites wearing masks and chanting in Latin while doing unspeakable things to trafficked Eastern European women… …and you’ll go, “Ah, well, you know… maybe it’s just a dream? Maybe it’s symbolic? Maybe it’s about marriage?” No. Kubrick is saying: The ruling class could and do openly reveal themselves as sex-cult Satanists, and you would find a way to rationalise it because accepting it would break your IKEA-conditioned mind. # Now listen to Slavoj Žižek. I know we’ve all tried and listened to hours of Zizek and all we learned is that he always sounds like he wants to sneeze. So let me translate one of Zizek’s best theories, which I was reminded of by the superb Mikey and Nance on The Dangerous Maybe. Link in the description for their full deep dive. Every human order. Every workplace, sports team or nation state, has rules. But you don’t join the order by following the rules. You join the order by how you, in unison with other order members, break the rules. You become a worker by bitching about the customers with your fellow workers. You become a player by shouting at the ref with your fellow players. And you become truly part of the elites who rule our society, by participating in acts of harm and abuse against the poor and vulnerable of that society. It’s obscene. Behind the order of society we see is the obscene, the unseen, order of society that forms its bonds of trust via shared acts of obscenity. It’s not a conspiracy. Not a secret cabal in a volcano. It’s just the fact—well-documented, not even hidden—that sexual abuse functions as a bonding ritual for powerful men. A trust network. A shared secret. Like a golf club, but with worse behaviour and even worse fashion choices. So it’s weirdly naive to think Eyes Wide Shut is a warning about Epstein. It’s far, far worse. It’s the archetypal pattern of male power. The template. Epstein was just one banal, predictable, inevitable iteration of it. And we refuse to see it. Even when it’s right there, ritualised, gaudy, obscene… our eyes propped open, our eyes forced open, our eyes… wide shut. Listen to the podcast audio
Dec 16, 2025 · 9 min