Here’s a pointedly stark and palpably fierce excerpt from art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, which was published just this month: If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems…
Tag: apocalypse watch
“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and Terrifying Potential
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism…
A Psychic Invasion from Above and Below: Our Present Cultural Apocalypse
As someone who rode the apocalyptic wave of the aughts and 2010s very hard, I find it striking to note the uncanny, almost clinical precision with which mythologist and author Michael Meade, writing back in 2012 about trends that were then becoming visible, forecast and diagnosed the deep mythic-psychological apocalyptic eruptions of 2020-2021: Often apocalyptic…
COVID-19 and our apocalyptic house of cards
With the advent of the Coronacene, the Way of Apocalypse has apparently chosen all of us at once.
Teeming Links – August 9, 2019
Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
Teeming Links – March 8, 2019
Has it really been more than a year since I published a Teeming Links post? It would seem so. The last one is dated October 2017. Chalk it up to the fact that I’m deep into a Ph.D. and now buried in my dissertation. And also the fact that 2018 was the most insane race-to-the-finish-line…
The necessity of constructive pessimism in our dystopian world of digital illusions
Robert Kaplan, writing for The Washington Post: It is impossible to imagine Trump and his repeated big lies that go viral except in the digital-video age. It is impossible to imagine our present political polarization except in the age of the Internet, which drives people to sites of extreme views that validate their preexisting prejudices….
You will be assimilated: Our future of tech-enhanced brains to keep up with AI
Here’s renowned neuroscientist Christopher Koch explaining in a Wall Street Journal piece that our future will be a dystopian nightmare in which humans will necessarily become ever more completely fused on a neurological level with super sophisticated computer technologies. This will, he says, be a non-negotiable requirement if we want to keep up with the…
Brilliant: This one-minute short film about a prepper’s dream coming true
This one-minute film by neophyte French filmmaker Gaspar Palacio is just brilliant. And I don’t use that word lightly. It’s like a master class in cinematic microfiction. Here’s how Palacio describes it at Vimeo: The one minute tale of a survivalist. When the siren rings in the distance, a family has to get inside the…
The tragedy of Rome and the farce of America
I’m confident that what follows is the best paragraph I’ll read this week. I daresay it may be the best one you’ll read, too. Unsurprisingly, it’s from James Howard Kunstler’s blog. For me, it provides both a substantively and a tonally accurate description of what I’ve been seeing, hearing, and experiencing around me in recent…