I am signaling you through the flames.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from “Poetry as Insurgent Art”
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from “Poetry as Insurgent Art”
"And if the Trump Shock has anything like the success of the Nixon Shock, what will this world look like? Perhaps it is too early to tell, but neoliberalism is already being contested by the technofeudal creed of neoreactionaries such as Peter Thiel. Cloud capital is displacing financial capital and replacing the divine role of the market with the holy grail of the transhuman condition (the merger of cloud capital, AI and the biological individual). Financialisation will soon be under similar pressure. As AI develops, Wall Street will not be able to continue resisting the merging of cloud capital and finance, as seen in Elon Musk’s ambition to turn X into an “everything app”. Such developments will do to payments what the internet did to fax machines, with serious repercussions for financial stability, including any future role for the Federal Reserve. And in place of the dream of a Global Village, we will have the Walled Nation. Nevertheless, that globalisation recedes does not mean that autarky is possible. The Trump Shock is pushing us into a Bisected Planet, one part of it comprising vassal countries that have yielded to the Trump Plan and a second part where the BRICS experiment is allowed to take its course."
marriage as an institution fits into an overall strategy of isolating and controlling women. men are slightly stronger physically, but only on average - as individuals there’s a lot of variation. our culture finds ways to amplify these differences. women are not supposed to lift heavy objects. women are not supposed to have visible muscles. we are supposed to rely on men to do the muscle-building work. we are supposed to restrict our eating.
and then, we are supposed to sort out - we are supposed to live with one guy who we are all told needs to be one of the ones who is taller and stronger than us. our culture turns a slight average difference into a pervasive power imbalnce between individuals. this strategy developed over thousands of years. some laws have changed, but our culture is still very much designed to grant men control over women’s bodies.
this is why marriage grosses me out. i know this isn’t news, lots of people have said this before. but damn, sometimes i am just struck by how pervasive and insidious the cult of patriarchal masculinity is.
Polisario - Untitled
Music from Saharan cellphones is a compilation of music collected from memory cards of cellular phones in the Saharan desert.
In much of West Africa, cellphones are are used as all purpose multimedia devices. In lieu of personal computers and high speed internet, the knockoff cellphones house portable music collections, playback songs on tinny built in speakers, and swap files in a very literal peer to peer Bluetooth wireless transfer.
The songs chosen for the compilation were some of the highlights – music that is immensely popular on the unofficial mp3/cellphone network from Abidjan to Bamako to Algiers, but have limited or no commercial release. They’re also songs that tend towards this new world of self production – Fruity Loops, home studios, synthesizers, and Autotune.
spending more time on studying revolutionary history has led me to conclude that almost every contemporary opinion on what a revolution would or should look like now is basically fanfiction. this includes liberal “a revolution is a state of wretchedness to be avoided at all costs” as well as leftist/Marxist romanticism and pseudo-pragmatism. a revolution is not a computer game.
much of the time the course of events was changed not just by the transformation of social circumstances (though that remains a main or primary aspect), but also because of interpersonal grievance/ego/ideological blinders, practical limitations that demanded (or seemed to demand) concessions or compromised choices, factional infighting where some had a better position than others for reasons both arbitrary and highly determined, the circulation of misinformation, covert plots that other actors couldn’t account for, the intervention or lack thereof of outside actors, and just plain ol’ luck or random circumstance. these are not things you can preemptively account for except in the broadest sense.
Very funny to me that DSA / jacobin / verso book brigade and various other toothless mainstream leftists are trying to "sound the alarm" on mineral extraction, an issue anarchists, specifically green / anticiv / anprim / nihilist anarchist have been writing about for years for free on anarchist library dot org.
Ten years ago we were getting called "crazy" "anti-worker" "anti-progress" by these same people for critiquing extractivism, for opposing mining, for opposing "green energy." Now they're cashing in on climate anxiety and frankly, gentrifying anarchist positions against extraction by repositioning these critiques from a democratic socialist perspective, removing the radical anti-civ roots from which these ideas were born.
I have to say a book that is questioning the logic of electric cars in 2025 is too little, too late. I think that if in 2015 you were too caught up in Bernieism to understand that we're not going to techno-solutionism our way out of a toxic planet I really dont give a fuck about what you have to say in 2025.
Emily Dickinson
A statue in the wreckage of the Palisades fire in Los Angeles.
Photo by Eric Thayer for Associated Press.
Marlon Brando, April 3, 1924 – July 1, 2004.
Steve Shapiro, Brando and the Little Bridesmaids, The Wedding, The Godfather, 1971.
