2459 – Oh Sovereign, My Sovereign feat. Quinn Slobodian (2022 Trashfuture podcast)

“This week’s free episode is all about William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson’s book “the sovereign individual,” which describes a wonderful world in which fifty rich men live in armoured citadels and everyone else scrapes a living off the land. Do not become addicted to water, my friends!

If you want to learn more about Quinn Slobodian’s work, check out his site here: https://www.quinnslobodian.com

If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture“

LISTEN

WARNING (decided to put this warning for each post that contains injurious and otherwise insulting content. The images and books mentioned are not endorsements in any way, they are here given as critical examples. There is enough hate speech online and techno-fascist homophobic-mysoginous-transphobic propaganda everywhere, so this posting does not aim to add more suffering to injury. None of this will be tolerated in the comments, goes without saying)

The 1997 book The Sovereign Individual (from here on SI) sits on top of top-selling Amazon lists, and holds the dubious title of  “Das Kapital of the Ayn Rand worldview” (E. Glenn Weyl). This is an extension of a must-read article by historian Quinn Slobodian (Crackup Capitalism, The Globalists etc) about the aftermath and popularity of SI amongst the crypto-bro neo-monarchist anarcho-capitalists Silicon Valley crowd (Peter Thiel, Balaji Srinivasan). It is lively, very funny, and informative talk – in the sense that you won’t have to read this book, which I would not advice anyone to do.

How many bad, idiotic future takes, bad airport self-help bestsellers peddled by hucksters and self-aggrandizing charlatans can we take? A lot it seems. This book is so wrong on so many levels why would anyone bother to analyze or devote 1 h of their lives to it. In Romania “sovereign individuals” have been a media sensation making the news since they refuse to show their papers or refuse to recognize the Romanian state. Most of them are caught driving without a driving license, and while Romanian media branded them as weird ‘radicals’ and ‘sectarians’ (which is not far from the truth) nobody bothers to actually place them in this libertarian continuum.

The Romanian cases, from a country that nobody even bothers to mention in the news, and is basically a ‘standing reserve’, are at bottom end of our discussion, yet they are still influenced (attracted) by the book by William Rees Mogg and James Dale Davidson and their antistate worldview. It is perhaps ironic that sovereign individuals in the East appear like petty criminals or juvenile deliquents (I will get to that), completely out of place from the chummy exclusivity of the SI. This for the simple fact that they do not have many privileges (other than having a Romanian EU passport – that in fact translates to being a second-ranked citizen). The initial SI conceit – is made for rich individuals who want (and have the money) to escape the grasp of the state and of democratic rule. They feel that the elite is not elitist enough and surely not interested in allowing anyone to join their ranks without the necessary monetary power, and most importantly – they are citizens of a decrepit empire, not citizens of a satellite, second-rate, second-world country.

This anarcho-capitalist cookbook failed on all accounts – but it has achieved notoriety since the claims made by its authors are constantly being dusted off, revived, and repackaged as brand new. In a sense this is exactly one of those bad novums that Darko Suvin, theoretician of the SF wrote, it is those new things that are not new but are constantly attracting attention just because they are based on notoriety and self-confidence, not on facts or any sort of valuation. They always have the same solution, shrink the state, minimize governments, and establish freeports. For them, elites are not enough isolated, and the ivory towers are not high enough. The tech geniuses should never mix, mingle or even dilute their gene pool. According to SI, globalization should be not just about going to exotic locations, but enjoying your privileges, and celebrating cheap labor and ‘sweatshop’. about our sovereign right to retreat, the fantasy of “opt-outing” of everything (of course taxes and inflation).

What (according to Quinn Slobodian) makes this book a special case is that it is completely proud of its dystopian outlook and cynical about its statements before such cynicism (not the Greek one) became the rule. It basically heralds (and proclaims) the collapse of the nation-state in the wake of cyberspace expansion. It is basically an unadorned, unapologetic, and stripped-down version of free markets triumphalism and elitism. Everyone who is not part of the breakaway ‘zone’ the have-nots, the ‘wasteoids’, ‘welfare queens’ (what would be an anarcho-capitalist text without the enemies of the ‘free society’), and losers of the market economy are left on the outside, in the Cursed Land of the collapsing state. Maybe the most annoying thing is that our world has started to look more and more like what was endorsed by SI propagandists. Milei in Argentina, Trump in US, and Netanyahu in Israel are both pro-free markets and enemies of democracy. This is also the world of bitcoin con artist Sam Bankman Fried, who was both one might say incredibly successful and an appalling disaster (these are both characteristics of the SI way).

Another good observation (among other funny and caustic jabs) is that the anarcho-capitalist mindset has a juvenile inclination, it sounds a bit like a R L Stevenson adventure. You get your pirate gold and you stash it away preferably on an empty offshore fiscal paradise island (forgetting that there are no more ’empty places’ (or emptied by colonial genocides). The Goldbug has something of tabletop game, their outlook is gamified, where you ‘farm’ and transform yourself into the king of the castle.

A big blindspot is of the cognitariat (the authors pretend they are part of that) is a complete lack of social imagination. They actually indulge in the dream of complete isolation of the information society. You isolate yourself from labour but you still have nannies and servants. They are also very prone to de-growth dreams in the sense of devolving the state but they are not off-the-grid preppers, they are thinking about having a top position in comfy super-rich semi-feudal enclave. Nowhere does the book worry about who cooks for you or who takes out your garbage. Everyone is disconnected from the material base and productivism is not even mentioned as if computers will supply everything like in an elitist version of full luxury communism.

There are a couple of interesting (much more interesting than the SI) science fiction who actually work trough all the details of such a vision. Two of them were mentioned at the cusp of the late 70s and early 80s which seems to be a time when Reagan turbo-charged such speculative worldbuilding. First is

Alongside Night is an agorist SF from 1979 (there is also a trashy movie adaptation with Kevin Sorbo apparently) pits agorist (black market fanatics) Milton Friedmanians and Hayekians to battle it out among the ruins of the collapsing US state.

Considered a classic libertarian SF, the 1981 is again an example of what if an arcology (that feels pretty feudal) would emerge after some riots, with citizens of the arcology living like a state inside a state or city within a city in future LA. All of these fictions became part of the freefan’s subjectivity.

Anti-woke pro-gun sentiment also runs high in cryptobro and yellow-black milieus, as can be seen from this t-shirt design posted by some German anarcho-capitalist TW account.

2416 – Financial Empire w/ Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla (Jacobin Radio 2023)

“Olúfẹmi Táíwò guest hosts an interview with Daniela Gabor and Ndongo Samba Sylla on how financial power has shaped the global economic order under capitalism from colonialism through Bretton Woods, the Washington Consensus, and today’s Wall Street Consensus. 

Read Daniela’s work: people.uwe.ac.uk/Person/DanielaGabor

Read Ndongo’s work: rosalux.de/en/profile/es_detail/N8SVHTS8SA/ndongo-samba-sylla?cHash=ccf0c8d371bde0fecbac8337bbc6f832

Support The Dig at Patreon.com/TheDig“

Here is 2h of the most intense and informative talk I got to listen to recently. I totally recommend both of them to follow in TW/X – if you are still on that platform. We had some previous posts on economy and political economy and inflation, but this one is truly essential for everyone interested in how global financial institutions came to exist and how the dollarisation of the world after WWII came to dominate our lives. It is also a very good introduction into two important theories that have lost the battle in the market of ideas – but are increasingly resuscitated in order to make sense of the rising unequal exchanges, dependencies, and monetary imperialisms that structure the Global North/Global South axis in capitalism: Dependency theory and World-systems theory. What is important is that both of them (one from Eastern Europe and the other from Equatorial Africa) advocate for a new global economic system where the Global South is at its center (the so-called “Bandung Woods” named after the Afro-Asian or Asian-African Bandung Conference in 1955 Bandung, Indonesia) to replace the Washington (or now Wall Street) Consensus.

Most of what I am saying here tries to approximate what the two eminent (imho opinion) macroeconomists and monetary sovereignty experts spell out. I am going to quote in full Gabriela Gabor (who happens to be a Romanian born) from the written version of the interview (available here).

DANIELA GABOR:

The Washington Consensus is in a sense a marker of who makes the rules in the global economic system, and that was Washington. Its intellectual father was John Williamson. He was quite reluctant to recognize himself as an intellectual father, because very quickly, the Washington Consensus was dubbed as a neoliberal consensus. I think it’s best described as a holy trinity of economic policies that were prescribed to countries, particularly in Latin America. This was a “what’s-happening-in-our-backyard” type of arrangement for the United States.

The three pillars of the Washington Consensus were economic stabilization, privatization, and liberalization [my emphasis). Economic stabilization basically meant the central banks have to target inflation and to keep prices stable; privatization meant trying to reduce the footprint of the developmental state in the economy by preventing the state from allocating capital or getting involved in production through state-owned companies or enterprises; and liberalization of international trade meant removing trade barriers, but also liberalization of prices domestically by not using price controls and removing subsidies as much as possible.

This is interpreted as an attempt to change the balance between the state and the market. Of course the states vs. markets framework is a crude description because the state had to construct certain markets. But it is true that the Washington Consensus was a policy paradigm and a political project to kill off the developmental state. In the 1950s and ’60s, the developmental state, under what we describe now as heterodox economic ideas, attempted to design a national development strategy in a context of  deteriorating terms of trade.

For developing nations, the question was, how do we make sure that we will get paid better for our exports than what we have to pay for our inputs? That typically meant industrial upgrading. That typically meant having a good industrial policy. It typically meant having some form of financial repression, which subordinated the domestic banking system to the needs of the industrial policy. It meant some form of a social contract with domestic capital and also with foreign capital, but mostly domestic capital, to make sure that domestic capital worked together with the state for industrial policy purposes.

The Washington Consensus is basically a political project to dismantle this developmental state and instead to bring in the market as the mechanism to allocate resources. The state doesn’t disappear of course. But what we know is that the state that is useful for citizens in a sense disappears because you have an increasing removal of the state from the provision of public goods, one way or another, under the idea that the market can do things better than the state.

In the postwar era, you have the Bretton Woods institutions that are pushing this Washington Consensus all over the world. Wherever the IMF or the World Bank go, they leave a trail of structural adjustment programs. You have the IMF pushing for stability and particular forms of monetary and fiscal austerity under the Washington Consensus. There is an increasing recognition toward the end of the 1990s that this has meant a lost decade for Latin American countries, that it produced a lot of poverty across African countries that were forced to adopt them. Of course there are certain domestic political constituencies that preferred the Washington Consensus rules simply because they align well with the aims of right-wing politics.

By the early 2000s, Bretton Woods institutions become a bit more unwilling to promote the more radical elements of the Washington Consensus. This leads to what is called now the Post–Washington Consensus, which is a recognition that there are market failures. The idea is that if there are market failures, then of course the state is necessary. So you don’t have the resurrection of the developmental state, but you have the resurrection of the state as a regulator that tries to correct market failures but doesn’t allocate capital or doesn’t interfere with market signals. It corrects the signals if those have gone wrong one way or another.

In some ways we still have that now, because all discussions about carbon prices, for example, have to do with how to achieve the low-carbon transition; they rest on the idea that the state doesn’t need to do a lot more than just correct the failure of the market to price the climate crisis.

NDONGO SAMBA SYLLA (who has written a book on the history of CFA – Africa’s last colonial currency):

I am from the generation whose parents suffered the consequences of the IMF and World Bank austerity policies. You could see concrete impacts because many people were fired from their jobs, for example, because one of the ways to implement these structural adjustment policies was for the state to clean up its own budget. That means limiting its spending, and one way to limit the spending is to cut health expenditures and education expenditures and also to get rid of some civil servants.

Reduced state budgets also meant less investment and less open-door immigration policies. That has been the impact. That’s why if you look at the development trajectory of Africa and compare that to Asia, you would see that the most significant difference came after the 1980s. This is because Asian countries were not subject to IMF and World Bank policies in the 1980s and 2000s.

Some countries, for example, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Niger — their real GDP per capita in, say, 2015 was lower than their best level of real GDP per capita before implementing the IMF and World Bank’s policies.

That’s a clear indicator of the failure of these kinds of policies. But their primary aim was to prevent the emergence of the developmental state. There are many things people say about Africa, but the first two decades were developmental decades, despite all the shortcomings and despite the many proxy wars. But the leaders were really committed to creating some development, and you can see that in the work by the African economist Thandika Mkandawire.

On that final note, what is the Wall Street Consensus? (paper by Gabriela Gabor here)

he Wall Street Consensus (WSC) is an elaborate effort to reorganize development interventions around selling development finance to the market. The Billions to Trillions agenda, the World Bank ‘Maximizing Finance for Development’ or the G20 ‘Infrastructure as an Asset Class’ all call on international development institutions and governments of poor countries to ‘escort capital’ – the trillions of institutional investors – into ‘investable development bonds’, preferably in local currency. For this, the 10 WSC commandments aim to simultaneously reorganize local financial systems around bond market-based finance and forge the de-risking state. The state derisks bond finance for institutional investors by extending guarantees and subsidies to cover (i) demand risks attached to user-fees for (PPP) infrastructure, (ii) political risk attached to policies such as nationalization, higher minimum wages and climate regulation, (iii) climate risks that may become part of regulatory frameworks as material credit risks and (iv) bond market (liquidity) risks that complicate foreign investors’ exit from development assets. The WSC narrows the scope for a green developmental state that could design a just transition to low- carbon economies.

2403 – The Century of the SELF (2002 BBC documentary by Adam Curtis)

timespace coordinates: the long 20th century

To say that this epochal documentary with all its flaws, its non-sequiturs, and under-theorizing has marked our generation is an understatement. Some things are left unsaid in retrospect (it is almost 10 years or more since I have watched this series), particularly one should situate this in the context of modernity and the transfer of peoples of ideas that went on between Europe and the US, none of which went one way only. Again this is a very Eurocentric history (for a different perspective on techno-modernity check here), so it has definite and clear limits as it is mostly about the Euroatlantic world and Central Europe. The Century of the Self is also the triumph over the European Old World bourgeois civilization of the US consumer culture zeitgeist aptly described by Victoria de Grazia in her magisterial study Irresistible Empire.

Source: Charnysh 2022 quoted by Adam Tooze (not Curtis!)

But then, on the other hand, you have had the immense impact of these foreigners with bad Middle European or Eastern European accents forced to flee, outernational émigrés escaping anti semitism arriving in troves from the continent. Besides the German Frankfurter Schule critical theory – you also had another cultivated emigree diaspora from the former Habsburg Empire that brought to the East Coast with them the vivaciousness and sophistication of Viennese 1900 cultural life and went on to define advertising, marketing, and even how Western liberalism identity started defining itself during the Cold War against the Communist bloc. Another history that barely gets mentioned is how the Western democracies have been using for example – “rational choice theory” (and here the names of William Riker, Kenneth Arrow, and James Buchanan stand out) – to try and immunize the ‘Free World’ and its values by constructing a ‘scientific’ approach to social science research against the Marxist critics of Western democracies. Some ideas found a better reception across the ocean,

Psychoanalysis is just one such example to follow in the wake of the fall of the Habsburg Empire. One could pinpoint others, starting with the Genevese school of neoliberal economics. Another one, followed in detail by Adam Curtis is the trajectory of Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays (developer and early pioneer of PR) and Anna Freud in the United States. We should be wary of a pharmakon way of explaining everything or giving too much attention to ‘interiority’ and inner mental states, but since Foucault, detailing such genealogies and discoursive fields helps us understand how we came to be where we are. This documentary is also influenced by The Century of the Self is still a very compelling history of how the SELF became so central not only to advertising but also to identity politics and individual freedom of liberal capitalism also to the anthropotechnics – ways in which Western counterculture has tried to free the human subject or a hidden identity through mindfulness, techniques of meditation, human potential, yoga retreats, actualization what is known as New Age – especially as developed by the Esalen Institute since the 1960s California. It is also the perfect documentary about control after “decentralization”, or what follows in the wake of the uneven transition from the disciplinary society to what Deleuze has termed the society of control in his seminal essay from 1990 (some even say that this was his most important testament). The century of the self has become even more evident in the 21st century – the time when protocols or algorithmic capitalism is really ruling the day and when AI-driven scams, influencers, and deep fakes abound. The century of the self should be also put into dialectical relation with its inverse – the “personality cults” and authoritarian styles of the former East it was meant to overcome, and such a retreat into interiority and VR, when faced with the horrors of Vietnam War, and the government of the US supporting dictators abroad or signaling a failure of nation-building abroad or a certain developmental model. Silicon Valley is itself a piece in this puzzle, an innovation hub based on a startup model supported by Venture Capital funding to ensure US technological hegemony by sponsoring former dropouts of the counter-cultural revolutions of 1968, raised on psychotropics and weaned on petro-dollars.

2274 – Adam Tooze: American Power in the Long 20th Century (lecture 2019)

“In 2002 Tooze was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize for Modern History for his first book, Statistics and the German State, 1900–1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge.^{[citation needed]} He first came to prominence for his economic study of the Third Reich, The Wages of Destruction, which was one of the winners of the 2006 Wolfson History Prize,^[15] and a broad-based history of the First World War with The Deluge, published in 2014. He then widened his scope to study the financial crash of 2008 and its economic and geopolitical consequences with Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World, published in 2018, for which he won the 2019 Lionel Gelber Prize.^[16]

Tooze writes for numerous publications, including the Financial Times,^[17] London Review of Books,^[18] New Left Review,^[19] The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian,^[20] Foreign Policy,^[21] and Die Zeit.^[22] Since 2022 he sits on the board of the ZOE Institute for Future-fit economies.^[23]” (wiki)

More by Adam Tooze on London Review of Books: https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/adam-tooze

From the YT page: The history of American power, as it is commonly written, is a weighty subject, a matter of military and economic heft, of ‘throw-weight’, of resource mobilisation and material culture, of ‘boots on the ground’. In his lecture, Adam Tooze examines an alternative, counterintuitive vision of America, as a power defying gravity. This image gives us a less materialistic, more fantastical and more unstable vision of America’s role in the world.

By subscribing as a non-payed member to Adam Tooze Chartbook substack (I urge the one who can afford it to do it!) – I felt I entered some of deep end-hole of the “Matrix”, a place where stats and economic pieces of news meet policy making and even arts. He is one of the most active internationally (planetarily) “connected” people I know (and I do not mind using this over abused word when it matches). From the current Ukraine War to the so-colled New Cold War, from the Inflation Reduction Act to de-carbonization policies – this is a place to get your information. He is also not one of these usual pundits or experts – isolated and somehow affiliated to an ominous think tank, but a historian specialized on the war economy of Germany and one with a solid Keynsian background. At the same time he is a self confessed liberal Keynesian and not afraid to admit it. He also reads a lot, and follows a LOT of empirical evidence from just about everywhere. He’s also used to track down Marxist takes on the energy crisis – on the instrumentalization of the energy crisis by the fossil fuel industries (in what he calls a “Kaleckian moment” – Kalecki being this Polish left wing Keynesian that anticipated the resistance of the business lobby in thw face of government initiatives for full employment). He’s also challenging a lot of basic assumption – regarding China or the US at this crucial moment. What I like about his approach os the dynamic feeling – almost procesual caracter that is deeply informed but does not give in to settled fact or lazy thinking.

Here is the time to forget all what you thought you knew. We take the American century as being an inevitable outcome, an accomplished fact, from the closure of the West, its golden spike – also called The Last Spike toward the middle of the 19th c – to the disappearance of its native first nations (they are still around and still resisting oppression & depredation!). Well, here is a crash course into why the US as a great power of the 20th c or winner of the Cold War was more of a funambulist act. This is an important lecture to watch to follow because it makes all this triumph, inevitability and causal efficacy of the US as something manufactured, or at best an ad-hoc momentary or emergency issue. Stay with Tooze till the end and u will not regret it. Beside the summary of several other intersting books he quotes (such as Irresistble Empire or Fear Itself), he aims at starts revising (it is a revisionist history in this sense) some of the most cherished notions about America’s place in the world. As one question from the public aptly observed – it is “a great man history” take, and this feels a bit regressive to focus on a central banker, and a US central banker at that (Timothy Franz Geithner), but Geithner is somehow less known than Rubin, Alan Greenspan or Larry Summers. The financial history books of the late 20th feels they somehow missed how Geithner has “defied gravity” or why he put it in these terms. Globalization did not start with the late 40s after-war institutions highlighted by the extrordinary biographic book on the life of Maynard Keyenes (the so-called Washington Consensus at the Bretton Woods Conference) in earnest – but only in the 1990s. What he makes clear is that the Cold War was very nearly becoming hot during the 1980s and the war games of the Able Archer 1983 NATO exercise. There are longer histories here than the complacent aberration of the Trump event might suggest – and Tooze speaks about how the Marshall Plan, the Bretton Woods and the New Deal was built on a very peculiar coalition: Northern liberals, progressives, labor and the Solid South. Even the very notion of Manifest Destiny makes things less settled or anchored in reality or certitude. That is precisely the vote that has shifted to the Republicans. He has for lack of a better word – a dialectical view on the US, and he is more interested not in the Global New Order or the 800 US military bases around the world but in the new generation of ordering efforts by the US ruling elites. An order that somehow flies in the sense of common sense or even the gravitational pull of such players like China (who in one mentioned graph is supposed to have poured more concrete btw 2010 and 2013 than the whole of the US in the 20th c!).

2247 – TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew testifies before Congress (full hearing)

On several accounts, this is probably one of the most interesting pieces of current politics as a spectacle I have seen recently. It is several hours long and it is really interesting to skip through, on several accounts that I want to detail below. It is basically an almost textbook example of double standards and also a way to see how Congress politicians (US) that would normally disagree on almost everything (Medicaid, immigrants, Green New Deal etc.) are agreeing on one thing: that the popular social platform TikTok cannot stay under Chinese ownership. That’s a strange form of nationalisation- something that is anathema for both US liberals and cons. Also, one cannot understand this sudden Tiktok phobia without previous measures taken to curtail reliance on Huawei infrastructure or the whole scare around G5, with the Chinese leading the new global technology standardisation measures. So here it is:

1. This hearing is an unexpected proof of the links between the Silicon Valley tech giants and NSS, an institutionalized relation that has been amply explored by Linda Weiss in American Inc.?. That amazing book from 2014 gives so much insight into the e U.S. innovation system. It ends on a warning note – a perceived un-productivity or inefficiency that has stifled innovation, a decline that has only accelerated these last years. This history of institutional bootstrapping that has grown out of the Cold War pursuits of technological supremacy and permanent defense preparedness in front of external threats – has produced a very successful combination indeed, yet it has stopped bringing in the expected results. This combination of geopolitical threats and domestic political constraints that has been such a catalyst for countless start-ups, for huge technological breakthroughs in robotics, space technologies, and nanotech, and that had this tip-toe coordinating role in the private-public relationships was starting to wobble and crack up. Financialized corporations are being regarded as stifling innovation and actually boycotting R&D in today’s world. Since about 1910s monopoly capitalism has been the name of the game, and huge corporations (big firms socialized by banks and stock markets) found themselves not in competition with other firms so much as with the growing power of trade unions. Responding to these pressures as well as Bolchevik fear mongering, Maynard Keynes opus called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money basically (as Charles Mudede put in a recent post) basically advices and advocates for the transformation of the working class (mostly white) into white collar workers that defined the second half of the 20 century. Now that middle class has declined in the West and is mainly growing in China and India (and probably Africa in the future). According to others he didn’t stabilize capitalism as much as save a crumbling British Empire. Right-wing Keynesianism and military deficit spending may try to do just that for the American Empire but there’s other forces at work. BRICS (India, Brazil, China, South Africa, Russia) signals a change and willingness to avoid over-reliance on the dollar as an international currency reserve (and by extension the US Fed). What’s more fascinating than to see a world power that promoted free trade for decades turn into a “protectionist”?!
2. The fact that this TikTok hearing is not like the Facebook Zuckerberg hearing before Congress four years ago is also a sign of the times. There not only a premium of Congress to show off its patriotic alliegence and anti-China sentiment in public, but also a huge benefit to be reaped for Big Tech that has shown itself a national assett on the global stage. Everything is allowed on the global hegemony stage, even kamikaze gestures like fucking up the careers of scientists that have previously worked for you, and are now considered unreliable or potentially a liability in the new climate of China Initiative launched by the Trump government in 2018 and continued under Biden.
3. Another thing that comes across from various reactions and comments and online memes produced after the hearing (from the Sinosphere as well) is that it is all a witch hunt. The majority of proof brought by the Congress was frankly laughable. This hearing has been really working against the intentions of the Congress, and actually gained support and even celebrity status for the relatively unknown Shou Zi Chow, a citizen of Singapore not mainland China.
4. What is again quite clear is that politicians (US and elsewhere, with the exception of China maybe) are completely at the mercy of technologies that they do not care to understand, regulate or mitigate. They are basically (as one friend put it) surfing platforms that are managed by their campaign managers or specialists, while they live in a sort of blissful ignorance. It is very clear that they do not care to understand what these platforms are about, as long as they can reap benefits or if they think that the surveillance, misinformation and addictive-behavior-inducing apps at home is provided by what they consider American-patriotic platforms. Also, Red Scare is apparently not a bygone thing, and everything can be mobilized in the new Cold War. It basically made them look both ridiculously united and also completely out of their milieu in terms of the Internet and social media.
5. The increasing sensation that TikTok has somehow gamed the algo capitalist economy and has suddenly offered or at least intensified things in a new direction. As my friend Cristian Dragan and Ion D sez (both have taken to exploring TikTok new hybrids), the platform seems to create overnight popularity, turbo-charging popularity sky-high like nothing seen before (with the likes of Insta or FB) and also allow a much higher degree of horizontal shuffling or at least a combination of otherwise invisible content (from countryside location, to menial jobs, to the city to areas considered completely isolated). This comes with a greater susceptibility to vibes and to hybridization of styles visual or musical.

Bruh, I don't recommend watching any of the TikTok Congress hearing.

It shows how technologically behind our governmental officials are.

Peep this fucking dude.

My pupils are so fucking dilated right now bruv. pic.twitter.com/zPfVtq0KC9

— AMadamWebuss (@AplatypussTV) March 23, 2023

2246 – Rebranded Mickey Mouse (2023)

spacetime coordinates: in the near future of a zoned and enclaved United States of America with Disneyland city-states

Production:

Damaged PowerAid vending machine
Edited by Jason Harvey
Executive produced by Reggie Henke
Produced by Mackenzie Jamieson
Ny Footage shot by Johnny Frohman
Music by Jerry Paper
Staring Nate Varrone, Danny Catlow, Rich Sohn

Thanks a lot to Felix Petrescu (my main source for many things vimeo, cinematic, musical & digital culture related outside of this blog) for suggesting one of the most emblematic videos I have seen lately. On one side it is a fictitious, humourous, unruly dark anti-Disney nightmare. Frankly, the horrific ride and family trip to Disneyland gone bad from Escape from Tomorrow (2013) directed by Randy Moore appears benign in comparison with Rebranded Mickey Mouse. The rampage and amok generated by this short are on par with our daily media offerings , an experience exposed to the overdrive of the post-truth (military-entertainment powered) era.

On the other – Disneyland – is revealed as something else completely, not the Twilight Zone of Escape from Tomorrow, but a way to understand what capitalism looks like nowadays, how -using the title of a new critical reader -these forms of “mutant neoliberalism“ have proliferated. In a way, nothing appears familiar, mainstreamed or standardized because the most fringe things have been amplified by platform capitalism. We are dealing with a growing fragmentation and vectoring of oddity that no longer seems to stick to the old liberal mold. In a world where everything is reduced to self-promotional activity, Rebranded Mickey Mouse is also a parody of the “pitch”, of finding something out-of-the-box, of something “new”. Original satiric horror movies like the 2020 I blame Society movie or Brand New Cherry Flavor series start exactly when the pitch does not work, or when as a women horror director, you get an asshole ripping you off or geting all the credit.

You can only pitch your ideas to a mega-franchise and it is the only way to make an impact. An anarchic and sadistic Steamboat Mickey has already attracted the attention of Walter Benjamin early on (something that I tried discussing here). Benjamin remarked on both the liberatory potential of the Disney anthropomorphized mascot as well as how (later on) the brutality of this misbehaving surreal cartoon could be channeled into unhinged fascism for real. I hope I can elaborate elsewhere about the ventures of military-entertainment-Disney complex.

Rebranding Mickey Mouse format and style and technique is quite interesting. It is almost like a found footage short, but not quite. It looks more like a nature wildlife (or urban wildlife) movie because it uses a lot of infrared or at least night vision shots, surveillance footage, multiple CCTV screens and even at some point the ubiquitous Chinese facial recognition software shots – becoming a staple signifier in Western pop for high-tech dystopian authoritarianism. But instead of some hyenas or some foxes, you get a grotesquely painted guy with M Mouse ears talking into the camera while he roams trough the bushes, city or private homes.

Today’s geopolitical or technological fears have a certain look. Real or imaginary they show the impact on Western pop culture of more general trends or alignments and decoupling. Witch-house bands making a few years ago goth or healthgoth style video clips (thanks pnea for signaling this) have suddenly switched to something more geopolitically attuned. They are using in their latest music videos (in contrast with earlier standards) graphics and footage that shows or mimics easily recognizable surveillance aesthetics associated with “social credit” in China, or the facial recognition apps or traffic videos of Chinese jaywalking. Dark-tinted glasses are not dark enough today if they do not point in the direction of your currently preferred dystopian outlook.

I liked the fact that complete commodification has ensured that every extreme act (killing a Disney exec for example) by the Rebranded M Mouse is part of a promo campaign or a pitch to the mother company. One can only get the attention of higher echelons, and find employment as their new mascot if you are basically a break-in, and attract the attention of the police or law enforcement, that collaborates (almost like in the recent Trump indictment) to somehow achieve even more notoriety. More media coverage is good and the violence attracts attention. Violence is the only way today to show that one means business. Mayhem ensues when a supposed Disney fundamentalist stabs and kills the Rebranded Mickey M during a live press event. The whole media/platform environment works as a trampoline for such extreme acts and even contributes to aggravating and launching the 3 WW.

What I found refreshing is that is is not a war against an enemy from the outside, but an enemy on the inside: the very American household brand Disney. President G I Joe Biden is himself a deep fake president – and uses a deep fake voice to launch an all-out nuclear attack on all the Disneylands within US borders. It comes as no surprise that such an extraterritorial state model has become a reality. If as historian Quinn Slobodian reminds us in his latest book Crackup Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (that I haven’t had the chance to read yet), we deal with a long history of bizarre but very specific neo-liberal heretics, this video also highlights the difficult road towards an indefinitely postponed “market utopia” or catastrophe libertarianism. From the beginning, such individualist zoning has been aimed against Socialist states but was also a way to circumvent all market controls and discard both democratic mechanisms and gun controls (in the US case). This is a typically Western dream about Asian-Pacific development as a libertarian prosperity solution, an entrepreneurial wishful thińking about Free Economic Zones or freeports plans that has taken hostage the startup community. The reality has been that this economic model of anti-democratic success, based on specific Asian (HK or Singapore) precedents has been very difficult to replicate elsewhere, particularly without major state support and steady flow of subventions.

Disneyland in this short fictive video has in the meantime acquired the status of a “land”, opposed to the very idea of the 19th century nation-state. Well, anyway such Disneyland corporation separatism (always with US backup) has amassed more power than an average small country. At the same time, because of its association with Western values (both specifically American conservative values & individual freedoms), Disney is still open to sanctions or boycotts from the outside (see cancel culture in a larger global and non-Euroamerican context). So at the moment when Disney has become the American Dream export par excellence, the global giant has ij this video morphed into a smaller Lichtensteins or Luxembourgs or Singapores with their own laws (its own constitution?), its own private army, and a Disney Ministry of Defense.

One can see a lot of collusion between the global ailing (or at least reconfiguring) US hegemon and its autonomous entertainment arm with embassies in Paris and Tokyo. Disney has been a global arm of the US influence everywhere including Eastern Europe but it has also achieved a sort of untouchable autonomy. So let’s speculate further. As much as Google, Apple, FB, Microsoft, the Disney+ streaming service functions as a monopoly to elbow out Netflix, but also as a potential chain of extraterritorial microstates. You do not have only US army bases but also a chain of “degenerate utopias” masked as theme-parks (a term reprised by Darko Suvin from Louis Marin 1973), that have complete discretion over their non national labor force (hire-fire-and-dump them model), but also upon what is considered illegal or unwanted.

Disney as form of soft power certainly, but also one could easily spill over into hard power and global conflict. That is, whenever and wherever US interests and cultural imperial status quo in this matter seems threatened. It is really interesting to hear the calls for Big Tech regulation following the ridiculous but very telling bipartisan hearing of the TikTok CEO recently and hopefully this won’t be just a witch hunt. At this moment, no one sees the Disney conglomerate as a threat to national security, nor do they see Palo Alto BIG TECH as such a planetary threat closer to home, although these platforms were the ones spreading disinformation at home and destabilization across the globe. For me, this is actually the whole scope of this short mad video – to find a situation where a US household brand triggers the actual downfall of the US, not China or any other external power vying for global hegemony. What escapes most of the current analysis, and what Quinn Slobodian achieved in his recent book I think is making neoliberals wake up from their “Hayek island” dream. This is how the whole democracy rhetoric has been hollowed out from the inside by the very promoters of free trade within special economic zones. Ethno populism tends to obscure the fact that the whole national state discourse and ‘bring back prosperity’ or ‘make America great again’ at home is “perforated” (as Slobodian observes) by numerous tax-free special zones that aim to attract global investors and hope to emulate Dubai in UK, US or elsewhere.

As some have remarked earlier, the Joker villain – from the Batman (DC franchise) isn’t so much a villain but a sort of exemplary broker gone loose, a total libertarian freedom fighter nutcase that rearranges everything to his contingent liking. He’s not so much a nutcase but a perfectly unpredictable entrepreneur, someone that does not try to save the sinking ship of capitalism but helps to sink it with various antics and unpredictable moves, a disaster capitalist riding the Schumpeterian waves of capitalist destruction. How do you turn Mickey Mouse into a Joker?

My final point is that during an already divided, uncertain situation in big part made more uncertain by Big Tech stakes, only an external enemy can promote more unity among the PPP (public-private projects). So one could consider the Disney US civil war parody a sort of nationalist (Trumpian?) parody call for more unity and for tighter integration at home with companies that have been deemed too treacherous, too global or selling their soul to transnational interests rather than foment economic growth and jobs at home. Following this Cold War logic, we have to ignore the ‘feral’ nature of this video because its true meaning lies in the fact that it is framed as an experiment of a Public-Private consortium or a DARPA-style agency that wants to upgrade or pitch and infiltrate Disney, a conglomerate that has become too complacent or too soft, but that still has a global reach.

2127 / The Anarchists (HBO docuseries 2022)

spacetime coordinates: a US enclave in Acapulco Mexico cca 2015 till now

It showcases a series of events that unfold over six years. An impulsive one-time gathering in Acapulco, turns into an annual event. Directed by Todd Schramke. It showcases a series of events that unfold over six years.

I have posted in the past an in-depth documentary in 3 parts directed by Ramonet (Tancrède) about anarchist history, thinking and various experiments, and even mentioned in passing the figure of Murray Rothbard (1925-1995). In comparison this documentary feels like a joke or a mock-up but for many it might still spell the truth about current anarcho-capitalist trends. Others have done a much better job at outlining the intellectual history of that particular school of extreme market capitalism from which it sprung called neoliberalism, and how its birth after WW1 out of the ashes of the multi-national Habsburg Empire was much more than the usual key figures everybody mentions (Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises), yet they are the ones who left a lasting and one might say pretty damaging imprint on today’s brand of globalism. It is in this context that historian Quinn Slobodian mentions a few important others (such as Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin), that struck a different path than their predecessors or contemporaries not supporting the usual laissez-faire economics but ending up on some bizarre intellectual paths of their own (including preparing some of the actual racist enthno- politics or one might say).

As capitalism arrived in Romania after 1989 with layoffs, unprecedented deindustrialization, price liberalisation (and the follow-up: gig economy and precarity), the usual fare of shock therapy (at least in Eastern Europe) was also accompanied by a sleuth of translations from some of these and other writers. Since these ideas suddenly started being so pervasive, so ‘natural’ in our societies, their influence ranges from government edicts to from movies and (sadly) school textbooks. Hard to trace their history or to even question them nowadays as presentism rules. Still there’s family resemblances. One characteristic they have in common (even the Wilhelm Röpke and Michael Heilperin might agree on that) is in the words of another important historian – Ellen Meiksins Wood – the differentiation of ‘spheres’ in capitalism, in particular the separation of the ‘economic sphere’ from the ‘political sphere’. The way in which capitalism exploitation works along in history is by transforming certain “essential political issues—struggles over domination and exploitation that historically have been inextricably bound up with political power—into distinctively ‘economic’ issues.”(check Ellen M W essential article from 1981 on that!).

Here come the anarcho-capitalist of today. Californian Ideology is drenched with that too. It is a direct child-brain of the Reagan-Tatcher compact. In other obnoxious ways it keeps vaunting its purity & pseudo outcast veneer – by affirming its libertarian credo. Year they have a mottled base and have drawn members from all sorts of corners (and this docu makes it amply clear): affluent types ex-finance ex-Wall Street types, Tech Billionaires, Dark Web traffickers dominante to which one might add gun ownership rights promoters, preppers, ex vets, home-schooling activists, tax-resistence activists, even the odd pacifist, conspiracy theorists etc. Still, most vizibile in the end are PROMOTERS OF HYPERBITCOINITIZATION and its almost as if this subtends their whole experiment, without any questioning ot tech scepticism (as long as they sponsor you & coin pays). But to talk about real – thermodynamic costs. It’s a crypto data mining bonanza world where thermodynamics (Gottfried Leibniz’s point about mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace’s demon – an argument wisely made jn regard to Blade Runner by C Mudede) is forgotten, magically suspended. It’s not at all far-fetched to say ideas espoused or ideological commitments expressed by ancaps had a say in both the alt-right and the 2021 United States Capitol Attack as well as the current crypto boom and bust. Bitcoin and blockchain tech are part of what could be coined Silicon Valley Solutionism – of preffering a technological fix for everything or pushing their inventions and solutions especially if they benefit the providers of those very solutions (sold with an invisible higher prize tag than what the city administrations have payed to make it snug & comfy for them). Anarhapulco seems like a bizarre neocolonial enterprise in US backyard: Latin America. Since end of 19th c ghe rising US Empire has played dirty, brutally pushing its interests and orchestrating numerous anti democratic political coups in the name of democracy, subverting local power and increasing misery and instability. It’s NSS apparatus, it’s corporations and elites have been instrumental in that. Important to understand that these flimsy overnight positions and ideologies are not at all as spontaneous or self-made meaningless Anarcapulco ‘joke’ had deep roots in the Cold War era narratives and paranoia of movies such as Red Dawn or books such as Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand where the enemy was either US state (or IRS) described as a hideout for ‘commies’ or ‘parasites’ at home. Movies such as Tge Hunt also speak of this shifting paranoia that characterizes uses of ‘RINOs'(Republican In Name Only) to blame those deemed un-loyal, ‘bad actors’ and especially the strawman of Cultural Marxism or malefic liberal elites at home.

The reality is much more complex, and there is actually historically and institutional reasons why this complicity btw the National Security State and its covert support for such radical free market elements or entrepreneurial ideas works almost because of ideals that otherwise would deny all state involvement and all goverment aid. Did the at any point ask or consult even the local communities were they landed? Did they use any democratic means to inquire what the locals think prior to their arrival there? Noy at all. All this whining over taxation and constant victimizing over government interference actually hides the way cities in the US have been declared “failed cities” (see Detroit – who also makes an appearance in The Anarchist as a ‘white’ commune ? almost the counterpart of Anarcapulco). They ignore the almost complete systemic racism, non existent welfare, rampant environmental injustice sjd unwillingness to act on it, a minuscule public spending and endemic lack of goverment interference – since for all its global reach, tech supremacy, influence in world affairs and military over reach (800 mil basis around the world) the US internally is built on feet of clay.

Important to understand that these anti- government ideas did not go away with Tatcher or Reagan, but have been very cooking up, alive in the dotcom boom rise & fall, the foundation & impunity of (national asset) Big Tech entrepreneurship since the early 1990s, well before COVID 19 pandemic struck and expose how the trust in much public institutions had been eroded, or if public infrastructure and even liberal democracy was itself worth saving, well before the UBER leaks scandal hit us.

So maybe you won’t find anything of the above in this docuseries, and on watch lists and recommendation. I find these things pretty blaring. The Anarchists is more about the celebertarians and seasteading than their actual history of ancap encrouchment (although u see a lot of Ron Paul and even clips with Ayn Rand – tough that would be enough to put you off). Watch it if you must, keeping in mind all of the above or enjoy a conventional beach resort party gone sore. The only interesting part (beside its almost cheapo reality TV feel) is how made-up and how unconvincing sound this cries for freedom from normal affluent mostly white (apart from very few notable exceptions) mostly bachelor, well educated and mostly male (the women had almost scripted exclusive nurturing roles). The only unstable elements – the sad PTSD vets are almost colateral, but they are the only shadow of constant wars abroad (Irak, Afganistan) and the way imperial foreign policy strikes back, becomes war as mass culture. Militarism abroad has a tendency to spill over into militarization of police violence and disastrous & multiplying mass shootings.

Apart from a vegan place there is NOTHING absolutely nothing about the local Mexican anarchists or rich local resistance and anti-exploitation anti imperialist histories. Where is the history of the Mexican Revolution, of of the earliest revolutions of the XX c? Where are the Trots’s in exile or the Zapatistas in the South? All these counter-histories seem forgotten, delete. Nothing about the terrible costs inflected upon migrants that want to move North in search of a better life no matter what the cost to their personal liberty and freedom or the risk from de-hiydration or being hunted down by vigilante right wing border patrols. None of that here! It is a history in a bubble of another bubble. Nobody is questioning the criteria on which this on rush for so-called boundless optimization, efficiency and guaranteed benefits is built. Here are the absolute total normies you might say – and look how easy it is nowadays to self-identify as ‘anarchist’ or be reborn overnight as libertarians or have a friend in crutches hand you a book on the EVIL gov, and then instant ‘alternative’ lifestyles suddenly feel part of ‘your’ orientation and mission. This generally tends to end bad for the unprotected. Is it odd, is it ‘radical’ to be one of those suddenly moving from the rich Global North to the Global South being moved by ‘vibes’ and crypto-currency sponsorship and blogging platforms?! Don’t think so. It’s striking that most ‘crypto scheme’ promoter plan to revolutionize the economy only in impoverished, deregulated, and de-funded countries and mostly having suffered directly under the US neo-colonialism. They are either reeling after neoliberal ‘shock therapy’ or finding themselves squeezed under crushing private international debt & austerity measures. This possible explains how crypto arrived in Salvador via goverment promises and Philippines via gaming. The whole cheaper than at home (low cost) hotel- ballardian (Cocaïne Nights) environment living in Anarchapulco is actually what the utopia of this seasteding (fiscal paradise) crowd was all about.

IMDB