A warning (unlike my normal excerpt). This post is designed to analyze the bizarre phenomenon of those rare individuals who become famous for committing murder (or for killings that are deemed, legally, to be somehow distinct from murder.) As such, it involves a discussion of the inciting incident for that celebrity. Be aware of this fact.
Read MoreNone of this matters. People get worked up about these things that frankly do not matter and then it gets plastered all over social media as people look for the newest thing to be outraged by. They are outraged, because their outrage is profitable to the people who work to influence their emotions.
Read MoreSo that happened. By “that” I mean an attempted coup happened – it occurred as I was putting together a slate of book reviews, and honestly I didn’t have the bandwidth to really do anything about it.
Read MoreThe world is burning down around us, and we’re going to work. We’re going to the grocery store and the laundromat and watching Netflix. We have no ability to productively imagine what we have to do in this situation, because the obvious option – taking to the streets, going on strike, making actual demands – are things that we have been conditioned not to do. We continue on as we have been, because the alternatives are either outright unimaginable or are the objects of horror and anti-fascination.
Read MoreCyberpunk predicted in the early 1980s that people would one day live in a world that looked very much like the 1990s. Its authors – led by William Gibson – did this primarily by taking the temperature of the world around them and just predicting the worst non-apocalyptic future they could. It was also the most successfully predictive science fiction movement ever.
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