On Monomania: The High Strange Moment in the 21st Century

When I was a kid, I loved science fiction and this included alien abduction and UFO stories. I don’t think I really believed, even then. For a while, I even claimed to have seen one, though this was a lie. In this way, perhaps I better embodied the X-Files slogan “I want to believe” than the characters — I wanted to believe, but I simply didn’t.

On Forbidden Knowledge: The Big Other and Social Censorship

This makes cosmic horror an interesting genre – what we are looking for in it is something that we tend not to think of as anywhere near desirable: we are looking for someone to assure us that an individual person’s life doesn’t matter. This is not simply a way of understanding cosmic horror, but a way of using cosmic horror as a lens through which to read other events.

Your Desires Have Been Captured: A Discourse on the Mutilated User and the Alienated Worker

There is no individual solution to the situation we find ourselves in. To say, though, that there are no individual components is a mistake. Every collective action is made up of individual actions: it requires that we all consider our situation and broadly take actions – individually and in coordination – that point in roughly the proper direction.

On Sovereignty, Subjection, and Play: A Theory of Perversity (Odd Columns, #13)

Perversity is what might be called “ectopic play” or “ectopic sovereignty” – sovereign authority deployed in a limited fashion without permission and in a place where it isn’t considered to belong. In some contexts this might be criminal or stupid. In others, it can be genius. This juxtaposition is what makes perversity so interesting to me. It is the willingness to creatively misuse a given system.

What is Modernity?

My worry is that, as alienating and bad as things are now, that the cessation of modernity might be followed by merely swapping one savagery for another. We like to believe that the world is growing less brutal and less violent, but the moral arc of the universe doesn’t bend towards justice: there is no arc. There is no absolute, inevitable progress. Everything that we get, we need to push for, fight for, argue for. It’s possible that the world might be a better and more just place if the modern era had never happened, but it has happened. If it is undone, it will most likely be undone through a great deal of suffering.