Month: October 2023

in a paywalled post on his very lucrative and popular Substack, the ersatz Hunter Thompson Matt Taibbi covered a recent development in the ongoing battle between European regulatory bodies and the Big Tech firms. The EU passed the Digital Services Act, which places far greater onus on platforms for monitoring content and for doing away with manipulative user interface designs. as part of this roll out, European Commissioner for the Internal Market Thierry Breton has sent letters to Zuck and Musk warning them that they’ll need to do something about the “illegal content” on their respective platforms if they want to avoid hefty consequences for continuing to operate on the Continent.

Taibbi’s very reasoned and thoughtful stance on this supposedly censorious overreach by the EU is that Zuck and Musk “should hire Louis C.K. and have him flown to Brussels to tell Breton in person, American-style, to eat a bag of d— (sic).” the post is titled “Europe, Get Off Our Speech Lawn,” and subtitled “The European Union deigns to lecture America on free expression.” you don’t need that lecture though, huh Matty, seeing how polite you were to self-censor your slam dunk dick joke.

whatever Taibbi goes on to say about this I have no idea, because I’m not giving Substack my credit card information. this morning I’m feeling pretty down on Substack, despite my own use of the platform, since they rely on schlubs like me to provide free content while making cash deals with gigapundits like Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald, all to legitimize their business model and erode what’s left of public journalism in the exact same way Uber destroyed taxi cab companies.

the extent to which the DSA actually censors anything that would not be censored in offline media is unclear to me. “hate speech, child sexual abuse material, scams, non-consensual sharing of private images, promotion of terrorism, the sale of counterfeit or unsafe products and copyright infringement,” these are all things that American news media can’t broadcast/print anyway, so is Taibbi upset he won’t be able to promote a scam selling counterfeit child pornography that incites terrorism on Twitter? maybe, I don’t know the man. I didn’t even read the newsletter. anything’s possible.

the DSA also covers a broader, vaguer, and more insidious range of content: disinformation. this is where things get murky. what constitutes disinformation? who decides? is disinformation pushed by government officials, usually styled “propaganda,” at issue here? is anything the EU disagrees with false, anything it says true?

these are dark times, epistemologically speaking. for centuries, power maintained tight control with strict monitoring of who can know what, what secrets must be kept. since the the exponential increase in information made available in the last 60 or so years, a different strategy was taken, at least in the West: drown everyone in so much information that it’s impossible to sort through it all and come to an adequately “informed” decision. this makes it so that what’s easiest is to continually seek out confirmatory sources, partitioning off the social sphere into noncommunicable psychic sectors. in such a world, what difference does it make if a few people get the straight dope, if everyone’s convinced their mutually exclusive view of the world is Gospel? and yet here we have a regulatory body, a supranational hierarchical power structure, fretting over the idea that the wrong information might get into the wrong hands.

again, I have no idea if Taibbi wrote about any of this; he can make money keeping his posts behind a velvet rope that I don’t care to be let into. meanwhile, I’m offering all this, for free, and no one even notices.

the situation in Israel demonstrates a cunning on the part of Hamas that some commentators can only explain by arguing that “this is what Netanyahu wants,” or “Mossad knew this would happen, and let it happen.” (gee if that’s the case, then I wonder what other things Mossad might have known about and maybe facilitated, perhaps 22 years ago in Manhattan? I digress) Israel’s domestic politics are not pretty right now, or they weren’t until a week ago, with 38 straight weekends of protests against Netanyahu’s “alleged” corruption indicative of deep divisions in the country. and there’s nothing like an invasion to rally unity in the face of, as Israeli officials are so fond of saying, subhuman barbarian hordes. subhuman barbarian hordes with a keen sense of strategy and timing.

anyone not bought-and-sold, either literally or psychologically, by Israeli propaganda knows it’s ridiculous to condemn violence on the part of Hamas without at least mentioning the nearly 80-year-long campaign of settler colonialism carried about by Zionists under the auspices of Western, namely Anglo-American, patrons. others can detail the systematic, psychopathic destruction of Palestinians, the huge disparities in casualties, the shameless bad faith with which Israel claims its “right to defend itself.” of course, Free Palestine, down with Zionism.

deeper, though, than the overt anti-colonialist struggle, the situation in Israel is a warning shot for the coming crack-up of the neoliberal world order. Israel is and always has been a white colonialist project given justification by cynical deployment of “anti-Semitism”, so that the Anglo-American establishment can maintain an outpost in the oil rich Middle East. the reign of the New Romans (who incidentally operate Empire more like the Spanish than the Romans, but don’t spoil their fun) is only possible so long as pipelines pump that sweet petroleum out of the Arabian desert and into American or British banks. part of maintaining this foothold is in Israel projecting an image of indomitable strength, hence the billions of dollars in funding and arms sent there each year by the United States–Obama signed an agreement that promises $38B to Israel between 2017 and 2028, and Antony Blinkey has said they’re working on sending more aid to assist in what Netanyahu believes will be a prolonged conflict.

if this is to be a prolong conflict, it means that Israel is not in the position of indomitable strength it needs to contain this uprising. a very bad sign for Empire. and if the conflict drags on, those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause will join up with Hamas, further destabilizing the region. the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, long-time supporters of Palestinian liberation, may be called into to provide reinforcements. keep in mind that World War I, aside from being a clusterfuck of petty squabbles between the decrepit houses of the European aristocracy, broke out due to conflicts between empires seeking access to markets and capital. nowadays, China, Russia, and the Anglosphere are competing to assert market dominance in the 21st century. Ukraine serves as proxy conflict between the US and Russia over economic access to the Eurozone. and now, with the promise of a prolonged conflict in the Middle East, the oil fields of the Arabian Peninsula, Iraq, and Iran may now be up for grabs as well.

the US has already promised to dispatch aircraft carriers and destroyers to the Eastern Mediterranean to support Israel’s “right to defend itself,” “enough to start World War III,” according to Marwan Bishara of Al-Jazeera. Bishara worries that Netanyahu may be “tricking the Biden administration into war” with Iran, fulfilling Bibi’s long standing dream of punishing the Islamic Republic for its nuclear program. but Biden has also, despite his gestures towards military withdrawal, promised to not “leave a vacuum to be filled by China, Russia, or Iran” in the Middle East. it would be extremely rash of Netanyahu to expand a conflict that his IDF does not seem operationally capable of sustaining, but then again these kinds of wars don’t explode out of reasoned strategy. and the Empire is buckling, a position that only ever leads to rasher, and more violent, flailing.

and if Lebanese Hezbollah gets involved, Israel may be stretched so thin that its only option will be nuclear. and make no mistake, even without nuclear arms, there’s not much Israel can offer other than total devastation, either in a military victory over the present invasion, or by reducing Gaza, the West Bank, and the entire region, to ruins, fulfilling the doomsday prophecies of the evangelicals, those Jesuits of the Amerikkkan Empire.

but the ruins of the old world are always the fertilizer of the new, and if there is to be a new world, we must rethink what liberation is, where to best direct rebellion, and how to manage resources without the extractive logic of Empire.

against the advisement of my mental health professionals, not to mention my better judgement, I’ve been listening to Death Is Just Around the Corner a lot lately, for the first time in years. why is this a bad idea? aside from Mikey’s contagious pessimism, astute as it may be (though he seems better since kicking junk, and my parasocial well wishes to him for it), it means I’m thinking, as though I don’t already, too much about Pynchon, too much about Gravity’s Rainbow, too much about how maybe there’s nothing left for me to say.

because I only ever need the slightest nudge in that direction, now I’m thinking maybe I’ll reread Gravity’s Rainbow. to be sure, I will eventually. but I probably ought not right now. again, peace be upon MSJ, no shade, one love, all that, but I really don’t want to be a guy who filters basically everything through his understanding of Gravity’s Rainbow. it’s a little much to have every episode of your podcast make reference to, or quote at length, one novel, exhaustive as that novel might seem.

of course, MSJ has a broad and deep understanding of a lot literature, so I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. in fact, I’m envious of how much he seems to know, how thorough and dedicated his thinking is, the conviction and self-assurance he has connecting a variety of disparate ideas. why can’t I seem to maintain that steely-eyed focus? probably because it would make me a spoil-sport, a wet blanket, a crank, an impolite dinner guest. and unfortunately, somewhere along the way, I learned, subconsciously, that it’s a lot easier to be a go along to get along kind of guy. why, I know all too well why. it’s embarrassing how much psychoanalysis still holds true.

with the help of my actual, not metaphorical, mental health professional, who isn’t a psychoanalyst per se, I’m coming to realize a whole host of shit I spent the better part of my life deliberately not realizing. not like, repressed memories or whatever, I don’t even really believe in repressed memories. but working through shit, that’s what making art is for, but also but my internal resistance to fully submerging into what all that shit is is, well, there’s a lot of tricks my ego plays to dissuade me from getting there. one of the most obvious, to me anyway, is thinking about Gravity’s Rainbow, rather than touching upon whatever it is in me that’s fucked.

complicating my own personal internal defense mechanisms is that I have to spend 40 hours a week turning off my ability to feel and think deeply so that I can do customer service. and more than anything, what I envy Pynchon for is having been granted the time and money to lose his fucking mind enough to create a book that seems to encapsulate the whole world. but to do that, he had to really touch upon whatever it is in him that’s fucked, and also whatever it is in the world that’s fucked, and boy howdy is that a lot of pain to feel.