#its all about like moral outrage at the mere existence of technology that has existed for long

[kissycat]

Using AI in medicine predates chatgpt/LLM popularity by years. I know this because I worked on a related project in 2020 but it was a thing already long before that and it has nothing to do with LLM 👎

[princeanxious]

Why would you hide the Villain remus and Janus thing in the tags, I'd read the hell outta Hero Virgil turned Villain

you mean this??? shdbic aaa Yeah I want to write it, but i also want to write a lot of things. xD but this is def one of those things i’d love to write a short-ish one-shot about just so I can write it.

can you imagine? Virgil, young and anxious, manifesting powers of the light and dark variety, able to manipulate shadows and summon electricity with such fine precision because he’s spent so long fretting over accidentally hurting someone with it that he refused to even dare try and step into the hero scene until he was 150% certain that he’d trained his powers to disconnect from his emotions so that he’d never have an outburst that could even harmlessly shock or scare someone. He’s so in control over his powers that its to an insane degree just because he wants to make sure he cant hurt anybody on accident.

(complete ramble continued under the cut bc boy howdy this got so long it might as well be its own short one-shot)

And, he’s worked so in depth with his powers because of course he can’t just suppress them!(Suppressing electricity based powers doesn’t get rid of that energy, it just makes that constantly generating energy stay put and build, which makes it even more dangerous when it’s finally released, so suppression is a no go) So of course not only does he work extensively with learning how to control his powers, but also how to healthily use them and expend his energy safely, effectively, and skillfully as he grows into them. Might as well push your limits of learning just how much your power can do if you have to learn how to exist safely around others by controlling it, right?

So, by default, by the time Virgil is both old enough and confident enough in his powers to consentingly apply for registry to the worlds heroes association, he’s both insanely skilled with his powers, and also insanely talented(the equivalent to a child prodigy, not that many people in charge of the worlds hero association believe that, though.). The people who had been interviewing him believed the same, thinking him to be just another super teenager boasting about his skills when they couldn’t even sense his power, thinking that what little power Virgil did have was not even worth bothering to report anything substantial about the interview. That he’d oughta go try the villain’s headquarters, because at least they take in wandering powerless for henchmen all the time.

Virgil, feeling pissed but not quite enraged yet, because what teenager wouldn’t hate it to be so invalidated and demeaned at being out right dismissed as a threat, let alone considered more of an invalid for not having powers, starts to display his power. 

First it’s the main interviewer’s phone that they’d been glancing boredly at, drained suddenly of all power. Then it’s the landline of that specific room, then it’s the lamp, the computer suddenly shuts off with zero warning and nothing of it turns on. The lamp in the corner of the room goes dark, bulb by bulb, and the printer in the room dies. Virgil’s eyes are glowing violet but he hasn’t moved any more than the annoyed twitch of an eyelid. the light’s overhead turn off, leaving the lights in the hallway still on, leaving the remaining light in the room coming from the single window in the room and the open doorway. 

He reaches up a hand, and snaps once, and shadows swallow up the light over the hallway and the window, acting as a wall from the inside and out. 

Now the only light in the room is his glowing eyes.

The second interviewer is struggling to summon fire from her hands to light the room, but it doesn’t work. The energy she’s using to summon the fire is immediately sapped by Virgil’s force, there isn’t even a spark. The first interviewer can feel Virgil’s power now, it’s bright and burning. It’s like he has a core in the middle of his being like a sun’s core because its storing so much power, and the only reason they can see it now is because Virgil’s using his power. He has so much control that even on a nonphysical level it’s nearly tangible, the way that they can see his shadow powers conceal even the existence of his power, now that they know what their looking at.

In mere seconds, this kid has tipped the world on their head and put the fear of god into them, an undetected yet undeniable threat in the making. 

They watch his eyes tilt with his head, and the distinct sound of the entire building powering down is unmistakable, shouts of surprise and confusion due to the failure of the buildings many fail-safes failing to trigger. And then, with another snap, all power is restored to normal in the blink of the eye, all machines and lights are functioning perfectly, not an irregular shadow in sight, and all at once Virgil reads as a normal human teenager, not a whiff of power to be sensed. He looks pretty peeved, though.

“Maybe I will try my luck at the Dark Side then, at least they care about the people that look to be taken in. Let me know if you changed your mind, I’d love to have a do-over. With a different set of interviewers, mind you.” before he walks out of the interview room, off to blow off some steam legally and safely.

Imagine his outrage when a week later he’s served a summons to court, deeming him a “Threat to Society” and “better left in jail until the court can be convinced of his good nature” because he’s an “out of control juvenile gifted with an unprecedented amount of power that he couldn’t possibly control without strict legal supervision and interference and cannot be trusted to continue to exist as a normal citizen until the W.H.A deems it safe.”

Faced with possible lifelong inprisonment and zero control over the rest of his life because an association of supers think that they know better and that he’s some stupid teenager that was set loose on the world with means to only cause catastrophe and devastation, or freedom at the hands of some ambiguously grey moral decisions every once in a while and being treated as a normal human being even if he has to be a henchman to another super for a while? 

The decision isn’t a hard one to make.

So imagine his surprise when he’s not only accepted into the Dark Side after being respectfully asked to demonstrate the full extent of his power and his control over it, but instead of becoming a villain’s henchmen, he instead gains the full title of Villain(with another Villain(Janus) stepping in to mentor him and show him the ropes of the rules and everything), and even further: Gets his own henchmen assigned to him. 

A pair, Patton and Logan. 

Patton has a partial shapeshifting ability, but it only really lets him turn into a big frog man, making him perfect for doing any of the main heavy lifting for the team, and also perfect for protecting Logan when under attack. He’s built like a himbo and is absolutely 100% a himbo, heart of gold, super strong, buff dad bod, the whole sha-bang.

Logan has a power that is one part linked with memory, one part linked with technology. His brain can retain information like a computer databank, and he can get any misfunctioning technology to work if he can get his hands on it or a connection to it. He avoids all the quirks that interfere or damage real databanks and technology(like magnets, water, and short-circuiting) and can semi-directly connect with devices he is familiar with, without having to hold/touch/look at one.

All together, they have the beginnings of a well rounded team: the brawns, the brains, and the leader with plans and the power to make it happen. Even before finding out their reasons for coming to the dark side, Virgil becomes ride or die for them. (And honestly, they’re also pretty ride or die for him too, not even starting with the fact that they’re both like 26-27 and Virgil is an 18 year old anxious mess that had to make the decision over being the bad guy or losing any and all autonomy for the foreseeable future, which is gonna fuck up any kid and young adult’s brain. So, lowkey adopt him as a younger sibling even though he’s the boss of them and just barely taller than them.(Virgil is a tol lanky boi, and while Logan, standing at 5′9″, is but an inch shorter than Virgil at the start, Virgil still has growing room and peaks at about 6′4″ by the time hes 22. Patton at his normal height is like 5′6″, but frog man height is like 8′3″)

Oh, and they definitely make the Worlds Hero Association regret not taking Virgil’s existence kindly, Big Time.

[lailoken]

The Witches' Supper

“ The figure of the witch in the early modern era was an amalgam of religious typologies including blasphemer, heretic, spiritual malefactor, idolater, consort of fallen angels, and liege of the Devil. In parallel the witch accreted the substance of secular criminality: poisoner, thief, abortionist, grave-robber. These opprobrious brands were impressed on the accused by those whose written records survive, often in the form of legal tractates or penitentials. Yet as command of the printed word spread beyond legal and religious centers, other typologies emerged: healer, folk-charmer, superstitious rustic, impoverished wretch, and others. This procession of witch-guises has continued well into the present day, to include the glamorized images suffused in popular culture: the witch as diabolist caricature, illusion-maker, emanant of sexual allure, and repository of the unexamined ejecta of Christian orthodoxy.

An important and little-examined dimension of the witch-guise is that of the reveler at the Devil's Sabbath banquet. The imagery of this feast appears frequently in woodcuts and is occasionally innocuous, but at other times proffers the image of the witch as necrophage. The assembled coven is alternately portrayed as consuming unbaptized infants or the grisly products of desecrated graves; human bones are also included at the table, as they are in portrayals of the witches' Grand Rite. From the perspective of desecration taboo, the array of grim foodstuffs is no less appalling than the relics held in veneration by the Roman and Eastern Orthodox Churches: teeth, fingers, jawbones, foreskins and skulls, incorruptible corpses and vials of blood which liquefy and coagulate at auspicious moments. Yet, witches too have their saints and ossuaries, their hallowed relations to the Holy Dead. It is the passage from stewardship and veneration of remains to ritual consumption that triggers affront in the common mind, and has also contributed to the fear of witchcraft. Despite its abhorrent qualities, this forbidden lore persists and is known to some modern practitioners of folk magic as The Witches Supper' -a clandestine and disturbing meal which is, in some cases, a cipher for profound spiritual arcana, as well as the lore of poisons.

The process of bodily decomposition was a matter of fascinative obsession and repulsion to our ancient forbears, from both religious and magical perspectives. Upon death, the body naturally undergoes myriad biochemical changes bent toward the singular goal of material retrogression, the descent of the incarnative vessel to the mortified estate of the Profane Adam. Discoloration of tissue, stiffening of the body, abdominal bloating and pooling blood are mere precursors of the great corporeal tumult whose horrific imagery resembles the demonic horrors of the witches' cauldron. Bodily decay produces its own array of chemical poisons, many of which are responsible for the fetor so viscerally offensive to the living nose, but, also serving as inviting beacons to scavengers and detritivores. The fortress of primordial Adamas, once inviolable with God-given dominion over Nature, is rapidly transformed into a food source for a great variety of organisms, this status heralded by the production of corpse-poisons. Many of these putrefaction-derived compounds, in isolation, can be intoxicating or deadly to Homo sapiens"; some of them, in minute amounts, are also associated with pleasure or sexual allure, thereby recalling the ancient connubium between Eros and Thanatos. In some cases the corpse-poison also served a magical function before physical death: the power to cause flesh to rot on a living body, by forced infection and corrupt magical principles, was a known power of Zuñi medicine men and a documented procedure during the slow execution of witches. This odorous stew of nitrogenous cadaver-compounds falls into the ancient toxicological classification of ptomaines, from the Greck ptoma, indicating a corpse or provenance is the graveyard and charnel house, the crypt and plague-pit, and they are united in both science and magic as the vaporous effluent of the necropolis.

Witches and diabolical consorts at the Sabbath-feast.

No less than the natural decomposition of the human body, foodborne illness is also caused by organic decom 'fallen body'. Their position, and has been colloquially referred to today as a kind of poisoning. Corrupted food been a perpetual fact of civilized existence and has required ingenious solutions to forestall the advance of decay. Transmitted by the noisome taint of worms and micro-organisms en masse, putrefaction was a philosophically confounding process both dead and alive; the stench and ugliness generated in contaminated victuals were likewise an offense to reason as well as the senses. Early technologies of food preservation included cooling, drying and salting to arrest decomposition, or, in some cases, to mask the objectionable flavors of rancidification. The ancient arts of meat preservation naturally share a kinship with embalming: the outrage of post-mortem decay was of prime importance to the Old Egyptians, whose methods of providing salvific respite for the corpse may rightly be considered a magico-religious art form. In Christianity, the processes of corporeal decay were assigned to the dominion of the Devil, likely one reason for the folklore that Satan cannot abide the presence of salt. Persons who claimed to have attended the medieval Witches Sabbat remarked on the absence of salt at the feast. Similarly, when salt was brought in, the spectral revelers of midnight's table suddenly vanished, leaving the guest alone. The power of salt for slowing or arresting decay also relates to its magical uses for exorcism, blessing and consecration. The magician's exorcised circle is thus both fortified and mummified, a perfectly-preserved moment in time and space.

Both the corrupted products of Death and the means of slowing or arresting them bear crucial relationships to the Witches' Supper, which in one interpretation (stripped of its heretical elements) can be seen as fostering a ritual intimacy with the deceased. That the witches' delectations should be portrayed in the first instance as necro- cannibalistic is consistent with the position of witchcraft as transgressive, and as operating in spheres roundly condemned by religious and social orthodoxy. The witches' relation to the dead vis-à-vis their atrocious meal is, on the surface, portrayed as a mock Christian communion, or as the vulgar tactic of demonizing enemies by implied cannibalism. On a different level, the Supper operates as a hieroglyph of specific witchcraft power, namely the unique magical relationship between witches and the so called 'Mighty Dead', the retinue of ancestral shades and fountain of pre-incarnate atavism. The art of necromancy, or magically calling forth the shades of the dead, has long been a vibrant strand of witchcraft and magic of many epochs, and in many recensions may be considered its driving engine. Linked with more ancient currents of shamanism, this art was known from the writings of ancient Sumer, Chaldaea, and Greece, the latter providing the prototypal witch-figure and poisoner Circe, the sorceress of Homer's Odyssey.

The materia of the Dead—flesh, blood, and bones—is the mumia of art, known well to witchcraft, alchemy, folk magic, and medicine. The act of its ritual consumption, presented in early modern Witches' Supper depictions as vulgar cannibalism, encodes a number of precise ritual formulae and powers in necromantic magic. The most important of these is the elevation of 'dead matter to a living state by its incorporation into the living body. This is the active principle underlying the Holy Eucharist, wherein, through divine transmutation of elements symbolizing the mumia, Christ's body and blood are come forth from the tomb, and commune with the Body of the Faithful. The potent necromantic implications of the Holy Communion, as a magical act, would have been instantly recognizable to practitioners of folk-sorcery, particularly in contexts where funerary rites maintained close communication with the departing spirit.

Present within the Feast of the Dead is also the Formula of Opposition, a precept which underlies many historical patternings of witchcraft. Named by Andrew D. Chumbley, who wrote about it extensivelys , the Formula is an operant dynamic between the sorcerer and the 'Other', that being the zones of spirit-alienation external to personal experience and containing ungathered seeds of occult numen. In the case of historical folk magic, Formulae of Opposition are often transgressive against law, religious orthodoxy, or social convention, but above all against Self; as exacted they often make use of inversion. In violation of strongly-held personal Tabu, the structure normally governing conception and use of magical power is overturned, resulting in a liberation of consciousness, and the acquisition of previously-forbidden realms of power. At the Feast of the Witches, a culinary encounter with dismembered limbs, organs, and heads serves as an oppositional force on a multitude of levels, from the basic violation of the senses, to affronts against personal and group morality. Whilst the actual consumption of decomposing human flesh by historical practitioners of Sabbatic rites is an open question, it is, perhaps, the wrong question. More relevant is the depictions of the moribund Feast as a symbol of initiatic power gained through the Formula of Opposition.

The Accursed Victual, as a component of the Feast, may also mask the presence of initiatic power, conveyed through mumia. A recurrent component of magical charms is the secretion of semen, menstrual blood, feces, or urine into food as a spell of control over one's victim. This action mimics the spoor secreted by many mammals for the 'marking'or'claiming’of territory and if correctly engaged draws upon a vast astral repository of atavism, and belongs to an ancient stratum of magic reaching into prehistory. Spells employing such secreted matter are transgressive of ancient dietary laws wherein food, and the feast itself, represents a sacrosanct compact between the dining parties. However, when the parties are wholly conscious of the nature of their food, and eat nonetheless as they are shown doing in portrayals of the Witches' Supper- it may be presumed that there are religious or magical reasons for doing so, namely reverence for the deceased, the acquisition of power, or both.

All such approaches to the Feast are essentially necromantic, and as a coercive approach to spirits, it is properly classed as sorcery. It is thus aligned with early modern witchcraft, but ritual communion with the dead using food and drink is also a feature of ancient religion." Roman cults of the dead persisted into the early centuries of Christianity, with night-long memorial feasts in honor of those whose bodies had passed, often in situ at the tombs themselves. Archaeological evidence, as well as the written record, reveals remains of ancient graveside banquets, including drinking and cooking vessels. Church prohibitions on pagan rites honoring the dead occurs in written form as late as the thirteenth century, indicating that such observances were still in practice. Feasts offered in honour of the dead persist into the modern era, even in exemplars largely bereft of religious trappings. Ritual consumption of the dead as part of a socially acceptable funerary practice, is also documented.

The abominable meats, bones, and sundered limbs often pictured at the Witches' Supper may be afforded an additional interpretation with regard to their magical rôle at the Witches Sabbath. In certain inquisitional records, an emergent pattern among some groups, which differed from the usual clerical projections, involved a banquet with archaic features which scholar Wolfgang Behringer has called "The Miracle of the Bones'." This features the restoration of life to a cow or other animal from a disjointed skeleton. The implicit power of this mystery as a magical practice is captured in a section of Robert Fitzgerald's Midnight's Table, a manual of witchcraft lore and spellcraft concerning the arcane power of the witches' banquet:

The Mind void yet the Thought fully formed.

The Body hungry yet the Spirit replenished.

The Wood unfinished yet the Table carved.

The Platter empty yet the Larder full.

Here the desolation of the witches' feast remains, as well as their potentiality as nutritive victuals or even as living beings, is invoked, the suggestion of Voidful Presence through the juxtaposition of emptiness and corporeal flesh. Extrapolated beyond the objects themselves, the table may be seen as the witches'altar or circle, the zeroth vessel of all-potentiality which, like a cornucopia, may contain a multitude of fruits by way of ritual power. This symbolic and emblematic patterning is completely consistent with the atavistic patterning evident in the orally-transmitted magical lore of the Sabbatic Cultus.

The natural transformative processes of rot and decay are crucial strands of the magical currents feeding folk magic and witchcraft. The alchemists of Europe explored putrefactive states thoroughly, borrowing the process from Nature, then emulating, calibrating, and magnifying it under precise fractionations in glass vessels. It is likely that, as with the Royal Art itself, a considerable 'portion of putrefactive magic in Europe was a direct inheritance of Arabic and Islamic magic; such texts as Ġäyat al-Hakim and Kitab al-Sumum employ numerous members of dead animals, some ritually killed, for cursing, poison, and magical power. These usages also occur in the later corpus of European grimoire formulae. However, the powers of putrefaction and decomposition had a far more ancient pedigree, one of which is of specific interest to the Sabbath banquet. Correctly harnessed, they give rise to both of the primary mysteries of the witch sacrament: the Bread and Wine.

In the Bread and Wine of the Witches Supper, some have seen the historical outlines of the ritual consumption of psychoactive substances at the Sabbath, specifically conveyed through food and drink, and indeed this interpretation is present in some modern-day witchcrafi practices. Historical references are uncommon, but suggestive. The Inquisitor Pierre DeLancre reported that the bread of the Basque witches' was black and revolting, its flour ground from black millet, and served with 'false meats'. Aside from its resemblance to cadaverous flesh, the "black bread' is of potential toxicological interest. In centuries past, white flour was a privilege of the wealthy, and poorer classes resorted to eating so-called 'black breads', made of rye and barley, and which also contained diverse adulterants from the harvest. Piero Camporesi in his Bread of Dreams has speculated that psychoactive contaminants of grain such as darnel (Lolium temulentum) and ergot (Claviceps purpurea) were so common in the flours of some regions and eras that the average peasant was in a constant state of intoxicatio as a consequence of poor diet. If true, the evidence cited suggests that the psychoactivity of such breads was an accidental by-product of a fouled food supply, but if the phenomenon was understood by herbalists and magical practitioners, there would be little to stop the cunning from crafting experimental loaves. Indeed, as with the Thelemic Cakes of Light', the Sabbath Bread has its own secret formulations.

The Nocturnal Assembly gathering corpses for the Witches’ Supper. Compendium Maleficarum, 1608.

The old term "Crow's Bread" originates in the founding lineages of the witchcraft order Cultus Sabbati, and originally referred to the intoxicating mushroom Psilocybe semilanceata as a gift of the spirits for visionary ritual use. In the late 20th century, the term was applied within the group for broader use to refer to any psychoactive ritual substance gathered from Nature, but its nature as 'Bread is linked both with the Communion Host of Christ and the male generative power linked with the 'Lord of Light’, in some cases identified with Lucifer. In this latter association, the Bread's power as Revelator is especially notable. Covines and lodges of the Cultus have long made use of venefic gnosis in various forms; its oldest known recensions, dating from the second half of the nineteenth century, contain obscure charms against poison, as well as certain ritual transmissions of power using a prepared psychoactive sacrament. Oral teachings long pre-dating the Great War concern another poisonous species of note in Britain: Belladonna. There are also adjunctive practices concerning a multitude of other plants of power, specifically their Eucharistic power. My contacts with other Traditional Witchcraft groups outside of the Cultus have, on occasion, affirmed the presence of such sacraments elsewhere, some of which have themselves passed into a largely symbolic or chemically inert form.

Within the Sabbatic Cultus, the Bread of the Sabbath Feast operates upon many magical levels, its essence is intimately tied to British agricultural cycle, the God of Harvest, Corn and Sheaf, sometimes manifest in the mythical divinity of John Barleycorn. The germ of this myth encloses the great mystery of ritual murder and resurrection embodied in the Holy Loaf, and the resulting sustenance of the kingdom. This quintessentially English expression of the Bread is thus seminal, nutritive, life- giving, and radiant, but also embracing the mysterium of Death and a patterning of seasonal time and tide. Here Barleycorn is sometimes identified as the Witch-Father Mahazhael. He is thus often depicted as a skeletal god with an erect phallus, bearing a scythe, sickle, and stalk of grain; his mystery is well encapsulated in his invocation from Chumbley's The Dragon-Book of Essex:

On the first day I awoke within the furrow.

On the second day I knelt in prayer 'neath the sun.

On the third day I stood in the long green robe.

On the fourth day my head was crowned with gold. 

On the fifth day the sickle laid me to rest.

On the sixth day my body was ground between stone.

On the seventh day I was raised anew

to feed the brethren at Midnight's table-

to serve at the Round Feast for both the Living and the Dead.

In addition to the process of ritual murder which births the Bread, the putrefactive processes used for its fermentation, via yeast or bacteria, are also reckoned as a part of the Corn-God's dominion. As a natural agent of corruption, yeasts are widespread and penetrate countless strata of the world, often contaminating foodstuffs, as well as the human organism. Even where fermentation conditions are controlled, the process of making bread and wine relies on the mass death of these microorganisms. This catastrophic loss of life, on the order of hundreds of millions of individuals per loaf, nonetheless provides a delectable crumb serving as both an holy sacrament and the common man's ‘Staff of Life'. A further relation between bread and the grave is its frequent off-white colour, recalling bone, and the hardness it attains when stale, sometimes petrifying, as a skeleton, over the course of centuries; and amongst some witchcraft practitioners, the churchly Communion Wafer is sometimes addressed within the circle simply as 'The Corpse' or ‘The Skeleton'.

The magical corollary to the Witches' Bread is the Vinum Sabbati, or Winecup of Midnight's Table. Its alignment is with the Moon and the Lunar emanation, the feminine principle, and the many humours of the body, primarily blood, but also the female sexual secretions, both gross and subtle. In witchcraft contexts, as well as other secret societies and magical orders, the Wine is of legendary status and a great deal of lore and doctrines have emerged concerning its generation and use. To some it is a cup producing fantastic visions, to others, an initiatic ordeal which serves as the most harrowing trial for the drinker. Certain teachings, through its association with both the Living Cup and its Wine as a single entity, have two essential natures which in combination, magically unify to create a Blessed Third, an apotheosis of both. Within the Cultus Sabbati, the 'Graal of Midnight' has precise formulations to empower and support the various pathways of Sabbatic Congressus: Thanatomantic, Atavistic, Sexual, and many others. By a metaphoric pathway, the Wine of the Sabbath is not only a fluidic medium, fermented and distilled within the Flesh of the Initiate, but also the entire process of corporeal transmutation during its imbibition at the High Sabbat.

As an actual drink conveying ritual power, a medieval prototype of the Wine of the Sabbath is to be found in Johannes Nider's Formicarius (1435), which alleged the witches of the Simmenthal region of Switzerland were initiated using a potion brewed from the ashes of infants. More important than the composition of the brew was its alleged effect: the beguiling draught conferred upon the initiate an instant knowledge of the Art Magical. Though described prior to the advent of the Sabbath as a major component of witchcraft, it is the ritual cup and its function as a bestower of witch-power which links it to the Witches' Supper.

The bridge between wine and the incorporeal host is also relevant to the nature of the witches' cup. Historically, the grape was considered divine not only by mankind but also by spirits of the Dead. In ancient Greece, the Vine-shoot was regarded as possessing strong properties of purification; wine was often poured there as a libation for the dead, as well as to chthonic deities. This custom of offering alcohol to the deceased resisted the strongest attempts at eradication; Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus (427-449) reports with outrage pagans bringing wine to the deceased in evening rites. Cæsarius relays a legend in which two servants at the monastery of Laach, charged to guard the vineyard by night, bribed the devil to do their work with a cophinum full of grapes, a deal which was apparently kept. Amongst the nocturnal activities later alleged of the Vaudois witches was the invasion of wine cellars, led there in a troupe by the Devil. "Under lead of the demon they enter cellars and drink wine, all of them first urinating in the cask from which it is drawn." The threefold linkage of wine to the Dead, witches and the Devil draw additional lines of arcane association with the Sabbatic Grail, both as a form of communion with the Dead and with the Black Man of the Sabbath, the God of the Lamiae.

The presence of Wine in historical English witchcraft and folk magic may indeed arise from its aspect as mock-sacrament, theʻpolluted bloodof Christ which featured in invertive and blasphemous sorceries. However, wine was present in England before the advent of Christianity; introduced by the Romans, there is evidence for viticulture among the Anglo-Saxons; one conservative estimate identifies at least 139 definite or possible vineyards in medieval Britain. Though climatological trends in past centuries have fluctuated, and viticulture has prospered or suffered accordingly, the Genius of the Vine has been present in England for millennia. This is certainly sửfficient time for a body of lore and rites to have accreted around the Grape and its divine expressions, drawing from numerous magico-religious currents, as well as the inevitable corpus of agrarian lore which accompanies so important and venerated a crop. This is to say nothing of England's great tradition of hedge wines, a testament both to the ingenuity of her vintners and the botanical diversity of her lands.

The Cup of Wine which features so prominently at the Feast of the Witches may be understood as the mechanism of sorcerous transmutation of the body, not only its vehicle, but its symbol, process, teaching, and legacy. This symbol in activated form unfolds, as an opening rose, the entire ecstatic algorithm of the Sabbat. Within the rites of Sabbatic Witchcraft, the Wine of the Devil's Graal appears in radiance at the confluence of sorcerous enchantment and spirit-veneration. Where the covenant of adepts is of sufficiently focused will, desire, and belief and of sincere devotion", the Cup is vinted, filled, mixed, and drunk. The motto ‘Ipse venena bibas’ or 'drink thou thine own poison' encodes the truth that the Grail of the Witch is both the cup from which it is drunk, and the initiate into whom the wine passes. The alpha-numeric essence of this matter is eloquently contained within the number 710, which corresponds both to the grail-poison (tar`elah) and the Sabbath itself.

The active magical nature of the Witching Graal, and its function as the intermediary in rites of 'Communion' naturally evokes the Body of the Goddess as the portal of mystery. In the Sabbatic traditions of witchcraft, the shade-mother Lilith or Liliya Devala is identified with the witches' cup in both its exalted and desecrated forms, aligned with sex-magical moduli of Void-mind (the empty cup) and the conjured circle of spirits (the full cup). Other permutations occur, especially those co-identified with the body of the Priestess or ritual adjuditrices. Each wine vinted within these cups is as much a product of the Vessel as the Vine.

Kenneth Grant has linked the Sabbatic Wine to the blood of Charis, wife of the smith-god Haephestos, and also known as the threefold goddess Charites, or the Graces. Expanding upon the writings of Massey, which quote the ancient writings of the Gnostic Marcus, Grant links the Vinum Sabbati with the blood of Charis, the 'original Eucharist'of the early Gnostic Christians. The vintage is the central component of the ancient magico-sexual rites of trance mediumship wherein the goddess spoke through a chosen medium. This bears certain similarities with kindred operations in the Order of Eastern Templars, as well as those of at least one Traditional Witchcraft lineage informing the Cultus Sabbati. Likewise, a cup-blessing used for the Wine connects its use to the forgotten intimacy of Samael and First Woman:

Bright Host of Saint Hawa, draw nigh unto this, my Cup.

Before mine eyes, the Well of Abomination,

Betwixt thy thighs, the Red Stream of Eternal Fire.

Behold thou the Good Companie assembled

To feast upon the grave-wandering corpse,

Draught of Manbane, and dew of the Forest grail,

The blood-fouling thorn, the Fang and Toad-froth,

Yea, All Delights of Resurrection's Vineyard:

O, Mercy of the Spirit I pray!

Here 'Communion' also relates in mystery both to the Witches' Agapae or love-feast as well as the coition of spirit transpiring within the circle of the High Sabbat itself. This resonates with the witches' Fortunum or Cup of Good Fortune, a specific preparation of male and female sexual secretions, ritually expressed in the correct lunar phase, and empowered through conjuration of precise spirit- presences. Withing these covines are preserved teachings concerning 'the vinting and pouring’ of the Agapae-wine, as well as its function at the Feast. It is impossible to pinpoint with certainty the origin of the oldest of these witch-rites, though their resemblance to some practices of South Asian Tantra is striking. This may be an occult adaptation of Tantric practice, as perpetuated through such magical orders as the Ordo Templi Orientis, with which some covines have had contact. However, the oldest witch- praxes of this type pre-date the Oriental Templars' contact with Tantra, and in fact retain elements marking their origin as specifically English and Northern European. Additionally, their foci incorporate atavistic formulae, placing them squarely within the precincts of an ancestral cult, as well as incorporating elements which would to many occult lodges, be considered "low magic".

Despite the linkage of these sexual witchcraft formulae with the Dead, their strata of magical expression very much concern the living, the present body of initiates, woven into the perpetuity of magical time. In addition to the powers of manifestation their perfected exaction radiates, they are capable of simultaneous intoxication, empowerment and nourishment -the great 'Transmutation of the Body' in which one becomes magic entire. Its linkage with the ghastly imagery of the demonologist lies in its formulation from the Corpus Humanis. Under correct conditions, the two give rise, like the antediluvian pillars, to the Great Temple of the New Flesh.

Returning to the concept of Crow's Bread, within the Sabbatic Cultus, the Liberty Cap mushroom (Psilocybe semilanceata), when encountered growing in the wild, is regarded as an omen of ancestral favor. A prime concentrator of atavistic force, it is a gateway to the dominion of Faerie and a guardian of the Way. It is never hunted, but when encountered must be acknowledged by certain ritual customs and sacrifices.

Importantly, it eschews dung, unlike other visionary mushrooms of its genus, and thus in mystical terms is separated from Abel, the unrefined or 'profane' nature of flesh prefiguring the sorcerer Cain. Proceeding as it does from the soil and thus the subterranean vaults of the Mighty Dead, its fruiting body is the brief apotheosis of those fallen and yet come again: the ephemeral Risen Phallus of the Spirit-Meadow. The mushroom thus subsumes three important mysteries of the Witches' Supper in one body: the Corpse, the Phallus, and the Visionary Sacrament. From a devotional entry in Hypnotikon:

Amongst the true-born of its flesh, it is known as ‘The Watcher on the Moor' and this is precisely where I was introduced to this Friend. It speaks of many things: great spectral mists uncurling before the moon; of time and the procession of bodies upon bodies; of hedge-haunting devils; of the deeds of the Saints' bones, resonant and deep in the earth; of the Immovable Stone and its wisdsom; of symmetries and arrangements of things - trees, plants, beasts; of holy books writ in ossuary dust; of the delectations and radiances of the flesh; of the Round Dance and the Fallen Star; of the Sovereign and Horn'd Head detached from the body, ruling over the Land; of the telescoping of the soul into indescribable abysses. When it has spoken its final word, and revealed its last vision, what then remains? The accumulated counsel of every incarnation as I'.

In the abyssal heart of ancestral shadow, the 'Bread' of Midnight's Table is served both for the Living and Dead. For those who sup in flesh, and walk in the world of men, it is a sacred loaf broken for remembrance: to honor the Dead with sensation and savor, and to call forth into the body, through the rite of necrodeipnon, what has gone before. For them who abide in shade, the Bread is the Lantern of the World, shone as a beacon for return to the flesh, if ever briefly. Through the medium of poison, and its child ecstasy, the decay and annihilation of Death is cast aside, the spirit clothed anew in the radiance of corporeal transfuguration. ”

—

Veneficium:

Magic, Witchcraft and the Poison Path

by Daniel A. Schulke

[meloncubedradpops]

Repo! the Corona Opera: Part Two Fascist Boogaloo

Greetings fellow Repo! fans,

Here is my second installment of a series of three essays where I compare our contemporary times with the movie Repo! the Genetic Opera. My first piece detailed the similarities between the two worlds, and turns out, I have an awful lot to talk about still. I ended my last article by posing the question, "What went wrong in this dystopia to normalize the concept of death due to nonpayment?" No doubt, this movie is incredibly outrageous on many fronts, particularly within the dynamics of the Largo family. As mentioned in the previous piece, I highlighted the pervasiveness of GeneCo's power and influence towards the citizens in the city (is it called city of GeneCo? GeneCo-land? GenCity? An actual city in Italy??). 

People who write stories often bend the rules to make their story compelling. Be it exaggerating social interactions, creating scientifically impossible scenarios, or even allowing the characters to use technology that does not exist yet. I admit the creators of Repo! applied all those tactics and more, which makes the parallels I draw that much more surreal. I want to acknowledge this before I dive deeper because yes, I truly think it would be impossible to have a company who can offer cheap and dirty surgeries with an absence of debilitating class action lawsuits resulting from botched procedures, infection, or their body rejecting the organ transplant. And while I admit Zydrate does not exist, yet, but we do have a long history with opioid abuse. If you asked me when I first watched the movie if I think the Largo family could be a mirror of an ultra wealthy family from real life, I would have politely disagreed with you. But times right now are freaking weird. A single day does not go by where something completely outlandish is blasted all over the news, particularly in the United States. 

In my last essay I pointed out examples where the citizens in GenCity live a life after experiencing a mass extinction event. Besides the technological anachronisms, society and GeneCo have an uncomfortably close relationship with each other. GeneCo is not merely a corporation that offers healthcare and surgeries, it has an unyielding power politically too. I argue that GenCity is ran by a fascist government that is controlled and operated by GeneCo. 

If you're not a person who is super familiar with fascism, basically it's an extremist right wing government philosophy. I find it interesting that in the song "21st Century Cure", Graverobber says: Industrialization has crippled the globe. Although plagues, war, and other hardships existed before industrialization, that paradigm of change accelerated the imbalances between man and nature. Fascism did not exist until after World War I, after all. Between the world war itself and the Spanish Flu of 1918, there was a lot of pain and suffering felt all over the world. Fascists took advantage of vulnerable populations and asserted that their political party is the only correct party, and those who oppose are considered an enemy. Historically fascist governments have blurred the lines between the spheres of what's considered "public" and "private", and often danced harmoniously with business allies in pursuit of profit. As an effect, fascist governments have required citizens to foot the bill of a private company's losses. With enough propaganda, fascist governments will have you believing that this is ultimately for the betterment of everyone. And if you give them enough time, they will normalize terrible acts against humanity that barely make a peep, if the truth even comes to light. 

For the rest of this essay, I will be highlighting examples in the Repo! movie that correspond with characteristics of fascism, using political scientist Dr. Lawrence Britt's The 14 Characteristics Of Fascism, which was published in the spring 2003 issue of Free Inquiry magazine.

The 14 characteristics are:

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism: Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays. 

The world surrounding GeneCo occupies itself with the concept that this incorporated area derives a sense of nationalism, in the absence of much dissent. If you see below, there is an advertisement on the top right corner that says, "Your Birthplace for a new Heredity". GeneCo is not just a company that sells organs and surgeries. It is its own incorporated city. This ad, combined with GeneCo's relentless messaging that not only did this company save humanity, you must conform to the idea that only GeneCo can provide you the experience of feeling clean, safe, and perfect.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

Being able to legally repossess someone's organs because they didn't make their organ payments is about as disdainful as you can get. Nathan has a whole song called "Legal Assassin", and there doesn't appear to be many laws that would at least have the pretense that these repossessions are remotely humane. There are multiple instances in the movie where Nathan approaches a client who is already restrained, panicked, and powerless. From what I can gather from the media in Gencity, GeneCo proliferates the idea that the company would be dysfunctional if people could get financed surgeries and let those payments go to collections. When you're a mega corporation, they let you do it.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause: The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial , ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

While the career of a Graverobber is certainly creepy and macabre, the idea that they could be executed without a jury of their peers is especially strange. After I created my last essay, my friend Veronica pointed out, that per "A Needle Into A Bug", one of the deleted scenes from the movie, that street zydrate is not actually derived from the brains of dead people. He extracts zydrate from bugs that nest inside the craniums of dead people, which in my opinion is a huge distinction. So who is he really stealing from? Is it morally okay to dig up a corpse to get drug goo to sell to junkies? Absolutely not, and the idea is incredibly disrespectful for the dead. And while I am sure there are graverobbers in this world that likely steal things like jewelry from corpses, I still wouldn't justify being executed extrajudicially. 

Further, Graverobber's relationship with the Largo family has me believing even more that GeneCo needs them more than their media campaign can justify. Rotti has access to incredible surveillance of the city, so you would think he would eliminate anyone who enabled Amber Sweet's addiction. My theory is GeneCo knows that street zydrate may result in more surgery sales. However they want to continue making money selling the lab-grown stuff. So the end justifies the means, if we can associate graverobbers and those who use street zydrate as criminals, we can continue believing that "they" are the enemies setting everyone else back.

4. Supremacy of the Military: Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized. AND 12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment: Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations.

GeneCo employs a private police force to carry out law enforcement. They patrol around a graveyard, a quasi-public space carved out for those who mourn. And because there is pervasive video surveillance, Rotti can demand that they do his bidding at any time. An example is his order to murder the repo man. We aren't aware of any sort of involvement beyond the borders of GenCity, but even the concept of a graveyard being a warzone is a special kind of hell. 

5. Rampant Sexism- The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

Genterns! On the surface, it’s pretty cool that there is a large volume of female medical professionals who are skilled enough to carry out surgeries. However behind the sexy veneer is the reality that Genterns are not set up for success. They are not provided adequate PPE and work under non-sterile conditions. In the "Mark it Up" scene, one is killed by Luigi. Imagine going to medical school for years and years, only to be tasked with the job of organ warehouse worker. Then on one of your shifts you are stabbed to death because the CEO's son bumped into you while you were working. Not only that, but you are also expected to dress proactively for the purpose of selling the GeneCo product and experience.  

6. Controlled Mass Media: Sometimes to media is directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media is indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in war time, is very common. GeneCo has a monopoly on the media of the city. Politics, entertainment, healthcare, you name it, they have a direct stake in, and control over, the media. We do see from time-to-time tabloid clippings of the Largo family. But generally speaking, GeneCo puts a lot of effort in upholding their image. The best evidence is Blind Mag's story. She is a singer who acquired the ability to see after a GeneCo cornea surgery. And while she clocked into work day in and day out, singing and advertising for GeneCo for 17+ years, her departure resulted in Rotti murdering her. But why? Was he afraid of the things she would say? Rotti knew he was terminally ill when she declared her resignation, and yet killing her on stage is somehow less of a scandal?

7. Obsession with National Security: Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses. Fascist countries use fear as a tactic to keep the masses scared and compliant. The universe of Repo! is one filled with tragedy. Millions of people have died. I would imagine that the series of events that would lead to the creation and success of GeneCo was contingent upon people being scared for their lives. While dealing with the coronavirus, I find myself constantly checking my temperature, keeping my distance from people, and wearing a mask out in public. The human spirit is resilient, which is how we have survived so long. However sociopaths smell our fear and use it against us. The city of GeneCo is surrounded by plots upon plots of graveyards, signifying the carnage left after their public health crisis. I have a strong feeling that GeneCo was able to harness the threat of whatever caused the massive organ failure epidemic and as an effect created a power vacuum. 

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined: Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

This one is going to be a reach, particularly because there is an absence of religion in this story. I don't think religion would be on the creator's of Repo!'s purview, and honestly I don't blame them. If you look at the imagery of the story, however, it is very gothic. We have no idea if religion survives, and if it does, to what extent. I would imagine that people still have spiritual needs, and I argue that the GeneCo Opera is an example of how they get that fulfilled. 

"If you want it, baby, GeneCo's got it"

The GeneCo opera is not your typical opera experience. GeneCo specifically tells their customers to "testify". People are singing in unison, praising GeneCo. Clearly GeneCo has taken several human rituals and blended them together to create an over-the-top entertainment experience that seeks to advertise their company behind the testimonials of its patrons. The benefits of the opera for GeneCo, as a fascist entity, are two-fold: have people associate their most nirvana moments with an experience only GeneCo can offer (zydrate and surgery), and distract them with religious-like concerts so they won't question their neighbors being murdered on the streets by that very same company. 

9. Corporate Power is Protected: The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite. AND 13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption: Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

Throughout the entire movie, the Largo family is front and center. We know Rotti is terminally ill, and he utilizes his final moments to tie up loose ends in his life. His children feel entitled to his estate and the company of GeneCo. At no point do we see Rotti consult with a board of directors at GeneCo, a private fiduciary firm, or with any government entity. I would describe the company of GeneCo to be a weird combination of an aristocracy, government body, and corporation. His children commit crimes with no recourse or justice. Rotti kills the doctor who tells him he's dying. Luigi kills multiple people throughout the movie. In one of the opening scenes, we see a photograph showing Pavi is cutting off a woman's face. In the credits we see Amber's body guards lying dead on the floor during her press statement. What sort of corruption took place to make these occurrences so prevalent and normalized? 

10. Labor Power is Suppressed: Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

We aren't super privy to the machinations that make this city functional. But there is a clear stratification that has sustained itself long enough that healthcare is not a right in this city, and those who can't pay for necessary healthcare can finance it. In a just society, if we have the means to save humanity, we can figure out a way to pay for it. Be it taxes on the most wealthy or other cost-saving measures, if there is a will, there is a way. However if you give a company enough power and money, it will do everything it can to stay on top. The best examples I can think of would be Nathan and Blind Mag's tenuous career at GeneCo. Neither really wanted the job they were given, but they were forced into those positions by Rotti. Had Bling Mag belonged to a entertainment union, would she have had more protections? Would a proper investigation into the murder of Marni result in justice being served, and the opportunity for Nathan to live a better adjusted life? Rotti masterfully manipulates situations that create powerless outcomes for his employees.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals: Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts We don't see any particular evidence that GeneCo is currently hostile to higher education or academia. What we do know is the technologies of this world are akin to something we'd see out of the 20th century. However GeneCo is advanced enough to synthesize usable organs.  In my last essay, I drew parallels to today by highlighting that there may have been a "brain drain" of intellectualism as a result of academics dying from their public health crisis. Outside of the opera house, we don't see many examples of art in this world. Maybe this is what happens when a government stops funding programs it deems frivolous or challenges the status quo?

14. Fraudulent Elections: Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

Based off context clues in the movie, we know that there is a group of voting citizens who help determine whether or not a company can repossess financed organs that are passed due on their payments. We don't know who makes these votes, the election process, or anything like that. So it is hard to say if GeneCo goes beyond their media campaign convincing voters to keep repossessions legal. Despite this lack of knowledge, I would argue that GeneCo wields incredible power regarding the course of elections for laws that apply to them. Okay, you want to pass a law to make organ repossession illegal? Fine, we don't have to offer products on a payment plan. The very threat of being able to take away healthcare is something right wing governments loveeee doing. 

Speaking of elections, the United States 2020 general election is approaching. Now that I argued the ways that GeneCo is fascist, I will tie together ideas from both of these essays into a final piece that I hope you will like. If you enjoyed this article, please send it to all your Repo! friends.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

Anarchy: The Life and Joy of Insubordination

In this essay I substitute “wage-slave” for “worker” since there are many different ideas of what “work” could mean. I am also considering the fact that “worker” is socially loaded with congratulatory appraisal as it conceals the true nature of it’s meaning: slave. Here I criticize “wage-slave” as a role and identity assigned to individuals by a system that requires their physical and mental subjugation en masse. The “wage-slave” is only such, as long as one fulfills that role and identity. Beneath that role and identity is a chaotic uniqueness which arms the individual with emancipatory potential.

When people ask “What is “anarchy”?”, my answer is rarely a reference to the popular philosophers of history who define it academically as an “ism”. My personal relationship to anarchy is one of constant exploration and discovery. For me, what differentiates anarchy from any other political idea is the anti-politics of its practice. As an anarchist, I have no inclination to recruit a mass of people to overthrow the establishment. I have no desire to construct persuasive programs encouraging the “worker” to join a party, vote, fight for better wages -let alone remain as a wage-slave. All I have is an anarchist project of my own: the reclaiming of my life from wage-slavery and social control. It is a project of self-preservation armed with hostility to all that attempts to categorize, confine, and control me.

Things we come to familiarize ourselves with like presidential elections, the police, banks, and wage-slavery are all social systems constructed to maintain order – an order maintained through coercion, disempowerment, and fear. Together these things make up the governmental establishment which occupies and applies ownership to geographical locations. The maintaining of this occupation relies heavily on an apparatus that monopolizes violent force, as well as the subjugation of any persons residing in these locations. The subjugation of a population of people wouldn’t succeed without the normalized logic of submission and psychological warfare. In order to gain access to the monopolized resources needed to survive, the conquered population of people are forced to reproduce and maintain the establishment through wage-slavery: enslavement in exchange for a monetary wage. At the root of this social control is the domination of the individual – a domination which reinforces the logic of individual submission to the group. For the sake of the leftist wet-dream, imagine every individual wage-slave deciding to quit their job, all at once, and all those who didn’t have a job deciding against getting one. Those few who monopolize resources would quickly lose everything and everyone they needed to protect them. With the expropriation of violent force, these individuals could unite and destroy those maintaining hierarchical power. But as years have shown, the continuity of capitalism and the slave-master relationship is complex and reinforced in a variety of ways.

As an anarchist against work, I will still validate the wage-slave’s stress and fear of poverty, their personal justifications for submitting to slavery and the colossal misery that accompanies these things. I can not deny the power of materialist accumulation, consumerism, and the toxic escapism which acts to distract and pacify outrage. I have seen apathy personalized as a lifelong commitment, embraced by those too emotionally defeated to break the chains of capitalism’s captivity. The idea of mass revolt would be ideal, but is unfortunately utopian. The workplace is constantly evolving to be more accommodating to the wage-slave. This includes, but not limited to, serving as a remedy for boredom, a platform for social networking and emotional comfort through economic security. These small personal relationships with work play a big role is stunting efforts to organize mass worker revolt. In other words, many people enjoy wage-slavery, and will even sabotage efforts to organize against it. It is inaccurate to assume people are one monolithic mass willing to rise up against the establishment. But rather than relying on a mass revolt, there is the power of uncontrollable, unpredictable individual revolt. These revolts are composed of cells or “lone wolf” individuals who make revolt a daily practice rather than a future phenomena to wait for. As an ex-wage-slave, I will validate the unique history and personhood of a wage-slaving individual, their desire for freedom and the suppressed rage that accompanies their contempt for what they do. I will validate their hatred for every social construct of domination that compresses them. I will validate a wildness they keep caged up in fear of being called “crazy” or “weird”. I will validate a behavioural uniqueness they possess which society would attempt to pathologize and eliminate to maintain psychiatric standardization.

So many norms, roles, and identities shoved down our throats from birth - is it really a surprise that the oppressed “workers of the world” haven’t smashed capitalism to pieces by now? Where in the prison of society do we find the encouragement to not only be our unique wild selves, but to also weaponize our hostility towards the societal apparatus of control? Individuality, often promoted within the confinement of a pre-constructed identity – one assigned at birth and necessary for the functioning of capitalist society – is defined by society rather than the chaos of indefinite, ungoverned self-discovery. Due to the anthropocentric lens through which we view the world, wildness is moralized as an evil savagery in need of domesticating and management. Wildness is the enemy of the technological colonization of the natural world. So what does anarchist wildness look like? Anarchy as wildness refuses the control and domination of socially constructed systems which subjugate individuality. Where ever there is social constructs attempting to subjugate individual uniqueness, there is a politicized program at play. This program (which often attempts to acquire a dominating position) is responsible for normalizing a standardized way of life in which individual people are reduced from complex ever-changing beings to the identity of “worker”, or - for the sake of this essay -“wage-slave”.

What does it mean to be ungovernable? Within ungoverned self-discovery come questions of survival. Without the instinct of survival, the capitalists who profit from the products of my labor would have no leverage to enslave me. Food, shelter, etc. are essentials that require the labor of others to maintain. Under systems that require a mass of people to maintain, individuals are discouraged from finding the power to acquire their own food and/or create their own shelter. Today, shelter (industrial buildings fixed up with plumbing, electricity, etc) are manufactured by one group of people (wage-slaves) and sold to, and occupied by others (consumers). Alienation can be found here where those purchasing or renting space have no direct connection to its construction. Just the same as when people purchase food in grocery stores, they are disconnected from the true source of that food (slaughterhouses, for example) since someone else puts in the work to harvest, process, and package it. The leverage capitalist society maintains over every individual is that of survival. Through monopolizing resources, those with the most can enslave those with the least. So what way do anarchists survive if they refuse the role and identity of “wage-slave”? If an individual decides to arm their desires with action, how does that individual refuse enslavement to a boss or master and continue maintaining access to resources? Under capitalism, the expropriation of resources from those who monopolize them is considered illegal. This is where anarchism breaks away from the civilized notions of social reform and finds affinity with illegality.

I can only speak for myself when I talk about illegalist anarchy since for every individual, their interpretation will be influenced by circumstances unique to their experience. There is also an entire history rich with illegalist anarchy taking place in the early 1900s around the globe, and continuing on today. For the purpose of this particular essay I will be focusing on illegality related to resource expropriation as an argument against wage-slavery. So from this perspective, illegalist anarchy is the refusal to confine my anarchist activity to an above-ground, liberalized, mass-appeal activity. It is the daily practice of experimenting with methods of survival that refuse the limiting moral code of law and order. It is the weaponizing of chaos from which I find courage and strength in joyfully discovering new ways of surviving – all of which circumnavigate wage-slavery. I have grown sick and tired of bosses, workplaces, and forcing my body to wake up with the sound of a blaring alarm. I am in full retirement from wage-slavery at the age of thirty-three, and I have absolutely no desire to turn back. So, how do I eat? How do I survive without a paycheck from a workplace to sell my labor? A reality that is often difficult to remember is that everything one needs to survive already exists all around. In addition to poly-crop guerrilla gardening and foraging, food is stockpiled high in grocery stores. Tools for creativity and sabotage are hoarded by hardware stores. Dumpsters are filled to the brim with a variety of resources. What has been stolen from the individual is a sense of direct connection to these resources. Through learned consumerism, people see themselves as merely consumers- basically, “If I don’t have the money for this food, I just go hungry tonight.”. Through fear, capitalism along with the state has pacified a healthy outrage that could motivate us to take the resources needed to survive. This is another form of alienation – but one that keeps the consumer passive: if you make something with your own hands, you feel more connection to it as yours. But when someone else makes it and you see it in a store window, there is no direct connection. Therefore, there is less emotional justification for outrage or motivation to break the barrier of law and fear. Similar to the factory jobs I worked where a single product was put together by multiple people. If each person is only responsible for producing a piece of the whole product, there is no direct connection between the production of that product as a whole, and the individual worker. Therefore, the wage-slave doesn’t develop a relationship with what they produce, because a single product is produced by multiple people.

Rather than celebrating individualism, this process glorifies workplace collectivism- a useful tool in encouraging productivity and unifying “workers” for the common good of capitalism. What is socially discouraged in the individual is a creative rebellion that crafts plans and ideas on how to undermine the security apparatus that protects resources. Store cameras, Loss Prevention officers (or as some of us call them for short “LP’s”), magnetic security devices attached to items, etc. While one individual spends their time and energy at work and maybe planning what bills to pay next, the ex- wage-slave individual has the opportunity to utilize free time to experiment with different ideas on how to get shit for free. Eight hours of committed work at a factory (or grocery store, office place, etc.) could be eight hours of strategic planning, assessing, and experimenting with illegalist activity.

Another opportunity is the wage-slaving individual experimenting with illegalist activity within the workplace. Of course, the stakes are a little higher since the individual would have surrendered personal information to obtain the job, but an inside-the-workplace perspective can offer an opportunity to exploit weaknesses in work-place security. Though, personally, I haven’t met many people who take much advantage of this. And this is probably due to the fact that they depend on the job in a way that outweighs any advantages of work-place theft.

Coming back to the anti-work perspective on illegalism, when it comes to the resources of survival, the time not surrendered to wage-slavery can be time put towards careful planning, personal fear-assessment, and target seeking.

As society forces us into schools to begin the indoctrination sequence of behavioural conformity and obedience, we have very little opportunity to learn about ourselves and our capabilities. Between school and our homes, playgrounds and neighbourhood streets, we’re allowed a regulated time-frame of play. From my own perspective, play is the materialization of imaginative desire, exploration, and discovery. Each of these are fundamental tools necessary in observing and comprehending one’s environment and their relationship to it. Embedded in that relationship is a “self” that is composed of experiences and personal desires. But with such a narrow time-frame, a young individual only has a limited scope of exploration and instead, with development, begins internalizing the rhetoric of consumerist, productive, and responsible adultism.

For real though - what can most people say about themselves and the lives they live? Aside from a few forms of escapism or maybe hobby activities that stem from personal desire, many peoples lives are just wage-slavery, paying bills, paying for materialist shit and wage-slave some more to stockpile (save) money. Shit, people spend most of their lives using the present to prepare or secure a future- the existence of a future which is often taken for granted in the first place. So how much can one know about their self when so much of the “self” is being constricted, conditioned, and defined in terms of wage-slave productivity? Whether class or social, the status of an individual under capitalism is determined by their access to, and relationship with, materialism. But what about a “self” unbound by capitalism, and insubordinate to materialist representation? Or a “self” that refuses the traditional categorical assignments of social constructs and embraces life as anarchistic existence? A life of illegalist anarchy then allows for the limitless possibilities of creating one’s self day by day.

In my opinion, refusing the wage-slave role and identity destabilizes social control on an individual level. Since it is a firm work ethic that must be drilled into the individual to secure the foundation of capitalism (or any system that requires massified subjugation for its sustainability), individuals who refuse wage-slavery are subjected to a variety of social pressures including personal judgement, ridicule and the threat of poverty. To build up a confidence in one’s self that is immune to the social pressures of being talked down to (as well as a confidence in ones creative, determined self to avoid poverty), is to reclaim power as an individual. It is a power that reclaims “self” from the role and identity of “proletariat”, “worker”, or “wage-slave”.

Like chaotic negation to all socially fixed identities, there is power in contradicting the social identity and expectation of the “wage-slave”. This power also undermines the assumption that “the group” (or formalized organization, society, the masses etc.) is stronger than the individual. If “the group” is unable to subjugate an individual, that individual carries the potential to inspire the emancipation of other individuals from “the group”. A group, or systemic establishment, is only as powerful as the subservience of the individuals who comprise it. Without subservient individuals to reinforce the power of “the group”, there is no group - only empowered individuals.

The power of presidents, politicians, the police, and the military industrial complex, economic systems of every form and social constructs require the subservience of individuals. Without individual participation, the continuity of any system unravels. This is what makes individuality not only important but also powerful. Under capitalism, refusing wage-slavery requires courage; assimilatory subservience is psychologically coerced with the threat of starvation and poverty. The logic of submission is only negated through a fearless self-confidence and the desire to become socially ungovernable.

Could an individualist anarchist change the world? As unlikely as it seems, who am I to say no? Different people are inspired by different things. To some, a personal relationship with someone else’s words can shatter a worldview. Those same words armed with the actions of an individual could spark flames of social insubordination, possibly multiplying into spontaneous fires of joyful emancipation. It is not the leadership of deceptive, double speaking academics or committees (invisible or not), political schemes, or popular catch phrases that ignite personal rebellion. In my opinion and experience, it is the discovery and re-claiming of “self” as powerful, unique, and wild. From this perspective, anarchist illegality negates the domesticated conformity of internalized workerism. Illegalist anarchy confronts law and order with insurgency, preserving wild chaos as individuality against the homogenizing effect of society. To reclaim and reinvent one’s life as a daily exploration of personal adventure is anarchy against the socialized guilt and pressure to abandon rebellious youth.

Wage-slavery is the enemy of play, individuality, and freedom. Social systems require the subjugation of individuality to either homogenized membership or fixed group-identities in order to maintain their existence. With all social systems the formula is similar: individuality is surrendered to the group in order to be granted access to resources. Under capitalism, the wage-slave - or in Marxist terms, “the proletariat” - is an identity pre-configured with the role of reproducing capitalist society. This includes an individual surrendering their mind and body to a master in exchange for a wage that serves as the permission slip to access resources. But to the anarchist individual armed with the illegality of resource expropriation, anarchy is survival without permission.

Anarchy can not be experienced through history books, the reformation of work places nor the confines of a new societal system. Anarchy breathes with the rhythm of the wild in constant flux, ungoverned by anthropocentric laws and order. I rejoice my anarchy in the transformative abandonment of the role and identity of “the proletariat”. There is no great future revolution on the horizon to organize or wait for. There is only today, with no guarantee of tomorrow. There are no charismatic leaders to open the door to freedom. There is only the power of anarchist individuality defined by the liberating ammunition of desire.

[epistolizer]

Hit & Run Commentary #120

Josh Harris, the author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”, is now a 43 year old married father of three.  He has also renounced the hardline position that made him a household name among Christians and no doubt millions of dollars.  A thing to ask is how many around his age bracket as a result of his advice that became nearly gospel truth in some circles now find themselves with only cast asides, sloppy seconds, and defective goods left to pick over?  And that doesn’t even touch the issue of those not wanting to be alone having to make a wrenching decision between companionship or acceptance by their church community because of the ecclesiastical blacklisting that results from daring to marry a divorced person or one outside the narrowest of dogmatic confessions. 

Now that no other man really wants her, Monica thinks that President Clinton should want to apologize to her. But if Monica liked it at the time by not crying rape and apparently came back for multiple helpings, why should Bill feel that he is obligated to?  

Headlines are shocked that a Texas school board might cut Helen Keller but keep Moses as part of the curriculum.  But while the story of Helen Keller is an interesting historical and medical curiosity, beyond its Lifetime movie of the week appeal, her labors aren’t exactly of the sort upon which an entire civilization is based.   Maybe if a school district wants to keep Helen Keller, they can always cut out some of the drivel that gets harped upon from mid January until the end of February.  

At the end of a Triscuit commercial, the pitch woman assures with a wink that she is also not genetically modified.  Wonder how long until articulating pride in that is castigated as a form of noninclusive hate speech.

In his defense of the mainstream media against castigation by the Trump Administration, Mitt Romney effused, “The free press dispelled the false conspiracies about the 9/11 attacks.”  If Romney is referring to the lapdog press of entrenched elites, did these mouthpieces conduct their own investigations?  Or, instead, did such propagandists merely reinforce what they were told by their bureaucratic or secret society handlers?  

Will Democrats deploring Trump’s rhetoric as stoking the possibility of nuclear war articulate criticism of their colleague insinuating the mass murder of actual Americans in a similar manner for failure to comply with an anti-Second Amendment agenda?  

In the sci fi drama “The Colony”, a New World Order-style dictatorship with the assistance of extraterrestrial overlords would eliminate entire metropolitan areas perceived as hindering the implementation the planetary authority’s policy directives.  Skeptics might dismiss such a plot as highly unlikely.  But is it in light of one Democratic legislator threatening mass murder for failure to comply with any draconian firearms confiscation proposals?  

Instructive and revealing.  Radical Democrats are comparing border enforcement personnel to the KKK while letting it slip that they have no problem murdering in the most horrifying way imaginable Americans that refuse to comply with totalitarian plans to eliminate the Bill of Rights and infringe upon liberties endowed by the Creator.  

Amy Powler in a commercial for some Google contraption says she only wanted women at her Thanksgiving Dinner this year. Would a commercial saying no women or minorities allowed be deemed acceptable for prime network viewing time?  

In a commercial for one of its gadgets, Google has Amy Powler vocalize a line about not wanting any men at her Thanksgiving meal this year. Shouldn’t the writer of this remark receive the same punishment as the Google functionary stating in a company memo that the alleged discrepancies in technology fields are the result of inherent gender differences?  

In an analysis of the Star Wars worldview, homeschool activist Kevin Swanson criticized the franchise in part from the political theory he perceived the series as espousing.  According to Swanson, the films are ungodly because the plot focuses upon two ideologies jockeying for power in order to implement their particular vision of large interstellar government.  Mind you, in his analysis of The Hunger Games, Swanson condemned characters in that movie for resisting the prerogatives of empire.  It is doubtful a film about a two hour prayer meeting is going to sell many tickets.  Likewise, there isn’t going to be much of a story if both sides of a conflict are already comporting themselves by Christian standards.  The films are, after all, called “Star Wars” not “Star Hallmark Channel”.  

If intruders bursting into Nancy Pelosi’s office would justifiably be tasered or sprayed, why not migrant swarms pouring over the border without authorization?  

Parents not wanting their children pepper sprayed shouldn’t cross delineated borders without authorization.  

Those condemning the use of tear gas to repel border violators interestingly probably have no issue with the heathen savages that murdered an interloping missionary.  

If one is obligated to ascent to the principle that men and women are equal in all things, why all of a sudden is it an outrage to douse a woman threatening law enforcement personnel and international border integrity with pepper spray?  

If women are such delicate creatures that they cannot endure U.S. border protection officers deploying pepper spray as a deterrent, why ought we to think that they can handle the full wrath of the Russian, Chinese, or assorted Islamist militariess on the battlefield?  

Analysts from both the left and the right are pretty much in agreement that the missionary murdered by the heathen savages on a remote Indian island pretty much got what was coming to him.  So what then is so wrong with radical Muslims killing Christians or the Red Chinese harvesting Christian organs?  One insisting that one is acceptable but the other inappropriate has, perhaps unwittingly, embraced Rousseau’s foolishness about the so-called “noble savage”. Will Democrats jacked out of shape that Roy Moore dated young women still over the age of consent or that Brett Kavanaugh laughed at a flatulence joke while in high school get as discombobulated over Mike Espy rendering services on behalf of an African dictator accused of slavery and mass murder?  But those outrages pale in comparison to the Charlie Brown Christmas special.  

On Fox News, Rep Jim Hines said that there is no way to know who in the caravan threatening to violate the nation’s borders is criminal or not. As such, the Congressman seems to admonish, the President should not speak or or treat these individuals as if they are.  If that is the case, perhaps he should allow the general public to ramble the halls of Congress unscrutinized without having to stop at assorted checkpoints.  

Greater fuss seems to be made that James Hodgkinson published anti-Trump letters to the editor and remarks on social media than that he actually shot people.  So how are these literary undertakings different than those of the New York Times, MSNBC, or increasingly CNN?  We are constantly beaten over the head about the necessity of voluntarism and on giving back to the COMMUNITY.  So why does it sound like this variety of civic engagement will land you on the do not fly list?  

In a sermon, Independent Baptist Stephen J. Anderson claimed that atheism is often the result of having watched too many science fiction movies and television programs.  How about a number of science fiction authors pushed towards atheism as a result of churches too legalistic in terms of their application of the Bible?

President George H.W. Bush passed away at his home in a Texas gated community.  Yet the Bush family stands among the foremost of establishmentarian Republicans that would deny the nation a similar degree of protection through their ongoing opposition to the construction of a border wall. 

Contrary to George H.W. Bush, “community” is not a beautiful word.  It usual becomes nothing more than whatever group you are required to belong to for the purposes of survival getting in your business not because of some distinct moral reason but because those in charge of the group wish to perpetuate their own power by justifying the existence of the group as an end in itself.

By Frederick Meekins

[shirlleycoyle]

How Shadowbanning Went from a Conspiracy Theory to a Selling Point

In our current, feverish reality, it can be hard to remember that previous lifetimes were just as surreal. Two years ago, in a Congressional hallway, conspiracy titan Alex Jones really did pursue and then confront Congressman Marco Rubio, calling him a “snake,” a “frat boy,” and a “little gangster thug.”

The cause of the altercation was both typical Jones—a stunt for attention, in front of a pliant bank of TV cameras—and something much larger. Jones was infuriated by his supposed “shadowbanning” from Big Tech platforms, and he’d come to Capitol Hill to demand answers.

“The real election meddling is by Facebook and Google and others that are shadow banning people,” Jones bellowed in the direction of those cameras. “They are outright banning people and they are blocking conservatives involved in their own First Amendment political speech.”

Jones’ pursuit of Rubio was one of several colorful incidents spanning 2018, when conservatives and the far-right alike were gripped by the fear that they were being silenced on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Ultimately, those conservative users included the president himself, who tweeted, “Twitter ‘SHADOW BANNING’ prominent Republicans. Not good. We will look into this discriminatory and illegal practice at once! Many complaints.”

In the past two years, shadowbanning has become a central part of the cosmology of the right wing. At a round of anti-trust hearings in July, Rep. Jim Jordan declared, “I’ll just cut to the chase. Big tech is out to get conservatives. That’s not a suspicion, that’s not a hunch, that’s a fact.”

But despite Jordan’s performative outrage, while it was once the conservative and far right cause du jour, shadowbanning has, more or less, come to be accepted as an immovable part of the technological landscape. And instead of merely loudly complaining, many people are, cannily, turning to something a lot more profitable. A host of alternative social media platforms that have sprung up in recent years, each promising to be the most free. Shadowbanning and supposed “silencing” at the hands of Big Tech have gone from a controversy to an integral part of the business model.

Trump’s 2018 tweet appeared to have been responding to a VICE News story, which reported that Twitter wasn’t showing several Republican congressmen, Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel, and Donald Trump Jr.’s spokesperson in their dropdown search bar, making them less easy to immediately find and slightly limiting their reach. The intent, Twitter told VICE News at the time, wasn’t to specifically silence conservative voices, but, as a May blog post from the company put it, “combat troll-like behaviors” and make users more visible who contribute to “the healthy conversation.” (After VICE News’s report, the ability to find those prominent Republican users in a drop-down search was quickly restored.)

What constitutes “healthy conversation” is doubtless a judgment call; what’s more, Twitter’s decision fed into a paranoia already stoked by a purported “report” from Project Veritas, the conservative sting organization best known for misleadingly edited videos, which claimed that the company’s engineers conspired to silence viewpoints they didn’t agree with. “'Shadow banning' to be used to stealthily target political views,” the organization trumpeted.

Conservatives in high places took up the call: at the Congressional hearings that fall, which were broadly about how platforms like Facebook and Twitter combat disinformation and foreign influence campaigns, House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden took time to demand that Dorsey address shadowbanning. 

Shadowbanning caught on in part because it fed into a long history of conservative suspicion, the idea that mainstream methods of communication were biased, stacked against them, unforgivably liberal. The place where that’s historically been most visible is in newspapers and news broadcasts. Fox News, of course, was founded on the idea that “fair and balanced” news was in criminally short supply. But as the Atlantic wrote in 2014, Fox News is one of a long series of conservative alternatives to mainstream news, starting with conservative newspapers like Human Events.

In 2018, the low grumble of silencing and unfairness coalesced into something far more visible, and shadowbanning became permanently enshrined as part of the conservative and far-right landscape of grievance. (It was even, at times, conflated with users who were indeed silenced on those platforms, not in secret, but outright: Milo Yiannpoulos, Alex Jones, Laura Loomer and others were loudly kicked off various platforms in 2019.)

In actuality, the only group of people who could persuasively make the case that they were being truly shadowbanned on the basis of their identity were (and are) sex workers, who say they’ve faced permanent suspensions and what they suspect is shadowbanning on Twitter, as well as their accounts being repeatedly deleted on Instagram for sharing things as anodyne as photos of their freshly painted toenails.

In 2018, most of the people who complained of being shadowbanned still had plenty of places to complain about it—their own websites, radio shows, and, in the case of Alex Jones and InfoWars, a network of secondary Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, semi-official ones whose sole purpose is to link to InfoWars stories and which remain active to this day—the idea that conservatives needed an alternative platform quickly took hold. The earliest one that ultimately took off was Gab, which launched in beta in 2016, and whose CEO Andrew Torba was kicked out of the startup accelerator Y Combinator the same year for violating its harassment policy.

Torba describes himself as a “conservative Republican Christian” who felt forced to hide his views because he worried it would be, as TechCrunch wrote at the time, “a hindrance to my career — which proved to be true.” In his telling, when he became open about his views, he was called a “racist” and a “bigot,” and ultimately kicked out of Y Combinator (which did not help fund Gab). Y Combinator, meanwhile, said that he’d been removed for speaking in a “threatening, harassing way” to other Y Combinator alumni, for instance writing in a Facebook comment, “All of you: fuck off. Take your morally superior, elitist, virtue signaling bullshit and shove it. I call it like I see it, and I helped meme a President into office, cucks.” The controversy almost certainly helped drive Gab into the spotlight: Google Trends shows that while Gab launched in August of 2016, its mentions in news skyrocketed in November,  when news of Torba’s ousting began circulating. (Discussions of the far right’s burgeoning influence, of course, also became a big topic around November of 2016 due to the presidential election, which probably also helped.)

Gab has claimed throughout its life that the network seeks to allow for truly free speech. Regardless of those lofty goals, it’s primarily become popular with Nazis and the far right, most ignominiously becoming the place where a man posted a violent manifesto before killing 11 people at a mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.

It soon had competition and company. The founder of CloutHub, a little known social network that launched in 2019, told a site called Just the News that he’d personally been shadowbanned on Twitter, adding, "So I have first-hand experience with big-tech censorship. I felt it was un-American and that the people needed to have a platform where they can discuss issues without big-tech silencing our voices." Brighteon, a YouTube alternative, promises “Watch documentaries the techno-fascists don't want you to know even exist.”  And now there’s Parler, which in a floridly written “Declaration of Independence,” claimed, “They manipulate their platform to hide information. They shadow ban, trick and deceive. They have become enablers, and often leaders, of the vicious cancel-culture mob who goose-step through our online communities and scream down those who dare to disagree.” Unlike Gab, however, Parler doesn’t make any pretense of being ideologically neutral, trumpeting its success at courting Republican lawmakers and other Trump allies.

In a way, though, none of these sites are really successful without Twitter or Facebook, sites that are constantly referenced and used to promote users’ moves to these other platforms, none of which seem to be able to exactly survive without the supposedly unfair ecosystem that surrounds them. (News organizations are also wholly reliant on these platforms to get anyone to see stories, and suffer similarly from opaque changes to the algorithm; the people who are shadowbanned, however, seem to see themselves as inherently special.)

The effect is that many prominent conservatives are touting their moves to Parler while continuing to tweet, like full-time Twitter user and former Congressional candidate DeAnna Lorraine, who recently wrote, “Welp Since Twitter Thought Police have began aggressively shadowbanning me lately, I’m heading over to Parler! I’m going to start posting regularly there as I need a backup platform. Follow me there! Also does anyone know of an app that auto syncs your Tweets to Parler posts?” Rep. Jim Jordan, who railed recently that Big Tech was “out to get conservatives,” invited his Twitter followers in June to join him on Parler, tweeting, “They don’t censor or shadow ban.” He continues to tweet many times a day.

To date, Parler and Gab are still battling for the ultimate prize: President Trump, who continues to use Twitter, even as he darkly rants about its unfairness. And by late June, Parler—in what will seem deeply ironic to some and like poetic justice to others—had reportedly begun banning liberal users, proving, perhaps, that the point was never about truly free and unfettered speech at all.

Follow Anna Merlan on Twitter.

How Shadowbanning Went from a Conspiracy Theory to a Selling Point syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[theconservativebrief]

Since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution (or, at the very least, since the dawn of The Jetsons), Americans have been seized by the anxiety of being replaced by robots. In some service industries, these concerns have proven prophetic. But the technology is still far from perfect (see: the massive temper tantrums on social media over CVS’s automated self-checkout), and even though one report has predicted that robots could replace human workers by 2030, most people can rest assured that their jobs are safe for the time being. Most people, that is, but sex workers.

In Rolling Stone, writer Breena Kerr profiles Aura Dolls, a sex doll brothel in Toronto where clients can pay $120 an hour and an additional $90 per half-hour to do whatever they want to the six dolls on staff (provided they do not “make any extra holes” in them, though one wonders what would be the occasion for doing so). Brothel employees clean up the dolls between appointments to prepare them for the next customer.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Aura Dolls is not the first sex doll brothel of its kind: There are similar establishments located in Barcelona, Moscow, and Turin, Italy. Such sex doll brothels have also been erroneously referred to as “sex robot brothels,” even though most do not possess such artificial intelligence.

Due to their high cost (a customizable Real Doll, for instance, starts at $5,999), sex dolls in general are still considered expensive novelty items. Legally speaking, they also exist in a somewhat gray area: Though they don’t technically violate most state prostitution laws, the moral opposition to sex work in the United States is so intense that it would inevitably serve as a barrier. Plans to open a brothel in Houston, for instance, were scrapped after the city council amended an existing ordinance to forbid business patrons from engaging in sexual congress with inanimate objects.

For these reasons, sex doll brothels are far from commonplace. Nonetheless, there’s been major outcry over the mere prospect of sex doll brothels, particularly in the legal sex industry in the United States. (Prostitution is illegal in the US except in a select number of counties in Nevada, where it is highly regulated.)

Allissa, a sex worker at the legal brothel Sheri’s Ranch in Nevada, is outraged that unlike legal brothels, which cannot openly advertise for fear of violating solicitation laws, sex doll brothels would ostensibly be able to openly advertise on billboards (as one recently did in Vancouver). She also believes they would pose a serious safety threat.

“If any guys start using these brothels, the dolls can’t consent and they have no limitations,” Allissa told Vox. “We’re very clear about what can happen and not happen during a party. And if sex dolls were to become popular, clients would think that [a lack of limitations] was normal.”

On the surface, this seems like an obvious concern: When presented with the choice between a flesh-and-blood woman who can consent to sex and a $6,000 hunk of silicone who can’t, logic would seemingly dictate that any man who opts for the latter is more likely to harbor some problematic views of women.

But this doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. Sex doll brothels could potentially serve as a viable option for clients who may lack the social skills necessary to form meaningful relationships with humans. “Patrons [who] may have some sort of social anxiety or perhaps are disabled, who might not be comfortable with the social interactions of a human sex worker, would benefit greatly due to this service,” an Aura spokesperson said, adding that the brothel has received a number of inquiries from visually impaired people and the hard of hearing.

Sex dolls could also potentially serve as outlets for people with non-normative sexual preferences (think a taste for violent or nonconsensual sex) who don’t wish to harm a living person, or people in monogamous relationships who want to sexually experiment without actually committing infidelity. It would be unfair to characterize all of these people as misogynists eager to enact their twisted rape fantasies on unsuspecting hunks of plastic, just as it is unfair to characterize everyone who buys sex (an estimated 14 percent of American men) as brutal and exploitative.

“The dolls can’t consent and they have no limitations”

It’s safe to say that many sex workers’ primary objection to sex doll brothels isn’t moral or philosophical, but economic.

It is true that it costs less to masturbate into a rented hunk of silicone than it does to have sex with a legal prostitute. Allissa wouldn’t tell Vox how much she charged for a party, citing solicitation laws, but generally speaking, while sex workers’ rates vary widely according to many factors, a typical “Girlfriend Experience,” or more intimate sexual encounter, costs about $1,000 per hour at Sheri’s Ranch competitor the Moonlite BunnyRanch, and it’s not unheard of for an in-demand sex worker to charge far more than that.

That’s a far cry from the $120 an hour quoted by Aura Dolls, but brothels also tend to take a hefty commission from their workers (at Sheri’s Ranch, it’s 50 percent). They also aren’t responsible for the bulk of employee costs, which saves quite a bit of money on the management end: Allissa says she pays for room and board when she works at the ranch, as well as her own drinks, condoms, sex toys, and her hair and nails.

When you consider the level of cleanup involved in ensuring that sex dolls are up to hygiene standards for repeated use, it makes sense that the maintenance costs for a sex doll brothel would be fairly high.

“Due to the costs of hiring cleaning staff and employees to make sure the dolls are in tip-top condition every single use and making sure they are thoroughly cleaned along with the maintenance of the products and facility, [running a sex doll brothel] is not as cheap as one would imagine,” the Aura spokesperson said.

NurPhoto via Getty Images

Of course, sex workers provide a service that has far more value than any provided by sex dolls. In a world that encourages men to suppress and tamp down their emotions, it’s not uncommon for sex workers often act as impromptu therapists for their clients. “A lot of my job has to do with nonsexual intimacy. I’m creating a connection with them,” says Allissa. “They talk to me about their troubles … it’s a lot of genuine human connection. I do have clients who don’t have sex at all and they just want to cuddle and talk to me.”

A sex doll could not perform emotional labor on that level, or provide any of the other less tangible benefits of flesh-and-blood companionship — but at the same time, neither can your iPhone, or any of the other myriad technological advances that make our lives both infinitely easier and a lot lonelier.

It’s going to be a long time before sex doll brothels become mainstream, if they ever do. Still, as technology around AI improves and brands start developing sex dolls that are able to convincingly replicate human sexual response, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that sex dolls could one day join the ranks of vibrators and other sex toys, which now enjoy a certain mainstream respectability and are considered supplements of, rather than threats to, a healthy and safe sex life. Even Allissa says they could potentially be used as a training tool during parties, or a way to school male clients on how to give women pleasure.

Prostitution is called “the oldest profession” for good reason: There’s always been high demand for paid sex, and there likely always will be. But that doesn’t mean the industry is totally impervious to change. So far, we’ve seen strip clubs and porn movie theaters shut their doors due to the ubiquity of free internet porn. If sex dolls and robots ever become sophisticated enough to convincingly replicate IRL sex, who’s to say that a handful of brothels in rural Nevada won’t suffer the same fate?

Time and again, when confronted with the choice between convenience and affordability and the less tangible benefits of emotional intimacy, humans have opted for the former. There’s no reason to think that the sex industry will prove the exception to the rule.

Perhaps surprisingly, however, that’s not what Aura Dolls says. “We believe that there will always be a demand and market for human sex workers as it is considered one of the world’s oldest professions,” the spokesperson told Vox, perhaps unwittingly echoing other mega-corporations’ arguments in favor of automated workers. “We do not foresee it to be replaced anytime soon.”

Original Source -> Sex doll brothels are now a thing. What will happen to real-life sex workers?

via The Conservative Brief

[logothanatos]

Is There Really Such a Thing as a "Communist"?

While I still share dank commie memes or I sometimes use the term "communism" with a positive valence, substantively I'm not exactly a communist, at least in no traditional sense. I am only a "communist" in the same sense Zizek speaks of being a communist: our political aspirations involve prioritizing the problems that arise from our relationship to the commons, and involve determining what the commons can have a claim to in the face of a normative dogma of individual exclusivity in appropriation.

I think traditional communist discourse is often stuck in a private v. public property false dichotomy, and also seems to understand "private property" in either vague terms, or in a sort of composite way which conflates various different rights claims, treats the problem of ownership norms primarily in terms of rights, and treats private property's existence as inseparable from the institutional practices around the management of both labor and the means of production (which makes some amount of intuitive sense if ownership is conceived only in the former two ways). This mirrors the same sort of approach to property as pro-capitalists who hole to liberal political philosophy. Even vaguer is perhaps the boundary, institutionally, between public and private property when public property is taken as synonymous to State property with "public" access (which is not at all times strictly enforced)--except perhaps in the method of acquisition (funded by tax, acquired through eminent domain, etc.) and in its societal justification (representation of the people, a proviso logic to seizing perfectly legal property, etc.). In any case it would still seem that the use, acquisition, and proper justification of either of those, by the State, are, under Statist ideology, fully under the prerogative of the State (whether or not it has obligations to the people, such as democratic representation or republican constitutionalism).

That is, after all, what the political notion of sovereignty recognizes abstractly, in which case "public property" simply seems to be a notion of private property proffered as appropriate at the scale or level of the political society, wherein its proper use is defined based on political morality or social purposes. That this property relies on giving legitimacy to the particular notion of political society at hand that places limits on sovereignty (namely territorial limits, which is akin to limits based on property), is a superficial difference insofar as the norms and conception of ownership is the same: the right to some territory, by some peaceful means of acquisition, and with a right to abandonment, and with delegation of some of these rights to others in smaller parcels via title. That States are non-ideal and may violate legitimate acquisition or fail to recognize illegitimate abandonment is a matter of practical history, and has little baring on the theoretical notion of what constitutes a State. If anything, private property as oft understood is also affected by non-ideal histories. So if the only difference between private property and public property is the subject who owns--in this case the political society whose ownership is thereby characterized as jurisdiction over a territory--then the issues and implications surrounding a theory of property are equivalent for both of them.

That there are contradictions herein whereupon homesteading private owners have full rights to their property but, by virtue of the political society, have those rights on offer by the State, is no surprise, as it is the sort of thing one can expect from a labor theory of property that dodges solving the problem of criteria for abandonment and scope of acquisition by positing a largely ad hoc utilitarian proviso. But this is ultimately to cede ground to an ultimate arbiter of what is owned as opposed to building an actual theory of property, as neither abandonment nor acquisition are merely marginal concerns in a theory of property. The supposed utility of this approach, in other words, is a contingency brought about by the weakness of the underlying theory of property. When Locke, for example, like some other political thinkers (e.g. Rousseau), speaks of the gap between rights without societal recognition and rights with societal recognition, he immediately hopes to close the gap through God and, his subsidiary, the State.

But the gap is not really closed in this manner--rather, the State is simply another agency of its own within the particular society, whose interests do not manifestly reflect those of its subjects even under democratic governance. If recognition of one's property cannot be acquired from others in the society, one would expect this to be even less so from those who wish to represent or exceed society. A theory of property must determine both a means of property, and a means to that means--it must determine a "final cause," e.g. that final thing for which acquisition is no longer a question but rather is its basis. For Locke the connection between the self's ownership of land and products and the labor made possible by these and the body was God's grace and dominion over the rewards of self and his original gift to self via endowment of the body, and for most liberals it was the State (through legal title), which merely acted as a subsidiary to God in this respect. The more intelligent anarcho-capitalists recognize the problem with these, at the least, although they pretended to solve the problem with "self-ownership," in which the subject and object of ownership are the same but the scope and criteria of such ownership is still indeterminate given the indeterminacy of the subject-object, and its powers, through which it is thought acquisition and abandonment are initiated. Western thought is thereby stuck within a monotheistic or anthropocentric notion of dominion and stewardship, with a Great Chain of Being that puts humanity closer to the substance of things and thereby to the purely creative power of God. The evidence of this fixation is precisely the way theories of property are provided and structured. It is no wonder that the practical implications have been Western imperialism, whether or not this fixation could be enumerated as any significant or primary cause rather than a rationalization. There is of course something to this idea of purely creative power, but so far it doesn't seem particularly useful on the subject of ownership insofar as it precisely proceeds from something which must already lack creation (in the case of ownership, acquisition), and thereby something which creation cannot affect (in the case of ownership, thereby something that cannot be acquired).

Not to digress, but rather to return to the traditional communist engagement with issues of property, when public (or, in this case, common) property is conceived without the State the notion is inadequate--it gives us scant information on how the negotiation of use among participants take place, let alone what ideal "public" management would look like. And this is crucial from even differentiating it from private property, to the extent that such negotiations are precisely what determines publicly recognized claims individuals have for use (and, thereby in retroactive fashion, "acquisition" and "abandonment") of a certain scope or aspect of the so-called "public property." In such a case it seems that the communist is looking at the State as a model for the practice of ownership (even as it advocates a "stateless society," which would then simply seem to mean a society without State enforcement of, or protection of, a "private sector"), while the anarcho-capitalist is looking at the private sector as a model for the practice of ownership (even as it advocates a "stateless society," which would then simply seem to mean a society of private fiefdoms, rent-based proprietary communities, and more fragmented sovereignties, effective through absolute control over access--not something too different from the State, except ideally constrained in its territory by base rules of acquisition correspondent to its outer interactions [no war of conquest, etc.]).

For, it then becomes clear that it is hierarchy as such--albeit a democratic one (collective over individual) for the communist, and an autocratic/dictatorial one for the anarchocapitalist (individual over collective)--that is given as a basis for the claim a property. This is why, for the communist, the administrative use of a good must be specified prior to the existence of any level of individual ownership, whereas for the anarchocapitalist the right must be specified prior to the use and defended through market services. That is, for the communist, the dominant collective power must decide whether the ownership claim would be justified, and it can do this not through a notion of rights (as rights are precisely distributed by the collective according to its prerogatives), but on the basis of what it sees as a potential valid use for the goods in question. For the anarchocapitalist, no such justification to society is necessary, except insofar as one has a right which pre-exists society and must be fought for and defended against encroachment (through market services), and whose existence must be rationally demonstrated to other individuals. It's no wonder then that while communists were required to be anarchist, their treatment of property and sovereignty fetishized the liberal State to such an extent that it would be seen as a means towards statelessness (the famous "self-abolition" theory). This theory of self-abolition is not entirely absurd, as the proliferation of the State form across society would also be equally experienced as the swallowing up of the State into the private sector as a key actor or asset for the market, precisely in its defense of transaction costs through legal property titles and thereby its indirect enforcement of traditional management through its enforcement of contracts. But it does not guarantee statelessness--rather, it can mean mercenary warlordism, embroiled elites, and extremely unstable and erratic, yet versatile, legal systems. An extensive war economy and commodification of death/outrage, rather than statelessness.

And there is more than one way for the State to expand--the State can expand without the State form expanding. We see inklings of the aforementioned symptoms, for example, in big-C Communist countries, although the hierarchical structure makes sure that this potential is stymied into, precisely, an extensive centralized war economy with versatile legal systems that seem less unstable or erratic due to cultural hegemony expressed in the form of propaganda and political paranoia. While there is no commodification of death or outrage, the ominpresence of propaganda is a redirection of that energy into State-sanctioned messages that at least promise outrage--against Western capitalist imperialists, for example. This is an expansion of the State, though not of the State form. Also notice that the contrast between the communist and anarcho-capitalist has nothing to do with markets. That communists seem vehemently anti-market means nothing, insofar as this anti-market stance is merely a function of this more central valuing of public/common property over private property. But precisely this, practically speaking, fails to preclude the forces of the market, insofar as the notion of "public/common property" is always haunted by that of private property. This is clearly the case in the big-C Communist countries insofar as they had black markets, and it is also visible in the post-Maoist, state capitalist PRC.

This is why my approach is not traditionally "communist"--rather, it involves an intersubjective theory of property which dissolves even the need to solve the problems posed by other sorts of property theories, and consequently is not dogmatically against individuals owning some means of production. In fact, if communists wish to ride the coat tails of automation and post-industrial production, they must recognize that the low costs of both acquiring and producing machinery for mass production of intricate, detail-oriented products means that some forms of production not traditionally done in a decentralized, private or individualized manner, will now be done precisely in this way. This is especially so when the boundary between production and consumption are institutionally blurred by the increased importance of the possession and distribution of information in production--communication itself, in other words, has become a form of production or a power for material production. The means of production is not a monolith, and this is the sort of nuance one must introduce when talking about Marx's notion of collective seizure of the means of production. Marx's blanket call for collectively seizing the means of production also suffered from the same ailments as the notion of "public" or "collective" property aforementioned: Does this mean democratic management of the means of production? Where does one practically draw the line between a means of production and those things which merely produce--is drawing a clear line concretely possible, although some technology or other is seen as key to productivity in relation to key products, to the accumulation of wealth, etc. (as capitalism can make evident)? Does "collective seizure" mean adequate mechanisms of distribution of the means of production to individuals in society (such distribution mechanism collectively managed)? Does it merely mean distribution of the surplus to society as a whole, equally or proportionately (as understood by the Communist economies)? Does it mean central planning by democratic representatives of the people (as it at least nominally meant to the Communist states)? Would some things be outside of democratic management? Etc. Straightforward answers to any of these are likely to be unsatisfactory if they do not sufficiently address the problems which may arise, or diminish the extent of adverse effects which may arise, due to a poverty in property theory, in moral, political and economic terms.

Nonetheless, the blanket call for collective or social seizure of the means of production makes sense historically--in Marx's time, massively productive machinery were almost exclusively huge and highly costly, as well as being less informationally rich in their production process, and less computationally involved. Landlord-merchants could afford to both acquire and store these machines in mass over time as well as patronize their development and had exclusive easy access to infrastructure by which to distribute any resulting surplus so that they may be able to take advantage of the machinery's productivity. And of course, between the landlords and the merchants there was a battle for a beneficial arrangement, leading to the restructuring of land ownership (the English Enclosures). This state of affairs thereby allowed merchants to leverage management power through both contract and initial familiarity with the workings of the machines. They were also machines with highly specialized parts that correlated with different steps in the process of production in a single, unitary product, requiring coordination among the machines that was deliberate, attentive, and careful, or more generally calculated when it came time to exchange any surplus. The landlord-merchants who owned or gave space to these masses of giant and interdependent machinery required manpower for use, surveillance and maintenance. The combined result was the eventual purchasing of labor-power and integration of the peasantry into the market-place, leading to rapid urbanization. Ergo, technology in this form during the process of industrialization was necessary to seize collectively because they could only be used, surveilled and maintained collectively. And in a sense, despite exploitation and employment management hierarchy, they indeed were used, surveilled, and managed collectively (making it ambiguous what is meant by "seize collectively," beyond its reductive negative goals under Marxism [e.g., abolishing wage-labor]). Information and computation-based machinery for production, even the larger, interdependent, costly ones, are much easier to surveil and use, though maintenance is still a huge cost given their need for storage space and the need to navigate that space when dealing with technical trouble-shooting. And these are the sorts of massive machines we are now left to deal with, though their markets have narrowed in tandem with the automation, downscaling and simplification of the production process.

Nonetheless, the nuance needed when understanding what it means to "seize the means of production" is why "communism" actually has some tension with Marxist theory. This tension is between the goal of Marxist communism and the goal's theoretical poverty, the latter of which naturally results from the fact that "communism" wasn't concretely understood in Marxism and also from the fact that Marx's theory of politics, culture, etc., suffered from economic reductionism (which is not the same as historical materialist thought--politics, culture, etc., can still be looked at materially without reducing them to those features salient to the methods of labor and exchange of its products in that society, although they must be looked at as things which are at the very least also produced [even if incidentally] and which may contribute to exchange [even if incidentally]). But perhaps its this fact--communism's theoretical poverty relative to Marxism--that makes communism "the real movement of society," rather than the movement produced by, or constitutive of, the ideology of communism. There is then really no such thing as a communist, except as someone with a series of libidinal historical attachments, who thereby tends towards the rehabilitation and fetishization of the big-c "Communist" countries of the U.S.S.R., Maoist PRC, etc., or otherwise tends towards a largely negative project that makes them indistinguishable from any other anarchist except in their privileging of Marxist critique of capitalism or their rejection of common anarchist principles and praxis. And then there is the bare-bones anarchist who is also a communist, in their sharing of oppositions and in the poverty of that anarchism. And then there is the sense of "communist" mentioned in the opening of this post: characterized by focusing on problems related to the need of, and encroachment on, the commons. And this is the sort that most captures all these other sorts, although it may also include those whose views are not canonically seen as "communist." It is also the sort that seems most relevant today. But to call oneself "communist" under this definition is to enumerate no solution--"communism" is not really a solution, given what has been said and what the psychology seems to involve.

[ivankahasbeentreatedsounfairly]

Nearly 50 years ago, Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” reached bookshelves in France. It was a thin book in a plain white cover, with an obscure publisher and an author who shunned interviews, but its impact was immediate and far-reaching, delivering a social critique that helped shape France’s student protests and disruptions of 1968.

“The Society of the Spectacle” is still relevant today. With its descriptions of human social life subsumed by technology and images, it is often cited as a prophecy of the dangers of the internet age now upon us. And perhaps more than any other 20th-century philosophical work, it captures the profoundly odd moment we are now living through, under the presidential reign of Donald Trump.

As with the first lines from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s “The Social Contract” (“Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains”) and Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles”), Debord, an intellectual descendant of both of these thinkers, opens with political praxis couched in high drama: “The whole life of those societies in which modern conditions of production prevail presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that once was directly lived has become mere representation.”

In the 220 theses that follow, Debord, a founding member of the avant-garde Situationist group, develops his indictment of “spectacular society.” With this phrase, Debord did not simply mean to damn the mass media. The spectacle was much more than what occupied the screen. Instead, Debord argued, everything that men and women once experienced directly — our ties to the natural and social worlds — was being mulched, masticated and made over into images. And the pixels had become the stuff of our very lives, in which we had relegated ourselves to the role of walk-ons.

The “image,” for Debord, carried the same economic and existential weight as the notion of “commodity” did for Marx. Like body snatchers, commodities and images have hijacked what we once naïvely called reality. The authentic nature of the products we make with our hands and the relationships we make with our words have been removed, replaced by their simulacra. Images have become so ubiquitous, Debord warned, that we no longer remember what it is we have lost. As one of his biographers, Andy Merrifield, elaborated, “Spectacular images make us want to forget — indeed, insist we should forget.”

But in Debord’s view, forgetting doesn’t absolve us of responsibility. We are not just innocent dupes or victims in this cataclysmic shift from being to appearing, he insisted. Rather, we reinforce this state of affairs when we lend our attention to the spectacle. The sun never sets, Debord dryly noted, “on the empire of modern passivity.” And in this passive state, we surrender ourselves to the spectacle. 

For Marx, alienation from labor was a defining trait of modernity. We are no longer, he announced, what we make. But even as we were alienated from our working lives, Marx assumed that we could still be ourselves outside of work. For Debord, though, the relentless pounding of images had pulverized even that haven. The consequences are both disastrous and innocuous. “There is no place left where people can discuss the realities which concern them,” Debord concluded, “because they can never lastingly free themselves from the crushing presence of media discourse.” Public spaces, like the agora of Ancient Greece, no longer exist. But having grown as accustomed to the crushing presence of images as we have to the presence of earth’s gravity, we live our lives as if nothing has changed.

With the presidency of Donald Trump, the Debordian analysis of modern life resonates more deeply and darkly than perhaps even its creator thought possible, anticipating, in so many ways, the frantic and fantastical, nihilistic and numbing nature of our newly installed government. In Debord’s notions of “unanswerable lies,” when “truth has almost everywhere ceased to exist or, at best, has been reduced to pure hypothesis,” and the “outlawing of history,” when knowledge of the past has been submerged under “the ceaseless circulation of information, always returning to the same list of trivialities,” we find keys to the rise of trutherism as well as Trumpism.

In his later work, “Comments on the Society of the Spectacle,” published almost 20 years after the original, Debord seemed to foresee the spectacular process that commenced on Jan. 20. “The spectacle proves its arguments,” he wrote, “simply by going round in circles: by coming back to the start, by repetition, by constant reaffirmation in the only space left where anything can be publicly affirmed …. Spectacular power can similarly deny whatever it likes, once or three times over, and change the subject, knowing full well there is no danger of any riposte.” After Trump’s inauguration, the actual size of the audience quickly ceased to matter. The battle over images of the crowd, snapped from above or at ground level, simply fueled our collective case of delirium tremens.

Since then, as each new day brings a new scandal, lie or outrage, it has become increasingly difficult to find our epistemological and ethical bearings: The spectacle swallows us all. It goes on, Debord observed, “to talk about something else, and it is that which henceforth, in short, exists. The practical consequences, as we see, are enormous.” Indeed. Who among us recalls the many lies told by Trump on the campaign trail? Who can re-experience the shock felt when first seeing or hearing the “Access Hollywood” tape? Who can separate the real Trump from the countless parodies of Trump and the real dangers from the mere idiocies? Who remembers the Russians when our own Customs and Border officials are coming for our visas?

In the end, Debord leaves us with disquieting questions. Whether we love Trump or hate him, is it possible we are all equally addicted consumers of spectacular images he continues to generate? Have we been complicit in the rise of Trump, if only by consuming the images generated by his person and politics? Do the critical counter-images that protesters create constitute true resistance, or are they instead collaborating with our fascination with spectacle? We may insist that this consumption is the basic work of concerned citizenship and moral vigilance. But Debord would counter that such consumption reflects little more than a deepening addiction. We may follow the fact checkers and cite the critics to our hearts’ delight, but these activities, absorbed by the spectacle, have no impact on it.

Surely, the spectacle has continued nonstop since Jan. 20. While Debord, who committed suicide in 1994, despaired of finding a way to institutionalize what, by nature, is resistant to institutionalization, we need not. We seem to be entering a period similar to May 1968, which represents what Debord called “lived time,” stripping back space and time from the realm of spectacle and returning it to the world of human interaction.

The unfolding of national protests and marches, and more important the return to local politics and community organizing, may well succeed where the anarchic spasms of 1968 failed, and shatter the spell of the spectacle.