Where-Have-You Bin

The pschogeography of digital space, pixel land, cyberspace, non-space. The "fake" world that sits atop and beneath our wiggly, fleshy, bodied one.

The internet conditions our modern experience, so much so that the technologies themselves are symbols of a sort of thought, of experience. The "medium is the massage," and not merely purveyor of old ideas or hatreds. Although the Fukuyama-esque love affair with the "liberalising" force of the internet has by now died off, replaced by a sort of bland hand-wringing. Neoliberalism's lofty rhetoric and willingness to negate human ...

I'm a bit late to the party, but so what? The film is still #94 on IMDB's popularity ranking as of writing: by proxy my relevance is in the top 100!¹

Also, the title is a bit of a lie. My purpose here is not so much to review «Interstellar» as it is to talk about the state of big science-fiction productions more generally. Part analysis, part whining complaint. I make no further apologies than this.

Supermassive Black Hole

by @joelphilipe via Unsplash

Recap & Argument

Interstellar takes place in a near-future America suffering from dust storms and mass crop failure. We meet Matthew McConaughe...

There And Back...Again

And then I get to come home and stare into another (smaller) screen to work on applications and a personal essay and and and...there's a lot of work to do. Sometimes I feel like all I have energy for is to keep myself from falling ever further inward and downward. Part loneliness, part...something. I do not do well with nothing to do, with nothing to think about, without novelty.

Whether that novelty is in the milieu about me (travel) or in a sense of intellectual voyage makes no real difference. I am quite happy to gaze at NASA's APoD blog, wondering at the scale of the...

Clocking in at just 232 3 x 5 inch pages, Jackie Wang’s treatise on the United States’ prison apparatus is vastly more thorough and detailed than works three times its length. Wang, who began the project as far too many Americans do—by losing a loved one to a predatory “justice” system—lays out a tireless case for the abolition of prisons in America, and provides some of the most cogent and comprehensive analysis for our current “post-capitalist,” post-2008 position.¹

Wang expertly lays out and then proceeds through a strip-search of the lurching, 1033-fueled machine that turns human sufferin...

THE PROVERBIAL INTERNET QUOTE OF WISDOM:

"Sometimes people use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like a person' and sometimes they use 'respect' to mean 'treating someone like an authority' and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say 'if you won't respect me I won't respect you' and they mean 'if you won't treat me like an authority I won't treat you like a person' and they think they're being fair but they aren't, and it's not okay" [sic]

The language of human rights would fit easily in here--but who gets to count as human? Is it "humanitarian" interest that lea...

In this America, but not my America, life is not a precious resource. In this America, getting sick does not only punish the body with pain, but absorbs and claims your future, subsumed to debt payments. A new lifetime–if you are unlucky–of deductibles, calls from collections, and a deeper and deeper hole. You wonder if you, and the loved ones also stuck with this bill, wouldn’t just be better off dead.

In this America, but not my America, all that matters is money to be made. More than the lives of our fellows. More than the lives of our children. There is paper over ears, hundred-dollar bil...

If we took
for the people
back to the home
to the farm
to the urban center
now stolen (again)
by the white man

if we took,
just from the few
who can amply afford
to lose

The author walking at Le Petites Dalles Normandie, France

This can describe many things:

Blacking out: drunk, you went to the club, you danced and maybe you fucked somebody but without the memory, it’s a

scene change in a film, the cut-to-black of a softcore porno, the grisly murder or car crash that we can only imagine because it’s

off camera, like the service and maintenance labourers at high-powered dinner functions or state events, armies of the unrecognised on whose backs ride the faces of the easily identified are carried

sleeping on trains, in cars, past the aggressively monotonous sc...