This message comes to you from San Francisco, where I have stopped for a very brief visit in a very busy few weeks. A couple of the sessions I recorded Stateside on my last trip a couple of weeks ago (I know) are now live! For Socrates in the City, I spoke to UNC Wilmington professor of religious studies, Diana Pasulka, about her absolutely wild new book on “UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny” - and about the time the Men In Black came calling at her house.
This is one of the most head-spinning interviews I’ve done to date. Take a look:
Also while I was in NYC I had the opportunity to guest-host the New York Times podcast, Interesting Times, where I spoke to author and fellow book-lover James Marriott about his concern that short-form online brainrot risks taking us back to a “New Dark Ages”. We talked TikTok, McLuhan, medieval monks, and Nayib Bukele as the first truly net-native autocrat. Watch here.
Now, on to a rant that’s been brewing in the back of my mind for a little while. It partly crystallised today, writing this short comment at UnHerd on the announcement by the Pentagon that the execution by firing squad of former US Army major Nidal Malik Hasan, who killed 14 people and injured more than 30 others at a Texas military base in 2009, will be livestreamed. That set me to thinking about the online economy of spectacle, in short-form video, and especially the way gore videos have become increasingly ubiquitous, in the context of political activism and propaganda, sometimes bizarrely juxtaposing snuff from both sides of the same conflict in a single newsfeed. The result is both horrible and, cumulatively, weirdly numbing.
But this is only one of the more extreme variants on a form of content now ubiquitous in the digital public realm: in fact, one of clickbait’s most seductive registers. But while it’s a kind of content that mimics political engagement, I’m coming to think it’s not just antithetical to political organising, but actively malign: a product that delivers profit for the maker, but - for the audience - not action but apathy, depression, and alienation. I call this type of content Despair Pornography.