The Antisocial Socialist

Just finished: The Long Red Tomorrow by Erik Grove. This was great and you should all read it when it comes out. If you like your noir critical, your cyberpunk elevated, and your Mars basically uninhabitable (not that it stops people from trying), this is for you.

Currently reading: End Times Fascism And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. This is a grand unifying theory of Why Are Our Leaders Like That. Klein's strong point is framing metaphors and grand unifying theories, and she's very good at it. This book is no exception. She and Taylor posit this current wave of fascism as different than the classic kind in no small part because its proponents subscribe to an apocalyptic worldview. While Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Pinochet et al. simply wanted to purge the world of anyone not racially and/or ideologically aligned with them, leaving, you know, the world, today's tech oligarchs, billionaires, and fascists are driven by apocalyptic narratives and seek to end it.

evening_tsar had a really great post up the other day about rewatching Buffy and the prescience of the Trio arc, which I agree with (much as I loathed the plotline and the season, even if it looks pretty good in retrospect), figures that are capable of great power and lack empathy but are also like, pathetic dweebs driven by male ego and insecurity. And this is very true—witness Elon's meltdowns when people point out he's bad at playing videogames. But we are also ruled by the more traditional sort of cinematic monster, the guy who wants to end the world for the sake of ending it. Partially because he'd rather burn everything down than lose, but also because the people who have everything are so dissatisfied with the world that they seek to destroy it out of a self-important, solipsistic belief in themselves as the protagonists of history and in search of a fantasy of a new world modelled after their own desires. 

The authors look at fascism's parallels with religious apocalyptic fervour, but Klein and Taylor's most important idea is that in particular, the AI boom is driven by a desire to keep the fossil fuel industry afloat. They've been talking about this in interviews, and it's well sourced. Trump was against Silicon Valley until he wasn't, and the pivotal point seems to come when the tech oligarchs told him that data centres would reverse the decades-long slow progress on the transition to green energy. This is huge. This is the most disgusting criminal enterprise I've ever heard of and everyone involved should be shot against a wall rather sent to Forever Jail because there's a chance they might escape Forever Jail and this is like, movie-level villain shit that needs to be eradicated such that it never rises again. The tradeoff was never "a machine will do your emails for you and you can make cute cartoons"; the tradeoff was "you're unemployed, everyone you know is unemployed, also we lit the planet on fire." They have created hell on purpose. They have destroyed your future and the future of everyone you know just for the sake of destroying the future. Not as a byproduct of getting richer or whatever—getting richer is the byproduct—but out of hatred for life itself.

Anyway it's a very important read and it's probably already on your list.

Fiction

1.The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
2. Invisible Line, Su J. Sokol
3. Choices: An Anthology of Reproductive Horror, Dianna Gunn (ed.)
4. Neosynthesis, Bryan Chaffin (ed.)
5. Changelog, Rich Larson
6. Sequel: An Anthology, Chenise Puchailo (ed.)

Books With Pictures In 'Em

1. The High Desert, James Spooner

I am behind on all my podcasts and likely will continue to be, but In Bed With the Right's "The Lord of the Rings with Michael Lutz" jumped the queue because, well, you know me. It's another one on "why does the right like nerd media whose thesis inevitably stands in opposition to their political project?" and I'm a sucker for that.

LoTR is obviously a more challenging text when it comes to political analysis than, say, the Culture or the Expanse or even Star Wars where it's just like, oh, well, they just read/watched it and went straight to Opposite Day. Tolkien was conservative. But Tolkien was also anti-fascist in a way that conservatives just aren't anymore, and also Tolkien's relationship with his fans was weird and, it turns out, quite fun. He would answer anyone who wrote him and wanted to make people happy, which means a lot of what he wrote contradicted other things he wrote. What it meant to be conservative was fundamentally different than what it means now, and you really could be an anarcho-monarchist, I guess.

Anyway, they go into all that, and his relationship with fandom and the legacy of that, and it's just really fun.

 Relieved to wake up in a city that voted for school lunches and not unlimited imported cops.* Chow is not my favourite, mainly over her handling of pro-Palestine protests, but she's the best possible outcome and will probably be more progressive with a stronger mandate than last time and a vastly more progressive council. I have quibbles with individual races, but council overall looks way better. It's a clear message that Toronto is sick of the far-right bullshit that has buried our city since the time of David Miller. 

Also, it's just nice to see someone who likes the city elected to run it. That ought to be a low bar, but Brad and his bot army really wanted to paint a picture of Toronto as a dystopian crime-addled hellhole populated entirely by homeless Hamas bike-riding drug addicts on one side and a tiny group of scared rich Jews** holed up in their midtown houses in terror on the other. It's really not that; as I point out constantly in my Law & Order: Criminal Intent Toronto reviews, actual crime in Toronto is negligible. It's one of the safest places in the world to live, unless you are Indigenous or homeless, but Brad was never concerned about those folks. Olivia, for all her flaws, genuinely does love it here, and I've met her a ton of times at various events. 

So this is not a victory in the "we won and get to have brunch" sense but it is a massive sigh of relief.


* Bad Badford's proposal involved hiring more cops than get trained annually in Toronto, so where were they supposed to come from?
** Bradford, as you can guess by his name, is not at all Jewish, and frankly his philosemitism borders on fetishistic.
*** For the three people who read them, there is a new season with a new detective and reviews are coming, but it's coming out when both Canadian and British baking shows are out, there's new Slow Horses and Diplomat, and there's a goddamn telly show about giant squid attacking people in Newfoundland, so it's going to have to wait. 

Just finished: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. Yeah, I just wanted this to go harder, I think. I got the sense that he wanted to write a creepy horror story and a dark academia story but with a happy ending for the slow burn gays, which absolutely I support, but I still wanted a deeper commitment to either the creepy or the dark academia story. Many problems would have been solved by making one of the characters not white. 

Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke. You have probably heard of this and I have had a hold on it for ages, but if somehow you missed it, this is a story about a tradwife influencer who gets isekaied into 1885, with a family that is like her family but not quite her family. This is not a spoiler because it's obvious from the word go: She is not actually in 1885. That story is interspersed with her rise and fall as an influencer and the crumbling reality of her perfect marriage and home.

Listen, I get that this is a deeply flawed book, especially the ending, which weirdly had some of the same problems as my issues with Summer Sons (a.k.a., you gotta commit to the bit). I also want to point out that this book is around 500 pages long and I read it in three days over a busy weekend because I couldn't. Stop. Reading. It's funny as fuck. Burke very clearly detests her lead character and often I find it off-putting when the point of a story is "let's put a bad person in a bad situation and torture the fuck out of her" but the satire is strong enough with this one that she gets away with it. 

Below all the funny there's a really solid core of asking why women enforce the patriarchy on other women, how libertarianism and conservative bootstrap ideology is ludicrous and even in the past that they idolize so much we lived in a society, and why white women are Like That. Anyway just really engrossing and I'd love to talk about it.

Currently reading: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI by Cory Doctorow. I always appreciate Cory's writing on tech stuff, and while I disagree with him on a lot of his takes around AI, I'm still interested in his argument. Which boils down to that we need to think less about the tech itself and more about the political, social, and especially economic relations that dictate how the tech is used.

Which of course is very true, and he argues it brilliantly, but to me that's not all of it. You ultimately can't do good deeds with a cursed sword. That said, the distinction in the use of tech between a centaur (a technology that can extend what a human can do) and a reverse centaur (technology that dictates what a human can do) absolutely matters in AI discussions and so this is very good so far.

Just finished: Hustle, Baby by Priya Guns. I don't have a lot more to say about this but it's quite good throughout; I felt the ending was too rushed to feel climactic or satisfying, and I reiterate my issues with that mid-2000s thing of short sentence fragments (is that just a mid-2000s thing? I don't think I read enough realist fiction to be clear) but the setting, characters, and sharp-edged anti-capitalist satire cover a number of flaws.

Currently reading: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo. This one was recommended to me ages ago (I forget by whom) and has been on my list forever. It's a Southern Gothic dark academia queer horror that ought to be more up my alley but something about it is bugging me??? I'm not sure what. It's about Andrew, who was about to join his best friend/adopted brother/obviously the love of his life Eddie at grad school at Vanderbilt when Eddie suddenly dies by suicide. Also they could both see ghosts. Eddie was rich and left Andrew a house (along with a roommate, Riley) and the one prof is very keen to have Andrew continue the research into folk stories that Eddie was doing before he died. Somewhat reluctantly, because he's quite a disagreeable person, Andrew falls in with Eddie's old crowd, who do a bunch of drugs and race cars. He keeps having visions of Eddie's revenant and is convinced he was murdered.

The vibes are pretty great and it's a fun read, but I'm waiting for something more. Humour, maybe? These characters are all in their 20s. They should be at least a little funny. Also, are there no girls who go to Vanderbilt? I feel like they would outnumber the boys in the department. All the boys are hot, which makes sense because we're in a closet-case's POV, and of course it's about Southern white masculinity (the treatment of the three POC characters so far has been...something) but. There are many boys and I find it hard to distinguish any of them, or Halse's working-class mechanic character from any of the academic nerds. 

I'm about 2/3 through and we've just hit a curse, which is cool and which I would have liked to have happened much, much earlier, as the dark didn't feel dark enough through much of the book.

Just finished: What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed. Chat this is so good. Read it. It's one of those books that is a joy to read in all its weirdness but holds up better under analysis (Wizards Vs. Lesbians episode about it). There is a lot going on at every level, which is possibly why Reed only writes a book every 30 years. 

Currently reading: Hustle, Baby by Priya Guns. This is about a Tamil family in Malvern in the early 2000s. As refugees from the civil war, they're barely surviving. Mary is a born-again Christian, her teenage daughter Dilo has been hustling the other kids since elementary school, and Mary's sister Anji, once a Tiger, gets roped into an MLM (not that kind, or that kind) and also gets the family kicked out of their church; unfortunately, Mark, a day-trader, is there to rescue them and bring them into a new church and a new scheme. 

This so perfectly captures the time and place, and I love the characters, especially Anji. I'm not a huge fan of the prose style, which has that very fragmented, snappy upmarket fiction rhythm to it, but it's worth it for the politics and satire.

Just finished: Nothing

Currently reading: What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed. I am racing the library hold expiry on this, but I think i'll make it as I'm into the last stretch. It's such a strange book to try to describe—there's almost no plot, just vibes. John tries to help Sudharma, the translator, communicate with the basket-men, a sentient species native to the planet, but ultimately worries that the only way to do so would be to alter Sudharma’s brain to understand the world the way the basket-men do. He tries to help Iren, a jess (a third gender that exists among one of the groups of settlers but is a marginalized identity), with a mysterious reproductive health issue. He has a relationship with Vo, a visitor from Earth, who is entwined with the aiyi who have taken over the planet and transformed her into basically a godlike entity. He struggles with the heteronormative world of Scythia compared to his polyamorous homeland.

Meanwhile the desert is its own thing, with every animal species beginning its life cycle as a plant. Also did I mention that John carries around a bag made from his great-uncle's skin soaked in his brain, which he refers to as his soul.

This is basically Jeff VanderMeer-style worldbuilding with Becky Chambers-style plotting and Ursula K. LeGuin-style prose and gender exploration, and it's just deeply engrossing for all its weirdness. Maybe because of its weirdness. Plot is overrated.

 There's been a lot of good content this week, especially with Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor doing the podcast circuit, but the podcast that really had me this week was Behind the Bastards' "Radovan Karadžić: The Genocidal Dictator Who Became a New-Age Guru" (Part 1, Part 2).

This is a story about the Bosnian genocide so. I mean. It's obviously incredibly horrifying. I remember the news coverage at the time well. They deal with it as sensitively and respectfully as anyone could manage, though if you want a blow-by-blow for some reason, this is not the episode. 

It's Karadžić's post-genocide career that makes this episode truly special, and believe me that it's worth listening to the atrocities to get to what happened next. Because past the crimes against humanity is possibly the strangest, funniest turn a bastard has taken in a good long time. There are early comparisons to George W. Bush, better known for his other work, and maybe there's a profound tidbit in here about the way we remember and sanitize mass murderers whose crimes occurred in our lifetimes but basically do yourself a favour, if you can stomach the kind of content BtB features, give it a listen without knowing anything at all about what happened to Karadžić after the genocide, then tell me what you think.

Oh also Jamie Loftus is on it, if you want more incentive.

 Of course it's Wizards & Spaceships, "Are We Having Fun Yet? ft. Peter Watts." I have adored Peter's writing (both fiction and non-fiction) for about as long as I've been keeping this journal; Blindsight is by far my favourite hard SF, and probably my favourite overall SF book ever. His work is so good because he's ten steps ahead of everyone else in terms of thought experiments and unforeseen consequences. Also he's funny as fuck.

The sound quality of this is not great due to it being a live, and inebriated, recording, still, I implore you to give it a listen. Come for the doomsday discussion, stay for the terrible puns.