Today was a pleasure. A perfect DS day you might say. We took a couple of coffees down to the motif, had a chat with the Singularity and took a study in the sun. It is quite unfinished so we must return but the weather is more than likely going to throw a spanner at us.1 If we cannot finish it I would not be too disappointed however as in its current state the study shows a little more of our attempt to work more consciously on colour; we faced the sun so we made it yellow, we stood on snow in shadow and we made that blue. That is the harmony. We did it fast and because we had to leave and we have not yet had the chance to spoil the energy with our well intentioned efforts to realize something more.
Look here, we liked a conspiracy as much as anyone; it's exciting, its juicy, its gossip, its transformative even. We used to enjoy Fourteen Times, The X Files, The Twighlight Zone, the sordid mystery of the Jack the Ripper case of the stories of great government conspiracies around Roswell and who killed JFK. Even when watching the madness of info wars there is a buzz and this is so even when know it is all rubbish. A good conspiracy theorist is hard to not look at, like the deadly tape in Infinite Jest, but look here, we also enjoyed the feeling of the conspiratorial in social theory at the university which even though different kind of feels the same, the ultimate 'real' conspiracy of capitalism becoming clearer with each text.
At University we participated in what was termed the 'social turn' in art, a widespread anticapitalist radicalisation of a generation of art students which snowballed through the two thousands finding a climax of sorts in Occupy. After that our feeling of conspiracy was matched and trumped even by post occupy events in the UK austerity mincer. In recent years we see a social turn on the far right with the conspiracy turned up to eleven and we don't like that very much. We don't like it when the boot is on the other foot perhaps is it? Not really, it's more that it is far right, it is objectively insane and it is mainstream and it is the will of 'power' as much as 'the people'; it's a takeover! Or is it? So and so on the daily dot or slate or something wrote that Russia continuously fights a war on the west and that wars battleground is in the citizens heads, our heads, perhaps that is where the alt far right takeover really is. Perhaps it exists nowhere more so than in the minds of the generation of anticapitalists mentioned above. If that was true it is not now. All that alt right memery has grown up and now walks on its own two very actual but unreal pegs. How far does it reach? Who can say what could clear our societal head? What could measure how far we have shifted? A war with Russia perhaps?
Hope not, but it's a topsy-turvey Alice through the looking glass bizzarro world we now experience on the media. Do we not see today similar notions of a great capitalist elite system screwing everyone but this asserted not by the sociology professor or anticapitalist activist researcher but by Icke or the info wars fella.2 We don't like that very much. Let us imagine that we see a far left and a far right you tuber, Brand and Icke maybe (although Icke of course has his own network now), spinning out their daily bulletin, painting the picture of corruption, crisis and cover up, hop scotching the logic to eventually arrive at similar a diagnosis of a corrupt system run by the 1%. It's not farfetched at all to compare, but then we ask who is to blame, what is the remedy? Then we have difference. While the leftist preaches real democracy, equality, transparency and social/climate justice for all - the power of corporations the evil to overcome, for the alt righter it is the cathedral that is the evil to be overcome, the institutions of democratic society in a broad sense must be taken out to usher in an authoritarian era. Herregud!3
In this game of ideoality4 the real alt far righter feels like their winning, their nationalistic dreams becoming more true with each post as the world opens up the possibility of a great new authoritarian leader to keep the border closed and smash the cathedrals, and who can deny that a great tide tech utopian power is with them? Orange Peel doesn't make bad bets after all. And they grow and demonstrate against 'the elites' like snowflakes! See how they gather on the knowle in anti lockdown rebellion. Let us join them; we see right and left wing hippies, white van man men, the youth of the day, students, the odd Trump flag, we hear a few chants of 'Lets Go Brandon', men and women, people of all backgrounds it seems, like a 90's rave! A bizzarro world indeed but what is that stiff spikey feeling under foot? That smooth playing surface for us all to zip about5 has not grown from the grassroots, its astroturf! Astroturf woodstock! And it's covering more and more of our shoddy liberal democratic pitch.
Nothing grows from astroturf. New strips are bought in and rolled out on top of the old when necessary. No one needs tend to it, it needs no water, no soil, no care, no trimming, no work. The pitch we have all been living with is a bit knackered after so many long hard seasons but it is not unplayable. It needs reseeding in parts, watered and mowed in others, some patches just need time to grow but over on the far right side by the corner flag there is indeed a patch of astroturf. Folk over there have fallen for the Venables sales pitch.6 Astroturf can be made to sound so much better than grass and as El Tel,7 who of course is not mixed up in this at all beyond analogy fodder, explained his case to some Terry Wogan stating that if astroturf were normal grass would sound crazy!
That little corner of plastic reality is spreading. Hard far right politics is being rolled out under our feet and noses in the guise of grassroots community activism and this done, as we saw in Work 40, not through hyperstition but through networks which function to launder ideas up the flag pole from whatever nonsense scores highly on the You Tube. Confuse and erode until we suddenly realise that the astroturf pitch is laid, the ribbon is cut and up in the directors box Russel Brand sits as a moderate in a diabolical Nrx regime alongside the likes of Icke, Wakefield, Robinson and Shemirani, with Eric Clapton playing at half time!
With turning back,
John
1. The phrase is usually to 'throw a spanner in the works'. A spanner is a handheld metal tool and 'the works' refers to mechanical apparatus of some sort. The phrase means to cause an immediate problem. The phrase to 'throw a spanner at us' is unusual possibly and UK midlands variant.
2. Refers to Alex Jones. The wide world of conspiracy is often condensed to only David Icke and Alex Jones. See Dane Bowers, verse 16, line 3.
3. Translates to 'oh my God'.
4. Ideological reality?
5. See verse 7, line 3.
6. Football manager Terry Venables promoted the radical idea of playing on astroturf pitches.
7. Terry Venables was known as 'El Tel'. This refers to his living in Spain and has nothing to do with electricity.
8. Hyperstition. A Word coined by accelerationist Philosopher Nick Land which describes the process which fiction becomes reality, lies become truth. He says:
"Hyperstition is a positive feedback circuit including culture as a component. It can be defined as the experimental (techno-)science of self-fulfilling prophecies. Superstitions are merely false beliefs, but hyperstitions – by their very existence as ideas – function causally to bring about their own reality....hyperstition is thus able, under ‘favorable’ circumstances whose exact nature requires further investigation, to transmute lies into truths."