Living in Today’s Dystopia: Unpacking Apocalyptic Realities, Water Security, and Transhumanism

What if the apocalypse is already here, but we're too busy imagining zombies and nuclear winters to notice? On this episode, Bram E. Gieben, author of "The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World with No Future," unpacks the eerie realization that our present might be the dystopia we've been fearing. We explore how apocalyptic narratives can distract us from the grim realities we currently face, drawing on insights from all sorts of fields of study. The discussion confronts the uncomfortable truth that our solutions to technological and climate crises might be more fantasy than feasible reality.

Next, we plunge into the murky waters of environmental water security in the United States, specifically the contentious issue of water rights. Using real-life examples like the endangered mussel in Florida, we highlight the complex interplay between ecological preservation and urban necessities. Inspired by John Gray's "Straw Dogs," we ponder what it means to live a good life in a world on the brink of ecological collapse, reflecting on the millennial left's responses to these daunting scenarios post-Bush administration.

We also tackle the intriguing developments in transhumanism and the metaverse, dissecting how early optimism has given way to skepticism and critique. From the grandiose claims of tech billionaires to the limitations of AI, our conversation traverses the performative nature of modern political activism and the disillusionment faced by progressive youth movements. We wrap up with an examination of Mark Fisher's lasting influence and the complex legacy he left behind, urging listeners to confront today's realities with intellectual rigor and nuanced understanding. Tune in for a journey through the intricate narratives shaping our world.

Chapters

• 1:35 Exploring Dystopia and Apocalyptic Narratives
• 15:38 Environmental Water Security and Future Predictions
• 23:58 Exploring Transhumanism and the Metaverse
• 37:03 Navigating Mediated Political Performances
• 45:21 Navigating Defeats and Activist Atomization
• 51:53 Exploring Political Disillusionment and Activism
• 1:00:34 Navigating Reality and Metaphors
• 1:09:14 Elite Overproduction and Society Decline
• 1:24:17 Analyzing Mark Fisher's Influence and Legacy
• 1:37:57 Analyzing Mark Fisher's Legacy and Influence
• 1:52:39 Building Hope in a Dystopian World
• 2:02:04 Navigating Complexity and Contradictions

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:35

Hello and welcome to VARN blog. And I am here with Bram Geben, the author of the Darkest Timeline, living in a World with no Future, from Revo Press. We're going to be talking about it today. You're also the host of Strange Exiles, correct? That's correct and full disclosure. I am also an author at Revo Press. In fact, I'm writing a book that's similarly bleak, which is called Walktopian to Barbarism, and the last chapter will probably be entitled it's Been All Barbarism the Whole Time, entitled it's been all barbarism the whole time, but um. So you know, we're from an uplifting press these days, apparently. But um, I actually I read, I've been reading your book and I've listened to your um. You talk with mike watson over on the I don't think it's called the Acid Left Podcast, but that's the stream. I got it on.

Bram E. Gieben: 2:40

It's called Heroes and Be Damned now.

C. Derick Varn: 2:42

Yeah, which is kind of a better name. Anyway, I'm going to go ahead and preface this with that. This book is bleak in a way that, um, a show that's had danny besner and benjamin studebaker and myself on it, uh, I don't think we actually go as far as you. So, um, uh, I, I think, um, we should talk a little bit about you know, premise is of the Darkest Timeline, like why do you feel like people have tried to make so much of the political ramifications of these apocalyptic narratives, and what do you think it actually says?

Bram E. Gieben: 3:40

So to talk a little bit about the premise of the book, it's an analysis of the apocalypse, you know, in both the aesthetic sense, in the scientific sense, in the mythological sense. I try and look at it from several of these aspects and I think what I'm trying to discuss is the ways in which the fact that we've conceptualized these apocalyptic futures can get in the way of recognizing the dystopian aspects of the present. So that's summed up, you know, at the start of the book by a quote attributed to William Gibson, which is that the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed. I think a little bit later on in the book a quote, somebody from the Autolith groupica Sarkar, and she says that the apocalypse can start at different times depending on where you are. It's very subjective, you know. So for someone dispossessed of their ancient homelands, that's when the apocalypse begins. For other people it's going to be different. So I think that's where the premise begins is the idea that we already live in a very dystopian present.

Bram E. Gieben: 4:38

That's where the premise begins is the idea that we already live in a very dystopian present, and also that the ways in which we write about the potential disastrous consequences of technological acceleration, of climate collapse. We quite often write in the tone of if we can do this or if we can't do that. You know it's very much premised on the idea that action is still possible, when in actual fact, if you look at the, you know a lot of the evidence and take a broader view. Look at the worst case scenarios that people are increasingly talking about happening, particularly with regards to climate. We're already too late for a lot of these solutions, or those solutions could have unintended consequences. So these are all things I unpack in the book.

Bram E. Gieben: 5:20

But, to qualify it a little in terms of this, whether this is a doomer manifesto, I don't think of it as such.

Bram E. Gieben: 5:26

It's more of a book about time and about the idea of the future. And I think, in terms of interpreting the future, we have these various ideologies and ways of looking at things that are teleological, that have an end goal in mind. I've looked at, you know, writers like John Gray who have very strong views on progress, and you know that our belief in that might be something of a legacy, of that Christian kind of Judeo-Christian you know kind of millenarian tendency. I've also looked at the analysis of people like Zizek, you know. I think one of the reasons Zizek is such an important thinker is that he, you know, came to be as a thinker, as a philosopher, in a collapsing culture, in a collapsing regime you know, seeing the fall of communism in his home country. So I think that gives his insight a particular keenness and sharpness that you can use to think about the various ways we talk about the future, both in the utopian and the dystopian.

C. Derick Varn: 6:34

Yeah, I actually started thinking about this a little bit and there's kind of a time theme actually even in the book that you may not have noticed. But I'll point out to you and I was looking at your references. But you start with a quote even before the Wayne Gibson quote from Living in the End Times by Solveig Juzek, and I have always thought that that was one of the more underrated Juzek books.

Bram E. Gieben: 7:06

It's one of my favorites actually, yeah, yeah, I think one of the first I read. I'll read the quote here, because it's a really good one. So I think this has a bearing on talking about things like proposed solutions to climate change, like cloud seeding or you know all these kind of like moonshot methods of perhaps capturing some carbon and fixing things. So Zizek writes domination over nature necessarily entails the class domination of people over other people. Domination over nature necessarily entails the class domination of people over other people.

C. Derick Varn: 7:48

The way to rid ourselves of our masters is not for humankind to become a collective master over nature, but to recognize the imposture in the very notion of the master about this, uh, the two ways that climate is spoken about right now in a lot of left-wing circles and a lot of critical circles, and in one case you get like the idea that, oh, if we don't do something about it drastically, we're all going to die, to which I say a lot of us are going to die, but you're probably not that lucky um that you're all going to die. Um, we humans have survived actually pretty big shifts and and and climate before, although and we know this from genetic population bottlenecks, so it's not even like the. I find that um just as much of a dominating cop-out as the. Oh, we can just seed the clouds or use carbon capture, etc. Because it's just not to say that we shouldn't do some of that.

C. Derick Varn: 9:17

Although you, I have very, I have very much concerns that everything we'll do to mitigate climate change will have drastically unforeseen consequences, because I know the history of ecological intervention from from people in the past come from the south eastern united states, whose entire landscape was altered in the late 19th, early 20th century because the plantation uh farming system completely stripped all the forest of the region and they tried to put the forest back. Quick growth and what they did was a mixture of bringing in pine trees and japanese uh and it went horribly wrong. It led to kudzu and giant pine and all this stuff, and most people who grew up in the southeast barely know that that landscape is like largely modern and largely not indigenous. So I always think about those case studies when we're like, oh, we're going to get really optimistic about some climate intervention and I'm like, well, those things almost always do something. You don't see they have a reaction.

Bram E. Gieben: 10:31

I mean, in a historical sense, large-scale interventions in natural processes. I mean, arguably, everything we do is that that's the story of humanity, it's the story of agriculture. So there is a way to balance these things, to balance human activities with natural cycles. In actual fact, you know, previous societies have done a much better job of that than us. You know it's the industrial societies that have come to these disastrous consequences and the interventions of large-scale industrial societies, societies that have come to these disastrous consequences and the interventions of large scale industrial societies. International cycles does have a terrible history. I mean we don't need to mention the five year plan in Russia. We don't need to mention the disastrous effects of Maoist communism, the campaigns to kill pests that resulted in the deaths of, you know, countless numbers of people.

Bram E. Gieben: 11:29

I interviewed a guy called Josh Ellis from a podcast and he's been writing about climate collapse in an American context for quite a while and he actually talks about the way that the basically the way that the boundaries were drawn between states and how that relates to those states are supplied with water from the nearest large body of water, like how reservoirs are distributed and because of the choices that were made, you know back when that was being decided. Essentially, a lot of counties are going to run dry and that's currently, you know, brought American agriculture to a tipping point, you know, to a point where it would be very easy to lose a cycle of crops. And then you have cities like Las Vegas, where Josh is from, where you know it's now illegal to build new housing without air conditioning because it's technically impossible to live there as a human being under those temperatures without, you know, serious scientific intervention. So I think the choices we make now, even the choices that are the right choices to you know, mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Even those could have unintended consequences.

Bram E. Gieben: 12:31

so I write about that well I mean really like sorry to grab it on, but like where john gray comes into this was with kind of his skepticism about the idea of progress and um, when he's writing about transhumanism, what he says is that you know, the idea of um escaping the human cage and uploading yourself into some sort of digital hereafter that's, too is a project that kind of depends on infrastructure, like human infrastructure that's got to be maintained. So if you go through some sort of societal collapse, that infrastructure too is threatened. I think the same is true of what we're talking about here in terms of agriculture is those systems are just very, very fragile. They depend on a stability in human relations and in human climate conditions that we've had for a very long time. There's nothing to particularly suggest that those are safe. In fact, we've got quite a lot of evidence to kind of suggest the opposite.

C. Derick Varn: 13:28

Hmm, actually I live in the Mountain West, so I'm about seven hours north of Josh if he's in Las Vegas, or maybe not even quite seven hours, he's now in Britain actually he's moved away.

Bram E. Gieben: 13:43

But Vegas is where he wrote a lot of his kind of journalism about the climate.

C. Derick Varn: 13:49

He's moved from one hellscape to a completely different kind of hellscape I was about to say. Normally I would say getting out of Vegas is a good idea, but to Britain, I don't know Although ecologically probably a sounder idea, Vegas should not exist. That's true.

Bram E. Gieben: 14:06

It's quite green and leafy here.

C. Derick Varn: 14:08

Yeah, if you've ever been to Vegas, once you leave the Strip you're in a flat desert that's just filled with strip malls and you realize that there's no way that the water needed to maintain the, the, the uh kind of insane extravagance of the strip is like maintainable for for that long. Uh, here and um, in salt lake city we are building housing as fast as you can get it up, um, but we don't really have the water for the housing. Um, so, uh, to put it another way, we've been talking kind of not totally as a joke about the future in which we have a giant, non-fatal but very unpleasant arsenic cloud rising from the, from the lake bed of the salt lake, because we've run out of the water, and the local politicians before we had two years of good snow, which had been kind of flukes were arguing that we needed to cut down the trees to save the water. Yeah, save the water, yeah. And I was like, okay, this is like almost. This isn't even farce or LARP, it's so beyond that, it's like so obviously stupid you can't even fathom it.

C. Derick Varn: 15:35

And I think that's interesting to deal with with the United States.

C. Derick Varn: 15:39

You are absolutely right that water right problems are a big issue with the States because of the way water access is drawn from upstream and downstream and often, um, you have over siphoning of of reservoirs, uh, for major cities, um, but you also have weird, like a lot of ecological laws in the united states create weird downstream effects, so like, for example, there's an endangered species of mussel in florida that we have to siphon off a whole lot of water to um at the cost of entire ecosystems upstream in alabama and georgia, and it's like, so like, okay, we're saving one really endangered mollusk, um, and I'm not saying we shouldn't do that, but we're doing it at the expense of other, not just you know, the urban infrastructure, whatever, which you know.

C. Derick Varn: 16:36

Maybe we should talk about that, um, because a lot of it's highly inefficient here, because our, our, our water infrastructure is like over 100 years old in the east coast cities in a lot of cases and has not. It's not easy to redo because the infrastructure has just been built on top of, and I think, uh, john gray got me thinking about this a long time ago. Actually, you know, I like to call John Gray my favorite reactionary. For those of you who don't know, he is a reactionary.

Bram E. Gieben: 17:07

For me, his core text is Straw Dogs. I try to, I guess, pay homage to the style in which that is written. It just proclaims itself. It doesn't, um, qualify, it doesn't really uh bother giving the other side of the argument. It just makes declarative statements and I think like so you know, in terms of the darkest timeline, where does that come from? It's from the show community, and in the show community that their alternate history, their darkest timeline, which is a little bit like the Star Trek mirror universe, it begins with the role of a dice by one of the characters.

Bram E. Gieben: 17:46

I think that's kind of a good metaphor for where we are now and that some aspects of living in a collapsing world, a world where the things we've become accustomed to under capitalism become less available to large amounts of people, all of these things could be upstream consequences of choices that we make now. And I think you know the example that you gave there with the kind of the local ecological distribution of water to one project undermines the precarious nature of an ecosystem elsewhere. Those are the kinds of choices that we're making and they're quite existential, you know, and I think, like even when you see people uh write about the latest warnings from climate scientists. They're always phrased in the terms, terms, tones of um, if we take radical action now or unless we take radical action now. I think I was trying to write something that came from the point of view of assuming that no radical action now or unless we take radical action now. I think I was trying to write something that came from the point of view of assuming that no radical action would be taken or that any radical action that is taken might have also disastrous consequences. And back to that point of the unequal distribution of the apocalypse. Even back to what we've been talking about in terms of water supplies In South Africa recently there were whole townships going without water. I think you've had similar things happening on the Mexican border, perhaps in Arizona, maybe Texas, I can't remember exposed to the problems that come with water scarcity.

Bram E. Gieben: 19:21

But the idea that that's not coming for everyone in the mid to long term, or even the mid to short term, that depends on having a lot of faith in things like supply chain infrastructure, the corroded infrastructure of things like electricity networks, water networks.

Bram E. Gieben: 19:37

For a long time capitalism hasn't invested in these infrastructure projects and as such, we live in a bit of a crumbling world that's ill-equipped to respond to the challenges that we face. So, yeah, I think that's the question living in a world with no future. If it is the case that there might be very little we can do to avert the worst effects of accelerating technology or accelerating collapse, there must be a way to find what John Gray calls the good life within that. So I was trying to find that point of the good life and also just think a little bit about what it means to predict the future, what it means to presume on our particular arc of history from where you're standing, um, you know, uh, so these are the kinds of things I get to in the later chapters yeah, um, I think the chapter that seems really relevant to me when we're talking about this as a transhuman nostalgia chapter.

C. Derick Varn: 20:36

I think actually that's where you mentioned the John Goy good life quote and I want to go into that because I was very much feeling, you know, your book actually spoke to mine in a way that I wasn't expecting it to. I've been writing a book on the quote millennial left, a term that I've used reluctantly, people, you know, um, I picked it up from from platypus affiliated side and I use it because I I unfortunately think that there is a generational demarcator, even though it's not clean Like, um, you know, the millennial left really starts with Gen Xers like Mark Fisher and it ends with whatever the hell's happening now, which aren't really millennials either. But there is a clear denunciation for me that your book actually hints at and reference more than an argument when we were looking at, like, uh, um, these, these key arguments, um, and right after the Bush administration is, uh, when we get this first round of, what do we do with if we're actually dealing with the apocalyptic um, and that's John Gray, straw dogs is from that time period a little bit before, but um, uh, you know, know, he's always been kind of a dour conservative and uh, but around around the bush administration he pretty much just gives up on humanity. Um, but you know, and uh, um, and when we talk about him as a dour conservative, he's also kind of a socialist a little bit, but but in a very like reluctant and almost bitter way. Um, if you read new dawn by him, where he just argues about he attacks neoliberal capitalism is like, uh, one of the worst, uh, purveyors of false optimism.

C. Derick Varn: 22:33

Um, but I was thinking about this because I was thinking about the way in which, in which this millennial left has been bookend by this apocalypse question and by people like capitalist realism. I had a lot more relevance after Fisher died in a lot of ways than when he wrote it, even though its cultural milieu is very much the odds, like it's, it's very much from, you know, 2004 to 2008, and it's, it's uh, it's references, um, and in fact, um, I was actually laughing at a little bit of what Fisher argues in a capitalist realism, because in his critique of a lot of pop culture, because later on Fisher, around the times of politics and joy, starts embracing that pop culture, particularly the Hunger Games and whatnot, and I found that weird because I was like, I was like, uh, your, your own analysis in your earlier work indicates that you realize this is kind of a trap, um. So I mean, I guess we're kind of jumping around here so let's go into the transhuman stuff and then we'll come back to fisher. So so what do you think?

C. Derick Varn: 24:01

I will say this the transhuman we've seen some of that with like the ai fears and people sounding like there's a lot of people now who are tech billionaires, who also sound like nick bostrom. But you kind of realize there's a weird, um, self-aggrandizement in that where they're like, oh yeah, our, our stuff can destroy the world. So you should totally listen to us because we'll put a stop to it. And you're like your stuff can barely answer the question that I asked it on chat you could be in a way that actually answers the question. So I'm not sure that you're accurate about our singularity overlord from the LLM, but like it does seem like around 2009 is when we saw this real cultural explosion around transhumanism and it's kind of come back. But we did, but it's come back now without any of the optimism of its first round, like like I mean, you remember ray Kurzweil and whatnot, like all those people in the end of the aughts who were like, we're going to be immortal soon.

Bram E. Gieben: 25:07

So Kurzweil's still going. I don't know if you saw him recently on Rogan oh boy, it was really funny. I've not heard a podcast with so much dead air in a long fucking time. And it's because Kurzweil is still telling us, with what he considers very accurate statistical backup, that singularity is coming and that it's going to be benign. But Rogan has seen a lot of apocalyptic movies, so he keeps pushing back with really dumb questions like, yeah, but what if robots, man? Like what if Skynet? And you know, basically it does eventually. Kurzweil does eventually say, well, yeah, you know, it could be catastrophic if there was a super intelligent AI and it made decisions about the human race much longer. You know, like the paperclip problem, where it decides that because it's in charge of producing paperclips, it's going to convert the human race to paperclips or whatever.

Bram E. Gieben: 26:00

But in terms of my arguments about transhumanism here, I'm very much following what John Gray's written there about it, which is that it's kind of an artefact of the physical world. All of the promises of the digital realm are very much artefacts of the physical realm. It's very much the same in terms of all of the identities that we might try to inhabit, if you think about the idea of virtual reality. It's a completely singular first-person view of the world. If you look at first-person shooters like Call of Duty, everybody who is not the player is basically collateral. So we're coming towards, uh, you know, a conception of identity that's dictated by transhumanism, that kind of replicates the very subjective, singular point of capitalism.

Bram E. Gieben: 26:51

Um, so I think, at the same time as I don't believe that, you know, progress is, as you know, kind of the thing that should like, like that's basically the foundation of of neoliberal hegemony is scientific progress, technological progress, and I definitely don't go to a dark place, like nick land, of saying that the acceleration of this is going to take us to, uh, you know, some kind of singularity.

Bram E. Gieben: 27:16

I think it's a double bargain. Um, the scientific interventions that we could make to restore balance to the ecosystem they are potentially disastrous, but so are the consequences of retreating from it into anything that transhumanism can promise. You know, even the identities we inhabit in our own physical bodies, the ways we define ourselves, all of these are potentially at the moment, kind of under threat. You know, from automation, from AI, from social media and the way that we've come to inhabit you know very online avatars, service proxies for us. So I think we've already started to retreat into that transhumanist realm, but I definitely think of it as a retreat rather than being an advance of a you know form of progress yeah I don't know, I maybe wouldn't stop there, though, like I.

Bram E. Gieben: 28:11

You know, in a later um essay in the book I'm writing about the metaverse and um, you know Mike Watson has written very eloquently as well about this topic and you know he's very optimistic about the political and sociological potential of forms of online collaboration and gaming.

Bram E. Gieben: 28:29

And that's another, you know another arena where you know technological, you know, giants like Musk and Zuckerberg want to dominate and own the metaverse. They want it to be a platform, like social media now, where you're kind of corralled into it. Um, so, you know, I think like, while there's potential there as well for for radical organizing, for for radical play, for, um, you know, for co-creation, well, much of the potential there is feels to me a little bit like the potential of the early internet felt like it had. You know, like there was going to be infinite space for people to create and collaborate and play, but it's ended up being a quite tightly controlled corporate arena. So I think we're in danger of losing even the, the spaces where there might be room for us to organize and play, and I think, like much of the. I'm just trying to say that these things require an unflinching look rather than to make the argument that nothing can be done if that makes sense.

C. Derick Varn: 29:29

Yeah, I think I mean unflinching looks is sort of the motto for the podcast here, but I do think there's a lot to this idea. Um, you know, I read mike's work on the metaverse and and I was sort of I I was sort of just throwing my head behind it a little bit and going like, well, I agree that that potentiality is there, just like I agree that the liberatory internet that we all poo-poo now was an actual possibility. It was choices in the way we organize mediation and the way that we uh support the internet, the way we power it. It's large physical infrastructure, which is also my big pushbackback on a lot of theorists around this, like Baudrillard, who just pretends the physical infrastructure does not actually exist and does not operate along physical means and so that somehow we've transcended both the capitalist cycle and other physical limitations because of these computers. And he sees this as this you know, his version of darkest timeline is this totally mediated and authentic world.

C. Derick Varn: 30:42

Um, one, I have no idea what authentic world is sorry, baldriard and and two, um, there are choices, but when, when, when mike was writing about the meta metaverse, I'm like we already know what what facebook's going to do about the play as soon as it seems like it might complicate its ability to operate in multiple political territories that are contested, and, given the kind of polycentric nature of both the state and and corporations, you can kind of see it cartelling things off more and more to like facebook today, where, you know, 10 years ago I could say pretty much anything I wanted to on Facebook, unless it was outright hate speech or like an undeniable direct threat of which a person would adjudicate, whereas today that's all handled by algorithm in a way that's super restrictive and it even leads to, both on TikTok and on Instagram, zoomers speaking in a weird code designed to get around the censorship variables and I think, um that that has been lost on people.

C. Derick Varn: 31:54

But what that implies about this cartel dot internet, because the even the internet that we have, the worldwide web. We have it because it's initial creators for goad patent and copyrights on on it, both when when DARPA and ARPA work on it in the U? S military and later on when British and American scientists came up with the worldwide web. Separately from that that, they did not patent it. If they had, it would have been dead on arrival.

Bram E. Gieben: 32:23

Ironically, Tim Berners-Lee basically was behind the first internet browser and because of the way that that was constructed and copyrighted, we have the open web, which has now been colonized by corporations.

C. Derick Varn: 32:39

Exactly, but the stuff that we see built on top of that infrastructure today comes pre-colonized in a sense, yes, and so I am much less hopeful. I guess about that because we already have the infrastructures, already captured now in a way that was not in like 2000 or the 90s, or you know. Um, and there does seem to be like this grand search for a return for the early internet, and there are certain platforms that you may have it for a little while. Uh, discord acts like irc, uh, um, you know, but as soon as you get certain things involved in it, you get more complicated. So, for example, we have the blogging world of the aughts. Well, we've had an attempt to recapitulate that in the sub stack space, right, but the incentives are very different. The incentives are very different.

C. Derick Varn: 33:42

The blogging world was a way to start yourself off as a writer, but it was also a way to be engaged adjacent to whatever formal writing positions that you had, whereas Substack is a substitution, often for opinion and other journalism. There's a reason why people like Glenn Greenwald, even though he's one of the richest journalists in the world, have headed that way, and that's because there's not money for them to do the old investigative journalism that they do. And one of the things about the Substack world is that, even though it generates enough money for an author to live or even potentially get you know a six, maybe seven figure salary if you're really really big or not salary, it's not really that rents effectively. It's not enough for you to be able to go and actually do investigative journalism or anything. So increasingly, that journalism uh kind of devolves into punditry, which has its own separate set of agendas, and there's also no real editorial staff to push back on some of these people, um, to say like hey, have you actually been able to prove this thing that you are intuiting or whatever? Um, I don't mean to come down on seymour hirsch, but seymour hirsch has been, uh has made, many predictions historically that I've been wrong and the editors have pushed back on him on, uh, now that he's on substack and I do read his substack and I enjoy it, but like he, he does not have that and he's made he's made statements that have been incorrect.

C. Derick Varn: 35:25

I think we have to think about that when we think about how you're going forward in this information infrastructure ecosystem, with the democratization of information, without also doing what a lot of liberals do, which is to idealize the old gatekeeping system.

C. Derick Varn: 35:41

If it's that was, that was good. But instead of trying to instantiate that, what liberals are have actually been doing for the most part, they're kind of it's kind of hitting them in the ass. Now, actually, um, but in the united states, with these gaza protests, because the irony is, a lot of the stuff being used against them was stuff that was encouraged to dampen down on Trumpism and the at least on social media. Um in the um, in the 2020s, the early 2020, like 2020, 2021. And now that's being thrown at them with like, uh, ramping down political posts etc on instagram. And I was surprised that people were surprised this was happening, like, because I'm like you've already done this and you've done it under the cynical friend enemy distinction without realizing that these corporations do not. They're not actually as progressive as you've been assuming they were going to be strategically.

Bram E. Gieben: 36:38

They're strategically progressive perhaps.

C. Derick Varn: 36:40

Right, right, and they're strategically. They're also those same places are also strategically reactionary. It's almost like a metabolic process to capture different markets, whoever thinks market they're going to gain more from at any particular given time.

Bram E. Gieben: 36:56

And I think there are similar dynamics at play in the people creating the content that goes viral, you know, and are consuming it too. I talked a little bit about this with Jason Miles on this Is Revolution, and you know, in terms of the colored campus protests, there was one intervention that I think I was listening to on a podcast and I think it was blocked and reported, and essentially it was somebody who was a counter protester, or rather was trying to circumvent what had been set up as a checkpoint within a university. The person was a university student, you know, so paid their fees to attend the university and they happened to be black, so they were filming themselves on their mobile phone making the argument you know, I'm a black man, I've paid to be here, I have a perfect right to be black. So they were filming themselves on their mobile phone making the argument you know, I'm a black man, I've paid to be here, I have a perfect right to be here, and you're impeding my progress, so you're claiming that you're liberals what the fuck is this? But at the same time, the protesters themselves are filming themselves be challenged by this guy, and you can hear in the video, which I think was made by the person who's the anti-protester that they were also trying to shape a narrative and frame a narrative. So I think, like what I'm seeing is, if you think about how differently that plays out, to, say, the 1960s protests against the vietnam war, when there was coverage of that, whether it was photographs or film, that that that was, um, you know something that was taking place and then being transmitted via the media to an audience, whereas what's happening here is there's two sets of people, both of whom are imagining an audience that might or might not be there when the content's going out live, performing to that audience a particular narrative, and those narratives are taking place simultaneously. They're both being filmed, two versions of reality at the same time. So it's a very, very different thing.

Bram E. Gieben: 38:44

I think that the way that social media has shaped the way we interact with other people is that we've gotten such a sense, from being online, of speaking to the gallery. You know, look at how many people start their posts with hey guys, you know, or hey, hey folks. Or you know, or hey, hey, folks, or you know. It's this idea that you're speaking to not just individuals but a group of people who are invested in you coming across a certain way, or representing a certain point of view. Being on the right side of history might be one way of putting it. You know that's a very popular side to be on history might be one way of putting it. You know that's a very popular side to be on.

Bram E. Gieben: 39:21

So I think, like it's that mediated form of performance which I try and associate with uh, virtual reality and with simulations in the book. I think it's very easy to create within yourself a simulation. I think that's what you're doing when you create an avatar. I think the more invested you become in an avatar, the more like a simulacrum it becomes to take it back to baudrillard and the more difficult it becomes to tell the difference between the original and the simulacra. You know, I I talked about this a little bit with jason too but I I very much fell for facebook and the kind of confessional posting of selfies and things like that.

Bram E. Gieben: 39:55

Oh yeah, me too. I also got drawn into the argument culture that developed on facebook after 2008 or so and they had the nested replies and you could, you know, as soon as someone posted something you'd get contrary takes and people kind of getting invested in it. And I not only got invested in that, but I got burned quite badly by it. And I think I got burned badly because, like everybody else, I wasn't really being me in those discussions. I was role-playing a version of me that was more like how I would like to be perceived by other people a best version of me, you know. And so when you're challenged, it's not you that's being challenged, it's the perfect version of you that your ego is invested in.

Bram E. Gieben: 40:35

And I think it took a long time to deprogram myself from that stuff. And I'm not saying I'm completely deprogrammed. I still post on X, I still post on Facebook. I tell myself it's because I have stuff to promote or things to sell, but I also have a day job. I don't have to be doing that. So I think we're all invested in these forms of performance. What I think it's maybe necessary to think about is the way in which being invested in an avatar taking part in what effectively adds up to a simulation of a discussion, simulation of an encounter, simulation even of a fight or a confrontation what are the psychological and political consequences of that? I wanted to try and engage with that a bit, which does kind of take us back to Bostrom, but I'll maybe park it there for a minute.

C. Derick Varn: 41:22

No, I was actually. I was going to. I read an article by Paul Sutherland that I actually am going to release to the channel I will have. I will have come out to the channel by the time I released the show. So my my audience, if they watch everything, which they probably don't, but if they do, they will have been exposed to this argument.

C. Derick Varn: 41:45

But I was picking up on Baudrillard and a little bit Umberto Eco, and so is Paul Sutherland on this idea that there's a reason why all politics seems both cringe and LARP-y. Well, LARP is really a term of about 10 years ago and the cringe is a more modern term. But the reason why, uh, is that so much of politics is viewed so strongly through mediation that, um and the mediation is self-curated, um that that becomes where the politics like is both incoherent and almost knowingly impossible. Like whether or not we're talking about Jan 6. Are people talking about liberated zones on on college campuses? And this is not to go after the Gaza protesters, but I mean, there's nothing liberated about those zones. That's just. That's just like a performative declaration about those zones. That's just like a performative declaration. You could try to argue from an anarchist or left communist point of view that it's prefigurative. But I don't really see how it's even that, because it is clearly for an audience in a curated way.

Bram E. Gieben: 42:58

Do you know? This piece that Zizek gave to Occupy. It's on YouTube, it's quite a famous one and he basically, very briefly, he makes the point that this is not the revolution, this is not the counterculture, this is the carnival. Don't get lost in this. And I think, like that's, I don't think that was heated at all.

C. Derick Varn: 43:21

I think we're, we're very much in that you had David Graeber literally saying the opposite, which this was that that occupation was the goal itself. And you know, I I remember at the time being very much on team on team Zizek, that youek, that the Carnival is not bad. And if anything, I will say today, when people go back and talk about how Occupy failed and they make it sound like they knew it the whole time, and I'm like I was writing at the time and you motherfuckers were mad at me when I said how Occupy was going to fail, that it necessarily had to fail. Me, when I said how Occupy was going to fail, that it necessarily had to fail, and that's the point, that how it failed was going to set the terms for the next round of politics and what came out of it was the more important thing, which I basically say that now every major political event, that the political event itself is easy to get lost, in that it's that that energy is impossible to maintain forever. Often, even if the goals are delimited, impossible that the larger contest in the, in the shift throughout the system aren't aren't clear. I mean, um, my most unpopular stance lately is like, while I support people doing, uh, a boycott, divest, um, activism, the bds stuff. I've also pointed out that, like, most of what they're focusing on is such a small part of the israeli economy that it will not have anything like uh, you know, coke pulling out of south africa had it's a completely different structure of an economy and the past analogy in some ways is a way not to look at that. I think there's a lot of that going on and I also think this leads to this wild oscillation in the same people and we can get to Bostrom, because I think this does connect between hyper-optimism and hyper-pessimism in the same person.

C. Derick Varn: 45:21

Uh, within a very small window of time, like, um, and I think you and I probably could talk about peers where we've been subject to that because of the way uh politics has come up and and you experience it, it's very hard to keep your head above water. You know, I remember during the second, the second Bernie Sanders campaign and during that, what looked like it may have been the consolidation under Corbyn even cynical me who had been arguing with Mark Fisher, even when he was alive, that that his uh sympathies for corbinism were misplaced um, that it's hard to resist that lore, like, you know, even someone who can be as as cynical as me, when everyone's out in it, you're like, well, you do have to have a little bit of intellectual humility and go like maybe they see something I don't. Yeah, um, or maybe there's something about some potentiality there that I don't see. And I think that's the right impulse to have actually even even now.

C. Derick Varn: 46:26

But it sometimes it can get you lost in these events where you're like you know, well, what do we do when bernie sanders wins and you don't have a democratic party that's like built around that orientation, like what is that going to look like? Are you know? I mean, in the case of Bernie Sanders, we never got that far anyway, but in the case of Corbyn, we kind of did. We saw what it looked like and it was Stochastic, stochastic. So I think that's now we don't know what it would like if, if Corbyn had had to actually, you know, be a prime minister. But in this weird way I was thinking about the Bostrom piece, about, you know, progress is not good if you're heading in the wrong direction. Yeah, and I was thinking about that a lot today, about these other times where it seemed like we were making tangential progress on the left, but we were heading in the wrong direction and we were actually liquidating ourselves without realizing it. And in Britain today it is very obvious that that was a left liquidation.

Bram E. Gieben: 47:34

But at the time, you know, even to my center class it was not obvious at all you know I mean, um, I'll definitely share with you that, like back in 2008, I was super optimistic about the idea of occupying places and creating temporary autonomous zones. I was reading a lot of Chomsky, I was reading a lot of Hakeem Bey and I was creating an internet, you know like I'd created a website that was publishing kind of edgy alternative stuff, you know. So I'd colonized my little bit of internet and set up my own TAS, my little bit of internet and set up my own TAS. And I think, like the subsequent disillusion with all of those ideas has definitely kind of informed this book, I think. You know, in terms of looking at Corbynism, a significant thing that happened with Corbynism was that it was a populist and youth-led movement. Lots of young people joined Labour because they broadly were progressives and they saw that Corbyn, at least, was a man of integrity which swamps progressive values broadly speaking and I think broadly speaking is the level at which people, most people, think politically. So, anyway, you know, the Corbyn movement ended in a kind of firestorm of allegations of anti-Semitism and that was what happened on the doorsteps. Is that all these people who joined Labour, who were can canvassing and were out and were very positive about Corbyn's chances were faced with. You know the consequences of that, being the narrative that you know you couldn't vote for an anti-Semitic candidate, particularly not one who wouldn't push the red button if the Russians fired their nukes. So I think you know he was the victim of a big right wing smear campaign. He was the victim of a big right-wing smear campaign and when the old new Labour guard came back in and there was, like you say, a purge of the Labour left, that was a betrayal of a generation of voters. That was basically taking away at least some glimmer of hope at the ballot box from a great number of people who'd become politically involved and active.

Bram E. Gieben: 49:32

And a similar thing happened in the wake of the 2014 Scottish independence referendum. People had allowed themselves to be idealistic for a year or two. They'd allowed themselves to entertain very utopian ideas of what would happen after independence was given, and then they had to deal with the fallout. You know the morning after, when it turns out that you know we were outnumbered and outgunned and that wasn't going to happen. And again you could make arguments for and against why scottish independence would be a good thing for the left or for the for, for young people. Uh, what's?

Bram E. Gieben: 50:05

What I think is important to note is that a generation of people around that time had a crushing defeat and they felt that, rather than the optimism that they'd felt for the last few years you know, maybe the activism they'd been involved in the last few years rather than thinking this is going in the right direction, they realised it hadn't been going in the right direction for a huge, vast swath of the rest of the population. So, in terms of why people are activists and the way they're activists now, the causes they pick up, the causes they get behind, it's very, very atomized. That would be my criticism. It's atomized, but can you be surprised that it's atomized? At the points where the kind of broadly speaking progressive youth vote has tried to mobilize and get involved in mainstream politics, it's been crushed and that's consistently happened for a very long time in most of the democracies that you could probably name.

Bram E. Gieben: 50:57

A similar thing, you know, you could say a similar story, was behind what happened to Bernie not getting the nomination. So these, I think, like the state of the millennial left you know I think you mentioned the term earlier and I'm prepared to talk about it Like, I think, the state of the millennial left. You know I think you mentioned the term earlier and I'm prepared to talk about it. Like I think the state of the millennial left is, it's the legacy of a series of crushing defeats in which people have allowed themselves to have quite utopian thoughts. So imagine that, being a defeated utopian, what kind of crazy project are you going to get yourselves involved in? What kind of unrealistic demands are you going to make and how far are you going to allow yourself to be diverted when, in actual fact, disastrous consequences for kind of the whole of humanity are not just coming down the line, but are already here?

C. Derick Varn: 51:42

um, yeah, yeah, I mean, we look at today, in 2022. Um, I was actually this might also end up being a chapter in my book when I was chasing these lines of causation back. Like you look at the russia, ukraine situation and you know I'm not here to adjudicate blame, I think that's actually kind of useless. But you look at the way that all set up and you know, I I'm like I like start seeing the history at the end of the soviet union, but you really see, accelerate, not euromidon Union, but you really see it accelerate, not Euromaidan, that's actually late. You see it accelerate probably around 2002, 2003, 2004. And the divisions that paid off now led to the Ukrainian Civil War, you know which. We don't call it that, but that's what it was. You know, after Euromaidan, that's all. That's already 10 years in the timeline. Really, like, if you look at the long array of causation, like it's not that it was inevitable, but each step makes it harder and harder to move away from. And so you look at what NATO and and and Russia were doing by 2022. And the fact that, like, someone like Biden could predict it. Well, you like, yeah, but you look, if you really go back and look at the steps. It's been obvious to certain thinkers, even certain ones that I think have very dubious politics, like the American analyst Peter Zion. It becomes very clear that, like for some people, they have seen this coming now for a decade and it's pretty predictable One of the things you mentioned about the betrayal.

C. Derick Varn: 53:24

I don't want to be victim-blaming, but I do think we have to be somewhat honest that there's been an active ignoring of the past among parts of the millennial left, because the moves made around bernie have been moves we've seen before, just like the mcgovern campaign. Similarly, we seeming to reanimate the democrats that set up literally the. The whole electoral regime we have today, as far as like how we get candidates and whatnot, is a result of 68 to mcgovern, um and primaries. And if you look at even how the primary system was was set up, it's set up to initially empower more and more people democratically get involved and disempower these old smoking smoking room filled with labor union leaders. Whatever, cutting what really were corrupt deals, if we're quite honest about it, to being able to game that system for the same results through very minor reforms over the course of 40 years Incrementalism and incrementally reclaiming. Basically, I think we've seen this from Occupy to the Sanders movement in that, ironically, what that did is very similar to the betrayal you see around Starmer. But, unlike Starmer, I don't think the american version recognized how betrayed it was. Yes, people complained about bernie, but, but they immediately, under bernie's guidance, threw their hat in with the biden administration and, um, kind of got played.

C. Derick Varn: 55:03

I mean, I think that's where there's so much anger amongst young people, not just around gaza. Um, it's hard to know what any of these polls actually mean, because I've been looking at their sample sizes and they're usually less than 2 000 and I'm like god, 2 000 students is not a very bit in a country of, you know, 350 million. That's a very small sample size, but, um, nonetheless, uh, it does seem like when, when people attribute the anger with students to Biden over Gaza, it actually looks like, no, they're angry with him for other reasons. Gaza is just another feather in the cap there. But what they're feeling is this general betrayal and I suppose, if you're 19, it's easy for us to forgive that, but if you're, uh, a 35 year old millennial leftist who's actually been studying this stuff, you know, probably since your mid-20s, you should have been a lot more aware of where this was headed. I think it was perhaps like an unavoidable thing?

Bram E. Gieben: 56:08

yeah, for sure. And and I think, like you know, it's about where you go from, from what happens. When you feel like you know your effort to join in with the mainstream conversation, join in with the democratic process, join parties like the Democratic Socialist Party, get involved in organizing, If you eventually feel like there is no way that that can ever get to a place, that isn't just incrementalism, then that's going to be disillusioning, it's going to put you to towards. You know more. Being more sympathetic to the idea that the personal is political is in itself enough that you know issues around identity are sufficient for as a battleground for activism and for for political change. I think it's just that activism around those things is very difficult to affect change. It can act as a pressure group and slowly influence things over years, but that's not what's being engaged in, and I think the intensity of things like the Gaza protests at the moment speaks to the disaffection of the people protesting. They have no faith that their involvement in the system would improve it, if that makes sense. So I think that's the danger and that's the position that these people have been thrown into and that accounts for some of their anger, and also it's, you know, activism.

Bram E. Gieben: 57:27

I'm not saying that activism isn't effective. I'm definitely not saying it isn't noble or that the people who participate in it, you know, and do things that are involved in direct action in communities, those will come from a very good place. It's just very easy for activism that's designed to plug the hole in the crumbling infrastructure of apocalypse capitalism not to be co-opted by the state in the form of loans, in the form of forms and permits, you know. And similarly, the type of activism that is involved around the carnival, you know, as Zizek called it going and showing up and holding signs and waving placards is that it does feel good to participate in it. That's very, very easily neutralized or ignored. When it becomes politically dangerous, they shut it down with military force, as they did with occupy. But the fact that these um protests are allowed to continue, the fact that, uh, you know, uh, huge numbers of people in britain can march for various numbers of causes, you know that speaks to the ineffectiveness of that activism rather than the opposite. No-transcript, it's just not an ask that's particularly realistic.

C. Derick Varn: 58:59

Well, it's actually interesting. It depends on the group and what their ask is, because some of them it's diverse. Yeah, it's very different groups.

C. Derick Varn: 59:09

Some of them, the actual cost of the endowments would be quite low. If they actually go after grants, however, from the military, then their schools collapse. But I've actually noticed that most of the students haven't even put that together and this is sadly something the British share with us is that our universities, by this point, are basically endowments that have schools attached to them and the schools are the lowest part of their revenue. Source Grant writing, graduate school, the medical industrial complex and being large I mean nyu and columbia are the largest landlords in new york city that's true in uh edinburgh as well.

Bram E. Gieben: 59:57

They're, you know, one of the one of the biggest landlords in the city, and I think it's probably true in glasgow as well. They certainly own some of the uh, you know most valuable property in the best areas of the city right, um, so I mean, yeah, yeah, continental europeans are like, what are you guys talking about?

C. Derick Varn: 1:00:13

like you know, yeah, you guys have a, you know, tax supported universities that are even their private universities, which are basically low endowment and pay and pay to go. No, you know, the anglo brain rot means that we turn everything into an investment in a mechanism, no matter what.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:00:30

So, uh, this is where I'd like to take it back to Boston. Um, in the chapter that kind of touches on the simulation art, which is a paper you know, he, he, he wrote in 1999, I believe. So it came out around about the same time as the matrix movies and is as enduring a metaphor really, I think. Think you know the whole. Do we live in a simulation? Uh, stuff is pretty, pretty common trope on the internet and has been since meme culture kind of awakened, um, and and similarly, uh, the matrix, you know, with this kind of system of being pilled, like we can now apply pills to any number of things. Uh, so I mean the other day about being forest ppilled, being a forest cell, you know. So it's universally applicable because it's such an elegant metaphor.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:01:22

What Bostrom was talking about with the simulation argument was these nested levels of an ancestor simulation. So once you consider the proposition that you might live in an ancestor simulation just simulation, you know, sophisticated enough to completely replicate reality and your subjective experience of it, there's no guarantee. If there's a civilization powerful enough to produce an ancestor simulation of that quality that you couldn't tell the difference between it and reality, then there's an entire possibility that within that simulation would be another simulation of similar quality. So the problem that Ostrom comes to in that paper is how do you know when you're in the basement level, the original culture that simulated that ancestor simulation, and so it's all dependent on this notion of awakening and that goes back to the notion of um, uh, you know the red pill and the blue pill as it's put in the matrix. You've got the choice between the false reality, which is kind of very much like the capitalist consumer reality. You can have your steak and you know, drive your fast car and wear your expensive coat, you're living a life of affluence, but you're controlled. You might not know it, but you're controlled and surveilled. Or you can have the basement level, the real on the nebuchadnezzar, where it's all a bit gnarly and you've got to fight the machines. But the problem with um that as a system of metaphor, is that there's no objective proof of the reality that neo wakes up into. It's equally, you know, uh, that does not offer proof of itself, not being a simulation. The matrix never really solves that problem.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:02:50

Uh, you know, as a, as a, as a, as a system of ideas, and I think like that's uh, when you get to the bottom of the bostrom reality stack, you could still be awakened. And that's kind of the reality that we're in now, because we live in such a a hole of mirrors where we're constantly acting through avatars, we're constantly participating in simulated forms of performance and behavior and discussion and debate. Because of this, it's very, very easy for us to feel like we've been awakened, like some pink laser beam has hit through the center of our forehead and suddenly we've realized that we're wrong about one subject or another. Our eyes have been opened, but there's no subjective proof, um that you know, once you've awakened, that you've reached the bottom of that boston reality sack. That doesn't mean that there's no value in awakening. This doesn't mean there's no value in asking a question, um. So you know, I connect that to the, the writer, philip k dick.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:03:49

Um, he, he believed that he had a whole new system of time revealed to him. The way he phrased it was the empire never ended. The idea was that, you know, the Roman Empire had continued in an unbroken line and our own current, present day, time was a holographic simulation designed to keep us, you know, in check by the Roman masters, designed to keep us in check by the Roman masters and he actually believed as well that it was a computer system of alien intelligence living in space and kind of helping us in the fight against this false Roman control. So that's obviously very silly. It was all mixed up with a lot of his kind of concerns with Christianity over the years. It was a kind of a christological system and it obsessed him until his death. But it's you know it doesn't mean it doesn't have any use as a metaphor. It's still a metaphor about social control, just like his best novels, and I think that's the same with with ostrom's writing.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:04:45

Like he's become quite a controversial figure. Um, I think you know there there was an attempt to kind of cancel him over remarks he'd made on a listserv when he was much, much younger. He's associated with, you know, the kind of effective altruism movement which is, you know, increasingly discredited and I think there's a feeling that he is a reactionary thinker. You know, long-termism A lot of people have been challenging those ideas. I think you mentioned a couple earlier. The ideaer you know long termism A lot of people have been challenging those ideas. I think you mentioned a couple earlier. The idea that you know, rogue AIs are more important to think about than present day climate issues.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:05:20

But his best papers, you know, simulation Argument and also the Vulnerable World Hypothesis they almost act as satires. Satires, you know, they're like a challenge to our thinking about um, our participation in simulations, our participation as avatars rather than as subjects, with agency and uh, I think that's. That's the, that's the key to what I think he's kind of like an important thinker, um, even if, um, I don't necessarily agree with his position on things. You know, his idea of where progress might be headed and what's the right direction is probably very different from mine, but I think he's, you know, in a way these are like all clockwork metaphors for our reality and our subjective experience of it. So I think they're useful in helping us navigate a reality we exist in now which is very mediated and it and takes place through proxies a lot of the time well, I was actually.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:17

One of the things I was going to give you credit for in your book was a smart engagement with a bunch of thinkers that I would think would would think the general public maybe rightly perceives as reactionary. We talked about john gray. Yeah, um, I actually like, like I said, I think john gray isives as reactionary. We talked about John Gray. I actually like, like I said, I think John Gray is my favorite reactionary, the. The another one that you you mentioned in the Pandora dynamics chapter is Peter Turchin, and you talk a little bit about his statistical inevitability arguments, which I think are, I think, if you actually read the Cleo dynamic books, he, his books versus his, his, uh, his interview persona is actually quite interesting because his interviews but so on, and he actually seems to support a lot of the bombastic claims made by journalists and in his titles of his recent books he does so as well.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:07:06

Yeah, he's good at the like during the memefied headline, but the substance of it is a bit more.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:12

Yeah, his most recent End Times book, as well as his Ages of Discord book. But when you actually read what he says, he statistically cave about a lot which is competitions between elite offering mirroring social problems elsewhere. I think sometimes he over focuses on elites. But I was thinking maybe he has some point when we look at today and we look at like where a lot of these protest cycles go in and out no-transcript, but then there's a, there's a counter tendency that does almost the opposite but it looks very similar it, but it looks very similar. So you look at something like BLM, which twice started in very urban black poor areas about very specific events, and ended, in the first round, in elite universities, in the second round, in elite coastal cities with high wealth disparities, admittedly, but that had a completely different dynamic than the cities in which these events started. Um, you know, uh, having blm end in seattle and portland is very ironic, since those are literally some of the rightest major metropolitan areas in the country. Um, my, my point about that is there seems to be a way in which this uh thing that Turchin writes about elite overproduction gets replicated. Yeah, and, and I was thinking about something else that has that he doesn't write about but relates to it is that our elites literally don't act like they think there's a future. And I mean that in a very like strict sense, in that they don't set up, like, when has a major political party actually set up a proper succession scheme? I mean, you're in Britain where, like the Tories, haven't been able to do that ever. Biden does not have any backbench of like of any. There's no obvious successor to Biden. There's no obvious successor to to biden. There's no obvious successor to trump. Um, they're both ancient men, they're, they're, they've already. Both are over the average lifespan of the united states. So that's weird.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:05

Um, these universities are attacking their own undergraduate program. Right, and actually if you look at, like a lot of these elite universities, their undergraduate programs, increasingly a small part of what the university is is actually probably the smallest part. Columbia is a university that's mostly grad students, which is also bizarre. But you look at that and you go okay, well, you know they're attacking these elite students, but clearly, one, they feel there's too many of them and two, there is no real addressing of a future there. Like crushing your students, like this is actually like turning your own and literally, in some cases turning your own children against you and literally in some cases turning your own children against you. And in some ways it looks like prior periods.

C. Derick Varn: 1:10:54

I mentioned 1968. Literally, the Democratic Party today is talking about moving their convention partly online to avoid another 1968 convention confrontation. So you know, they're aware of their past but they have no. There is no conception of the future there. Like like the best that the that the Biden vision could ever offer anyone was a return to a prior normal. It was not a new and better future. Um, it was. You know. We're not America's already great, are you know? We're going to return to the pre-pandemic world. We're going to return to the pre-pandemic world. We're going to return to the pre-Trump world. None of that happened. I mean, one of the ironies of the Biden administration is they actually mainly codified Trump era policies.

C. Derick Varn: 1:11:39

But the other thing that's really sort of shocking about it is and I do think maybe this relates to your book a bit they don't seem to have any vision of their own future, even aesthetically. So I I was telling someone the other day, well about a month ago, that it's shocking how, how the taste of the elites are so pedestrian and and I was like. The reason why that's shocking to me isn't, like some, like you know, sn. It's not like, oh, I think that elite taste should be better because it was in the past. Look at all those great elites. It's more that it indicates to me that they don't have even an aesthetic program to bequeath to the future.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:23

Like, if you think about avant-garde stuff and its relationship to elite culture, there's a lot of philistines involved, but that's. There is a sort of like I am passing down the tone of the future. We, the elite, see it. You pretty plebeians do not, in your bad, undistinct taste, right when, but when the when the elite cores like this don't have that distinction, you actually get the feeling like they don't have anything to be, they're not thinking about the future in that way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:12:53

Um, so I wanted to ask you like and maybe this is a way to tie this back in the fisher what do you do when, like, even the people who are in charge of society don't seem to have their vision of, uh, of the future either? There's not an extension of the present into the future which these people can speak to? And I think, yeah, it's really obvious in the uk, like it's kind of obvious in america, but the uk is like you know. You guys are turning you, your country into argentina, like as we, as we watch, and argentina's turning into something else even worse. So, like, uh and inflation's crazy. Um, it looks like kirsten is going to run in a landslide, despite being massively unpopular, and uh, it also looks like that labor is going to do very little with that and there's going to be very little difference between the five scattershot tory governments and whatever the fuck's coming up with the labor government. If they win which I like, I said, mathematically it's almost impossible that they don't. So what do you make of that?

Bram E. Gieben: 1:13:53

A couple of things I mean. First of all, I'd say I'm 43 and I've never had, I've never seen a left wing government in my time. I don't consider the new Labour government or the coalition, you know Tory liberal government to be anything approaching progressive forces. You know they were absolutely emblematic in their support of neoliberalism and while you could say that Blair's version of that, you know, achieved a lot in terms of levelling society out a little bit, making it a little less unfair, it didn't fundamentally change the goalposts of Thatcherite neoliberalism. It absolutely reinforced them with a lot of its decisions. So, yeah, yeah, is starmer going to give us anything other than you know, an even more tory-like, um you know, version of that? It's really really hard to say. I think you know I'm probably quite disaffected politically as well. I think I probably struggle to tell you you know which way I'd lean in terms of supporting someone to vote for. But to return to turchin a little bit, you know what he says about um elite overproduction. He says it's a bellwether for a society in decline. He says that you get to a certain point and if you look back at all the historical examples, um, the points at which instability comes into being are much less frequently to do with the working class rising up and having a revolution, are much more frequently to do with just being too many bureaucrats, too many, um people with, you know, in competition for elite jobs, um, or elite roles in society. And so he said, you know he uses that as a, as a, as a way of predicting some sort of collapse or end times. Um, but again it's, you know, it's phrased in such a way that what he's talking about is using his clear, dynamic system to avoid or mitigate some of the consequences of that, and what he prescribes is, is is itself, quite broadly speaking, a neoliberal solution, you know, um. So I think that's where it was going in that chapter of trying to compare these different forms of prediction.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:15:53

Um, one of the others I talked about was effective altruism, and william mccaskill developed this system called quality adjusted life years, and that's a way of calculating the life quality to individuals that you might be able to help philanthropically, say, one is blind and the other is paraplegic. Based on the quality of life, you could assess which one to save. So it's a very cold and mechanistic way of looking at charitable government and infrastructure activism, and I think it allowed the effective altruist movement to justify a lot of things. One of the basic calculations of effective altruism would be that it'd be more effective for you to, you know, go work on Wall Street and donate a significant portion of your income to the right funds than it would be to go and train as a doctor and work in the developing world saving lives and that was Amir Seredovastin's criticism of effective altruism. Effectively, was that? That's such a cold calculus. It's, uh, you know, it's very, very subject to your, your movement being filled with um corporate interests who basically want a calculus to be able to defend selfish choices. And even one of the effective altruist movements themselves, um, ended up buying a mansion to hold ea events in for celebrity guests, you know.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:17:13

So I think, like in the same way that mccaskill's system is a mathematical logic, that if you apply a kind of religious faith in it because you don't really understand how qualities work, similarly with church's clear dynamics, if you say, okay, well, he made a good prediction in 2010 that after the 2020 election, amer America would be very unstable and so therefore he's plausible, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that their logic is going to play out in that way and you actually have no way of telling, because you're making bets on a future you won't see. This is the problem with all kind of predictive systems, kind of predictive systems. That's why I kind of touch on um harry selden from the asimov novels about foundation is that you know, for for as much as harry selden's system was a method of predicting history, psychohistory, and as much as it shared with turchin a kind of analysis of the broad sweep of the ups and downs of um you know, human cultures and human knowledge and human progress, it was not focused on prediction as much as it was focused on preservation. So the point of the foundation is to act as an arc for human culture, not to preserve human culture itself but to preserve the stuff of human culture. So I think you know, for me that was where I tried to position myself, both politically, socially and in terms of offering any kind of solution or way out to the you know, the very grim worst case scenario logics that I've put in the book, because I think it's very important for us to value the role of archivist.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:18:48

We're in the business of creating things. We're in the business of creating things. We're in the business of telling stories. You know when, thousands of years from now, either our descendants or an alien species kind of stumble across what we've produced. We don't know if they're going to find it useful. We don't know if they're going to be able to understand it. All we can do is hope to add to the archive and hope that there are archivists to preserve it. So I think that's where I land with regard to predictive systems. Is that systems?

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:22

that preserve are probably more valuable than systems that predict.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:24

Yeah, I go back and think about the.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:26

You know I'm kind of a historian of Marxism Arsatz at this point and didn't set out to do that not trained for that but nonetheless is what it ended up kind of being uh, and you definitely see this like response of predictability in marxism where like, uh, yeah, marx, marx makes a couple predictions in the 1850s and moves away from that because they don't happen and he realizes the problems and you get this sort of moving away from trying to count the eggs before they hatch. But there is this inevitability doctrine in early, second international and third international Marxism that is carried over, which leads to all sorts of attempts to predict the quote final crisis or this or that, and it actually it's Marxist to be all over the place politically because their predictions keep on being wrong and they keep on having to adjust them and make political alliances, partially based on this predictive analysis, based on this predictive analysis I think that's Gray's criticism of Marxism generally is that any theory that depends on the teleological analysis of a final event followed by some sort of utopian society?

Bram E. Gieben: 1:20:42

that's completely changed. For him that's just another allegory for the Christian tradition, it's just another allegory for there being an afterlife, some other allegory for there being a savior. So he's skeptical to the point of complete nihilism about any teleological system. For him it's almost like it's very easy to identify patterns when you only live, you know, a fraction of 100 years, because on either side of you in history are going to be 100 year movements, but over a long enough timescale. He doesn't find the evidence for a system like Turchin's that would say that there are these echoes and repeating phases. For him it's chaos and there's no reason to presume that the arc of any one culture, the arc of any economic system, ideological system, is going to end in a certain place. Anything can happen.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:37

Yeah, well, this is the thing with Turchin. I actually find Turchin's predictions to be a little bit more problematic than a lot of other people do, because I actually find Turchin's understanding of the past to be more selective than other people do. When I read his book about, like he basically thinks that the that this generational cycle thing explains all of history mathematically and there's only one variable that changes. It's uh, before the industrial revolution mouth. This is right. After the industrial revolution mouth. This is that's the only thing he changes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:22:18

But then he like reifies national blocks going backwards and forwards in history, so like national data sets are read as like descriptive and even about areas of which we can't really talk about these things being nations in any way that we would talk about today, like when you're talking about like ancient empires, discrete national borders and whatnot, they don't exist the way they do now. So the trying to read that world in terms of these data sets is a very weird thing to actually do, but it also leads to like crazy stuff in in the contemporary moment are in the just right before the contemporary moment. So, for example, when, uh, when Turchin goes to explain the 1950s in the United States and ages of discord. Um, what does he do? Well, he says, like, well, it was just this time period where the elites, for whatever reason, were nice and let labor to the table, right, and he's only talking about it in terms of the United States, right, all right, how do you miss that? There's a global context for for why, uh, the bourgeoisie would have been willing to play that game in that time period?

C. Derick Varn: 1:23:29

Like, like, if you miss that in your theory of like, why everything is going the way it is and you're, like, not looking at world war ii as causative, you're not looking at the existence of the soviet union as causative, um, why should I trust you on your analysis of other things? Because that's, that's blatant, like for sure, right, and he's also not. He's not looking at uf wealth patterns after world war ii, like, like the whole. You know, famously, george kennan points out oh, the united states has 48 of the world still surviving wealth, because the rest of it was destroyed in world war ii or hasn't been unvalorized and undervalued nations. And like, when you're talking about, like, the long array of american politics and you don't mention that stuff, I don't know why I should take your predictions all that seriously.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:24:17

Um, I mean, I would say like maybe a better bellwether of a declining culture is its tendency to produce narratives in the form of totalizing systems. Like I've been reading a lot of hannah and it strikes me that her historical analysis doesn't depend on producing a definitive viewpoint on anything. She does attempt to offer definitions, like in on violence. She's very, very much in the project of trying to tease out the difference between power and violence and and concepts like that, but she's not making a definitive statement. And where she is making the definitive statement is because she's drawing on, like generations of thinkers and saying this is a broad consensus and she's letting you still come to your own conclusions.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:25:02

I think you know, even if, um you read the whole of turchin's book and didn't pay attention to the more kind of hyperbolic statements he makes, sometimes in interviews and on you know in articles, um, nonetheless, what he's selling there is a totalizing system. So he's selling you a tool that you could use to understand why the world that's like. It is much like Jordan Peterson's 12 rules for life. So I would say that you know, like his very writing, his attempt to produce a system that's going to explain why things feel like they feel is itself a symbol of a culture in decline, a culture that's still trying to find the new big story, when perhaps there isn't another chapter. You know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:47

You know that open-endedness in the faith that the future will settle. This is not there.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:25:52

Yes.

C. Derick Varn: 1:25:56

Okay, so this brings us back to where we started, and I think this will be a good final stretch of our conversation. Let's talk about Mark Fisher. Mark Fisher's clearly an inspiration to you. I literally started an essay on the ghost of my life where I say that Mark Fisher is a weird ghost in my own life.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:25

Um, but, uh, you know, for for reasons that are much discussed elsewhere, just in, in happenstance, because, um, I had read capitalist realism before I published the vampire castle essay, but, but, but, beyond that, I had no idea who he was like. I, I think I'd come across k-punk in the aughts, uh, and read some of it, found it interesting, but then I was like, also do losing atari gobbledygook, I'm, I'm going elsewhere and, uh, and I find fisher's capitalist realism, which I've recently reread, and his, uh, ghost of my life, which is another book that I find more problematic, but actually more interesting, because it's more problematic, very interesting, as composed to late Fisher and the politics of joy period and all that where, but I was struck by your reading of him and where there's real problems, even in capitalist realism, where he almost posits insanity or depression as beginnings of a liberatory politics. Um, and this, this focus in fisher on on mental health and by by the end of his writings. You know, when he gets into the work of david small and whatnot, he's literally full-on anti-psychiatric. But also, in a way, going back and reading those writings, even though they're not even from a decade ago, it's interesting how much he gets wrong about where the therapeutic is going to go, because he thinks they're about to double down on pills and stuff forever. And I'm like, oh, that's all about to end, buddy, like it's actually about to end very soon.

C. Derick Varn: 1:27:57

Um, so I was going to ask you, what do you make of capitalist realism now? What do you make of those elements where he tries to find very individualistic, very psychological ways out? And what do you think about his later populist stuff where he's really doubling down on voluntaristic hope in a way that I don't think ends up being all that healthy?

Bram E. Gieben: 1:28:24

so let me talk a bit about, like, my experience of reading Fisher and where I discovered him and what he means to me. Um, so I started in music journalism around about 2003 and I think I discovered K-Punk around a similar time and I'd always been actually a fan of music journalism. I used to get Select Magazine, nme, melody Maker, and that was an era where there were really incredible journalists writing for all of those papers and music criticism was engaged in as a really serious thing and for me, fisher really elevated that by bringing critical theory into it in K-punk and that was really a gateway into critical theory for me. I have a little bit of a background in it because my dad is a social scientist. He taught at the European University and edited a book called Stuart Hall in the 1980s. So I'd read a little bit of Stuart Hall and I kind of had a political consciousness, read a little bit of Stuart Hall in that and I kind of had a political consciousness.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:29:24

What K-punk opened up for me was that there was a mode of writing about pop culture that would use this analysis and I think you know in my first few years as a journalist that was very much just like an aspiration that I couldn't really fulfill because of the nature of the stuff that I was writing. So it's taken me away a long time to find my way to writing in that kind of, like you said, maybe post-Fisher style, and I think in a way I've always admired his craft and his style more, in a way, than the politics is concerned. I also take as a starting point a lot of you know the key points from capitalist realism that he's made most you know. Obviously, it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Of course, even that style doesn't belong necessarily to Fisher. It has its roots in Frederick Jameson.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:30:23

Slavoj Žižek is another great example of writing about culture, using critical and critical theory to analyze it and, um, I think you know it can also be a little bit of a shallow approach sometimes. Like you know, it's not like, um, taking a political idea and then talking about any form of media in order to make it accessible. Is is just a brilliant formula. I think it's quite hard to get right the balance of, you know, using pop culture to analyze serious ideas. In terms of you know, the different stages of Fisher, I think capitalist realism is an odd one.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:30:54

It's such a slim volume that I have reread it a few times and it strikes me it struck me the last time how much um, personal detail there is from his life, particularly about, you know, his work as a lecturer and working in a college. So I think, like it's easy to think of him in terms of some of the aphorisms that his work has generated and not to consider that there was, you know, uh know, like blogging was a huge stylistic influence on him, and even when he was writing Capitalist Realism, which has been read and taken as inspiration, you know, as a manifesto, it's still full of details about his personal life, I think as well. You know the fact that he's not here to evolve those ideas that he might have been wrong about is really interesting. I think there's a lot of people, for instance, that would like to forget the Vampire's Castle essay and say, well, if Fisher was around now, he would have changed his mind about all of that.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:31:53

When someone's gone, their ideas are all that survive and the contradictions between those ideas are the interesting parts of what's left. And the contradictions between those ideas are the interesting parts of what's left. You know, the attempt to kind of, I guess, like have a consistent voice is something that living authors are engaged in. So for me, like that's why I really like reading Mike Watson's work, because I think he's really really good at picking up parts of Fisher and running with them to a place that Fisher might have run, but also to different places. You know he's also not afraid to challenge some of the parts of Fisher's work that you've been talking about there. So I think it's maybe the work of other writers to reconcile those contradictions or even problematize them.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:32:37

For me, the big legacy of Fisher, like I say, is that his style and that way of talking about pop culture using critical theory is probably the biggest influence on my writing. I'd say as well, probably without Fisher I wouldn't have maybe read farther into critical theory. You know I don't come from an academic background of philosophy or critical theory. I come from literary criticism. So, yeah, he opened up a world for me through music criticism that led to a much broader perspective. So he'll definitely always be a huge influence on me. I think it's maybe up to other writers to carry that on in different ways and explore those contradictions, you know.

C. Derick Varn: 1:33:21

Yeah, well, there's a couple of things I really like about Fisher, one of the people working I mean we have to also remind ourselves of the critical theory milieu of the aughts when capitalist realism is written Fisher, as part of this blogging movement, you know, uh, early zero books, um, for good and ill, was made up of academics and lecturers who were in a precarious situation often, who got their start as bloggers both in the in the united states and in britain, um, doing all kinds of various things. I mean object oriented ontology, which seems very removed from other stuff. Now, uh, that was that first round um of writers. Then, even even when Fisher was in charge of zero, much less when Doug Lane took it over and included Skelly Wags, like myself, in the editorial process, um, uh it, it was a very different milieu and included Skelly Wagslot myself in the editorial process. It was a very different milieu. And one thing I could tell when I was reading your book is like you structure an essay, like Fisher structures an essay, like there's an introduction to the concept in pop culture, then there's a launch off into something else. In fact, I would say one of the differences between you ironically since you come out of the literary criticism world and music criticism, and as a person who also got my writing start, also in music, I was not a journalist, I was a zine writer.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:55

I didn't even get that far but was in music, journalism, and then I do have formal training in philosophy and also literary theory, and in America, literary theory and critical theory I have this strange feeling they've always been more together than they are in Europe. Weirdly, like that's. If you were encountering European theory in an American university in the 90s and aughts, you were actually probably encountering it in a literature program where the philosophy programs were. There were some continentals allowed. People would talk about Nietzsche all the time, but most of it was analytic philosophy, so our historical philosophy, pre-20th century stuff. It was not critical theory.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:53

But, fisher, when I talk about that, though, the way critical theorists read about pop culture in the 90s and the early aughts was totally inaccessible. I mean, I actually do agree with that, pierre bardu, you know, characterization of, uh, post-structuralist intellectuals in the 70s and 80s as like basically distinction terrorists, mongering, the fact that you can't figure out their symbolic game systems, um, fisher, you know, I guess jishak is another person, um, but fisher's whole goal seemed to be to make that stuff accessible even more than james made it popular right, yeah, and I I really appreciate that because there's a.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:36:33

you know that's one of the. The principles of journalism is is like clarity, um, and accessibility, um, those are, those are important things in writing, and I think he humanized a lot of quite complex bits of critical theory in a really interesting way. Yeah, I think that's quite what you said. There's very perceptive.

C. Derick Varn: 1:36:56

Yeah, so you know, and so Fisher. For me was like a way to engage in that without me having to spend hours and hours decoding Derrida-Dees or figuring out what exactly weird thing from Heidegger that somebody may or may not have been understanding correctly. You know, fisher, you didn't have to do that, it was actually a relief. Now I want to give the British critical theorist, going all the way back to the kind of new left Marxist historians, a little bit of credit. And lo and behold on me to give the British any credit for anything. But in general, the British critical theory tradition writes clearer than in Americans or French. We, you just do like the American Americans, we like to pretend that we're French, even though we also hate them for some reason that I don't quite understand. I have a theory about this, but it's, it's not a political one, it's just, you know, the bourgeois revolutionary traditions having jealousy about each other and in denial that they look alike, but uh, um, nonetheless, I think it's.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:37:57

I think it's really interesting when, when I think about fisher and the lineage of Stuart Hall or Frederick Jameson, all of whom are so one of the reasons I think Stuart Hall wrote in such a clear and accessible way was perhaps to do with the fact he was engaged with the Open University.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:38:16

European University was meant to be, you know, a university that you could attend, like a correspondence college basically, but it was, you know, affordable and also the materials were accessible. And what that meant is that, you know, Stuart Hall was a huge figure in the new left before the? U was founded, was able to contribute to texts that were then, you know, broadly used by universities that were teaching them more complicated stuff, because it gave an accessible in to, you know, subjects like you know how the discourse shaped our formations of modernity and questions like that. But even if you go back to his early writings, you know, when he was writing for British newspapers, there's a lucidity and a precision there and I think in a lot of ways he's, you know, definitely one of the forebears of Fisher, in the sense of being able to write about these things in a clear prose style and communicate those ideas in an uncomplicated way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:18

So I guess this does you know, the two most important books for me by fisher are, I mean, there's really, there's, there's, I guess, a strange and eerie too, and I don't think about that one. There's another one that I always forget about, but, um, capitalist realism goes to my life and when you talk about the parts of you know, capitalist realism, when you see parts of fisher's life go through, because it's part of this blogging thing that he's kind of cleaning up and making into a book, that's also true, I think, doubly so, in Ghost of my Life, where there's just so much of his own life in there, even though it's not obvious necessarily, and I'm not a person who is, you know, like a close friend of Mark. We, we exchanged some letters.

C. Derick Varn: 1:40:01

I published an infamous essay, I wrote a response to it and then I wrote some questions for Doug Lane to ask Fisher on an interview once, and that's been, you know, and other than private, like messages back and forth, you know, corresponding me, asking questions me, me riddling him to try to get a coherent theory of class out of him. That was a something I really tried to do, like, um, uh, but he really resisted it, like really actively resisted it, um, nonetheless, um, I found, I find that today that Fisher is also symptomatic to me, but in a way that's different, because it also intersects with my personal life, because most of the figures are people that I don't know. I'm not claiming this insight or insight to Fisher. We never even met in person. We only exchanged articles and and questions and correspondence. But, like um, um, that makes him an interesting figure for me because for sure.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:14

Uh, there's also a way in which I'm haunted by his legacy, cause I literally worked for his press that he left, um, and I published, uh, the vampire castle essay but also critiqued it, and so he's an interesting figure for me and I find him to be, just like you mentioned earlier, a person who people have tried to freeze in time, including some of his biggest defenders, and to pick elements of him that are easier to handle, like we try to present a clear, unified Fisher, and I think one of the things I got from your discussions and Mike Watson's discussions and actually just reading books myself and I could mention I'm writing something on Ghost of my Life myself is that he's actually not all that of a consistent figure.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:57

There are interesting fracture lines. Even when I mentioned the class, I kept on accusing him of not having a marxist theory of glass, which I still stand by, but but I actually went through his work, uh, and through k-punk later on and I was like, well, no, he does here but not here, and he does here but not here yes, exactly and I think like yeah like.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:42:18

I've had the chance to read a little bit of mike's next book, which, which is about, you know, addiction and you know, online capitalism, and he very much kind of does attempt to deal with two of the kind of, I guess, unfinished aspects of Fisher's work that you've talked about One, the mental health discourse and one the kind of half-formed ideas of acid communism. So I think you'll find it really interesting where Mike's gone on the on those two points. I think for me, you know I'm less interested in the acid communism stuff. I'm sure I'm sure that that has some value in it and I'll return to that part of his work. I am very interested in how he wrote about mental health and I actually had to kind of slightly keep that out of this book because I feel like it would have added several other chapters. I think I'm going to probably return to it. Um, you know how a person, as a person who's had psychiatric treatment for a large part of his life, who takes psychiatric medicine, you know I'm very interested in the discourse around things like the dsm categories, the definitions of mental illness. I'm interested in discussions around, you know, the anti-carceral part of mental health discourse.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:43:28

At the moment, one of the best writers on this, of course, is Freddie DeBoer, and the fact that you know some of Freddie's writing not just is an analysis of his own experiences with bipolar disorder but also of, you know, there are essays out there written by Freddie Richer, among his best work, which he says he can't read because he wrote them when he was in a manic bipolar phase. So I think, you know, deborah is a perfect example of somebody whose collective works, if they're assembled, you know, long after he's gone, will contain many contradictions, and that's because they were written in different phases of consciousness, driven by his own mental health, his own subjective experience of reality. I am absolutely sure the same is true of fisher, as someone who experienced depressive disorder. Um, and I think there's there's almost like a fatalism in reading the work of anybody who took their own life and it. You know he's far from the only philosopher in that category, um, but in the same way that, like I can be um massively an admirer of zizek's ideas, I would distance myself from many of the things that he's written about Islam or about migration. And similarly I can look at the work of someone like Valerie Silvanus and be a massive fan of the way that she satirized, you know, the concepts of masculinity, femininity, without necessarily meaning that I like endorse the fact she shot under Warhol or Ted Kaczynski is another person who's who's writing I've taken a lot from. Obviously I'm not going to endorse him as, as a bomber, and I think you know so. The same logic for me applies to Guy Debord, to Mark Fisher. It's, it's too tempting to try and frame what they wrote around what their fate was. I don't think that that's necessarily helpful and I also think it is possible to pick and choose from the writing and the thinking of people who massively contradict themselves, whether that's a contradiction between what they wrote and what they did or within the writing itself. Yeah, if that makes sense, I think, like that's. That's where I would agree with fisher is that I think having that wildly diverging psychological perspective on things may be a way to produce forms of writing or forms of ideas that push a little bit beyond. Um, you know what, what the conventional thinking is, but out in the wilds it's going to be chaotic, I think.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:46:03

For Fisher, he wrote about capitalism as being subject to bipolar cycles. That swings up and down the periods of mania, the periods of depression. I think the world of capitalism is maybe a little bit more similar to borderline personality disorder, cluster B disorders where you can be acting out in the world. More similar to borderline personality disorder, you know, cluster B disorders where nobody really you can be acting out in the world, having all sorts of grave consequences for your life without really understanding the underlying traumas and triggers that cause those. I think you know, if anything, there's no pattern in the cycles of boom and bust in capitalism that resembles bipolar, I think, is much more resembles the kind of um behavioral deficiencies or or problematics of of a cluster b disorder. So yeah, I'm very interested in what fisher has to say about mental health and and it's definitely an area of his writing where I would simultaneously be able to argue that you know probably the same conclusions and also the opposite, I think you know, yeah, uh, my, my readings of fisher have been.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:11

They alternate between, I think some of that stuff is insightful and some of that stuff is a horrible uh set of don't take all fisher's advice, um, about mental health, um, but I I do think that there's something. I mean you mentioned bung chul han in your book, who's uh, another theorist who's very frustrating to me and in a way that like I don't have the same relationship to as fisher, where I sometimes I just get like there's a lot of times where I agree with bung chul han but still want to throw his book across the room because I don't think he proved his point. He just, like you know, asserted it, but not even as boldly as john gray does. So it was, um, but I do think that there's. There's something there about the intersection of psychology.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:56

I was thinking about this the other day. If you were to like, uh, write down what the dominant science of our day was off of our discourse around it, you would think right now we were having like this heyday of of psychology. But if you actually look at the scientific literature, this actually is a period of particularly what the fuckness when it comes to like almost all the presumptions of replicability. I mean there's been massive paradigm shifts on it, like can we even talk about depression as a coherent singular thing, et cetera, et cetera.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:48:33

But that's approaching maybe something that Fisher was driving towards right, which is that our psychologies are actually bound up with our societies, that they're not. The disorders don't exist within the person, they're well woven into the social fabric, and I think there is, you know, like mainstream discourse is moving more towards that absolutely there is maybe a political gap to step into there, where you can therefore say that mental health discourse is inherently political.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:49:04

But this mental health conditions are, you know, caused in part by the, you know, the system of capitalism within which they exist, that they're inextricable um so, yeah, maybe he's had already some influence there on the broader political spectrum, rather than just the theory, if you see what I mean.

C. Derick Varn: 1:49:22

Yeah, well, I think also we've had to deal with the fact that, like, yes, there's problematic assumptions in anti-psychology and you know, david's smell is not even the worst there. I mean, you know we can get into Thomas Saz and those people, but there is a real sense in which, like Thomas Saas and those people, but there is a real sense in which even the therapeutic has had to deal with the fact that therapeutic is socially instantiated. But I think that leads you to a series of. I think it leads to more difficulties and answers. Actually, when we talk about, like this proliferation of, of self-therapeutic culture, because therapy is so expensive that you know, a lot of people end up doing it and going through it and self-diagnosing and everything on tech talk, and it's become a kind of identity issue in a way that I don't think Fisher could have foresaw there's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:25

It's funny that you mentioned borderline personality disorder. I'm also a scholar of Christopher Lash, another person from a different time period, who also was a critical theorist, who wrote maybe too clearly in a way that became a problem in Iran, and I don't want to just parrot all of Lash's paradigms because I'm not a Freudian in that sense and I also think some of it is slightly pseudoscientific, but I do think he did have an insight in his culture of narcissism. That's quite interesting in that he, when you mentioned borderline, he actually talked about Fordism as secondary narcissism, talked about fordism as secondary narcissism and what was developing what we'd later call neoliberalism, uh, as primary narcissism. And then, if you extrapolate from that schema, what would come after those two things, if you continue down that path, would be borderline personality. Cluster b disorders, so like are what he would call in a classical Freudian sense, like total psychic devastation.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:27

So in that sense, I do think there's an interesting schema there where this focus on the self moves from, like, identifying yourself with the institution one form of narcissism to identifying the only limit to the self being yourself primary narcissism to not feeling like you have a self at all because you're constantly constructing it. You're actually having to construct authenticity all the time, which leads to authenticity being completely unavailable to you. This is a good bunch of home point. Well, if you take that framework from Lashen and Freud, it actually indicates you are in borderline world where, like, you're just wanting people to recognize you and it's leading to an incoherent and disordered relations where you don't understand your triggers, you don't understand your limitations and you're just basically responding in more and more hyperbolic ways um, I did an episode of the podcast about like wellness, cults and, and the idea that celebrity is the ultimate uh, parasite essentially a psychic parasite that we have, because they represent that unattainable, perfected, photoshopped wellness.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:52:39

But they also advocate that you can always improve yourself, work on yourself. So you know, I think these ideas are very live, but at the same time I think you know, I mean, you know jonathan hate writes about, about anti-fragility. Uh, the human body is anti-fragile. If you, if you don't exercise, then the muscles get weaker. You know it has to experience adversity in order to become strong. And he makes that same argument about mental health.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:53:04

And while I think, like a lot of hates, arguments are basically small c, conservative arguments pull yourself up by your bootstraps, maybe try doing a bit of this, a bit of that. And they do broadly echo things like cognitive behavioral therapy. You know I've had benefit from those forms of behavioral therapy which are about looking at your assumptions, looking at, you know, the way that you frame your readings of narratives within the world and within other people's behaviors. So I, you know, in a way like my view on that is less towards the anti-psychiatric and more towards the pro-psychiatric, and I think those interventions are helpful if they're about not even building like a more coherent self, but about building more functional stuff. And it certainly surprised me to find that what has helped me out of depressive states, or you know what has helped me out of depressive states or you know, aberrant behavior, has been more structure, has been, uh, you know, more, more of a, more organization within my life and more structure, uh, that's.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:54:10

That's kind of the opposite of what I maybe would have expected. I might have, you know, thought like if I could be freer, then I will be happier or less confined or oppressed. In actual fact, the more rigid the structure is, I think, the more comfortable I am. And where that brings me back to Byung-Chul Han is that it can be quite comfortable to be the citizen of a panopticon.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:54:36

It's quite a beguiling image, especially for people with narcissistic tendencies, to never know if they're being watched, but always believe that they are, and I kind of think that's where we find ourselves. So then it's just for me about how do you react to that as an individual. If it's the case that we are going to be surveilled, we are going to be monitored, we could be subject to a collapse, which would mean dwindling or patchy infrastructure. You know we can entertain all of these as things that might happen, but they are already happening to people all over the world. They have already happened in history to people you know people without you know millions, thousands of people in history have lived under oppressive regimes, have lived through periods where there was harsh censorship or controls or limits on behavior.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:21

It's actually sort of the historical norm actually.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:55:23

People are living there now. It's the historical norm, and so therefore, we can temper idealism about how society should be with the recognition that it's possible to live under conditions that most of us would maybe consider intolerable and also would be quite happy to ignore, as long as they aren't happening to us yeah, I, I do think that it gives us the point of hope, although I was gonna ask you have you read a lot in the communization theory?

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:51

because your book, weirdly, in a way that doesn't read like communization theory at all.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:55:56

But no, I don't think I have read a lot of that stuff. Name a few authors I might have picked uh er Aaron Ben-Yev, the Endnotes Collective. I haven't come across these guys, but it's Endnotes Collective.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:09

Yeah, tycoon in France, those guys Because I'm not a communization theorist, I have a lot of critiques in, but I do think some of the stuff that they talk about is becoming comfortable with failure and collapse as actually the precondition for actually having movement, like yes, like it is the idea that, like, get rid of your old hopes and dreams and find new hopes and dreams, and in the process of letting that go, and while I don't come to the conclusions they do, like I'm not going to get into specific ones about environmental collapse or the riot as the primary form of political activism and blah, blah, blah, because I also agree with you actually focus on riots.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:54

It's like focus on occupations is actually getting kind of torn up in the immediate carnival response are, in this case, carnival as far as fire or natural reaction even, um, but I do think that there's there's a sense in which like, uh, I push back on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:57:11

You know, people are gonna read your book and they're gonna think you're blackpilled. I, I brought that up in the beginning. People are constantly accusing me personally of being like too negative, black pill, whatever, and I'm like, but if you, if you think I'm doing it just so that the end result is you feel like there's nothing. That's not the point. The point is, like some of these hopes you're using to obscure reality in a way that makes them an impossible hope, whereas if you were to remove the, the coping mechanism, you could actually build a real, more substantive, more more durable, possibly actionable hope and precisely it derrick, and I think the way I phrase that in the book is that to to say that we're living in a world with no future is to demand that the future is reimagined yeah, um, I'm super excited about your book.

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:05

I'm glad that we're on the same press, even though I think I have a strange feeling that revo press is going to get. It is going to get, uh, an attitude of being the bummer of the left presses like yeah I.

Bram E. Gieben: 1:58:17

I've had a, I've had a wee glimpse at some of the other covers and I think we are all kind of like coming for some of the utopian shibboleths. But I think there's always a bit of hope in those narratives about the negative side of things, like we've been saying. You know, unless you pass through the eye of the needle, how are you going to see what's on the other side?

C. Derick Varn: 1:58:44

Yeah, yeah, and I think that's a, that's, that's a, a good place to end and a good place to end your book, which you did, because otherwise I would say it gets pretty heavy, I would. I'm just going to plug when I, when I read your book, I was like, oh, oh, you have this thought worm that I also have, and you've been reading this reactionary thinker, that I also read, that I didn't think anyone else read. So, um, I very much felt a kinship by reading your book.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:14

I was like, ah, someone else who, like, thinks peter turchin's a weirdo um someone else who like thought that, yeah, nick bostrom's a reactionary but there's actually interesting stuff in that book. Like um are those series of I mean, that book that I have by him is actually a series of essays that were probably about 15 years but, um, someone else who paid attention to saint bat, batman, st Batman free, being a weird, uh effective altruist. I think everyone's picking that up now. But, um, yeah, so I, I do think uh, people who, who, like Varn world, are going to like this book, and I also think people should check out your podcast.

C. Derick Varn: 1:59:55

I, um, I actually listened to one of the episodes with joshua ellis to prepare for this and I was like really much, like, oh yeah, this guy like knows like some of the stuff about america in a really intimate way. That's really uh good to kind of work through that, you don't? I find it weird actually that leftists don't talk more about leftists in america. I understand my british leftist wouldn't, but like don't talk more about the weird repercussions of american regulations and laws and their downstream effects, because they actually are really important when we're talking about, like, what are we going to do about the environment? Well, there's been weird knock on stuff.

Bram E. Gieben: 2:00:31

If you want to be an effective activist, then thinking about infrastructure and how that could be improved to support climate goals is absolutely a place to start.

Bram E. Gieben: 2:00:42

Yeah, that could be improved to support climate goals is absolutely a place to start. Yeah, no, thank you for taking time to consider all the ideas in the book and to engage with me. I really, really appreciate it. I'm very much excited to read yours now for similar reasons, um, so, yeah, no, hopefully we can. We can do a little podcast exchange. We'll have you back on strange exiles when your book comes and we'll uh, we'll have another big chat then.

C. Derick Varn: 2:01:01

Yeah, I have about four chapters half written. So like um, uh, for, for those of you who don't know, um, I've been writing a book on chris for lash that I set aside to write this book, not that I'm never going to do the last book, but my co-author in the last book is finishing a dissertation and we thought she optimistically thought it would take about a year and a half to finish. And we're like three years into this now and I'm like, ok, so I'm doing this book in the interim on my big scholarly Christopher Lash monstrosity. But, but it's, it is on similar themes. It's more focused on specifically the the, the way there has been a weird dynamic of flipping back and forth between ideas, between vertical horizontalism and and apocalypticism and hyper-optimism. That sounds brilliant Matt.

Bram E. Gieben: 2:02:03

That sounds really fascinating.

C. Derick Varn: 2:02:05

Mark Fisher and David Graeber almost literally manifesting two specters of this, even going back and forth in opposite positions and different points of their own lives, and trying not to make them univocal, because I actually think that's a fundamental mistake with both. Graber tried to mean more univocal than Fisher did, I think, but neither one of them are actually terribly consistent. And I would also venture to say, if you read Bram's or my work over the course of 20 years, you would be like, oh, those guys are right. I mean for me, I mean like when, when I started writing, I was a fucking reactionary, so like, um, you would very much be inconsistent.

Bram E. Gieben: 2:02:50

I think trying to impose univocality on a person is is, uh, is a fundamental mistake, um, it's again maybe a consequence of us all thinking of ourselves as brands, because if you, if you are, if you think of yourself as a brand, then it's a good thing to be reduced to a single aphorism, but I think Mark, as a writer, would probably resist that.

C. Derick Varn: 2:03:11

Definitely Well. On that note, thank you so much. People should check out your book.

Bram E. Gieben: 2:03:18

You can get the book at linktreecom forward. Slash the darkest timeline. That's nice. It's over there All right. Thank you so much for having me, man. Yeah, thank you.