Futurism Restated #90: Nothing Is Real
Futurism Restated #90: Nothing Is Real
(Sung to the tune of Bill Callahan’s “My Apocalypse”): My Impostor
(This week’s newsletter opens with a somewhat long account of a recent encounter with an impostor account on Facebook; if you’re just here for the music, feel free to scroll down below the break. This week’s recommendations include new releases from Perila, the Not Not Fun label’s White Poppy, new AD 93 signing GAISTER, Music From Memory’s H.A.N.K., Stroom’s Merope, and more. )
Last week I opened my Instagram DMs to discover an inauspicious message alerting me that there was a profile pretending to be me. The person writing to me was a musician; they attached a screenshot of a message they had received from fake me. To read the message that fake me had sent was uncanny. There I was in the profile pic, shaved/bald head and glasses, a selfie I had taken in an airport just last year—but the text was nothing that I would ever say: “Hey! Your music is incredible you’re seriously talented. Keep up the hard work it’s paying off!.” (sic), obviously—and sickening.
Fortunately, the impostor’s profile had been taken down by the time I was alerted. But before I had time to breathe a sigh of relief, I learned that I had another imposter, this time on Facebook. I already knew about impostor accounts impersonating music journalists, because at Pitchfork, we occasionally receive emails from independent musicians reporting that someone posing as a Pitchfork writer has contacted them in the attempt to solicit payment in exchange for coverage. (It goes without saying that this is not how journalism works at any credible outlet.) Distressingly, the frequency of those reports seems to be increasing. But to see such a solicitation coming from “me” was something new, and far more disturbing.
“Hey! I just wanted to take a moment to say how incredible your music is,” wrote my impostor, in a message shared to me by one of the musicians they had contacted:
“You have a real talent, and it's inspiring to see how much dedication you put into your craft. I'd really love to chat sometime and hear more about your journey and what inspires your sound. If you're up for it, send me a text! Keep up the amazing work; it's definitely paying off, and I can't wait to see where you go from here!”
Despite the uncharacteristically, nauseatingly peppy tone, the Facebook page otherwise could easily have passed for my own page (especially since I haven’t been active on my own FB page for years). For content, the impostor had repurposed my own Instagram posts going back several years—mostly, but not all, posts promoting my writing on Pitchfork and Substack. Yet there were even photographs of my family, which felt especially violating.
Once the solicited artist had replied with a “hey, thanks!,” fake Philip Sherburne set the trap: “By the way, I'm Philip Sherburne-journalist, managing editor, and content creator at Billboard and pitchfork. Great to connect with you! And I'd love to help you gain more exposure! I can arrange a feature article on Billboard, plus airplay and organic reach. if you're interested.”
Then, the details (all spelling/punctuation/grammar errors are the impostor’s):
“I'1 be publishing an article highlighting you, your recent release, and your previous work. The article will include links to your music, allowing readers to easily access your tracks, leave comments, and contact you via email for potential features. It will be a great promotional opportunity on Billboard. We'll also help boost your exposure by targeting at least 50,000 views on YouTube, which will help increase your subscribers, as well as a minimum of 100,000 streams on Spotify. I also have connections with radio stations in the US and the UK, and I can arrange for your music to be played at least 4-6 times daily for about two weeks. The audience this will reach could be substantial, and I want to include this in the article.”
(Strangely, I’m pretty sure I’ve never written anything for Billboard, and I’ve certainly never been a managing editor anywhere; I don’t know why my impostor decided to make that a part of my resume, unless they were simply copy-pasting boilerplate copy they’d used for other journos before me.)
The feeling of having my identity stolen like that—with the express purpose of scamming people out of money by preying on their vulnerability, in an era when getting coverage for an artist is increasingly difficult—was horrifying. I quickly posted a warning on my socials that there was an impostor out there, and heard back from a few different artists who had been propositioned. One had even attempted to PayPal the impostor $200—meaning that, until PayPal flagged the transaction as suspicious and refunded their money, the reputational damage to me had already been done; in this artist’s eyes, I was someone whose services could be purchased. I find that depressing, but I’m also aware that many people have absolutely no idea about the ethics that regulate journalism. Some of it’s just plain ignorance and residual “fake news” distrust, but the proliferation of “blogs” charging for track premieres certainly hasn’t helped erode trust in music journalism.
Using Facebook’s built-in tools, I reported the impostor account, along with a couple more impostor accounts I found that seemed to be, thankfully, dormant. Then, in a fit of pique, and after a couple of glasses of red wine, I posted warnings under each of the impostor’s posts—“This is a scammer, not the real Philip Sherburne!”—from my own Facebook account. I also DM’d the impostor several messages that weren’t technically death threats but wouldn’t necessarily dissuade them from thinking I hoped they suffered a violent demise in short order.
This was, of course, a mistake, because by the following morning, they’d blocked me. And once they’d blocked me, I could no longer check to find out whether the account was still active. Thus began a rather Kafkaesque 36 hours of trying to get the offending account taken down: First I created a burner account, so that I could view the impostor’s page. (They had, of course, deleted all my warning comments; they never did reply to my messages of ill will, however.) And since the only way of reporting an impersonator’s Facebook account is through a drop-down option on the account itself, now that I was blocked, I couldn’t continue reporting it to the powers that be at Meta. (No idea if repeat reports might make any difference, but smashing that “report” button had felt satisfying.)
On my own Facebook account, I alerted my followers to the fraudulent account and asked them to report it. Soon, notifications began rolling in: “We reviewed the profile your friend reported and found that it isn't pretending to be you and doesn't go against our Community Standards.” What, as they say, the fuck? Around the same time, I received another notification from Facebook, this time alerting me that my burner account violated Facebook’s community standards—I’d used a different email to register, and replaced my surname with my middle name—and Meta had put the kibosh on my attempted deception. Fair enough; I had, in fact, violated their terms of use. But I had to marvel at the irony that they’d nuked my burner account in less than 24 hours, yet rejected multiple reports of an obviously fake impostor account. (There was more, too; somewhere in there, I was given a link to a media site to report impostors, and I duly uploaded my passport photo and detailed the whole sorry chain of events, only to have the automated form tell me that the user profile URL I was attempting to report was invalid.)
In the end, a person I know who works at Meta got it taken care of for me, for which I’m grateful. In retrospect, my frustration seems like much ado about nothing; perhaps the 1700 words I’ve written on the subject are excessive, even egocentric. But, coinciding with the aftermath of the U.S. election and the news Trump’s victory—it was all going down at the same time, the day I was flying home from Portugal—I couldn’t help but feel like the impostor and the Republican victory were all part of the same phenomenon: the erosion of trust, the exploitation of weakness, the obliteration of standards of verification. This is the future they want; it’s certainly the future that Elon Musk has set in place by, for instance, stripping verified users of their blue checks, and encouraging the flooding of the platform with misinformation. They want us to be unable to believe what’s set in front of us; by flooding the zone with shit, they keep us distracted and demoralized.
The whole thing coincided with a creeping disgust I’ve been feeling with the very idea of social media, or at least with social media as it currently exists. I’d already been souring on X/Twitter for a while, and all the more so once Trump won the election; even though my impostor wasn’t directly related to that platform, this was the final straw. (Update: Trump appointing Musk the co-head of some Orwellian-sounding Department of Government Efficiency—alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, meaning that redundancy is baked in from the very top—well, that is actually the final straw.)
I’m not deleting my Twitter account, but I don’t think I’m going to be posting there anymore. Instead, I’m moving my activity over to Bluesky; you can find me here. There’s been a general and highly visible exodus of Twitter users to the alternative platform in the past week—I saw someone rather cleverly dub it the “Xit”—and the energy on Bluesky, at least at the moment, is refreshing. We’ll see how things shake out, but particularly with the Trump administration on the horizon, I feel like something of a vibe shift is in order: We need new ideas, new attitudes, new spaces. (We also need a new Democratic Party, but that’s a topic for another time.)
Before I move on to this week’s music, one final thought about my impostor. Armed with a PayPal account my impostor had used in soliciting money from one of the musicians he reached out to, I did a little research, and from the existence of an Afrobeats musician who shares the same name as the PayPal account the scammer was using, it occurred to me that they might have been African. Up until that moment, I’d been imagining them as someone American, middle class, white. By coincidence, in a conversation with a friend, he mentioned having read a story about scammers who solicit nudes from American teens, then blackmail them with them. (In the story he cited, one of the affected teens had ended up dying by suicide.) Many of those scammers turn out to be from economically depressed foreign countries with high youth populations and disastrous employment outlooks. This new possibility made me pause. I imagined a young man, poor, living in a country with a depressed economy and few job prospects, certainly nothing to yield anything resembling what an American would consider a living wage. Might they be justified in taking advantage of first-worlders on the internet? Why, certainly, should they care about ethics in music journalism? I quickly dismissed the idea; a scam’s a scam, and theft is theft. I wouldn’t give a pass to a pickpocket, after all. But the thought experiment reminded me, at the very least, that things are not always as simple as they seem. And while the internet is supposed to be the great leveler, the great democratizer, the very illusion that we all have access to the same public town square might only contribute to masking the vast inequality behind the scenes.
Today’s newsletter is free to read for all, thanks to the generous support of paying subscribers. Those kind souls are duly rewarded with access to exclusive playlists for chilling and clubbing, the semi-regular Mixes Digest posts, and full access to the archives, including interviews with Belong, Seefeel’s Mark Clifford, Kompakt’s Michael Mayer, and more.
Record of the Week
GAISTER: GAISTER (AD 93)
The most surprising record I’ve heard in a while comes from GAISTER, the trio of Coby Sey, Olivia Salvadori, and Bo Ningen’s Akihide Monna. I’ve been a fan of Sey’s work since I saw him perform at Unsound a few years ago. But this record couldn’t be much more different from his 2022 album Conduit. The seeds of GAISTER were planted when the three musicians first played together in 2019; they eventually went into the studio together in Reykjavik, where, Monna says, “The sound spontaneously spun out as if we were pulling at each other's hearts and minds with a strange internal connection and sensation. Something pure was brought out.” You can hear as much from the recording. Salvadori sings, backed by her bandmates, while Monna plays drums and percussion, and Sey plays percussion, synths, and Wurlitzer—but from the sound of things, any separation of labor is strictly notional, given how seamlessly their contributions are fused. The core of the record is really voice and drums; imagine Meredith Monk by driving, half-post-punk/half-krautrock grooves, and that might give you an idea of the first half of the album, particularly songs like “Source” and “Conscious Concentration,” with their samba-school thrum and radiant, close-harmonized tone clusters.
The album feels like a single organism that changes shape from track to track; the form changes, but the essence remains the same. “Solar” is an a cappella drone reverie that builds to an ecstatic climax. “Geist,” “Shi,” and “三” reduce their element to spoken-word and atmospheric accents; the closing “Assonanze” and “Sento” are a choral one-two punch, the first disorienting and the second soothing. It’s one of those rare records where I listen and think: Where is this coming from? I don’t mean geographically or even in terms of the artists’ biographies or inspirations; more in the sense that I can’t fathom what dimension they tapped into and pulled this from. It seems to come from another place entirely. And then, more often than not, as soon as “Sento” finishes, I dive right back in from the start.
Albums and EPs
Perila: Intrinsic Rhythm (Smalltown Supersound)
With apologies to the pathetic fallacy, Perila’s new album has arrived right on time for the autumn rains and 5:30 p.m. sunsets (which keep getting earlier every day). I’m having flashbacks to listening to Grouper in Berlin, 15 years ago. Rustling found sounds, murmuring voices, darkly rumbling synths, smoke mixed with fog mixed with dusk—you pretty much always know what you’re going to get from a Perila record, but that doesn’t make a new set of iterations on her favored themes any less satisfying. If anything, Intrinsic Rhythm feels slightly more tonal than what I’m used to hearing from her, more structured around synths that provide a gravitational center while still allowing everything else to drift. It particularly reminds me of some of Biosphere’s darkest work, but with all traces of techno (and, indeed, rhythm itself) erased, so that only the cavernous atmospheres and intimations of distant thunder remain.
Molero: Destellos del Éxtasis (Holuzam)
Conceptually speaking, Alexander Molero’s debut album, 2020’s Ficciones del Trópico, covered similar territory to Andrew Pekler’s Tristes Tropiques, but where Pekler’s imaginary tropics were abstracted beyond recognition, the Venezuelan-born, Barcelona-based Molero took a more fantastical, even naive approach, with a synth-heavy palette steeped in German kosmische. On his second album, once again for Lisbon’s Holulzam label, Molero pushes outward in all directions, melting boundaries between contrasting elements and ideas: new-age flutes, technoid pulses, drone frequencies, digital bell tones. It’s psychedelic music untethered from psychedelic cliches, a free-floating play of ripple and bubble and whoosh. There are shades of mutant exotica in “Atemporalidad Primitiva,” but that’s the rare instance of semi-solid stylistic ground. For the most part, it feels like multiple Berlin school records playing at once—a kind of copacetic chaos, a crystalline murk, a braiding of wormholes.
DJ Lycox: Guetto Star (Príncipe Discos)
Speaking of Lisbon, by great chance I happened to review DJ Lycox’s new album for Pitchfork this week. (Technically, he lives in Paris, but in sound, anyway, he’s very much a Lisbon artist.) I won’t repeat myself here, but suffice to say that it’s the most rhythmically invigorating record I’ve heard in some time, and also—on a couple of songs, anyway—the catchiest. Plus, I absolutely love what he does with the bass.
The kind people at Flur, the Lisbon shop with ties to both Holuzam and Príncipe, gave me a slew of records when I visited their shop last week, so hopefully I’ll have more Lisbon-related recommendations in the coming weeks, when I’ve had a chance to listen properly.
Andrea Belfi & Jules Reidy: dessus oben alto up (Marionette)
Patience reigns over the debut collab between Italian drummer Andrea Belfi and Australian guitarist Jules Reidy. In the opening “dessus,” Reidy’s just-intoned guitar shimmers like spring light in the mountains; Belfi’s brushwork is in no hurry to get anywhere at all. Stray tones float through the upper reaches like dust motes. It moves with purpose, but the destination is a secret. Things intensify on “oben”: the feedback darkens, rolling toms fold inward, like a clenched fist. “alto” writhes like an object on the verge of exploding, until some switch is pulled, some excess channeled, and a determined halftime groove carries through to the radiant conclusion. “up” closes the album on a meditative note: a slow, steady churn of ringing fifths and metal surfaces, nearly post-rock in its sheer vibiness. File alongside Oren Ambarchi’s Ghosted trio.
Merope: Vėjula (Stroom)
Fresh of Milan W.’s phenomenal Leave Another Day, which I reviewed for Pitchfork, Stroom returns with a gorgeous ambient record grounded in the Lithuanian kanklės, a type of zither. Merope are the duo of Lithuanian singer and multi-instrumentalist Indrė Jurgelevičiūtė, who played on Raphael Rogiński’s recent Žaltys, and Belgian guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Bert Cools; on Vėjula, they’re joined by a pretty staggering list of luminaries—Shahzad Ismaily, Laraaji, Craig Taborn, Bill Frisell, among others. The album’s a little bit ambient, a little bit folk. On some tracks, like “Koumu Lil,” new-agey synths and processed vocals take the fore, sounding very much like they could have appeared on Moon Glyph. Others, like “Namopi,” place their emphasis on acoustic timbres and human timekeeping. In a very few places, like the closing “Rana,” it gets a little too sweet for my liking, but that’s a question of taste, not execution; I don’t fault them for it. And in any case, one of the sweetest songs, “Lopšinė,” is one of my favorites, if only because Frisell’s electric guitar is so beautiful. (Note to self: I really, really need to explore Frisell’s catalog.) At times, it’s a sneaky release; it took me a while to realize the extent of the vocal manipulations on songs like “Spindulė” and “Aglala,” in which Jurgelevičiūtė’s voice is gently sliced into ribbons of pure tone. The latter song is another of the album’s highlights, a foggy ambient abstraction whose pastel dissonance reminds me a little bit of Laurel Halo’s Atlas.
H.A.N.K.: The Big Melt (Music From Memory)
Music From Memory is on a roll right now. I suppose that’s always the case, but between recent records from Total Blue (FR73), Tim Koh & Sun An (FR69), the recent Virtual Dreams II comp (FR87), and the upcoming Suso Sáiz, they’re really killing it. H.A.N.K. is the duo of Alex Kassian, whose E2-E4 reconstruction I wrote about in FR78, and Nick Höppner, formerly of minimal-era greats MyMy, longtime Ostugt Ton A&R, Panorama Bar resident, and all-around Berlin institution. I’ve always loved Höppner’s sensibility, lush and warmy tonal even in an era that tilted toward the clipped and brittle; his solo albums Folk (2015) and Work (2017) are both great. Interweaving their initials to form H.A.N.K., the two leave house music by the wayside; instead, The Big Melt is a sunset-tinged foray into krauty Balearic, buoyed by rippling slo-mo grooves and dripping with tripped-out guitar leads. I’d actually overlooked the promo, and only picked up on the release when David James correctly called it the “perfect companion” to the Total Blue album from earlier this year (also on MFM, FWIW). The H.A.N.K. album doesn’t have quite the same deja vu vibes as the Total Blue; it’s less self-aware, a more straightforward vibes-for-vibes-sake experience. But what vibes! It’s going to sound even better next summer.
White Poppy: Ataraxia (Not Not Fun)
White Poppy: Paradise Regained (Not Not Fun)
As I was listening to H.A.N.K. on Spotify, the algorithm then served up a song from White Poppy’s Paradise Regained, which is certainly fortuitous, as I’d been meaning to write about White Poppy here since September. Crystal Dorval’s project hadn’t crossed my radar until recently, even though she’s been putting out records on Not Not Fun since 2012. Ataraxia is apparently the third installment of her Paradise Gardens trilogy, which began as a thought experiment involving something she calls “transcendental tropicalia,” or a fusion of new age, shoegaze, and bossa nova. I haven’t heard this album’s predecessors, but Ataraxia is delightful: sweet, melodic, a little naive. I get a hint of Emeralds’ Mark McGuire from some of the guitar melodies, and even more so the Durutti Column; the vibes are faintly retro, thanks to the pitter-pat groove boxes and jazzy chord changes, but they’re never kitschy—just gentle and blissed out. And despite how easily it goes down, it’s hardly a facile listen; there’s real depth here. It’s dream pop of the highest order.
Paradise Regained, the album that Spotify’s algorithm served up to me, is a collection of outtakes and B-sides spanning the full trilogy. Unlike the instrumental Ataraxia, there are vocals here, and she turns out to be a wonderful singer; I’m occasionally reminded of Broadcast’s Trish Keenan in her slightly breathy purity of tone. As songs like “Memories (Surf Mix)” show, she’s got a real command of melody; that song strikes me almost as a kind of ambient folk, halfway between Grouper and Jessica Pratt.
Skee Mask: D (self-released)
For the second time this year, Bryan Müller opens up his hard drives and shares a bundle of previously unreleased tracks, this time dating from between 2016 and 2020. There are radiant bass-music epics, lush electro brooders, aquamarine footwork bubblers, and slow-fast funk interludes; the common denominators through it all are Müller’s habitual fullness of texture and depth of tone—the bass could peel paint, but the softness of his harmonies prevents even the toughest tracks from feeling too aggressive. I’m particularly happy to hear not one but two pure ambient tracks, “MDP1” and “Culpae,” while the closing “1414 Dub” makes a nice throwback to 2010-style dubstep/dub techno crossover.
Michael Mayer: The Floor Is Lava (Kompakt)
The news these days is so bad that a little bit of levity goes a long way, which means that a new full-length from Michael Mayer is right on time. Mayer’s last album, &—which came out eight long years ago, in what feels at this point like a very different world—was a pop-forward affair with guest vocalists galore, but aside from a few songs (“Disco Dancers,” “State of the Nation”), it was also relatively restrained, more introverted than extroverted. The Floor Is Lava isn’t understated, exactly—idiosyncratic, perhaps. It’s a wildly varied record: The opening track, “The Problem,” with its wonky organ progression and slippery trumpet lead, reminds me of old Luke Vibert; once the breakbeat kicks in, it’d be easy to believe you were listening to an unreleased Wagon Christ tune from 1994. A few tracks later, “Kiss and Tell” offers a kind of squelchy, breakbeat-funk downtempo; the closing “Süsser Schlaf” is a little bit The Cure, a little bit reggae, a little bit easy-listening kitsch. There are, naturally, a few uptempo trance-techno ostinato anthems (“Feuerstuhl” and “The Solution,” which I’d prefer as an instrumental; the vocal’s a little too trance for my tastes). My favorites—after that delightfully odd opener—are the tracks where he taps into that classic Kompakt chug: the churning breakbeat maelstrom that is “Sycophant,” with its killer crescendo; the low-slung stomp of “Vagus,” with its lumbering two-note riff; and, particularly, the doomy “Brainwave 2.0,” an almost cartoonishly reduced (yet seriously effective) track made of elephantine horns, rock-steady drum beat, and the most antic clap pattern I’ve heard since the “Diwali” riddim. Strangely, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with “Brainwave Technology,” from Mayer’s 2021 of the same name; on balance, it feels like a kind of Belgian/Balearic techno crossover—something that might not seem to work on paper, but on record, it makes all the sense in the world.
Balmat News
Luke Wyland: Kuma Cove (Balmat)
Freshly out, Portland musician Luke Wyland’s Kuma Cove is an atmospheric marvel in which repetition—the core of so much electronic music—twists and tangles, turning inward and unfamiliar. Daniel Bromfield recently interviewed Luke for Portland’s Willamette Week, which you can read here.
Recommended Reading
Herb Sundays: Warren Defever
I’ve been a fan of His Name Is Alive since I first purchased a cut-out copy of Livonia from the annual WVKR fundraiser sale at the Vassar College student center in 1990 or 1991, based solely on the fact that it was on 4AD (I did worry, however, that His Name Is Alive might be some kind of Christian band, based on the name). The opening song, “As We Could Ever,” sounded like a transmission from another world; I was hooked. So of course I’m here for Warn Defever’s Herb Sunday’s installment—all the more so for the fact that it opens with a Hildegard von Bingen piece. I love what Sam writes in his introduction:
A lot of Herb Sundays is about reckoning with the past which Defever has done with grace in the past decade, finding new ways to approach his former selves including the “idiot kid” who made all those old cassettes, but in a method to move forward. The other thing Herb is about is how things become greater (or lesser) than they appear to be (the art history asshole in me would rush to use the word transubstantiation), through time, canon erosion, and something otherworldly.
Livonia is like many other beautifully-named (but ugly-sounding in our own Midwestern mouths) towns in Michigan. Cities with names more expansive than the topography and sights of the actual place. The fact that Defever’s internal, and uncomfortably strange vision, forced its way into the hearts of global goths in faraway England, and beamed back to us as something operatic, something holy, is reason to believe our own banality is also worthy of more romantic study.
Hari Kunzru on Music for Writing To
For Harpers, the author of White Tears, Red Pill (big fan), and Blue Ruin (ditto) weighs in on the importance of ambient music for his writing practice.
The idea of music that can “accommodate” multiple levels of attention without “enforcing” any one is the most precise definition I’ve found for the kind of music that helps me to work. As Eno says, it’s less “background music” than it is multilevel music, something that creates a perimeter if that’s what I want, but which doesn’t suffer from requiring my sustained attention. I don’t think of ambient music as a genre, except in the most vague way. It’s not a particular set of sounds; it’s more a practice of listening, of using music as a tool to induce a particular mental state. When it’s functioning, the music recedes, leaving a space for thought. And though I’m not aware of it, I’m still listening. I have a high tolerance for repetition, but kitsch and banality quickly begin to force themselves to the front of my mind. Clicking on a playlist titled lo–fi beats to relax/study to brings me little relaxation or sense of studiousness. Since I am also a degenerate record collector, this suits me fine.
https://harpers.org/archive/2024/11/lo-fi-beats-for-work-or-study-hari-kunzru-work-music
Haley Nahman: Beyond Dread
I suppose you could file this alongside other post-election “self-care” essays, a genre that doesn’t interest me much, but I found Nahman’s candor and thoughtfulness both refreshing and helpful.
From my comfortable apartment and comfortable life: mad mad mad. I stomped around my bedroom in my sweats. Now it was 3pm and I’d gotten no work done. My friend was teaching a pay-what-you-can movement class in Manhattan at 4pm, which I’d committed to attend, but as the time to leave drew closer I dreaded it. There was a gravity to my miserable little cave—if I stayed all night I just might find the bottom of it and bounce back up. But I remembered the joke I’d been making to Avi lately when I dreaded leaving the house. I borrowed it from a Christian podcast clip that had been ironically passed around Twitter a while ago: Dreading leaving the house was the devil’s work. If you overcame it, God had something special planned for you. I pulled on a fresh pair of sweats and left.
Douglas Rushkoff: This Game Is Not Reality
More post-election thoughts; this time on the failure of institutions and the growing importance of solidarity and mutual aid.
“The political institutions that seem to be failing us now are just one symptom of a civilization whose many institutions are no longer up to the challenge of contemporary, digital life. Their inconsistencies and compromised value systems simply can’t hold up to the stresses of this time. How can we discuss border policy and immigration when the essential premise of the “nation state” is itself an intrinsically unjust construction? People who live on one side of an imaginary line are entitled to basic human rights that are to be denied those who live on the other side? No amount of policy can correct for the injustices of neoliberalism, nationalism, or colonialism. So we can’t pretend that any political solution is more than duct tape.”
That’s all for this week—thanks for reading.