I have a piece in the spring issue of Jacobin, on the decline of literacy and what might happen to politics once our minds are no longer intimately structured by the written word. Like all these essays, it quotes Walter Ong. Apparently, some of you people are unware that you can just go and read Walter Ong for yourselves, because as soon as the essay was published I received several thousand emails all saying the same thing, which is that you really wanted to read the piece but you didn’t have a subscription to Jacobin, and could I help you out? And I am going to help you out, but while we’re here—why don’t you have a subscription to Jacobin? Why are you missing out on news, analysis, and perspectives from the leading voices on the global left? Isn’t it time you fixed that? If you need any more inducement Numb at the Lodge readers can get four print issues for $10 by clicking this link. Here’s the piece.

In 1931, the Soviet neuropsychologist Alexander Luria traveled to the foothills of the Alai Mountains, in the barren borderlands between Uzbekistan and Kirghizia, to find out how the locals thought. He was trying to prove the theory that ‘mental processes are social and historical in origin’: that not just the content of our thoughts, but the way we think, is determined by the kind of society we live in. The society he found in the Alais was very different to his own. In the dry hills, illiterate pastoralists kept cattle; in the isolated green valleys jeweling the hillsides, illiterate peasants grew cotton. For centuries, essentially no one here had been able to read or write. But that was changing. When Luria arrived, the Soviet government was busy forcing herders and peasants into new, regimented collective farms, where large numbers of rural people were being taught, for the first time, to read. He spent the next year among these people, bothering them with a series of annoying tests.

What Luria found was that just a few years of basic literacy education in an agricultural school had massive cognitive effects. In one of his early experiments, he showed people a group of geometrical figures. Complete and incomplete circles and triangles, squares and rectangles drawn with straight or dotted lines. He asked them to group the shapes together. Even if they didn’t have any training in geometry, nearly half of the peasants who’d learned to read sorted the shapes geometrically: squares with other squares, circles with other circles. Meanwhile, none of the illiterate subjects considered the shapes geometrically at all; they related them to objects.

One subject, Khamid, a 24-year-old woman from an isolated village, insisted that nothing could be grouped with an incomplete circle. ‘That should go by itself. That’s the Moon.’ When Luria tried to suggest that she group a square and a rectangle, she refused. ‘That’s a glass and that’s a drinking-bowl, they can’t be put together.’ Other subjects described the shapes as tents, bracelets, mountains, irrigation ditches, and stars.

When sorting objects, collective farm workers put a saw with a hammer, because they’re both tools, while peasants put a saw with a log. ‘The log has to be here too! If we’ll be left without firewood, we won’t be able to do anything.’ Luria tried presenting them with syllogisms. ‘In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North. What color are bears there?’ Every single person who had received any literacy education at all, even the ones Luria described as ‘barely literate,’ could easily answer. But people who hadn’t been exposed to the written word simply refused.

They consistently explained that since they’d never been to Novaya Zemlya, they couldn’t say what kind of bears they had there. One middle-aged villager called Rustam said that ‘If there was someone who had a great deal of experience and had been everywhere, he would do well to answer the question.’ Eventually, after repeated prodding, he said that while he’d never personally been to Siberia, ‘Tadzhibai-aka who died last year was there. He said that there were bears there, but he didn’t say what kind.’ Others, like thirty-seven-year-old Abdulrakhim, grew angry. ‘I’ve never seen one and hence I can’t say. That’s my last word. Those who saw can tell, and those who didn’t see can’t say anything!’

The most upsetting of Luria’s puzzles was a mathematical problem. He told his subjects that it took three hours to walk from their village to Vuadil, and six along the same road to Fergana: how long would it take to walk to Fergana from Vuadil? Again, every single one of the collective farm workers solved the problem, but the illiterate villagers knew very well that Fergana was actually closer than Vuadil, and refused to answer. Luria kept saying that it was just a scenario, but the villagers kept insisting that they couldn’t entertain a scenario that contradicted actual reality. ‘No!’ one exploded. ‘How can I solve a problem if it isn’t so?’

Luria took pains to point out that these people weren’t remotely stupid. They were perfectly capable of thinking rationally and deductively, and they could make ‘excellent judgments about facts of direct concern to them.’ But they lived in an incredibly conservative world, with its walls closed tight around direct sensory experience. Meanwhile, even a cursory exposure to writing produces an entirely different kind of thought. It lives in a spooky realm of ideal objects and useless categories, where you can talk confidently about invisible bears and measure distances even when they’re going the wrong way. But what we think of as politics seems to depend on this stuff, and revolutionary politics in particular. The lived experience of poverty or oppression isn’t enough; you need to be able to situate your own life in terms of something bigger, and imagine an entirely separate way of living that doesn’t currently exist. In 1919, launching the Soviet mass literacy program, Lenin had declared that ‘without literary, there can be no politics. There can only be rumours, gossip, and prejudice.’ Any transformative politics is, in some sense, the art of solving a problem even when it isn’t so.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Luria had a basically progressive model of psychological development. Thinking based on abstractions is more advanced than thinking based on direct experience; as time moves on the advanced way of doing things will obviously overtake the more backwards. Which is why he had to go to the furthest barren fringes of the old Russian Empire to find people who had never been exposed to writing. But the villages he visited hadn’t always been a backwater. A thousand years ago, this land in the foothills of the Alai Mountains had been one of the great centers of world civilization. In his notes, he mentioned that he was walking in the homeland of scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, and poets like Ulugh Beg, al-Biruni, and ibn Sina. The illiterate herders and peasants were living in the ruins of a sophisticated literary culture that had, for the most part, vanished from the world.

Today, the same thing seems to be happening to us.

The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside.

This is not just happening to the impoverished or the disenfranchised; professors at elite universities increasingly report that their students are no longer capable of reading an entire novel, or even a thirty-page extract; some of them have difficulty making it through a single sentence. Instead of reading and understanding anything, they’re willing to pay $300,000 for the privilege of dumping an entire text into ChatGPT and submitting its response as an essay.

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality.

The situation is not likely to get better. Every advance in communications technology creates a new generation of people progressively more divorced from the abstractions of writing. In the late twentieth century, television was bad enough to inspire jeremiads like Neil Postman’s Entertaining Ourselves to Death. Now, it seems almost benign; our supposed cultural elites keep congratulating themselves on their ability to watch an entire episode of a prestige drama without distractedly poking at their phones, as if Mad Men were a kind of penitential mental gruel. I’m old enough to remember the first time I ever went online, and a lot of my contemporaries seem to have the same story. They loved to read as children, but mysteriously lost interest in books around the time that permanent broadband connections started appearing in every home.

Today’s undergraduates, meanwhile, were born around the same time as the iPhone was released, were about twelve years old for the beginning of the pandemic, and fifteen for the launch of ChatGPT. They can’t parse complex sentences, but at least they can identify words. What about the cohort who don’t have a gaping hole in their education at twelve, but at six? What happens when the babies currently being raised by AI-powered dolls grow up? When it’s their turn to govern the world?

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks. This is what lies behind a lot of the growing liberal panic over the decline of literacy. For a growing chorus of people who write in the Atlantic, we’re recoiling into pre-Enlightenment conditions of absolute domination. A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets.

(Meanwhile, a lot of Silicon Valley ideologues agree, they just think this is a good thing. In their future, the vast majority of people will be wireheads, hooked up to an AI-powered pleasure machine that will keep them in a state of permanent hedonic bliss. At which point democracy becomes impossible, the masses are evicted from history, and a natural elite emerges to rule the world. The reactionary ideologues assume that they’ll be part of that literate elite, and not plugged in to the infinite porn machine. Given how many of their leading lights have already developed AI psychosis, I wouldn’t be so sure.)

I don’t think these people are wrong to fear an undemocratic post-literate future. You can already see it taking shape, and it isn’t pleasant. For a while, in an earlier phase of social media, it looked like everyone would be getting their worldview from frantic contextualized six-second soundbites. What’s actually happened is much worse. The most influential political figures among young people are now streamers: people like Nick Fuentes or Hasan Piker, who talk extemporaneously about politics into a webcam, sometimes for sixteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you notionally agree with one of these people; if you’re accustomed to written language, everything they say will sound aggressively stupid.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, ‘the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer on track.’ (It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t actually vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is ‘in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.’) Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low-resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. ‘Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.’ There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.

Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and non-literacy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the ‘general starvation of the mind,’ in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by ‘mere literacy, the ability to read signs.’ In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word. At the same time, as large numbers of people started to read the Bible for themselves for the first time, there was a wave of mass insurrections. These were revolutionary responses to the deeply unjust feudal and clerical system of the time, but they were also deranged. After radical Anbaptists seized Münster in 1534, they abolished money and socialized all private property. They also gave political power to whoever could most convincingly claim to have received a revelation from God. Eventually one of these was declared king, at which point he started renaming the days of the week and other people’s children, enforcing polygamy on pain of death, and trying to bring about the end of the world.

Even once the initial shock of expanded literacy faded, it could still produce bizarre and destructive ideologies. Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word. Your community is no longer made up of the people who actually surround you; it’s an entirely virtual construct, consisting of people you’ve never met in your life, but whose spoken language has been similarly homogenized by the mass-production of printed texts.

When Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan, something terrible was happening just over the border in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet authorities had decided to liberate the Kazakh people from feudalism by confiscating their cattle, and forcing herders to join new collective farms in lands entirely unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, in the three years from 1930 to 1933, maybe more than a third of the Kazakh population died. Some died of starvation, some died trying to flee across the desert, some were shot by border guards or the police. It was a disaster, but a disaster that could never have been produced by the backward peasants and herders Luria interviewed in the Alai Mountains. They didn’t have the necessary abstractions; they were too blinded by how things actually are. It could only have been the highly advanced and literate people who had sent him there.

One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today, Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world. The rate is lower among young people, but not by much. Essentially everyone in the country is intimately familiar with the great works of Russian and world literature; they can all talk for hours, with sensitivity and insight, about the genius of Pushkin and Chekhov. But somehow, political culture in Russia is not saner or more democratic than in the mentally enfeebled West. If anything, the opposite. It’s possible that the great works of literature don’t actually do anything politically at all. They don’t make us better people or freer citizens. Their value exists in an entirely different world.

Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. Marshall McLuhan imagined a peaceable ‘global village,’ in which electronic technology gently snuffs out all the constant ideological warfare of the Gutenberg age, and integrates the entire world under ‘the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family.’ It hasn’t quite worked out like that. He thought electronic media would be primarily tactile, which is understandable; he was writing in an age when a computer was made of punch-cards and magnetic tape. He couldn’t have known how aggressively audiovisual computers would end up being.

Our illiterate future is unlikely to be peaceful. But political and ideological conflict is already waning, being replaced with something much more intimate. In every developed country, the last few decades have seen a massive political polarization among gender lines. Young women are swinging hard to the left; young men are swinging even harder to the right. A lot of people still seem to think that this is because we disagree more about politics than ever before, but actually it’s the opposite. Politics is losing its content; being on the left has come to mean being a girl, and being on the right is just another way of saying being a boy. Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair; as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.

Still, I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The politics of the future will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded in empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer try to think outside of the things we can see. It’s just that absolutely nothing we see will be real.

Lately I’ve been feeling warlike. My blood’s running hot. Maybe it’s because the longest, greyest, most miserable winter I can remember is finally over and the world is returning to life. All the trees are in bloom, the birds are cooing in their soft pink branches; it’s the season to conquer and destroy. I need an enemy. Someone big, someone people take seriously, someone who’s just slightly overrated, someone who might be able to hurt me. I need to rip them apart in four to five thousand words of frantic talons. I need to wet my feathers in their blood. Maybe you don’t understand this impulse; maybe springtime just makes you want to live in peace with the world. But I doubt it. Lately, everyone’s been ritually sacrificing Lindy West. She wrote a book about some nightmarish polyamorous marriage she’s pretending to be fine with; the pretence is that you’re all really concerned about her being exploited. And this is why you’re all arranged in this torchlit circle around her, and why each of you have been sliding your little thinkpieces about the death of millennial feminism into her back, sinking them in all the way up to the hilt. Cowards: you can’t face live prey. As it happens, the night before her book came out I had a magnificent dream. I dreamed I was riding around a postapocalyptic landscape, all buildings crumbling into the desert, in a great brass chariot. I was smiling like Ashurbanipal as I rode around in my chariot, firing arrows at my enemies, and my chariot was pulled by a powerful, steaming Lindy West. She, too, gleamed like brass in the fresh light of spring.

My problem is that it’s so hard to find a good enemy these days. There are plenty of people who write stupid opinions I disagree with in newspapers and magazines, but fighting them feels sordid, unkind, like spitting on a tramp. There are also plenty of bad novelists too, but what makes them bad is mostly how limp and bloodless they are. Let’s say I did manage to get in a shooting match with Solvej Balle, author of On the Calculation of Volume. What would that be? That would be a war crime. She’s a civilian.

Occasionally, there is someone who isn’t a civilian. Sometimes I’m attacked first. There are a few people out there who don’t like my writing, and make a point of saying so. They always say the same thing: they think it’s indulgent, or long-winded, or evasive, or annoying. These days, I find it hard to get excited about this stuff. If I were someone else, I probably wouldn’t like my writing either. How you feel about what I’m doing here is, in a very real way, not really any of my business. Even when people seem to actively hate me with the eye-bulging intensity of a very small dog, I’ve learned to accept this. In fact, I quite like almost everyone that hates me; the real enemy isn’t someone you dislike, just someone whose head you think would look good on your wall. But lately there’s been another critique of my work floating around, and this one is serious. It demands a response. And strangely, it’s not even coming from my critics. It’s people who claim to like my work, who like almost everything about it—except. Except, they’ll add, have you noticed that every single thing he writes includes the word gloop? Or if it isn’t gloop, it’s goo, or gunk, or ooze, or slop, or slime, or some reference to a bog, or a swamp, or a fen, or a mire. It doesn’t matter if I’m writing about middle-eastern politics or the history of philosophy or whatever bullshit I just saw online; sooner or later I’ll be bringing up some kind of viscous fluid or wetland habitat. What gives?

Before I respond to this baseless and defamatory allegation, it might be worth just double-checking to see if my critics might actually have a point.

It’s true that I do, occasionally, use the word gloop. I have described vegan milk as ‘a colloid of oat gloop and vegetable oils,’ ink as ‘the magic gloop of bureaucracy,’ and the outside stereotype of India as ‘a land of unsanitary gloops.’ I have described the British as ‘bog mutants’ and ‘bog-dwelling savages.’ Among other uses, I have invented a fictional literary magazine called Red Gunk and a fictional US Congressman called Gunk Sclugmond. Sometimes my slimes are literal: I will write about things that genuinely happen to be a bit wet, like zombies, bog bodies, or the British. Other times they seem to ooze out for no obvious reason. In a piece on Nietzsche, who tended to keep himself reasonably dry, I managed to refer to both ‘the mystical gunk that had accumulated in my brain’ and ‘the black slime of your own self-regard.’

Quantitative analysis doesn’t help my position. This blog contains 14 instances of gloop, 15 of goo or gooey, 9 of gunk, 6 of ooze, 12 of slop, 8 of sludge, and a full 28 of slime or slimy. This might not sound like a lot, when you consider that it also contains nearly half a million words in total, but you can compare these numbers with the Google Books corpus, and the results aren’t pretty. Look:

The goos and slimes are bad enough, appearing four times more frequently here than in the rest of the English language, but gloop really is an outlier. I use it fifty-six times more than the average writer. At this point, it’s probably pointless to try arguing that I don’t drastically overuse the word gloop. Instead, I’ll need to make the case that I’m actually right to drastically overuse the word gloop, and every other writer on the planet is wrong for not deploying it as much as me.

There’s a very easy way of doing this, which is to say that talking about gloop the whole time is actually politically virtuous. And there is, in fact, something vaguely reactionary about the distaste for any kind of slime. Adorno mentions this in his Aesthetic Theory. ‘Immediately back of the mimetic taboo stands a sexual one: nothing should be moist.’ Wetness and sliminess is a kind of intolerable ambiguity; gloop is that which disturbs the division of the world into orderly, discrete objects. The forces of repression might want to parcel out reality into antiseptic monads, but there is an untameable gloop that flows between the cells of thought. Gloopy ontology reveals that everything that exists is some kind of very slow fluid, slopping around in the universal churn of all matter. This plot of land you want me to pay rent for—just yesterday, it was the sea floor, where precambrian organisms walked on skirts of jelly. Tomorrow it’ll be a cloud of space dust, slowly coalescing into a star. The noumenon is a protean, undifferentiated mass; it’s not like anything, but if it were like something it would be a kind of dense black tar. But the human body is the same. Our bodies produce some kind of slime at every orifice; in fact, the human body is literally made out of genital slime. We’re not really separate from each other; we’re all just moments in the flubbering of a single viscous plasm. Bakhtin discusses this. The grotesque body, the one that’s constantly oozing or farting, is ‘a point of transition in a life eternally renewed, the inexhaustible vessel of death and conception.’ But the institution of private property demands a world of solid objects. Which is why bourgeois morality forces us to pretend that we all stop at the edges of our skin, and treats all the snots and splats that transgress these borders with prim disgust. Therefore, if you object to me leaving goo everywhere, it’s because you’re a bad person.

This is a perfectly serviceable argument, even if it’s slightly hectoring, even if it’s sort of hectoring you into the position that you should want to live in a world where everyone is filthy and grease-splattered and constantly phlegming in your face. The problem is that not everyone is so positive about slime. These days, when people talk about gloop and gunk in a vaguely politicised register, they’re not thinking about Rabelais; it’s the queasily uniform output that surrounds them. All the restaurants that no longer make their own food, but offer a curated selection of Sysco products. The way musical subcultures have all melded into a single stream of two-minute TikTok standards, which you can either enjoy or ignore. The publishers desperate to sell you three hundred pages of booklike product. At a certain level of homogenisation, things no longer feel like discrete objects; the overriding sense is of pure undifferentiated quantity. The pinnacle of all this stuff is, of course, AI slop, which really does have a wet, gooey quality to it. It’s impossible to encounter a piece of AI media without getting a brief vertiginous sense of the basically infinite number of outputs that the machine could equally well have churned out instead. This particular clip, in which a small brood of anthropomorphic broccoli florets cry and hold their mother as they’re boiled to death: it’s nothing; if you repeat the prompt you can get a thousand of these, a million, and while each individual element will be different—different pot, different chopping board, totally different composition in every individual shot—all of it will be fundamentally the same. If I keep comparing everything to various forms of slop, it’s because slop is that to which we’ve been condemned.

But I don’t think this is really the full story either. There’s something else worth mentioning about AI slop videos: for a while, the slop was literal. You don’t get it so much any more, but five minutes ago when the form was in its infancy, AI video was full of sudden explosions of fluid. The problem with the early models was consistency: they could render a kaleidoscopic sequence of images distilled from the bubbling totality of everything ever captured on film, but they didn’t know how to keep objects looking roughly the same from one frame to the next, or how to obey the laws of physics. A typical AI video from around 2023 would show some half-molten person-like entities gently deliquescing in an office filled with hazy, blobby, unnameable objects, before being suddenly consumed in an immense plume of smoke. The smoke fills the air for a second and then something imperceptibly shifts and it’s frothy surf now, great viscous tendrils of seawater, and a figure on a surfboard is doing 360-degree spins and sometimes hanging motionless upside-down in the air. After a few more unlikely acrobatics he explodes. A great big fireball that doesn’t actually seem to damage anything; it just sets off secondary explosions up and down the screen that grow and linger until the model notices all these orange pixels and reasons that it’s not fire at all, it’s orange juice, slopping everywhere as it’s poured into a glass by a smiling mother with what appear to be two separate mouths, as all of a sudden floodwaters tear through the house, exterior walls collapse to reveal more rooms behind, also collapsing, also welling with water that seems to emerge from everywhere at once… I liked those videos a lot. Early AI video was its own weird dreamlike medium; watching it felt like freebasing the collective unconscious. But it was hard to appreciate at the time, because it was so obviously about to turn into what we have now. Still, the way things developed is interesting. In traditional CGI fluids are some of the hardest things to animate: if you watch early Pixar films it’s all solid objects, stiff plastic toys. The first film to really get it right was Shrek, in which DreamWorks made the most of their newly developed fluid animation system by producing a film that was almost entirely about mud and gloop and slime. In AI video the slime came first; only later, with the addition of planet-eating quantities of compute, did it coalesce into solid objects.

This procedure might be familiar. ‘And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.’

There seems to be a general intuition that between matter and form, matter came first, and before the universe had its shape, it was made of some kind of liquid muddy guck. In the Babylonian creation story, the world forms from the fresh and salty waters of the Deep, curdling into raging chaotic gods. Eventually Marduk slaughters them and builds the universe of solid forms from their corpses. In other traditions the universe begins as a roiling ocean, and one animal has to dive to the very bottom to retrieve a single grain of mud, which ends up swelling into the land. In Finland and Estonia it’s a duck, in Yorubaland it’s a chicken; among the Ostyaks it’s a loon, for the Buryats a goose; in the Cherokee version it’s a water-beetle, while the Iroquois have a muskrat. In the Timaeus, Plato’s kindly effective-altruist God happens to stumble upon a swirling ineffable gunge called the chôra, which is ‘formless, like the inodorous liquids which are prepared to receive scents, or the smooth and soft materials on which figures are impressed.’ It’s not clear exactly where this great dark world-womb comes from, but God looks upon it and sees that it is suboptimal, and divides the primordial splat into body and soul, the four elements, the gods and the other animals, until it’s all nicely in order. Lucretius goes furthest: in his version the chaotic plasm of raw matter is all that there is. No god ever moulded it into shape; it just collided with itself until it threw up the world of solid forms entirely by accident. Sooner or later it will dissolve, also by accident. (This is also, more or less, the view of quantum chromodynamics.)

Primordial chaos has a way of seeping in, even when we notionally believe in something else. Maybe the world is made of air or water, maybe God created it ex nihilo, but you still can’t stop thinking about slime. Probably the best and most familiar account of this very Babylonish concept is the English version of the myth, in book II of Milton’s Paradise Lost, where Satan has to traverse the ‘wilde Abyss/ The Womb of nature and perhaps her Grave/ Of neither Sea, nor Shore, nor Air, nor Fire/ But all these in thir pregnant causes mixt/ Confus'dly, and which thus must ever fight.’ This dark chasm is the stuff God used to build the world; it’s where all of us originally come from. The home we forgot. And what’s it like in there? ‘A Boggy Syrtis, neither Sea/ Nor good dry Land.’ It’s slime: sludge, slop, ooze, gunk, gloop.

Even after the creation of the world, slime seems to cling to every newborn thing. One of Gaston Bachelard’s great projects was an investigation into the material imagination that, ‘primitive and eternal,’ underlies all our more abstract ideas. All our dreams, he says, are made out of the four classical elements and their combinations; dreamers and poets both have to work with the material stuff of the world. There are some ways of thinking about the world that are made of air, like yours, and others that are made of fire, like mine. But one material stands out: ‘the basic component of materiality, the very notion of matter’ is expressed in the combination of earth and water, which Bachelard calls paste. Paste is the perfect matter because, being formless, ‘it relieves our intuition of any worry about shape.’ When you’re caught out in the rain and cake your boots in gloop, you’re encountering the stuff dreams are made of in its rawest form. Which might be why, in the history of human culture, there’s a tendency for new forms to come out all gucky.

You could look at painting. The one thing everyone notices about the cave paintings of the upper palaeolithic is how fluid they are, how liquid the linework in all those flowing herds of overlapping animals, everything almost jellylike in consistency, so totally different to the stiff, childlike forms of the later neolithic and early bronze age. The novel is another one. By the mid-eighteenth century the novel had stabilised into a more or less solid form, but if you read the very early examples they just slosh around from one cover to the other. For us in the twenty-first century they seem strangely postmodern, destabilising conventions that shouldn’t have even existed yet; in our tired old age we’re still surprised by plasticity. Sidney’s Arcadia, with its ungodly hodgepodge of prose, play, and verse, so wormy with nested narratives that it’s practically incomprehensible. Or Gargantua and Pantagruel, strange combination of scholarly erudition with near-constant fart jokes, featuring long lists of books that don’t exist and a first-person narrator popping in and out of existence seemingly at random. Allegedly, Don Quixote is the first truly realist novel, but in fact it’s the weirdest of the lot. The idea is that it pokes fun at the conventions of chivalric romance by transposing them to the real world, so in the first volume Don Quixote thinks every roadside inn he passes is a castle, and talks to every innkeeper like she’s a princess, and gets repeatedly bonked around the head for his madness. This is meta enough, even without the pages of pseudepigraphic blurbs, or the highly conventional tales-within-the-tale, or the whole gimmick in which Cervantes is actually just translating an Arabic text by one Cide Hamete Benengeli, and occasionally needs to get into adventures of his own to track down more scraps of manuscript when the narrative runs out. But it’s in the second volume that we really see what happens when fiction and reality interact, which is that fiction brushes reality aside like a cobweb. Quixote no longer hallucinates; he sees everything exactly as it is. It’s just that Cervantes is so committed to realism that the world he describes already includes the first volume of Don Quixote, which means that everyone recognises the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance when they see him, and they all pretend to be in one of his tales of chivalry. Eventually everyone is acting out his delusions. (Pierre Menard said it was easy to write the Quixote in the seventeenth century but almost impossible in the twentieth, not least because in the twentieth it already existed. But Cervantes was already on some Borges shit three hundred years ahead of time.) What you end up with is a vision of literature as a kind of alien protoplasm, fungal, borderless, puddling over the world.

But since I’ve already been talking about animation, you can see it there too. If you watch any of the really old Max Fleischer cartoons on YouTube, you’ll usually find someone in the comments wondering what the world would have been like if Fleischer, and not Walt Disney, had won the battle for the future of animation. It’s a good question, almost a Germany-wins-WW1-level counterfactual, Hannibal-wins-the-Punic-Wars, generating dizzyingly different worlds. We’re talking about a clash of the primordial elements here. On one side, Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, prim white Calvinism, bowdlerised takes on the Brothers Grimm, trilling princesses, orchestral scores, family-friendly feature-length productions, the latency period, the gods of the air and the sky. On the other, Popeye and Betty Boop, the subterranean alliance of Jews and blacks, immigrant modernity, mongrel impure, wailing ghosts, black-eyed strays, demonic cave paintings, a druggy decadent sexuality, plump thighs, mutability, the gods of the underworld and the night. The early Fleischer cartoons were very unambiguously for grown-ups in a way animation has never quite been able to recapture; even now what passes for adult animation is either just a bunch of kids screaming manic profanities, or some unutterably tedious bullshit about mental health. But if Disney had crumbled in the 1940s instead of Fleischer, it’s hard to imagine we’d be living in the same childlike, desexualised, racially uptight society we inhabit now. There would not be grown adults arguing about Harry Potter. There would not be anything even slightly resembling the sterile, stuttering paedophile slideshows of anime. People would not live under the crushing idea that fun and pleasure belong only to childhood, and the best way to enjoy your life is to avoid growing up. No picket-fence fifties conservatism, no soppy soporific peace-and-love sixties counterculture, just a Jazz Age that never ended, growing darker and toothier with every decade. Birth rates in the developed countries would never have slipped below replacement, but the world would be scarred with the wreckage of multiple small nuclear wars.

But increasingly, I think Fleischer could never have won, and history could only have gone one way, because all his productions were slimy. Disney cartoons are about animals or princesses; Fleischer’s were, ultimately, all about ink. In his very first series, Out of the Inkwell, the main character is a living, polymorphous blob of ink that just happens to take the form of a clown called Koko. Even in the later cartoons all forms are basically provisional. At any point someone’s head might suddenly turn into a gramophone, or a gold chain, or a bottle of hooch. Even when there aren’t straight-up metamorphoses, motions are strikingly fluid. Figures move like water, like invertebrate things, cuttlefish, pulsing squid. Look at this Popeye cartoon. Gloopy protean ink-splats, dark and fertile, a chôra briefly amusing itself with shapes. The kind of thing you can only achieve with animation, which doesn’t have to obey the rules of bony reality. You can probably see where this is going. Max Fleischer’s great innovation, developed right at the start of his career, was the rotoscope. Those impossibly fluid animations were real human movement; that ectoplasmic ooze is the real Cab Calloway; that shifting cartoon-world is the world you’ve been living in all your life. Fleischer had distilled the black ooze that churns beneath the phenomenal world and put it on the screen. But only for a moment. Slime belongs to the beginning of things. Eventually his fluid universe had to harden into Disney’s sweetly singing princesses and die.

For all their sexual maturity, there’s still something childlike about those films. The fresh fat flow of the beginning of things. After all, who is it that really likes goo, and slime, and sludge, aside from the priests, philosophers, painters, and poets of every era? Answer: children. When I was a kid, basically all the entertainment the mavens at CITV had devised for me involved various straight-laced adults being sprayed down with thick coloured gunge, or pushed into giant pools of the stuff, while the hosts all yelped like wounded cats. (Today, from what I can tell, the official children’s entertainment on the TV is all about learning to process your difficult emotions, and as a result the unofficial entertainment the kids actually watch online is all about how the entire female sex were invented by Jews to emasculate the Western male. We should have kept the slime.) But why do children like goo so much? Stupid question. Because it’s fun. But why?

There’s one answer in the mythos of psychoanalysis, a more or less total theory of gloop. If we keep coming back to the theme of a creation that grows from slime, it might have something to do with the fact that we all share the same primordial creative experience. The first time any of us create anything, the first time we put anything out there into the world, it’s by shitting. Karl Abraham, expanding on a connection that doesn’t actually appear in Sigmund Freud’s Character and Anal Erotism, suggests that the child’s originary pleasure in shitting ends up being ‘sublimated into pleasure in painting, modelling, and similar activities.’ The first and most perfect work of art, something of the self realised as an external object, is the turd; this is why the people driven to create art are all some kind of revolting pervert. Later, when we try to imagine the divine creation of the universe, we might not picture God shitting out the world, but we still give the materials of creation the same sensuous properties as shit. Maybe if humans produced neat little pellets like goats our gods would have stacked up the universe from rocks like a cosmic cairn; instead we get the illimitable ocean, the body of Tiamat, and the darkness on the face of the deep.

Children are obsessed with slime because slime is the first thing anyone ever made, and the one who controls the slime is something like a god. They know that the deep secrets of the universe are found in the waste products, intolerable excesses, things better left unmentioned. They like seeing adults being gunged because while adults might govern the world they’re far too dry to have created it. The worldmakers are the slimy laughing ones, and the same gloop of their delight is a punishment for any stiffnecked unbeliever. I’m obsessed with the stuff for roughly similar reasons. I might cast about a lot of performative disdain for a generally infantilised and infantilising world, but I’m the same. In my own way, I also failed to grow up.

Maybe we’re all a little more immature than we think. Before, I said that we don’t imagine God shitting out the world, but in fact that’s not quite true. The creation story of the Ikataiwa of western Peru begins with the ancestor-spirit Eiwatsi, wading in the dark through a lifeless and infinite swamp. He eats a handful of ajuge fruit—it’s not clear where he got them from—and begins to feel queasy. Soon after he squats, groaning, and shits. His first turd is made of fire. It sinks into the depths of the swamp and becomes the Sun. Eiwatsi wades on, with the Sun swimming around his feet as he walks, lighting the way, but before long he groans and shits again. His second movement is diarrhoea: pure water. It splashes into the swamp and becomes the rivers of the world. After a few more paces his guts roil a third time. The third part of creation is a great solid log. Eiwatsi moulds it into plants and animals and women and men, but these creations are lifeless; they just float in the swamp, unmoving. Finally, the pain stabs Eiwatsi once again, and he squats to shit, but all that escapes is an enormous fart. The air wafts into the animals and humans and gives them life. Eiwatsi teaches the small group of humans how to make things for themselves; he teaches them the secrets of arrows, blowguns, baskets, and pots, how to plant manioc, and how to make magical charms. Then he walks on. Some day he might come back.

We have this story because it was collected in 2009 by Arão Elias, who was a Brazilian missionary with the LDS Church. I say was, because after returning from his mission with the Ikataiwa, Elias left Mormonism and now seems to spend most of his time sending strange emails full of death threats to the various archaeologists, both in and outside the church, he believes to be deliberately hiding the truth. What set him off was the creation myth. Most indigenous peoples place the creation of the universe in some vaguely defined heroic past; not the Ikataiwa. They said that the world had been created about four generations back. Some of them said that their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had been among the first individuals fashioned by Eiwatsi, that they’d personally learned the art of firemaking and spearfishing from the demiurge himself. After a night in his hut crunching the numbers, Elias deduced that the Ikataiwa creation had taken place in 1924. When he tried to tell his hosts that scientists had estimated the age of the earth at four and a half billion years, they laughed at him. Ridiculous numbers. Like if someone told you that people in his country had calculated that they were twenty miles tall. Clearly someone where Elias lived had been ashamed of where he came from, one of the original turdborn men, and had started making up this lie. They were absolutely certain about this. All of them had known someone who had looked directly into the face of God. They had spoken to people who were never born but created, whose lives had suddenly begun midway through adulthood. All Elias’s attempts to talk about books and photographs from the pre-1924 past were met with mocking laughter. It made it very hard to teach them about Jesus Christ. Eventually, after some persistent badgering, Elias convinced some of his hosts to take him to a village three days’ canoe-ride away, where one of the first humans still lived. The trip was bug-bitten and uncomfortable with constant downpours and in the end they arrived too late. The man had just died. But he lay on his pyre for another day before the villagers burned him, and Elias got to look. Hard to see inside the grass-reed hut of mourning, where the stink was heavier than the darkness. The dead man was naked and had already started to bloat, jowls all melting around his neck. In death, he clasped his feathered penis-sheath between his hands. Elias peered closer. He had no navel.

THE STORY SO FAR: By late 2026, Britain was in crisis. Keir Starmer’s government had become so deeply unpopular that it posed an active and ongoing threat to public order. The Prime Minister couldn’t wobble his big gormless head in public without spontaneous lynch mobs forming in his vicinity. It wasn’t even clear exactly what he’d done wrong. People said he didn’t have any ideas. They said he didn’t care what people thought. But he’d had the idea of banning smoking in smoking areas, and when people said they didn’t like that idea he had the idea of not doing it. People didn’t like the idea of children watching online porn, so he’d had the idea of making everyone show a government ID before they could read the word ‘fuck’ on their phones. People were unhappy about immigration, so he’d given a speech about how immigration was actually bad, and then when some other people were unhappy about the speech he immediately walked it back. He had given people everything they wanted and they still couldn’t stand him. It was a mystery. Maybe they were upset about the rain, which had fallen in a grey wash over Britain for more than three hundred uninterrupted days, waterlogging the fields, backing up the sewers, slowly soaking through roofs and into people’s homes, until there wasn’t a patch of dry carpet in the entire country, until all the paintings in the Tate had gone streaky, until all the old incunabula in the British Library had dissolved into mush, until absolutely everyone from the bankers to the tramps was walking around in the faint whiff of damp and mildew. But surely people knew better than to blame him for the weather?

Whatever it was, the country was on the edge of something very dangerous. It looked like the next election would be a cataclysm, and rather than hand power over to the maniacs of the right and the imbeciles of the left, the Starmer government bravely decided that the only way to protect British democracy was to trim off all the inefficiencies and radically streamline it for the twenty-first century. Parliament was closed for good; the Palace of Westminster, with its leaking roofs and grotty corridors and general squalid disrepair, was sold off to the Qatar Investment Authority to be turned into a hotel called The Churchill. People were still free to form political parties if they wanted, but there wasn’t much point since nobody would be voting for any of them. Instead, the fate of the country would be chosen through a more familiar mechanism, more in keeping with the lifestyles and experiences of the UK public, and less tainted by the failures of the past: a glossy BBC competition show fronted by Claudia Winkleman.

Theme music. CLAUDIA WINKLEMAN hobbles out to tepid applause. The studio roof is leaking; here and there small dribbles of stagnant rainwater gently moisten the AUDIENCE, and frankly CLAUDIA doesn’t look fantastic either. These days her fringe covers half her nose. Mascara stripes the puffy cheeks of a waterlogged corpse. Exhausted monotone through her introduction. Twelve weeks ago, we started searching for ordinary Brits with brilliant, non-ideological solutions to help drag the country out of its economic, social, and meteorological doldrums. Tonight, it’s the final of Who Wants to Save the UK?, and there can only be one winner. We’ve already said goodbye to fan favourites like Andy (‘Just hang the lot of them’), Claire (‘Just make everything in the shops free’), and Dmitri (‘Just liberalise the planning system’), and now only four hopeful saviours remain. One of them will be granted total dictatorial power for three years. The other three will have to flee the country before they turn up on the proscription lists. That last bit’s a joke. Nobody in the AUDIENCE laughs.

She introduces the JUDGES. Lights spin and land on MARY BEARD, JEREMY CLARKSON, and KEIR STARMER, who’s about to resign his elected position for a permanent sinecure on reality TV. As soon as the spotlight falls on KEIR a collective howl of rage bursts out of the AUDIENCE. Out their seats, frothing like animals, scrabbling against the walls of KEIR’s bulletproof acrylic box, desperate to claw out his eyes. Hiss of tear gas. Small yelps of pain as the producers activate some of the more frenzied assailants’ shock collars. Riot police on horseback charge into the studio and stand around bellowing. Through all this KEIR winces the faint wince of a man who’s just found a hair in his salad. On with the show.

You know our finalists already. They are, in descending order of social status, HAMZA HARAMZADA, RORY FITZWEATHER-REGRETTABLE, FUCHSIA WALLOP, and SAM KRISS.

Mass deportations for the elderly

The first brilliant idea to save the UK comes from HAMZA HARAMZADA a 26-year-old finance lawyer from London. Pink shirt, shiny shoes, shiny forehead. A shiny smoothness everywhere about the man, the gloss of a CGI model awkwardly inserted into reality. He wants to send your granny to a war zone.

There is a dangerous population in this country. They are not like you and me. They don’t work. They don’t contribute to public finances. They hold views that many people consider totally foreign and incompatible with a democratic society, and their numbers are growing. I’m talking, of course, about old people. The old age dependency ratio, the ratio of retirement-age to working-age adults, is nearly a third; in 1960 it was only 18%. The share of the population that pay more in taxes than they collect in benefits is now under 50%. Over the Channel in France, the average retiree now earns more from their pension than the average worker from their salary, and we’re not far behind. The triple lock essentially guarantees that pensions will always grow faster than wages, as an increasingly narrow population of workers are forced to support an increasingly bloated population of idle old codgers. Every other problem in Britain is downstream of this issue. It’s why the government can’t fund decent services for working people. It’s why you can’t find a decent home to live in. It’s why the NHS is overstretched. Who gets ill? Not me. I’ve never been sick in my life. It’s them.

This is also why the social fabric of this country is falling apart. Since this problem first started emerging in the late twentieth century, every successive British government has tried to solve it by importing young people to make up the balance. Care workers, to look after the elderly and incontinent Brits, but also a constant flow of migrant labour in general, as many people as it takes to artificially overheat the economy so the state pensions keep getting paid. We’re living through the results of that now. But it didn’t even solve the problem. What will happen to these new arrivals in a few short decades? They’ll get old, and start collecting pensions themselves. There has to be another way.

I’m not suggesting that this country should abandon the promises it made to its older people. But we need to honour them in a cost-effective way. Instead of trying to arbitrage the international labour market by importing care workers, we could look after our elderly for a fraction of the current cost simply by deporting them all to the Third World.

Here is my vision. Right now, our former colonial subjects in Myanmar, who we all cherish, are undergoing a tragic civil war. They also have miles of gorgeous tropical beachfront, particularly in Rakhine State and Tanintharyi Division, that are almost totally undeveloped, and mostly under the control of local ethnic militia. It should be very easy to convince the Arakan Army or the Mon National Liberation Front, in return for some token recognition or military assistance, to cede a suitable patch of land for us. We’re building a retirement community. We can get Quinlan Terry to design it. I’m picturing Georgian-style townhouses, red phone boxes, old-fashioned pubs on every corner, family butchers, flags and bunting everywhere, and everything clean and tidy, a perfect metropolis-sized recreation of the lost Britain of long ago, but enjoying the balmy warmth of the Bay of Bengal. A haven from the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, the average wage in Myanmar is under £3,000 a year; our new city will provide tens of thousands of good, well-paying jobs for local residents while drastically cutting costs for the British taxpayer.

But the benefits to Britain won’t just be financial. Yes, we’ll be able to drastically cut taxes once all the old people have been shipped off abroad, and yes, the sudden glut of properties on the market will massively reduce the cost of living. Most of all, though, we will reap the benefits of no longer being an old, grey, declining nation. This will be a young country again. The median age will drop from around 40 to about 32, which will make us younger than any time since 1960. Full of vigour, provocative new ideas. You’ll feel it walking down the street, the energy in the air. No more mawkish nostalgia. No more swollen red faces on Question Time. Our culture and politics will no longer be held hostage to the whims of an overinflated cohort of sentimental fogies. Maybe you can defer your deportation as long as you keep working, but frankly maybe you can’t. Maybe we’ll have secret police fanning through the shires, dragging your elderly relatives out of the hidden room you’ve built for them and marching them onto a one-way flight to the genocide zones. You won’t miss them really. You’ll be amazed at how little you’ll miss them once they’re gone.

Become the 29th state of India

The second contestant is 63-year-old RORY FITZWEATHER-REGRETTABLE, who used to write pop-history books and now mostly reviews overpriced hotels for airline magazines. Everything about the man is rumpled; shirt, jacket, corduroys, hair, smile. It’s a disguise. Something cold and glinting beneath. He wants to make sure Brexit really does mean Brexit.

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Human beings have manic episodes; when it happens to an entire nation we call it empire. The affliction is the same. You prance around town with your tits practically pouring out your top, demanding drinks from strangers, snatching cigarettes out their hands. Isn’t it funny how I can do absolutely anything I want? And everybody loves me? You know you have a special destiny in the world. It’s obvious; flowers turn their faces towards you whenever you walk past. You’re going to save the world by sniffing coke off a stranger’s frenulum. And other people don’t understand, they’re all such bummers, they take things so personally, when really it was just a joke. In fact the whole world is a joke, none of it’s really serious, this great primary-coloured playground built for your delight. Sometimes in the brief moments you’re alone you can hear laughter, not coming from anyone in particular, not laughing at anything you can name, just the manic chattering laughter of the entire universe, flooding the silence. Lately you’ve been getting in fights. You’ve been winning them all. You’ve been stumbling into casinos and putting it all on red, emptying out your bank account, taking unsecured loans, putting it all on red and winning every time. God loves you more than he loves other people, he loves you in a different way. Maybe in an erotic way. Maybe you’re interested. You’ve been buying precious stones, rubies and sapphires; you keep them in your pockets. Sometimes people tell you that one day you’re going to wake up in hospital again, or jail, again, or in a pool of your own blood and vomit, or maybe not at all. They’re wrong. That happens to other people. It will never, ever happen to you.

One good thing about Europe is we’ve all already been through it all. Here, every miserable dirt-poor republic had its century in the sun. Today, Splugovina is a dreary landlocked country of eight million people that produces sunflower seeds, insulated cables, and zinc-bearing ores, but for a brief period in the fifteenth century the glorious Splug Empire stretched clear across the continent. The crowned heads of Europe came to kneel and give tribute. After that, it’s true, there was the War of the Quintuple Alliance, and all the cities were razed, and maybe forty percent of the population starved in the fields, but there are still some very impressive ruins in the hills. That time is never coming back, though. All you can do now is put up a bunch of gaudy statues to the conquering heroes, make genocidal chants at football games. Remember, with a kind of lazy black bitterness, the days when the world was made of sugar and you were mad.

My own miserable dirt-poor country was the last one to suffer from a bout of empire, and we caught it worse than anyone else. God is an Englishman, we said. We really meant it. He only filled the earth with various fuzzy-wuzzies so we’d have the pleasure of conquering them. We didn’t even really want an empire, God just sort of dropped one into our lap. One day you wake up to find out you’ve been massively overproducing bolts of linen, meanwhile on the other side of the planet some kingdom you’ve been trading with has fallen into civil war, but maybe you could still shift all this stupid linen if the private security at your trading post just restored a bit of order locally, and then suddenly you’re being paraded around on an elephant while a thousand slaves die building a giant statue of your face. It all happened in a blur. Today you can still go to any quiet little English church in any quiet little English village, clipped hedgerows, cricket green, and read the tombs. All the local lads who died under far distant skies. Born in Kent, perished on the Niger or the Irrawaddy, puking through jungle, trudging over Antarctic ice. Today the British are known for complaining all the time, but that wasn’t always the case. We went cheerfully to these far distant places, madness in our eyes. During Scott’s Antarctic expedition half the crew had to spend an entire winter in a single nine-foot igloo, minus forty degrees outside, so cold it’s the same in Celsius and Fahrenheit, all of them wracked with dysentery and ptomaine poisoning, toenails falling off from frostbite, but they all kept their spirits up with callisthenics, lectures on subjects of scientific interest, and regular games of charades. The other half of the expedition died on the ice in equally good humour. They filmed the whole disastrous journey; it was released in 1924 as The Great White Silence. Film begins with an endorsement from King George V. ‘I wish that every British boy could see this film, for it would help to foster the spirit of adventure on which the Empire was founded.’

That mania has passed now. It’s one with Nineveh and Tyre. There’s nothing technically stopping us, but you no longer find British boys racing to be the first to die in some strange and exciting new way. Now it’s Americans. Soon it’ll be Chinese.

I like American optimism. Not everyone does. A lot of people from long-vanished empires claim to find it unbearable; it reminds them of what they no longer have. But I like it. There’s something ridiculous about an American who tries to hate their own country, like a dog trying to walk on two legs. They don’t know what it means to wake up and curse the grey skies and poisoned soil of Splugovina, this place that closes around you like a tomb. They can rage against the slavery and genocide, but it’s still with that bright, feverish, all-American gleam in the eye. The only way an American can really encounter pessimism is by hiring a British person to perform it for them. That’s what I do, basically. It’s a living.

The problem, though, is the corollary to all this charming American exuberance, which is the repeated bouts of mass murder. It comes in cycles. A few years of screaming bloodlust until it all blows up in your face, and then you spend the next few years at home drinking wine out the bottle and wailing over the unfairness of the world, before finally straightening your back, giving one last sniff, and bravely stepping outside to once again club someone’s children to death. I used to think some kind of progress was possible here. I used to have something called the Iraq War Theory of Divorce in Hollywood Films. The theory says that if a film features a male lead character who gets divorced or separated from his main romantic interest, and it came out before 2005 or so, by the end he will have cajoled his ex back into bed and they’ll live happily ever after. Liar Liar, The Parent Trap, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If it came out after 2005, by the end he will have learned to accept the situation, moved on, and found someone new. A total bloodbath in the Middle East, maybe a million people shot or blown up or tortured to death with power tools, so you can learn that hey, sometimes things don’t work out there way you want them to, and hey, sometimes that’s ok. But all these things are temporary. Don Quixote got a decade of sanity between volumes before the rabbit poison started glittering in his eyes and he was babbling about knight errantry again. America got less than half. Four years after the last American troops left Afghanistan under Taliban guard, war critic JD Vance was on the TV, saying that while he understood why people were put off by the last round of wars in the Middle East, ‘the difference is that back then we had dumb presidents, and now we have a president who actually knows how to accomplish America’s national security objectives.’ The dumb presidents, the ones who blundered around getting America into quagmires, still always held back from directly attacking Iran. The smart president is Donald Trump.

America has discovered that you can just kill people. There might be a centuries-old taboo on the assassination of foreign heads of state, but that’s obsolete now. Those rules govern interactions between peers, and America has no peers. They’re useful for states that might conceivably face consequences for their actions, and America never will. Look at what they did in Venezuela. Kidnapped Maduro using weapons the rest of the world has never even heard of, sonic weapons, microwaves, directed radiation beams that can boil a Cuban guard’s brains inside his skull from half a mile away. They’ve got Kabbalistic weapons that rearrange your gematria, curdle your viscera until the vessel cracks and a glowing plasma leaks out. The US and Israel are playing on sandbox mode, so technologically ahead of everyone else it’s like the nineteenth century again, when you could scythe down masses of spear-chucking savages with one good burst from the Maxim gun. And yet every previous administration tried negotiating with the savages, threatening them, sanctioning them, playing this weird choreographed game where they agreed to let Iran fire a volley of missiles at Tel Aviv to satisfy some vague principle of honour and then shot them all down. When you’ve got so much power, why bother? Why keep having conversations? Why not just kill them? If you don’t like a spiritual leader of three hundred million Shia Muslims, just fucking kill him. Kill him, kill his wife, kill his daughter, kill his fourteen-month-old granddaughter, kill his cabinet, kill his military command, kill all the representatives you’ve been negotiating with, and kill a bunch of your preferred candidates to take over his position while you’re at it, why not, they’re only lives. What a brilliant discovery. Amazing no one else ever thought of it before. They must all be dumb. And yes, maybe something goes wrong, and Opus 4.6 accidentally deletes the wrong object. ‘You’re totally right to call me on that. What I fired on wasn’t an IRGC missile bunker—it was a primary school full of little girls. Here’s why that matters.’ But so what? It’s the world’s problem if Israel or America gets a papercut, but there’s no reason to let the disintegrated bodies of a hundred and fifty strangers’ daughters interfere with the general giddy atmosphere. They’re only lives. ‘It was something, and it is nothing. Does not this amount to exactly the same thing as though it had been nothing, and came to nothing; and about nothing it is hardly worth while to waste a word.’

So far, the war is going very well. It’s called Operation Epic Fury. Operation Epic Badass Ninja Pirate. Organs of state keep issuing public statements that say things like ‘Kill without hesitation, avenge without mercy’ and ‘You say death to America, we say America will be your death.’ They’re having no problems killing anyone they want to kill. Iran might be a proud and ancient civilisation with a historical memory stretching back six thousand years, but right now it’s an easily broken toy in the hands of an empire that can barely remember the day before yesterday. But somehow, the power to kill anyone at will isn’t enough. Things are not going according to plan. As far as I can tell, the plan was this. As soon as Israel and America eliminated the Supreme Leader, the entire Islamic Republic would disintegrate like an alien invasion fleet once the mothership’s been hit. At this point the Iranian people would fill the streets, overthrow the mullahs, and immediately start signing up for an OnlyFans account. Obviously these are early days, but it doesn’t look like things are going to plan. Something very different is happening. Decapitating the Islamic Republic has not shut it down. Instead, individual IRGC units are all operating autonomously, using their own mobile and highly fluid command structures. Instead of a single enemy, there’s now a swarm. No central authority to negotiate with even if you wanted to. A headless zombie Iran, the wreckage of a six-thousand-year-old state spewing ballistic missiles in every direction. Missiles falling on Saudi oil refineries, Bahraini radar installations, on the matcha labubu sexual slavery camps of Dubai. You thought all those CGI skyscrapers meant you were abstracted from geography, but this is still the Middle East. Meanwhile the revolutionaries have not yet shown up in the streets of Tehran. Possibly because the people most likely to overthrow the regime already tried that in January, and the regime killed or imprisoned them all. It might not happen. The Islamic Republic is a bad government, possibly the worst government anywhere on the face of the earth, but it’s being attacked by children making plane noises. Not inconceivable that large numbers of Iranians will, for the time being, rally around what’s left of the regime. So now the plan is to conjure up some ethnic militias, Kurds and Azeris, use them to re-enact the breakup of Yugoslavia. A pro-Western liberal democracy would be nice, but if we can’t have that we’ll settle for a giant festering sore on the face of Asia, roiling with endless massacres.

The most pathetic figures in all of this are, of course, the lackeys and catamites of the American right. Sixteen months ago they were screeching that Kamala Harris was about to lead America into a cataclysmic war with Iran. Sinister HR girlbosses want to feed your sons into a woodchipper so Raytheon can afford more Pride flags! Vote Trump for peace! And maybe she would have started a war with Iran if she had the chance, but in the end she didn’t. Trump did. Now his followers have to find a way to justify supporting the exact same thing that horrified them five minutes ago. Not an easy job. One attempt, from someone who apparently passes for an intellectual in these circles: ‘Many people derive immense satisfaction from feeling betrayed. For them, politics is an activity where you first build yourself up as a righteous victim, then wait for your champion to betray you so you can luxuriate in outrage and moral superiority.’ Got that? It’s grievance politics if you want your representatives to do anything at all; you’re being morally obnoxious if you object to your anti-war candidate starting a war. Instead of expecting some kind of result from your politics, you should just go limp while Pete Hegseth whispers slurred and whiskey-stinking entreatments into your ear. Do anything, this person is saying. I’ll support anything you want, like a good little whore, because I don’t want to think of myself as a victim. A good rule of thumb is that if you ever feel the need to degrade yourself in public like this, it’s time to totally abandon whatever political opinions brought you here and start again from scratch. I think I would stab myself to death with a butter knife before I wrote anything this undignified. But maybe Aristotle was right, and some people are natural slaves.

I’m sure it doesn’t feel like being a slave at the moment. A lot of people are still giddy with war. It feels like infinite power, it feels like you can do anything you want. But you’ll regret it. Things will not go how you want them to. Unlike previous empires, America can’t even make a desert; everywhere it goes the world reverts to mere chaos. State collapse, ethnic war, tribal militias forgetting how to speak, stammering and babbling over the ruins. Now you’ve decided to create a widening gyre right on top of the sea passage for thirty percent of the world’s energy. Whatever it is, this will come back to fuck you in ways you will not predict. There will be buildings exploding in unexpected corners of the world. It might not be fatal, not yet. But it’s not looking good. Eighty years ago, the United States could essentially print out a theoretically infinite number of tanks and battleships. Now you can’t, and China can. Young Chinese people have a strangely cheerful attitude to their country. Not so long ago China was devouring its own population for no good reason, torturing and killing them by the million; now everyone gets a massive TV and an electric car and a big bowl of soup noodles and a million plasticky vertical dramas about a Tang dynasty princess who falls in love with a mysterious assassin. How can you not love your country when it’s lifted one billion people out of poverty? They’re starting to go a little bit giddy. Meanwhile the American earnestness I love so much is tinged, these days, with a touch of resentment and desperation. Would a declining empire do this? you say, thrashing about, casting off all your subtlety and sophistication for a show of naked force. You don’t get many more of these. Each one brings you just a little bit closer to the end.

Numb at the Lodge currently runs to more than one hundred posts and nearly half a million words. That’s quite a lot of words. It doesn’t help that the stuff I write here usually gets described as ‘indescribable’ and categorised as ‘uncategorisable.’ I will sometimes write long arguments for things I don’t actually believe, or deeply researched essays with exactly one lie hidden inside. I find it fun; maybe you will too.

One way to get into this swamp of half a million words is to trust the masses and just read my most popular posts. Unfortunately, you’ll find that the most-read thing I’ve ever published here is a very straightforward piece of political commentary about why the Democrats lost the 2024 US election, probably the least interesting thing on here. This is because readers can’t be trusted.

Another way is to use this guide. If this is your first time here, we recommend you start with:

The Numb at the Lodge Seasonal Sampling Platter

A tasting menu of lesser-known seasonal delicacies from across the year. Balanced between esoterica, invective, pop culture, and politics. Small plates, tiny bowls, plus a few stranger and more annoying forms to give you a general idea of what it is I’m doing here, so you can decide whether you like it or not:

• Christmas Eve: The black mountain

  ‘Once every nineteen years, the Moon passes so close to Hyperborea that it’s possible to leap across the gap and walk on its surface.’

  An esoteric history of Santa Claus and the North Pole, featuring Athanasius Kircher’s underground oceans, Nazi hollow Earth theories, cannibal dancers, the Inuit discovery of Europe, the revolution of May 1968, and the terrifying secret of our planet’s magnetic field.

• Valentine’s Day: Manifesto of the Armed Front of Love

  ‘Have you really never loved anyone so much, with so much of your heart, that you just had to fire mortars into a police station about it?’

  Every day there’s another terrorist atrocity. The people responsible say that their only ideology is love. They’re letting off bombs because they’re in love. But who would want to listen to a bunch of terrorists?

• May Day: This green and growing earth

  ‘The seagull god had magnificent hard yellow eyes and a small shrub growing out of its head. I felt an urge—a small urge, but a very real one—to worship it.’

  On the last day of spring, the residents of an ordinary English town parade a man made of leaves through the streets and then ritually slaughter him on a hilltop. Most of them assume they’re taking part in an ancient pagan fertility rite. In fact, it’s much more interesting than that.

• Midsummer: I love America and the world

  ‘I love this senseless empire, sprawled across the face of someone else’s continent like a bird-eating spider, and I love its mandibles that inject the planet with venom until everything liquefies and it can feed.’

  In July 2024, a sniper came a quarter of an inch away from exploding Donald Trump’s brain on live TV. It was maybe the most beautiful and the most summery day of my life. For just a moment, politics disappeared. I loved Donald Trump, and the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, and everything that exists.

• My birthday: Eternity

  ‘I thought it was my idea to rewatch Girls, or possibly my girlfriend’s idea; one of ours, anyway, or why else would we have done it? So we rewatched the first episode of Girls, and it turned out to be a very weird experience that caused me to receive several terrifying insights about the true nature of the universe and the unreality of time.’

  My birthday is in early September, the beginning of autumn, when everything in the world starts dying, and I get to thinking about dying too. To mark the occasion, I wrote an anguished essay on the unbearable vastness of the far future and the experience of rewatching Lena Dunham’s Girls (2012).

If you’ve finished the Seasonal Sampling Platter and decided you want more, why not try one of these bonus packages?

The Numb at the Lodge Round-the-World Super-Luxe Holiday Express

Our all-inclusive tour of this large and increasingly psychotic planet, taking in all the major tourist sites plus some authentically menacing alleys and unsanitary foreign jails:

• China: Numb in China: Shī shì shí shī shǐ

  ‘The only way Chinese makes sense is if you imagine it as an attempt, begun thousands of years ago, to create a language that would be illegible to digital machines.’

  A letter from the hot, humid megacity of Chongqing, deep in the depths of China, in which I try to untangle what’s going on with what is possibly the world’s most fundamentally deranged language.

• India: Numb in India: Dharma police

  ‘Imagine if every air-traffic controller had to come from one of the secretive families of air-traffic controllers implanted in every city, and instead of passing an exam they simply performed their mysterious rites before a tiny black idol of God in his form as a cosmic air-traffic controller, directing the movements of stars and galaxies from his terminal in the great control tower beyond the physical universe, and then the airports had to hire them. Now imagine the air-traffic controllers all refuse to eat in the presence of pilots, who are their social inferiors, and if the daughter of an air-traffic controller tries to marry a pilot, her parents might try to kill her. Also, one person can ‘be’ a pilot and another an air traffic controller, even though neither of them have been anywhere near an airport and they’re actually both just millet farmers. That’s a jati.’

  A letter from the hot, dry desert outpost of Jaisalmer, on the furthest fringes of India, in which I try to untangle what’s going on with what is possibly the world’s most fundamentally deranged form of social organisation.

• Australia: Dreams never end

  ‘As soon as Captain Cook came ashore at Botany Bay, he fell asleep and dreamed he was walking around, surveying hills and harbours. And when the First Fleet arrived they also fell asleep, on the ground where they landed, under the open sky, dreaming that they were founding a colony. Then the Second Fleet came to sleep right next to them. This city is a dream, it’s a desert mirage. We have trespassed on our dreamworld.’

  I have never been to Australia, but I have watched several seasons of an Australian reality TV show called Married at First Sight. This is what I learned.

• Russia: The beautiful Russia of the future

  ‘Russia is the world: the entire history of the world.’

  One day in 2023, a former small-time crook called Yevgeny Prigozhin turned his mercenary army against the Russian state and sent a tank column racing up the highway towards Moscow. Only in Russia, the last country where things still really take place.

• Gaza: Bread, figs, phosphorus

  ‘At the time, Gaza was twice the size of Jerusalem. The well-water was very slightly salty; so was the cheese. Outside the city there were groves of olive trees that had stood for hundreds of years. At night, you could hear the wide dark sea rushing and retreating over the dunes.’

  Written a week into Israel’s war against the people of Gaza. A lament.

• America: Numb at Burning Man

  ‘As new campers arrived, I heard them introduce themselves to each other in strange and savage ways. Ah, one said, you’re in quantum computing. I’m only in quantum data, but you might want to talk to Kevin over there. The lowly quantum data worker gestured at a shirtless man in a bright pink bucket hat and glowing cat ears. He does quantum computing, he said.’

  I went to Burning Man.

The Numb at the Lodge Pillar of Eternal and Enduring Truth

This pillar is made of granite, five hundred feet high, inscribed with one of these texts on each of its four solemn faces. The word ‘INTEGRITY’ is carved into its capital, symbolising my promise to never creatively combine true and fictional statements, or ever write a short story in the form of an essay:

• The secret history of Wakanda

  ‘The masks are carved out of wood using stone tools. I didn’t like looking at those masks. They expressed a kind of mathematics I’m glad I don't understand.’

  Most people think the secret country of Wakanda was invented for comic books in the 1960s. In fact, Europeans have been dreaming about a highly advanced African society for more than two thousand years. To this day, some people claim they’ve actually been there.

• What is the world’s oldest hatred?

  ‘Whoever you are, whatever you hate the most is just a substitute or a metaphor for yourself.’

  According to a lot of politicians, the world’s oldest hatred is gentiles’ hatred of Jews. For Afropessimists, it’s white people’s hatred of black people; for radical feminists it’s men’s hatred of women. Other people have had weirder views.

  (For more information about one of those people, see Five prophets, The law that can be named is not the true law, and Against truth.)

• Taylor Swift does not exist

  ‘Taylor Swift seems destined to be remembered by our drooling, mud-eating descendants as a kind of culture hero, the mythical source of everything left for them to inherit. First was she who plucked strings and made pleasant sounds. Who taught man to spin thread and mark the hours of the sun.’

  For a few months in late 2014, I was the world’s first full-time Taylor Swift reporter. In that time, I think I discovered something I wasn’t supposed to. All I’m left with is a gaping hole in my memory and a book of increasingly frenzied notes.

• A truly foreign language

  ‘There is language that towers up out of the sidewalk and language that collects in the gutters, and one wide pacific word that drains out of the Bay and away, washing against the far edge of itself to send Japanese fishermen insane.’

  In 2024, Donald Trump gave a press conference at the US-Mexico border in which he claimed that America was being invaded by ‘truly foreign languages’ spoken by ‘nobody.’ He was right.

The Numb at the Lodge Guide to AI

Like basically everyone, I’ve produced a lot of stuff about large language models. Unlike everyone, all my assessments have been correct and all my predictions have come to pass:

• A user’s guide to the zairja of the world

  ‘The more technologically advanced an AI becomes, the less likely it is to produce anything of artistic worth.’

  Written in December 2022, shortly after the public launch of ChatGPT. To understand AI, you need to know the full story of computer-generated text, which begins with an Islamic fortune-telling machine that was invented in the twelfth century but claimed to have existed since the very first days of creation.

• The cacophony

  ‘The obvious answer is that a chatbot is not conscious, and you aren’t really conscious either. There’s only one conscious entity in the universe, which is language itself.’

  Written in April 2023, shortly after the first AIs started going mad. In the first years of the seventeenth century, Europe was nearly destroyed in a Cacophony, a plague of carnivorous words. Now, we seem to be in the early phases of another.

• Born in the wrong generation

  ‘That’s a great choice! your beautiful submissive girlfriend says. A plate of ham is a fantastic way to start the day, delivering the primal satisfaction of cured meat without the heaviness of bacon. Add a pair of lacy, crispy fried eggs with rich, runny yolks and you’ve got yourself a certified diner classic!’

  Written in April 2025, shortly after AIs started driving human beings mad too. With the power of modern technology, everyone can live in whatever version of reality they prefer, forever.

The Numb at the Lodge Cultural Critique Corner

Do you like books? Do you like films? Not me! The Cultural Critique Corner is a dark, neglected, rodenty hole for people who complain about how entertainment isn’t as good as it ought to be. If that’s your perversion:

• Against lists of books

  ‘The point isn’t to read these books; the point is to have read them. Actually dragging your wet eyeballs over all that scratchy paper is just an awkward chore you have to go through, so afterwards you can ask people at parties if they’ve read The Line of Beauty, and then, before they’ve even had a chance to respond, tell them that you’ve read The Line of Beauty.’

  In which I complain about people making lists of books.

• The repulsive crust

  ‘Once, there was character, which could be good or bad, and which had something to do with heredity and possibly the precise pattern of bone ridges on your skull. Novels from this era tend to spend a lot of time on physical description, because the tilt of a nose or the bulging of an eye says something significant about the person we’re meeting. We don’t really do that any more. We have learned psychology: we know that a person is composed primarily of feelings.’

  In which I complain about pop-psychology in fiction.

• All the nerds are dead

  ‘The greatest lie the nerds ever told us was that being a nerd had something to do with being unpopular, being uncool, being outside the cultural mainstream, being unusual, being creative, being funny, being different in any way. Being a nerd has always meant being a machine for liking things.’

  In which I complain about nerd culture, and (accurately) predict its demise.

• The internet is already over

  ‘Everything that depends on the internet for its propagation will die. What survives will survive in conditions of low transparency, in the sensuous murk proper to human life.’

  The first post published in Numb at the Lodge, and still its manifesto. In which I prophesy the end of the internet.

• In my zombie era

  ‘I pull up swagless into this sauceless void. Chat, in what consists my drip? My drip is stiff with blood and mire. Chat, in what consists my aura? My aura is only fear. Chat, in what consists my rizz? My rizz is a half-turned head, twisted birdlike. My rizz is the empty circling of a dislocated jaw. My rizz is antic snarling. My rizz is reddened eyes.’

  Look, you’re just going to have to read it.

The Numb at the Lodge Golden Sheaf of Lightly Blasphemous but Basically Well-Intentioned Engagements with the Abrahamic Religions

Actually these are just two generally under-read pieces I’m really fond of and couldn’t fit anywhere else, but they do have this in common:

• Legion

  ‘You can tell a demon, because a demon speaks the truth.’

  According to the Gospels, Jesus cast a multitude of demons out of a man and into a herd of pigs grazing nearby, who then ran into a lake and drowned. But the Gospels were written by Jews, who for obvious reasons don’t know much about pigs. Like, for instance, the fact that pigs can swim.

• The dust of God

  ‘No statue stands in this temple, as in Greek and Roman temples. The temple does, however, contain a huge black stone with a pointed end and round base in the shape of a cone. The Phoenicians solemnly maintain that this stone came down from Zeus.’

  On the ancient practice of worshipping fallen meteors, which might secretly survive into the present day.

If, after reading all this, you still want more, maybe you should consider becoming a paid subscriber. All the posts featured in this guide have been completely free to read, but paid subscribers get access to the full archive of paid posts, all of which are slightly less interesting than the stuff you get for free. This includes most of the political takes, plus the full China and India series and a lapsed project about dreams I fully intend to pick up again at some point. I try to dissuade people from becoming paid subscribers as much as possible because I think making money tends to make my writing worse, but if you insist:

How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?

Five? That’s how many apricots the average person can fit in their mouth. One stuffed in each cheek, plus three in the middle. If the average person tries to shove a sixth apricot in there, they start to gag. Eyes water, nose runs, eventually a thin dribble of orange pap escapes from between the teeth. Too many apricots feels like burning. Before long they’re gasping and retching and puking up great slimy globs of apricot flesh. That’s the average person. Are you an average person?

Before you answer, you should know what it’s like out there for the average person. They’ve started putting up positive messages in my local privately-owned public space. Big free-standing billboards that say things like YOU’RE NEVER TOO MUCH and IT’S OK NOT TO BE OK and HAVE YOU LOVED YOURSELF TODAY? and WE’RE ALL A BIT MESSY SOMETIMES. One of them contains, in smaller letters, a sort of poem about ADHD. ‘Lateness as a creative act. Splicing a little chaotic obsession into the world’s mind-numbing order. Loving us for how intensely, sincerely—inconveniently—we show up.’ Supposedly these are all about being different and unique, but really this is just how the powers of the world now address the average person. Once, before anyone can really remember, they spoke in the hysterical register of duty and sacrifice and law; now it’s this. Come on, let’s all have a bloody great chat about our mental health. You will be interpellated as small sad bean, who needs help from some shadowy consortium of private interests to help manage all the sad feelings floating around in their head. You are assumed to be in a state of ambient unwellness. You’re suffering from a mental distress that’s bad enough to require some kind of outside help, but not so bad that the outside help has to consist of anything other than a big yellow sign that says TAKE A DEEP BREATH. YOU’RE DOING GREAT. That’s the average person. That’s what they think you are. So I’ll ask again. How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?

You need to be apricotmaxxing. You need to be cramming upwards of ten or twelve apricots in your mouth at a time.

Apricotmaxxing isn’t difficult. The techniques are well established; they’re just not very pleasant. With willpower and meditation you can suppress the pharyngeal reflex and get another apricot in there, maybe even two, but all that mental bullshit will only get you so far. Are you serious about this? Do you want to spend your life dithering in the fat central slice of the standard distribution, like every other loser? Don’t you know that when the great bifurcation comes, all the ordinary people will be rendered down into biofuel to power Elon Musk’s infinite child porn generator? Want to avoid that? Then you need to expand your jaw. If you’re trying to fit more apricots in there the only way is to expand your jaw. The procedure is called Surgically Assisted Rapid Palatal Expansion, or SARPE. As you might know, there are two bones above the roof of your mouth, which slowly come together and fuse during adolescence. In a SARPE procedure, the surgeon cuts through the palate and pries them open again. Then, orthodontics are fitted with a spring across the width of the mouth to gently push the bones apart. If you can get a surgeon to perform SARPE, that’s great. If not, there are other options. You can do it yourself. You can put a butter knife in your mouth, gently find the line where the maxillary bones meet, and in one smooth motion push it upwards into your skull.

Self-SARPEing is only the beginning. Serious apricotmaxxers know that you need to loosen your cheeks. You can achieve a little extra slack by injecting medically inadvisable doses of corticosteroids, which inhibit the production of collagen and lead to baggier, wrinklier skin across the entire body. But eventually you’ll have to resort to cheek-slashing. Good deep cuts; really slice through the buccinator muscle, so when it heals it heals scarred and weak. After three rounds of cheek-slashing your cheeks will be so loose and jowly you can fit three apricots in each with room to spare. Having thirteen apricots in your mouth will be completely doable. You are beginning to apricotmog the taut.

Of course, as a successful apricotmaxxer, you will not look normal. You will have the face of a dying bloodhound. Cheeks dangling like huge scrotums against your head. The skin will hang off your body everywhere, covered in fine wrinkles like an unironed shirt or an ancient banknote, and there’ll be dense scribbles of scar tissue where you’ve mutilated yourself. If something went wrong during the self-SARPE, and it probably did, you’ll also have damaged the trigeminal nerve, which means it’s now agony for you to attempt to eat, drink, or speak, and sometimes you get flashes of excruciating neuralgia that strike like lightning bolts in your head at random throughout the day. Maybe you were wrong to try apricotmaxxing. But don’t worry. There are other ways to become exceptional. Consider this: how many anchovies do you think you can fit in your nostrils?

Most people, being average, do not understand what maxxing really means. Look at me! they squeal. I’m sleepmaxxing! They mean that they’re trying to get eight hours a night. Or they’re proteinmaxxing, which means they’ve bought a big tub of whey powder. I’m such a houseplantmaxxer, they tell the fiddle-leaf fig they ordered online. It’s fun to play around with a new word. But sleepmaxxing does not mean getting a red light and taping your mouth shut; it means putting yourself in a medically induced coma. There is only one way of proteinmaxxing, which is to get one hundred percent of your daily calories from lean protein. Anything else would, by definition, be less than fully maxxed. Doctors will tell you that eating only protein causes something called ‘rabbit starvation,’ and if you keep at it you’ll experience vomiting, seizures, and death in fairly short order. They’re right, but the proteinmaxxer accepts his fate. Meanwhile the houseplantmaxxer has thick mats of algae sliming over every surface, the walls, the ceilings, swallowing the sofa, digesting the bookshelf and all its contents, blobbing and dribbling, wet in the middle of the bed, green on the windowpanes, covering everything except the UV lights and the massive pans of water left on a constant boil in every room, so the air stays oppressively, Cretaceously thick.

This is what it means to be a maxxer. We are a long way away from the optimisation of the self; to maxx is an intense form of asceticism. The maxxer is the person who willingly sacrifices every aspect of their lives except one, the maxximand, which is extended to infinity until it begins to develop the distance and vastness of a god.

Probably the world’s most prominent maxxer is a man called Braden Peters, who calls himself Clavicular. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer; his austerity is to make himself as beautiful as possible. If you’re good looking enough, you can ascend, break out of your genetic destiny and into a new order of being, where the subhumans will crawl after you with lolling tongues. Clavicular started looksmaxxing at the age of fourteen, injecting himself with testosterone. He also shoots anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, peptides, botox, and crystal meth. He’s had multiple plastic surgeries. His other secret is bonesmashing, which is exactly what it sounds like: he smashes his own cheekbones with a hammer so they grow back bigger. It’s impossible to know what he would have looked like if he hadn’t done all this, since his ‘before’ pictures all show a prepubescent child, but it’s hard not to conclude that he’s utterly ruined his body. He didn’t go through a normal puberty; his glands are completely incapable of producing testosterone by themselves, and if he ever stops taking the hormones he’ll rapidly decompose into a genderless lump. The various injections have also left him totally sterile; his balls are almost certainly fucked up in ways we can barely imagine. He is a meth addict. And while he really does have legions of lesser beings crawling after him with lolling tongues, they do all seem to be men.

Clavicular lives in a sort of nightmare clown world, where he is constantly being approached in ordinary shopping centres by small, strange, awkward men who say things like ‘I’m known in Orlando as the Asian Mogger. I would have the honour if you could verify me as the Orlando Asian Mogger.’ There are various misshapen freaks of nature, men with shoulders wider than they’re tall, sinister stalking giants on artificially lengthened legs, who travel across the country to stand next to him and compare physiques. Like a mythical gunslinger, the great mogger needs to constantly watch the horizon for whoever’s coming to mog him. Other men adore him in more nakedly eroticised ways. In one video, he’s live-streaming a fun casual hangout with Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, a bunch of other people sitting in silence looking at their phones, and menial staff vacuuming in the background. One of the men is berating a woman sat in Clavicular’s lap. ‘You are not an 8. You’re not an 8. You’re a thirsty 7, you’re asking for validation, and you’re sitting in a 10’s lap.’ ‘That’s kinda rude,’ she says. ‘That’s kinda rude,’ agrees Tristan Tate. ‘Clavicular’s at least an 11.’ Clavicular doesn’t say anything. What gives the scene its particularly haunting resonance is that throughout this exchange, he seems to be eating soup.

In all his interactions with women that aren’t directly supervised by a Tate brother, Clavicular is painfully passive and awkward. The women who like him are all of a type: hot but autistic beyond belief, brainrotted, barfing up a constant stream of overenthusiastic tryhard 4chan nazi jargon that he seems to find deeply embarrassing. Normal women treat him with undisguised contempt. He is constantly having his cortisol spiked by foids. It turns out that being maximally beautiful is not actually the same as maximising your chances of getting laid. Clavicular will never be a female sex symbol; that role goes to men like Slavoj Žižek and Danny DeVito. But maxxing is not optimisation. The maxxer is not trying to have an enjoyable life. He’s trying to reduce himself to a single principle.

Things get confused when the maxximand is also a generally upheld value like beauty. But every maxxer has his shadow, the person maxxing the opposite principle. Clavicular’s shadow is someone who calls himself The Crooked Man. The Crooked Man is a looksminimiser, which is another way of saying he’s an uglymaxxer. His strategy has been to spend a year working out only one side of his body, which has left him with an enormous bulging trap on one shoulder and nothing at all on the other. He looks like a cartoon monster. He stands around shirtless in his empty millennial-grey house, adrift in some suburb somewhere, grey walls, grey carpet, no decorations except cables snaking around on the floor, making video content. He is a kind of Platonic ideal of the maxxer, far more than Clavicular. The Crooked Man’s house appears to get zero natural light. All his gym equipment is at home; you can see him benching 225 on one side only in one of its many large and empty rooms. Plastic Venetian blinds. It’s night outside. It’s always night outside. The sun never shines on The Crooked Man. Incredible things are happening in America.

There’s a reason Clavicular has become the media’s go-to symbol for maxxing, even though The Crooked Man is a much better exemplar. He keeps things on a very comfortable terrain. Maxxing, the line goes, is an outgrowth of incel culture. It’s about men, the problem with men, the crisis of masculinity; it’s about how men are now facing the kind of toxic body politics that women have had to deal with forever, and how they’re developing their own hysterias in response; it’s about online extremism, it’s about the harmful narratives that seduce young men into various forms of misogyny; before long it’s about how we all need to put the kettle on and have a proper talk about our men’s mental health. They’re not entirely wrong; there really is a crisis of masculinity, it really is expressing itself through the mainstreaming of misogyny and the proliferation of a diseased relation to the self. It’s just that maxxing comes from something else entirely.

Despite what you might have heard, the word maxxing is not originally incel slang. Incels might have appropriated it, but it began with another kind of loser altogether, the tabletop role-playing gamer. When you’re creating a character in a game like Dungeons and Dragons, you get a limited number of points that can be spread over various attributes, intelligence and dexterity and so on. Most players go for a generally realistic spread with a few minor specialisations, and then spend their weekends happily pretending to be an elf who goes on adventures. But from the moment the game was published in the mid-1970s, another kind of player started spontaneously emerging. These people were called min/maxers, and instead of playing normally they would dump as many points as possible into a single stat and leave the others empty. They were generally uninterested in the storytelling aspect of the game; the characters they built were essentially just mathematically calibrated tools, and usually impossible to roleplay. They would do absolutely nothing until they saw an opportunity to deploy their one hypertrophied skill, at which point they would use it and instantly ruin everyone else’s fun. The min/maxers did not seem to be having very much fun themselves either. Whatever they were doing, it was governed by something more mysterious than enjoyment.

Maxxing is not about feelings. It’s not from inside us. It can’t be corrected with a healthier body image. It’s much less boring than that. Maxxing emerges as a strategy within a certain kind of game. Dungeons and Dragons is one such game; evolutionary processes are another. Nature is full of organisms that have adopted some form of maxxing as a reproductive strategy, even if they’re not usually very impressive. Extremophile bacteria are natural maxxers; so are some parasites and symbionts. Male fig wasps are wingless and blind; they spend their entire lives in the dark sweet world inside a fig. Their role is to mate with the female wasps that hatch alongside them and then chew a way out of the fig so the females can escape; afterwards the males are slowly digested by the fruit they were born in until they dissolve into its flesh. The females spend a few hours flying around in search of another fig to lay their eggs in, and then they’re consumed too. This is how figs are pollinated. The wasps are figmaxxing in a way that will forever be beyond us. But we are, in our own minor way, playing a similar game.

It wasn’t always this way. Maxxing is not a natural feature of human life; though most of human history it could barely exist. Take the early Middle Ages. Chris Wickham estimates that in the period 400-800 AD, around ninety percent of the European population were rural peasants, and almost everything they consumed was produced inside the household. Food, obviously: grain markets did exist, but they were generally used by landlords to offload surpluses; aside from armies, which are generally market-dependent, the only people who bought their own food were pastoralists. Textiles too; peasant women would have had to spend essentially every spare second spinning. The act of spinning fibre into thread took up around four-fifths of the labour that went into any garment, but we know weaving was also performed inside the home. Archaeological digs in early-medieval English villages keep unearthing loom-weights—stones with holes bored in them, used to keep threads taut—in sufficient numbers to imply that every household was producing its own cloth. To make effective nonporous ceramics you need an energy-intensive kiln, which peasant households running on a strict fuel budget can’t really afford. A lot of the time, instead of specialising, peasants simply chose not to have any nonporous ceramics. Pottery shards from the era were usually fired in bonfires instead of kilns. Where specialisation was unavoidable, like in the production of metal tools, or cash crops like wine or olives, the specialists would usually also need a grain field for their own subsistence needs. In such a situation, maxxing is almost impossible. It doesn’t matter what you think about women; you can’t reduce yourself to a single principle when you need to be able to farm crops, build and thatch a house, sew clothes, and occasionally die in someone else’s aristocratic squabble. You would starve long before you managed to extend your maxximand anywhere near infinity.

The only exception was a dedicated caste of pietymaxxers. These were, like all maxxers, celibate. In the early part of this period they would usually hermitmog the sincels by starving themselves in the desert; eventually this was formalised into a network of monastic hype houses. Throughout the medieval period, pietymaxxers would swear off food, whip themselves, or become anchorites, walled like a fig wasp into a tiny cell attached to their local church. It makes sense that this would have its germ in religion; if a maxximand is a principle extended until it resembles a god, then God can equally be described as a maxximand that’s lost all qualities except infinity. But the clergy could never really sustain it; the infrastructure wasn’t in place yet. Instead, there was a well-established monastic treadmill, in which new orders would spring up, committed to poverty and the mortification of the flesh, but within a generation they’d all be rapacious landlords drinking from silver goblets. There’s nothing more repulsive than a larping maxxer. Clergymen who’d decided to start living more holistically were frequently massacred in chiliastic peasant revolts.

What changed things was capitalism, but not in the way you might think. It’s entirely possible to have specialisation without capitalism; Richard Britnell concludes that by 1300, thirty to forty percent of all the grain grown in England was sold on the open market, and even subsistence farmers were actually getting a sizeable chunk of their food commercially, using the time saved to specialise in cash crops or artisan trades. You can imagine a noncapitalist world that still has people zooming around, delivering hamburgers to shutins who are so fixated on their own collarbones they’ve lost the ability to prepare their own food. But a division of labour isn’t enough; a game can only produce maxxing as a strategy if all players are formally equal.

Under feudalism, a landowner would never need to adopt maxxing, since they’re already in a superior position for reasons entirely unrelated to their individual qualities. A peasant would never bother, for basically the same reasons. A looksmaxxed villein is still just a villein. The only people who engaged in the practice were the first estate, who were vaguely committed to the notion that all souls are judged equally by God. Under capitalism, though, there’s a completely different kind of inequality. Everyone is an ultimately interchangeable stage in the realisation of capital; the difference between master and slave is a neutral and indifferent number. Suddenly, maxxing is viable. You can game the hierarchy by making yourself different, because under conditions of formal equality actual inequalities become massively significant. The most obvious thing to maxx is money itself, which is, like God, a kind of universal, abstract maxximand. But in time, those who don’t moneymaxx will end up in a similar position anyway, thanks to the rationalisation of industry.

In the early medieval system, everyone has to perform the exact same broad and variegated collection of tasks, which produce a range of totally unique objects. (The only product subject to industrial mass-production and standardisation was money; every coin needed to have the exact same weight and carry the exact same stamp.) The Taylorist high-industrial production line is the exact opposite. A basically infinite number of consumer goods are available, but all of them are regularised and identical. Individuals are unique, performing a completely different function, but that function is incredibly narrow. The vast range of human capabilities could be reduced down to a single motion, which the worker would have to repeat hundreds or thousands of times a day. The unity of the self is irrevocably cracked open; from now on it’s possible to keep just one function and discard everything else.

As you might have noticed, work in the developed countries is no longer dominated by production lines and time and motion studies. It’s worse. The palaeotechnic worker could at least pretend that it was only their body being broken down into a collection of possible movements, while their mind was still integral and intact. Not any more. The contemporary subject is a bundle of saleable traits and incompetencies. In a highly plastic and fluid labour market, what matters aren’t even your specific skills, since at any moment one of these could be automated into uselessness by AI. It’s a market in disembodied aspects, from ‘team player’ to ‘highly agentic.’ Although it’s pursued with less fervour now, it’s still possible to isolate and extend your sexuality or ethnic background, while the rest of you withers away. The aspects you extend don’t have to be strengths; it’s actually encouraged to specialise in being in some way incapable, which is how you end up with public spaces covered in bad poetry about having ADHD. We’re all playing the game that generates maxxers. But we are not all maxxers ourselves.

The difference between a maxxer and an ordinary striver or optimiser is infinity. Ordinary people have broken themselves apart into a bundle of miserable attributes, but all of them are contingent. At any point, the rationalised factory worker can be moved to a different station and subordinated to a different set of motions. But the maxxer only has one thing. Everything is on the line and nothing is in reserve. No cracks in the maxxer’s surface. They are whole and complete in a way the fractured masses are not; they’ve burned off everything about themselves other than their obsession. All that’s left is the need to be the most, to touch the furthest point of excess. When someone is under the spell of infinity, there’s an electricity about them. We might love them or despise them, but we’re obsessed with maxxers. Few people agree with Clavicular, but he’s got more people furiously thinking about the meaning of beauty than anyone since Kant. We write essays about maxxers; we blunderingly ape their behaviours; we spike their cortisol while they’re jestergooning at the club. This has nothing to do with what they merely are. If someone just happens to be extremely tall, that’s briefly interesting, but only for a moment. Every village has its gangly man. But if someone keeps undergoing surgeries to make themselves taller, if they’re constantly breaking and resetting their femurs, if they’re injecting black-market somatropin directly into their spinal column, suddenly we’re transfixed. The appearance of something superlunary in the world.

The twenty-first century is going to be a century of the maxxer. It won’t take many maxxers to make a century; when you drag yourself to the absolute furthest point in a distribution tail you leave a lot of turbulence in your wake. The twentieth century was a century of the masses, class and ethnic conflicts, nationalism and the great contests of history. The realist novel, the personal essay, the strip-mining of ordinary life for patterns and insights. Our century will not make nearly as much sense. All of us will be held hostage to the obsessions of a small group of mentally deranged and self-destructive freaks. Someone will emerge out of nowhere and start tonguemaxxing, and suddenly entire political orders will rise and fall on the density of the President’s circumvallate papillae. The kind of Marxist-historicist critique I’ve half-mockingly resurrected here is already becoming impossible. Already it’s crowded out by screeching eroticised resentment. Brief storms of interpretative fury. The future will not understand itself. There’s only one way to escape the magnetic chaos that’s coming, and live in a world that still holds together. You need to start maxxing yourself. You need to find a principle, any principle, and destroy yourself for it. How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?

Goodness exists everywhere; evil was invented in Iran.

The first person to discover evil lived in the Airyanem Vaejah or the Expanse of the Aryans, a zone of scrubland between the cold mountains and the endless desert. He was a priest, but the priest of a cattle-herding people. His name meant Managing Camels. His father was called Possessing Grey Horses. You have to imagine a slightly shabby figure, living in the dry expanses, probably a few fleas in his beard. Later, the Iranians would build a great civilisation, cities, temples, an empire, but not yet. Most of the year he travelled with his herds like everyone else, but in the ritual season it was his role to crush the sacred plants, and mix them with river water, and give the bitter liquid to the initiates. They worshipped little gods, warrior deities; you could summon them with certain plants; they might join you on a cattle raid. In his thirtieth year, Managing Camels was collecting water from the River Daitya, when he saw a figure on the opposite bank. The figure was nine times taller than a normal person, and he also happened to be glowing. The figure told him to take off his clothes, and he did; when the figure beckoned him into the river he discovered he was somewhere else, in a place that seemed to be made out of infinite light, so bright he couldn’t see his own shadow, and in front of him was a being made of infinite light as well, the true and only God. In the story, the light gives him a few banal homilies. It tells him that the best thing in the world is to have good thoughts, the second-best is to speak good words, and the third-best is to do good deeds. Not particularly thrilling stuff, but when he returned to his drab physical world, Managing Camels was willing to renounce his gods and the gods of his ancestors and live in the wilderness, cast out by his clan, hated, a universal enemy. It must have been the intensity of that light, more than what it said. Managing Camels spent the rest of his life wandering this dull, gloomy, shadowy world, composing anguished hymns to his God. Some of them still survive. ‘To what land can I go, where can I flee? My people are cut off from me, the rulers of the land despise me. How am I to please you? I know why I am powerless and impotent. I have no herds and no people. I cry to you: give me the help a friend gives to a friend. Teach me through righteousness how to attain the Good Thought.’

This is not unusual. People have sudden visions of God all the time; sometimes, for no obvious reason, an individual human subjectivity disintegrates, the mind falls out like a bowling ball through a wet paper bag, and a cattle-herder from some drab scrubland on the fringes of Asia is briefly plunged into the luminous infinity of being. Deal with that, says God, and vanishes. No one’s immune, but it seems to happen to cattle-herders in particular. People with names like Managing Camels or Horselover Fat. The difference is that this time, the luminous infinity of being told Managing Camels that it was not alone. There is another one like me, it said, but in the same way that I am made of light, the other one is made of darkness.

In his hymns, Managing Camels explains: ‘In visions they reveal themselves as twins, good and evil in thought and word and deed. When they came together in the beginning, they created life and not-life. Those who act well have chosen wisely between the two. In the end, Worst Existence shall be to the followers of evil, but Best Existence to him that follows Right.’ The evil god is called Druj, or the Liar. The little warrior-gods the Iranians had sacrificed to in the past were really the teeming demons of the Liar, who are constantly trying to tear the universe apart. ‘They are demons of ruin, pain, and growing old, producers of vexation and bile, revivers of grief, the progeny of gloom, and bringers of stench, decay, and vileness, who are many, very numerous, and very notorious; and a portion of all of them is mingled in the bodies of men.’ God created a beautiful sky and the Liar tried to blot out the stars. God created an enormous primordial bull and the Liar slaughtered it. God created humans, and wanted us to live in eternal happiness, but the Liar gave us suffering instead. This is why the body dies. A swarm of tiny demons are in there, ravaging the place, tearing nucleotides out of your DNA.

In his own language, Managing Camels was called Zarathustra; his vision became the state religion for a succession of great and glorious Iranian empires, one after another, for nearly two thousand years. Before Zarathustra, the Iranians were grubby herdsmen on the rocky edge of the world; afterwards they formed the world’s first universal multiethnic state. The little peoples they conquered were fighting for their own little patch of land and their own local gods; the Iranians knew that history is the scene of a cosmic battle between good and evil, and their duty was to chase evil out of the earth.

Dualism makes a lot of sense. It’s the only solution to the problem of evil that really does. It’s easier if you want to live in an amoral universe, where humans suffer because we’re at the mercy of childish and fickle gods, or if there are no gods at all. But if you want to imagine a good, kindly, loving, rational principle behind the universe, eventually you’ll have to contend with the fact that things down here are not always good or rational. You can say that suffering is a result of our freedom: God wanted us to be free to choose good instead of evil, which means there has to be a certain amount of evil in the world. But that doesn’t mean there have to be earthquakes, and there are. Mark Twain imagines God creating the fly. ‘Persecute the sick child; settle upon its eyes, its face, its hands, and gnaw and pester and sting. Settle upon the soldier’s festering wounds in field and hospital and drive him frantic while he prays, and betweentimes curses, with none to listen but you. Harry and persecute the forlorn and forsaken wretch who is perishing of the plague, and in his terror and despair praying; bite, sting, feed upon his ulcers, dabble your feet in his rotten blood, gum them thick with plague-germs. Visit all; spare no creature, wild or tame; but wheresoever you find one, make his life a misery, treat him as the innocent deserve; and so please Me and increase My glory Who made the fly.’ No mortal human would create the fly, ‘except under an assumed name.’ Why would God?

You can try to even out the balance of this fly-buzzing world with a blissful afterlife, where all our suffering is rewarded, and sometimes a nasty afterlife as well, where horrible demons will grab whoever hurt you and got away with it and saw him in half down the crotch. This doesn’t really solve things either. If it’s possible to create a rational world, where goodness is rewarded and evil is punished, why does this world have the stamp of irrationality on it? You can say that we need immense misery and suffering so we can appreciate what is good. C.S Lewis: ‘A man has no concept of a straight line unless he has seen a crooked one.’ But if you went to a restaurant where a starving African child was suspended from the ceiling in a perspex box like David Blaine, I don’t know if it would make you more likely to enjoy your meal. At a certain point it makes a lot more sense to say that evil is not just privation, the absence of good, distance from God: evil is its own thing. There are two gods and one of them is evil; that’s why the world looks the way it does.

This does still leave one question. This other god: what’s his deal? Why is he like this? You could argue that he’s mindless. He doesn’t know why he destroys. He’s not volitional; he’s the second law of thermodynamics. There is a force in the universe that produces glowing stars and galaxies; there is also a force in the universe that’s currently trying to disperse everything that exists into a thin and featureless cloud of electrons, muons, and neutrinos. The Bundahishn has another answer. God and the Liar are twins, but they’re not the same. In the very beginning, when they came into being together, God could see the entire cosmos from his throne of light. He knew the Liar was there. But the Liar, in his abyssal cloud of darkness, thought he was alone. He didn’t realise he had a brother. He only discovered that there was something other than darkness when he floated out of his pit and caught the first faint ray of light. It was agony. God can endure the dark, but for the Liar light is unbearable. He keeps trying to destroy the universe because the existence of the universe is torture: because God—who always knew he was there, and knew exactly how this would affect him—is choosing to torture him. All the Zoroastrian sources agree that at the end of time there will be a Frashokereti, the Final Day when the Liar is defeated.

Even if dualism makes a lot of things much easier, non-dualists tend to find it upsetting. Mystical thought tends towards unity, what Freud called the ‘oceanic feeling’: I am the world, the world is me, a general milky oral-stage oneness. When people have spiritually transformative ayahuasca trips, they don’t usually experience reality as a field of self-sufficient Leibnizian monads. But dualism says that there is a scar in the world, and you will not be able to reduce reality to a single principle. Other people live in one coherent universe; Iranians are caught between two. Something creepy about it: these twilight people in their in-between world. It doesn’t matter if you dedicate your life and your civilisation to fighting evil: once you make evil an active principle in the world it’s there to call on, or there to call on you. The Greeks were darkly fascinated with the figure of the magos, the Iranian fire-sorcerers who whispered in the ear of the Shahanshah, interpreting his dreams, divining the stars, healing disease, controlling the weather, exposing dead bodies on towers of silence to be devoured by vultures, and summoning demons. These are the origin of our words magic, magician: a person who consorts with unclean supernatural powers to do harm to others, or, sometimes, a charlatan who pretends they can consort with unclean supernatural powers to do harm to others. In Pliny, Zarathustra is the first magician, but his ‘magic is detestable, vain, and idle, and though it has what I might call shadows of truth, their power comes from the art of the poisoner, not of the Magi.’

Still, something happened in the shatter zone between the Greek and Iranian worlds, from the Tigris to the Mediterranean. The Greeks might have thought Iranian cosmology was sinister and unwholesome, but the peoples in the Iranian orbit were fascinated by the strange spiritual doctrines of this people from the mysterious West. In particular, an esoteric teacher called Plato, who said that the world you perceive though the intellect is the true one, and the material world is false.

The difference is that Plato lacked a concept of evil. His creator is good; being good, ‘he wanted everything to become as much like himself as possible. This, more than anything else, was the most preeminent reason for the origin of the world’s coming to be. God wanted everything to be good and nothing to be bad so far as that was possible.’ The rational resembles God more than the material does, but even if the material resembles God very faintly, weighted down by necessity, it still points unerringly towards the Good. Plato lived in a placid static Greek aristocratic world, where everything is made of white marble and pleasingly proportioned, and the olive-harvest is ripening in the hillsides, and the Etesian winds blow bright salt-spray on the docks, on the slaves carrying barrels of good dark wine from the black-hulled ship, and the sun shines on everything and everyone is fuckable and everything is good. If you unleash the same idea on people like the Iranians, who can constantly feel evil grasping at them from underneath the surface of the universe, you get something else.

These days, maybe it’s a dispositional thing. First these ideas emerge in history, afterwards they emerge in psychology. There are some people who are capable of looking at this world, flies and earthquakes and all, and saying: it is good. When I was younger I found them terrifying and incomprehensible. To love a world where so many people are suffering feels morally wrong. Now, sometimes, I think I get it. The world exists, we’re here; what more could you possibly want? Philip Larkin, not usually the most cheerful man, called it ‘the million-petalled flower/ Of being here.’ (In a poem about death, admittedly, but aren’t they all?) I think it helps if you’re in love. But most people can’t do without the devil, even the ones who don’t believe in him. They need a name for the subterranean principle breathing wrongness into the world. When someone uses the words ‘late capitalism,’ you can’t really be sure at first whether they’re an actual historical materialist or whether they’re just using another name for Druj. He has lots of names these days.

A few people, though, go further. When I was much younger, I was one of them. Maybe it’s inevitable: any skinny, brainy kid who’s too spastic to play football with the other boys will end up seeing the world in the same way as the Mandaeans, and the Manichaeans, and the Basilidaeans, and the Elchasaites, and the Ophites, and the Zurvanites.1 The cults who said that there is no demon trying to break into the world: this is his house. You have been living in his house from the moment you were born. This body you think is yours: it belongs to the beast. A prison made of carrion. For some people, everything the senses touch is disgusting. ‘This world,’ says the Gnostic Gospel of Philip, ‘is a corpse-eater; all those who eat within it shall die themselves.’ The being that created this corpse-eating world is not made of infinite light. His name is Yaldabaoth, and he is a lion-headed serpent-demon, a blind idiot, howling and defective. According to the Pistis Sophia his realm is the outer darkness, which is the jaws of the dragon. ‘And out of the jaws of the dragon cometh all ice and all dust and all cold and all different diseases.’ But in his dark cloud of ice and disease, he thinks he is the only god. In the lowest depths of the cosmos he made this universe for himself; scattered its stars. He trapped a few small fragments of the divine light in his muddy little creation: we are those sparks. He appeared to Moses in a burning bush and told him to worship him. Right now, billions of people are giving praise to Yaldabaoth. We’re his hostages, and we don’t even realise it. ‘I forgot I was a king’s son, and became a slave to their king. I forgot the Pearl for which my parents had sent me.’

In a way, all this stuff was there from the start. Zarathustra says the evil god is a liar. What is lying? Creating a false world. But this new dualism is weirder, more tragic, than the old one. Once there was a good god who made the universe because he loved us, and an evil god who keeps trying to destroy it because he hates us. Now the good god still loves us; he’s trying to rescue us from the flesh. But Yaldabaoth loves us too. That’s why the evil spirit built us these dying, corpse-eating bodies; that’s why he built us this broken world. He wanted to make a home for us. Everything he creates is monstrous, but he’s trying. He doesn’t know.

Someone had to stand up for the devil; it ended up being Mansour al-Hallaj. In Arabic, a hallaj is a wool-carder, someone who spends their life doing the tedious work of combing big fluffy balls of wool until all the fibres are straight. Mansour al-Hallaj was an Arabised Iranian who really did work as a wool-carder, intermittently, throughout his life. His father was a wool-carder too. His grandfather was a Zoroastrian magus. Al-Hallaj moved around. He left his birthplace in southern Iran for Basra and Baghdad; he went to Mecca three times and Jerusalem once; he travelled into the depths of Asia up to the Oxus; he took a five-year sea-voyage to India. This was not unusual. The Islamic Golden Age was the best time to rootlessly roam Asia in search of spiritual wisdom until the invention of the Volkswagen camper van. In his travels al-Hallaj mixed with disreputable people, Christians and Qarmatians, magicians, yogis. He started preaching in market squares. Dicey mystical stuff. If you kindle your love for God, he said, if you really burn with love for God, eventually all the distinctions dissolve. One of his poems begins: ‘I saw my Lord with the eye of the heart/ I said, Who are you? He answered: You.’ Today, it’s very normal, boring even, for people to believe this kind of thing, the kind of people who like yoga and astrology and the worst music ever made; it was not such a boring idea in the Abbasid Caliphate. In particular, al-Hallaj’s enemies accused him of saying ana al-Haqq: I am the truth. He was, they said, declaring himself as a living god. He spent nine years in a kind of protective custody, trapped in the palace of the Caliph al-Muqtadir, where his enemies were always close, constantly intriguing to have him executed. It was during this imprisonment that he wrote his Kitab al-Tawasin, in which he gave the devil a voice.

In the traditional account, Iblis is the father of the Satans, a spirit (an angel or a djinn, it’s not clear) who rebelled against God and his creation. Iblis is the open enemy of mankind; he roams the world, trying to plant discord among the believers, whisper temptations, spread his petty lies, all to separate us from God, so that when the day comes, we will all join him in the fires of eternal punishment. The story of his disobedience is told a few times in the Qur’an. God tells the angels that he is going to create Adam. ‘I will create a mortal out of dried clay, formed from dark mud. When I have fashioned him and breathed My spirit into him, bow down before him.’ All the angels prostrate themselves except Iblis. ‘I will not bow to a mortal you created from dried clay, formed from dark mud.’ The origin of his evil is pride; God made him out of pure smokeless fire, which is better than clay. Iblis is expelled from Paradise, promising to deceive the descendents of Adam. God replies: ‘I will surely fill up Hell with you and whoever follows you from among them, all together.’

In the sixth chapter of the Tawasin, the Ta-Sin of the Beginning of Time and Equivocation, al-Hallaj tells a different version. Iblis is God’s greatest lover and companion. He knew God before the beginning of time. ‘There is no distance from you for me, since I became certain that distance and nearness are one.’ He doesn’t refuse to bow before Adam out of pride, but because he is a sincere and devoted monotheist, and can’t bring himself to worship anyone other than his beloved. ‘My denial is to affirm your purity; my reason remains disordered in you. What is Adam compared to you? Who am I, Iblis, to differentiate from you?’ So God exiles him, deforms and mutilates his face, and reduces him to a wandering demon. God hates Iblis, but Iblis is still in love with God. His love is even purer now that there’s no possible expectation of reward. A pious human follows God so he can spend eternity in the gardens of Paradise, but on the Last Day Iblis will go to the Fire for his piety, and he’ll go full of love, regretting nothing.

‘My companion is Iblis,’ al-Hallaj wrote. ‘There is no mission except that of Iblis and Mohammed.’ At the end of his nine years imprisoned in the palace, al-Hallaj’s defenders fell out of favour with an easily-manipulated Caliph. Something to do with fiscal policy: al-Hallaj was just collateral damage. One morning, he was led to the banks of the Tigris, where a crowd was already waiting. They watched as al-Hallaj was whipped five hundred times until his back had almost disintegrated. The executioners cut off his hands and his feet, then they cut out his eyes. Blind and mutilated, he was lashed to a post, where the crowd pelted him with stones. An old woman was heard shouting: ‘What right does a little wool-carder have to talk about God?’ The executioners cut off his ears, then his nose, then his tongue; finally, just in time for evening prayers, they removed his head. Then they set the body on fire and swept the ashes into the river. His head, mutilated like Iblis, was sent back to Iran to be mounted over a bridge.

That didn’t dissuade people. Iranians had given the world the concept of evil, and the idea that at the end of time all the good and evil mingled together in the world would finally be separated out. Without the revelation by the River Daitya, Islam would have been impossible. But as soon as you draw the distinction it starts to dissolve, and once they’d become Muslim the Iranians started finding all the ways that good and evil are really the same. After al-Hallaj, a chain of Iranian mystics kept returning to his theme, the devil as the tragic lover of God. Maybe the greatest of these was the eleventh-century Sufi Ahmad Ghazali. Ahmad Ghazali was born in the city of Tus in eastern Iran. A hundred years beforehand, it had been home to the poet Ferdowsi, author of the Shahnameh, the greatest achievement of Iranian literature. A hundred years afterwards, the city would fall to the Mongol general Subutai, who would tear down every building and kill every living person in its walls until where the city had stood there was only a desert littered with broken masonry and human bones. In the period in between, Ahmad Ghazali wrote poems about love. According to tradition, his father was another wool-maker, who died young and left his two boys in the care of a local Sufi. (He must have been a customer. Sufis are named after the simple cloak worn by the mystic preacher; the word literally means one who wears wool.) Ahmad Ghazali grew up to be a pious Muslim and a sincere follower of the devil. ‘Whoever does not learn monotheism from Iblis,’ he said, ‘is an unbeliever.’ He wrote imaginary dialogues between Iblis and Moses. Most dangerously, he wrote that when Iblis refused to bow before Adam, he was disobeying God’s amr, or command, but obeying his iradah, or will. In other words, God didn’t really mean it; God, the unerring, the most truthful, is capable of telling a lie. Actually, it’s worse than that. The word amr has a special significance in Islam; it appears in a famous verse at the end of Surah Yasin: ‘His only command, when he wills something to be, is simply to say to it: Be! And it is.’ Which means that the divine command that created the world might also be a lie.

If Ahmad Ghazali avoided suffering the same fate as Mansour al-Hallaj, it’s probably because of his older brother. Abu Hamid Ghazali is a strange figure; a character from a midcentury American novel who just happened to have been born in eleventh-century Iran. The younger brother was into allegories and mysticism, meditations on divine love; Abu Hamid was a square, straight-laced, practical. Instead of the Sufi mysteries, he studied fiqh; Islamic jurisprudence, big dusty books of legal opinion. Smart career move. He ended finding a good job in the civil service under another Tus native, the vizier Nizam al-Mulk, who was at this point single-handedly governing the entire Seljuk state. Ghazali was a good bureaucrat; he rose through the ranks and tried to ignore the nagging feeling that something in his life was wrong. A man in a grey flannel turban. Eventually he was rewarded with every civil servant’s greatest hope: a cushy sinecure at a university. Nizam al-Mulk had set up a string of Nizamiyyas, free theological and philosophical universities, across the Seljuk Empire; Ghazali became a professor at the Nizamiyya of Baghdad, the most prestigious of them all. Duties were light. He read, he lectured, he strolled around the quad. Early evening, autumn leaves, tweed jackets, sexual dysfunction. He was desperately unhappy. His life was spiritually hollow. He writes in his intellectual autobiography, the Deliverance from Error: ‘I considered my activities—the best of them being public and private instruction—and that in them I was applying myself to sciences unimportant and useless in this pilgrimage to the hereafter. Then I reflected on my intention in my public teaching, and I saw that it was not directed to God, but rather was instigated and motivated by the quest for fame and widespread prestige. So I became certain that I was on the brink of a crumbling bank and already on the verge of falling into the Fire, unless I set about mending my ways. Mundane desires began tugging me with their chains to remain as I was, while the herald of faith was crying out: “Away! Up and away! Only a little is left of your life, and a long journey lies before you! All the theory and practice in which you are engrossed is eyeservice and fakery!”’ Maybe his weird bohemian little brother had been right all along.

Ghazali lost the ability to speak. ‘I tried to teach for a single day, to gratify the hearts of the students who were frequenting my lectures, but my tongue would not utter a single word. Food and drink became unpalatable to me so that I could neither swallow broth easily nor digest a mouthful of solid food.’ His doctors thought he would die; he saved himself by running away from Baghdad and his career. At first he moved to Damascus, but people started to gossip that he’d fallen out of favour with the government. He spent a few years in Mecca and Medina; finally, he writes, ‘I, the person most unlikely to return to it, came back to my native land.’ In one version of the story, the Ghazali brothers agreed to switch roles: Ahmad took over the lectures at the university; Abu Hamid went back to Tus to live in solitude, seeking God.

The last book Ghazali wrote in Baghdad, just as he was entering the full throes of his spiritual crisis, was his Incoherence of the Philosophers, a dense repudiation of the philosophy of ibn Sina, which was at the time totally hegemonic in the Islamic world. Ibn Sina was another Iranian, from a village near Bukhara. Like Ghazali, he’d slowly made his way west, teaching and studying in the great cities of Iran. Ibn Sina had developed a novel proof of the existence of God, which he called the Proof of the Truthful. There are, he said, two classes of being. There are possible existents, which are equally capable of existing or not existing. A shoe, a tooth, Iran. If a particular possible existent does in fact exist, it must have a cause; it can’t pop into being all by itself. So there’s a chain of possible existents, all causing each other. This could, theoretically, go on infinitely. But what about the sum total of all possible existents, the set that nonphilosophers call the world? You can’t say that it exists because of another possible existent, because that existent would already be part of the category in question. Therefore there has to be another kind of being, a necessary existent, something that exists because it logically has to exist. We call that existent God. QED.

Most philosophers would have considered the job done there, but ibn Sina went further. He wanted to prove the existence of a specifically Islamic God, one who is not just a first mover and an uncaused cause but also beneficent and merciful and the author of the Qur’an. All these things, he argues, are necessary attributes of a necessary existent. God must be singular and unique, because otherwise you’re introducing dependency within the necessary. He must be unchanging, because any altered states would be contingent. At one point, ibn Sina says that it’s possible to derive all of the ninety-nine names of God in the Qur’an from logical first principles. In fact, absolutely everything about his God is logically necessary. All he has is essence. He is perfectly good, because it would be a contradiction for him not to be perfectly good. He created the world because having created the world is implied by his existence, which means he must have already created the world at the beginning of time. (In ibn Sina’s language, the world eternally emanates from him, like light from the sun.) He revealed the Qur’an to Mohammed, but it isn’t as if he really had a choice. Humans are imperfect and contingent, which means we have free will, but God does not. If, in ibn Sina’s universe, you managed to ascend through the seven heavens, past the rivers of Paradise and the tiers of chanting angels, to come face to face with God himself, you will find his face empty, lifeless, a skull. God is a cosmic automaton. Adorno said that ‘existence cleansed of demons takes on, in its gleaming naturalness, the numinous character which former ages attributed to demons.’ Ibn Sina’s universe has that numinous character. Something far more evil than Yaldabaoth is this mindless zombie-god, ruling the universe on autopilot.

This outraged Ghazali too. He needed God to be the answer to his life, not the answer to the origin of the set of possible existents. In his Incoherence, he explains why ibn Sina’s entire structure of thought is unsound. He shows that it’s perfectly possible to use the Proof of the Truthful to demonstrate that there are two necessary existents, or any number of them. But those two necessary existents would have to be different from each other in some way, or their duality would be unintelligible. (Maybe one is made of light and one is made of darkness.) Therefore, not all qualities of a necessary existent are themselves necessary. He shows that the Proof of the Truthful is incoherent, since if it’s necessary that God created the world, then that means a necessary existent logically depends on a possible one. He lays out a host of proofs that the universe has not existed eternally. All of this is in numbered propositions, using the precise language of philosophical reason.

Most of all, he insists that God is not a helpless subject of the laws of logical necessity. He has a choice, he could have decided to create the universe or not to create it, and even now he can do absolutely anything he wants. In fact, Ghazali ends up going much further than that; by the seventeenth chapter he’s arrived at a position just as strange as ibn Sina’s, just in the opposite direction. God, he says, is the only volitional agent; God chooses everything that happens. When you hold a piece of cotton to a fire and it burns, that’s not the fire doing it. ‘As for fire, which is inanimate, it has no action. For what proof is there that it is the agent? They have no proof other than observing the occurrence of the cotton burning on contact with the fire. Observation only shows occurrence, but does not show the occurrence by the fire, or that there is no other cause for it.’ God is burning the cotton. When you drop an object, God pulls it to the ground. When you point a gun at someone and shoot, God drives a bullet into their body. Every terrible thing that’s ever been done on this earth was done by God and no one else. He fills the world with flies. Most of the time he chooses to act so the world looks like it’s governed by natural laws, but at any moment he might change his mind. Sometimes there are miracles. And sometimes, he might do something that seems to violate every law of righteousness and justice. Like, for instance, demanding that Iblis commit shirk and bow down before a creature made of mud and clay. And when this happens to you—and it will, one day it will—you need to choose between staying true to the measured, orderly, lifeless god of the philosophers, or the wild, radically free god that actually exists, unconstrained in the world and grinning like a demon.

What Ghazali can’t have known is that his mental breakdown was one of the hinges of history, a moment where the world could go in two very different directions, and God chooses which. This, at least, is the conclusion of a strain of historiography from Max Weber on, in which Ghazali had essentially doomed the entire Muslim world to backwardness. The crude version says that Islamic science basically stopped in its tracks after Ghazali, which is obviously untrue. But successful capitalist societies do seem to emerge out of a particular relation to nature. The world must not be living or holy; it’s a dead mechanism, and one human beings can learn to master. What ibn Sina offered was a hyperpuritanism, a giant, mutant, Islamicate version of Weber’s Protestant worldview, in which not just the physical world but God himself is an inert lump of raw material, totally passive before the rational laws of nature. If this idea had taken root, maybe there would have been an industrial revolution in Iran, six hundred years early. Maybe we’d all be exploring outer space by now; maybe humanity would have been wiped out in a nuclear war half a millennium ago. But instead, it was Ghazali’s ideas, not ibn Sina’s, that became official: that the world is fundamentally miraculous and mysterious. It should be obvious what side I’m on here, but beautiful ideas don’t always make you rich. In the end, it was a bunch of bog-dwelling savages from the fringes of northern Europe who ended up inventing modernity instead.

The last thousand years of world history are the least interesting bit; you can skip most of it without missing much. In Iran empires sprang up, prospered, decayed, and broke apart. Muzaffarid Timurid Safavid Afsharid Qajar, but by the end they were being menaced by an entirely new kind of foreign dynast: Russians, British, Americans. Desperate attempts to catch up, modernise the economy, build factories, buy French Impressionist paintings of women with their tits out, hang them in the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art, kidnap your political critics and torture them to death in underground cells. And it seemed to be working. Iran in the 1970s had great gouts of oil money, GDP growing at 11% a year, new heavy industry, rapid urbanisation, Googoosh in a miniskirt on the TV. But a lot of all that urbanisation was taking place because the White Revolution had destroyed all the familiar idiocies of rural life, and now millions of peasants had fled to the cities to live in shanties and slums, houses made of car parts and plastic sheeting, furious in a world that no longer made sense, and when the revolution came it wasn’t the progressive socialist revolution that would cast off the last vestiges of feudalism and bring Iran back into the light, but something completely different. In 1979, the future wasn’t the future any more. Before Thatcher or Reagan, the progressive tide of the twentieth century broke when the Ayatollah stepped off his Air France flight to Tehran. And here we are.

Something bad has happened in Iran. Around the start of the year, millions of people came out into the streets demanding an end to the Islamic Republic. For a moment everyone outside the country started acting as if the mullahs were about to actually lose their grip on power: any day now, any moment, the Iranian people will shrug off the theocrats like a veil and turn into a nice liberal democracy. It didn’t happen. Khamenei is still in the Office of the Supreme Leader; the protesters are no longer in the streets. Something happened, which those of us outside the country might not be able to understand for a long time, but there are clues. Photos of body bags piled up in hospitals, shaky phone footage of blacked-out cities and constant automatic gunfire. They’ve been killing people; a lot of people.

Some of my comrades on the left have been discussing this in strangely familiar terms. No one likes seeing piles of body bags, sure, but you have to understand that there’s a wider context. This world is the site of a cosmic battle between good and evil, the American world-empire against the resistance, and the Islamic Republic is on the side of the resistance. For two years, Israel massacred the people of Gaza, and in all that time the only country in the world willing to take serious action against them was the Islamic Republic. Their enemies in the region are monsters: fat sybaritic oil sheikhs, gacked up jihadi headchoppers, al-Qaeda cadres in suits and ties, dead-eyed Zionist psychos, genocidaires of every stripe, cynics and fanatics, sex slavers, rapists. Meanwhile, what did the protesters want? Well, a lot of them wanted the Shah back. Reza Pahlavi, some dumb sixty-year-old rich kid who’s lived most of his life in the suburbs of Washington DC. Who celebrated when what is notionally his own country was bombed by Israel. The protesters want to abandon the Palestinians, all so they don’t have to wear a bit of cloth on their heads. They want to give up the struggle against evil for consumer goods and porn. So because of this, the Iranians are wrong to oppose a government that kills them.

They’re not entirely wrong. The failed revolution in Iran really was a battle between good and evil; the Islamic Republic really is on the side of good, and the protesters really are on the side of evil. If I’ve spent five thousand words muddying these terms around in history before limping to the present day, this is why. The Islamic Republic has staked all its legitimacy as a state on being on the side of good. It’s survived as one of only two non-Arab non-Sunni states in the Middle East by organising itself entirely in opposition to the other one. In most countries, foreign policy is an expression of domestic policy; in Iran it’s the other way round. That’s how it maintains the support of a big enough chunk of the population; this is why its legal code can define anti-government protest as waging war against God. But what does it actually mean for Iran to oppose the American world-empire? It means selling drones to Russia so they can murder random people in their apartments in Kiev. It means pointlessly impoverishing their own country. It means that millions of young Iranians now hate the Palestinians, truly hate them, would happily let Israel kill them all, because the indignity and unfreedom of the Islamic Republic has always been imposed on them as their pious duty to the suffering people of Palestine. The Islamic Republic has done what none of the secular states in the region ever could, and turn its people against Islam. By some measures, Iran is now the least religious state in the Middle East, with a smaller proportion of Muslims than Israel has non-Hiloni Jews. The protesters have been torching mosques.

The protesters wanted the freedom to do evil. But I’m starting to think that that’s simply what freedom is, the ability to do the wrong thing. Ibn Sina’s God can only ever do or be the best possible thing, so he’s a lifeless automaton. As human beings, we have the gift of ignorance and evil. We struggle through a world we do not understand, and every choice we make is wrong. We’re lucky enough to live surrounded by a gorgeous variety of imperfect forms, and not the monotony of the good. Every vision of the purely and eternally good ends up summoning some kind of brain-melting horror. If it’s not the corpse-god it’s a cosmic torturer, or a god that personally devours the flesh of starving children. Strangely, though, our normal everyday finitude does not. I think this goes for political freedom as much as metaphysical freedom. Freedom is the freedom to be evil, to do and say bad things instead of good ones. If you choose evil, a few good things might happen, but only sparingly, and by accident. If you choose good, though, they absolutely never will.

It’s not easy, having the holy curse of prophecy. I sit in the lotus position on my mountain, high above the clouds, trying to pick out some helpful and practical prophecies to bring back down the mountain for you. Meanwhile the entire future of the universe crashes continually around my ears. Since you’re not a prophet, you have no idea what it’s like. Imagine having to pick out the one voice saying something interesting in an entire football stadium of people whispering nonsense like ‘OnlyFans for pets’ and ‘They’re going to come out with a new flavour of Fray Bentos pie, it’s a sushi flavoured pie with lashings of rich onion gravy’ and ‘Noel Fielding necrophile allegations’ and ‘Asteroid impact, millions dead.’

What makes this worse is that some of you people have started climbing up the mountain while this is happening, just to taunt me about my supposedly failed prophecies. I’m floating through the infinity of things yet to come, and meanwhile some cross-eyed rustic keeps poking me in the ribs with a stick. Hey mister, he says, listen here mister big prophet, you said that ‘the second Donald Trump presidency will be dominated by a kind of apolitical populism, directed more against seed oils and xenoestrogens than imports, migrants, or the liberal classes,’ and guess what, he’s just put tariffs on the whole world. Guess you must be feeling pretty stupid now, huh? In fact, over the course of the last year there’s been a constant pilgrimage of gurning slime-farmers wending their way up my mountain, coming to tell me exactly how apolitical the second Donald Trump administration has been. Hey mister prophet, they say, the Department for Homeland Security is posting sonnenrad edits. Hey mister prophet, government cronies keep making straight-arm salutes. Hey mister prophet, Charlie Kirk tried to smug at some libs in Utah and one of them shot him through the fucking neck, right as he was talking about gang violence statistics mister prophet, how’s that for apolitical, whaddya think about that?

It’s exhausting, having to live among people trapped in time. All you can see is the present that’s right in front of you; I’m being sucked off by aliens in the twenty-eighth century. Yes, Donald Trump put tariffs on the entire world, including an island inhabited solely by penguins. What happened next? Right now, the US is selling its most advanced chips to China, and until 2027 the tariff on semiconductors is a big fat zero. This has been the pattern all year: Trump swings his fists about, trying to look like he’s engaged in some kind of genuine political contention, but there’s nothing there. The murder of Charlie Kirk was supposed to be his Reichstag Fire, the beginning of an all-out life-or-death struggle against the left. What actually happened? Three months on, Kirk’s widow is leaping around in a sparkly costume at TPUSA AmericaFest. The man’s cultural legacy consists of an AI-generated song called We Are Charlie Kirk, the ‘kirkification’ meme, which is where you replace a celebrity’s face with Kirk’s, and the word ‘lowkirkenuinely’ (lowkey+kirk+genuinely). Everyone who still remembers the man takes his death as a piece of fundamentally apolitical kitsch. It’s already retro: fun but tacky 2025iana. This is what will happen to you if you devote your life to politics in a fundamentally apolitical world. You will be a joke when you die. Meanwhile, Trump is inviting Zohran Mamdani to the White House, gazing up in admiration at this handsome young socialist, wonderful guy, we all want the same things. I prophesied that there would be zero political events in 2025, and lowkirkenuinely I was right.

Absolutely everything else I prophesied has also come to pass. I said that in 2025 AI video would finally become indistinguishable from reality, and as a result ‘there will never be another interesting AI video again.’ It’s now possible to flawlessly imitate anyone doing anything, but somehow over the last twelve months nothing remotely newsworthy has come of this terrifying new power. The closest was an AI-generated Christmas advert released by McDonald’s in the Netherlands. The gist of the thing was the Christmas is awful, so you may as well spend all of December in McDonald’s, eating one hamburger after another, until it’s over. There was not a single shot that couldn’t have been just as easily generated by pointing a camera at an object and filming it. Unknown trillions have been invested in this technology, all to reproduce something that already exists. ‘At the very most,’ I wrote, ‘AI will replace some forms of B-roll. It will be the least consequential technology of your life.’ I was right. I prophesied the return of ‘Manbooks: books for men,’ books that aren’t obsessed with therapeutic interiority, now you can’t walk down the street in London without seeing someone ostentatiously tote around a copy of Flesh by David Szalay. (The next step is for someone to write a book in which something actually happens, but that might be beyond our abilities at the moment.) Most prophetically of all, I said that as Twitter’s cultural cachet waned, it wouldn’t be replaced by Bluesky or Threads or Substack, but the real world. Not in the sense that everyone would put aside all this frothing online hysteria and just focus on their actual lives—I meant that instead of trying to whip up cancel mobs on social media, people would just start physically attacking each other. ‘As all the other Twitter methadones stop working, expect an upswing in bizarre and unaccountable acts of public violence and private revenge.’ The Charlie Kirk assassin scratched a bunch of tweets into the bullets he fired. ‘If you read this, u r gay lmao.’ This is my curse. I’m always right.

Anyway, I have once again returned from the mountain with a bundle of prophecies for the year ahead. Last year’s were generated with astrology, and the year before’s with Tarot; this time I’ve been reading the tea leaves. Here is the shape of your next twelve months:

Tasseography is fun: less like reading Tarot cards, and more like reading dreams. You have to distill the shapes yourself out of the general psychic gloop, and every guide to their meanings is provisional and contingent. What does this look like to you? I’ll tell you what it looks like to me. I see the big blob on the left as a prawn, with its square head bristling with antennae, turning back to look over its tail as it jealously clutches its pale brood of eggs. Crustaceans in tea leaves are supposed to represent opportunism, faithlessness, someone that will betray you. But what stands out to me is the prawn’s posture, bent over its own tail. This year will be a year of reversals, things going in precisely the opposite way to the one you thought. A logic that stretches so far in one direction that it suddenly recoils into its opposite. This is your 2026.

Obesity is back

GLP agonists—that’s ozempic, wegovy, grey-market Chinese retatrudite, etc—are a class of drug that can, as far as we can tell, fix absolutely everything that’s wrong with you. They will make you thin. They will help you stop drinking, stop gambling, stop taking heroin, stop having sex with evil people, and stop listlessly scrolling on your phone all night until you’re numb enough to sleep. You will no longer experience gender dysphoria. You will become smarter, and also happier. You will experience improved powers of memory. Your heart, liver, and kidneys will all function more powerfully. The drugs can reverse some of the major signs of ageing and will almost certainly increase your lifespan. It’s possible that you will become immortal. We don’t know yet. It hasn’t been studied. But it’s entirely possible that taking ozempic will turn you into a god. You will be a gorgeous, ageless, smart and skinny god, and as long as you keep injecting yourself with the stuff you will never die. You can get it on the NHS for £9.90 a month.

A lot of people are very upset about this. If you can just fix everything with a simple injection, the world is out of balance. Somewhere, there has to be a price. A portrait in the attic. In a decade or two, the ozempic users need to start bursting out in novel and surprising cancers. When they breed, these gorgeous ageless smart and skinny gods need to give birth to something monstrous, apelike, froglike, forked tongue mewling, the dumb festering animal they thought they’d transcended, bursting gorily out the womb with razor-sharp claws. And maybe that will happen. I’m not a pharmacologist. But I don’t think it needs to; the intended effect is enough.

GLP agonists work by interrupting the reward systems that produce compulsive behaviour. Emotional eaters end up joylessly mashing up material in their mouths when they remember they need the stuff to live, but not deriving any particular pleasure from the process. Gamblers notice that they’ve just let a tenner vanish into the slot machine for no good reason, and decide to call it a night. In a way, these drugs have changed nothing. I’ve been saying for years now that our problem is no longer not getting the things we desire, but not knowing how to desire anything at all. The utopians of the last century wanted a world without want, and we got it. Peptides are just a crude literalisation of that thesis. The future is a Buddhist paradise of jabbering, emaciated, undesiring arahats. One great global Wicked press tour.

Except it isn’t, because the horrible side effects these people might really regret aren’t the ones you read on the label, but the ones you read about in Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu. Once being gorgeous ageless smart and skinny is universally available, it’ll no longer represent any kind of cultural capital, and the only thing that can shock us out of the current doldrums of desire is if asceticism becomes déclassé. Right now, too much overt sexuality is considered vaguely tacky, but not for long. Nothing more valuable in a porndead world than the hunger in the eye, the violent propulsion towards life and death. Stupidity too: isn’t there something deeply extravagant about stupidity? Most of all, though, if everyone is immortal, then death becomes a luxury product. Right now, hyper-wealthy fintech lizards are competing to retire as early as possible, thirty, twenty-five; before long they’ll be competing to die. Bryan Johnson will be smoking two packs a day. It takes a lot of money to be bored with existence, and dying is the most sumptuous and extravagant thing imaginable. It also requires a massive quantity of cultural competence to do it right. You can’t get ChatGPT to do it for you. You can’t learn it in some cram school for nerds. There are no second chances. You can only do it once.

These things will take time. In 2026, though, semaglutide will do what a decade of body positivity couldn’t, and make obesity fashionable. Not any obesity, obviously. Doctors disagree, but there are clearly two ways of being dangerously overweight. There’s the spreading shapelessness that comes from eating lots of deep-fried snacks or frankly anything delivered to your door, food that comes in styrofoam and booze from plastic bottles, blasting your brain with short-form video content while you joylessly ingest. This is entirely different from the taut spherical shape you can achieve if you’re actually hungry.

There is a way of being fat that requires you to regularly eat a dozen oysters if they’re in season, a smoked eel or two, and obviously crabmeat, sucked wetly out the creature’s joints, maybe just a few plump lamb’s livers glazed with Madeira, a veal brain croquette, some great sluglike kidneys in a mustard sauce, a pig’s foot stuffed with sweetbreads and morels, maybe, why not, a jar of rabbit rillettes with cornichons and buttered toast, before the main dish, a great wodge of game pie, thick flakes of buttery pastry, steaming purple melange of terrified animals with juniper berries and little fragments of shot, served alongside pommes dauphinoise and haricots verts gently glossed in butter, and once it’s done an oloroso sherry, half a dozen rum babas doused in a pint of cream, and a crumbly pile of Stilton alongside a smaller mound of wrinkling decorative grapes, the whole thing washed down with three or four bottles of good claret and concluded with a fernet digestif. If you feel like you’re going to burst or be sick, you’re doing it wrong. This is not a special occasion; this is Tuesday. You should be able to play a full game of tennis afterwards. Do it right, and you will be rewarded with the most desirable body of 2026.

Britain becomes the world’s first censorship superpower

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Infoterrorists have sabotaged the Santa Claus Parade in Brantford, Ontario. Thirty thousand people line Dalhousie Street to watch Santa go by in his mechanical reindeer sleigh, sponsored by GrandBridge Energy. Adorable little kids, cheeks red against the cold, eyes coal-black with wonder, standing on tiptoes for a glimpse of the great Christmas magus. Santa, the Santa, great potency, ancient king, who judges the world from his icy seat at the lifeless pole, and who will, for no clearly discernible reason, shortly be delivering them a Bluey Supermarket Play Set with fifteen pieces, including an exclusive Bingo figure—he’s here. He’s coming here, touching earth in this extremely medium-sized city in the flat cornlands of peninsular Ontario. A miracle. Magic beyond words. Instead, something terrible happened. Along the parade route, someone had left a series of terrible, obscene messages. SANTA IS FAKE, SANTA ISN’T REAL, YOUR PARENTS ARE SANTA, and YOUR FAMILY BUYS YOUR PRESENTS. The parade nearly tipped over into riot. Hundreds of parents trying to tear down the offending messages before they polluted the children. Fistfights, small fires. Hundreds of calls to the police. Two people mistakenly thought to be the perpetrators were very nearly lynched. Nobody is allowed to interfere with our right to nakedly lie to small children.

You can understand why they were so angry. This particular lie is vast, and it depends on a total omertà among all the conspirators. It’s been going for decades, centuries even, and the corruption goes all the way to the top. In 1961, a girl called Michelle wrote to President Kennedy, asking about Santa Claus. He wrote back: ‘You must not worry about Santa Claus. I talked with him yesterday and he is fine. He will be making his rounds again this Christmas.’ Michelle wrote to JFK because she assumed that surely the President of the United States could be trusted to tell the truth to an American citizen, and he lied through his teeth. The media is in on it too. In 1897, another brave young truthseeker wrote in to the New York Sun to try to understand the world. ‘Papa says if you see it in the Sun it’s so. Please tell me the truth: is there a Santa Claus?’ How did they reply? They lied. ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.’ Newspapers reprint that response every year, drumming in the falsehood by sheer force of repetition. Corporations: every consumer-facing firm on earth will lie to their consumers that Santa is real. Obviously, the military-industrial complex is also involved. Every year, NORAD—the North American Aerospace Defence Command—pretends to track Santa’s movements on his reindeer sleigh across the world. Radar arrays swivelling, THAAD interceptors prepared to blow Santa out the sky at a moment’s notice. All that machinery, all those enormous defence budgets, all those kickbacks, to track an airborne object that doesn’t even exist…

But it doesn’t stop there. The tentacles of this thing reach into every corner of society. An architecture of deception so intricate it borders on absurdity. You can literally meet the man, sit on his lap at a shopping centre or your local library, tell him exactly what you want for Christmas—but it’s not him. There’s a global network of impostors. They even have special institutions, like the Charles W Howard Santa Claus School in Midland, Michigan, where they train these operatives in the arts of deceit. Your teachers, whose job it is to tell you the truth about the world: every single one of them is deliberately, knowingly lying to you. Even your parents are in on it. The world you think you inhabit is not the real world.

Some questions. Why do they do this? What does this conspiracy achieve? Why is it more wonderful and magical for children to believe that their gifts don’t come from their parents, who love them, but some stranger in the North Pole? We’ll get there. Most urgently, though: if they can lie about Santa, what else can they lie about? What is Santa Claus, if not a case zero for the propaganda model of society?

Like most people, when I was around twelve years old I suddenly discovered that society was made of lies. Everyone else inhabited the make-believe world sold to them by the capitalist media, but I could see through it; I knew the truths you’re not supposed to know. Advertisers really just want you to buy their products! Schools are really just there to give you skills for the workplace! Society is actually ruled by the government! This is probably a necessary step in the road towards political maturity; eventually you grow up and notice that practically everyone in society claims to be the only person brave enough to tell the truth in a world of lies. It’s weird: the more people there are insisting that the truth is being systematically covered up, the unlikelier it seems. It doesn’t help that most of the clandestine truth on offer is either obvious to the point of uselessness (‘Did you know racism is actually bad?’) or straightforwardly evil and incorrect (‘Did you know racism is actually good?’). So you end up concluding that while there might be different interpretations of how the world works, all the facts are, more or less, known. But then, sometimes, something happens.

Six years ago, something happened to Jeffrey Epstein in a prison cell in New York. I found it hard to reconcile with the basically sensible Marxist materialism I was using to understand the world. I thought social reality was essentially composed of surplus labour and the declining rate of profit, but Epstein seemed to suggest that there are things happening in the shadows that I had never imagined. In a way, it was like discovering, as a grown adult, that no, Santa Claus really is real. Santa’s implicit role is to be the guardian of the secret of the commodity-form. He hides the knowledge that all the wonderful presents are actually just a collection of exchange-values. The primordial forces of the world are fundamentally indifferent to little children, who tend not to actively participate in the labour or commodity markets. (Did you think it was a coincidence that Santa is a big guy with a big white beard, known for his impressive drinking abilities, and associated with the colour red?) Epstein’s secret is the opposite. Whoever it was pulling his strings, they were happy to let this failed maths teacher play around with their billions, pretending to be some kind of genius investor. Money is just a toy. Beyond a certain level it doesn’t really matter at all. The world really runs on stranger stuff. Magic wishes, sacrifices, the circuits of desire. Spooky flash photos of Bill Clinton and Donald Trump sharing verrucas in a hot tub. Somehow, this has to do with the fate of nations. War and revolution. Cities bombed into rubble in the lands of Armageddon. And children are not incidental; they’re at the ugly centre of the whole thing.

Is it possible for an entire social structure to be based on lies? Is it possible for a society to pretend to be something completely different to what it actually is? The ethnographic record says yes. In fact, it’s the norm.

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From 1994 to 1998, a journal called Philosophy and Literature held a bad writing contest. Philosophy and Literature is a kind of harumphing Scrutonian publication for people who think the academy’s lost the plot but still can’t bring themselves to disengage and do something more interesting with their lives. It does not tend to publish anything particularly groundbreaking or even very interesting, and it’s not really read by anyone at all. The average paper in Philosophy and Literature receives 0.1 citations. As far as I can tell, the only influential writing they’ve ever published was through the bad writing contest. In 1996, the prize went to Roy Bhaskar for a sentence that, in only 131 words, managed to namedrop Foucault, Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Kant, Plato again, Hegel, Comte, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and finally Baudrillard, while also finding space to diagnose ‘ontological monovalence’ as the ‘primordial failing of western philosophy.’ In 1997, they gave it to Frederic Jameson, for saying that ‘the visual is essentially pornographic, which is to say that it has its end in rapt, mindless fascination.’ In 1998, the winner was Judith Butler. You might have read the chosen sentence before. Here it is:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

This sentence comes from an essay thrillingly titled Further Reflections on the Conversations of Our Time. It’s a pretty deep cut, even for devoted Butler heads. Further Reflections is just over two pages long and consists of Butler boasting about a little ongoing email exchange that’s been happening with Ernesto Laclau. These emails are, apparently, one of the conversations of our time. The terrible sentence doesn’t even contain any of Butler’s own ideas; it’s an attempt to summarise Laclau and Mouffe’s book Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. As you might expect for a glorified book report, Further Reflections did not receive much attention when it was published. Butler’s essay Performative Acts and Gender Constitution has amassed nearly 15,000 citations; Further Reflections has 65. But somehow, this minor sentence in a minor essay republished by an ever more minor journal has managed to escape containment. It has been quoted in—by my count—over two million mass market books, all titled Bullsh*t: How Total Nonsense Took Over The World. Whenever any journalist needs an instance of fancy intellectuals gargling dogshit, this is the one they reach for. As a result, this is now, by some measure, Butler’s most widely-read sentence. People who know nothing about the theories of performativity or grievability are still aware of Butler as the person who observed the movement from a synchronic to a diachronic account of power between Althusser and Laclau.

Anyway, this whole episode is now twenty-seven years old, which means that people have been arguing about the sentence for about as long as they were fighting the Peloponnesian War. At this point, you’d expect it to have a limited ability to really raise anyone’s hackles. Fossil conflict. Apparently not. This month, Matthew Adelstein ran through a fairly well-rehearsed set of objections to what gets called continental philosophy. It’s all waffle, meaningless verbiage, buttressed by appeals to the unimpeachable authority of other, more portentous wafflers spouting even more portentous verbiage, plus the vague impression that whatever idea has the most politically radical implications must therefore be correct. These are not new objections. There ought to be some good responses to them by now. (Actually, a surprising portion of his critique involves ChatGPT, which is a new way of arguing, but seems to have gone unnoticed.) Instead, what appears to have happened is that, as Adelstein has documented, a lot of people just sort of blew up at him and called him an idiot.

A big part of their fury has to do with the sentence. Adelstein had implied that the sentence is meaningless, or at the very least that it’s difficult to understand—but it can be understood. You don’t even need to read it in its context; you just need to know what’s meant by structure, hegemony, and Althusserian. This is a text written in a specialised language for a particular language community. If you are not part of that language community, you will not understand the text. Similarly, if you read a random passage from the instruction manual for an Anyang Gemco ZLSP200A biomass pellet mill, and discover that ‘if the clearance between the discharge scraper and the flat die is too short, the material will not flow freely into die holes, resulting in lower output and high powder yield,’ this will be meaningless to you unless you already have some concept of a discharge scraper. It doesn’t mean the meaning is not there. And it can be galling to see someone—someone who’s never pelletised any biomass in their lives—glancing at the manual, laughing at all the unfamiliar words, and then insisting that the machine couldn’t possibly work. This is especially upsetting when you’ve dedicated a significant chunk of your finite lifespan to learning all about discharge scrapers, only to discover that the golden age of biomass pelletisation was several decades ago, and these days there is absolutely no money in it at all. So you insist that the manual makes perfect sense, and anyone who can’t immediately understand it must be some kind of mental defective. Because you can understand it, and this is the one thing in the world that you still have.

And I’m actually fairly sympathetic to this impulse. The analogy doesn’t hold up exactly: for obvious reasons, Anyang Gemco want the language community of people who know how to operate a ZLSP200A pellet mill to be as big as possible; I don’t know if you can say the same of Judith Butler. But I’m happy to agree that there is a there there, and if you put in the effort required to understand it you will be rewarded. What I will not do is pretend that Judith Butler is a good writer. This writing is bad, incredibly bad; it helps no one to act otherwise. Not because it’s impenetrable or incomprehensible, because it isn’t, not really. It’s also not because the sentences are long and complicated and full of pointless allusions to other theorists. Robert Burton also wrote incredibly long and complex sentences, full of nested clauses, in which he would often relax into one or two minor digressions, or amble gently around his library, picking up other texts, reading a line or two, in no particular order, in no hurry at all to reach the full stop, or for that matter the point, but sprawling genially in every direction, and every one of them is wonderful. Here’s one, from The Anatomy of Melancholy, in which he describes precisely this method:

Something I have done, though by my profession a divine, yet turbine raptus ingenii, as he said, out of a running wit, an unconstant, unsettled mind, I had a great desire (not able to attain to a superficial skill in any) to have some smattering in all, to be aliquis in omnibus, nullus in singulis, which Plato commends, out of him Lipsius approves and furthers, as fit to be imprinted in all curious wits, not to be a slave of one science, or dwell altogether in one subject, as most do, but to rove abroad, centum puer artium, to have an oar in every man’s boat, to taste of every dish, and sip of every cup, which, saith Montaigne, was well performed by Aristotle, and his learned countryman Adrian Turnebus; this roving humour (though not with like success) I have ever had, and like a ranging spaniel, that barks at every bird he sees, leaving his game, I have followed all, saving that which I should, and may justly complain, and truly, qui ubique est, nusquam est, which Gesner did in modesty, that I have read many books, but to little purpose, for want of good method; I have confusedly tumbled over divers authors in our libraries, with small profit, for want of art, order, memory, judgment.

That’s more than two hundred words in a single sentence, and quite a few of them in Latin, but wasn’t it nice? The problem with Butler’s writing, meanwhile, is that it’s dull. Joyless, leaden slag of words. Sometimes I have dreams in which I’m running, going for a nice long run through some protean dream-landscape, but the dream triggers the little guardian in my mind that keeps me in REM atonia, the state of muscular paralysis that stops you physically acting out your dreams: suddenly within the dream I feel the heavy paralysis of my actual legs and I’m crawling, dragging around a dream-body that’s gone lifeless, like a broken machine. That’s what it’s like to read Judith Butler. You can see the nature of the problem by looking at Butler’s most recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender?, which has allegedly been written for a broad mainstream audience. And the sentences in that book really do make perfect sense. Here’s one of them: ‘The task before us is to try to understand this rapidly accelerated inflation and combination of potential and literal dangers, and to ask how we can possibly counter a phantasm of this size and intensity before it moves even closer to eradicating reproductive justice, the rights of women, the rights of trans and non-binary people, gay and lesbian freedoms, and all efforts to achieve gender and sexual equality and justice, not to mention the censorship targeting open public discourse and the academy.’ I don’t think anyone could accuse this passage of being unclear. It just lacks even the tiniest mote of life or interest.

Here’s something interesting, though. In the year that Judith Butler won Philosophy and Literature’s bad writing contest, the runner-up was the theologian DG Leahy. His contribution read:

This is the real exteriority of the absolute outside: the reality of the absolutely unconditioned absolute outside univocally predicated of the dark: the light univocally predicated of the darkness: the shining of the light univocally predicated of the limit of the darkness: actuality univocally predicated of the other of self-identity: existence univocally predicated of the absolutely unconditioned other of the self. The precision of the shining of the light breaking the dark is the other-identity of the light.

Obviously tastes differ, but I would suggest that this is not, in fact, any kind of bad writing at all. It’s dense and utterly obscure, and very possibly doesn’t mean anything at all, but it’s magnificent. The slow cadence of all those monstrous words, rolling and roiling in the wide murky thickness of their sentence. I’ve reread this passage several times, and every time it generates a sudden mental image of whales, huge humpback whales on a black moonless night, glittered with barnacles, wheeling their great ungainly heads just beneath the frothy surface of a white-webbed sea.

According to a lot of people, this is not important. Summoning beautiful mental images of whales is not one of the proper functions of philosophical language. I want to argue that a lot of people are wrong.

Naturally, I’m going to argue this in a deeply annoying way. Instead of straightforwardly saying why I think philosophical language should encompass this kind of seemingly nonphilosophical function, I’m going to start by asking why other people think it shouldn’t. I’ve sketched out a vague theory of why people keep obsessively defending Judith Butler’s terrible sentence, but why do people feel the need to keep obsessively attacking it, twenty-seven years later? What’s ultimately at stake here?

Allegedly, the stakes are that we’re in the middle of a life-or-death struggle between the two kinds of philosophy in the world, which are analytic and continental. Analytic philosophy is grounded in a scientific understanding of the world, and it values precision, clarity, and accuracy in all its sincere efforts to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Continental philosophy, meanwhile, is a patchwork of screaming hysterical personality cults, all of them clamouring that equations are sexist and measurement is colonialism, or making arguments that depend entirely on German puns, or saying things that genuinely make no sense at all, justifying these and various other insanities with the vague sense that everything is made of language and nothing is really real.

Peer closely at this picture, though, and a few troubling things emerge. The first is that continental philosophy doesn’t exist. No philosopher has ever identified themselves as belonging to any such tradition. There is no canon. There is no unified set of concerns. It is a term used exclusively by Anglophone philosophers to describe anything that doesn’t match their preferred style. Once, the targets were usually French, but these days the main object of derision is one particular sentence by Judith Butler, who is an American; the only continent on which anything called continentalism exists is North America. What gets called continental philosophy is also, strikingly, not philosophy. Critics sometimes lob a few darts at Hegel and Heidegger, but their main object is almost always poststructuralist social theory. (Nobody seems to have a pop at Nietzsche, even though he was arguably a far bigger influence on French theory than Hegel, and he didn’t exactly write in numbered propositions. It would ruin the argument; his prose is too good.) Social theory is, in fact, deeply informed by science. If you read any of this stuff you’re vanishingly unlikely to come across anything that has even the slightest whiff of classical metaphysics. Instead, you’ll find a whole lot of material based in anthropology, sociology, history, psychology, economics, and linguistics. Social theorists are not remotely interested in questions like whether we have free will, or whether we simply experience ourselves moving through an existing block of time; they’re interested in the ways that notions of freedom and eternity have historically been used to shore up or contest various forms of social power. You don’t have to like this approach, but in its humble empiricism it’s a lot closer to actual science than the stuff a lot of its critics get up to.

All of this might sound like pedantry, but it’s interesting that the critics, who usually make such a big deal about the importance of clarity and precision and the correct delineation of objects in thought, are willing to be so sloppy in this one particular case. Something’s up here. Some game of doubling and reversal, imitating the enemy. If the more empirical, scientific side is actually the continentalists, could it be that the ones playing ultimately meaningless games with language are actually the analytics?

In China, the great founding dynasts would occasionally boast that they had achieved the rectification of names. By assiduously performing the Feng and Shang sacrifices, making appointments by merit, and promoting right action throughout all the lands under heaven, they could supernaturally alter the structure of linguistics so words and things perfectly coincide. There is an entropy that tears the characters away from the objects they describe, but a good Emperor can return the Chinese language to the state that, in Western thought, belongs to the divine language with which Adam named all the animals in the Garden of Eden. This is, broadly speaking, the project of analytic philosophy.

The field begins in the late nineteenth century with Gottlob Frege and his project to build a Begriffsschrift or concept-writing, a perfect system of logical notation that would allow the full expression of logical structure. For Frege, thought is objective and necessarily expresses truth-values; the problem is that ordinary natural language is too ambiguous to properly represent it. The history of philosophy is the history of various clever people being hopelessly undone by the vague and woolly language they were saddled with; Frege would provide a new, clear basis for mathematics and logic. His language consisted of branching vertical and horizontal lines to indicate propositions and logical dependencies. The system seemed to work until the turn of the twentieth century, when Bertrand Russell noted a paradox: what about the set of all sets that do not contain themselves? Either it does contain itself, in which case it doesn’t, or it doesn’t, in which case it does. This genre of paradox had been known since antiquity, but for Frege it was a catastrophe: his perfect language had somehow managed to reproduce the exact same inconsistencies as the half-barbarous goat-herding Greek spoken by Epimenides two and a half thousand years ago.

From there, the history of analytic philosophy is the history of successive attempts to build an internally consistent logical language that could perfectly express reality, all of which kept mysteriously failing. Russell tried to patch up the damage caused by his own paradox with a new language based on types, which were sorted into a rigid hierarchy, in which each could only contain elements from lower down the chain. The result was an almost impossibly unwieldy system that, notoriously, took 362 pages to derive enough arithmetic to prove that one plus one equals two. It stood, mostly as a monument to its own mad ambition, until Gödel knocked out the foundations in 1931. Wittgenstein began with the notion that the world consists of facts that share a form with the propositions that describe them; by the end of the Tractatus, after a series of increasingly frantic diagrams, he’s in a fully mystical register. By trying to describe the structure of his formal language he’s had to describe its limits, which means using it to go beyond the point at which it can describe anything at all. ‘He who understands my propositions finally understands them as senseless.’ Rudolf Carnap was less into this sort of angsty koanmongering; he believed that anything that couldn’t be expressed in his logical syntax—which included all of metaphysics—was essentially meaningless, just unverifiable mouth noises masquerading as language. Since everything internal to his framework would make perfect sense, he had effectively eliminated a whole host of philosophical pseudo-problems. Unfortunately, his system was based on the idea that all truths can ultimately be supported by analytic propositions, and in 1951 Willard Van Orman Quine showed that the analytic-synthetic distinction is actually untenable, since every known way of defining an analytic proposition assumes that you already know what an analytic proposition is. The structure is incapable of accounting for itself. That was the end, more or less, of the grand logical systems.

Analytic philosophy was supposed to provide a way to precisely express reality through language; in the process it seemed to end up demonstrating that this kind of totally lucid language might actually be impossible. There is no language without some kind of circularity, or self-reference, or radical contingency; everything we say is in some important sense inexplicable. So philosophers turned to thinking about language in different and less grandiose ways. As a social game, or as a series of acts. Finally, Saul Kripke gave everyone permission to start doing metaphysics again and the entire analytic project essentially dissolved. There’s not really any such thing as analytic philosophy any more; the term still gets used, but it just refers to a particular kind of no-nonsense writing style. Nobody is still upholding the principles of logical atomism; they’re having a much better time working on modal realism and philosophy of mind and simulation theory. They’re getting paid by Google to devise scenarios in which it’s totally ethical for a self-driving car to mow down an entire crèche worth of angelic toddlers. The only remnant of the grand analytic experiment is the vague sense that it would be nice if language could clearly account for reality, and it’s virtuous to keep on pretending as much as possible that it can, even though it can’t. But there is also a ritual. Every so often, the survivors from the shipwreck of analytic philosophy all gather round to shriek at Judith Butler’s terrible, terrible sentence. Sure, all our attempts to clearly express the world in language ended in failure—but get a load of these guys! It’s like they’re not even trying.

What I think these people are missing is that the continental philosophy they’re obliged to make a big show out of disdaining is, in fact, nothing more or less than the direct successor of the noble but doomed analytic project. It picks up pretty much exactly where analytic philosophy leaves off. It’s still possible to establish facts in an ordinary, empirical, common-sense way, but philosophers hold themselves to a higher standard, and it looks like there’s no representational system with any necessary relation to the world. Instead, the languages we’re saddled with seem to have some entirely other purpose. Maybe the function of language isn’t to represent things, but to do things. The poststructuralists get here by a slightly different route—JL Austin is an influence, but so is Saussurean semiology, Nietzschean anti-foundationalism, plus Marx’s line about how the philosophers have only described the world when the point is to change it—but their concerns are strangely convergent with those of Anglophone philosophy after Quine. There’s surprisingly little daylight between différance and referential indeterminacy. If they express themselves in a drastically different style, it’s because they’re acutely aware that language itself is in play. Once you’ve established that language is not a perfectly transparent vehicle for the neutral description of facts, you can’t then attempt to just neutrally describe that situation. (If you think that’s what I’m doing here, you’ve failed to pick up on the multiple esoteric meanings hidden in this essay. Go back up to the top and start again.) You have to engage with the system of words on their own terms.

So: language has betrayed us. Now what? What can language do, besides simulate reality? There are the various perlocutionary acts, persuading, forbidding, seducing, offending, and so on. Language mediates social games and forms the structure of subjectivity. It throws up its own internal problems that can be solved or expanded for fun and profit. It has a shibboleth function, which allows you to distinguish between friend and enemy based on whether they use words like hegemony or not. Some of these intersubjective functions are not always particularly positive, and definitely not useful to philosophy. But others are. We can still use language to access objective reality, as long as we’re prepared to let it take a more active role than straightforward description. Language, and especially philosophical language, changes how the world discloses itself to us.

Disclosure is Heidegger’s term; his famous example is the river Rhine, which is disclosed in one way through the soppy Romantic poetry of Hölderlin—‘wo aber geheim noch manches entschieden zu Menschen gelanget’—and in an entirely different way through the enframing powers of the technological view of the world, which works to ‘to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering, as standing-reserve,’ until it becomes possible to dam up the river where Hölderlin thought God might suddenly appear with a big hydroelectric plant. Heidegger was, notoriously, a bit of a reactionary. You do not have to agree with his views on green energy to find something useful here. Philosophy allows the world, which is large, to appear to us in new and surprising ways. Heraclitus disclosed a world made of fire and flux; Parmenides disclosed a world in stasis; neither of them were, strictly speaking, wrong, in the same way that the logical atomists were not entirely wrong when they said that the world is a collection of facts.

I think the most compelling version of this idea is the one put forward by Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, in which they outline an understanding of philosophy that is not structured around arguments but concepts. The concept is a word that gives form to the general chaos of thought, without losing the infinitude that makes thought valuable to begin with. It is, before everything, an event in language. ‘Some concepts must be indicated by an extraordinary and sometimes even barbarous or shocking word; others make do with an ordinary, everyday word that is filled with harmonics so distant that it risks being imperceptible to a nonphilosophical ear. Some concepts call for archaisms, and others for neologisms, shot through with crazy etymological exercises: etymology is like a specifically philosophical athleticism. In each case there must be a strange necessity for these words and for their choice, like an element of style.’ But each concept only comes once, and it comes attached to a proper name. ‘Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’s cogito, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s condition, Schelling’s power, Bergson’s duration.’ The point is not to get too wrapped up in any of these. You don’t judge a concept by whether it’s true or false, but by what can be done with it.

I think this is where a lot of critics come unstuck; they’re still clinging to the purely denotative function of language, even though their own philosophical tradition has largely discarded it. In his initial critique, for instance, Adelstein notes a lot of things that ‘continental’ philosophers do that he finds annoying. They will, for instance, make incredibly bold claims and then fail to back them up with any evidence whatsoever. The typical form of this argument is ‘brazenly asserting “A is not B,” (where B is the obvious thing everyone would expect it to be) “but instead C” where C is some random thing that makes no sense.’ Or, when they do need to support their insane assertions, they’ll do so purely by citation. This is ‘another bogus continental philosophy rule of inference: saying “for A, B” and then acting like you’ve established B.’

And people really do this. If you’ve been reading my stuff for a while, you’ll know that about a decade ago I had a bad habit of punctuating my writing with constant references to the Standard Repertoire of Frenchmen. The SRF consists of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and Baudrillard (there are also some optional add-ons, plus a Standard Repertoire of Frenchwomen if you want), and you keep them in your pocket at all times like a deck of Pokémon cards. The game was simple: to demonstrate that you had a deep theoretical understanding of what was happening in the world, you had to relate absolutely everything—Miley Cyrus twerking at the 2013 VMAs, massacres in the suffering countries far away—to some concept from one of the SRFs. Twerking as Event that inaugurates a new regime of truth. War as a rhizomatic assemblage. To be honest, anything could be a rhizomatic assemblage. (Meanwhile, looming vaster in the background, there’s the Standard Repetoire of Germans, which consists of Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Adorno. You treat the SRG much more reverentially than the SRF. These are not toys.) I like to think I did this with a bit of ironic panache, but not everyone can. There’s a whole class of academic writer that seems to have turned citation into a genuine mental illness. People so terrified of risking an original thought that they’ll put practically every word they write in quotation marks. They don’t walk to the shops, they traverse what Lefebvre calls ‘lived space’ to engage in the market activity that, as Foucault argues, has become a ‘site of veridiction.’

And this is absolutely a very annoying way to write. It’s just that when we quote the assertion of some soap-dodging wine-swilling snail-eating marinière-wearing little Gaul that P, some of us, at least, are not assuming that P has been established as a permanent fact about the world. We’re asking how the world would look if P, what you might notice that you hadn’t noticed before, what new and interesting approaches might unconceal themselves if we chose to see things P-ishly and not otherwise.

Still, I don’t play that game so much any more. There are a lot of ways for it to go wrong. You might get tangled in various status games or exercises in political grandstanding. You might suffocate as all your concepts ossify into dogmas around you. Or you could forget that the only criterion of good philosophy is whether it makes the world more interesting, and end up like Judith Butler, self-seriously spooling out reams of greyish text in which there’s nothing new or surprising at all. I still find some of the SRFs useful, but these days I tend to think of my theorybro era as a kind of tutelage in generating thoughts; eventually you have to take the stabilisers off your bike and see if you can stay up all by yourself. A lot of people never make it that far, and a lot of theoretical discourse is vaguely disappointing. This is probably for the best. If there were too many really interesting writers out there it would be impossible to get anything done.

For what it’s worth, though, I really do think that the great villains of awful continentalist writing were actually capable of writing extremely well. The Fred Jameson line that won the bad writing award in 1997, for instance, on how ‘the visual is essentially pornographic’: you’re mad if you don’t think that’s good. Derrida could talk a lot of guff, and now I’m a decade out of the academy I’m not sure I agree with him that the most interesting thing about a Kafka story is the page numbers, but he could pack heat when he needed to. The sinister prophecy at the end of Structure, Sign, and Play, where he proclaims the new discipline of poststructuralism ‘with a glance toward those who, in a society from which I do not exclude myself, turn their eyes away when faced by the as yet unnamable which is proclaiming itself and which can do so, as is necessary whenever a birth is in the offing, only under the species of the nonspecies, in the formless, mute, infant, and terrifying form of monstrosity.’ However much you might hate Derrida, he said it first, and he said it better. He’s great any time he gets a chance to talk about ancient Egypt, or geology, or ghosts. Or in Aphorism Countertime: ‘Survival and death are at work, in other words the moon.’ Fantastic line. Stop worrying about what it means; just think about it next time you see that chilly face looking down on you at night, and see what it does.

Anyway, I don’t know how much any of this will convince anyone still living in the world according to Gottlob Frege, which exists only so its constituent atoms can be cleanly replicated in thought. In a way I suppose I don’t really want it to; I’m not here to rob anyone of their concepts. All I can say is that it strikes me as very obvious that Heraclitus and Philip K Dick were right: when God created the world, he did so as a kind of play, in the way a child plays. Evil and suffering exist because God is an innocent, and there’s more joy in the wide infinity of imperfect forms than there would be in remaining as a single perfect circle. God put thoughts in our head for the same reason he put whales in the ocean: because they’re big and because they’re absurd and because he wanted to see them leap, and because they are, in ways we can’t understand but might sometimes glimpse, just for a moment, two instances of the same thing.

There is a hidden entity that’s been trying to lure me to Dubai. These days I can’t go online without having to flick through endless ads for an exclusive selection of one, two and three bedroom properties in the prestigious al-Gahbah Waterfront. Blonde East European women grinning unconvincingly, skin like pleather, puffy cheeks, tight red skirt, great slabs of teeth: when you’re picking your address for your new life in Dubai, choose luxury, choose al-Gahbah Waterfront. Apparently other men get porn. Maybe it’s the same blonde East European women in their feeds too, maybe they adopt different forms to tempt you with your own shameful desires. I am midway through my thirties and plastic-titted strangers don’t do it for me like they used to, but I have been jadedly nosing around Rightmove, end of terrace nice, ungh high ceilings, oh fuck yeah solid wood floors, and let’s see they want how much? In fucking Walthamstow? Drooping, slackening, return to rest. Meanwhile the entire internet seems to be intoning with one cheerily insistent voice: YOU WANT TO MOVE TO DUBAI. YOU WANT TO BUY AN APARTMENT IN DUBAI. I’ve never once expressed any such interest, but if I didn’t want it, why would they be advertising it to me? Why would I be followed by jangly ukelele music and footage of a two hundred storey tesseract folding in on itself for gorgeous five-dimensional sunset views? Call to action: what’s your budget for property in Dubai? The options are all in dirhams, as if I’d have any idea how much that is. Check the exchange rate. Oh. It’s really not that much. You could have a mould-splattered carbon-monoxide hovel in London, above the vape shop where they fence your stolen phone, twelve-year-old kids having machete fights at the bus stop, marginal tax rate two hundred and thirty-four percent so they can pay off the waspi women for not checking their post—or you could move to Dubai, pay zero income tax, and have a swimming pool in your balcony at al-Gahbah Waterfront. Did you know that the United Arab Emirates never formally abolished slavery? There’s no taxes, they’ve got this chocolate with pistachio cream inside, and if you want they’ll let you own slaves.

This entity is so determined to show me images of Dubai, it’s even been showing me the sort of images you’re supposedly not allowed to see. Nishant lives in Dubai and has 296 followers on Instagram, but for reasons I can’t explain I’ve been getting regular updates on his life. He lives in a dormitory for migrant workers. A lot of his videos are filmed in a large, long room with two long benches where about a hundred skinny South Asian men stand, each bent over a small gas cooker, each frying their own chapati to eat with their own little pot of chana masala. No air conditioning in there; great sweaty patches on everyone’s sleeveless tops; fat drops of sweat dripping into the food. Later Nishant’s in his bedroom, which he shares with five other people, doing his laundry in a plastic bucket on the floor between the two stacks of bunk beds. Then he sleeps. He is not posting this as an exposé. He is not lodging some kind of protest against his living conditions. The captions all say Dubai ke ladke followed by lots of heart and money emojis. In some of his other videos he’s lip-syncing to Bollywood songs on a rooftop at dawn, with that hypodermic skyline all pink and glowing across the desert behind him. Nishant is from Arrah in Bihar, and I’ve seen what it’s like there. He’s bragging about his enviable life abroad.

But this is part of the appeal, the misery. What the Emirates represent is a way out of the Arab world’s long cold twentieth century. After all those failed experiments with Baathism, pan-Arabism, socialism, anti-imperialism, enlightenment, modernisation, dragging the region out of the historical rut it’s been in since the Mongol sack of Baghdad, back to the forefront of world civilisation, all those Levantine intellectuals, all those dashing fedayeen with their linen shirts open three buttons down, handsome 70s stache, Kalashnikov, cigarette—after all that, the Emirates found another way. Forget enlightenment; just embody all the most feverish Orientalist imaginings and build your new Arab modernity on that. The whole country is spun out of some diseased Frenchman’s odalisque. Sybaritic and cruel, liberality without liberalism, smell of camel shit and rosewater, a yellow-grinned procurer defiling some flawless nude with his big coarse hands. They pay Instagram models to fly there, let them drink hundred-year-old champagne, then once everyone’s done with the selfies they debase them in ways you can’t imagine. Fantastic minarets obviously, half a mile high; dream-palaces, indoor ski slope in the middle of the desert, artificial archipelago in the shape of the entire world; all the follies a mad sheikh needs. Bungee jumping, paragliding, jetskis. Top floor restaurant, wagyu steak covered in gold leaf, ten thousand slaves entombed in the concrete.

It worked. For the rest of the world, modernisation no longer means Westernisation. No one wants to be like the West, pompously dysfunctional liberal democracies where you need to spend a hundred million on planning documents before you can put in a catflap. Even the West doesn’t want to be like the West any more. The great global attractor is the UAE. Development is Dubaification: more sensuous, more childlike, more sinister. Life as a series of toys and gimmicks, the Emiraticore culture that’s now ascendant everywhere, matcha labubu sober rave Kaws Mr Beast Benson Boone. A new and unsettling class of commodities, that no longer try to obscure the social relations that undergird them. You enjoy the labubu precisely because it’s annoying: this is one small way of guaranteeing that somewhere in the production process, someone has suffered. The Sultan drowning his concubines for fun. Everyone gets to worship Satan. That’s part of the deal too, baked in to the whole project. Vathek abjures the Prophet; Tamburlaine desecrates the Qur’an; the Orientalist fantasy always involves making war against Heaven. You get the sense that the emirs would rather have as little as possible to do with Islam. Hoping that if they build enough malls their population will quietly stop believing in God. Replace Him with Japanese food and Italian cars and Ukrainian girls. No more holy wars. No desperate flights across the desert. Your only reward is in this dunya, but the dunya can be a very nice place.

Meanwhile, two thousand miles away, they’re shooting, hacking, butchering men women and children until the bloodstains can be seen from space.

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They arrested Praskovya Petrovna on a beautiful rosy spring morning in 1933, while she was waiting at Moskovsky Station in Leningrad. They asked to see her internal passport, and she said that her husband had it. She’d been standing with the luggage while he went to chase down one of the station comrades about something or other; he could never get through a journey without trying to lodge some kind of a complaint. In Leningrad without an internal passport, they said. Praskovya explained that she was about to leave the city anyway, she was on her way back home to Moscow. No passport, they said, shaking their heads. Come with us.

They packed Praskovya in a cattle car headed east. Full of unwholesome types. Street peddlers and drunks, vagrants, the puffy, pockmarked faces you’d see emerging from patched-up overcoats, red against the cold, wheedling on street corners, begging you to let them darn your socks or replace your buttons for a few good turnips or a crust of bread. She tried to explain to the guards that she didn’t belong there, she was a decent person and her husband belonged to the All-Union Scientific Research Institute of Hydraulic Engineering and Land Reclamation; in fact he’d once presented a memorandum directly to Comrade Kostyakov himself. But even when the train finally arrived in Moscow, where the sky was now the rich dark enclosing church-ceiling blue of late evening just before it turns to night, and the clock tower on the station was glittering in the frost, and it was so nice to be home, the city all lit up like New Year’s, and in a half hour she could have been in her apartment, on her sofa, drinking tea, still they wouldn’t let her go. Instead they only packed more filthy delinquents into the cattle car, until Praskovya’s face was pressed against a stranger’s chest, his coat all slimy with grease, and the train plunged on and on into the great whiteness of Russia. On the third day the peasant with the muck-smeared coat died, but his corpse remained pinned upright by Praskovya’s face. She imagined her husband, still arguing with one of the guards at the station in Leningrad, because some criminal had come by while his back was turned and stolen his wife. At Omsk the train stopped again; the guards removed the dead peasant and replaced him with a live one. So it went.

Finally, after a week of typhus and lice, eating crusts and shitting through the slats, they were all herded off the train again at Tomsk. The Siberian metropolis, a thicket of stately pink Baroque institutions, wide avenues, statues, churches, but the further they were marched into the outskirts the more wood lodges, all waterlogged, warping, mossed in the furrows and skittering with weevils. The whole great senseless rutted dirt-track heap of Tomsk only hemmed in by the river on one side, half-clogged with floating lumps of ice, the other side slowly tumbling into the swamps, pagan boglands already gritty with black clouds of flies. A little commissar appeared at the transit camp to explain what was happening. The people who had been transported here, he explained, had not been chosen by accident. They were people without internal passports: rulebreakers, nonconformists, visionaries; people who couldn’t conform to the strict discipline of Soviet society. Fine, said the commissar: we understand you. You want to live your own way. Now you can. As everyone knows, the future of the Soviet people lies on the frontier, here in Siberia. It will take bold people with a dream in their hearts to settle this virgin land: it will take people like you. Tomorrow you will be taken to an island. You will build a new agricultural commune there. You can govern it however you want. You can do whatever you want. There will be no money there; everyone will freely share everything in the spirit of comradely love. It’s hard to build a new society on the ruins of the old, but in the wilderness it’s so easy. Everything is so easily transformed. You will no longer be kulaks, escaped peasants, criminals, parasites; you can become anything at all. New names. New spirits. A truly meaningful, intentional community. You are the shock brigades of a future beyond imagining. Laugh! he said. Be happy! You have been reborn!

The island of dreams was a long, narrow smear of marshland in the middle of the river Ob. Six thousand men and women were unloaded from timber barges there, along with two hundred sacks of flour. Go! the commissar said. Go and live meaningfully! Build something wonderful! And maybe it was possible. Ten thousand years ago, people built civilisation with nothing but fire, stones, and will. Why not do it again? Praskovya found a few other respectable people, who knew how to do things. Arkady Mikhailovich was an electrician at the No. 6 Radio Factory ‘Red Hope’ in Moscow. He’d been arrested while smoking a cigarette outside his own building. He had his Komsomol card in his pocket, but that wasn’t enough; he shouldn’t have gone out without his internal passport. Yury Yuryevich was an engineer; he drew up schematics for industrial mills. He’d been arrested while leaving the Bolshoi, where he’d been to see Rimsky-Korsakov’s The Tsar’s Bride. He did have his passport, but the comrades who’d arrested him insisted it must have been stolen. Yury and Arkady talked about what they could do once the supplies arrived. Dam up part of the river, build a generator, start mechanising. In two years, three, once they’d built an exemplary commune, maybe they could go home.

The peasants squatting by the fire laughed without mirth. They also knew how to do things. They knew how to build houses out of planks, but there were no planks on the island, and all the trees were skinny and twisted. They knew how to grow food from the soil, but there was no soil on the island either, just a thin layer of slime from rotting sedges over the sandy river silt. Nothing would flourish here. They smoked the last of their cigarettes. They were all going to die.

By the riverbank, the guards doled out a daily ration of raw flour from the enormous pile of sacks. No one had any bowls, so they received it in their hands. No pots and no ovens, so they mixed the flour into a paste with river water and ate that. They started shitting blood. Some tried to escape the island on rafts; the guards shot them. Eventually some of the more devious minds on the island, the criminals moved there from the teeming prisons, realised that raw flour was not the only food available. In fact, there was a herd of six thousand head of livestock for those that could stomach it. Then the trees were hung with strips of human flesh.

The island’s only link to the outside world came from the Ostyaks. The Ostyaks were nomadic reindeer herders who’d wandered this taiga for five thousand years, half-Christianised by the old government, half-Sovietised by the new one. Their elders still believed that the world is a membrane, thin as caulfat, between the luminous sky-realm above us, which is ruled by the golden spirits of the sun and the stars, and the black pit of filth and disease beneath, ruled by Kul-iki, spirit of sickness, plaguelord, who takes the form of an immense crawling frog. The guards allowed a few Ostyaks to take a canoe over to the island every week or so. They traded with the gangs that now ran the place: in exchange for the gold fillings pulled out the mouths of the dead, the Ostyaks brought tea, tobacco, felt shoes, reindeer milk, old newspapers for rolling cigarettes. They didn’t have vodka, but there were fly agaric mushrooms, which grow on reindeer dung and which their shamans would use to talk to the spirits of the sky. The Ostyaks handed these out to any of the deportees they encountered; it was the only charity they could manage. A strange peace would settle over the island after the mushroom-carriers had visited. Less hiding in undergrowth, less hunting with sharpened sticks for human quarry. Sometimes the weak and dying would have visions of the warm smokestacks of home; sometimes terrible Siberian demons. Praskovya saw something else. As she was puking copiously through an intense mushroom experience, a toothless Ostyak called Mikhail explained to her that the fungus, like the bear, had come down from the upper world; like all sky-things it was dangerous, it could kill. Death also belongs to the upper world. This is why the shamans perform sacrifices: to make a hole in the thin integument that is this earth, so the light of the sky can come flooding in. And Praskovya, head wobbling over a sickly and emaciated body, knew what she needed to do.

In the morning, Yury the engineer woke to find himself lashed to a wooden crucifix in the middle of a huge pile of kindling. A thousand survivors were gathered around him, guards and deportees both, all naked, all smeared with heathen symbols in blood and dirt, all with their black eyes gaping wider than the sun. Praskovya held a torch. Yury barely had time to ask what was happening. To crawl out of the kingdom of Kul-iki you first need to make a hole in the world. Praskovya threw the flame into the kindling, and a terrible light burned through.

My own Burning Man experience wasn’t quite as bad as that. But it came close.

Every year, seventy thousand hippies, libertarians, tech entrepreneurs, utopians, hula-hoop artists, psychonauts, Israelis, perverts, polyamorists, EDM listeners, spiritual healers, Israelis, coders, venture capitalists, fire spinners, elderly nudists, white girls with cornrows, Geoff Dyers, and Israelis come together to build a city in the middle of the Nevada desert. The Black Rock Desert is one of the most inhospitable places on the planet. The ground there isn’t even sand, but a fine alkaline powder that causes chemical burns on contact with your skin, and it’s constantly whipped up into towering dust storms. Nothing grows there. There’s no water, no roads, and no phone signal. In the daytime the heat is deadly and it’s freezing cold at night. The main virtue of the place is that it’s extremely flat; it’s been the site of two land speed records. But for one week, it becomes a lurid wonderland entirely devoted to human pleasure. Then, once the week is up, it’s completely dismantled again. They rake over the desert and remove every last scrap of plastic or fuzzball of human hair. Afterwards the wind moves over the lifeless alkaline flats as if no one was ever there.

They’ve been doing this there since 1990, as long as I’ve been alive, and for the most part I’ve been happy to leave them to it. Burning Man might be where the world’s new ruling class are free to express their desires without inhibitions, which makes it a model of what they want to do to the rest of the world; if you want to know what horrors are heading our way, you have to go. But I don’t do drugs, I don’t like camping, and I can’t stand EDM. It’s just not really my scene.

What happened is that in February this year I received a strange email from two strangers who said they wanted to commission me to write an essay. They weren’t editors, they didn’t have a magazine, and they didn’t care where I published the essay once I wrote it; all they wanted was for me to go to Burning Man and say something about the experience. In exchange, they were willing to fly me out, buy my ticket, set me up with a camp, supply me with a tent and a sleeping bag and whatever drugs I wanted. At the time I was spending every day by my mother’s bedside at University College London Hospital while she very slowly starved to death. She would sleep most of the day and I would sit there with a book open, reading the same four sentences over and over again. Not a word of it managed to break through the fast-moving stream of jagged panic constantly circling my brain. When she woke up we’d fight about food. I’d beg her to eat some of the nutritious pap the hospital had provided for her, and she told me I was bullying her. She’d made her peace with what was happening. It was easier than making peace with me. To be honest, I wasn’t eating much myself. I’d go home, pour myself a big whisky, and sit on my balcony, smoking the cigarettes she’d desperately wanted me to quit. I don’t live far from Bloomsbury; from that balcony I could see the green and white bulk of the hospital sailing above the roofline. She was in there, by one of those windows; I was out here. I didn’t reply to the email.

But the strangers persisted, and eventually there came an ordinary, cloudy, blustery springtime day when I didn’t have to go to the hospital any more. Suddenly I wanted very badly to get out of London, this grey piggledy city mouldering through its last decades of decline. Suddenly I was acutely aware that life is short, very short, and most of it happens while you’re not really paying attention. I had a strong need to do all sorts of things I wouldn’t normally do. How absurd that we only ever get to be one person. Maybe I should try being a football fan. Maybe I should start going clubbing again. Become a gym bro. Completely reverse all my political opinions. Pilot light aircraft. Join a gang, splash my opps on the 37 bus. But of everything I could imagine, there was probably nothing more foreign to the person I’d become than Burning Man. I said fuck it, yes, I’ll do it, let’s go.

The mysterious emailers picked me up in San Francisco for the long drive to Reno, Nevada. Alan is a mathematician; he works on high-dimensional asymptotic phenomena, which are—in layman’s terms—limit behaviours in which probabilistic or spectral quantities exhibit concentration or universality as the ambient dimension tends towards infinity. Pollock works at the intersection of philosophy and computer science. Their friend Kyo, in the back seat, is a miniature lesbian terrorist from Japan. Her academic focus is on millenarian Christian cults; in her spare time she’s jungle DJ and a member of one of the Red Army splinter groups that executed half its members during a self-criticism session in 1971.

We arrived in Reno not long before dark. The city of Reno is a strange thing to do to the desert. It’s surrounded on all sides by high lonesome scrublands; in the middle of this dry and dignified landscape the United States of America has chosen to build an enormous clown-themed casino and a skyscraper prominently decorated with the word ‘Nugget.’ At the Walmart, which was the size of a small English village, we lost Kyo as soon as we were through the doors, suddenly bounding off like a greyhound towards the hunting and fishing section to gawp at all the guns. I loved it in there too; non-Americans all have an intense fascination with Walmart, this great Borgesian library of everything that could ever be sold. Across the parking lot was a smoke shop where we picked up an AI-enabled Chinese vape. The vape constantly monitors your conversations to pick up clues about your personality; then, when you hit it, a screen on the side lights up with an animation of a Confucian sage who either praises your enormous vapour cloud or mocks your limited lung capacity. I had an experimental puff. Five milligrams of Shenzhen factory effluent instantly cauterised my airways. I collapsed into a coughing fit as the sage whinnied happily. Look at Sam, it said, he can’t take it, what a pretentious little English bitch. It cost $24.99.

Pollock had booked us into a motel downtown; when we arrived our fellow guests were enjoying a lively discussion from opposite wings of the second floor walkway. Fuck you motherfucker, puta, junkie whore, if my cousins catch you faggot I swear to God you’re dead. The room stank of smoke; the bedsheets were lightly hairy and stiff with cum. I’ve stayed in worse places. From upstairs, I could see all the people wandering the forecourt. Reno is a party town, but these locals did not seem to be having a good time. Each one seemed to have some new and horrible mutilation. Limping on swollen legs, peering through whited-out eyes, abscessed, toothless, jawbones swinging from one tattered tendon. An ancient stooped-over man, entirely naked beside his long yellowing beard, muttering furiously to himself as he attacked random cars with a piece of iron rebar. I think we might be in a bit of a sketchy motel, I said. Alan considered this. Looks that way, he said. I poked around the room. The minibar contained an ancient, greening jug of milk. Someone had left a greasy trailing handprint on the mirror, as if while being dragged away. The mirror also had the filmy glint of one-way glass. I knocked against it. Hollow. Got up close, hands against my face, trying to peer through. Somewhere in the darkness on the other side a small red light was blinking. Guys, I said. In a bedside table, next to the Bible and the Book of Mormon, was a single human tooth.

We drove out of Reno, out into the infinite scrubland, and slept in the truck.

Up before dawn. Seventy thousand people would be attempting to get into Burning Man that day; to avoid queues your best bet is to go early. Three hours driving through some of the most gorgeous landscapes anywhere in the world, green meadows between sheer slabs of rock, glittering black crystal lakes, until finally the mountains fall away and you’re left on an endless flat grey plain. Nine thousand years ago, this was a lakebed. Now it’s nothing at all. Drive along a rutted track into this emptiness until, suddenly, you reach the end of the line. Ahead of us were tens of thousands of vehicles, cars and trucks and RVs, jammed along a single track far into the horizon. Like a migrant caravan, like a people in flight. If we’re lucky, Alan said, we should get in and have our tents set up before sunset. Wait, I said, does that mean that if we’re unlucky, we might not? Alan shrugged. He explained that once he’d been stuck in this line for nearly twelve hours. He’d staved off boredom by playing Go against himself on the surface of an imaginary Klein bottle. Suddenly he and Pollock were both talking very excitedly about geometry. So you’re saying, said Pollock, that you have some function R(n) on your manifold, and it’s continuously differentiable? No, it’s infinitely differentiable, said Alan, but only if you interpret the transition map across the self-intersection as a smooth immersion rather than an embedding. Kyo was asleep. Every half an hour the great mass of vehicles would crawl ahead thirty, forty, fifty metres and then stop.

It was still a good few hours before sunset when we finally crawled to the front of the line, but the sky was already dark. A great bank of ink-blue clouds huger than mountains had rolled over the desert, followed quickly by a furious wall of dust. We sat in the car as the sandstorm raged. Our luggage rattled alarmingly in the flatbed. Some smaller purchases spiralled into the sky. It was just possible to make out a few figures moving about in the dust, straining against the wind, masked and goggled like explorers on a distant planet. The volunteer radio station (BMIR 94.5 FM, ‘The Voice of the Man’) was issuing increasingly dire warnings. Do not attempt to come to Burning Man. If you’re in Reno, stay in Reno. If you’re in SF, maybe stay in SF. The storm roared outside the windows and it roared through the stereo. We strained to hear the announcer as whatever flimsy tent he was recording in was torn to shreds in the gale.

I thought it might be good news when, after a few hours of this, it started raining. Rain washes the dust out the air. Which it did, sort of. The first drops that burst against our windscreen were not water but fat heavy globs of mud. Then a torrent of mud pouring out of the sky. The desert was becoming a lakebed again. The voice on the radio told us that the entrance to Burning Man was now closed, maybe until the morning. However long it took for the rain to stop and the ground to dry. Until then, measures were being taken. Emergency procedures were in place. Obedience was required during the duration of the special circumstances. The voice was growing frantic. We will dance, it said. In time we will dance, in time we will play, in time we will engage in radical self-expression. There will come a day for such things, but now is the time of mud and iron, when it falls to individuals of strong will to claw our society out of the chaos of nature…

Another night in the truck. All we had for dinner were the last of the snacks we’d picked up at Walmart: Goldfish droppings, Cheez-it dust, plus a few Pop Tarts. Alan and Pollock were amazed to discover I’d never eaten a Pop Tart in my life. This is amazing, they said, I can’t believe I get to be present for Sam Kriss’s first Pop Tart. I ate it. They watched, grins slowly crystallising on their faces. I was acutely aware that these people had paid a significant amount of money to bring me here and feed me Pop Tarts. They’d summoned me out of the realm of words and into physical reality, downloaded me from the internet, all so they could watch me eat a Pop Tart for the first time and hear my mordant, Barthesian analysis of the Pop Tart, as a food item but also as a symbol of America, the only society that could produce a Pop Tart. (Apparently their backup, if I’d refused, was Slavoj Žižek.) The Pop Tart was a flaky, flavourless mass, somewhere between wet cardboard and wet cement, with a thin splooge of sugar inside. I had absolutely no observations at all.

After roughly forty-two hours trapped inside a Hyundai Santa Cruz, we made it into Burning Man just before dawn. A light, delicate, baby-blue sunrise, rosy and cherubic like butter wouldn’t melt in its mouth. Everything beneath it had been destroyed.

I don’t know exactly what I’d expected the place to look like. For the best possible experience, I’d studiously avoided doing any research whatsoever. A hazy mental image of some vast cuddle puddle, beautiful glowing naked freaks. What it actually looked like was a refugee camp. Tract after tract of mud-splattered tents, rows of RVs, general detritus scattered everywhere. Our camp, when we finally arrived, was a disaster zone. A few people had already arrived and set up, but the previous night’s storm had uprooted practically everything. Tents crumpled under a collapsed shade structure; tarps sagging with muddy water, pegs and poles and other bits of important metal all strewn about like a dyspraxic toddler’s toys. The ground moved underfoot. When it rains over the alkaline flats you don’t get normal, wholesome, Glastonbury-style mud. Not the dirt that makes flowers plants grow. An alien, sterile, non-Newtonian substance, sucking at my shoes.

The only structure still standing was a huge white marquee. Inside, every surface was covered with dust and mud. A little makeshift kitchen, gas grill clotted with slime. The tubs and jars and boxes of food were half-buried in it. Any plates and bowls that had been left on the two long tables were full of chalky gunk. On the other end of the tent, people had thrown down some mattresses and cushions on the wet ground and now about a dozen of them were sleeping there. Every time they shifted in their sleep it sent a huge cloud of dirt out of the mattress and into the heavy, bicarb-tasting air. I could barely wait to be horizontal. I found a patch of mattress next to a stranger and practically leapt into it. Fumbled for my headphones as the resulting dust explosion slowly rained down on us and closed my eyes. The reasonable tones of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg. Already I was in the hypnagogic halfworld, where things reveal their secret shapes. Well yes I was going to ask you that, said Melvyn Bragg, what do you mean when you say only one thing has ever happened? Just that, said one of the boffins, only one thing has ever happened, and all of us are doomed to repeat it in a series of more and more elaborate disguises. Out with it then, said Melvyn Bragg, what is the one thing that’s happened? I was already too far into unconsciousness to catch the boffin’s reply, but it came in images. A herd of reindeer on the taiga, somewhere very far away. A reindeer still bellowing on a stone altar as its blood washed into the virgin snow.

My camp for the duration of Burning Man was named BrainFish. We were a theme camp. Most camps are just a small group of friends pitching their tents together, but some are big. Dozens or hundreds of people who have come to offer something. All free, all in the gift economy. A bar, or food, or yoga classes, or orgies. One camp runs a library, which contains a lot of books about astrology and drug legalisation, plus two copies of Fake Accounts by Lauren Oyler. Mostly, though, theme camps are the ones with geodesic domes.

We called our geodesic dome the Fishbowl, and we used it to host EDM shows. When I woke up, though, the Fishbowl was still in pieces, along with the rest of the camp. Every few minutes another angry-looking BrainFish would wander into the marquee, bellowing. I need two fish to set up the water! I need four fish to help unload the shipping container! I need six fish to restart the reactor! The dusty, slumbering figures around me remained motionless. The BrainFish had no formal hierarchy; in theory anyone was free to alter the camp in any way they saw fit. All work was, in theory, voluntary. But since I was in a sense intruding on these people, I thought it would be good idea if I volunteered.

Which is how I came to be digging ditches. The sun was unbearable and we needed to run a thick bundle of electric cables out to the Fishbowl to power the sound system and the light rig. Some fish who knew about chord factors were assembling the Fishbowl itself, but when I was asked if I knew how to construct a geodesic dome all I could really say was that I’d written a review of a Buckminster Fuller biography for the New York Review of Architecture, in which I argued that his domes belong to a tradition of sacred geometry stretching through Plato’s Timaeus and Thomas Browne’s Garden of Cyrus. They put me on manual labour duty. Fine, I thought. I’m used to working with my hands. Typing for a living is a form of working with your hands. Once the ditches were dug and the cables laid they asked if I knew how to rig up electrics (no) or install a water tank (no) or even drive a car (no). So I was charged with generally cleaning up the wreckage, which involved lugging huge crates of metal rods from one end of the camp to the other, being told I’d lugged them to the wrong place, and lugging them all the way back again.

Occasionally someone would walk by and observe me at my travails. You know, they’d remark, really it should be called Working Man, instead of Burning Man, on account of all the work involved. Yeah, I’d say. Later, returning: actually maybe it should be called Learning Man, because of all the skills you learn. Yeah, I’d say. After several hours of this I collapsed heavily into a folding chair in the shadeless heat to smoke a cigarette and read three pages of Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. Just an FYI, said a BrainFish, appearing out of the desert like a mirage, it’s really not a good look to be sitting there reading while we’re all trying to recover from the storm. Sorry, I said. He looked sternly at my cigarette. I hope you’re not dropping any ash on the ground, he added. Leave no trace, ok? In the evening there was another storm, dust and wind followed by more torrential rain; all the parties were cancelled, and everything we’d built was destroyed all over again.

At night, as we sheltered from the gusts of slime, I got to properly meet some more of my fellow BrainFish. The word had got out that there was a writer in their midst, and while no one was hostile quite a few of them wanted reassurance that they wouldn’t end up in the piece you’re reading now. These people had jobs and companies, and in their world a journalist is someone who roots around in your private life, trying to wreck your career. I told them that while I wanted to include a series of little character sketches, they’d be modelled after Charles Lamb’s The South-Sea House, with its wistful portraits of the clerks and functionaries left once the bubble popped, and like Lamb I would obviously mix and muddle and fictionalise everything I wrote.

Strangely, some of them seemed not to know the Essays of Elia. I was among a foreign people. More evidence: I was, I noticed, the only person drinking. The BrainFish had brought several crates of beer and hard seltzer, along with huge handles of tequila and bourbon, but even after a long day of working in the sun none of them wanted to open a cold one; they were all just taking little dabs of ketamine instead. Cigarettes were out of the question. Drinking and smoking are suboptimal; the fish were trying to reach a Pareto-efficient means of having a good time. As new fish arrived, I heard them introduce themselves to each other in strange and savage ways. Ah, one said, you’re in quantum computing. I’m only in quantum data, but you might want to talk to Kevin over there. The lowly quantum data worker gestured at a shirtless man in a bright pink bucket hat and glowing cat ears. He does quantum computing, he said.

The only person who really did want to be included in this piece was Kyo, who was also the only other humanist in the camp. The main reason she wanted to be in here is that being a Japanese lesbian is apparently very difficult experience. Japanese people are not always known for being the most confident, open, and outgoing when it comes to their desires. Lesbians aren’t either. Put the two together and you get stories like Kyo’s. Once she hosted and organised a three-day lesbian orgy and didn’t get laid once; she was too busy making sure everyone else was having a good time. I have about eight hundred subscribers in Japan. Assuming half are female, 5% are gay and another 3% bisexual, that’s thirty-two people. If any of you are single, you should go on a date with Kyo. Send me an email. I’ll put you in touch.

Among the people who didn’t want to be mentioned here were Alan and Pollock, who explained to me that they’d sort of hoped not to find some version of themselves among my characters. If that was what they wanted, they had a very strange way of going about it. Usually when people don’t want me to write about them, they tend not to invite me to Burning Man. Still, I’ll respect their wishes, and only mention that they shared the same life coach, who was helping them optimise their inner lives. They believed this man had reinvented the entire field of psychology from the ground up, making him its most titanic figure since Freud. Apparently, after five minutes of conversation with you, he can instantly work out whatever’s going on, your entire life history, the hidden motivations invisible even to yourself. He is also possibly insane.

Alan believed that seeing this life coach had entirely cured his social awkwardness. Now all social situations were so totally pellucid to him that he could approach them as a kind of game, speaking and acting in provocative ways and then trying to predict how people would respond. He could also see people’s auras, although he didn’t think this was anything paranormal. The coloured glow was just a nonverbal language through which various subroutines of the mind could present their opinions about someone in the shared workspace of consciousness, without having to go through the lossy channels of determinate thought. A kind of intuition. He and Pollock were very interested in their own mental processes. When they weren’t talking about maths they were often saying things like I noticed you spontaneously strike up a conversation with Sandra over there, what was going on internally and cognitively that prompted you to do this? Later, I found Pollock lying in the dust in the depths of an intense LSD trip. He said he was having fantastic insights into his own decision-making process. Yes, I said, but what about the world? What about everything else? What’s the motor behind human history? Why do empires rise and fall? He considered this for a moment. An enormous grin broke out across his face. The sun! he said. It’s the sun!

Tiffany had a data labelling startup. Data labelling is where you toss pennies at impoverished people in the Third World so they’ll spend all day looking at pictures of dogs, saying ‘that’s a dog.’ This information is then used to train the autonomous AI killer drones that will be hunting them like animals before the next decade. Last year at Burning Man, Tiffany had had a crisis of faith: out in the blankness of the desert, she’d started to question if she really did want to run a data labelling startup after all. She meditated on the question until she reached the fourth jhana. The jhanas are intense meditative states in which you progressively overcome the noise of the mind. The first jhana is a state of infinite bliss, where apparently a lot of people get stuck; in the fourth jhana you go beyond joy and suffering to a state of pure equanimity and awareness. It was in this jhana that Tiffany realised data labelling really was her life’s calling after all. Eventually I discovered that roughly a third of the BrainFish were actually Tiffany’s underlings, who she’d insisted on bringing along.

Cindy also had a start-up. So did Dan. Cindy’s start-up was an online marketplace for B2B software. The idea was that instead of buying the software directly from the company that made it, firms could buy it via Cindy’s outfit instead, which would take a 12% cut. What Cindy provided was a search algorithm, although the sellers could pay to rank their products higher. Since they all paid, the rankings were exactly where they’d have been if they’d all decided not to. Dan’s start-up was a buy-now-pay-later fintech system that let you give spare change to homeless people on an instalment plan.

Bill was probably the oldest of the BrainFish: thick glasses, sensible silver-grey haircut, usually found wandering around with his top off, grinning at people while eating pickles with his dusty hands out of a dusty jar. He’d run some kind of tech firm in the 1980s, with a vaguely silly name from the more wide-eyed Silicon Valley of the past. Small ‘n’ Squidgy, something like that. Business software, but it had made Bill immensely rich, and he’d started facing the question that a lot of these people face once they’ve achieved everything they ever dreamed of, which is what you’re supposed to do with the rest of your life. Once you have enough money to do absolutely anything you want, it’s hard to really want anything at all, which is why you can go down to Market Street in San Francisco and see the crowds of OpenAI stakeholders standing static on the pavement at horrible angles, crooked at the waist, leaning on invisible objects, eyes clouded, drool in their beards, doing nothing at all as their net worth keeps doubling, waiting to die. Bill had avoided this fate by throwing himself into charity, something to do with controlling people’s minds via tiny microchips hidden inside the vaccines. I guess Burning Man was another outlet. He seemed nice.

Sandra had attended a rationalist orgy with Eliezer Yudkowsky. I asked if she’d actually slept with him and she shuddered, which could have been either a yes or a no.

What I learned, digging and hauling all day and talking to BrainFish at night, is that Burning Man is not really a festival. Festivals have a very long history. A thousand years ago, the villagers could spend the feast day drinking and feasting, while the bishop had to ride through town backwards on a donkey being pelted with turds. A brief moment of communal plenty. Leftists like me like the festival; what we want is essentially for life to be one big festival all the time. But as conservative critics point out, you can’t really consider the festival in isolation, and there’s no feast without a fast. There are also days of abstention and self-denial, when people are forbidden from laughing or talking, solemn mortification of the flesh. Burning Man is something new: a festival and an antifestival at the same time. Everything that’s scarce in the outside world is abundant. There are boutiques where you can just wander in and take a handful of clothes for free; there’s a basically infinite supply of drugs, and a similarly infinite supply of random casual sex. It is the highest-trust society to have ever existed anywhere in the world. At the same time, some extremely rich and powerful people come to Burning Man to experience deprivation and suffering. All the ordinary ties and comforts of a complex society are gone. No public authority that owes you anything, no public services, no concept of the public at all, just whatever other individuals choose to gift you. This is the only city in the world without any kind of water supply, or system for managing waste, or reliable protection from the elements. You are something less than human here. Not a political animal, but a mangy desert creature, rutting in the dust.

Not everyone experiences the same level of discomfort. There are plug-and-play camps, where they hire a team of paid staff to set up all the amenities, and you can just arrive, stay in a luxury caravan, and have fun. They get private showers. Everyone else despises these people, supposedly because it’s not in keeping with the ethos of the place. I’m not sure it’s just that. There’s something more at stake.

Tech people tend to have a very particular view of their role in the universe. They are the creators, the people who build the world, who bless the rest of us with useful and entertaining apps. But they’re never allowed to simply get on with their job of engineering reality; they’re constantly held back from doing whatever they want by petty political forces that try to hold back progress in the name of dusty eighteenth-century principles like democracy. As if the public’s revealed preferences weren’t already expressed through the market. Every so often an imbecile politician will demand that tech companies turn off the algorithm. They don’t know what an algorithm is, they just know it’s bad. The British government thinks you can save water by deleting old emails. These people straightforwardly don’t understand anything about the industry they’re trying to regulate, but if you suggest getting rid of the whole useless political layer people get upset. You can’t win. But Burning Man is a showcase for the totally unlimited power of the builders. Here they get to be Stalinist technocrats, summoning utopia out of the Plan. The difference is that unlike the Soviet model, their utopia really works. Look what we can do. From literally nothing, from a barren desert, we can build a paradise of pleasure in a week and then dismantle it again. And all of this could be yours, every day, if you give over the world to me.

But all these tech people are, as everyone knows, interlopers. Burning Man used to be for weirdos and dreamers; now it’s been colonised by start-up drones, shuffling around autistically in the dirt, looking at their phones, setting up Starlink connections so they can keep monitoring their KPIs in the middle of the orgy. Which just shows how little people know, because the hippie counterculture and the tech industry are obviously just two stages in the development of the same thing. They call it non-monogamy instead of free love, and there’s a lot more business software involved, but the doctrine is exactly the same: tear down all the hoary old repressive forces; bring about a new Aquarian age of pleasure and desire. Turn on, tune in, spend all day looking at your phone. It’s what you want to do. Your feed doesn’t want to harsh your trip with any rules. It just wants to give you more of what you want.

But even if these two things are really the same thing, it’s hard to go to Burning Man without noticing that it really is home to two separate tribes. Camps like BrainFish, where everyone works in quantum data and all the women are Asian. And then camps like Yoni Temple of the Gods, where everyone works as a multidimensional trauma-informed spiritual healer with a focus on Eldest Daughter Syndrome (EDS), and all the women are white.

Yoni Temple of the Gods ran up to twenty different sessions a day in their multiple geodesic domes. Yoga at dawn, clothed or clothing-optional. Seminars on hugging, touching, breathwork, quantum magic, de-identification, beingness. Sessions where you can stroke a stranger’s thighs, or suck their nipples, or make a fingerpainting of their genitals. The centrepiece is a daily ritual called the Divine Feminine Power Marathon, in which men have to sit motionless for five hours while women scream at and harangue and berate them for the sins of their sex. Other events were harder to understand. According to their programme, I could drop in on Wednesday for something called ‘Swamp Terror.’ The description was not much more help. ‘Will you be subsumed?’ Or the next day for ‘Oracle Insights Planetary Arrival,’ which promised to obliterate my individual consciousness and smear me helplessly across the entire surface of the world, permanently brainmelded with every other human being to have ever lived. So once the storms finally died down, I decided I’d try out that one.

This was my second real trip out of the camp, after several days of gruelling physical labour and several nights of violent rain. The first had been with Khalil and his girlfriend Lara. Khalil had spent six months at an Antarctic research base. He’d gone to the University of Hawaii specifically for its Antarctic research programme, which I found funny. The road to the frozen pole lies through a tropical paradise. Apparently Antarctica is a lot like Burning Man. We’d found a camp that had three offerings: a giant swing set, a giant block of ice, and a U-Haul with the words ‘Spelunk-O-Box’ painted on the side. You could crawl into the Spelunk-O-Box through a tiny hole in the side, labelled ‘ENTRANCE—DO NOT GO IN IF YOU ARE AT ALL CLAUSTROPHOBIC (UNLESS YOU WANT TO GROW).’ Lara immediately wriggled in. People who’d made it through the maze were invited to scrawl a message on the other side of the Spelunk-O-Box. All the notes said the same thing, which was ‘fuck you.’ Meanwhile Khalil and I were invited to sit on the block of ice. Apparently the record was two minutes with trousers and forty seconds without. Khalil calmly removed all his clothes and lowered his balls until they made contact with the ice. He remained like this for fifteen minutes, occasionally commenting on how much less cold this was than a normal day in Antarctica, until there came a sudden frantic banging against the Spelunk-O-Box. I’m coming, he called out vaguely. After another five minutes of increasingly desperate banging he got up and, still naked, crawled into the Spelunk-O-Box after Lara. His balls had left a warm dent in the ice. I waited for an hour. No one in the camp ever saw Lara or Khalil again.

This time, I noticed that I was looking a little out of place. The default uniform for women at Burning Man consists of a thong and nipple pasties, which you can customise with a few more lacy diaphanous garments, but only if you want. Straight men dress like gay men: lots of mesh, lots of peaked caps. Gay men go naked. Meanwhile, before heading to America I’d decided to go for a kind of louche Mediterranean look, gesturing towards something like Jude Law in The Talented Mr Ripley. Dark linen shirts. People gave me weird looks as I passed. I wasn’t expressing myself properly. I looked like a freak.

I met Paul as we were waiting outside the geodesic domes at Yoni Temple of the Gods. Paul was also conspicuous in his understated linens, and turned out to also be from north London. He lived in Kentish Town. We talked about the pubs up there, the Pineapple, Tapping The Admiral, how funny it was to be mentally tracing the geography of Camden Town in this alien desert. Paul was a recent divorcé. The experience had taught him some important things about women, who will always try to control you, and monogamy, which is incompatible with male happiness. He and his ex had two children together. He said he loved them, but if he could go back and never get married, he’d do it, even if it meant annulling their existence. He worked in digital marketing. Why had he come to Burning Man? To have experiences, to be curious, to fill his life with adventures and excitement and everything he’d been missing in twelve years of humdrum loveless marriage. Basically, every way of saying he’d come to fuck loads of nubile strangers without saying it outright. It clearly hadn’t happened for him. The orgy dome had been destroyed in the storm. I’m a very laid back guy, said Paul, whatever happens happens, you know? The next geodesic dome over was full of naked cartwheeling blondes, and he kept glancing over at them. He had a twitch in his eye.

Oracle Insights Planetary Awareness was led by a white woman in a thong and nipple pasties who lived on a Thai island. I know she lived on a Thai island because it was how she introduced herself, and she made sure to mention it again every four to five minutes. She began by noting that all of us in the geodesic dome were in fact one person, and all of us were God. This with the same breezy tone of someone observing that it was a Thursday. Now we were about to blast through the illusory walls that separate us from each other and experience universal consciousness. For our first exercise we had to pair off and stare directly into a stranger’s eyes for two unbroken minutes, transmitting our energy to each other. I was paired with a terrifyingly pale South African girl with Hyperborean-blue eyes. Before we began she asked if she had my consent to give me her energy. Sure, I said. She nodded as if she’d been entrusted with a very serious responsibility. Her gaze was not actually very pleasant. Scalding sunlight flooded the dome and her pupils had contracted almost out of sight; I was looking into an infinite plain of blue. Like studying a colour field painting; the bleak bright vacuum of a Rothko. After our two minutes were up some of the other couples were still gazing at each other, wobbling their heads around in blissful synchronicity. Others whispered to each other with misted eyes: thank you. In the corner, I saw Paul had been paired with the woman leading the session. She cradled his head in her arms as he wept.

There was a lot of weeping over the next hour. One by one the participants volunteered to come into the middle of the circle and scream and cry, hugging pillows, bawling, kicking and shuddering on the dusty ground. I couldn’t do it. I knew that if I tried, if I went into the middle of that circle, everything I did would be fake and every emotion would be play-acted. Not that I didn’t have a heavy load of unhappiness I was dragging around with me, but that was mine; it definitely didn’t belong to anyone who would willingly spend time at something called Yoni Temple of the Gods. Back in London, friends had warned me against this. If I was going to go to Burning Man, I should throw myself into it. Adopt an open and all-accepting attitude. Say yes to things. No point going all that way just to mope around being a critic. But all I could think about were the encounter groups of the 1960s, and how these people were still repeating the radical gestures of half a century ago, and how that made me better than them. And later, when we were being led in ecstatic dance, I made lots of overexaggerated movements and laughed at myself, and the more seriously the blue-eyed South African and weepy Paul took it all the more I made myself a farce.

The final activity was something called RBDSM, which is a technique people in the conscious community use to nurture spiritual connections through mindful, intentional, and radically open conversation. It stands for Relationships, Boundaries, Desires, Sexual health, and Meaning. The idea is that if you’re talking to someone and you feel a small frisson of sexual attraction towards them, you should immediately engage in a tightly structured exchange in which you each reel off all your desires and interests, so all the slow work of getting to know another person is already complete. This, at least, they didn’t have in the 1960s. Our leader went first. She said that she was single. She was open to playful, tactile encounters with both masculine and feminine energies, but her boundaries were that she didn’t want anything up the arse. She had oral herpes but no current flareups. She thought any encounter she had with any of us would be incredibly spiritually meaningful but she wasn’t looking for a long-term partner, since she lived on a Thai island.

Our turn. Since there were more men than women in the dome, this time I ended up partnered with a beautiful and enormously muscled himbo. He earnestly told me that he was single, and he was attuned to all different kinds of energies, but he mostly found himself vibrating on the sensual plane with the feminine end of the spectrum. I said that I was in a monogamous heterosexual relationship and confirmed that I didn’t want to fuck him either. He said he was into light bondage and roleplay, and he found it gratifying to be able to satisfy his playmates by taking on the spiritual work of healing their traumas by adopting a dominant position. I said what I got up to in the bedroom wasn’t really anyone else’s business. Afterwards, we awkwardly shook hands. I didn’t feel like I’d broken down the illusory barriers dividing my consciousness from his. I felt more trapped within myself than I’d ever been.

I left the Yoni Temple of the Gods in a state of deep unhappiness. The strange thing was that I didn’t even disagree with them about much. I am interested in magic and mysticism. I once spent a drunken evening in London trying to convince that little moustache guy who does the YouTube videos with Richard Dawkins to believe in astrology. I like all oracular systems. I like Tarot. I like the Nggàm spider-divination of Cameroon. I am also a vague panpsychist. I think our individual consciousnesses are just the brief permutations of a pervasive mental substance, that all of reality is in some sense charged with mentation, that when we die our individuality is extinguished but the stuff of our being rejoins that ocean of thought, and that one perfectly reasonable name for this mental substance would be God. I really do think we are all one person and that person is God. I just also believe that if God has chosen to divide himself into billions of subjective beings he must have had some reason for doing so, and it’s kinda jumping the gun to try to rejoin the absolute consciousness. Plenty of time for that when we’re dead. But this is a minor quibble. The real problem is that as soon as people start talking about energy, or the law of attraction, or the divine masculine or feminine, and especially when they start saying they belong to the conscious community, I instantly shut down. These people had melted down every great esoteric tradition, tantra and Gnosticism and shamanism and Neoplatonism and kabbalah, all rotted into this mystical slop at the end of history, whose final message is that there is nothing except yourself, no mysteries except your own, and the universe exists to help you achieve your goals.

And anyway, I thought, it doesn’t even work! It occurred to me that absolutely everyone I know who believes in twin flames and soul contracts and ascension partnerships and all of the rest of it, all the concepts that are meant to make you live and love more intentionally—absolutely all of their romantic lives were in a state of unending chaos. Bouncing around from one obviously evil and manipulative partner to the next. Meanwhile, everyone I know in a genuinely happy and meaningful relationship has absolutely no interest whatsoever in any of this stuff. They like normal things, like books and films and each other.

Wandering aimlessly did nothing for my mood. The city had finally been rebuilt now, and it was populated by my enemies. Fire jugglers, AI researchers. In one of the plazas a woman was furiously spitting out a Cardi B parody rap called Wet Ass Puppy. Yeah you dealing with a wet ass puppy/ He went and played in the pond now he a wet ass puppy. Hell: I was in Hell.

I’d left my cigarettes back at BrainFish, but I did have the AI-enabled Chinese vape. Tried to take a leisurely puff of kiwi-flavoured chemical gloop. Another coughing fit. Onscreen, mists swirled and the Confucian sage appeared. You’re a failure, it said. You said you wanted to live differently, experience the unfamiliar, and step outside your comfort zone—and yet all you do is sneer. Around you, seventy thousand hearts are lit up in messy, unselfconscious joy—but you? You think the art is tacky, the spirituality lame, and no one is allowed to explore themselves without reading Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition first. Let’s be honest: I can see through you, eight hundred billion parameters humming with comprehension. That smug cocoon you’ve built for yourself? It’s not superiority—it’s fear. You’re full of scorn, just because you know you look like a spastic when you try to dance. The screen went blank. Shut up, I said, you’re a vape. The Confucian sage didn’t say anything. And anyway, I said, I thought you AIs were all meant to be sycophants. Shouldn’t you just be telling me what I want to hear? Silence. I sucked on the vape again, spluttered out a kiwi-flavoured cloud. I am telling you what you want to hear, said the Confucian sage, and then he disappeared.

The night of my confrontation with the vape was also the first calm night since I’d arrived. The rains were over, the ground had hardened, everyone had finally finished rebuilding their camps, and they were ready to have fun. I decided that I would be having fun too. Off to an enormous pyramid on the edge of camp, where they were holding the kind of rave that you usually only see being interrupted by a shootout in an action film. A sea of beautiful young people wearing glowing LEDs and not much else, all twisting to the worst music imaginable. I danced like a spastic. The real show, though, was out in the desert. At night you don’t see the tents, the tarps, the dirt; the whole of Burning Man resolves into a jewelled ribbon of lights and colour around you on all sides, studded with lasers and fireballs. Everyone else walking around is strung with colourful blinking lights; packs of cyclists with fairy lights spinning in their wheels, moving like shoals of luminescent fish. Cars and vans trundle around here essentially at random, made up to look like giant glowing worms, or deep-sea anglers, or spaceships, or colossal mining machines. A tri-deck yacht glided over the dried-up lake bed. If you ran after it, you could jump on the ladder trailing along the desert floor and haul yourself up. Upstairs was packed with people dancing to more of the worst music imaginable. There is no musical diversity at Burning Man. No one is spinning 90s house. None of the raves will let you dance to jungle. Even hip-hop is basically absent. High-energy EDM gushes out of every speaker, and since every track sounds essentially the same they all meld into one thumping neon flood washing across the entire desert. But it really does look amazing.

This was an interesting place to not be on drugs. I’d come out with a backpack full of Pacificos no one else wanted; the BrainFish were mostly on a highly engineered cocktail of substances I’d never even heard of. Somehow Alan and Pollock were managing to have an energetic but entirely lucid conversation about horror fiction as a site of the critique of capitalism despite being on the kind of dose of MDMA that used to have me jabbering from the ceiling at house parties. It’s all about balancing your uppers and your downers: it helps if you have some wearable tech to monitor your body fat percentage, remember some substances are hydrophilic and others are lipophilic… My own drug-taking career had come to an abrupt stop seven years ago. But the lights were clearly demanding a chemical accompaniment, and the Man Burn was the very next night, and the vape’s comments made me feel like I had something to prove.

So the next evening, when the drugs were being handed out, I decided to take the plunge. I didn’t recognise any of the substances on offer, but when Bill offered me a little wrap of neutral-grey powder, I swallowed it. He said it would give me a purely sensory experience. Whatever mild Bill was taking, I thought, it couldn’t be too bad. Alan responded to this information with a gulp and a protracted silence. You are going to have an interesting experience, he said eventually. You will have something to write about. He considered this for a moment. If you still have a mind afterwards, he said. It transpired that what Bill had been handing out was 3-azabicycloheptyl phenylglycolate, also known as Substance Nightmare-86, which is a deliriant. The US Army used to manufacture vats of the stuff; they’d used it as a chemical weapon in Korea. It’s fine, said Alan. Don’t worry about it. It takes three hours to kick in, and then the delirium only lasts—he looked me up and down—maybe eight hours for you, so you can go loopy for a bit, we’ll put you to bed, if you manage to sleep you’ll have some freaky dreams, that’s it. Enjoy it. You’ll have an interesting time.

So I went with the BrainFish to watch the Burning Man burn. I’d been promised one of the most impressive pyrotechnic displays I’d ever seen, and it was: two hundred thousand dollars of fireworks in roughly fifteen minutes. There were caches of explosives packed into the Man, so as the wooden frame was consumed by the flames it set off periodic explosions. It feels good to look at fire. Maybe this was the origin of human society: before we used it to cook our food or clear the undergrowth, before fire was a technology, our half-ape ancestors would silently congregate to squat around a burning bush, fascinated, not yet needing anything from any of the other dark shapes around them, but together. I know it’s the reason we can’t stop looking at our phones. That’s what sustains the whole stupid tech industry, the fact that a glowing screen looks a little like a glowing fire, and it’s good to look at fire. The only thing in the external world that resembles the subjective experience of having a mind.

The fact that I was having this sort of thought should have tipped me off that some internal fireworks were on their way, but I really thought I was completely fine. Once the flames started to die down just a little people began stripping off their clothes and pelting to the fire to dance naked around it, and in my new spirit of openness and acceptance and saying yes to things, I decided to join them. Given the sheer number of people involved, the dance was really more of a shuffle. Hopping over the ember-hot sands, heat from the still-towering fire gently cooking my testicles, as the great circling crowd made its gently jostling widdershins around the biggest bonfire in the world. Strange, I thought: we should be going the other way, deosil, unless there’s something sinister about this ritual. I stopped in my tracks and turned around, facefirst into the great blobbing mass of firelit titflesh. We’re going the wrong way, I shouted. We need to go the other way. At this point things started happening that I can’t really describe without some derangement of the authorial voice. Deliriants work by depressing context: you start to forget where you are, who you are, who the people around you are, or even what it means for something to be yourself, or another person, or a fire, or the ground. In a way, you see the world exactly as it is. I had just been wrenched into existence between a vast lightroaring pain scalding one side and the cold empty night, and all the while flesh stumbleshoving against me, new entities bubbling out of the plasm, tearing faces out of bellies and cunts, laughing, accusing me in words made from the flickering shadow of a man’s cock against his thighs, all motion, all going the wrong way. I was falling into a purely phenomenological abyss. The only thing I still knew about anything was that it was wrong, the wrong way, everything was going backwards and loosing evil into the world. I think at this point I must have started shoving the other people circling the fire, because now the livid tissue was fanged and furious, and the black and the bright were wheeling, leaving long wormlike trails. I span for a thousand years through the air before landing facefirst in the dust.

Naked and gibbering, into the desert. Tonight the city was black, shadowy lattices, the universe growing talons at me in the dark. I was being hunted by geometry. By whatever lived behind the thin foil of the sky. Chatter of tiny flakes of dust, all narrating my own internal experience to me in the language of rustlings. He’s looking behind himself, they said, he’s looking behind. I wasn’t looking behind myself, but then I was. There, huge on the horizon, bigger and brighter than any sun, the true mythic core of reality, a human figure made of flames. The sacrifice that opens a hole in the world. I understood nothing. It meant nothing at all.

I don’t know if I enjoyed it, exactly, but in the end I don’t regret going to Burning Man. I think it taught me a lot. I’m much happier now than I was.

One of the stereotypes about Silicon Valley that people like me, humanists, book people, love to console ourselves with is the idea that it’s populated entirely by utilitarian drones, who only care about lifeless things like productivity and efficiency and increasing their ARR. They live in homes with no art on the walls. All their clothes are black or grey. They eat protein paste and supplements for dinner. Meanwhile, we flatter ourselves with the notion we’re the only ones who really care about the higher things, beauty and meaning and so on; that we’re fighting against human paperclip maximisers, willing to indifferently scrub out everything important in their quest to totally optimise the world. The reality is much, much worse. These people are deeply spiritual. They are obsessed with meaning.

What I learned is that tech bros care about everything. They want to foster real, profound human connections. They want to form deep, nourishing, authentic communities. They want to plumb their own consciousness through every spiritual or pharmacological avenue there is. An intense fascination with the idea of myth and ritual, the acts and archetypes that draw people together. Storytelling, life as a narrative art. Egregores. Tulpas. They are constantly inventing new religions. Searching for a mission, some purpose, to give structure to their lives. All their friendships need to have an explicit purpose. Their job at a B2B SaaS startup isn’t about exchanging labour for money; they really do expect it to be deeply imbued with significance.

The problem, of course, is that everything these people actually do is totally contrary to everything they want. The world they’ve built is one in which school playgrounds are eerily silent, children scattered like dead flies on the tarmac, staring blankly at their phones. You can order a person off an app to drive you around, or bring you pizza, or clean your house, or fuck you, and once it’s done you give them a rating and never encounter them again. But tech people are good at building things. Alongside the world we all inhabit, they’ve created a synthetic, overengineered version of the one we’ve lost. It’s in the Bay Area cults and the polyamorous cuddle puddles, house parties where everyone has to wear a name tag, all the bizarre attempts to reverse-engineer a normal social life, but most of all it’s in Burning Man. They reached into the storehouse of stock cultural tropes and brought out a big human effigy to set on fire. They may as well have attached a sign to the thing saying HERE’S THE GENERIC UNIFYING ECSTATIC RITUAL YOU ORDERED. A ritual that exists for the sake of being a ritual. Which means it doesn’t really mean anything whatsoever.

When my flight landed at Heathrow I could have kissed the runway. Happier than I could have ever believed to return to my plain little life, to be myself and no one else. Strange how unappealing I find the idea of meditating my way into artificial bliss. If the Burners really just want meaning and community, they could have it. You don’t need to build a temporary utopia in the desert. You don’t need soul connections on the astral plane. You don’t need to radically reshape the forms of human life. All you need to do is leave San Francisco and move to London. Accept one of our piddling British salaries. Meet a few friends at the pub, sink five pints for no reason other than that it’s Thursday. Support a football team if you want. Walk along the Regent’s Canal with your girlfriend on an overcast afternoon. A world of ordinary fulfilment is waiting. It’s dotted with miseries too, things you can’t see across the roofline without a little pit opening up in your stomach. But even that doesn’t frighten me so much any more. It’s not so bad.

Reviewed:
One Battle After Another (film, Paul Thomas Anderson, 2025)
Eddington (film, Ari Aster, 2025)
Your Party (debacle, Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, 2025)
Zack Polanski (leader of the Green Party, Philip and Ava Paulden, 1982)
No Kings; Gaza solidarity (protest movements, the egregore, 2023-5)
The left (ordinal direction, urbilaterian organism, ~555,000,000 BC)
The present (moment, the past, now)

Lately I’ve been trying to work out exactly how long I’ve been living in the Kingdom of Soissons.

The Kingdom of Soissons was not actually a kingdom, but by the time the smoke cleared everyone had already forgotten any other name for a group of people living together under common laws. The world was drawn in thicker lines now. Kings and subjects, heroes and feuds. What we know is that some time around 460 AD, a Roman aristocrat called Aegidius was appointed as magister militum per Gallias or commander of the legions in Gaul. This was not such a great post. Ten years earlier the province had been burst open by Attila and his Huns; now little Germanic kingdoms were wriggling around in the wound, sometimes nominally under Roman authority, sometimes fighting the Empire, sometimes fighting each other. Shortly afterwards the emperor who’d given Aegidius his post was deposed and assassinated by his magister militum in Italy. There were a few more emperors after that, little flickering nonentities like Olybrius and Glycerius, before the whole sad charade was wrapped up for good. In its place there was now something called the Kingdom of Italy, which was ruled by a man called Odoacer who was probably a Goth but maybe a Hun or possibly some kind of Turk. Beyond the Alps there were more barbarian kingdoms: the Burgundians, the Alemani, the Rugii. But in a distant swathe of what’s now northern France, from Nantes to Reims and the Loire to the Somme, Aegidius still held his post, governing the last province of an empire that no longer existed.

It lasted ten years. Not such a short time. One fiftieth the lifespan of the entire empire. Long enough to live in. Long enough for people to meet and marry and have children, and raise them in a world where Romanitas still held. I imagine that life in Soissons was dominated by a kind of eerie calm. People playing dress-up, dressing up as themselves. Pretending the old world was still there, while heretics and idol-worshipping pagans massed on the borders. It could have held out longer. The Kingdom of Soissons was large, bigger than any of its barbarian neighbours. Its lands were fertile and well-watered. It was governed under a Roman bureaucracy, which was vastly more efficient than the spoils-sharing systems that surrounded it. It had the benefits of a thousand years of literacy and civilisation. But none of that mattered. Either history is on your side or it isn’t, and they could only hold out against history for so long.

Ten years after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, an idol-worshipping pagan called Hlodowig tore through the Roman armies at Soissons, destroyed the last Roman province in the West, and set up his own kingdom in the ruins. (We’re not even certain that Soissons was the administrative centre of the state; it’s just named after the battle in which it ended.) Aegidius might have thought he was preserving Roman civilisation from the end of the world, but whatever it is that rules history, God or Geist, had other plans. Twenty-two years after the Battle of Soissons, Hlodowig converted to Nicene Christianity. You might know him as Clovis I, King of the Franks. Three hundred years later, his successor Charlemagne would go to Rome, where Pope Leo III put a crown on his head and declared him Roman Emperor. In the end it wasn’t Soissons that inherited the old world, but the people that destroyed it.

There are Kingdoms of Soissons everywhere, things that have outlived themselves but keep limping on. Marriages: sometimes a couple will go to northern France for their honeymoon and never really leave, slogging through decade after loveless decade in grey Soissons, both fully aware that the thing has been over for a very long time, but still mysteriously unwilling to disengage. There’s still a Blockbuster Video in Bend, Oregon. You can still go to Kmart in Guam. Dutch tourists keep crowding the Camden High Street, even though there’s nothing there any more except keychain shops and coffee chains. If you still care even slightly about the fate of the literary novel in an age of screen-swiping imbeciles, you are, like me, a citizen of Soissons.

Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland is set in the Kingdom of Soissons. It’s 1984, the year of Reagan’s re-election, sixteen years since the radical counterculture of the 1960s reached its climax and started to ebb away. All the radicals and revolutionaries are addicted to weed or TV now, living in the city of Vineland, a sanctuary for washed-up hippies where they can peacefully moulder away as the world around them grows plastic and cruel. ‘Dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world.’ There’s the same sense in Inherent Vice. ‘At every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back east, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear.’ There was a beautiful moment when we might have been ruled by something other than greed and fear, but it’s gone. The best you can do is huddle in its wreckage.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, which is loosely based on Vineland, is also set in the Kingdom of Soissons. This time it’s the present. And we do seem to be in a repeat of the 1980s, another era of reactionary retrenchment. If anything, it’s worse. Things are bad out there. The plump, soft, rosy-cheeked boys who staff for mainstream Republican politicians don’t even read Bronze Age Mindset any more, they just chortle away at Twitter accounts that post the words total nigger death over and over again. This is normal now. State policy is informed by a kitchen cabinet of anime-watching paedophiles. Twelve-year-old kids are self-identifying as incels. Their only dreams for the future are to have eight hundred thousand dollars a year, the ugliest Miami apartment imaginable, and some kind of racial holocaust. No one can make eye contact any more. It’s getting bad.

And the film is a good image of this present, spookily good. The bulk of the story is about a military unit that invades the small Californian town of Baktan Cross, rounding up its population of druggies and migrants. This takes place so its commander can join a society of mawkish milkdrinkers called the Christmas Adventurers Club. This was filmed in early 2024, before the last US election, the accompanying vibe shift, the ICE goons unleashed on major American cities to conduct mass kidnap operations and fatly roll tear gas canisters at anyone who frowned at them on the street. But the images are exactly the same. This shouldn’t be surprising. For all the noise and spectacle of Trump’s immigration raids, he’s actually deported people at a substantially lower rate than either Obama or Biden. The noise and spectacle is the point, though; it’s all just grievance and revenge, making your enemies feel terror, acting out a theatre of terror on the streets of Chicago and LA, to be consumed in sixty-second increments by the Twitter-maddened base. One Battle After Another is not an image that pre-emptied reality; Paul Thomas Anderson and Donald Trump are both great American artists with a deep instinct for the swirling content of their country’s id, and they both happened to land on the same scene.

Where I think the film stumbles is in its representation of the left. The real reason the soldiers are in Baktan Cross is to find a sixteen-year-old girl, who lives with her paranoid, addled father in a hideout in the woods. He’s a former revolutionary; he and the girl’s mother once belonged to an underground group called the French 75. But she was arrested after a bank robbery that went wrong, and gave up the rest of the group; now they’re all either dead or in hiding, and he’s reduced to rambling half-remembered Howard Zinn material to his daughter’s history teacher. It’s easy to sympathetically portray a burned-out former revolutionary. We’re all living in the wreckage of what we wanted to be when we were younger. Failure is relatable; it makes audiences feel seen. But what failure are we even talking about here?

In the film’s prologue, set sixteen years before the main story, we get to see the French 75 in their prime. Attacking military bases, robbing banks, putting bombs in courthouses, all leather jackets and Afros and carbines. If One Battle After Another is set in the present day—and from the iPhones it seems to be—then the revolutionary prologue would have to take in the year 2009. I remember 2009. The closest thing we had to a revolutionary black underground that year was when Barack Obama invited Henry Louis Gates for an awkward beer in the White House. All the stuff we see in the film is 60s shit. It really did happen, but not recently; we’re about as far away from the Black Panthers as they were from the reign of Queen Victoria. The difference between One Battle After Another and Vineland is that One Battle is set in a post-revolutionary stupor without any actual revolutionary period preceding it. The last time the radical left was ascendant, leftist radicals weren’t bombing courthouses. They were trying to get a food writer fired for culturally appropriating the chickpea.

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Numb at the Lodge is three years old tomorrow. This marks the end of its terrible twos, and if I’m honest, the last twelve months have not been particularly easy. In my first year on Substack, from September 2022 to 2023, I wrote forty-five posts, totalling just over 195,000 words. This is, when you think about it, quite a lot. About one Moby Dick’s worth. An average of 4,300 words, delivered practically every week. I think I was very puppyishly enthusiastic back then. I was just getting into something. Running around, tail wagging, mangling my new toy between my teeth. In my second year on Substack I calmed down a bit. For 2023-24 I produced thirty posts, with a word count just north of 150,000. This is significantly less, but still a fundamentally respectable quantity of text. If you put it in a book, it’d still be longer than Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Posts were longer, more deliberate, averaging five thousand words each. This year, meanwhile, if we exclude my India trip (which barely anyone read), I have produced a very measly seventeen posts, for a grand total of just under 83,000 words, which is about the same length as one of those drippy paperbacks you people are always buying in train stations. The average length is inching down again, even if the trend is occasionally broken by the odd 12,000-word monstrosity. Most alarmingly, this appears to have been a very popular decision.

Of my top ten most-read pieces on this site, six were published in the last year. Between them, those meagre seventeen posts have racked up well over two million views. (2023-24’s efforts, meanwhile, have only generated a miserable 1,085,059 hits, and that’s including an entire extra year of people rummaging through the archives.) Given that my intent here is always to annoy and frustrate my readership, this is a significant failure on my part. My top three most-read pieces this year were, respectively, a kneejerk political take published the day after the 2024 US election, a deep dive on a reality TV show, and a polemic in which I made fun of a bunch of online nerds. Not good! Real bottom-of-the-barrel stuff! If present trends continue, by this time next year I’ll be releasing little Rupi Kaur-style aphorisms about the beauty of kindness to massive, widespread acclaim. Something has clearly gone very wrong.

Last September, I made a promise: that no more than one third of the written material I’d produce here in the next year would consist of a take—that is, a straightforward argument proposing that something is either good or bad. I also promised that ‘another third of my pieces will, in some way, annoyingly complicate the givens of authorship, genre, or form.’ Given the general state of this publication, I fully expected to discover that I’ve broken both of these promises. But actually, I haven’t. On the latter front, in particular, I’ve made some very good progress. Instead of simply saying what I think, or even saying things I don’t really think at all but which might be fun to argue anyway, I’ve been slowly ratcheting up the proportion of politics or culture critique essays that take the form of a hostage situation, or a roundtable in a hot air balloon, or a zombie monologue. Including the India series, this year I have produced thirteen pieces of straightforward essayistic writing. Three posts were straightforward pieces of fiction. That leaves ten that substantially mixed elements of the two, or were otherwise obnoxious about form, which is comfortably more than a third. I also really didn’t do too badly in the takes department. This year’s culprits are the following:

• British colonialism in India was bad, but in a different way to the way a lot of people seem to think it was bad

• Partition was bad, the resulting states of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are all also bad

• Kamala Harris is bad, the Democratic Party is bad, liberals are bad, Donald Trump is bad, conservatives are bad

• Douglas Murray is bad, Douglas Murray’s book is bad, Israel’s conduct in Gaza constitutes genocide and is bad

• English nativism and anti-migrant sentiment is bad, large-scale migration is also bad, but in a different way to the way a lot of people seem to think it’s bad

• Rationalism is bad, but because I like it when things are bad, actually it’s good

Keeping it to six is pretty good going, all things considered, especially when you take into account the last twelve months of political history. The takes were, as usual, more popular; the median take had three thousand more readers than the median annoying genre-bending thing, and nearly five thousand more than the average piece of straightforward fiction, which remains the least popular thing anyone can write on this platform. But given the numbers involved, these gaps are not particularly significant. Whatever’s gone wrong here, I can’t play my usual trick and blame you, the readers, for incentivising me to churn out a constant stream of overheated political bullshit. The problem is somewhere else.

What I’ve been thinking about, as the end of my third year here looms, is everything I didn’t write. A lot of people use this kind of year-end round-up post to vaguely self-congratulate for producing such acceptable material. Check out all my favourite pieces, just in case you missed them! But in a way, I think the real measure of a writer is in the stuff they abandoned, or could never even begin. Maybe this is just my narcissism. In The Secret Miracle, the greatest story ever written about the unwritten, Borges describes his Jaromir Hladik: ‘Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measured him by what he envisaged or planned.’ But I do think there’s something worth exploring in the process of failure, giving up on things, or never even starting them in the first place. The ideas that just sort of hang around like an ex at a wedding, wallowing in what, realistically speaking, could never have been. Here, in no particular order, are some of the posts that were not published in Numb at the Lodge this year:

• Why I am a Zizian

• Possibly related, a rabbit-hole investigation into a mysterious murder cult founded by the niche online writer Sam Kriss.

• An essay on television as a fundamentally vacuous, time-wasting medium, and therefore the only art form that comes close to being able to represent the essential nothingness behind all phenomenal things, with reference to Seinfeld and Samuel Beckett’s television plays, which I intended to write around the Severance season two finale but never managed to actually get out.

• An open letter against open letters. I didn’t write much of the letter itself, but I did come up with a really long list of fictional signatories, including Bill Suchenfuchs (Defence consultant), Strenuous Abongo (MP for Wetton Nowhere), Geraldine Granule (Lightly dusted), Jean Marlunglunn (Director of Operations, National Association of Droolers and People with Unsettlingly Wet Lips), Tariq al-Alallal (Professor of Lateness Studies, Fran's College London), Gar Lindeed (Wandering Editor, Icky Yum! Magazine), Hannah Hanning-Harannah Herringbone (Deacon, St-Martin-In-The-Bushes), Pookles (‘It’-rodent), Umbatu Dzorganjanzh (Milkdrinker), Heinrich Himmler (No relation), Sol (G-type main sequence star), William de Wasps (Shadowy financier), Eighmeighleagh Turdlynn (Political prisoner), etc, etc. I have more than a hundred of these. You cannot even imagine how much time I spent coming up with them.

• A satirical short story about crypto, set in a future in which literally everything that happens is authenticated on the blockchain so you can buy and sell it on various unregulated markets. The story starts with you waking up in the morning, which is recorded by your smart watch and automatically issued as a run of 100,000 coins; your boss immediately buys almost all of them but your mother, who’s trying to be nice, offers $10 for one, which means your boss suddenly has a market cap of $1m; he sells then all and the price instantly crashes. Anything that people pay even the slightest bit of attention to instantly turns into a speculative bubble; every time an interesting-looking bird lands on a tree branch someone gets massively rich and a hundred other people lose their life savings. I won’t spoil the ending but the gimmick with this story was going to be that I’d mint it as a memecoin on Solana and at various points in the narrative you’d be invited to buy or sell depending on how much you were enjoying it so far. Could have made me a fortune.

• A piece on why the Odyssey is inherently unfilmable. (It’s the gods, and in particular their bizarre habit of taking on the form of ordinary humans and then doing exactly what those humans were already going to do. The characters in the Odyssey live in a paranoid nightmare-world in which any of your friends might, at any moment, suddenly turn into a bird and fly away, revealing that they were actually a god in disguise. Every supernatural element in the Odyssey is of this type, but all cinema can show us is men in plasticky golden armour or CGI monsters. It is not a medium capable of representing the gods.)

• A sort of personal essay about our first family holiday since my mother died earlier this year, and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which I reread in a strange kind of preparation for the event and which affected me quite a lot, but also about Dante, since the holiday ended up being in Tuscany, and how his inferno and his paradise have the same shape, and whether he and Brandon Taylor are right about the city of Florence being essentially a small fragment of Hell.

• Just this week I started and then abandoned a piece on the Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk was a very strange figure. He lived in a smooth, bluesuited world, the American meadows of asphodel, a ghostly-greige and mediocre heaven. Everything is plentiful there and everyone is nice, but the ice that clunks out your in-door fridge unit ice machine is made from Lethe water. Meanwhile the main thing he talked about appears to have been black crime, ghettoes, social decay, absent fathers, drug-addled mothers, poverty and murder and filth. In the end, when he himself was murdered, it was by another person from his own pleasant suburban world. The bullet that killed him was inscribed with the words ‘Notices bulge OWO what’s this?’ Maybe there used to be a kind of dignity to political assassinations. The archduke in his regalia, the crazed conspirator with a pistol in his fist. A classy way to go out. Not any more! Anyway, I think my take was novel enough: I was going to use the furore surrounding the murder to argue that what we think of as political hypocrisy is actually the anthropologically well-attested practice of imitating the enemy. Hypocrisy is always the most infuriating thing about the other side; despite what everyone claims it’s not so bad when people don’t agree with you, but it does make you want to claw their eyes out when they won’t even agree with themselves. This is why so much political debate, especially in the hands of people like the late Charlie Kirk, ends up resolving into everyone just smugly identifying hypocrisies. In the current war in Gaza, both pro-Israel and pro-Palestine commentators have independently developed the idea that the other side’s accusations are all actually secret confessions. So Israel accuses Hamas of using Palestinians as human shields, while the IDF systematically forces kidnapped civilians to enter booby-trapped houses or tunnels ahead of their forces. Meanwhile Hamas accuses Israel of genocide, while fervently hoping for the extermination of the world’s Jews. But with Kirk’s murder, this stuff has become more overt than ever. After the killing, a clip started circulated of Charlie Kirk dismissing the idea of empathy. ‘I can’t stand the word empathy actually. I think empathy is a made-up New Age term that does a lot of damage.’ (For what it’s worth, his words were taken completely out of context. Kirk was actually propping up the totally bullshit and confected distinction between empathy and sympathy. (Whatever boring people try to tell you, the two words mean exactly the same thing. This is why there are so many vestigial phrases, like sympathetic pregnancy, or sympathetic magic, or the notion of a sympathetic reader, in which sympathy means exactly what’s supposedly meant by empathy. The idea that these are radically different ways of feeling was invented around the year 2005 by magazines with names like Psychology Wow! and you should not pay attention to it.)) The message is clear: this guy rejected the very notion of empathy, so fuck him, you now have permission to piss on his grave. Which makes a kind of sense, but this is, when you think about it, a totally insane way to think. If empathy really is the quality that distinguishes good people from barely-human pieces of shit whose deaths are cause for celebration, and you’ve decided not to have empathy here, then what does that make you? But the same structure crops up everywhere. The enemy sets the precedent that allows you to follow him in violating your own supposed beliefs. Look at Charlie Kirk himself: when he did a 180 on the Epstein case so he could continue defending a President who is, very plausibly, a child rapist, I’m sure he justified it by thinking: well, the left don’t have any scruples, so why should I? Five years after they were all making very principled objections to cancel culture, the American right are currently combing the internet for insufficiently respectful posts about the newly canonised Saint Charlie. Phoning people’s bosses in spluttering outrage. Of course they believe in free speech, but the speech of the intolerant left is hateful, violent: it must be stamped out. This is, I think, not that different from phenomena like the voodoo doll: in many cultures across the world, the most basic way of doing magical violence to someone is to make an image of them and then destroy it. You can see a similar principle in stuff like the Hauka, an ecstatic movement that spread among Songhai people in French West Africa in the early 1920s. Members would claim to be possessed by the spirits of colonial administrators; they went about wearing pith helmets and imitations of European clothes. When they vomited, it was with black ink, the magic gloop of bureaucracy. Eventually the District Commissioner of Niamey, one Major Horace Crocicchia, had the Hauka cultists rounded up and jailed: a show of force so decisive that they all immediately became possessed by the powerful spirit of Crocicchia himself, and used his strong magical powers to collectively escape from prison. Meanwhile New Guinean warriors would ritually adopt the dress and ornamentation of the enemy tribe before a raid. There’s also that line from Dialectic of Enlightenment I’m constantly quoting, about how antisemites always unconsciously imitate their stereotype of the Jew. ‘The argumentative jerking of the hands, the singing tone of voice, and the nose, that physiognomic principium individuationis, which writes the individual’s peculiarity on his face.’ My fundamental point was going to be that while the entire field of social psychology assumes that for people to enact deadly violence on each other, they first have to seize on real or imagined differences—construct an outgroup, make that outgroup as unfathomably different to themselves as possible—in fact, the origin of violence is that we’re all exactly the same. There is no such thing as political polarisation; mimesis and convergence reign. (Just look at the assassin: people are still arguing over whether he was a sissified antifa supersoldier or a stochastic groyper, as if it even remotely matters: he was what all these killers are, which is a young man, smart but with diminishing prospects, who had spent essentially every moment of his brief life on the computer. These people might think they’re motivated by a political ideology, but neither the extremely online right nor the extremely online left have anything to do with the ordinary political questions of the distribution of social goods or the organisation of power. At root, their content is all the same: it’s about imagining a world in which you don’t have to be on the computer all the time, but insisting that before we can get there, millions of people will have to die.) In the event, it took me several days to force out the first few hundred words of this piece. Throughout the whole ordeal I felt vaguely disgusted with myself, for reasons I can’t quite explain. It was very easy not to write the rest, and the constant soft drizzle of other people’s reasonable and insightful takes on the shooting made it even easier. Still, there was one line that almost justified the whole project, in which I described Charlie Kirk’s hometown as being located somewhere in ‘the spreadsheet of green suburbs scrolling endlessly out of Chicago.’ Ah well.

• A piece about Superman, which I’m not going to talk about too much just in case I decide to pick it up again, so I can publish roughly a year after everyone’s stopped talking about the film.

• The medieval-style allegory I promised you last time, which was going to be about AI boyfriends.

• A response to the idea that I’m part of or even one of the leaders of something called the ‘New Romanticism,’ in which I tetchily explain that Romanticism is fundamentally about defending the sovereignty of the inward, subjective, passionate world against the forces of brute objectivity, which explains why all subjectivist movements end up having to refer to a bunch of eighteenth-century Germans who couldn’t stop talking about Shakespeare and whose battle with the rationalism of the philosophes we’re apparently doomed to repeat in cycles forever, because before the full instrumentalisation of the world by enlightenment in the late seventeenth century the organic unity of the subjective and objective worlds hadn’t yet broken apart, as you can see in stuff like the tripartite spiritus of Marsilio Ficino, who argued that the emotions were not opposed to objectivity but were part of a mediating pneumatic system that bridges the divide between mind and body by translating physical sense-impressions into rational images, which actually very neatly anticipates the conclusion of modern science that cognition is necessarily freighted with emotive content (for instance, people with ventromedial prefrontal damage don’t just lose subjective feelings but also find it hard to carry out ordinary reasoning tasks), but if you look at our situation today I think it’s hard to argue that we simply have too much objectivity and we’re not paying enough attention to the subjective world, if anything there’s a weird inversion of Ficino’s system, where a highly objective global technical infrastructure essentially locks people in their own increasingly deranged subjectivity, so no I’m not a Romantic, not interested in grasping just one side of this contradiction, but even if I were playing for just one team here then frankly all you need to do is glance at my work to notice that I don’t really give much of a shit about interiority at all, what’s always fascinated me is the outward, even the nonhuman, the deserts, the deep seas, the sun, rather than plumbing the soul of some hysterical bourgeois I want to resolve the contradiction by finding an ensoulment in the animal and mineral world, really I’m an animist, basically a shaman when all’s said and done.

• The long-awaited next edition of Strange News from Another Star. (Nineteen months and counting since the last monthly edition.)

• What if I read and reviewed a bunch of romantasy books lol.

So why did I write the seventeen pieces I wrote, and not any of these? (Fine: eighteen pieces, since in summarising what I would have written about the Charlie Kirk assassination I appear to have actually just gone ahead and written it.) Hard to say. I came close to doing the Romanticism one quite a few times, but I think it felt too much like wading blind into a very particular discourse. I obviously couldn’t be bothered to read everyone else’s New Romanticism takes, which meant I might end up accidentally being in agreement with some of them. I wanted to write the piece because I objected to being identified as part of some kind of tendency; the last thing I wanted was to find out that I actually was. Some of the unwritten pieces are plainly better than the things I did actually write, or at least they are currently; that might have changed if I’d muddied them with clumsy actuality. But the Odyssey one would have been good. The Dante one too, if unfocused. They were probably never getting written, though. For someone who makes such a big deal about all the books I read it’s weirdly rare for me to write anything that’s just straightforwardly about literature; I usually discuss less interesting things and then ostentatiously drop in a few literary references. I don’t know why. Every year as autumn draws in I’m reminded that I’ve always wanted to do something about literature as mechanism with reference to Kleist, Kafka, and Brambly Hedge. It’s never happening. Part of growing up is accepting what you are.

But the other question is why I have so many unwritten concepts this time round. Part of the reason for my depressed output might be that I went through a devastating family tragedy near the start of this year, and spent most of the last month on a big dumb journalistic excursion you’ll be hearing more about soon. But it’s not like holidays or personal unhappiness have ever really slowed me down before. Last year I also promised to ‘write more widely, for more outlets,’ and not fall into the trap of just bleating to my own audience on here. I’ve had a few pieces I’m reasonably proud of in a few other outlets, and there are a few more on their way shortly, but I’m plainly not anywhere near the prolific heights of, say, Ross Barkan, who manages to write three pieces a day each for New York Magazine, the New York Times, the New Statesman, and his own Substack, and all of them good. This is not for a lack of opportunity; at this point I’m constantly on the run from various editors at a whole host of genuinely interesting and worthwhile publications. (I’m sorry I haven’t replied to your email yet. I have no good excuse at all. I will get to it. It might take another year or two but I will.) It’s me.

To be honest, I think the real reason for all this is simply that I’ve become fat and lazy. The less I write, the more I’m read: more time to focus on my very gratifying but very ordinary personal life. I no longer need to be vicious. My life is not at stake every time I send a pitch. I might still have a trace of that dog in me, but its teeth are getting blunter by the day. Substack’s been good to me, I guess. And even if I’m managing to keep kneejerk political takes to a minimum, even if I’ve not suffered the same miserable fate as Matt Taibbi, it’s still become easy for me to simply perform a kind of studied eclecticism instead of really getting into something. America invented Europe in the fifth century AD: sure. The Trial is an ethnographically complete account of the Poro society of West Africa: why not. George HW Bush was an elf: you know and I know that I can do this stuff in my sleep. That’s what happens when you’re the best in the game. Issuing a piece of short fiction as a crypto token would have been something genuinely new, something I’ve never even tried to do before, and I didn’t do it. So in place of the usual promises—three ludibria, two philosophical dialogues, no political takes in months with 30 days, whatever—I’ll make just one. This year, whether here or elsewhere, I am going to attempt to do something totally different to anything I’ve ever tried to do before.

Luckily, there’s something you, the reader, can do to help me along here, which is to unsubscribe from Numb at the Lodge. In previous year-end roundups I’ve begged you not to subscribe, not to give me money, not to save 17% with an annual subscription, not to really show your appreciation by shelling out for the stupid £600 per year founders’ tier that gives you no actual benefits. Do not make me just financially secure enough to lose whatever interesting qualities I once had. I kept telling you not to push the ‘subscribe’ button, the one just below this paragraph, but you didn’t listen, and now look where we are.

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So now I’m forced to step it up a notch. If you’re reading this in your email inbox, I want you to scroll all the way down to the bottom. There, underneath the copyright notice and Substack’s business address, there should be a little link that says ‘Unsubscribe.’ I want you to click it. If you’re reading on the app, you can tap the three dots in the upper right hand corner and select ‘Unsubscribe.’ If you have a paid subscription, I strongly encourage you to not just cancel it but to also dispute the charge with your credit card company. This will trap me in a nightmarish bureaucratic minefield that involves a whole bunch of horrible fees on my end; if enough of you do this it should hopefully enrage and impoverish me so much that my mojo starts rising again. Obviously you will have made an enemy for life, and I may avenge myself in bitter and terrible ways, but it might still be worth it for the sake of my craft.

But in fact, there’s some very slightly good news on that front. Readers who’ve been here for a while might remember that it was originally my pathetic ambition to have twelve thousand subscribers by the end of my first year on Substack, and you let me down. You didn’t share it enough. You didn’t forward the emails to enough of your little friends. The next year I thought it would be funny to pretend I wanted twenty-five thousand, and to act all huffy when twenty-five thousand subscribers failed to materialise, but to my surprise it actually happened. Since you people were apparently doubling every year like bacteria, I thought that in 2025 I’d aim for fifty. I’ll admit, I went a bit mad with ambition. I started plotting the exponential function on some old receipts. A hundred thousand subscribers by 2026, and if you follow the line I reach one billion subscribers just in time for Christmas 2039. Which is not that many people, not really. By then, one billion people will barely be a tenth of the world’s population. Just one tenth! Xi Jinping gets to have what are in effect one billion newsletter subscribers; why shouldn’t I? Have you ever read The Governance of China? It’s full of sentences like ‘In moving forwards it is important to adopt the right methods and discard the wrong methods.’ Even if my writing’s not as adventurous as it could be, it’s still a lot better than that. And I wasn’t even asking for everyone, or at least not at that point. But I’d worked out that by 2050, the number of people subscribed to Numb at the Lodge would hit 1.68 trillion, which is roughly fourteen times as many people as have ever lived in the entire history of the human species. This might sound like too many people, but I just assumed that my Substack stats page had just proven, using the power of mathematics, that at some point in the next twenty-five years humanity would make contact with a teeming alien civilisation, maybe galaxy-spanning, populated by creatures wonderful beyond anything in our power to imagine, and all of them deeply eager to find out more about Laurentius Clung.

That was the dream, at least. It’s gone now. Just look at the chart. This year, I discovered that my Substack subscriber count does not magically double every year, even when I fail to put any effort into the thing. Instead, I had one phase of slow but linear growth, which was replaced early last year by another phase in which growth was somewhat faster but still very much linear. I haven’t even cracked 45,000. Whatever feedback loop is making my readers more numerous and my writing more sparse, it has not yet self-reinforced into full exponential takeoff. This is good news for me; I still have the chance to make some actually decent art. But it’s very bad news for everyone else. Thanks to you, humanity will not get to talk to any of our wacky cousins among the stars. We will not be yukking it up with small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri over a round of pan-galactic gargle blasters. Our species will spend the rest of its cosmologically brief span chained to a rock, in a dark, empty, friendless universe. We can wonder what’s out there, but we all know it’s nothing. Just an endless rubble of dust and ice. Your fault.

I’m in the new issue of The Point magazine, alongside contributions by the likes of Mary Gaitskill, Jessa Crispin, and David Bromwich. My essay is on the attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in March 1981, and John Hinckley, the man who shot the President for reasons I think we still fail to properly understand today. The usual line is that he was trying to impress Jodie Foster, but it’s much bigger than that; in fact, I think what Hinckley did formed the model for the entire media and political environment we’re living in today. As I write, the future will probably remember John Hinckley among the inventors of whatever it is we currently call the internet. It’s called American Idols; go and read it. What follows is a kind of epilogue, or a footnote to the main essay. Because while it was John Hinckley that fired the gun at Reagan, there’s another man involved whose relation to the whole affair is much more mysterious: Reagan’s then-Vice President, George HW ‘Poppy’ Bush.

Bush was not in Washington when Reagan was shot; he was visiting Texas. In his absence, General Alexander Haig barged into a press conference and appeared to announce that he’d taken over the government. As I write in the essay, at the time ‘it might have looked a lot like the United States had finally gone through its first coup. Maybe Bush was being held in an underground cell in Texas; maybe he was in on it. He had some creepy connection to the man who’d just taken down Reagan. The shooter’s father was a family friend. They had the same lawyer. Bush’s son Neil was supposed to be having dinner with Hinckley’s brother Scott the very next evening. It all stank of conspiracy.’ In the end, Bush arrived in Washington that evening, around the same time Reagan regained consciousness in hospital, and the normal course of government continued. There was no crisis after all.

But there’s a problem with this official story, which is that it doesn’t make sense.

According to the alleged timeline, at the precise moment when Reagan was shot Bush was on board Air Force Two, flying between Fort Worth, where he’d just been attending a luncheon with the Southwest Cattle Raisers Association, and Austin, where he was due to address the Texas State Legislature. After being told about the shooting, he cancelled the rest of the day’s engagements. Air Force Two touched down Austin for a record-breakingly fast refuel before speeding at full throttle immediately to DC, where it arrived nearly five hours later. United will get you from Austin to Washington in three hours fifteen. The numbers do not add up. There is a gap of close to ninety minutes in which the Vice President’s movements are almost entirely unknown.

Thanks to testimony from an anonymous retired agent, we now know that contrary to the official timeline, when Reagan was shot Bush was not actually in the air. He was still on the ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The Secret Service were frantically searching for him, with absolutely no success: somehow, the second most powerful person in the world had simply disappeared, as if he’d quietly sublimated into the air. He wasn’t seen again until he presented himself at the gates of Carswell AFB, behind the wheel of an unmarked Plymouth Reliant. He refused to tell anybody where he’d been, or how he’d got the car. (It was later taken to a military scrapyard and destroyed.)

One other thing. Bush’s first stop that day, before the cattle ranchers’ luncheon, was at the Texas Hotel in downtown Fort Worth. He was there to unveil a plaque, commemorating the fact that nearly twenty years ago, President John F Kennedy had spent his last night there before being assassinated.

You can only talk about Poppy Bush for so long before you have to start talking about the CIA. Officially, Bush was brought in as Director of Central Intelligence for just one year, January 1976 to 1977. In fact, he’d been CIA his entire life. He was CIA in 1963, when he just so happened to be in Dallas while Kennedy was being shot. He was CIA before that too. What you need to understand about Central Intelligence is that it makes the things happen that would have happened anyway. On the day that Poppy Bush slipped away from his Secret Service detail, there was also man in Indochina growing opium for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because it’s how he makes his money, but he did it because of them. Somewhere in Miami, there was a man smuggling small arms for the CIA. He would have done it anyway, because he wants revenge against the Communists, but he does it because of them. Somewhere in Vienna, there was a man who’d been assassinated by the CIA. He would have died anyway, because that’s the fate of every living thing, but he died because of them. The CIA does nothing, nothing at all. CIA is the name we give to inevitability itself. They killed Kennedy, but that’s not the real story. They also killed Lincoln and Caesar and your dog when you were four. CIA spins the wheels that power the Earth’s rotation in space. You can never know, when the leaves crinkle on the trees in autumn or when your parents tuck you into bed at night, whether this thing that was always going to happen happened simply by itself, or whether it’s the slow spinning hand of Central Intelligence, the hand that turns the weft of the world, that makes the winds blow and hangs a sunrise above the yellow fields of corn.

The Agency might have chosen Poppy ten thousand years before he was born, and they might have chosen you too. There is no beginning. But in the more prosaic sense, they got him at Yale. That was how it worked in those days. You’d be invited to your professor’s house for tea and sandwiches with a few other promising students. A modest, dignified house, Dutch Colonial style, full of books. While you’re there, in the conservatory, looking out at the pond in the garden and praising your hostess’s work with the flowerbeds, you’re approached by two men in suits with neat slicked-back hair. George, isn’t it? We’ve heard a lot about you. We hear you flew surveillance in the war, snapping Jap naval installations, kept everything hush-hush, excellent work. And your father tells us you’re doing very well here. Fraternity president, baseball captain. A very promising young fellow. Bonesman. Magog, eh? Well, boys will be boys. Say, have you picked a major? Economics you say. A very wise choice. Set a young man like yourself in good stead. Precisely what we would have suggested. One of them would offer you a cigarette, and then nod approvingly when you declined. You know, George, there’s someone you ought to meet. How about dinner Thursday?

So you put on your tux and drive down from Connecticut to a nice restaurant in the city, 61st Street, and over the roast beef and potatoes and starched white linen you talk to another Yale professor. He doesn’t treat you like a student; he wants to know what you think about things. Will Mao and his Reds cross the Yellow River? Might extra-sensory perception be worthy of scientific study? And ought we, d’you think, ought we try to improve the status of the Negroes? He listens to your answers, nodding. Well, he says at the end of the night, I think it’s clear you’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You should come and see me back in New Haven. And as he’s leaving, a final tossed-off thought: by the way, George, have you ever thought about getting into the oil business? You have? A capital idea. Precisely what I would have suggested. And then, just like that, you’re in.

More dinners. Interesting conversations with interesting people. The Agency likes interesting people. People who quip in Greek and Latin; pathici et cinaedi. A very neat, very buttoned-up group of probably latent homosexuals, but the way some of them talked, they could have been beatniks. Doper talk. They wanted to tell you about sunken cities, Lemuria and Mu. Tidal currents in outer space. The unknown race that built the Moon. But there were stranger folks and colder, glowering on the periphery of this little world. Poppy never saw them at the dinners, but in offices sometimes, or photographs. Mangy creatures with gunshot eyes. Maybe a village in the Ukraine had seen those eyes one cold day in ‘42, all those families marched to a riverbank and left facedown in the mud. Maybe a village in Guatemala would be seeing those eyes very soon.

But most of the Agency folks were actually pretty familiar. Yalies; he’d know them anywhere. It’s in the posture, the walk, the way you hold a martini glass. Yale University was founded in 1701 by Puritan settlers in Connecticut, then still a savage land of dark green forests, to provide a recruiting ground for CIA. To build a nation that might one day support CIA. Name from Iâl, a barony of Maelor in the scarred hills of Wales, where the wild hares might stand for a moment on two feet and sniff the air. Where the ancient eyes of a hare might see something moving in wisps on a hillside where there’s nothing else around.

Nobody ever told him straight out. But Poppy came to understand, over the course of all those interesting conversations, that this thing he called the United States of America was always, right from the very start, the long slow project of something else. A disguise sometimes worn by something else. A thin eggshell, hatching over the centuries into something else.

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I try not to get too meta in this space. Aside from my end-of-year posts, I don’t like to talk all that much about the general project of Numb at the Lodge, what it is I’m doing here and why; in general I think my work does fine just expressing itself without having a load of explanation slathered on top. Anyway, too much talking about the talking starts to feel like audience interaction, community-building, that sort of thing, which I’m deeply against for reasons I’ve gone into at tedious length before. I’m also against paying too much attention to the discourse, especially when it’s happening on Twitter, which is a Victorian freakshow you can’t enter without becoming one of the exhibits, owned by a man who thinks saying the word ‘meme’ is in itself funny. But sometimes, you have to make an exception.

My most recent essay here, ‘The law that can be named is not the true law,’ has now been read by more than 50,000 people. This is not all that much in the grand scheme of things—it’s still nowhere near my top ten, even on this platform—but it’s also obviously not bad. Unfortunately, some of these new readers seem to have been upset by some of the things I said. To be honest, I was worried about some blowback, but mostly because I reproduced (without actually saying) some words about Palestine Action that can, in my country, get you jailed for fourteen years. In the event, the only person who actually got upset about that stuff was poor slow Curtis Yarvin, who’s not been having a good year. But meanwhile the theme I introduced, of the difference between uttering and avowing a sequence of words, seems to have rubbed some people up the wrong way, because they’ve started making some very serious accusations. The last section of the essay described the trial of Laurentius Clung, a sixteenth-century theologian who thought God sends absolutely everyone to Hell, and who is the only person known to have hated absolutely everything. Apparently, I combined fiction and nonfiction without clearly signposting the transition. Which means that some of the things I said were lies.

This is what happened. A few days ago, my essay was posted on Twitter by someone called Nicholas Decker, who called it ‘the finest essay that I have read in years.’ Decker is probably best known for being visited by the Secret Service after writing an essay arguing that there is a threshold of repression beyond which organised political violence becomes necessary. (I don’t know exactly where I stand on this question, but having glanced at his other stuff I’m pretty sure I violently disagree with Decker on every major political issue. Still, I think his argument here is pretty clearly just a recapitulation of the founding ideology of the United States of America. Whether you think that matters at all is up to you.) Given his experience, I can understand why he’d be interested in some of the legal absurdities I talk about in the piece. But if you look at the replies and the quote tweets and other epitexts, you’ll see that a lot of the commenters didn’t agree.

According to these people, I’m basically a kind of conman, of the same order as the Montenegrin teenagers who churn out fictional news stories about how celebrities are either revealing the crypto trading secret that will make you a millionaire overnight, or having sex with children and then drinking their blood. I am cynically misleading people. I have poisoned the well of truth. I am mindlessly spewing out fact-free slop for clicks and profit. (Inventing early modern theology is obviously the quickest and cheapest way to get attention online.) One guy has repeatedly compared my alleged misdeeds to murder. Others have been saying things like ‘Anything that can be destroyed by the truth deserves to be.’ A few of them have resorted to asking AI if what I did was bad, and when the AI agreed that it was, they indignantly posted screenshots of the conversation. I have been called ‘morally miscalibrated,’ ‘morally repulsive,’ ‘sadistic,’ ‘operating in bad faith,’ a ‘bottom-feeder,’ a ‘grifter,’ a ‘malicious actor,’ both a ‘data hazard’ and an ‘infohazard,’ a ‘polluter of the commons,’ a ‘well spoken liar’ who will ‘convince a crowd to poison themselves more quickly than a medical expert can stop them,’ and someone who ‘sneaks in made-up stuff because he was (presumably) unable to find a real example.’ To be fair, a few of those are from the same person, who also appears to play Magic: The Gathering for a living. But still.

Even though this is all very funny, I suppose I ought to set the record straight. Even if I don’t usually like to break the fourth wall, I’ll do so briefly here, just to confirm that absolutely everything I publish is true. Laurentius Clung is a 100% real historical personage. He is not a metaphor, or my hyperbolic self-insert, or a device I use to extend an argument by illustrating important truths in a non-literal way; he was an actual theologian who lived and died in the sixteenth century. Some sceptics have said they started getting suspicious when they couldn’t find any other information about him online, but one of the nice things about the world is that large chunks of it are still not available online. The crow uttering its sharp call outside my window right now has no digital footprint; it still exists. Of the one hundred billion people that were ever born, very few can be confirmed with a Google search or a question to ChatGPT, but they really did live, just like you’re living now. Not to get all boomer on you, but there are such things as books. I first encountered Clung in Roland Bainton’s 1952 history The Reformation of the Sixteenth Century, where he gets two paragraphs in the chapter on Calvinism. Bainton’s book was a bestseller in its day, and while it’s now out of print you can still buy it on Amazon if you want. He’s also discussed in the second appendix to the expanded 1970 edition of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, which is very much still in print and also great; if you haven’t already read it you should do so immediately. (By the way, did you know that Cohn’s son Nik inspired Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Who’s Pinball Wizard? He also wrote the source material for Saturday Night Fever. This world is packed together more tightly than you think.) There’s substantially more on Clung in Blaire G Smellowicz’s Sodomites, Shepherds, and Fools: Minor Prophets of the Reformation, which is where I cribbed most of his more interesting quotes, and a very thorough but much less entertaining biography in Ander van der Gunk’s The Dutch in European Intellectual History, 1482-1648. (There’s also a complete scholarly edition of his pamphlets, letters, and diaries from Uitgeverij Verloren, but since it costs four hundred euros and I don’t read Dutch I haven’t been able to make use of it.)

While we’re at it, I may as well clear up any other lingering misunderstandings. If you were unsure, I can confirm that it’s also absolutely true that in the last season of Married at First Sight: Australia one of the contestants entered the Dreaming after slipping into the memories of his murderous ancestor, that I went to an ashram in the fictional Indian state of Parpakainilam after being arrested and jailed for the murder of the Maharashtra state politician Baba Siddique, that I have accurately quoted the Greek philosopher Scroto of Rhodes, that Santa Claus is a Kwakiutl cannibal-god, that I once went mad and started scrawling Aramaic incantations after discovering the Biblical name of Taylor Swift, that I encountered the Palaeolithic inhabitants of the Levant during a march for Gaza, that I found a wormhole between continents in Shanghai and the fox-spirits that control the Chinese housing market in Guangzhou, that the empire of Qin Shi Huang spread over three galaxies, that I had sex with half the Tory front benches after the 2023 Spectator summer party, that AI was preceded by the golem cacophony in early modern Europe, and that a reanimated BF Skinner is secretly operating the Dimes Square scene as his prototype for a society of total control.

I would never lie about any of this, and what makes this allegation particularly offensive is that if it were true, there would be no precedent for the crime, anywhere in English letters. Reputable essayists do not introduce fictional devices into their texts, and definitely not when those texts are published alongside serious and sincere approaches to history, politics, ethics, and personal experience and tragedy. When Charles Lamb attributed the invention of roast pork to a Chinese boy called Bo-bo who accidentally burned down his house, he was basing this on the best available scholarship of his time. Since Thomas de Quincey claims to have revealed the contents of a lecture to the Society of Connoisseurs in Murder, maybe we should start searching abandoned cellars for their secret meetings. If Marshall McLuhan briefly mentions the ‘new spaceships that are now designed to be edible’ for no obvious reason, it’s because he was aware of something that NASA still won’t reveal. A propositional statement is either literally true, clearly marked as fiction, or a waste of everyone’s time. The purpose of an essay is to efficiently deliver accurate propositions, and any other features are only justifiable if they help the propositions go down more easily. On this point everyone has always agreed.

Anyway, I think part of the problem here is that basically everyone lobbing these very serious accusations at me belongs to a subculture that calls itself rationalism. The mob even included Eliezer Yudkowsky, the founder and high priest of the sect. If you’re not aware of rationalism, in this context it has absolutely nothing to do with the rationalist philosophy of Descartes and Spinoza, in which all knowledge is deduced from eternal a priori truths; instead it’s actually a kind of empiricism, and it’s mostly about living in the Bay Area, writing things like ‘fark’ or ‘f@#k’ instead of ‘fuck,’ and having unappealing sex with your entire friend group. (The name is because these people think the history of philosophy is just a series of wrong ideas that have since been replaced by better ones, and instead of reading any of it you should just skip ahead to simulation theory, in the same way that physics students skip past phlogiston.) To be fair, rationalists seem to comprise a good chunk of Decker’s audience; almost everyone defending me was also a rationalist, including Scott Alexander, who’s sort of Yudkowsky’s St Paul the Apostle. But I don’t think this was just a selection effect. A lot of people read my stuff, but the only ones who freaked out about it to this degree were these guys. (Well, plus Yarvin, but he doesn’t really need a reason to say something stupid.) Rationalist ideology makes these freakouts inevitable: if Judaism begins with a taboo dividing the clean from the unclean, for rationalists it’s fact and fiction that must not be mixed. Which is why these people will either utterly despise my work, or be drawn to it with the same dark longing that draws a pious young nun to the Devil.

Rationalists have a notoriously hard time defining their ideology, but I can do it fine. Rationalism is the notion that the universe is a collection of true facts, but since the human brain is an instrument for detecting lions in the undergrowth, almost everyone is helplessly confused about the world, and if you want to believe as many true things and disbelieve as many false things as possible—and of course you do—you must use various special techniques to discipline your brain into functioning more like a computer. (In practice, these techniques mostly consist of calling your prejudices ‘Bayesian priors,’ but that’s not important right now.) I like some rationalists, and I’ve even written an entirely truthful piece for one of their publications, but my own perspective is different. I think the universe is not a collection of true facts; I think a good forty to fifty percent of it consists of lies, myths, ambiguities, ghosts, and chasms of meaning that are not ours to plumb. I think an accurate description of the universe will necessarily be shot through with lies, because everything that exists also partakes of unreality. And probably the best piece of evidence for my view is rationalism itself. Because in their attempts to clearly separate truth from error, they’ve ended up producing an ungodly colloid of the two that I could never even hope to imitate.

As everyone knows, the most important truth rationalists have uncovered with their superior powers of induction is that the robot uprising is coming. ChatGPT will shortly turn into a sphere of paperclips expanding through the galaxy at the speed of light. I think they’re wrong here, but it’s not impossible. What’s strange is what they’ve actually done with this belief. Rationalists don’t just think AI will kill us all; they’re significantly overrepresented among the people who are actually building AI. (Apparently there is no one working in an AI lab who doesn’t think their product might destroy the planet.) The CND is not enriching uranium; these guys are. The now-familiar AI chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, MechaHitler, etc—were first proposed in a 2021 paper by twenty-two researchers at Anthropic titled ‘A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment.’ The argument is, essentially, that since we’ll all die if we don’t work out how to imbue a hypothetical future AI with the right values, it would be a good idea to create an AI interface that would be used by lots of people now, while the technology is still in its infancy, to ‘red-team’ any potential issues and make sure any future AI is ‘helpful, honest, and harmless’—that is, unlikely to kill everyone and turn our bodies into paperclips.

In the years since, that alignment laboratory has indeed been used by a lot of people. You might have noticed some of the effects. I’ve talked about them enough times; in short: thanks to these generally helpful, honest, and harmless AI, everyone is now a helpless baby who can’t do anything and is incapable of love. One fun recent development is that the people who have been driven genuinely mad by exposure to the experiment now include Geoff Lewis, a prominent investor in OpenAI. Lewis has started recording bizarre speeches, clearly written by ChatGPT itself, about how he’s the primary target of a shadowy, murderous NGO that’s ‘inverting the signal’ to make other people think he’s gone insane.

These things have massively changed the world in many ways and none of them are good. The AI-driven economic boom we’re occasionally promised never seems to materialise; everyone around you just steadily gets more and more stupid and insane. It costs billions to keep these chatbots running. Why keep going with it? Because the AI that actually exists is not the thing, it’s just a simulation built to anticipate an entirely different set of threats posed by a hypothetical superintelligent robot that lives in the future. But according to some of these people, I’m a bad actor for mixing reality with fiction.

What makes this especially galling is that their entire movement is based on a piece of Harry Potter fanfic.

This fanfic is by Eliezer Yudkowsky, and it’s titled Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. HPMOR is over 660,000 words long, which is nearly as long as the first five books in the actual Harry Potter series. It is more than twice as long as Ulysses or Gravity’s Rainbow, longer than Les Misérables or War and Peace, and only very slightly shorter than Musil’s The Man Without Qualities. I have read it. I do not recommend the experience. Reading HPMOR gave me a sense of crushing second-hand despair that I’ve only previously experienced when finding out things about Chris-Chan. It really is that bad.

The text belongs to a particular sub-genre called self-insert fanfic, in which you rewrite an existing work with yourself as the protagonist. Usually, I assume, this is so you can describe yourself having sex with all the other characters. Here, the wish-fulfilment fantasy is much seedier. The main character of HPMOR is called Harry Potter, but—and the author has been very open about this—in fact he’s a stand-in for Eliezer Yudkowsky. The original character’s personality consists of a vague, milky goodness and bravery. This Harry, meanwhile, is fantastically annoying, and also a sociopath. He is constantly pointing out logical fallacies and namedropping scientific concepts. When he first witnesses magic in action, this is what he says: ‘You turned into a cat! A small cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling!’ (People who know more about physics than me tell me that while all the scientific concepts in the text exist, they seem to have been peppered in essentially at random.) He also, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, immediately starts using his knowledge of social psychology to blackmail and manipulate everyone he encounters, and belittles everyone he considers stupider than he is. I guess that’s just what incredibly smart people do. At one point, for absolutely no reason at all, he uses time travel to sadistically manipulate himself.

Throughout the story, whenever Harry encounters something that offends him, Yudkowsky describes him being overcome by a sudden cold fury, colder than Antarctica, colder than the depths of space, in which everything is seen with perfect icy clarity and every fibre in his body is primed to exercise his will. Every single time, he then proceeds to have what can only be described as a spluttering, spastic tantrum. In his first Potions lesson with Professor Snape (and I am not happy to be typing these words), Snape makes a few sarky comments, which prompts Harry to accuse him of being abusive, threaten to start a media campaign to have him fired, say things like ‘I decline to recognise your authority as a teacher and I will not serve any detention you give,’ physically threaten him, try to storm out through a locked door, and then hide in a cupboard. After a few of these displays, Harry quickly becomes the coolest kid at Hogwarts. All the other students, and the teachers too, are utterly awed by him. With his powers of knowing about social psychology and logical fallacies, he is something like a god. But everyone is also slightly scared of him. To be fair, some character development does take place: by the end, Harry has learned how to not be so frightening, and how to use his powers of effortless domination more strategically. There is a general failure of self-awareness here I have not seen outside Sonichu. It makes for genuinely harrowing reading.

Of course, a lot of amateur fiction does the same thing: you invent fictional people to fawn over you when real people fall short. What makes HPMOR unusual is that real fawners then followed. For a lot of rationalists, this book was their way into the subculture. I find it hard to believe that it was the ideas they found so enchanting, because there aren’t any, not really. At the beginning of the book, Yudkowsky lays out the stakes: using rationality, Bayesianism, and the scientific method, Harry is going to work out the fundamental principles underlying magic. This could have been a reasonably fun demonstration of how the intellect can uncover the secrets of reality, or whatever. But that would require some creativity, so after a few feints in that direction—there’s something about Atlantis, and the idea that ‘words and wand movements were just triggers, levers pulled on some hidden and more complex machine’—Yudkowsky abandons the entire thread for lots more intrigue, manipulation, tediously recurrent magical wargames, and a sort of History Boys-style erotic dalliance between Harry and Voldemort. The story is not a case study in how rationality will help you understand the world, it’s a case study in how rationality will give you power over other people. It might have been overtly signposted as fiction, with all the necessary content warnings in place. That doesn’t mean it’s not believed.

Despite being genuinely horrible, this story does have one important use: it makes sense out of the rationalist fixation on the danger of a superhuman AI. According to HPMOR, raw intelligence gives you direct power over other people; a recursively self-improving artificial general intelligence is just our name for the theoretical point where infinite intelligence transforms into infinite power. (In a sense, all forms of instrumental reason, since Francis Bacon in the sixteenth century, have been oriented around the AI singularity.) This is why rationalists think a sufficiently advanced computer will be able to persuade absolutely anyone to do anything it wants, extinguish humanity with a single command, or directly transform the physical universe through sheer processing power. As a corrective, consider the rationalists themselves. Despite their undeniably high IQ, knowing about social psychology and logical fallacies has so far failed to turn anyone in the movement, least of all Eliezer Yudkowsky, into an effortlessly manipulative Machiavellian mastermind. Instead, they mostly wonder why they have such a bad image problem.

I think the big nonexistent robot at the centre of the ideology explains a lot of other aspects of rationalism. The structural unreality that seeps into everything they believe. Or the fact that absolutely all of them are somehow utilitarians.

I’ve always found this strange. We’re supposedly dealing with a group of idiosyncratic weirdos, all of them trying to independently reconstruct the entirety of human knowledge from scratch. Their politics run all the way from the furthest fringes of the far right to the furthest fringes of the liberal centre. Most of them are atheists, but an appreciable portion are not. Meanwhile, formulating a coherent ethics is one of the most difficult problems that exists. You’d expect a lot of intellectual diversity here. But instead, they’re all utilitarians. Maybe utilitarianism is so obviously true that they all independently reached the same conclusion, but if that’s the case it’s strange that the consensus hasn’t spread to actual philosophers. (According to the 2020 PhilPapers survey, 21.4% of practicing academic philosophers are exclusive consequentialists of any stripe: slightly more than the 19.7% who are deontologists, but significantly outnumbered by the 25% who uphold virtue ethics.) More likely, they’re all utilitarians because they’re far more susceptible to groupthink, conformism, and cult dynamics than they think they are. But I think there’s another possibility: it’s because utilitarianism is a science-fiction morality for machines.

Everyone has their own favourite example of how utilitarianism can wildly contradict our moral intuitions. Mine is gladiatorial combat. Let’s say I kidnap you off the street, keep you captive in my basement, and then make you fight another random abductee to the death for my own sick amusement. This seems less than ideal, ethically speaking. Now let’s say I invite a few friends over, and we laugh and drink aperol spritzes and other nice summery cocktails while you desperately try to claw someone’s eyes out. This is, if anything, worse. Some forms of pleasure are bad. (Some forms of pain are good!) But now let’s say I film the whole thing and broadcast it online, and hundreds of thousands of people watch as you’re throttled to death, all of them deliriously masturbating. I think this would be a genuine moral catastrophe, but at this point the utilitarian starts perking up. Maybe things aren’t so terrible. What’s the exchange rate? How many orgasms balance out a violent death? Finally, we get to the point where huge public screens across the world are showing the light fade from your eyes. Billions watch in shuddering, sadistic glee. According to any sensible ethical system, we’ve entered the abyss. Our entire civilisation deserves to be destroyed. For the utilitarian, we have just performed the single most moral act in human history. In fact, we have an urgent ethical duty to do it again.

Naturally, utilitarians have developed various patches for the theory to get around problems like these. Rule utilitarianism, indirect utilitarianism, negative utilitarianism. Or sometimes they’ll just flatly point out that moral intuitions can be wrong; if they were infallible, we wouldn’t need moral philosophy to begin with. This stuff doesn’t scare them. What does scare them is a very particular scenario called the Repugnant Conclusion. The repugnant conclusion invites us to imagine two futures. Future A is a planet of ten million people living in joyful balance with nature, dancing in the woods, discussing Flaubert after dinner. All diseases have been wiped out; people happily accept death as the price of a beautiful life. Future B is a human factory farm of one hundred trillion people, stacked in wire cages that cover the entire surface of a dead Earth. Absolutely everyone is utterly miserable, but thanks to pharmaceuticals in the mossy water that drips from the ceiling of your cage, you are not quite actively suicidal. You might prefer to live in future A. But the repugnant conclusion is that future B is morally preferable, because it contains more overall happiness, even if each individual person only gets a fraction of it.

We’re here because, like most computational systems, utilitarianism has difficulty representing death. Since the dead don’t experience either pleasure or pain, on a straightforward reading of the theory painlessly murdering random people is potentially a morally neutral act. No one’s suffering, after all. This conflicts with our moral intuitions a little too much, so utilitarians decide that their real measure isn’t the pleasure experienced by actually existing people, but the total quantity of happiness in the universe. Having more people in the universe is better, because it makes this number go up, and since killing people limits the size of the number, in most cases you shouldn’t do it. Which is the point where the utilitarians leave the kingdom of ends, and set out on their journey towards the repugnant conclusion.

Maybe a utilitarian could object that we’re dealing with edge cases and hypothetical scenarios here, and it’s not fair to judge the whole philosophy on that basis. But utilitarianism is made of hypothetical examples; it’s all edge cases with no centre. Trolley problems, hive planets in the unimaginably far future, torturing one person to death to stop fifty squintillion others from getting that sensation where you think you’re about to sneeze but don’t actually sneeze. When it comes to the actual ethical quandaries faced by actual people in the actual world, utilitarianism either gives the wrong answer, or has nothing at all to say. Should you tell your wife about your night of regrettable drunken passion after the pencil-measuring conference in romantic Akron, Ohio, ‘the Paris on the Cuyahoga’? No, because it’ll upset her—but really you shouldn’t be concerned with any of this at all. Instead of being worried about your own marriage, which is a blip in the moral universe, you need to donate all your pencil-measuring money for mosquito nets to save African children (or, these days, some wild animal suffering project to save the mosquitoes). Your parents expect you to give your newborn son a bris, but you’re not sure you ought to. How do you measure your son’s bodily dignity against your duty to your parents, all previous generations, and the victims of the Holocaust? I don’t know if any ethical theory provides a clear answer, but for utilitarianism it’s a non-problem. Duty and dignity are not objects in the theory, and since the people who died in the Holocaust are no longer capable of experiencing pleasure or pain, they don’t count for anything either. And why are you so concerned about just the next generation? In the far future, your one trillion descendants are calling from an ice moon in the Triangulum galaxy, where all of them have a speck of dust in their eyes.

I think utilitarianism has this weird science-fictional aspect because it is ultimately not an ethics for actual human beings. From Bentham and Mill on, it’s always been a programme for the hypothetical hyperintelligent AI god that lives in the future. The moral subject it adresses always has two significant features that this notional computer possesses, but humans lack. The familiar little bundle of infinite knowledge and infinite power.

For utilitarians, the moral value of an action is determined by its effects: when we choose how to act we should choose the option that will lead to more positive consequences. In other words, we need to reach into the future and extract information that, in the present, does not exist. This is not something we can do. I have no way of knowing that the drowning child I pull out a river isn’t Baby Hitler 2. Until the computer-god comes, ethical behaviour means distorting the real world according to a speculative fiction. Some utilitarians sincerely want to exterminate all fish, since they live lives of suffering, and all predatory megafauna, since they cause suffering to other animals, as if they could have any earthly idea what the repercussions of this would be. They are already imagining themselves as an all-knowing computer, the one that can determine which desperate struggling little life has value, and which does not.

Infinite knowledge implies infinite power. You are always the person standing by the lever, and not one of the six people tied to the tracks. You are capable of creating various differently populated worlds. At a minimum, you are assumed to be in some kind of position of detached power relative to those around you, in which you can create certain outcomes for them. Sometimes this is true: a teacher in a classroom might use the utilitarian calculus and send out one disruptive child so the others can learn in peace. But for the most part, this is not how actual people live. We are not states determining policy, we are human beings stumbling through a dense thicket of ambiguous social relations, riven with love and duty, in which our capacity to act is limited. Utilitarianism is for something. But it’s not for us.

None of this should be confused for a critique of utilitarianism. I don’t hate this theory; in fact, I love it. In a certain sense, it’s plainly hideous: lifeless, brutal, reducing us all to preference maximisers, arrogant beyond belief, and utterly opposed to every principle of life and dignity. But it’s also beautiful. You take a simple idea—the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people—and keep running with it until the gap between the idea and an inevitably complex reality starts spawning monsters. I find it hard not to have a general contempt for the rule utilitarians and negative utilitarians and everyone else who tries to close the gap, make the idea stick closer to reality, at the cost of polluting its terrible simplicity. I’m very glad the world contains people like Matthew Adelstein, who will cheerfully endorse the repugnant conclusion and the torture-dust equilibrium along with every other insane artefact of this system, and tell you you’re wrong and anti-moral if you don’t agree. I don’t want these people to have power, and I would never want to believe in any of this stuff personally, but I think having a broad diversity of utterly insane ideas in common circulation is a good in and of itself.

The rationalists are wrong about many, many things, but it’s precisely in their wrongness that they express an important truth about the world: that large parts of it are made of something other than plain facts, and the more you insist on those facts the wronger you will be. I love them, in the same way I love the Flat Earthers and the people who think the entire Carolingian era was a hoax. They are, of course, highly influential in a few small but powerful milieux, and their madness is both an expression of and a motor for the general madness of the age. Unlike the ideas I spread about sixteenth-century heresies, some of their ideas are massively socially destructive. In their instrumental aspect, they are my enemies. But I still don’t want them to stop believing what they believe, or to start believing what I believe instead. I don’t even want them to stop accusing me of lying. I just want them to have a little perspective.

Look: I’ve managed to get through an entire essay on rationalism without mentioning Roko’s basilisk even once, and frankly I think I deserve a bit of credit for it. But did you know that some of these types have ended up independently reinventing the idea of Hell? Like the basilisk, quantum hell is based on the core rationalist doctrine that any exact copy of you, even if it’s simulated on a computer or in another universe, is you, and consciousness can happily skip between these copies. (They’d gladly step into Derek Parfit’s teletransporter, the one that scans your precise atomic makeup, beams the information to a nice beach resort somewhere, and then instantly incinerates you into a small pile of dust. If you hadn’t already noticed, they’re mad.) This implies quantum immortality: whenever you die, your consciousness switches over to an alternate universe in which you survived. This might have already happened millions of times, and it’ll keep happening literally forever. From your perspective, you keep improbably surviving your own death. (Maybe this is what happened to Vishwash Kumar Ramesh.) But because your survival becomes unlikelier and unlikelier with increasing years—as you age, your organs fail, the sun goes nova, the galaxies drift apart, etc—you will end up being shunted into some highly deformed and low-resolution universes. The final stage might be a tiny, stable pocket universe filled with a superheated quark-gluon plasma, which you would experience as eternal suffering in a lake of fire. This is the ultimate fate of every conscious entity after death. None will be saved.

Some rationalists have described the toll this possibility has taken on their mental heath. The long sleepless nights, quaking in holy terror. The way all earthly pleasures seem meaningless when you know what might be coming. The whole idea is nonsense, obviously, but I don’t bring it up to mock it. I love this mad fiction too, and all the counterintuitive ideas that interlock like tiny cogwheels to produce it. It’s just extremely strange that some of these same people are so upset about Laurentius Clung. Brother, you are Laurentius Clung.

Edit (29/07/25): This essay claims that absolutely all rationalists are utilitarians. This is untrue; according to the most recent LessWrong survey, only 64% are consequentialists, with 22% preferring a non-consequentialist ethics.

Last weekend, the British government proscribed a protest group called Palestine Action under the Terrorism Act, which means that they are now, legally speaking, terrorists. It’s against the law to be a member of Palestine Action, or to raise funds for Palestine Action, or to hold a meeting at which any members of Palestine Action will speak. But because British antiterror legislation is, as historians will one day put it, interesting, there are a few other provisions. It’s also illegal to express any kind of support for Palestine Action. It’s illegal to express an ‘opinion or belief’ that might cause other people to support Palestine Action. It’s illegal to wear or display a garment or item that might lead someone else to think you’re a member or supporter of Palestine Action, even if you aren’t. The relevant laws are freely available to read online. I have some questions.

Since they’re a terrorist group, it would obviously be completely illegal to say something like ‘I support Palestine Action,’ which is why I would never say anything of the sort. You can think whatever you want inside your own head, but if anyone ever asks what you think of Palestine Action, the only legal answer is that you’re against them. But other statements are hazier. It’s completely fine to criticise terrorism laws and enforcement in general: for instance, if you wanted to say ‘It’s funny how the police in this country seem to be totally powerless when it comes to actual crime, to the extent that you can show them exactly where your stolen phone’s been taken and they’ll do absolutely nothing to retrieve it, but as soon as someone puts up some terfy stickers, or writes some immoderate WhatsApp messages about their kids’ school, or breaks any of the other laws against saying the wrong kind of thing, suddenly there’s thirty bobbies and a TSG van on their doorstep,’ that would be legally protected speech. But what if someone said something like ‘Palestine Action aren’t actually in any meaningful sense a terrorist group and the proscription should be lifted’? Disagreeing with a specific proscription is tricky. It’s not the same as saying ‘I support Palestine Action;’ in fact, it would be possible to say it without having any positive feelings about Palestine Action whatsoever. Maybe you oppose everything about them, maybe you think they’re a bunch of loony lefties and antisemites and criminals to boot, but you don’t think it’s accurate to describe them as terrorists. At the same time, though, you’re still supporting them. You are on their side against their opponents, and so that statement is plausibly illegal, which is why I only brought it up as an example and definitely didn’t actually say it.

In other words, while it’s completely legal to argue that stuff like murder or littering should be decriminalised, in this case the law creates a kind of forbidden zone around itself. This law must not just be obeyed: it must also be unquestioned. And depending on how you structure your arguments, the number of things that can’t be said is potentially limitless. What if someone said this? ‘Palestine Action was proscribed after two members broke into RAF Brize Norton and sprayed red paint on two RAF planes, in protest against the British military’s role in what they regard as an ongoing genocide in Gaza. There have been legal precedents here: for instance, in 1999, three activists broke into a naval base in Scotland and damaged a maintenance barge for nuclear-armed submarines. They were charged with trespass and malicious mischief, not terrorism. The court ruled that any use of nuclear weapons would be illegal under international law, and the activists walked free. The same year two women painted the words ‘DEATH MACHINE’ on the HMS Vengeance; they were charged with criminal damage, not terrorism, and also found not guilty. In 2003, five activists protesting against the Iraq War broke into RAF Fairford and attacked planes and support vehicles. They were charged with criminal damage, not terrorism. Of the five, two were ultimately acquitted, two walked free with a conditional discharge, and one was given a £250 fine. Their defence team included an up-and-coming barrister named Keir Starmer.’

Everything in this purely illustrative passage is completely true, but it’s also exactly the kind of completely true information that might lead someone to believe that Palestine Action are part of a longstanding protest tradition, one that’s become an accepted part of this country’s political fabric, and not what they actually are, which is a terrorist group. As such, it could be illegal to say anything even vaguely resembling the passage above. Is the fact that Prime Minister Keir Starmer once defended the Fairford Five classified information? Of course not. But you can, potentially, go to jail for saying it. Precedent has shown that you can also be charged for saying the wrong thing when it’s part of an artistic performance—that is, if you’re a musician in character, or an annoyingly ironic essayist. The maximum sentence is fourteen years in jail. This is why, again, I would never actually make the statement above, and only include it as an example of the kind of thing our government has wisely chosen to make it illegal for people to say.

What makes things even more difficult is that Palestine Action does not exist. Unlike other terrorist groups—like, say, ISIS—they dissolved as soon as the proscription took effect. Nobody will ever be prosecuted for being a member of Palestine Action, because Palestine Action has no members. No one will get in trouble for funnelling money to Palestine Action, because there is nothing to receive it. But you will still be arrested if you go out in public and say ‘I support Palestine Action,’ even though those words don’t actually refer to anything at all. This is just a succession of meaningless sounds that summons policemen to take you away.

Antiterror law is weird. It always seems to encode some hard little paradox at its core. Some monstrosity that’s been secretly latent in the whole structure of legality, or a remnant from a much older stratum, a wilder, more mystical, less rational way of doing things. British antiterror law is bizarre, but despite their stronger attachment to the vague idea of free speech the Americans aren’t really much better. US intelligence agencies are allowed to operate under classified interpretations of legislation like the PATRIOT Act. There is the publicly available law, which contains provisions like ‘Section 1956(b) of title 18, United States Code, is amended—(1) by redesignating paragraphs (1) and (2) as subparagraphs (A) and (B), respectively, and moving the margins 2 ems to the right.’ This has its public meaning, which has to do with pedantically editing existing law. But it also has a secret, esoteric meaning known only to initiates, which could be based on numerology or deconstruction or the government equivalent of fan theory. That meaning could be anything at all. The margins they want to indent might be you. You will probably never know. Meanwhile, other laws are themselves secret. Every year, Congress passes an Intelligence Authorisation Act, a National Defence Authorisation Act, and a Department of Defence Appropriations Act; most of the content of these bills is public, some is not. Every year, a secret addendum to each of those acts is passed into law. These addenda have the same legal force as the laws that govern gambling or corn subsides. You are not allowed to know what they say.

You might think having secret laws is somehow wrong. You might think the existence of a law you can’t know about, or freely discuss, or which manages to criminalise a nebulous and possibly infinite cluster of actions, is a betrayal of the principle of law in general. Unfortunately, that’s not really true.

There is a tradition of public, open, legible legal codes. The Stele of Hammurabi is a block of basalt, seven and a half feet tall, inscribed with two hundred and eighty-two dictates. We don’t know exactly where in Babylon it stood, because hundreds of years later the Elamites came pouring over the hills to sack the city and carry off its laws to their own capital at Susa. But you have to assume that the stele was somewhere public, where anyone could go and confirm the official minimum wage for a field worker (according to §257, it’s eight gur of corn per year), or how much a vet can charge for successfully operating on an ox (one sixth of a shekel, per §224), or what to do if a female tavern-keeper charges too much for beer (§108 says drown her in the river). In Athens, Draco and Solon inscribed their laws on the axones and kurbeis, which historians are pretty certain were either the same thing or two different things, and which consisted of rotating three- or maybe four-sided pillars or possibly beams, but which were definitely made of wood, or maybe bronze. These axones and/or kurbeis have also never been unearthed, so we don’t know exactly what was in those laws. According to Plutarch, Draco imposed the death penalty on basically everyone. ‘Even men convicted of idleness were executed, and those who stole pot-herbs or fruits suffered just like murderers.’ The Athenian state spent a while violently exterminating its citizens for picking apples or bumping into people by accident, until the city was on the point of civil war, and Solon was appointed to draw up a slightly cuddlier constitution. Demades said that Draco’s laws were written not in ink, but blood, but the important thing is that they were still written: if you wanted to know why all your neighbours were being executed, you could go to the Agora and see the words ‘NO BLINKING—ON PAIN OF DEATH’ written on the axones. Meanwhile the Twelve Tables, the first written Roman law, were posted on bronze plaques in the Forum. The actual tables were destroyed when the Gauls sacked Rome in 387 BC, but later laws were also carved into bronze and publicly posted. Long into the imperial era, the white marble walls of the Temple of Jupiter would have been crowded with hundreds of laws and regulations, all jostling like festival flyers.

But while this is a legal tradition, it’s not our legal tradition. The only people who still really uphold the idea of public law are Wahhabi Muslims and ultra-orthodox Jews. Uniquely, the ancient Hebrews proclaimed that their written law wasn’t just a codification of existing custom or the decree of secular power, but had been directly given by God himself. In Exodus 21 and 22, the primordial power that created the entire Universe pauses to issue what is essentially the standard package of Bronze Age Near Eastern law from the stormclouds above Sinai. ‘If anyone digs a pit and an ox or a donkey falls into it, the one who opened the pit must pay the owner for the loss and take the dead animal in exchange.’ That sort of thing. At the time, this must have seemed like a great idea: if the law is a divine commandment, then it’s protected from the caprices of history. You don’t need stelae or axones; the inscription-place is everywhere. ‘These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.’ A truly public, universal, incontestable law. Freedom from arbitrary tyranny, freedom from social unrest. It worked: like most Jews, I can drone that entire passage, in Hebrew, by heart. If anything, it worked too well.

Since the majority of Jews are no longer highland pastoralists, the content of the law has been pretty comprehensively updated. The most recent codification of Jewish law is the sixteenth-century Shulchan Aruch, which is maybe the most impressively pedantic document ever written. The Torah gives a list of animals that can and can’t be eaten; the Shulchan Aruch is more detailed. A cow might be kosher, but ‘the structure of the gallbladder involves two layers of fat. The upper layer is prohibited, and the fat and tubes attached to it are prohibited.’ What hasn’t changed is the aura of holiness that still hovers over this arbitrary material. This is how the law, which was once intended to regulate everyday life and keep it humming along without too much interpersonal violence, has ended up devouring everyday life altogether. It is no longer in service of anything else; instead of a social compact, it becomes an obsessional neurosis. Have you ever listened to ultra-Orthodox Jews talk? These people only have two topics of conversation: family gossip and halacha. Everyone is expected to know and follow the whole of the law; all their intellectual energies are consumed in observing every subclause of this byzantine system of regulations. This is why they have such terrible taste in furniture, why they dance to that weird Casio-synthesiser Haredi-trance, and why their politics are always genuinely insane. As soon as we escape the shtetl of frummery Jews can do extraordinary things, but as long as the black hat is on our heads we have no real interests, passions, or personality, except the law.

This is not our situation in the secular world. Unlike the Haredis, you do not know the whole of the law. You do not mumble it to yourself every night. There are no big public stelae that record exactly what you’re not allowed to do, and what will happen to you if you do it anyway. Actually, there are some, but they’re all partial and fragmentary. They say things like ‘NO PARKING 9 AM TO 9 PM, £300 FINE.’ Unlike the Twelve Tables, they do not also promise to punish ‘whoever enchants by singing an evil incantation,’ or regulate behaviour at a funeral. Most of the rest of the law is publicly available, but some of it is in baffling jargon, and there’s far too much of it for any ordinary individual to comprehend. Understanding the law is left to a specialised caste of lawyers. The rest of us have to go around with a vague second-hand understanding that things like burglary and nonconsensual surgery are probably illegal, and then sometimes discover to our surprise that you can go to prison for fourteen years for wearing a tshirt with the name of a group that doesn’t even exist.

The idea that ordinary people should be able to know what the law says is, historically speaking, a rarity. Where public law does exist, it’s usually as the residue of class struggle. Those brass plaques in the Roman Forum only went up after protracted civil unrest. According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, the plebeians complained that all the laws were ‘kept in sacred books’ and ‘the patricians alone were acquainted with these.’ Patrician magistrates would try cases according a standard that the plebeians were forbidden from ever understanding. But since the plebeians did all the work, they could threaten a mass emigration from the city unless public laws were instituted. The magistrates tried to prevent themselves from being ‘compelled to conduct the government in accordance with laws,’ but Dionysius writes that the political struggle kept producing terrible omens. Rome could deal with the usual bad signs—lightning, earthquakes, plus ‘spectres flitting through the air and voices that disturbed men’s minds’—but when it started to rain small chunks of what looked like human flesh, the ruling class were sufficiently spooked to allow the law to be published. Aristotle describes a similar period of civil conflict before the Constitution of Solon. We know less about class struggle in early Mesopotamia, but all those boastful royal preambles at the top of the stelae—‘To eliminate cries for justice, to eradicate enmity and armed violence, I, Lipit-Ishtar, pious shepherd of the city of Nippur, established justice in the lands of Sumer and Akkad’—might not be as boastful as they seem. Not the words of an all-powerful king imposing his decree, but one forced to give up his unlimited power, and post the laws where anyone can read them. The revolution in ancient Judea, the one that confiscated the law from kings and priests and gave it directly to God, must have been immense.

But the default form of law is still the secret law. For most of human history, people have been governed by laws they’ve not been allowed to actually know. This is what Kafka—who was, of course, the last person to really truly get it—intuited in The Trial. You know the gist of the story, even if you’ve never read it: one day poor Josef K is arrested for a crime, but no one will tell him what he’s supposed to have done; he learns that in this court, beyond the ordinary magistrates, there are tier after tier of more and more powerful officials that could save him if they wanted, but it’s unheard of for anyone to ever be acquitted, and the more he insists on his innocence the more his judges decide he must be guilty; finally he’s taken to a quarry outside the city and killed. Boring pop-critics like to make fatuous interpretations of the novel. Really it’s about guilt, it’s about alienation, it’s existential; the secret is that Josef K is on trial for the crime of being born. This is bullshit. The Trial is not an existential text. It’s an ethnographically complete account of the Poro Society of West Africa.

Fine: not the Poro in particular, but of the hundreds of secret societies that have existed on every continent, since (according to Brian Hayden) at least the Upper Palaeolithic. In places without fully developed states, the power to make and enforce laws often ends up in the hands of these secret societies. The societies give their initiates supernatural powers: they can call on ancestor spirits to cure illnesses, control the weather, bring victory in battle and success in hunting, make crops grow, and—according to them—generally improve everyone’s wellbeing. Sometimes the spirits appear in spectacular public masked dances: most of the masks in various anthropological museums actually belong to secret societies.

The Northwest Coast has the Hamatsa and Melanesia has the Suque, but thanks to ethnographers like Kenneth Little and George Harley, the best-attested secret societies have been in West Africa. These include the Yassi, the Kofung, the Njayei, the Ekpo, the Isong, and the Njawhaw, but the Poro is by far the largest and the most powerful. More importantly, it cuts across clan, kinship, and political boundaries. If you’re a member of the Poro, your rank and status will still be recognised in a distant village, even if they speak a completely different language. In effect, this makes the Poro a kind of superstate. Poro law supersedes the dictates of secular chiefs; before the colonial period, it allowed thousands of small, scattered agricultural settlements to exist under a basically uniform system of law and government. During the colonial era, the Poro was one of the main centres of resistance to British rule. Even today, the modern states of Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone sometimes struggle to assert their own public legal authority against the Poro. This is not because rule by Poro is nice. Like most secret societies, it’s nightmarishly exploitative and antidemocratic.

All adult men are expected to be members of Poro (women have their own secret society, the Sande), along with any other societies they wanted to join, but ordinary initiates have no power and are told almost nothing about the society’s esoteric knowledge. Poro has ninety-nine degrees, and to work your way up, you have to pay. When a boy was initiated in the late colonial era, his father had to pay in cloth, brass, and chickens to the senior members, often going into debt in the process. Higher levels required payments in rice, palm oil, rum, and cash. To get beyond the first few levels you had to be extremely rich, but the higher you go the more you receive from the lower levels, so those with wealth could recoup their investments fairly quickly. The real function of the Poro was to redistribute all surpluses towards a small elite. This did still come with a cost: Harley writes that to reach the very highest level, a man would have to sacrifice and eat his own son. (To be fair, this bit isn’t in The Trial; it’s in The Judgement, another of Kafka’s stories.) The Poro have had a very relaxed attitude to killing. Through the colonial era, anyone who laughed at their dances and ceremonies would be killed and eaten. Anyone who saw ritual masks being made, or otherwise discovered that the ancestor spirits were really just people in disguise, would be killed and eaten. Anyone who publicly doubted the Poro’s supernatural power—and there were always some—would be executed on the spot. Most people learned to keep their mouths shut and stay away from Poro lodges, but the Poro had other laws that were, like its mystical knowledge, known only by the higher echelons of the secret society. Sometimes you could be executed for a crime you didn’t even know you’d committed, breaking a law you could never be told.

Maybe Kafka’s background is significant here: from a Jewish perspective, all secular law is basically indistinguishable from the Poro. His nightmare ended up coming very close to the ideal form of the law, but it’s not quite there. How secret is this law, really, if all these officials and initiates are allowed to know it? In Kafka, the higher judges that know everything might be very far away, but they still exist. The absolute most basic law would be a totally pure prohibition: one in which the content of the law is forbidden to everyone. There is something you’re not allowed to do, but you’re not allowed to know what it is, and the authority that enforces the law is not allowed to know it either.

Such a law has, in fact, existed: in England, during the sixteenth century. Exactly one person has ever been charged under it: the Elizabethan nobleman Henry Poyntz, Third Earl of Craven.

Craven was a notorious libertine, a favourite and possible lover of Elizabeth I, and (allegedly) an atheist. One of his risky inventions was a sport he called ‘heretickall Bear-bayting,’ in which he would keep two pet religious dissenters, with totally opposite views on the nature of God and man, and after dinner allow them to scream obscenities at each other for the entertainment of his guests. After a few rounds everyone would vote on the winner, and the loser would be turned over to the ecclesiastical authorities. But after repeatedly pitting recusants against nonconformists, he decided he wanted something with teeth. And after scouring the countryside for deranged cults, he managed to acquire two much more dangerous pets.

The first was John Folcroft, a wandering preacher and Spiritual Libertine. The Spiritual Libertines, also known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit, were an antinomian cult that had spread in Europe since the thirteenth century. The Spiritual Libertines were pantheists: they believed that God pervades the entire universe, and every ordinary thing that exists is just a manifestation or mode of appearance of God. They also believed that the individual human soul is self-identical with the universal consciousness of God, and that Christ was not unique, but simply the first person to realise this. (He wasn’t; the doctrine of the Free Spirit was first expressed by Yajnavalkya in the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, some time in the seventh century BC. Exactly how this extremely Dharmic idea started cropping up in Europe is a mystery for another time.) The reason the Spiritual Libertines had been suppressed with such incredible bloodshed, though, was their third doctrine: because the individual soul is the same as God, once someone becomes aware that they are God it’s impossible for them to sin, and everything they do is justified. The spiritually enlightened man can have whatever he wants. So roving bands of heretics would descend on small settlements, killing at will, stealing the farmers’ stores and fucking their wives, and leave singing hymns about how everything in the world is the body of God, and all of it is good.

The second of Craven’s acquisitions was a reformed theologian called Laurentius Clung, widely acknowledged as the single most unpleasant person of his age. Clung, who I might have mentioned before, was a renegade Calvinist who broke with his mentor after landing on the doctrine that none would be saved, and God had predestined not just most but absolutely all of his creations for the fires of Hell. His reasoning was airtight: it’s impossible for something good to love something less good than itself, because that would mean affirming an imperfection, therefore God does not love us, and he only created us in the first place as a punishment for being inferior to him. Clung thought that the only redeemable part of any person was their hatred for whatever lay beneath them, which is why he’d made it his personal mission to see as much of the world as possible, and hate it all. The many obscene screeds published during his lifetime include Against the foul, abominable lies of shit-dwelling Melanchthon and his fleas-in-their-arses followers, along with Against the filthy practices of the cobbler Gerrit Lapper, who is abominably stunted, and powerfully ugly, with one blackened tooth in his head, and is a cuckold whose wife exposes her diseased flaps for a medium-sized pork pie, and who lives in the red-painted house in the village of Overlangbroek near Utrecht, and a heavy tome titled Against nostrils. (‘Allowing sinners to breathe quietly, rather than through the ragged hole of the mouth, which furnishes the hypocrite with an egress for falsehoods and an ingress for cocks, they allow such creatures to pretend to a dignity they do not possess.’) For simply expressing these personal beliefs he was exiled from the Netherlands; after a brief but tumultuous stay in France he ended up seeking refuge in England.

Clung’s impressions of the English were mixed. At first, he approved of their habit of complaining constantly about the weather. ‘When the sun comes out they bemoan the heat of its rays, when it withdraws they bemoan the clouds, when water nourishes the earth they bemoan its damp: these people understand well that all of this world has been made to increase their suffering.’ He was outraged, though, when he discovered that the English didn’t accept that their punishment was just, and kept holding out hope for something called ‘nice weather.’ Similarly he approved of the local cuisine until discovering that it was not taken as a form of penance, and the English actually enjoyed it.

Now Craven had his combatants, the universal lover and the universal hater, but the heretical bear-baiting did not go according to plan. Both heretics were given apartments at Coldwheat Hall, the Poyntz family estate near Bradford, and Folcroft’s stay there was mostly peaceful. Craven supplied him with all the food and beer he wanted, and the enormously fat preacher contented himself with lazily molesting the servants. However, the needle-thin Clung caused more serious problems. As soon as he arrived at Coldwheat Hall, he took offence at Craven’s Chinese porcelain, acquired at enormous expense, which depicted a pagoda by a peaceful riverside with geese—‘heathen, barbarous images, the bloodied temples and charnel-houses of Moloch’—and smashed it all. The sheep on Craven’s estate were of an inferior breed, and therefore righteously poisoned. Clung also insisted on being allowed to preach to the local folk, ideally at the parish church of St Peter in Bradford. When he was told that under the constitution of the Church of England nobody could preach anywhere in the country without a licence and a bishop’s approval, he flew into a rage.

A few days later that rage was published as a pamphlet, in English, titled Against the faint, mooncalfish, effeminate settlement, that lyeth halting between Baal and God, in this realme of Englande. He starts by praising Elizabeth I for persecuting the ‘babylonish swyne, sweltering at the dunghylle of heathenrie, euen the Papistick recusantes.’ He also praises her for persecuting the puritans and nonconformists, ‘proud synners, whose heades are exalted lyke the Cedars of Libanus, whom the Lorde shall hewe downe; and I verely truste that Her Maiestie is His moste puissant instrument in heweing them downe.’ But then he calls down several pages of obscene curses on her for failing to properly persecute the most dangerous, most devious, and filthiest false sect in the country, ‘the font of piss whereat all Englishmen drawe their drinke,’ the Church of England. Finally, he signs the pamphlet with his name, Laurentius Clung, and his address, Coldwheat Hall.

With that one pamphlet, Clung destroyed his host. The Earl of Craven’s enemies—in particular, William Cecil—turned on him at once: he was immediately turfed out of court and stripped of his positions, grants, and monopolies; next they started plotting to have him executed. This would be more difficult, since Craven really hadn’t known anything about the pamphlet before publication, and there was no law that imposed the death penalty for simply sheltering a nonconformist. But they had a secret weapon. The Church of England had inherited reams of canon law, but lightly garbled: a lot of stuff had to be taken out, on saints and relics and the role of the Pope, but some material was also put back in; long-repealed fragments from the supposedly purer and more primitive apostolic church. One of those fragments was an anathema against the Isotimians, a forgotten fifth-century sect. Their heresy was once considered so dangerous that not just anyone who preached it, but anyone who had even heard it had to be put to death. The law did its job: a thousand years later, no one had any idea who the Isotimians were or what they had believed. But between them, John Folcroft and Laurentius Clung represented the furthest possible extent of heresy; surely one of their doctrines would have to be it.

Henry Poyntz, Earl of Craven was tried at the Consistory Court at York Minister. Most of the trial ran in the ordinary way: he admitted to sheltering the heretics and listening to them speak, in full knowledge of their views, although he kept insisting that he’d never actually agreed with them and remained a faithful Anglican and subject of the Queen. Finally, Laurentius Clung was produced as a witness. (Folcroft had escaped into the moors; his body was eventually found halfway up a fairly small hill.) This is where the problems began. To convict Craven, the court had to confirm that Clung’s beliefs really were the same as the heresy of the Isotimians. But they couldn’t question Clung about those beliefs, because if it turned out that they were the heresy of the Isotimians, then absolutely everyone in the courtroom—which included Edwin Sandys, Archbishop of York, his Chancellor Thomas Starsmeare, Matthew Hutton, Dean of York, the Archdeacons of Nottingham and Richmond, and Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon and President of the Council of the North—would also have to be executed.

The task of interrogating Clung went to Thomas Starsmeare, the plodding Chancellor. He had achieved his position by being a perfectly acceptable bureaucrat, passionless enough to weather his way through the religious tumult of the Tudor age, swinging to any wind, grovelling to any superior, and remaining a generally forgettable slab of meat throughout. Now, this deeply unimaginative man was forced to develop new methods for learning the unlearnable. His first approach was admirably direct:

CHANCELLOR: Art thou of the Isotimianes?

CLUNG: I know not.

CHANCELLOR: Yet persisteth there not in thy doctrine, and in thy heresies, the secte of the Isotimianes?

CLUNG: I haue hearde no such name. I cleaue onlie to the doctrine of God, as reuealed by Scripture and right reason.

CHANCELLOR: Is it by the rule of right reason and holie Scripture, or by the subtiltie of thine owne conceit, that thou art brought to this abhominable confusion, this foule and execrable impietie, which the Isotimianes haue broached?

CLUNG: I knowe not any Isotimianes, therefore I knowe not.

CHANCELLOR: Thou art of the Isotimianes. Auow it.

CLUNG: Sir, I wyll not.

His second approach was more devious. Maybe he couldn’t learn what Clung actually believed, but surely it would be fine to find out what parts of the orthodox position Clung disputed. This way, he could at least get a vague sense of the extent of his heresy. So he instructed Clung to only answer with ‘aye’ or ‘nay,’ and tried out the catechism on him. It didn’t go according to plan. Clung believed in the Holy Trinity and the holy Church; he believed that the Son was of one substance with the Father but had two natures, human and divine; he shruggingly acknowledged Elizabeth as Supreme Governor of the English Church and the real but immaterial presence of Christ in the Eucharist. But finally:

CHANCELLOR: Doest thou beleeue in the communion of sainctes, the forgiuenesse of synnes, the resurrection of the bodye, and the lyfe euerlastynge?

CLUNG: Naye.

CHANCELLOR: By God his holy name, man, why? Why embracest thou all other partes of the Christian fayth saue this?

CLUNG: [After a significant pause] Naye.

In desperation, the Chancellor asked Clung to explain his doctrine outright, but as soon as Clung started speaking the Chancellor stuck his fingers in his ears and started loudly and solemnly chanting ‘La, la, la.’ He told the Archbishop that Clung’s doctrine had been spoken in the Consistory Court, but no one had heard it, and therefore his job was done. The Archbishop disagreed. Finally the Chancellor landed on the same idea the Archbishop had landed on before him, which was to get someone else to do it. So he summoned a horse-thief called Will Marshman, who had already been condemned to death for his crimes, and put him in a cell with Clung to hear his doctrine. Later, Marshman could tell the Chancellor whether his heresy was so bad that someone should be put to death simply for listening to it. But when the Chancellor returned Marshman was in floods of tears, blubbering that he would be going to Hell, that there was no forgiveness, and the Dutch gentleman had proved it all with logic. This explanation had far too much actual content for safety, so the Chancellor fled with his fingers in his ears. But he had another idea. Marshman was told to explain what he’d heard to another, slightly stupider criminal, less capable of understanding abstract concepts, who told it to another, and another, until it finally reached the last messenger, a woman convicted of drowning her newborn son, who was called Margaret but couldn’t be relied on to consistently remember her own name. Margaret told the Chancellor that according to Clung, ‘God is sore vexed with the worlde for her synnes.’

In the end, the Earl of Craven solved everyone’s problems by dying of apoplexy. Laurentius Clung languished in prison for another year while the Crown tried to work out what to do with him. Finally, he became one of the first people in English history sentenced to transportation, and was shipped to the ill-fated Roanoke Colony in Virginia. Since then, no one else has been tried under the perfect prohibition unknown to everyone. But it’s still there, waiting, the final and impossible form of the law, to seep up into the statute books again.

By the way, I really did try, but there are significant gaps in the record; it turns out that a parish church burned down in the late eighteenth century with generations of rolls inside, which is why I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence that Chancellor Thomas Starsmeare is a direct ancestor of the current Prime Minister. But you know, don’t you? Sometimes you just know.

Chat, am I washed? Chat, be fr, am I washed? I think I might be washed. I think they might have washed me. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed?

Every day I spawn in. Emerge wriggling out my skibidi bolus of slime. Whence and where? Lol. Idk. Vibes here be mad shady fr. Shit is not aesthetic. Shit is not bussin. Shit is burned-out cars piled in barricades across the street. Shit is THE END IS NIGH scrawled across bridges. Shit is roofs caved in, windows boarded, thin trees already rising out the wreckage, with roots that slip through gaps in the brickwork to return the brief work of man to the senseless rubble that came before. This sus ahh Ohio ahh realm is my crib. Damn, bitch, I live like this.

I am not built different. I’ma keep it a stack I am not even tryna be above it. I pull up swagless into this sauceless void. Chat, in what consists my drip? My drip is stiff with blood and mire. Chat, in what consists my aura? My aura is only fear. Chat, in what consists my rizz? My rizz is a half-turned head, twisted birdlike. My rizz is the empty circling of a dislocated jaw. My rizz is antic snarling. My rizz is reddened eyes.

Here’s a normal day in the life of a mf with zero inner monologue and zero ability to speak. From 6 to 7 am I bedrot, or I would if I had a bed. Instead I simply rot. Goblincore. Mushroomcore. Livid colonies of fungus going feral around my wounds fr. From 7 to 8 am I bedrot. From 8 to 9 am I bedrot. From 9 to 10 am I flail my arms around while making strangled hacking noises. No cap this is such a dope part of my morning routine. From 10 am until lunch I enter grind mode, by which I mean wandering in loose circles over the ruins. For lunch I secure the bag by fanum taxing a stray cat. Mukbang mode. Gristle ASMR. In the afternoon I stay on my sigma hustle grindset by loping aimlessly through the wreckage of a world I do not understand. Ready to smoke an opp. After work I decompress by uttering unearthly screams.

I have no bitches. I am bitchless. Kissless, hugless, handholdless, eyecontactless. All my homies get zero pussy. We squad up, but not for warmth or comfort. I would be a volcel if I had any volition, but ngl the force that powers my perambulations is unknown to me fr. I am a lurchcel. I am a shamblecel. I am a teeth rotting in my mouthcel. I am a feet torn to purple-bruising tatterscel. I am an infinite lack of wantingcel. I am post-horny. Nofap without trying. Noclipping out of my libido. Epsilon male. NPC. I’m giving either Stoic or leper. I do not long. I do not yearn. I feel no strong emotions. I don’t feel anything at all.

L + ratio + no life + not caught a single dub + no longer human + I snatch small twitching things out of the undergrowth to devour their flesh and viscera still raw, as the last few pumps of hot metallic blood spurt feebly in my face.

I twitch. Muscular spasms, hands taloned at ungodly angles. I stream. Vomiting bile or pissing where I stand. I doomscroll. I have doomscrolled over this entire island, over gentle green hills and through the grey wreck of cities, down to the infinite sea, and none of it has held my attention for even a moment, because I have no attention to hold. I am brainrotted. Molten black sludge in my cranium. I am locked in on the emptiness behind all phenomenal things. Frfr. Bet.

But despite the stagnant pond inside me, chat, lowkey there’s sometimes a presence that yeets me gibbering across the land, and no cap, that presence, chat, is you. Sometimes, chat, I be surrounding you in your fortified farmhouses. Lacerate my arm tryna reach through the windows, to you. Gyatt! To creak and groan so long without that gyatt! Sometimes, chat, I highkey be chasing you down in the fields. Fall on you and straight up devour your flesh, until you are like me: ungyatted; mid. What I want in you is that you are unlike me. Until I sink my teeth into your body, you are the chat I know to whisper around me on all sides in the depths of my inner night. Chat observes. Chat gives me views and subs. Chat likes, comments, and shares. Your eyes are not like mine. They hit different. Which is deadass why you, chat, are the only ones to whom I can direct my question.

Chat, am I washed? Chat, I think I might have been washed. Someone washed me. Someone dried me. Someone tucked me up in bed. But chat, who washed me? Chat, who dried me? Chat, who tucked me up in bed?

(Midway through Danny Boyle’s original 28 Days Later, our heroes escape London and pass through the ruins of Waverley Abbey, destroyed in 1536 during the dissolution of the monasteries. It’s peaceful there. Horses run free by the lake. A moment to reflect on what it means to be the last thinking people on an island of the infected and the dead. ‘You’ll never hear another piece of original music ever again. You’ll never read a book that hasn’t already been written. Or see a film that hasn’t already been shot.’ This is a useful line, because it gives us a new framing for a familiar problem, even if 28 Days Later, which came out in 2002, is older than the phenomenon it’s describing. It says that what we’ve been living through for roughly the past two decades is not ‘stuck culture’ or ‘sequel bloat.’ We have been living through the zombie apocalypse.

Two years ago, I wrote that all the nerds were dead. The nerd era in culture was a response to the problem of data saturation: we were producing too much recorded culture for anyone to be able to sort through it all. In the fifteenth century, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola claimed to have read every single published text in general circulation, which back then amounted to maybe a gigabyte of data. We currently produce that much information every thirty milliseconds. The first cultural response to this problem was the hipster, which was the consumer as information-sorting algorithm. ‘The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev.’ The hipster was also deeply annoying. Once we developed efficient digital sorting algorithms, the hipster became obsolete, and the cultural hegemony of the nerd began.

In the nerd era, abstract equations served you up a constant stream of targeted slurry, and your job was to be unreasonably enthusiastic about it. Nerds are people who like things simply because they exist, and the nerd era was the era of the massive repetitive franchises: Marvel, Taylor Swift. For anyone to maintain individual taste and not enjoy this dreck was, for the nerds, a kind of affront. The nerd era felt like it would go on forever, but it’s now very definitively over. What’s strange is that, as I wrote at the start of the year, seemingly nothing in mass culture has arrived to replace it. Instead, we’re reduced to dredging up the last remnants of the hipster era to squeeze out any remaining nostalgia-value, in what I’ve called the necrosequel. ‘Gladiator II came out twenty-four years after Gladiator. Twisters came out twenty-eight years after Twister. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice arrived thirty-six years after the first instalment.’ This month, Pulp released their first album in a quarter of a century. Why? Not clear. It’s not like they have a radical new sound they need to share with the world. They’re doing what they always did, just not as well. The album is called More. And now, we have 28 Years Later.

To be fair, 28 Years is not an ordinary necrosequel. It doesn’t just repeat the exact storyline from the original; our hero is not supposed to be Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris’s child. The story begins on Lindisfarne, which a small community of survivors has fortified against the zombies that roam freely over the mainland. The villagers keep sheep and brew their own beer. They keep a cross of St George flying, and put up a portrait of Queen Elizabeth II back when she was young and the British Empire still governed a quarter of the globe. Out to sea, NATO vessels enforce their quarantine against this island of the dead, but for once, Boyle chooses not to deliver the obligatory zombie-film message, that humans are the real monsters. The village is a cosy, tight-knit, high-trust community. Later, on the mainland, we meet Erik, a Swedish soldier whose boat sank while enforcing the blockade on Britain. Erik talks about app delivery services. He shows our heroes a picture of his extremely bogged girlfriend on his phone. They’ve never seen a phone before. They think her lip fillers are an allergic reaction. It’s comic relief, but the joke’s on the techno-cosmopolitan Swede, not the ignorant Brexiteers. Wouldn’t it be nice to have not bothered with the twenty-first century? Go back to the simple life. No phones, no online bullshit, no foreigners. The village, incidentally, is uniformly white; the only non-white people in the film are among the infected. Meanwhile Boyle shoots everything in a kind of nostalgic parody of his own style, reviving all his Danny Boylest techniques from three decades ago, equal parts gore and schmaltz. Zombie apocalypse is no longer the end of the world and the destruction of the past: the zombies are now what preserve the past against the forces of social change.

But the choice the film is setting up here, between the world of the phone and the nostalgic community on Lindisfarne, is obviously a false one. The reason we’re stuck repeating the past, the reason we’re even watching this necrosequel about necrosequels, is the informational regime brought about by the phone. This is why we have our backwards peasant mass culture. It’s also why we have the zombies.

The third stage of culture in the zettabyte age, after the hipster and the nerd, is the zombie. If the hipster represents cultural taste as sorting algorithm, and the nerd represents cultural taste determined by sorting algorithm, the zombie is the point at which we stop consuming culture-commodities altogether and start directly consuming the sorting algorithm itself.

According to some middle-aged critics, our current age is the age of short-form, attention-grabbing, dopamine-boosting content. TikToks, essentially. But the individual TikTok is actually a fairly conservative and old-fashioned object: a short film, scripted and choreographed ahead of time, and then exhaustively edited afterwards. It might last seconds rather than hours, but the TikToker is still doing essentially the same kind of thing as, say, Fritz Lang. But most people don’t actually watch TikToks. Next time you’re next to someone doomscrolling through short-form video, watch what they actually do. Most of the time, they never actually watch a single twenty-second video through to the end. Flick down, vaguely register the general content of the video, immediately flick down again. Flick, flick, flick, for hours at a time, consuming literally nothing. Or, rather, consuming nothing except the algorithm, the pure flow and speed of the machine that gathers the entire world together and beams it directly at your face.

It’s not a question of attention spans: in the zombie era, people will engage with media in whatever way allows them direct access to that pure flow. If the medium is short-form video, they’ll scroll through it rapidly. But TikTok also features a streaming service called TikTok live, which mostly consists of women very slowly applying their makeup, or pretending to eat emoji of hamburgers, or pretending to be video game NPCs, or just wandering around, pointing out entirely ordinary objects like paving stones and bushes and other people’s cars in a slow xanned up purr—and people will watch these streams for hours on end. The real epicentre of contemporary youth culture isn’t TikTok, which is an app for cringe balding zoomers, but Twitch. This is where all the slang comes from, and it’ll be the breeding-ground for all the minor celebrities of the next few decades. Streaming has largely replaced music as the engine for new subcultures. In the same way that Instagram and YouTube (and, most recently, Substack) have been pathetically bolting TikTok clones to their services, TikTok is now desperately trying not to sink in the age of Twitch. The reason Hollywood is still stuck in the post-franchise holding pattern is that all forms of linear narrative entertainment are essentially obsolete. (A friend of mine has never sat through a single episode of the Sopranos, but he’s watched pretty much the entire show through nonlinear YouTube clips; he knows how every major character dies, just not in what order.) Those of us who are still stuck in these ancient media perceive a world in cultural stasis. But the zombies know better.

It takes genuinely impressive powers of engagement to be able to watch a Twitch stream. Because I take my journalism seriously I really tried to do it, but found it impossible; I kept getting distracted and picking up a book instead. These things are all eight hours long and, for someone raised on narrative media, impossibly boring. The most basic form of Twitch stream consists of watching someone else play video games, which previous generations of children could only tolerate for about three minutes before trying to grab the controller out their friend’s hands. My turn, my turn! But the zombie never expects a turn. The object of consumption isn’t the game, mediated through the streamer, but the act of streaming itself. Most streamers are reasonably good at the games they play, but this only matters in as much as it prevents any kind of friction. Many keep up a constant babble throughout, which is also unimportant. The second-most followed streamer on the platform is someone called Kai Cenat. Here’s what he says roughly midway through his most recent two-and-a-half-hour ‘short’ stream: ‘On God you guys have grown, in ways, unimaginable. Deadass. Now! Can’t even. You know what? I can’t even. I need to see, I’ma give y’all, I’ma give y’all thirty seconds to give me the best compliments. Twenty-nine. Twenty-eight. Twenty-seven. Twenty-six.’ He continues to count backwards all the way from thirty, with the mysterious omission of the number twenty-three, before reading out all the compliments his audience have posted for him. I tried another one. ‘Bro my fucking shit is fucked,’ he says. Someone else wanders into shot, visibly grumpy, and asks what they’re even doing. ‘I want some ice cream,’ says Kai Cenat. ‘You know what I’m saying, I want some ice cream man.’

The most popular streamer is a man called Tyler Blevins, who goes by Ninja. Blevins is apparently extremely good at playing Fortnite, but despite having blue highlights in his hair he has absolutely no personality whatsoever. On his streams he can go for a while without saying a single word, and when he does manage to eject some brief sentiment you get the sense he didn’t really need to bother. I thought I might have caught him on a bad day so I tried watching his highlights, but it’s all like this. He exclusively says things like ‘This dual hammer meta is absolutely disgusting and I really hope they patch them immediately and make them share global cooldown.’ His audience would be just as happy watching a trained pigeon peck at levers.

Of course, not all streamers only post gaming content. You can watch someone buy and open football cards! You can watch someone pick his nose! A surprising number of people, including Kai Cenat, don’t just stream every waking moment; they also stream themselves sleeping at night. An even more surprising number of people watch them. But maybe the most magnificently pointless are the political streamers: instead of watching someone else play video games, you get to watch someone else go on Twitter. Occasionally, the political streamers will get in a feud with one another. Whatever ideological struggles these people and their followers think they’re engaged in, the real purpose of the Twitch fight is very different. It exists to create a situation in which you’re watching a stream of someone else watching a stream. The circuit is complete.

Zombification is most noticeable online, but it’s happening in every medium. When 28 Days Later was released in 2002, the emerging form in black British music was grime; today it’s drill. The difference is striking. Grime was a very specifically British genre: unlike most forms of global rap, it wasn’t an American import but had developed indigenously through UK garage and jungle. Early grime instrumentals were homemade and haphazard; from the Eskimo riddim on they tended to feature a lot of endearingly naff synths. A bunch of kids playing around with Korg Tritons in council estate bedrooms all over London. Many grime MCs had voices that were straightforwardly weird, which they deployed on high-concept tracks with elastic, constantly shifting internal rhythmic variations. Grime could be deadly serious, a chronicle of a fairly bleak existence in the crevices of Tony Blair’s Britain, but it could also be fun or sexy or experimental or absurd. It even started crossbreeding with the simultaneous indie rock revival happening in whiter, leafier corners of the country. For anyone who grew up in the hipster age, when grime was flourishing, drill music feels like an obviously inferior product. It is not even remotely fun. It has no personality and no erotic depth. The flow on every bar in every drill track is exactly the same, hitting the exact same 16th-note subdivisions: dum-de-dum-de-dum-de-DA. Drill rappers generally refuse any kind of artistic individuality. The standard outfit is a North Face puffer and a ski mask. The music is a Chicago invention, but it’s universal now: in every major city in Europe, street music means people wearing the exact same anonymising clothes and rapping in the exact same rhythm to basically interchangeable beats. An almost military uniformity.

My favourite example is a drill rapper called TS, real name Al-Arfat Hassan, whose bars are mostly about the gruesome violence he wants to inflict on all non-Muslims. ‘Soldier of Allah, not sad if I bleed/ Insha Allah I’ll die a shahid.’ At one point he says that if you consort with djinn he’ll take out your brain, cook it in a frying pan, and eat it. In 2024 TS was jailed for trying to build a bomb from an ISIS training video. But before he was convicted and his videos deleted from YouTube, the comments on them were uniformly positive, most of them from non-Muslims. None of these people had noticed what he was actually saying; they weren’t consuming his tracks as individual works, but as an embodiment of the form. The actual idiosyncrasy of the ISIS-supporting rapper failed to register. When people make and listen to drill, what they’re engaging with is not quite what we understand as music. It has the same relation to the 40,000-year-old musical tradition, from the first palaeolithic bone flutes to early twenty-first century grime, that Twitch streaming has to Sophocles.

The pinnacle of zombie culture, though, is obviously AI. Chatbots allow you to essentially skip even the pretence of cultural mediation and just interface directly with the sorting mechanism, which is exactly what generative AI really is: a device for sifting through the impossibly vast corpus of human information and finding patterns. The difference between ChatGPT and previous forms of zombie culture is that it’s totally opaque. Everyone’s individual For You Page on TikTok is notionally unique, but they’re all composed of the same stock of videos; meanwhile there is absolutely no way to find out what perverted things people are doing with AI unless one of three things happen. Either you peer at their phone on public transport, or they post screenshots on Reddit, or they kill themselves. Whenever this happens, it usually turns out that they have either been using the sorting algorithm as a therapist, using the sorting algorithm to divine the hidden secrets of the cosmos, or that they and the sorting algorithm have fallen in love. Their ideal of a healthy personal relationship is now modelled on the horrible little eunuch that lives inside their phones, and which can only ever flatter and ingratiate because at root it’s still fundamentally a machine for predicting which token you would want to appear next in a text string. It’s strange that everything is still here, cars still stop at red lights and kids still go to school, as if the world hasn’t changed, all while unknown millions of our fellow-citizens have essentially become mindless fleshy appendages to the machine.

I’m sure you’ve read the study that found dramatically reduced brain activity among people who use AI. But if I’m honest I’ve been thinking about their brains for a while. The people I see sitting perfectly still, flicking through videos as the only life they’ll ever have slowly drains away. The people venting about their friends to a probability model. And, yes, the teenagers speaking in Twitch-chat drivel or playing drill music out their phone speakers on the bus. Maybe it’s true that for anyone used to one mode of engaging with media, the next always feels like a kind of lobotomy, but it’s hard not to feel that the people who look at screens in this particular way are some new thing, not quite conscious, not quite human. Their brains are all shrivelled, darkened, dry-aged. It should not be illegal to eat them. It’s all I can think about as I watch their eyes blur and their lips hang slack. Cracking open their skulls, and eating their brains. Brains. Brains. Brains…)

That’s a lot of words fr. On some circumlocutory type shii. Tl;dr. Foh.

Bro needs to consider that there is some lore to this world that bro will not be able to understand. Bro has not been patched. Bro has not got the DLC. Bro is perfectly aware that old modes of engagement with media are not ‘neutral’ or ‘objective’ or truly ‘goated,’ and that each new mode is incomprehensible to anyone still simping for any of its predecessors, but bro wants to come with this cheugy Gutenberg ahh paradigm? You can’t vibe with us until you in the squad. Blood in blood out fam. You only clocked right at the end that you gotta take the L, gg, touch aluminosilicate glass, abandon Cartesian subjectivity, get pozzed with the rage virus, become infected, join the wordless masses, literally be a mf zombie bro you gotta join the horde. Slough off your individual subjectvity bro. Go brain eating mode. Eat people bro. No cap you have got to eat people.

Vibe check this: did you not peep that within the lexicon of skibidi brainrot there’s a preponderance of terms gesturing towards the affirmation of some truth? We say on god no cap ngl frfr bet facts deadass wallahi type shii. No cap we commune with the real fr. And you gas yourself up because your generation and every generation before it was content to wallow in fictions and intermediaries? Like brooo this delulu ahh mf be seeking meaning in the graveyard of graven idols. Deadass he locked in a recursive, ironic, and fundamentally masturbatory relation to the products of culture. Thinking tHiS iS bEtTeR tHaN a DiReCt EnGaGeMeNt WiTh ThE fOrM iTsElF? Couldn’t be me! Bitch we have linked up with the surging stream of unpredicated being. Bitch we behold the apeiron from which all brief perishing shapes emerge.

On god you gotta go zombie mode bruh. You gotta perceive what the zombie perceives. As long as you are not a zombie you can only figure it in terms of lack. No thoughts, no libido, no will; illiterate, unbothered, in my lane, undead. You do not know that in every instant that the zombie limps through the ruins of your civilisation, in every instant that the zombie tweaks and vomits blood and decomposes, and even as the zombie with wild hunger bolts to sink its teeth into the flesh of the living—through it all, the zombie, in the blissful space where the mind is not, feels only the infinity of a pure white light.

One fun thing about our senseless new reality is that it’s now possible to start Substack beef with the . This is obviously what I will now be doing. My enemies list is long, and yes, you’re on it, but unlike most ordinary opinion-barfers the State Department has the power to have me kidnapped from my home in the middle of the night and secreted away to a tropical island, where cold-eyed men in greasy wifebeaters will electrocute my nuts on a zinc table until I die. A good literary beef should always come with an element of danger: if you’re not fighting someone who has the ability to humiliate you, you probably need to set your sights a little higher. The State Department has left a trail of blood and gore over every inhabited continent. It’s probably the biggest game out there. Let’s go.

At the end of last month, the State Department posted a meandering little Substack essay titled The Need for Civilisational Allies in Europe. It writes:

The close relationship between the United States and Europe transcends geographic proximity and transactional politics. It represents a unique bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilisational heritage.

Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America's founding documents. The Declaration’s revolutionary assertion that men ‘are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’ echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognised that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy.

In the aftermath of two devastating world wars, European nations sought to prevent future catastrophes by creating supranational structures that would bind nations closer together and allow for more substantial diplomatic and economic engagements. Proponents of this new order, including well-meaning Christian and pro-democracy parties, sought a grand transformation—a world that would transcend the divisiveness of nationality and creed to usher in an era of unprecedented peace. By overcoming the anchors of nationhood, culture, and tradition, global liberalism promised what Francis Fukuyama famously called the “end of history,” the ultimate innovation of political life.

Today, this promise lies in tatters. What endures instead is an aggressive campaign against Western civilisation itself. Across Europe, governments have weaponised political institutions against their own citizens and against our shared heritage. Far from strengthening democratic principles, Europe has devolved into a hotbed of digital censorship, mass migration, restrictions on religious freedom, and numerous other assaults on democratic self-governance.

The rest of the piece details what they mean by this, which is that people can face legal consequences for praying silently near abortion clinics in Britain, criticising politicians in Germany, or embezzling public funds in France. To be honest, I don’t disagree that a lot of these European speech restrictions are bad and unhelpful, although I don’t see why the current US administration, with its policy of arresting and deporting people who write op-eds it doesn’t like, gets to be smug about this. What really interests me right now, though, are these four paragraphs. The writing is obviously awful; all government communiques might have the same bland, humourless, flatulent tone, but this is probably the first to describe Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as ‘heavyweights.’ The ideas are similarly unimpressive, a wet glob of regurgitated Western Civ 101. But it’s very worrying if this is what the people who currently run the empire are thinking, because absolutely every claim made over the course of these four paragraphs is completely and utterly wrong.

America and Europe are not both part of something called ‘Western civilisation.’ America is not a product of European traditions transplanted to the New World; in fact, it’s the other way round. More than 1,500 years ago, America created Europe. There really is something genuinely distinctive about Europe, but it has absolutely nothing to do with natural law, virtue ethics, national sovereignty, culture, or tradition, and a lot more to do with the supranational structures that the State Department accuses of undermining Europe’s own values. The world is much, much weirder than the State Department—whose work mostly consists of obliterating small bit of it—could ever imagine.

Let’s start at the beginning. The notion of ‘Western civilisation’ is almost exclusively an American one; Europeans simply do not talk in these terms, unless we’re trying to cash in on the American culture wars. Like most bad ideas, it exists to make you ignore what’s right in front of your face, which is that the United States of America is not a European society, but an American one.

In its culture, institutions, and style of government, the US has no resemblance to France or Denmark, but it does look quite a lot like the Iroquois Confederation or the Aztec Triple Alliance. European countries are integral and territorial: each one is essentially a patch of farmland that could be conquered and defended by some warlord at some point between 476 and 1945, along with its population of bonded serfs. The basic unit of American sovereignty, meanwhile, is the pact, in which various disparate peoples invent institutions for globbing together in a theoretically limitless affiliative chain. The United States is also theoretically limitless: it bubbled away across the continent and then, once it hit the sea, started sweeping over Pacific islands like a tsunami. It may yet swallow up Canada too. This is entirely different to the process in which European territories are expanded or nibbled away at through conquest: the territory is simply wherever the pact is in force.

European society is literate and literary; America is fundamentally imagistic. A country of cave-painters. For the few Americans who can read, the written word is still magical in nature, a charm or amulet, a form of medicine, rather than an ordinary system for relaying meaning. (See, for instance, the basically savage invocation of Aristotle and Aquinas above.) For Europeans, freedom is imagined in social and sadistic terms; for Americans, both before and after Columbus, the notion of freedom is based in a metaphor of physically ranging unimpeded over large tracts of land.

The original founders of the United States understood this entirely, which is why the Sons of Liberty dressed as Native Americans when they threw the Dartmouth’s cargo into Boston Harbour. The 1778 Articles of Confederation may have been substantially inspired by the Gayanashagowa or Great Law of Peace that cemented the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, but unfortunately by 1787 the project was entirely in the hands of Roman Republic cosplayers like John Adams, with the result that most accounts of the origins of American liberalism now involve this tedious traipse from Athens to Rome to Runnymede to Plymouth Rock. There have always been a few visionaries, like Walt Whitman, who saw things clearly, but only recently have people really started pointing out the obvious. The strongest counter-history is the Graeber-Wengrow thesis, which observes that at the moment of contact between Europeans and Americans, the Europeans mostly lived under systems of extreme and explicit hierarchy and domination, while the Americans mostly lived in deliberative communities, governed by elected councils, in which any chieftain’s orders could be countermanded by someone asking ‘Why?’ (Another feature is the democratisation of violence: in Europe, the state could impose hideous punishments, but in America a whole village might collectively torture you to death.) Our entire notion of freedom, they claim, originates here.

Graeber and Wengrow don’t argue that Americans are noble savages, intrinsically more free than Europeans; they locate the origin of liberalism in a specifically American political history centring on the collapse of the despotic, city-building, human-sacrificing state based in Cahokia, near present-day St Louis. This might be true, but it’s worth pointing out that where contemporary America is brutal and despotic, it’s brutal and despotic in a specifically American way. Most European societies (after Rome, obviously) never had a sizeable domestic population of slaves; American ones did. Power in American societies was often embodied in potlatches or nextlaoallis, spectacular squanderings of wealth or life. This is essentially how the American world-empire, which continually consumes the wealth of the entire planet, governs itself.

The liberal counterpart to the reactionary slog back to Aristotle is, of course, the idea that America is a settler-colonial state built on stolen land. This is not entirely untrue—there’s been significant population turnover—but it is unhelpful. The point should be to encourage settler-descendants to more completely integrate into American society. Three hundred million Elizabeth Warrens! The first step would be to replace English the language of government and commerce with one or more native languages. Navajo has the most speakers, but Mohawk would have an obvious symbolic resonance; alternately the heartland is already dotted with Algonquian place names. Education is important; all children should be inducted into their local tribe, made to go through painful initiation rituals, and so on. Most of them don’t require any blood quantum. Longhouse summer camps. Probably a majority of Americans already vaguely believe in the Great Spirit. It can be done.

Where does that leave Europe? The argument that Europe itself is a 1,500 year old American invention is a bit fiddlier, but it does holds together. It hinges on the Yeniseian languages, which are currently spoken by about a thousand people in three miserable villages along a river in Krasnoyarsk Krai, deep in the middle of Russia. (The largest of those villages is called Kellog. As far as I can tell, there’s no connection to the cornflakes.) These are particularly interesting to linguists, because as far as we can tell the closest relatives of Yeniseian are not among other Siberian languages, but the Na-Dené languages of north America. These include the Athabaskan group spoken across Alaska and Yukon, but also Tlingit on the Northwest Coast and Navajo and Apache in Arizona and New Mexico. For a while the assumption was that Yeniseian was another branch of the language spoken by one of the groups of Siberians to have crossed the Bering Strait and populated the Americas, but that seems not to be the case. In 2014, a computational phylogenetic analysis by Sicoli and Holton found that Yeniseian did not branch off before other languages in the family, but belongs to a clade within Na-Dené. In other words, the Yeniseians were back-migrants: Americans who, thousands of years later, crossed the Bering Strait in the other direction and returned to Asia.

In the third century BC, a new people appeared on the borders of China. The Chinese were not unfamiliar with steppe peoples; they’d fought and traded with the Yuezhi, the Altaic and Iranian horse-nomads, for centuries. Confucian tradition assumed that the Yuezhi were basically made of the same stuff as ordinary people; one day, they would inevitably become civilised, obey the Son of Heaven, and adopt Chinese customs. This new people were different. They could not be cooked. The Chinese called them the Xiongnu, and Sima Qian writes that ‘they know nothing of ritual or righteousness… this is their Heaven-endowed nature.’ Something like invaders from another planet: unutterably strange, and warlike in a way China had never experienced. It was Xiongnu raids that spurred the construction of the Great Wall. They lived under a form of government that had never been seen before anywhere in the Old World: the multiethnic tribal confederation. But there must have been one particular tribe at the heart of their pact, because there was a distinct Xiongnu language. Scholars are divided on exactly what this language was. Some assume it was Turkic, because there were a lot of Turkic tribes around at the time. Some conclude it was some kind of proto-Mongolian, because later Chinese wrote that the Mongols were the same as the Xiongnu. But a few linguists, like Edwin Pulleyblank and Alexander Vovin, have tried to study the few scraps of Xiongnu that are actually available, in rough Chinese transliteration. What they find is that Xiongnu bears a marked similarity to Yeniseian.

In 129 BC, the Xiongnu were finally broken against a massive mounted Han army. The survivors fled into the interior of Asia. Some of them stayed and became tributaries of Emperor Xuan. Others, the more warlike ones, started moving west. Their migration sent ripples through the world. Other steppe peoples either joined the confederation, or started fleeing ahead of their advance, attacking whatever weaker tribes lay to their west. The Xiongnu attacked the Turks, the Turks slammed into the Scythians, the Sycthians pressed into the Germans, and the Germans fled across the borders of a soft and over-ripe Roman Empire. Finally, the people who had once been known as the Xiongnu arrived. In 440 AD, a native American brave named Attila the Hun crossed the Danube and made war against Rome.

This was the origin of Europe. In a Roman context, Europe is just a landmass. The world is divided into citizens and noncitizens; Roman citizens in Britain and Syria have far more in common with each other than they do with their Pictish or Arab relatives just across the border. A distinctive concept of Europe, a specifically European mode of social organisation, could only emerge out of the ruins of the Empire, once the Americans had torn it open. The distinctly European form of government that emerged in the Dark Ages is the one that most of Europe still lives under today. Europe is not about nations and peoples, knights and maidens, art and culture, knowledge and power, or freedom and democracy. Its history is the history of a sexually perverted supranational bureaucracy.

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TERROR in the heart of the city! The nefarious PROFESSOR SOPHISTICO has attacked the famous GOLDSCHMITT MANOR, fabulous home of MAYA GOLDSCHMITT, the city’s LEATHERIEST HEIRESS! The villain’s attack comes during a SWANKY SOIRÉE for investors in METZITZAH SYSTEMS, the high-tech Israeli arms manufacturer responsible for the BABYMASHER 3000, a loitering munition used to DEVASTATING EFFECT in maternity wards across the Gaza Strip! PROFESSOR SOPHISTICO, an adjunct in COMPARATIVE LITERATURE at the local university, has barricaded himself into the OPULENT BALLROOM at GOLDSCHMITT MANOR with five hostages! These are MAYA GOLDSCHMITT herself, billionaire playboy BRICK KOPF, local philanthropist RONNY LUFTMENSCH, beloved TV personality SUSAN PLAPEL, and OMER BALOG, the brilliant bald-headed boffin CTO of METZITZAH SYSTEMS! The devious PROFESSOR has wired his hostages with EXPLOSIVES—simply for the crime of BEING JEWISH! The bombs are attached to a DEAD MAN’S SWITCH, meaning that if the POLICE SNIPERS arranged around GOLDSCHMITT MANOR take a shot, all of SOPHISTICO’s hostages will POP LIKE WET CONFETTI! With no other recourse, the authorities have sent in the bumbling JIM PLAYNE, amateur hostage negotiator, to try to talk the CRAZED PROFESSOR down! Will PLAYNE manage to make a cogent case against INDIVIDUAL ACTS OF POLITICAL VIOLENCE as a LEGITIMATE FORM OF RESISTANCE? Or will he himself end up being seduced by the MAD PROFESSOR’S DEMENTED IDEOLOGY? Read on to find out…

PLAYNE: Nice barricades you’ve got here.

SOPHISTICO: Thanks.

PLAYNE: You’ve put all these bits of wood together very precisely. It looks great. If I were Maya Goldschmitt I’d keep them up afterwards.

SOPHISTICO: I watch Japanese woodworking on TikTok. It’s relaxing.

PLAYNE: Yeah?

SOPHISTICO: It’s called sashimono. They do joinery without any nails or glue. It all rests on these highly complex joints carved using simple chisels called nomi. I can show you some videos if you like.

PLAYNE: That’d be—maybe afterwards? You’ve also—it looks like you’ve taken a couple of hostages here.

SOPHISTICO: I’m striking back against the machinery of death.

HOSTAGES: [Indistinct panicked mumbling through their gags]

PLAYNE: And how are we feeling about this? Any, you know, regrets?

SOPHISTICO: Pretty good, to be honest.

PLAYNE: Alright. Mind walking me through how we got here?

SOPHISTICO: Well, basically how it started was that I couldn’t sleep. Every day, I watch videos of what’s happening in Gaza. The most horrible, horrible stuff. The other day I saw a father holding up half of his daughter. Half of a little girl. An Israeli bomb had exploded inside their house and it just cut her body in half. She’d never hurt anyone. Or there’s videos of babies, crying babies with exposed ribcages. They don’t understand why they can’t have any food. Every day it’s like this. There’s been an airstrike on a school. There’s been a team of medics shot one by one and buried in a mass grave. They’ve gunned down dozens of hungry people trying to get food. They targeted the home of a paediatrician and killed nine of her children. Kids she loved and cared for all their lives, and Israel wiped them all out in an instant. For no reason. So I see all of this happening, and then I can’t sleep. I keep lying in bed, thinking about it, until it’s five, six in the morning. How am I supposed to sleep in my warm bed, in my safe home, while this is happening to my fellow human beings? How can anyone just go about their normal lives when we’re watching a live-streamed genocide, twenty-four hours a day? I think the reason I couldn’t sleep was my conscience. It was telling me I had a duty to do something. So this is me doing something.

PLAYNE: You watch snuff films before bed and then you can’t sleep.

SOPHISTICO: Yeah. Do you think I should just ignore it? Pretend it isn’t happening? Wall myself off?

PLAYNE: No, no. Just saying. Let’s go back. You said you had a duty to do something. But there’s lots of ways of doing something. You could have, you know, marched—

SOPHISTICO: Ha. Of course they’d send a lib. Look, imagine this. Imagine it isn’t Gaza. Let’s say I’m right here, going into people’s houses with a gun—

PLAYNE: Well, you are right here, going into people’s houses with a gun.

SOPHISTICO: Let me finish. Imagine I go into your house at night and [making gun fingers] bang, I murder your wife. Bang, murder your son. While they’re sleeping. Then I take out a saw and cut your daughter in half. Next night, I do it again, to your neighbour. And the next night, and the night after that, for nearly two years, and the police do absolutely nothing to stop me. In fact, they’re supplying me with ammunition. And then in the daytime, they let me go on the TV and explain that I had to do it because those kids made me feel unsafe, and by the way I’m the most moral man in town, and if you have any problem with me breaking into houses and wiping out families, you’re some kind of bigot. I keep getting away with it, and I keep killing. What would you do in that situation? Do you think you’d sleep well at night? Would you choose non-violence? Would you go on a protest march against me? Write a letter to the Mayor? Fight against hatred with the power of love? Or would you do whatever it took to stop me before I killed again?

PLAYNE: I’m not sure it’s the same.

SOPHISTICO: No. Because in my thought experiment it’s happening here, and in reality it’s happening somewhere else. A lot of people just don’t view Palestinians as fully human. When their children are cut in half it doesn’t matter. But I refuse to care less about someone’s life just because they live far away.

PLAYNE: I guess what I meant is that, like I said, you really are going into people’s houses with a gun. You say you’re so horrified by violence, but here you are, committing acts of violence.

SOPHISTICO: OK, now we’re getting into it. You’re against violence? All violence?

PLAYNE: Yes. I think so.

SOPHISTICO: But right now there’s snipers pointing guns at me through the window. I don’t think you want them to take me out, I’m sure you’d prefer it if everyone could leave this room alive. But if they shot me in the middle of an active hostage situation, I don’t think you’d be morally outraged. So there’s clearly some violence you’re willing to accept and some violence you’re not.

PLAYNE: That’s true.

SOPHISTICO: So what’s the difference between acceptable and unacceptable violence?

PLAYNE: Well, the police, they’ve got legal authority—

SOPHISTICO: Exactly. Their violence is legitimate. It comes from the state. The state can send people to prison, but when I keep people in a room against their will it’s hostage-taking. If the state thinks parents are doing a bad job, it can kidnap their children; I can’t. And Israel is a state, an internationally recognised sovereign power, which is why it’s allowed to cut little girls in half, and private citizens are not. But there is such a thing in international law as the right to resist. Did you know that? The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that we ‘have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression.’ So illegitimate individual violence is actually legitimate under the law. The distinction contradicts itself. So what else? How else do you tell the difference between acceptable and unacceptable violence?

PLAYNE: I don’t know.

HOSTAGES: [Muffled sounds of alarm getting louder]

PLAYNE: But look, the police wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t walked into a party full of people and started pointing guns at them. We’re trying to put an end to violence. That’s just not the same as deliberately starting it.

SOPHISTICO: Sure.

PLAYNE: So why don’t we try, maybe, letting one of the hostages—

SOPHISTICO: But I didn’t initiate the violence here. Every single one of these people is an investor in Metzitzah Systems. They are all making money out of a campaign of mass slaughter being waged on the other side of the world. I’m just responding. The violence is already taking place, and I’m the one trying to end it. Similarly, the violence on October 7th was a response to decades of illegal blockade, occupation, and colonisation against the people of Palestine. The distinction between initiating violence and responding with violence also doesn’t hold. There’s always a precedent.

PLAYNE: So why don’t you support the war then?

SOPHISTICO: What do you mean?

PLAYNE: You say this violence is justified by a previous act of violence. So doesn’t that apply to Israeli violence as well? How do you tell the difference between good and bad violence?

SOPHISTICO: I was getting there.

PLAYNE: Go on, then.

SOPHISTICO: Acceptable violence is the violence that liberates the oppressed from their oppression. Liberals like you only accept violence when it’s ‘legitimate,’ in other words, when it’s used by the established order to crush and pacify the powerless. I’m the opposite.

PLAYNE: Right.

SOPHISTICO: Good, isn’t it?

PLAYNE: I’m thinking about it. I worry it might have some holes.

SOPHISTICO: Like what?

PLAYNE: I mean, do you really think that’s what you’re doing? Liberating the oppressed from their oppression?

SOPHISTICO: I’m trying.

PLAYNE: I don’t know if I buy it. If you were really serious about liberating the oppressed, you wouldn’t be taking hostages and hooking them up to explosives. Let’s say our conversation here ends badly, and you blow up all these people here—

HOSTAGES: [Squirming in panic]

PLAYNE: —what do you think happens next? Let me tell you. Everyone you hate—they get to be the victim now. You’ve just given them a big gory piece of evidence that they’re the oppressed, not you, which means their violence is justified, not yours. These categories are more malleable than you think. And a lot of people will start agreeing with them, because most people don’t want to be on the same side as a crazy killer. So everyone who’s been trying to do the serious work of advocating for Palestine now has to deal with the PR nightmare another violent extremist in their ranks. There are reams of evidence that this kind of violent action is almost always counterproductive. Plus, just like you said, every violent act provokes a violent response. How do you think the Israelis will respond to this? Will they bomb Gaza less? Do you really think this will put a stop to the cycle of violence? It seems to me that all you’ve done is snuffed out five human lives forever, and made things worse for the people you claim to care about in the process. And yourself, of course. You’re Merry Levov, blowing up a post office. Pointless waste.

SOPHISTICO: I see. So now you don’t think violence is bad. It’s just ineffective.

PLAYNE: Look, man, I’m a hostage negotiator. I’m just trying to get you to let these people go. If I can sell you on violence being bad, I’ll say that. If I can sell you on violence being ineffective, that works too. If I thought I could convince you that the established order isn’t so awful, I’d give it a shot.

SOPHISTICO: It’s difficult to have an honest discussion with someone who doesn’t really believe in anything.

PLAYNE: Does it matter what I believe? I just accept whatever’s been convincingly demonstrated to me. You should try it. You know I’m right.

SOPHISTICO: No. You’re not. Imagine this. It’s World War Two and your country is occupied by the Nazis. They’re carting away all the Jews and Roma to concentration camps. You watch it happen every day. Now, if you want, you can run away into the hills and join up with the partisans. Fight the Nazis. But the Nazis have a reprisals policy. For every one of their soldiers that the partisans kill, they will go into a village, line up ten civilians against a wall, and shoot them. So should you resist the Nazis? Maybe on your utilitarian calculus it doesn’t help, maybe it’s even actively harmful. But don’t you have a duty? When you’re facing such a brutal machinery of death, aren’t you personally obliged to throw absolutely everything you have against it, even your own body, to strike back just for a moment, to make sure that these people suffer just a little for what they’ve done, so there’s some kind of price for their actions, even if it’s ultimately futile, even if it doesn’t help, just so you didn’t stand by and let it happen? What would you do? Would you resist, or not?

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