Cut down
Sizing up
As the end of the year lurches and tumbles forward, trying to pick up and tidy various thoughts and musings, I revisited the notes published here through 2025. About a year ago I offered this as overarching depiction:
A world defined by acceleration, escalation, entropy, extraction and force. Behaviour shaped by anger, fear, greed, identity and ressentiment.
I regret not adding ‘bad faith’ to this list, but it is certainly implicit in the framing.
What follows is a rather obvious conclusion: we have entered a hostile, destabilized environment. Nonetheless, I would suggest there still appears to be an incomplete recognition or acceptance of that logic. From the climate to geopolitics through to the digital and so on, we are increasing caught within conditions and structures that are dangerous and harmful. Yet such language is insufficient, it is too passive: there are actors that are dangerous, predatory and very willing to do harm. These are not conditions that are not supportive of the good life or our wellbeing.
I state what might be obvious because there is deep contextual and institutional inertia that pushes against following the logic of such observations. One of the many odd contradictions of the present moment is the way people manage to be so hyper activated, and yet simultaneously oblivious to recognising their surrounds as actively hostile and harmful.
Recognising and reckoning with this, I would suggest one must try to develop and refine a conscious, active attunement towards one’s surrounds - material, cognitive, spiritual - from head to heart to toe. Per my last note, this also means trying to lean into these changes, to adjust and be aware of what is taking shape, and be on guard for actors - be these individuals, organisations, platforms, institutions - that are predatory and dangerous.
More on that to come, but first turning and returning, cuts from this year, concluding with the strangeness and malice found in Franz Kafka:
Looking back, facing forward (11/1):
Disorientation and dysregulation of people [are] mirrored in a planet that is out of balance.
American exceptionalism is … exceptional. So many predictions, so little clarity, but whatever is happening, it is safe to assume that there is a considerable widening aperture of possibility.
Instead of the ‘flying geese’ model, China has adopted the ‘Pacman approach’ to economic development and security: it will eat as much as it can. Low end manufacturing through to high tech, coal to solar, anything and everything.
‘Moral decay’ is a powerful, precise term here and speaks more broadly to our present.
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In media res, in the style of immediacy (16/1):
‘At a certain speed, the speed of information, things lose their sense.’ Indeed. We are all in Baudrillard’s world now. At this point, we circle back to polycrisis being partly about a breakdown in our capacity to know. And reflect. And communicate.
Acknowledging these concerns and problems, there remains strong analytical grounds for judging the present moment as a kind of mirror or doppelganger of 1848 or 1989, a pivot on which history may or may not turn.
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Our digital existence disintermediates and disorientates, trapping us in immediacy and reactivity. And yet, it is possible to make certain judgements in real time, for some things one does not need to ‘wait and see’. One can recognise and judge destructive and stupid behaviour for what it is, as it happens.
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The brutal and the stupid (5/3):
Brittleness makes breaking more likely, one can be shocked by the shocking, but whether one should be surprised by it is a different matter. If there is a constant refrain by someone that, ‘On gaining power, I will do X and Y’, then is it surprising that, when a certain actor gains power, they indeed proceed to do X and Y? One cannot claim there have not been warnings.
The more the contents of our world move onto and into the digital realm, the more that we are beholden to those atop the cloud. We forget this at our peril, a world of algorithms and autoplay will not be one of our choosing.
Given how widely we rely on and celebrate technologies that encourage the banal and the kitsch, while actively eroding our capacity to engage in complex thought, should we really be so surprised or shocked that we find ourselves in a world of the brutally stupid and stupid brutality?
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Values all the way down (18/3):
Confused, overloaded, we stumble from update to update, constantly refreshing, all the while reducing our individual and collective capacities to comprehend and respond. The world is maxing out, and maxed, yet the response is to double down and double up. Cartoon villains makes it easier to blame ‘them’, not ‘us’, but escalation is a dance that requires partners.
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Last year, Hu Wenhui, an editor in Guangzhou, asked: ‘How should those unfortunate enough to encounter the garbage time of history conduct themselves?’
Good question. Perhaps two heuristics that might help:
The most direct is one of the insights from computer science that really is applicable to politics, economics and society: garbage in, garbage out (GIGO).
Combine Occam’s Razor with ‘if it looks like a duck…’, and from this: if it looks brutally stupid and/or stupidly brutal, then that is most likely what it is.
For of all us (un)fortunate enough, how to conduct ourselves?
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Polycrisis: redux, deluxe (8/4):
There is something quite remarkable how we seem to be threatened on the one side by incredibly stupid behaviours and decisions, and on the other side, the risk of all-powerful and all-knowing AI to rule them all. Real and artificial, intelligence and stupidity, all loop together in a demented, deformed Möbius strip.
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One can assume moral decay works the same as in other complex systems: it is non-linear, with feedback loops and tipping points that trigger abrupt and/or irreversible changes. Simply put: moral decay deepens, it spreads at a quickening pace.
Conditions of subpar and subprime multipolarity, a world of rivalrous forms of incapacity and vulnerability. The weak do what they can, the weakest do what they must. Or is that simply weak logic?
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Big tech, big mistakes (23/5):
Silicon Valley wears a thinly made human mask to conceal the faceless face beneath.
Following Lewis, in the age of data, evil is computed and executed in the cloud, processed by racks of servers humming quietly in carefully cooled data centres.
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AI will likely be highly deflationary in terms of producing content (words, images, music etc), but it might generate something like hyper-inflation for meaning. The process is roughly comparable: the destruction of value through over-supply.
There is a tendency to separate out events across different sectors and regions, but when looking back on this decade, it will be important to recognise that the arrival of LLMs was coterminous with the COVID-19 pandemic. There was an overlap here we tend to forget about. Both experiences were - and remain - profoundly disorientating and disordering. In different ways, each has challenged and changed expectations about what is possible and what the future holds. These experiences and changes have left us feeling more insecure, more uncertain.
John Maynard Keynes wrote: ‘There is no subtler, no surer means of overturning the existing basis of society than to debauch the currency.’ And the best way to destroy culture is to debauch symbols and representations.
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Academia in an interregnum (31/7):
My sense is that one of the only credible ways of adapting to the rapid and unchecked encroachment of LLMs is a conscious emphasis on the aspects of writing that are more distinctive and less easily predictable. A response in the form of a rearguard action that celebrates the human present in thought and word.
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…it is increasingly unsatisfactory to continue gesturing towards an ‘interregnum’ and the ‘end of the liberal international order’. Rather, there is need to reconcile such developments with thought and practice, and to look for signs of what is congealing. From debt to drones, gold to GPUs, manufacturing to markets, all these hockey sticks speak to new conditions forming. Amidst all the noise, we need to identify the signals and start trying to sketch out what is taking shape.
Whether we want it or not - and most of us do not - we are stuck in bad bipolarity. The reason for this is simple enough: it is impossible to avoid what the US and China do and will, their choices and chances reverberate across the globe. And so, the vast majority of the world - characters, collectivities, companies, countries - are increasingly caught in an unforgiving pincer movement undertaken by these duelling not-so-great powers, unattractive poles that still attract.
Compared to the relative conformity of the post-Cold War neoliberal era, what we are now seeing is more difference, with the two countries effectively placing different bets.
Both routes offer the promise of extreme power imbalances and considerable deflation at the price of human and societal stability.
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During a period of regime change, the discomfort comes from not simply recognising shifts taking place but following the logic of such observations.
The challenge is figuring out what is coming next. And this year has offered plenty of indicators of what possible orders, practices and trends that are forming and being willed into existence.
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The commonplace term ‘Kafkaesque’ means the much more distorted, demented, deranged features of his tales tend to be underappreciated. An ‘old manuscript’ of Kafka’s presented in his collected works:
It looks as if much had been neglected in our country’s system of defense. We have not concerned ourselves with it until now and have gone about our daily work; but things that have been happening recently begin to trouble us.
I have a cobbler’s workshop in the square that lies before the Emperor’s palace. Scarcely have I taken my shutters down, at the first glimmer of dawn, when I see armed soldiers already posted in the mouth of every street opening on the square. But these soldiers are not ours, they are obviously nomads from the North. In some way that is incomprehensible to me they have pushed right into the capital, although it is a long way from the frontier. At any rate, here they are; it seems that every morning there are more of them.
As is their nature, they camp under the open sky, for they abominate dwelling houses. They busy themselves sharpening swords, whittling arrows, and practicing horsemanship. This peaceful square, which was always kept so scrupulously clean, they have made literally into a stable. We do try every now and then to run out of our shops and clear away at least the worst of the filth, but this happens less and less often, for the labor is in vain and brings us besides into danger of falling under the hoofs of the wild horses or of being crippled with lashes from the whips.
Speech with the nomads is impossible. They do not know our language, indeed they hardly have a language of their own. They communicate with each other much as jackdaws do. A screeching as of jackdaws is always in our ears. Our way of living and our institutions they neither understand nor care to understand. And so they are unwilling to make sense even out of our sign language. You can gesture at them till you dislocate your jaws and your wrists and still they will not have understood you and will never understand. They often make grimaces; then the whites of their eyes turn up and foam gathers on their lips, but they do not mean anything by that, not even a threat; they do it because it is their nature to do it. Whatever they need, they take. You cannot call it taking by force. They grab at something and you simply stand aside and leave them to it.
From my stock, too, they have taken many good articles. But I cannot complain when I see how the butcher, for instance, suffers across the street. As soon as he brings in any meat the nomads snatch it all from him and gobble it up. Even their horses devour flesh; often enough a horseman and his horse are lying side by side, both of them gnawing at the same joint, one at either end. The butcher is nervous and does not dare to stop his deliveries of meat. We understand that, however, and subscribe money to keep him going. If the nomads got no meat, who knows what they might think of doing; who knows anyhow what they may think of, even though they get meat every day.
Not long ago the butcher thought he might at least spare himself the trouble of slaughtering, and so one morning he brought along a live ox. But he will never dare to do that again. I lay for a whole hour flat on the floor at the back of my workshop with my head muffled in all the clothes and rugs and pillows I had simply to keep from hearing the bellowing of that ox, which the nomads were leaping on from all sides, tearing morsels out of its living flesh with their teeth. It had been quiet for a long time before I risked coming out; they were lying overcome around the remains of the carcass like drunkards around a wine cask.
This was the occasion when I fancied I actually saw the Emperor himself at a window of the palace; usually he never enters these outer rooms but spends all his time in the innermost garden; yet on this occasion he was standing, or so at least it seemed to me, at one of the windows, watching with bent head the goings-on before his residence.
‘What is going to happen?’ we all ask ourselves. ‘How long can we endure this burden and torment? The Emperor’s palace has drawn the nomads here but does not know how to drive them away again. The gate stays shut; the guards, who used to be always marching out and in with ceremony, keep close behind barred windows. It is left to us artisans and tradesmen to save our country; but we are not equal to such a task; nor have we ever claimed to be capable of it. This is a misunderstanding of some kind; and it will be the ruin of us.’