Subscriber Commentary & Review Thread (#14)

Kenneth Clark: Terrorist; the politics of crisis; globalization and the Taliban; TikTok accelerationism and Wang Huning

Hello everyone, welcome to the 14th subscriber thread. For newcomers, I use these threads to share a wide assortment of the more interesting things I can remember reading over the last month. Usually they have a connection to the general themes explored here at The Upheaval. Sometimes they’re just entertaining. But in any case the comments are for the community (you) to discuss whatever you want. I do want to hear from you, and aim to be as engaged in the comments section of these threads as I can be.

First a quick heads up: Substack Inc. is currently testing some new features for international users, and I’m included in the Substack features test group, so these may show up for you over the next few months. These include pricing in local currencies (rather than USD), potential price adjustments based on local purchasing power, and alternative payment options beyond credit cards. I will have no control over this, but I want to make you aware in advance so that you aren’t surprised by any changes. Overall I’m pleased with this direction that Substack is exploring, as I think it could be quite helpful for some readers outside of the United States who have wanted to subscribe but have had trouble doing so.

Now, let’s get right into it…

1. The Global Politics of Fear and Crisis

Douglass Murray, “Can you really be radicalised by Great British Railway Journeys?” (The Spectator)

The British government is among the most dedicated in the world when it comes to keeping its people safe… from thinking the wrong thoughts. Which is why it runs “Prevent,” a program to prevent terrorism by encouraging people to rat out their neighbors to counter-terrorism police for wrong-think, as well as using behavioral analysis to pre-identify dangerous extremists to monitor. Recently some documents from Prevent became public as part of an official review, and, as Douglass Murray reports here, the factors designated evidence of “extremism” are rather interesting…

When I first saw these documents I felt a sort of white-hot anger. But then I read on and saw that these same taxpayer-funded fools provide lists of other books shared by people who have sympathies with the ‘far-right and Brexit’. Key signs that people have fallen into this abyss include watching the Kenneth Clark TV series Civilisation, The Thick of It and Great British Railway Journeys. I need to stress again that I am not making this up. This has all been done on your dime and mine in order to stop ‘extremism’ in these islands.

There is also a reading list of historical texts which produce red flags to RICU. These include Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, as well as works by Thomas Carlyle and Adam Smith. Elsewhere RICU warns that radicalisation could occur from books by authors including C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Aldous Huxley and Joseph Conrad. I kid you not, though it seems that all satire is dead, but the list of suspect books also includes 1984 by George Orwell.

Kenneth Clark you say? Well if Ed West ever stops publishing for more than a week we should probably just assume he’s been hauled off to an MI5 black site somewhere. But, I mean, honestly this is all completely understandable: anyone who consumes some real history, let alone Lewis and Orwell, really is liable to be at least a little bit radicalized against the relentlessly ham-fisted, malevolent idiocy of the post-modern regime…

Thomas Fazi, “The Rise of the Biosecurity Complex” (Compact)

This is a rather unsettling piece by the left-wing author Thomas Fazi on how fear and crisis have become central to governance around the world, and, moreover, how this obviously incentivizes a transition from just obsessively preparing for possible crises to scripting those crises in advance (whether deliberately, as in a conspiracy, or because mass narrative generates its own collective momentum towards making whatever is feared a reality).

In such a regime, “crisis” is the norm, the default starting point for all politics. Far from being a rational response to an objective reality, this narrative of permanent crisis or emergency should be understood as a way of shaping reality, and more specifically as one of the main tools through which Western ruling elites have attempted to overcome neoliberalism’s intrinsic tendencies toward stagnation and polarization, and its inability to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms.

In his 2022 book, States of Emergency, the Dutch political scientist Kees van der Pijl traces the roots of this crisis-led, fear-based regime to the end of the Cold War. The disappearance of the Soviet bloc and communism—the adversary that had given unity and purpose to the West for more than 30 years—exposed a moral and ideological void that threw the Atlantic ruling class into an existential crisis, despite the triumphant proclamation of the end of history. Having abandoned the rational class compromise of the postwar “Keynesian” era in favor of an aggressive class war from above, and having no legitimating symbolic reservoir, or “secular theology,” to draw from beyond nihilistic consumerism and individualism, the question for Western elites arose as to how to get the majority to accept being ruled by an increasingly small minority. The answer they came up with was fear.

Meanwhile, in London…

For the OG on states of emergency, however, see: Carl Schmitt.

Morgoth, “The Weird Duality of the Modern Airport” (Substack)

Speaking of fear and the security state, this is an evocative essay on how the airport has come to embody the bizarre combination of “Orwellian biosecurity meets Huxleyian indulgence” that is the hallmark of our modern globalized world: the dehumanizing humiliation ritual of the security line, followed immediately by the in-your-face glamorous consumerism of the duty-free zone’s designer shops, all of which seem to be the same no matter where you are on the globe. This duality is embodied in the airport – a place that is really a “non-place”:

French philosopher Mark Auge has developed a concept that he calls “non-places” to describe the spaces created by Globalization which are not meant to be dwelt in but passed through. The airport, the train station, the waiting room, or the bus. These spaces are devoid of identity, personal attachment, and sense of place. They are non-places, the same the world over. Because the non-place exists as a conduit rather than a place to be dwelt in, its function is to operate and process, to guide and sign-post, nudge, and direct.

The subject within the non-place is disincentivized from thinking or acting independently of the process of which they are now a part. They will sit where directed, walk where instructed, and acquiesce to what the functioning of the system requires. The speed of the flow of human bodies is also out of the subject’s control, and the potential for causing a disruption in the process via a malfunctioning ticket or gate garners a low-level panic in the subject who wishes to pass through the non-place on autopilot.

The non-place replaces the Human with the efficiency of the Machine, and so they cannot be anything but dehumanizing. But the trademark of globalist modernity is that every year more and more of the various “places” of life are colonized and replaced by non-places.

See: Our prophets of Technocratic Nihilism…

2. The Culture Section: “There’s No Escape” Edition

David Oks, “The West Lives On in the Taliban’s Afghanistan” (Palladium)

A uniquely fascinating report from a Palladium magazine correspondent’s travels in post-American Afghanistan:

Thus the Taliban has cemented its place in Afghan history. By dissolving the patchwork of warlord fiefdoms that made up the previous regime and uniting the country under one government, the Taliban had—for all its backward-looking inclinations—already done much to modernize a still-archaic country. Theirs was a golden opportunity: if anyone could transform a country so impervious to intervention from above or outside, it was them.

And yet I could not help but detect a surprising fragility to Taliban rule. The Taliban had intrigued me because they, alone among the regimes of the global periphery, seemed capable of articulating an alternative civilizational vision, one that was not merely an antithesis or restatement of Western modernity. I had come to Afghanistan because I wanted to see something truly different from the West. But even in the Islamic Emirate, I could sense a creeping Westernization.

I saw it, above all else, in many local Afghans whom I met and befriended. These were not Western liberals: they had friends among the Taliban, and were quick to defend regime decisions I found abhorrent, like the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas. But these subjects of the Islamic Emirate could not be kept from watching Stranger Things or Game of Thrones or Japanese anime; they had a better knowledge of Breaking Bad than I did. On Twitter—they, like so many Afghans, were avid users—shared soyjack memes and called themselves “sigma males.” They talked about feminism, “LGBTQ,” and pronouns—strange things to complain about in a country where women can’t go to school. They were becoming Westerners: culture war, America’s most successful soft-power export, was their induction. The younger members of the Taliban, online enough to follow Andrew Tate, were not immune.

And while these young men were still a tiny minority, they were also the bleeding edge. Social modernity is not kept out by the barrel of a gun: the internet is the ultimate vector of Westernization. Status flows downward, and ostentatiously so in a country as peripheral as Afghanistan. The U.S. was gone, but American culture was still the thing to imitate. In “the best steakhouse in Kabul,” the chef mimicked Salt Bae, and my friends joked with me about whether I could be in Manhattan. In the cafés, we could play Mortal Kombat while drinking coffee and listening to Western music. On Valentine’s Day—the celebration of which is forbidden in Islam—peddlers in the streets of Kabul were selling heart-shaped balloons. It wasn’t America, but it was trying.

The Taliban won the war; but in the long run, the social modernity they so bitterly resisted is on its way.

Sorry, I guess there’s really no escape, even in the Hindu Kush. There may be no more powerful force on the planet than the culture of liberal modernity embodied and propagated by America.

The rest is worth reading in full. And check out Palladium in general; they’re now regularly putting out some of the most unique and interesting writing in media. Like this piece interviewing a former SAS officer who became a soldier of fortune in Africa.

Bonus Read: This darkly amusing Wall Street Journal story about a Somali immigrant family unsuccessfully trying to rescue their son from becoming a broken American man-child.

Alex Kaschuta, “A new and improved Iron Curtain?” (Substack)

This also felt related:

One of the more common questions I get as someone who both hails from and has chosen to live in Eastern Europe is if it’s conservative as advertised.

I’m a stone’s throw from the infamous illiberal democracy of Hungary and a half a day’s drive from the Catholic empire of Poland, and I live in Romania, a country where, according to the last census in 2022, about 84% of people were practicing Christians, overwhelmingly within the strict and ritual-heavy Orthodox rite. And after the experience of about half a century of bitter communism, it’s clear that there must be natural, in-built defenses to a lot of the madness pervading the West here.

Yet a few days ago, a friend was complaining that she was about to have a very strange meeting at work. A middle-aged male colleague got breast implants, wears a wig, and wants to be referred to as “Angela.” Like many, maybe most talented Romanians who haven’t left the country, she works at a multinational company. They are on board with this, of course, because the alternative, even here, would be a lawsuit and the kind of bad PR no company wants to deal with. So, they’ve prepped her and her colleagues well in advance with sensitivity training so nobody rocks the boat. She’ll smile and nod because the show must go on. 

Anecdotes like this one are creeping up everywhere lately. The forces at play in Romania, and as far as I can tell, in the other countries of Eastern Europe, are the same ones working their liquefying magic in the West. It should not be surprising, there is no cultural border between the West (THE culture) and the culture of each individual Eastern European country. The only barrier is language, for now.

…

As long as the West keeps its elite operating system the same, this is what we get as well. Maybe a local flavor, maybe with more patchy implementation, a bit louder, and with more gesticulation - but this is now the status hierarchy and the conscience of the world. If the leading lights of the West are race-, gender- or sexuality-obsessed, we will be so as well.

Sad. But at least someday the Taliban will feel at “home” as they pass through the Bucharest airport.

On the other hand maybe these days…

3. Globalization’s Not What it Once Was?

Adam Tooze, “Chartbook #198 Globalization: The shifting patchwork” (Substack)

These are some very interesting charts from Chartbook:

So there seems to be some empirical evidence that deglobalization is happening. So maybe there’s a chance the future will be different than the gleaming airport utopia the globalists dream of. Also, is everything now really just still footnotes to the crisis of 2008?

Tangentially Related: This podcast between Andrew Sullivan and the philosopher John Gray is a really good conversation:

John Gray On The Dusk Of Western Liberalism

4. The Tech Bomb Goes Tik, Tok…

Gurwinder, “TikTok is a Time Bomb” (Substack)

Apparently sometimes an essay can successfully combine Chinese mastermind Wang Huning, crazy neoreactionary accelerationist Nick Land, and TikTok-induced brain damage, and I’m really here for it.

For Wang [Huning], then, the US’s unprecedented technological progress is leading it into a chasm. Every new microchip, TV, and automobile only distracts and sedates Americans further. As Wang writes in his book, “it is not the people who master the technology, but the technology that masters the people.” Though these words are 30 years old, they could easily have been talking about social media addiction.

For Xi and the CCP, eliminating “decadent” TikTok-style content from China is a matter of survival, because such content is considered a herald of nihilism, a regression of humans back to beasts, a symptom of the West’s terminal illness that must be prevented from metastasizing to China. And yet, while cracking down on this content domestically, China has continued to allow its export internationally…

…

At first glance the British philosopher Nick Land could hardly be more different from Wang Huning. Wang rose to prominence by being dour, discreet, and composed, while Land rose to prominence by ranting about cyborg apocalypses while out of his mind on weed and speed. In the late 1990s Land moved into a house once owned by the Satanist libertine Aleister Crowley (half a mile from where I grew up), and there he apparently binged on drugs and scrawled occult diagrams on the walls. At nearby Warwick University where he taught, his lectures were often bizarre (one infamous “lesson” consisted of Land lying on the floor, croaking into a mic, while frenetic jungle music pulsed in the background.)

Land’s own life followed the same course he envisioned for the liberal West; following years of high productivity, he fell into nihilism and the decadence of rampant drug use, which drove him to a nervous breakdown. Upon recovering in 2002, he embraced authoritarianism, moved to Shanghai, and began writing for Chinese state media outlets like China Daily and the Shanghai Star.

A few years after Land moved to China, talk of accelerationism began to emerge on the Chinese web, where it’s become known by its Chinese name, jiasuzhuyi (加速主义). The term has caught on among Chinese democracy advocates, many of whom view the CCP as the runaway AI, hurtling toward greater tyranny; they even refer to Xi as “Accelerator-in-Chief” (总加速师).

…

As for the CCP itself, it’s known to have viewed former US president Donald Trump as the “Accelerator-in-Chief,” or, more accurately, “Chuan Jianguo” (川建国: literally “Build China Trump”) because he was perceived as helping China by accelerating the West’s decline. For this reason, support of him was encouraged. The CCP is also known to have engaged in jiasuzhuyi more directly; for instance, during the 2020 US race riots, China used Western social media platforms to douse accelerant over US racial tensions.

But the use of TikTok as an accelerant is a whole new scale of accelerationism, one much closer to Land’s original, apocalyptic vision. Liberal capitalism is about making people work in order to obtain pleasurable things, and for decades it’s been moving toward shortening the delay between desire and gratification, because that’s what consumers want.

…

So, the CCP has both the means and the motive to help the West defeat itself, and part of this could conceivably involve the use of TikTok to accelerate liberal capitalism by closing the gap between desire and gratification.

Now, it could be argued that we have no hard evidence of the CCP’s intentions, only a set of indications. However, ultimately the CCP’s intentions are irrelevant. Accelerationism can’t alter an outcome, only hasten it. And TikTok, whether or not it’s actively intended as a weapon, is only moving the West further along the course it’s long been headed: toward more effortless pleasure, and resulting cognitive decline.

The problem, therefore, is not China, but us. America Against America. If TikTok is not a murder weapon, then it’s a suicide weapon. China has given the West the means to kill itself, but the death wish is wholly the West’s.

Brad, “The Digital Big Bang” (Substack)

A good reminder on how significant the information revolution has been to our general upheaval:

Whereas before the internet, dominant media of the 20th century operated within a system of centralized, one-way news dissemination — meaning to consume the news was to ingest a diet of information pre-selected by elites in control of the institutions of the industrial age — after the internet, information was no longer predominantly limited to a newspaper, the 10 o’clock roundup, and the expert class. Nor was it dispensed one to many via a rigid, top down pyramid. The elites had always played an intermediary role in the way citizens received and processed contemporaneous information, but the internet’s sheer speed and scope blurred the very definition of “news” and upended the concept of authority as a belief system anointing the chosen few.

This is why the most portentous consequence of the cataclysmic expansion of information and communication technology caused by the inception of the internet — what I like to call the “digital big bang” — has been the rapid dissolution of institutional authority and elite power. An abundance of information, in this case a limitless, infinite influx, greatly diminished the authoritative aura of previously select sources. The elite class went from enjoying what might as well have been a monopoly on a relatively tiny info-sphere (which in turn allowed a false pretense of moral certainty) to finding itself smack dab in the middle of an epistemic free-for-all.

It’s impossible to overemphasize how consequential this has been.

…

The internet’s democratization of information also brought with it a nasty little curve ball in the form of user-generated content and independent sources. Once-esteemed custodians of information suddenly found themselves besieged by millions of new players looking for a seat in the members-only temple of authority, and these filthy laymen — uncouth, unaccredited, PhD-less mediocrities the lot of them — had the nerve to think that they, too, could assume the coveted role of Truth Guardian.

As the early aughts gave way to the second decade of the digital era, the shepherds grew agitated with their new, relatively disenfranchised social station.

…

Increasingly evident schemes of control over the info-sphere and revelations from the Twitter Files illustrate the same thing that Putin’s attempt to censor all non-Russian information about what’s really happening in Ukraine does: Today, more so than ever before, power is just as much about force as it is controlling information. And thanks to the internet, the public’s relationship to power, authority, and information is likely to remain in a permanent state of flux.

Related: “Disinformation Inc: State Department bankrolls group secretly blacklisting conservative media” (Washington Examiner)

Meanwhile, in Clown World: “The United States Assumes the 2023 Chairship of the Freedom Online Coalition” (State Department)

The FOC is a coalition of governments working together to support internet freedom and promote respect for human rights, including the freedoms of expression, association, and peaceful assembly, as well as privacy rights, both online and offline.

5. The Grab Bag:

“Xi puts top brain in charge of Taiwan unification strategy” (Nikkei Asia) – Guess what, Wang Huning is back.

“CSIS documents reveal Chinese strategy to influence Canada’s 2021 election” (The Globe and Mail) – Turns out Tianjin Trudeau deliberately ignored Chinese influence operations meant to help his Liberal party in the last election. So now he might have to have the government investigate itself for wrongdoing like he did after debanking the truckers.

James Billot, “Bank of England Deputy Governor: digital pound is ‘likely’” (UnHerd), and “Britons face 20,000 digital pound cap under Bank of England plan” (Reuters) – Just say no to CBDCs, kids.

Slavoj Žižek, “Wokeness Is Here To Stay” (Compact) – While this is as badly written as is usual from the man, I honestly can’t recall the last time I agreed with anything Slavoj Žižek said… world’s truly all F-k’d up ya’ll, I’m telling you.

Thomas Hackett, “The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex” (RCI) – Yes, it’s everywhere now, and it won’t be going away anytime soon.

Matthew Crawford, “The corruption of California” (UnHerd) – “You, tender reader, might be scandalised by the ways of California’s DMV, but such a response is a hangover from another era. Under conditions of bureaucratic dysfunction typical of a party-state, corruption isn’t a problem, it is the solution.” You might be better off just learning how to live like a wise Brazilian or South African sooner rather than later.

Pedro Gonzalez, “The Poison Train: East Palestine and the Derailment of Norfolk Southern 32N” (Substack) – Great on-the-ground account of the train derailment in Ohio, and the corruption that enabled it and is already at work in trying to cover it up.

R.R. Reno, “Cursed by the Boomers” (First Things) – A deeply insightful essay on why the loss of a “tragic realism” about the nature of Man and our world has helped lead Boomer-generation leaders into decades of moralistic crusades, including providing an excuse for (badly) wielding raw power abroad and calling it peace.

Mary Harrington, “Culture as Metastasis” (Substack) – Why Tolkien reboots are like cancer. Also, fake meat. By the way, Mary has a new book out in the UK, and it looks spicy. I’ll aim to do a review of it around its US release in April.

And finally: my own interview in the Hungarian Conservative, if you missed that.

Do feel free to leave a comment or suggestion below. And thanks again to all of you subscribers for your continued support!