Eruditorum Press

Our Imposter Syndrome cancels out our Dunning-Kruger

Phil Sandifer’s Hugo Ballot

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Let me start by making something as clear as I possibly can.

This is not a slate. These are not recommendations. If you submit a Hugo ballot that looks exactly like this you are a deeply lame human being who should feel bad about yourself.

That said, I maintain my position that talking openly about our Hugo preferences and thoughts is the best way to combat attempts to hijack the Hugos while we wait for E Pluribus Hugo to pass in August. And probably beyond that, because frankly, it’s just a good idea to have a public conversation so that more casual fans who want to play the Game of Rockets can do so.

So here we go, with selected commentary. Retro Hugos will be done another day.

 

Best Novel

The Fifth Season (N.K. Jemisin)

Easily the best of the pack here. Really hoping Patreon backers pick it for a bonus essay. This is a genuine masterpiece with a last line almost as astonishing as its first.

The Dark Forest (Cixin Liu)

Better than the first volume, as I’ve said, and the first volume was a perfectly acceptable Hugo winner.

The Vorrh (Brian Catling)

I’ve been switching this and Seveneves back and forth repeatedly, and may continue to do so as the voting deadline approaches. Or maybe I’ll drop the next one.

The Shepherd’s Crown (Terry Pratchett)

I admit this as a ridiculously sentimental pick that would not be on my ballot were it not the author’s last book. Still, a Hugo ballot without it feels unimaginable to me.

The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi)

Brutally materialist SF.

 

Novella

Chasm (Nick Land)

More interesting and compelling right-wing science fiction than literally anything on the ballot last year. The failure of the Puppies to nominate Phyl-Undhu last year is really the best demonstration available of how, much like “Men’s Rights Advocates” do not actually advocate for the rights of men so much as attack women, they do not actually advocate for a right-wing literature so much as complain that people enjoy different books than them. I mean, Land’s even a blithering racist. What more could they possibly want?

Witches of Lynchford (Paul Cornell)

As a Paul Cornell fan who eagerly awaited the release of No Future, it’s thrilling to see him killing it in the mainstream.

Binti (Nnedi Okorafor)

I went looking for some compelling afrofuturism, because this seemed like a really good year to honor it. Man did I find it.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (Kai Ashante Wilson)

Rolling in the Deep (Mira Grant)

 

Novelette

An Evolutionary Myth (Bo-Young Kim)

Stumbled on this late while trawling the Hugo Nominees Wikia for a fifth choice, and was absolutely blown away by it. Easily my pick of the five.

Elektrograd: Rusted Blood (Warren Ellis)

The Dusty Hat (China Mieville)

The Corpse Archives (Kameron Hurley)

The Long Goodnight of Violet Wild (Catherynne M. Valente)

 

Short Story

Pocosin (Ursula Vernon)

Another category with a clear and unquestionable frontrunner for me, this is one of my favorite authors at her best.…

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“Set course for home”: Cardassians

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The imaginatively titled “Cardassians” is a solid story about innocent bystanders whose lives are upended by political gerrymandering. There are the Cardassian War Orphans, most notably the young Rugal, who are ripped away from the lives and families they know on Bajor in order to cover up a potential scandal involving a number of military higher-ups. But there is also the crew of Deep Space 9, namely Commander Sisko, who end up tasked with the unpleasant duty of uprooting these children from their homes as part of their jobs in order to avoid a diplomatic incident.

Like last season’s “Progress”, “Cardassians” examines the repercussions of life for administrators and local officials trying to do their best to represent their people, but who are ultimately at the whims of powerful governments and other systems of centralized authority who wish to consolidate power regardless of whether or not it serves the best interests of those who live under them. There’s no way to argue that being forcibly relocated to Cardassia, a planetary society he fears, distrusts and doesn’t even know, is going to be a net benefit for Rugal, so I’m not going to address it. Apart from the false equivalence in critiquing Rugal’s hatred of the Cardassians by paralleling it with the decades of brutal oppression those selfsame people inflicted on the Bajorans, there’s also the rather uglier implication that adopted children are always better off with their biological parents in every circumstance (the episode by no means endorses this perspective, but it doesn’t do enough to refute it either). But ultimately, this is a story about the Deep Space 9 crew having their hands tied in order to prevent them from making the obviously correct choice and exploring how to react to a situation like that.

The regulars themselves are a slightly mixed bag on this front…Commander Sisko is generally excellent, as are Garak and Doctor Bashir, but I disagree with some of how Miles O’Brien is written. His speech to Rugal near the end about how it’s wrong to write off an entire people with generalizations, stating that he himself has met some Cardassians he liked and some he didn’t, is beautiful knowing his backstory and an utterly perfect Star Trek moment. Or at least it would be if the chief’s history with the Federation-Cardassian War and the dismissive speciesist feelings he once suffered as a result of it were left unspoken and implied. Instead, the scene earlier in the episode where Miles expresses concern to Keiko about Molly associating with Rugal sort of undermines that moment’s effectiveness for me.

I know it was meant to show moral ambiguity and that racism is difficult to overcome overnight and how even good people can slip back into bad habits from time to time. But the thing is I don’t agree that was a good call. That’s not a Star Trek: The Next Generation message. This series is supposed to be showing us how we can *overcome* our various foibles and vices.…

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Eco, Ur-Fascism, and Dogs

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Jack, as news of Umberto Eco’s death was breaking last night, Tweeted a link to his “Ur-Fascism” essay, which he is quite right to say is brilliant and worth (re)reading. To my deep annoyance I first came across it after I had written “Guided by the Beauty of Their Weapons” and had used an ad hoc definition of “fascism” for a key section when I could have just used Eco’s. 

For this revisions were invented, of course, and when reworking the essay for the book version (still for sale, by the way) I did just that. So since it’s relevant to the times and a good day to honor one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century, here’s the revised “On Fascism” section of the title essay, in which I argue that the Sad/Rabid Puppies movements are accurately described as “fascist.” 

RIP Umberto Eco.

Part Four: On Fascism

I mentioned at the outset that this was not going to be a piece that made much of an effort to convince fascists not to be fascists. Here this becomes particularly important. I am not going to bother trying to refute the arguments that Theodore Beale has made for his positions. I am assuming, at this point, that you, as a reader, are in no way on the fence about fascism, that it is not a viewpoint you are seriously considering, and that you are appalled at Theodore Beale’s beliefs and disturbed by the fact that he has influenced a major and historic literary award.

Therefore, let’s not engage Beale on his own terms. The easiest mistake to make when trying to understand fascists is to think that they are best described in terms of a philosophy—as though fascism is a set of tenets and beliefs. This is a mistake that largely benefits fascists, who are generally disinclined to actually call themselves fascists, since they recognize that, much like “Nazis,” it’s not exactly a label that does a great sales job. On top of that, fascists have a remarkably well-developed vocabulary of jargon and a propensity for verbose arguments that puts me to shame. What this means is that if you attempt to get into some sort of practical, content-based argument with a fascist, you will suddenly find yourself staring down a thirty-item bulleted list with frequent citations to barely relevant and inaccurately described historical events, which, should you fail to address even one sub-point, you will be declared to have lost the debate by the fascist and the mob of a dozen people on Twitter who suddenly popped up the moment you started arguing with him. (And it’s always a him.)

In other words, this is manifestly neither a refutation of Beale’s positions nor of fascism in general. Rather, it’s an attempt to understand the “intellectual” traditions Beale follows, both explicitly and implicitly.

As a term, “fascism” is admittedly one whose definitions have become exceedingly broad. There are, these days, few adherents to the early 20th century fascist movements headed by Benito Mussolini and Francisco Franco in Italy and Spain, for instance.…

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Hey, Did You Hear The One About The Nuns? (The Last War in Albion Book Two Part Twenty-Seven: Nemesis)

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Figure 938: Miracleman throws a car full of people at Kid Miracleman. (Written by Alan Moore, art by John Totleben, from Miracleman #15, 1988)

Previously in The Last War in Albion: Coming to the end of his run on Miracleman, Moore decided to grapple with as brutally realistic a portrayal of a superhero fight as he could imagine – to actually show what such a battle would mean for the world in which it took place.

Moore had grappled with some of this in the first Miracleman/Kid Miracleman fight when, for instance, Kid Miracleman hurls a baby through the air in the middle of the fight, distracting Miracleman by throwing a baby at a nearby building, which Miracleman of course saves, but with the note that he’s broken a couple of the baby’s ribs because of the speed he was traveling, a grimly funny note of realism in a standard superhero trope. There’s a not entirely dissimilar moment in Miracleman #15 when Miracleman, in another fairly standard superhero punch-up moment, picks up a car and throws it at Kid Miracleman. “My apologists have claimed the car that I first hurled at Bates was empty, those who’d been inside having all previously escaped,” he narrates. “I’m sorry, but that isn’t true,” the final caption box changing color to be yellow on black – Bates’s colors. The shift in tone – from a winking subversion of the “superheroes save everybody” to a stark-faced refusal to offer any sort of salvation at all – is stunning.

And this is hardly the only such moment in Miracleman #15, an issue that returns over and over again to images of stark brutality. Kid Miracleman, under Moore, had always been portrayed as a brutally sadistic figure, whether in his mocking murder of his secretary in his first appearance “just to show you that I don’t mind doing that sort of thing. In fact, I quite enjoy it” or in his dispatching of the nurse in Miracleman #14. But what is striking – especially for Moore – is that the issue contains almost no textual descriptions of what Kid Miracleman does to London. Early on the narration establishes that Bates spends hours in London before Miracleman and company realize he’s back, and talks about “those hours that he had crammed with centuries of human suffering; those narrow side-streets filled with miles of pain. Having exhausted all the humdrum cruelties known to man quite early in the afternoon he had progressed to innovations unmistakably his own,” and the end narration makes a fleeting and bleak mention of “coral reefs of baby skulls, and worse,” but this is the extent to which Moore uses the written word to frame these depravities into the sort of classic and endlessly quotable lines that had characterized, for instance, Rorschach’s famously bleak narration in Watchmen. There are neither “abattoirs of retarded children” nor “gutters full of blood” to drown the vermin in.

Figure 939: John Totleben’s double page spread of utter carnage.
…

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“A pirate’s life for me”: Gambit, Part II

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Last time on Star Trek: The Next Generation…

“I suppose it’s worth pointing out the possible significance in the fact that the first few acts of “Gambit” chronicle the crew’s search for Captain Picard, missing and presumed murdered, and their efforts to discover the identity of his would-be killer and bring them to justice.” 
“It’s exciting to watch Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Data all try to think around each other and anticipate each other’s moves so as not to put the undercover operation with the pirates or their safety in jeopardy. Pulling it off requires them all to have an absolutely peerless level of intimacy with each other, so this is a really fitting test to give to this crew, especially at this stage in their career. It’s especially noticeable and interesting with Data, who is forced to apply everything he’s learned about human(oid) behaviour and culture in order to ensure he doesn’t let the Enterprise down during his first real stint as acting captain.” 
“There are still some lingering problems, though. For one, it’s a bit annoying that it is once again Captain Picard, Commander Riker and Data who get the majority of the interesting dramatic and strategic stuff. Doctor Crusher gets one scene in the teaser and then never appears again, and, most egregiously, Deanna Troi is reduced to spouting hollow, tin-eared expository dialog when really she ought to be the one doing most of the heavy tactical and psychological lifting.” 
“Also, another thing that bugs me is that for a story about space pirates, these guys really suck at being pirates. Captain Picard is absolutely right when he tells Tallera that Baran is a poor captain because he relies on fear and intimidation. Ruthless though they might have been, pirate ships were famously democratic and egalitarian institutions for their time, and it was most certainly a better career move (from both a financial and safety perspective) for a sailor to sign up with a pirate ship than to enlist in the navy or merchant marine.” 
“Of course this line of thought, as well as Captain Picard’s rather brilliant recursive performance as Galen, just makes me really want to see a Star Trek: The Next Generation AU where the Enterprise crew are a bunch of outlaw space pirates who get their kicks fucking with the big galactic imperial powers.”

And now, the conclusion…

Every great pirate adventure story needs to have a quest to find a secret hidden mystical treasure out on a lost island somewhere. “Gambit” dutifully gives us “The Stone of Gol”, which is brilliantly split into pieces and scattered across the galaxy for aspiring treasure hunters, supervillains and legendary heroes alike to go questing after, just like in all good fantasy RPG video games. It’s a very fitting MacGuffin for the Star Trek: The Next Generation universe’s take on adventure stories because it’s explicitly connected to the most overtly fantasy-coded of their alien races, namely, the Vulcano-Romuloids.…

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Say what you like about the zombie apocalypse, at least you don’t have to go to work on Monday morning

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There are fucking zombies everywhere these days. There are so many fucking zombies around these days that there are things complaining about how many fucking zombies there are around these days everywhere these days. There are so many things complaining about how many fucking zombies there are around these days that we’re on the verge of crossing a kind of things-complaining-about-how-many-fucking-zombies-there-are-around-these-days event horizon, whereupon all the things-complaining-about-how-many-fucking-zombies-there-are-around-these-days will collapse in upon themselves and be crushed to a things-complaining-about-how-many-fucking-zombies-there-are-around-these-days singularity. Or something. Whereupon there will suddenly not be many things-complaining-about-how-many-fucking-zombies-there-are-around-these-days. Or many fucking zombies, for that matter. No more than usual, anyways. No more than before the recession, which is the event which caused the already insane proliferation of zombies to escalate to a kind of meta-proliferation. The zombies will die down. Back to their original, natural level of presence and prominence. The only thing you can be sure of is that The Guardian’s arts/culture opinion writers will notice and announce it as an exciting new development (which they alone have noticed through their unique powers of penetration) exactly three years and eight months after the very last member of the category known as ‘Everyone Else’ already got sick of talking about how there don’t seem to be any zombies around these days.

I’ve said stuff about zombies before (thus adding my name to a long fucking roster)… though I think my stuff about zombies was better than anyone else’s, naturally. Largely because it was mostly about Cybermen. But I do have a couple more little things to say about zombies, or rather about zombie stories.

The first little observation I want to make is about how accommodating they are to having an ‘interesting and novel new spin’ put on them. And about how seldom it is actually done, which I think is telling. No, no, the spins people put on them are so pallid and tentative. Like, make them Nazis. (They have ideology now?) Or do a zombie Osama bin Laden. (Oh how edgy.) Or insert them into Jane Austen (yes, I know – you’re welcome). Oh, Seth Graeme-Smith, you iconoclast you. You’ve figured out a way to make millions of dollars by essentially releasing someone else’s pre-written, public-domain text with your shit smeared over every page.

Why? Why is the ductility of the concept of the zombie so rejected?

It can’t be the fear of diluting the concept. It’s true that zombies are a very pure and simple and clear concept… but the never-ending, always-churning, meat-grinder-cum-wood-chipper-cum-tombola that is/are the culture industries doesn’t usually worry about diluting clear and pure and simple concepts. You wouldn’t have sequels at all if people worried about that. What is any sequel but a dilution of the purity of an original idea? All sequels, and perhaps even more so prequels, are exercises in stamping all over gorgeous unity and wholeness and discreteness with big muddy boots. This is even more marked in sequels or prequels to high-concept stories, i.e. stories which trade in games of rigour about relatively simple rules-frameworks.…

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Comics Reviews (February 17, 2016)

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Avengers Standoff: Welcome to Pleasant Hill

Abysmal. Genuinely, shudderingly awful. Spoilers ahoy. A patchwork of ideas that have been done before, including an ending that not only directly rips off a well-remembered 90s book, but that rips off a well-remembered 90s book that was also drawn by Mark Bagley, right down to the reveal being “he was Baron Zemo all along.” Except Thunderbolts actually sought to do something with its premise, whereas the only idea this has is “well I guess we should do some misdirection and make people think it’s Bucky and Tony Stark.” The thing is, SHIELD trapping superheroes in totalitarian suburbia is actually interesting, whereas SHIELD mind-wiping villians and sticking them in totalitarian suburbia prison is Identity Crisis with the serial number half-filed off. This is insipid, a cash-grab crossover that doesn’t even pretend to have a motivation other than trying to forbid readers from actually picking and choosing among the glut of Avengers books for two months. I can tell you already that nobody is going to read Avengers Standoff in five years. Nobody is going to read it in one year. Shit, nobody should read it next month. I’m sure as fuck not going to. Why would I? I mean, if the choice is “drop both New Avengers and All-New All-Different Avengers, one of which has been serially disappointing me anyway” or “spend an extra $42 in order to follow a complete banality of a crossover?” Yeah. Fuck that.

Digital code: FMC1V5FXB5PX

Sex Criminals #14

That Fraction and Zdarsky steal the “masturbatory” joke that begs to be made about the four page sequence in the middle of this does not really avoid the fact that there’s a four page sequence of the comic openly admitting that it couldn’t get a key narrative beat to actually work right. The killer – I was shocked when I looked to discover that it was only four pages of the comic. It felt vastly longer. Anyway, it’s still Sex Criminals with all the wonder that implies, but this is a duff issue not helped by a recap page that serves more to sell the book to someone who’s already bought it than to remind a reader who may have forgotten the precise relationships among the secondary cast that make up most of what actually happens in this issue. 

Silver Surfer #2

Man, I was all set for this to be low in my rankings and cause for lots of complaining, but instead Slott and Allred make a well-timed digression into the Silver Surfer back catalogue for an issue that serves as a nice reminder of the fact that “it’s Silver Surfer done as Doctor Who with Michael Allred cutting loose on the Kirby homages” is a genuinely delightful premise. 

Digital code: FCMY5SJD89W7

Bitch Planet #7

Another comic that suffers from a huge delay in issues and an insufficient recap page – Whitney has, I’m pretty sure, not appeared since September, the cliffhanger hinges on who she is and what her relationship to the main character is, and yet the recap page neglects to mention her.…

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“Who are You?” Invasive Procedures

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You don’t want to disappoint Commander Sisko, do you?

Wait, you thought I was going to let Star Trek: Deep Space Nine off the hook for being the younger show? Whyever would you think that?

I have held a grudge against “Invasive Procedures” since 1993. Everything about this episode, from top to bottom, from conception to execution, repelled me at every turn from the beginning. At the time, I was only just starting to become a serious fan of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, that is, becoming actually invested in the setting and the characters as opposed to just watching the general aesthetics unfold from a distance with cautious optimism. And though it was still fairly early, I already knew that Jadzia Dax was going to be my favourite character from this cast. I liked Major Kira a lot too and she was the other early standout for me (in fact extremely early on I got the two of them confused) but it was Jadzia’s cool competence and poise that won me over the strongest, So how do you think I felt when the *very first* episode I was cognizant of to deal explicitly with Jadzia’s character was also the one that depicted her at her absolute lowest? It’s the exact same experience I would have rediscovering Tasha Yar on Star Trek: The Next Generation, like history repeating itself again

Somehow it strikes me as a bad sign that, when confronted with a joined character with several lifetimes of experience, the only way the creative team can come up with to convey this concept is to show what it’s like when she becomes un-joined. Emphasis on “she”-You don’t see The Doctor on Doctor Who suddenly unregenerate back to his nascent iteration with the show’s writers giving the excuse that they couldn’t figure out how to get across all his lifetimes of experience without a proof by negative. And you certainly would never see The Doctor reduced to a mewling, vulnerable damsel character to engender sympathy and give the male characters someone to fight for and protect. But that’s literally *all* anyone involved with “Invasive Procedures” talks about when defending their creative decisions: They all talk about how they needed to bring “vulnerability” and “tenderness” to Jadzia in order to “humanize” her and “develop her character”. It’s true that we all have moments of confidence and weakness and that we each have dominant and submissive sides, but that’s not what this story is about: This is a story about taking a strong, confident, independent woman and stripping away all of her strength and agency because the creators thought that made her distant and unrelatable.

And of course it would be Jadzia who would stump these writers. You could bring in Kira as a possible counter argument here by saying that her retaining all her power and authoritativeness cancels out what they do to Jadzia here, but that’s not how that works.…

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Lost Exegesis (House of the Rising Sun) — Part 2

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Part 1 of the essay can be found here. Unlike that part, this one will have spoilers of future episodes.

Watership Down

I have to admit, I was wrong. In the White Rabbit entry I claimed that Watership Down was in four straight episodes. It is not. But have no fear, it will appear again. Nonetheless, we might consider that the book has been “invoked” by virtue of the rabbit on the bus outside the airport terminal where Sun decides to stay with Jin. As such, we will continue to explore this rather delightful tale.

In terms of plot, Part 2 of Watership Down doesn’t have much to do with House of the Rising Sun, but there are a couple of interesting resonances. For example, the rabbits, led by Hazel, form a new warren which they dig out underneath the roots of a massive tree. They call their new home The Honeycombe. So we have a convergence of bee symbolism, the World Tree, and “caves,” just like this episode.

The rabbits make friends with a large bird, Kehaar, who speaks with a thick accent and performs reconnaissance for them. They use this to their advantage when they realize they have no females amongst them (they are all “bucks”) and decide to go raiding other locations to find “does” – to basically steal females from other warrens. Well, one warren is run under martial law, while the other is just a girl’s rabbit hutch on a farm. Two “away teams” split off (hmm). One returns empty-handed, lucky to be alive, thanks to the timely intervention of a train (which is actually kind of how the Island’s “monster” sounds). The other leads to the wounding of their leader, Hazel, who nearly dies before he’s rescued by his brother. After this encounter, he decides he’s going to lead his rabbits to raid the militarized “other” warren and steal their “mothers,” effectively splitting his own “hive” as not everyone agrees with him.

There’s a couple of interesting broader-scale themes that emerge in this part of the book that are relevant to LOST. First, the question is raised on what it’s like to live “naturally,” with the farm-hutch rabbits and the militarized “other” warren used for contrast. And this of course applies to how the Losties are organizing themselves in a “state of nature,” as it were,. What kind of political system are they setting up? Leadership by the most dynamic individuals, for the most part, just like Watership Down’s rabbits, but with everyone pretty much free to do as they please. It’s a question and answer that’s actually brought up by the historical John Locke, so this fits nicely into the larger pattern of philosophical thoughtfulness that LOST has already staked out.

Secondly, there’s the matter of rabbit mythology. After Hazel’s near-death experience, his brother Fiver (the mystic) ruminates on the possibility of “another world”:

“Hrairoo,” said Hazel one evening, “what would we have done without you? We’d none of us be here, would we?”
…

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The Dark Enlightenment of Flint

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A Brief Treatise on the Rules of Thrones will return on February 29th.

Jack Graham notes that “if you want a vision of the future, imagine Flint, Michigan – forever.” The neoreactionary movement, meanwhile has been doing just that for several years. Neoreaction – essentially the pseudo-intellectual wing of the loosely defined alt-right (see also Gamergate, Trump, and the “human biodiversity” crowd) – has been clanking around the fringes of the discourse for a few years now, basically getting started when a software engineer named Curtis Yarvin started a sideline career blogging as Mencius Moldbug in 2007, and gathering proper steam when Nick Land, formerly an academic associated with the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit at the University of Warwick and one of the forefathers of accelerationism, made a dramatic heel turn in the form of an essay called “The Dark Enlightenment” in 2013 in which he, and I’m paraphrasing here, basically concluded that the best hope of a posthuman future where everyone has face tentacles lies in the form of white nationalists. I’m writing a book that’s more or less about them. It’ll be fun.

Anyway, the key detail in all of this is that the catastrophic decision to try to save $4m by switching Flint’s water system over to the Flint river was made by not by elected officials, but by an Emergency Manager, a position created by a 1988 law and expanded dramatically in 2011. The law allows the governor to appoint someone to take charge of a municipal governor if he certifies that the city is suffering from a financial emergency. This Emergency Manager is unelected, but his powers trump those of the elected government; indeed, he can remove elected officials at will. His sole mandate is to balance the budget (My second favorite detail in all of this: he’s forbidden from raising taxes to do it). The sole oversight is the Local Emergency Financial Assistance Loan Board, a similarly unelected body that rubber stamps decisions over $10,000 including the sale of public assets. (My favorite detail: the law requires that Emergency Manager’s salary be shouldered by the city.)

What’s striking about the Emergency Manager position is that it’s more or less exactly what Mencius Moldbug proposes as the ideal system of government. Moldbug advocates for, essentially, government by CEO – an individual manager with absolute power subject to oversight by a board of directors who can replace him, with the metric for whether a government is successful being the degree to which the government turns a profit. Very much excluded from this – indeed consciously and deliberately excluded – is any notion of democracy. Moldbug despises democracy, viewing it as inefficient, duplicitous, and largely degenerate. In his view people are, whether they want to admit it or not, subjects of a sovereign. And given that, we may as well admit it and just return to actual monarchy.

It’s easy to laugh at Moldbug; he’s a more than faintly comical figure whose default style is meandering blog posts running thousands of words in which he badly stitches together clumsy readings of primary source documents in order to claim they reveal the bankrupt heart of modern democracy.…

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