Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure
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MONARCHY IS ONE OF the older and more ridiculous of human conceits. The more you think about it the weirder it gets. Elective or hereditary it's permanent; there's no such thing as rotating kingship, and the idea is that you do it unaccountably until you die, restricted only by God or the Mandate of Heaven. They are, like the current world's political situation is, totally ludicrous, but very, very serious.
Paul Musgrave, How My Brain Rotted
Over the past twenty years or so, the adult world that I was brought up to expect—a world featuring travel agents, newspapers, and the nightly news—has been more or less deposed, replaced by a creeping goo of permanent adolescence in which everything is social media.
Timothy Burke, Apocalypse Now
They’re not stupid: they quite intelligently understand that they no longer need any of what they are destroying and that they no longer care about the long-term. The only thing that matters is the pleasure of power right here, right now. Let us eat, be in a k-hole and have a ton of fun laying waste to an entire society, for tomorrow we might live forever. Even if we don’t, we can’t possibly lose whatever we do.
Put all of that together and you have a lot of people in charge who are fundamentally immune to arguments couched in terms of prudence, risk, duty, that are about preserving what you have today in order to pass it to your heirs. It’s the end times.
DEFECTOR IS A MODEL for what journalism should be; sport and politics, and independently and worker-owned.
David Roth, 'Billionaire Dipshit And His Strike Team Of Greasy Beavises Are Stripping The Wires From The Federal Government'.
They don't know anything about what they're wrecking, naturally—these are creatures that do and eat and shit on things, not ones that know—but it is more salient that they don't care enough even to try to know anything about it. They are busy and stupid in a way that mirrors their rancid imago—hardcore in a way that is mostly just erratic and impatient, secretive but grandiose, prissily paranoid, conducting their nasty business on an amphetamized and whimsical timetable—but they are also not really doing anything for the reasons that people or institutions do things.
WE MUST ASSUME BASED on his silence that Graeme Bird is dead, in an institution, or in any case is beyond authorship. This was a man whose incredibly prolific commenting and blog posting in the Australian internet and beyond, through the 2000s and early 2010s, makes his present absence from the internet inexplicable except by force.
THE POINT OF MAINTAINING a blog is a fundamentally personal and political one, shared with almost all writing that matters. Now, certainly, this blog will never ever matter; but that infinite irrelevance is even more reason I feel to think out the politics of maintaining it.
Here is my policy: I don't like AI, and will never use it for writing.
