It’s been a while since we last talked about Situationism, that giddy fusion of radical politics and performance art that seized the imaginations of a certain fraction of the European avant-garde in the 1960s. (Readers who missed those discussions the first time around, or simply want to review what’s been covered, will find those earlier posts here, here, here, here, and here.) I freely admit that a gaggle of mid-twentieth century European hipsters who spent more time getting drunk and bickering with one another than doing much of anything else may seem unlikely as a source of useful ideas just now, as industrial society lurches from crisis to crisis on its way down the long slope of decline. Still, raw weirdness has a power as well as a charm of its own. Weirdness, in turn, the Situationists definitely had.
They also had certain practical methods that can be turned to uses considerably more productive than the Situationists themselves ever attempted. As I’ve noted several times already, the Situationists were hamstrung by their historical context as beta-Marxists—that is to say, Marxists living in a society that was already dominated by a bureaucratic-managerial elite, the usual product of Marxism in its more effective alpha-mode. While beta-Marxists inevitably claim to be laboring long and hard to bring about the supposedly inevitable revolution of the proletariat, their actual function in society is to provide disaffected youths from the privileged classes with a harmless way to act out their fantasies of dissidence before reverting to type and embracing the status, the jobs, and the privileges to which their status entitles them.
Providing this service to the bureaucratic-managerial elites places certain requirements on beta-Marxist groups. On the one hand, it is to their advantage to craft the most forceful and cogent critiques of the existing society they possibly can, and thus to help fill out the reserve army of ideas so that the elites will have alternative ideologies in place as needed to cope with unexpected change. On the other hand, beta-Marxists are strictly required to pursue wholly ineffectual methods of social change, so that their antics won’t inconvenience the existing order of society. If you wondered why climate-change activists fling around soup in art museums and engage in other equally pointless and stupid actions, in other words, it’s no accident that they’ve settled on so feckless a choice of methods; their ideologies are descended from beta-Marxism and embody many of its most unproductive features.
The irony is that a few of the methods pioneered by the Situationists actually have considerable potential for individuals interested in embracing more freedom in their own lives. Of course making use of that potential requires those methods to be pried loose from their places in the ersatz theology of Marxism, with its insistence on the imminent proletarian revolution that will solve all the world’s problems. It will require, in fact, a shift of the kind sketched out in the last post in this sequence, The Road from Raswashingsputin, where I used the wholly imaginary nation of Lower Slobbovia to focus attention on the far from imaginary process by which the intended manipulations of collective consciousness by the elite classes have to make their way to individual minds.
As I tried to show there, the closer you get to the collective, the more power the elite classes and their hired sorcerers in media and marketing have; the closer you get to the individual, the easier it is for individual counterspells to frustrate their efforts. Yes, we’re going to talk about one of the counterspells. Its name is détournement, it’s one of the very few aspects of Situationism that still has a robust following today, and next to nobody seems to have noticed that it can be used to create something other than cheap photocopied posters and funny online memes.
Let’s start with the basics. The French word détournement means “diversion;” my Larousse dictionary mentions among other things that it’s the standard French word for embezzlement. To détourn something, to borrow a bit of garbled Franglish, is to put it to some unauthorized use, preferably some use that will trip up the agenda the raw material was originally intended to serve. Back in the day, the Situationists used to do that with the advertising images that were such a pervasive presence in 1950s and 1960s culture: they would take the image and swap out the slogans for something rather less supportive of the existing order of society. That is to say, the Situationists invented the image macro (to use the proper name of today’s internet memes) decades in advance.
More broadly, they applied the same logic to the arts in general. That wasn’t as absurd as it may seem in retrospect. Every artistic tradition has a finite creative space in which to operate, defined by the seminal works that set that tradition in motion. Once Monteverdi picked up the idea of opera from the Florentine Camerata, the little group of amateur musicians who created it, and turned it into the most popular art form of the age, there was a very large but finite number of possible operas that could be written within the space that he and the Camerata jointly defined. Once that space got filled up, which finally took place in the early twentieth century, new operas were either imitations of earlier works or pretentious trash: the space was full.
Every art follows that same trajectory. It so happens, furthermore, that most of the traditional arts of the Western world ran into those limits over the course of the twentieth century. By the century’s dawn, art music, painting, and sculpture had reached the end of their respective roads, and “pretentious trash” makes a very good label for what followed in all three fields. (It’s a running joke today in classical music circles that orchestras perform twentieth century music when they want to do without the many inconveniences of having an audience.) You can jolt an art form back to temporary life by bringing in influences from another culture, which is why jazz flourished so spectacularly in the twentieth century, but it’s a short term fix at best—again, the rapid decline of jazz after the 1960s is a good example.
Poetry and literature both hit similar limits in midcentury, which is why people could make a decent living as full-time poets until the 1950s but you can’t even dream of doing that today, and why “serious” fiction these days has an audience that consists almost entirely of literary critics and the handful of readers who listen to them. Even such new arts as cinema were caught in the undertow and dragged down, as witness the collapse of Hollywood in our time. By the time Situationism flourished, accordingly, most Western art forms were museum pieces; think of classical music, where creativity now takes the form of playing exquisite renditions of pieces composed centuries ago.
That’s normal in every culture, and most societies make the transition from the age of innovation to the age of performance without too much difficulty, even with a sigh of relief. Our culture is uniquely burdened in this context by its obsession with the phantasm of perpetual progress. Even as the arts themselves settle down comfortably into performance mode, with musicians striving to play Bach and Mozart perfectly and writers turning out endless variations on rigidly defined fictional genres—the murder mystery, the bodice-ripping romance, the politician’s press release, and so on—there are always intellectuals who can’t stand the thought that the Western world’s age of creative innovation has run its course in the usual way.
The Situationist concept of détournement formalized one of the more creative responses to that predicament. When a small boy hangs a discarded urinal on a nail on some nearby fence, it’s a practical joke; when Marcel Duchamp submitted a discarded urinal to an important gallery show, the critics swooned and described it as one of the most important works of twentieth century art. They weren’t wrong, because the vast majority of twentieth century art was even less interesting than the random piece of used plumbing Duchamp used for his prank. When an artistic tradition has exhausted the creative space available to it, playing sly games with the boundaries of the tradition is one of the few things you can do that won’t elicit yawns.
This, in turn, the Situationists took as their basic artistic mode. Even among that small subset of people who still remember the Situationists, not that many recall where the movement got its name. The idea was that constructing entire situations was one of the few artistic options that hadn’t been done to death by the 1960s. Duchamp did that some decades further back by putting his upended urinal in a major art show, redefining the urinal by putting it into a more prestigious situation than such things usually occupy. The same thing can also be done, however, by taking an existing artwork and putting it into a new situation, so that its changed context redefines the experience and meaning of the work.
That’s what an image macro does, by taking an existing image and applying new text to it to make a point the maker of the image probably didn’t have in mind. That’s also what the Situationists did when they took images from the advertising media of their time and slapped new captions on those images to mess with the heads of the viewers. That’s détournement. It’s a clever strategy, and one that can be applied far beyond its original artistic context.
Let’s follow the possibilities out a certain distance by applying détournement to technology. The first thing that has to be done to make sense of this is to discard the absurd and dishonest (though endlessly repeated) claim that technologies are or can ever be value-free. As John Ellis showed with great clarity in his 1986 book The Social History of the Machine Gun, every technology necessarily embodies the values of the people who design it, manufacture it, and market it—otherwise it would never be designed, manufactured, or marketed at all.
Every technology is good for some things, and thus furthers whatever agendas are advanced by those things, and bad for other things, and thus hinders whatever competing agendas those other things might have favored. Since technologies don’t simply appear out of thin air, in turn, the political, economic, and cultural leaders who influence the decision to invest in this technology and not that one pick and choose the technological options they support from among those that advance their own interests and disadvantage those of their opponents. When people babble about “what technology wants,” in turn, they’re either impressively clueless or they’re engaged in tactical camouflage, since very often the agendas being advanced by this or that technology are not things anyone in power wants to discuss publicly.
By the time any technology makes its way to market and becomes accessible to individuals, as a result, that technology has become a vehicle for specific interests and agendas. To buy and use any technology in the normal way of things is therefore tantamount to supporting those interests and acquiescing in those agendas. That’s how it’s supposed to work, at least, and in many cases that’s exactly how it works. You can see just how much the current political-economic system depends on that process once you notice just how shrill the system and its more privileged inmates get when they encounter people who refuse to buy into any given technology.
The reaction’s not unreasonable. As we discussed in earlier posts, the “magician states” of the modern industrial world depend to a very large extent on the voluntary obedience of the masses, who are lured into that obedience by the evil sorceries we call advertising and marketing. Those who refuse to participate are a threat to the system because they’ve become resistant to its spells; being protected from evil magic in one way or another, they decide for themselves which products and services they want to use, rather than having that decision made for them by the sorcerers of marketing agencies.
Refusal is a powerful magic, but it’s not the only option. Another way of dealing with the interests and agendas hardwired into technologies is détournement.
I’ll use a personal example here, because I learned to détourn technologies long before I’d first read about the Situationists. It so happens, for example, that I own a battered but functional used Kindle ebook reader. Ebooks are a great example of a technology with its own built-in interests and agendas, not least because many ebooks aren’t sold, they’re rented, and can be deleted by the seller at any moment. Back when ebooks were still being promoted as the wave of the future, the major ebook providers made no secret of their intention to elbow printed books out of the market. Their motivations were no mystery, either: if most readers had allowed themselves to be herded into ebooks, that same handful of major providers would have had nearly complete control of what people could read, and would have been able to slam the door on alternative views, edit what information resources were available, and push whatever agendas they wanted.
It didn’t work. The most important reason it didn’t work was the simple fact that too many readers didn’t go along with the corporate agenda. Some refused to get into ebooks at all; others tried it and decided they liked printed books better; but there were also people who détourned the new technology and put it to uses that tripped up the corporate agenda in various ways. I belong to this last group. I’ve never bought an ebook and, though I have a used Kindle, I’ve never downloaded a book from the giant corporation that owns and exploits that franchise. It so happens that there are several online archives, most famously Project Gutenberg, that make old, out-of-copyright books available in the major ebook formats for free. That’s what goes on my Kindle: unfashionable books by dead people. It’s a convenient reference collection, and it also gives me something to read when I’m going somewhere via train or bus.
Am I waving this about as some kind of evidence of virtue? Of course not. It’s simply a rather mild example of how a technology can be used in ways that sidestep (or fling down and trample on) the corporate agenda it’s intended to push. It’s important, for that matter, not to overstate the potentials of détournement. Not all technologies can be détourned effectively, and there are always hard limits to how far you can détourn anything. There are also situations in which refusal is the more effective option. That’s why I haven’t owned a television in my adult life, for example. Again, that’s not presented as some sort of evidence of virtue; instead, in my case, it’s the product of a reasoned assessment that the agendas being pushed by the technology of broadcast television are so toxic, and the effort needed to détourn the technology so large, that for me, refusal is simply the better choice
In the case of ebooks, the calculation runs the other way. That doesn’t mean that I can do whatever I want with ebook technology, of course. My ability to détourn the Kindle technology is tightly constrained by the technology itself (if it’s not a .mobi file my device won’t read it) and by other factors over which I have little or no control (there are only a handful of providers of old freeware books). Within limits such as these, however, it’s sometimes possible to take a technology and monkeywrench it so that it serves purposes that benefit me rather than whatever huge and insanely corrupt corporation happens to be pushing it at me.
I’ve used technology as an example here. Keep in mind, however, that détournement is no more limited to technology than it is to artworks or image macros. All through your life, you encounter situations of many kinds that are intended to benefit the corporate-bureaucratic system of modern industrial society at your expense. Sometimes, for one reason or another, it’s necessary to accept those situations and use other counterspells to ward off the negative consequences. Sometimes it’s better simply to walk away, giving up whatever benefits are being dangled in front of you so that you can avoid the downsides. In some cases, however, it’s possible to détourn the situation within the inescapable limits it imposes, and exploit it to your own advantage.
All three of these options, to be used intelligently, require certain habits of consciousness that the inmates of modern industrial societies are systematically taught not to develop, or even to dream of. As we explore some of the other strategic possibilities opened up by Situationism, those habits will become clearer, and their relationship to certain traditions of thought and practice in past and present will become hard to miss. We’ll pick up this topic in a future post.
Excellent!
I détourned some writings by the CCRU in my most recent piece: Analog Inevitability and the Situationist Intergalactical. I also linked to your article on the End of the Bureaucratic Era in it as well. I use the initial détournement in there as a spring board for my own ideas and words, mixing in some of the CCRU material and bending it towards my own will/ends. Looking at the CCRU again was a bit of inspiration from your recent chat with Nick Land and co. Thank you!
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/analog-inevitablity-and-the-situationist-intergalactical
https://justinpatrickmoore.substack.com/p/analog-inevitability-and-the-situationist
There are some new memes in there too.
I have also written a long piece of “American Psychogeography” I will start posting in three segments next month. The part in question focuses on how in America, all roads lead to Boston, on Route 128 in Boston, intermixing the work Benton Mackaye was tapped with doing on creating the circumferential highway there, how his geotechnic plan was abandoned, and instead the roadway mess that it is today was implemented complete with the M.ilitary I.ndustrial T.emplate of Raytheon and other arms industry and tech. Further, this was the area where Jonathan Richman was born and he wrote his influential song “Roadrunner” based on his experiences growing up in the area and driving up and down Route 128. Warm up your radio valves and stay tuned for that.
I like how you applied détournement to technology in your example. The hacking scene, which I used to follow, without having more than the basic technical chops, still does some of this, but they used to do it more and be much more interested in the areas of culture jamming and pranks. The Cult of the Dead Cow comes to mind… a lot of their hacks were pranks. The trickster spirit seems to run through both groups.
Détournement is a new word for me, though the concept made it into the English-language term “Culture Jamming” , I think. Never made the connection of either with image macros, but you’re absolutely right.
Interestingly, détournement in the musical arts has become my favourite genre. You’ll not find a professionally-pressed record of someone doing a perfect impression of, say, Linken Park singing the Spice Girls, but it’s a hoot of fun to stream. Or death metal anthems re-imagined as 60s jazz.
Some folk use AI for that type of thing but I very much prefer when it’s a recording of an organic performance. Is this a sign that Western Music is indeed out of ideas? Absolutely. This kind if remixing is the great fun of an Age of Performance, though, and I intend to enjoy it rather than whine about the derivative nature.
Analog Inevitability, well it’s coming because America and Iran are bombing all the oil and gas production fields in the Middle East, shutting down oil production. A lot of digital electronics, data centers, internet, etc is going to become very unaffordable for the average person around the world in the near future.
Hello JMG and commentariat:
Another Wednesday and another new post, this week about the Situs. Well, I was waiting John would write soon about Détournement, a very interesting Situationist idea, which has getting old very well (indeed, I think it hasn’t been outdated as another Situs ideas, methink).
John has written some technologies can be under détournement well, some another can be used without big risk for your mind thanks to “counterspells”, but a third group must be avoided without doubt, due to its toxic “nature” and contents (like TV). I agree. Indeed, since I limited my TV exposure near to 0, my mental health is better than ever. In the other hand, I’ve never used an ebook: the corporative “Hamelin flute” songs to give up the “outdated” paper books never worked for me; so I haven’t tried to “détour” that technology neither.
**********
John, you’ve pointed the Situ people had some good ideas (even intemporal ones), but another ones were too attached to their time boring Marxist hegemony. I found one of these wrong ideas in a book written by an author named Anselm Jappe, whose translated title to Spanish is “Hormigón”(“Concrete”). I guess you may don’t know this German essayist. His essay’s an ecologist and historic criticism against the modern architecture, whose main and usual “productions” are concrete buildings and structures. Jappe points that Situationism criticized fiercely Le Corbusier and another modern “star” architects during the past century, because Situs thought (with reason) their monster buildings influenced average people in the worst sense (dehumanizing urban dwellers due to lifeless and impersonal urbanism). However, Jappe writes Situs proposed (unluckily) as urbanism/architecture alternative a crazy utopian model, based in a “futuristic” view, which has getting old badly. For example, they thought the future towns would be based in a post-work society, in which automation thanks to full mechanization would allow every citizen to live a full leisure life (cough cough). Of course, this is a God Progress related belief…Their “solution” to the housing and cities problems was equal or worse than the “disease” they criticized.
I liked Jappe book, but he seems too attached to some “too Marxist” views in some of his essay (nobody’s perfect).
Oh, I was just thinking today, that a return to the situationalists would be a good idea! Thank you.
Some questions:
Q1: If art can be monkey wrenched, then one could use some pop song, that one always hears on the public radio, to insert, or change, some lyrics. Or just plain reinterpret it for own personal gains. I once pointed out to a collage diversity professor, that I found the song “Rise like a phoenix” inspiring, well I did not know that the singer was a transgender whatever, but or me it did not matter, it had an uplifting wibe and the phoenix is a gender less, or unisex, image. Hence as a cisgendered hetero white male, with a prominent beard, broad shoulders, and a pronounced beard, I also found it inspiring. The professor protested vehemently that the symbol of a phoenix was unisex; NO IT IS MALE! A short google search on the mythos showed the same male bird laying an egg. After which we had an unscheduled recess.
Q2: if “By the time any technology makes its way to market and becomes accessible to individuals, as a result, that technology has become a vehicle for specific interests and agendas.” Then what agendas are the builders of
https://www.derstandard.at/story/3000000310941/meshtastic-wie-man-sich-um-kleines-geld-ein-rebellen-funkgeraet-baut
Mesh grids persuing? Some are hailing it as the next Iranian cassette tape.
Best regards,
V
Oh,
and something to share. Recently I found out that the first documented use of a chainsaw was in a scootish manual of midwifery in the 18. century. It took about a century for someone to figure out that said medical technology could be used for cutting wood. One could say that a significant portion of the modern logging industry is a clever dethronement of medical technology. 😀
Best regards,
V
Excellent post, as always, JMG.
When I traveled to Europe in the early 1980s, I was fortunate enough to see some of the examples of earlier periods of art we covered in Art History class, and the astounding talent it took to make those come to life. It made modern art even more of a joke than I thought it was.
It is amazing how many people today still don’t catch on to the manipulation that most media and products contain. And that’s on top of the efforts to “build a moat” or ecosystem around their products. As soon as I discovered an Apple ipod nano I got as a door prize at a tech show wouldn’t work without loading iTunes on to my PC, I gave it away.
BTW – I can’t remember if you run Linux, but I’ve found the Calibre app pretty robust when converting between ebook formats. I always download .mobi from Project Gutenberg. My Kindle reader (paperwhite model I think) will read some of the newer, more secure format(s) but .mobi is preferred. I just wish the ereader handled PDFs better – converting those to .mobi can be tougher and still not fun to read.
>they would take the image and swap out the slogans for something rather less supportive of the existing order of society
Are you talking about swapping “AI” and “LLM” out for “cocaine”?
>That’s normal in every culture, and most societies make the transition from the age of innovation to the age of performance without too much difficulty, even with a sigh of relief
I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen you write. And the truest. We’re just going through the motions now.
Thanks for this excellent post, JMG!
It’s quite challenging to do anything genuinely new creatively. So far the best I’ve been able to do is my lighthearted critique of fantasy romance comic tropes (a relatively new and burgeoning genre) in Etherwood.
If I somehow figure out a way to do something really novel, I’m sure everyone here will know about it. It’s my hope anyway that hanging around unusual spaces like this will enable me to at least approach some original combination of thoughts.
My family’s method of détournement for television/streaming has been to exclusively watch high quality, beautiful shows from several decades ago, which we mostly own via physical media. In theory I agree with you about dispensing with it entirely, in practice I genuinely enjoy traditionally animated films, and the relative peace of turning on a movie for the kids so that the house can get cleaned or the dishes can get done is a big help.
Our blowback might not be as vehement as yours, but it’s been surprising how much pushback we get even from other large-family conservative Catholics for not putting on whatever the latest corporate ADHD-fest children’s show or viral AI slop youtube content. People feel personally attacked if we mention it at all.
@jmg “monkeywrench ”
Mr Abbey would be proud! If monkeywrenching something to your benefit has the same effect as the classic definition — then it is easier for more people push on it as you aren’t technically straying outside the “law”.
Starve the beast as it were.
thx!
Excellent article.
As I was reading, it occurred to me that in some cases the most obvious way to détourne a technology by returning to its original use: I imagine electrical engineers of the future salvaging old CRT televisions to hook up to their equipment as oscilloscopes, for example.
As for the angry reaction at those who don’t use modern technologies or who détourne them, I suspect part of it is an ingroup/outgroup thing: they look at someone like you and see Not-One-of-Us, a blasphemer of their gods (Progress) and mocker of their values and traditions. (And in better times, this is probably a valuable instinct to help ensure social stability. Of course, we are not in better times.)
Pyrite radio has existed since the beginning of radio. Some places have pretty interesting pyrite radio scenes, especially among immigrants and others without access to airwaves, think in places like NYC and Miami. In England it was integral to the rave scene, and the classic pyrite radio ships are actually what forced the hand of the BBC to start playing rock music.
David Goren has documented the current immigrant pyrite radio scene very well. There is also a very lively pirate radio scene shortwave. It is less policed than FM pirate radio, and thus a safer place to be a pirate broadcaster. The main difference is that mostly only shortwave radio fans and hobbyists are ones listening to radio.
The term culture jamming came from radio signal jamming, so perhaps one of the earliest uses of detournement, before it was said as such, was in broadcasting.
I am not suggesting anyone do anything illegal. But it isn’t illegal if you record a show and some pyrite hobbyist broadcaster just happens to relay it for you on their own station…
I do think the radio spectrum is part of the natural resources all citizens should have some access too, and not all be gobbled up by McGovCorp.
Brilliant again!
Credit cards, have never carried a balance in 45 years. Have collected 1-2% rewards for all this time. Free travel dollars to the tune of many thousands of dollars!!! There are many ways to use the man and beat the system. It is quite fun actually.
Living very simply, debt free, low income stream and tax bracket yet having a reasonable amount of disposable income. buying used, repurposing, repairing. Provide yourself with a wider margin of time to enjoy and do for yourself. Enjoy your garden and orchard.
I don’t use a cell phone. Yes, it is still possible.
Tuneout, turn away, a lifestyle of détournement is what you have promoted for a long time John. It is a gift that keeps giving. Physical, financial, intellectual freedom.
Thank you!!!!
@The Other Owen
> I think that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen you write. And the truest. We’re just going through the motions now.
It’s sad because we Faustians love our infinite progress and boundless innovation. Not so for other cultures, who would rather see their traditions finished and polished and become a stable, comfortable part of their culture.
And besides, the alternative is the endless slop we’re getting now, torn between on the one hand pretentious gibberish trying to be original at the cost of coherence, and on the other crass attempts to cash in on trends or nostalgia by spewing endless low-effort dreck because the only alternative is the former. It’s like living in a town where there a two-restaurants: a fancy high-class place where the chefs season their signature dishes with motor oil and rat poison, or McDonald’s.
Justin, glad to hear it. Thanks for this! As for the Trickster, yeah, he’s been very busy in American countercultures for a good long while now.
Tyler, well, one of the most interesting musical performances I ever heard was a concert by a band called Dread Zeppelin, which did Led Zep standards rewritten as reggae. Yes, there’s a place for that sort of thing — but there’s also a place for tribute bands. What’s a modern orchestra these days, after all, but a tribute band doing Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven?
Anon, and if it wasn’t that, ordinary depletion would do the trick all by itself. Welcome to Retrotopia!
Chuaquin, hmm! I’ll have to see if Jappe’s been translated into English or French. Outdated formerly avant-garde architecture has been an interest of mine for many years.
Vitranc, 1) good heavens, yes. Messing with songs is a classic form of détournement. 2) I don’t know the technology well enough to hazard a guess. 3) The thought of Scottish midwives armed with chainsaws sounds like something out of an unusually crazed dieselpunk story…
Drhooves, I avoid any technology that has too deep a moat around it. I’d throw out my Kindle if it wasn’t for online freeware sources. No, I don’t run Linux — I’ll probably have to do that sooner or later, but these days I can still get by on obsolete versions of Windows.
Other Owen, to me it’s not sad at all. It’s the normal maturity of a civilization. I love hearing different performances of the same works of classical music, for example — and in its own way that’s just as creative as making something brand new.
Sirustalcelion, may I make a suggestion? Don’t try to do something new. Try to do something well. If you do the latter, you’ll get an audience, all right.
Jerry, you’re welcome. Yeah, there’s some Abbey influence in this, and finding ways to monkeywrench your own mind and your own life is harder for the authorities to detect and punish.
Slithy, an excellent point. Sometimes going back to older technologies is a good thing to have in your toolkit, as the CRT-screen example shows; even before vinyl records began their astonishing resurgence, getting a rebuilt stereo and used records from a thrift store was a great way to return recorded music to its original use.
Justin, funny. I suppose “iron disulphide radio” doesn’t have the same cachet, even though they’re chemically identical. 😉
Tom, well, I don’t use a cell phone either, so it’s definitely possible. As for the rest, exactly. Banish the evil sorceries of the marketing and advertising warlocks and life really does become more fun.
“age of innovation to the age of performance”
related to the current transition from the age of abstraction (age of reason) to the age of reflection (age of memory)?
@TylerA,
I agree with you on that one.
Metallica sounds great played on a harp. I also like Hildegard von Blingen’s youtube channel. She has an amazing and unusual voice (high, crystal clear, very little vibrato perfect for early music) and sings medieval style and reworded versions of modern songs. They’re beautiful, and occasionally hilarious if you listen closely to the lyrics.
In the beginning of 2022, the person who runs the blog Face to Face / akinokure wrote about the exhaustion of American pop music and its correlation with America’s declining empire:
https://akinokure.blogspot.com/2022/01/collapse-of-new-pop-music-year-end.html
In the comment section he talks about how the next few centuries of America’s lifespan will be used to sift through all the American cultural creations during the 20th century and identify which ones to preserve for future generations of ethnic Americans, and how that parallels what happened to the Roman Empire.
Basically a national level analysis of the same civilizational transition from the age of innovation to the age of performance.
One place I have been seeing a surprising amount of creativity, new techniches and actual improvements is in the miniature wargaming piece painting and modelling space. If you look at golden demon winners over the years, the recent winners are usually a lot more impressive than the ones from the 90s. There’s also changes in fashion complicating things as well. Plus there’s all the 3D printing combined with digital sculpting as well as developments in traditional painting techniques.
I guess this is a case of, if you go niche enough, there’s still something new under the sun.
I decided I want to enter in my local model competition. I’m sculpting a japanese firefly squid by hand from milliput (epoxy putty), and will be painting object source light techniques for the bioluminescence. I wish I could find glow in the dark paint, though. That would take it to the next level. Never mind. It will be viewed in the light anyway, so it is sort of extraneous. Should be fun, and I’ve already learned quite a bit, even if a lot of it is about squid. All brush painting and traditional sculpting, nothing digital at all. Why? Because I like it, I can, and it’s weird enough I think it should attract a few second looks I wouldn’t get if I built and painted yet another tank or space marine. And my sculpting skills are probably better than my mini painting skills and I’d like to show them off and I’ve nothing to lose since my chances of winning at my current skill level are ppft. But I might be able to make people notice and remember this.
@116: “Anon, and if it wasn’t that, ordinary depletion would do the trick all by itself. Welcome to Retrotopia!”
Welcome also to “Twilight’s Last Gleaming,” unless I’m mistaken.
Here you go John, iron disulphide it is: https://imgur.com/a/8CP0Ahl
Speaking of Zeppelin, how about Spliceway to Heaven:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abGlV58-dyM
@TylerA: Negativland is my favorite group/ media collective doing audio detournement. A great “poppy” album if you haven’t listened to them before is Dispepsi. They’ve been doing this stuff since ’79 and are still at it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnGNo0I3Lpk&list=PL50335D83D74002EE
Another oldie but goodie is the college station classic from Evolution Control Committee (Columbus, Ohio) Rocked by Rape feat Dan Rather:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh-Z8_6_m4Q
@Pygmycory: Hildegard von Blingen is awesome!!!
@JMG:
Gleefully surprised to learn that beta-marxists invented the meme, cuz then the strategic deployment of memes (and their considerable effect) by the Kek-bros during the last decade has gotta count for the ultimate détournement, yes? 😉
A guy I know took some receipts from a bin because he has an app where he gets a quarter from every receipt scanned. I suppose that minor act of gaming the system counts as détournement since the idea of the app was presumably to reward you for shopping.
@JMG
Point taken. I will do my best!
John,
Doing tech détournement brings me a lot of joy. I’ve come to learn that by default, most pieces of technology are my enemy. Luckily, there’s almost always a way to bully them into changing allegiances. I’ve replaced my spyware, junkware, adware riddled windows OS with an open-source linux distribution and have been working on getting myself out of the Google ecosystem. I use the beefiest adblocker I can get my hands on and use a VPN to avoid tracking. One rule I follow is to never use services or products that require me to pay a subscription. There’s almost always a way to get around subscription services or to avoid them altogether.
Do you think that third-world “developing” (never going to develop) nations could use tech détournement and appropriate technology to improve their lives?
So I try to use “Irish Democracy” in my dealings with our overlords up here in Canuckistan. But sadly they are so grossly incompetent, especially here in BC, they out do me. Make my modest efforts a right piker. Going for a multi month bicycle camping trip from Palermo Sicily via swiss Alps to hopefully Dublin. No chance of wandering without smartphone as booking campsite reservations, ferry, banking, electronic travel authorization the British stazi require all are burdens one endures. But a bit of wild camping, cooking with 2 multi fuel stoves and avoiding the touristy bits should keep it real. Determined to not waste time on line daily-especially with all our current doomer porn stressing us all. Music study is a challenge without violin or guitar but started learning Celtic tunes on a Irish whistle. Watercolor kit for medieval villages scenes. And Tarot.
I listen to classical music. While I agree with your assessment of Western art generally, the early 20th century saw parts of the general repertoire composed: symphonies from Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen, Shostakovich, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninoc most of the works of Debussy & Ravel, and the modernist works actually worth listening to on rare occassions (e.g. Bartok’s quartets, Rite of Spring, Berg’s Violin Concerto). Meanwhile, most of the music churned out by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century composers (Spenglerian harvest-time of Autumn) was dull or not as good as the music in earlier or later decades, with the exception of Haydn, post 1780 Mozart, Beethoven, and possibly some opera composers
Anon, yes, those paired transitions do generally happen around the same time. The blogger is dead on target — that’s normally what happens as civilizations wind down.
Pygmycory, that’s an excellent example. As a civilization’s era of innovation winds down, it’s generally the odd little arts and crafts that continue innovating longest, because there’s still creative space left there.
Phutatorius, we’ll see. “Decline and Fall,” certainly.
Justin, ha!
Sven, an excellent point! “The biter bit, the hawk under the eagle’s foot, the spider in a steel web…”
Patrick, in an age when productive economic activity no longer pays the bills, finding ways to game the system is one of the few growth industries left.
Nephite, delighted to hear it. As for the undeveloped world, only to a limited extent, because even appropriate technology generally requires some access to concentrated energy resources and high-grade raw materials, and those are running short globally. Most of the world is as “developed” as it’s ever going to be, and for much of it, it’s all downhill from here, until the deindustrial dark ages bottom out and new forms arise.
Longsword, luck be with you!
@JMG
2) You should, it is the hot new thing in packet radio. Repeters are springing up in my region like mushrooms after sommer rain. And it is both license free to use and allows enkripted communication.
3) Well reality is stranger then fiction. At least John Aitken and James Jeffray thought so, when they included it in their 1785 Manual of midweifery 😂
My online acquaintance ediblspaceships made this one, throwing a bit of Marshall McLuhan into the media mix:
https://imgur.com/a/wUg67yb
Thanks for a great post and getting my synapses fired up on a favorite topic.
@ Vitranc # 7
Ouch!
Ok, very interesting… but…
Ouch!
Some interesting examples of both détournement and of moving from the age of innovation to the age of performance are in the tabletop roleplaying game space these past two decades.
When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, the makers of Dungeons & Dragons, in the late 90’s and began preparing to release the third edition of D&D, some of the lead designers were worried that if it wasn’t commercially successful, WOTC’s parent company, Hasbro, would do what they always do with product lines that fail to live up to expectations and shelve it, not touching it and not even licensing it out for others to make use of. So they convinced WOTC to make a substantial portion of the rules available under the Open Gaming License to allow third-parties to create and market content for the game, subject to some not-very-onerous rules. Part of the intention was that if Hasbro shelved the line, its legacy could still live on through third-party products.
Partly as a result, the third edition of the game was wildly popular, and a massive amount of third-party content was published. But it also gave a legal greenlight for others to make not just content but entire games, including partial clones of older editions of D&D, which many still prefer to WOTC’s editions. Thus the Old School Renaissance was born. These games were accompanied by others than took the basic framework of D&D’s rules — old or new — and modified or extended the in various ways, adapting them to sci-fi settings, horror settings, etc.
But that rush of innovation is now slowing down, and the OSR has come to focus on games that are especially good at some particular part of the old-school experience. For example, Shadowdark excels at high-risk dungeon-raiding, while Adventurer, Conqueror, King focuses heavily on military campaigns and simulating the political economy of a pseudo-Roman-era fantasy world. And if you want the more casual game play of the most recent edition of D&D but without the rules bulk, there are games for that, too.
And on top of that we’ve seen movements advocating simply playing RPGs from the 70’s and 80’s, as-is, with a focus on playing them as well and robustly as possible, to see just how much you can get out of AD&D, Classic Traveller, or the like.
“rigidly defined fictional genres—… the politician’s press release”
Nice…
Re e-readers: in addition to Project Gutenberg & Global Grey, I borrow a lot of library books to read on mine.
There was a theory circulating on Tumblr a little while ago that Marcel Duchamp, in claiming that he had created Fountain by purchasing a mass-produced urinal, flipping it on its back and signing it with a name borrowed from a comic strip, was flat-out lying. (Naturally, given Tumblr’s nearly unusable search function, I can’t find it now.) Some art history scholar went looking through old plumbing supply catalogs and couldn’t find one exactly like Fountain. The scholar concluded that Duchamp, an accomplished ceramicist, had made it. So by his own definition, it isn’t a readymade. It’s just a sculpture.
Meanwhile, now than many major cities have municiple aquariums with room-size glass-sided tanks, live underwater dance performance has become a thing. I have also seen videos of performances in open water including one on a shipwreck. So we’re not out of creative space yet.
Two tangential comments:
A girl I knew in high school whose parents had been card-carrying members of the (West) German Communist Party (DKP), and a few of her friends, staged the least useful (most useless ?) protest I have ever heard of, on the eve of the reunification of Germany (Oct 3rd, 1990). They marched over the market place of our town and protested that they preferred there to be two Germanys. Even though I had a crush on the girl at the time, I could see the stupidity of the protest, since the people of the GDR had just risen up in the millions and then migrated in the hundreds of thousands to the West.
On serious literature: I recently made another attempt to read a book by Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk. I love historical fiction, and I liked one of his historical novels, Red. Unfortunately, in all other books of his I have tried to read, he goes out of his way to kill any thrill or anticipation that the readers might feel, and his last book, The White Castle, about a 17th century Italian enslaved in Istanbul, was no exception. On the other hand, I am just now reading Leo Africanus by Amin Maalouf, a member of the Académie Française, and it’s marvellous. He pulls you into each chapter, he builds up drama, and his choice of words is a delight. The irony is that the setting is so similar: a (real) 16th century Muslim Andalusian who is captured by Italians and converts to Christianity.
Just to say that historical fiction is not dead, even though it has been taken quite seriously by many great writers, such as Lev Tolstoy or Thomas Mann.
Totally different genre, but has anyone here gotten into Meaningwave? Akira The Don samples speakers and adds musical accompaniment. I think many here would enjoy his Neville Goddard tracks, but he’s got songs featuring sorts of folks, from Jordan Peterson to David Goggins to Marcus Aurelius. (OK, well, the “Meditations” album only features Akira’s voice, as Marcus Aurelius couldn’t make it to the studio on account of being dead.)
@JMG,
OK, Zeppelin as Reggae is something I’ll have to check out. Cover bands are great, too. I never thought of an orchestra as a cover band, but yeah, that tracks. It’s funny that people respect the so-called “original” artists, when most of them are just performing whatever songs their record label has had written for them. Even if they wrote their own stuff ‘back in the day’, I’d rather see someone whose voice is in their prime than a nearly-dead geriatric being puppeteered on stage. I get that that’s somewhat unusual–our culture probably overvalues originality; I know I used to, but I’ve decided I might as well enjoy the derivative.
@NephiteNeophyte,
I take it you don’t agree with the phrase “If you aren’t paying, you’re the product”?
@pygmycory,
I never realized the genius behind Metallica until I realized most of their work sounds equally good played by an orchestra, a solo harp, or banjo and tub base… or, oh, yeah, drums and electric guitars, those work too, I guess. 😉
Hildegard von Blingin’ is amazing. I enjoy bardcore generally, but too much of it is just playing around with MIDI– there’s nothing wrong with that, but it sure makes someone like her stand out. Her ‘translations’ of lyrics are a real hoot. The Miracle Aligner is another like that; his voice isn’t as good, but he sings in Classical Latin (or Old English, or Attic Greek) which makes up for it.
If I understand your post correctly, then my husband’s and my game of turning car brand names into sarcastic names (Xterra to Xcreta, for instance) is an example of détournement. Our goal is to change as few letters as possible, ideally only one letter, which increases the creativity required to play the game well. Whenever we can we share our sarcastic names with other people, in the hope of getting them interested enough to play it themselves and thereby break the brand name spell. If nothing else, it breaks the spell momentarily.
Come to think of it, we play the game with many more branded items than just cars. We also buy as few branded items as possible, so that when people come to our house, they might notice the lack of brand-named items, which might jolt them into awakening to brand-name tyranny, even if just momentarily.
I use the fruit-company tablet I inherited for pdfs of dulcimer songs, so that I don’t have to haul two large binders full of paper sheet music with me to the local dulcimer club jams and playouts (almost everyone in the club uses their tablets in the same way).
Another thing I do that could be referred to as détournement is grow rangy native flowers and several fruit trees in the front yard, to wake passersby up for a moment from the sterility of the standard US front lawn as well as to provide habitat for the local critters and some food for us.
” the Western world’s age of creative innovation has run its course in the usual way” Yep, time to develop the etheric realm – looking forward to your life force workbook.
Vitranc # 6:
That DIY idea about changing well known pop songs lyrics remembers me how much fun I had during my late childhood and teen age with another guys at school, doing exactly that thing: our new lyrics used to be obscene and had some profanities, though sometimes we were “inspired” by cultural and/or political actual news, with a loose criticism implicit in those customized songs.
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Sirustalcelion # 10:
I think you’ve got a good idea when you prefer to watch old fashioned TV shows from past decades. Well, maybe it isn’t as healthy as giving up every TV contents, but at least I guess you’re able to grasp their outdated Spectacle (in Debordian terms), which is better than being under the nowadays Spectacle (and I think it’s easier to be detected).
————————————-
JMG # 16:
Dread Zeppelin…Yes, a very bizarre group, which since a lot of years ago is known by some “connoisseurs” here in my country too…
******
It’s possible A. Jappe has been translated to French, but I’m not sure of it in this moment.
By the way, this writer points (a bit upset) that Situs despised William Morris because “he was old fashioned”(of course, they seemed to think like good Marxists that industrial era soon would lead to a paradise of automatized no-human work era…).
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Anonymous # 19:
Pop music decline phenomenon can be detected within the USA and in a wider sense, in all the Anglosphere. However, I see since this century started, another decline in Spanish language pop music. The “Latinosphere” has been invaded (if you didn’t notice it) by the “Regueton” music, with its boring and rehashed sex/violence lyrics, simplified rhythms and voices “improved” by the “Autotune”.
My father, born in 1932, called the TV set the idiot box and the boob tube, and made fun of the commercials. One summer he cut the cord off the TV so his kids would go outside to the wonderful Wisconsin countryside surrounding our country home instead of staring at a screen.. It was repaired once school started up again.
John, I’ve just remembered how it’s said “concrete” in French, so I’ve guessed what’s the title of the French translation, (bingo) and I can say you it appears online (though unfortunately I can’t put here those links).
“Béton: arme de construction massive du capitalisme”(by Anselm Jappe).
Vitranc, so noted. As for chainsaw-wielding midwives, if they were from Texas I wouldn’t be startled at all…
Justin, you’re most welcome.
Slithy, of course! The OSR has run through its creative space, and come up with a set of rule systems that most people like. Now the focus of creativity is individual campaigns. That’s another great example.
Anon, thank you.
Heather, another very good site is Faded Page, at https://www.fadedpage.com/ .
Joan, hmm! Interesting. As I noted to Pygmycory earlier, it’s precisely in the odd little fringe arts that there’s still some creative space left. Underwater aquarium ballet, I think, qualifies.
Aldarion, many forms of fiction are still living because they’ve already passed over into performance. A good historical novel is like a good noir mystery or a good bodice-ripper romance — the readers know what to expect and it becomes a matter of how well the author uses the existing genre structures to produce a lively and engaging reading experience.
Tyler, derivative works are the wave of the future. I don’t think it’s accidental that my most successful fiction so far was derivative from Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos — I tried to do something interesting with the existing stock of genre elements and structures, and people seem to have enjoyed it.
SLClaire, bingo. Changing brand names in funny and derogatory ways is a counterspell, especially if you find yourself thinking of the brands under the changed names. (“Xcreta” is hilarious, btw.) There are lots of ways to détourn, and you’re doing some of them.
BeardTree, and that’s one of the reasons that spirituality becomes so important in the declining years of a civilization. Your father was a wise man, btw.
Chuaquin, thank you for this!
Aldarion # 38:
I read “The White Castle” last year and I liked this Orhan Pamuk “historical”
novel, so I disagree. I think from my personal view that Pamuk wasn’t interested in surprising his readers when he wrote it, but in depicting in a metaphorical way how “splitted” has been his country (Turkey) between love and hate in front of European or Western culture during its recent past; between another local topics (for example the “dopplerganger”). Maybe it’s a more interesting topic if you’re Turkish (though I’m not from that country, but I liked that book). If/when you look beyond the exotism and apparent lack of action nor surprises, I think you can enjoy a “philosophical” novel disguised as a historical one.
JMG # 45:
You’re welcome…I’ve also thought it was probable that book had been translated to French due to its author references and criticism against Situationists, whose main thinkers were Debord and another French men.
I don’t know if this is entirely pay walled or not, but it strikes me as a synchronicity:
https://www.honest-broker.com/p/the-shock-of-the-old
“In the year 2026, the dominant aesthetic theory is the Shock of the Old. Of course nobody describes it that way. But they should. Because it’s scandalous how much we rely on old formulas for current day artistic work. We’ve returned to digging into the dirt of the past for artistic inspiration …
People will soon demand something more from the creative economy—something riskier, something more inspiring, something more disruptive. Above all, they will insist on something more human.
And when it arrives, it will shake things up on a massive scale—akin to what happened with Romanticism, circa 1800 or Modernism, circa 1900. We will have something more than a culture built on scams and a constantly ringing cash register.
I’m confident in predicting this because the only other alternative is living in the past.” …
Catching shades of Mark Fisher in Gioia here, and the fear of the retro.
Detournement and remix culture can, when done in a certain spirit, draw on Lullism for creative recombination.
JMG,
The 1970’s was the last chance the U.S. had to take a different path. You are familiar with the still born green wizard movement but another short craze from the early 1970’s was a great if unintended example of detournement . I bet you remember the ” wacky packs” from around 1973. These were packs of irreverent stickers for kids that made fun of major consumer products brands.
Examples were; Weakies Cereal
Capn Crud Cereal
Moron Salt
Ratz Crackers
Crust Toothpaste.
The card riffed on the themes in the titles of the products with fun descriptions of the fake products attributes.
It is hard to imagine today such a challenge to the consumer products industry. Eventually those cards were canceled due to cease and desist orders. But I would guess if you made fun of a Disney Character like that today you would end up in a CIA black site.
Though this was just another kind of product for kids, it did tend to give many of us from the era a jaded view of the consumer products industrial complex we have carried forward to this day.
#40 Play the game with drug names, perhaps to create something reminiscent of the possible side effects.
I saw a satirical video about the USA’s need for gallium: Honest Government Ad: Alcoa.
Hi John Michael,
And to think that you’ve made the claim that humour is not your strong suit. I particularly enjoyed the sneaky pun: the politician’s press release. Nice one, and thanks for the chuckles.
Yeah, navigating the whole mess requires deft social footwork and neatly prepared lines of response. Like a lack of TV, it’s easier to say: ‘Yeah we’re in a really bad signal area’. Easier than saying ‘no’ which is perceived as an outright rejection – often viewed with hostility. Always best to look for the other option not supplied.
Actually, this happened at the bank yesterday. The teller asked me if I had the phone app to confirm something, and quick as a flash the reply came: ‘I don’t really carry my phone around with me after I kept breaking it’, accompanied by ditzy face overdrive 5000. Then laughed. We both ended up laughing at the sheer stupidity of the situation, mostly because such things happen to other people, and my ego is a non-issue in such situations. If I’d just replied ‘No’ and looked menacing or worse, upset, things would have ended very differently.
Like that martial arts business we spoke of long ago, step to the side and deflect the blow. It’s always of interest to me to see that often the people making these pedantic requests appear relieved when the entire situation is made farcical. We live in such a combative society, and most people don’t want to be acting in such a fashion continually with people unknown to them (this is a danger zone), but our elites encourage this outcome. The funny thing about it, is that they themselves have not learned how to fight, and get others to do the dirty work, but eventually that lack of hands-on experience means they miss the nuance as to when to employ the technique. It’s not a tool fit for day to day situations, like say, at the bank. This is probably why people are so stressed in work places…
Nice essay too. 🙂
Cheers
Chris
I second (or third) the “Hildegard von Blingen is awesome!!!”
Weird Al Yankovic made a career out of parodying songs.
Gamazda also reworks pop songs into piano pieces. Occasionally she does something classical just prove she can. She did a fine version of Pachelbels canon in D. Sometimes she shows off playing xylophone with her right hand and the piano with her left at the same time. 😊
NephiteNeophyte @ 27. They already do. Such as keeping venerable autos running for decades past their pull by date , without fancy “restoration”.
JMG, I am curious about use of the word ‘freedom’, which I am afraid I associate with the sentiment that “I should getta do whatever I want when I want.” I am interested in independence, which means to me a basic right of subsistence within the reasonable limits–rule of law, for example–needed to have a flourishing society. A more blunt way of putting it might be “It is not my job to spend money keeping you, your relatives or friends in business.” Or, also, different people have different tastes. Deal with it.
@TylerA,
It sounds like we have some quite similar tastes in music. I may have to look at the MiracleAligner. What do you think of Algal the Bard? He plays usually about half a dozen instruments per song, and sometimes teams teams up with Hildegard.
Thinking of derivative works…
fanfiction and fanart. They’re a very mixed bag. I’ve seen everything from absolute drek to others that knock most published writing out of the water. They’re generally a very lively space, even if the quality is often low, and most of them are derivative even ignoring the constraints of working in someone else’s world.
But AI and scammers have been really damaging the fanartist/writer experience in the past two/three years, and I’m wondering how much of a future it has. Long-term, the net likely won’t support them in their current form.
I might have quit writing given how nasty things are getting, but I’m also most of the way through my largest ever, very popular fanfic project, so I hold my head high and keep going. I have some great readers, some of whom also write things I like to read, and we sort of egg each other on. I do wonder just how long I will keep doing this. I will have been posting fanfic online for twenty years as of this fall, which is crazy to think about.
Justin, the thing that fascinates me is that he can’t see that “living in the past” is the best way to get something more human. Still, that’s my experience of Gioa’s essays — so very often, he almost gets it.
Clay, good gods — now there’s a blast from the past. Kick A Man Boy Sauce! Ill Tempered Sneer laundry detergent! Hiccups Milk of Amnesia! Grave Train dog food! And to celebrate St. Patty’s day:
Yeah, I was into those in the day. Can you tell? 😉
Chris, the one kind of humor I can sometimes get away with is deadpan absurdity. As for using excuses, it’s a good plan!
Mary, and I don’t read that rather odd meaning into the concept of freedom. Deal with it. 😉
Pygmycory, well, my tentacle novels can be described as fanfic, so I certainly won’t look down my nose at other practitioners! The biggest need right now in writing generally is some way to screen out LLM slop. I look forward to whatever clever solution evolves, and I hope your work benefits from it.
I would add Ralph Vaughn Williams and Paul Hindemith to the list of composers in the 20th century who are well worth a listen. But I won’t deny that there have been diminishing returns after about 1897 when Brahms gave up the ghost. Someone mentioned Sibelius: His violin concerto is one of my favorites. If he hadn’t devoted so much time to carousing with his pals, maybe we’d have had a lot more high quality work from him.
Detournement? I like to call the Yukon XL SUV the Yucko-N Extra Large. And I like to combine adds for Trojan-enz with the slogan “What’s in your wallet?”
TylerA,
I actually do agree with that phrase, but with only a couple of caveats.
There’s ways to hack and get around having to pay subscriptions. For instance, most news sources hide their articles behind a paywall, but they usually only do it after the article has accumulated a certain amount of views. Before the views reach critical mass, the Internet Archive often archives the articles, allowing you to read them without needing to pay for a subscription.
The second caveat is that there are so many trackers on the internet that you’re the product no matter what, even if you’re paying a subscription. The only way around this is to either avoid using those services, or to have a beefy adblocker, VPN, and tracker blockers.
Agreed. In visual arts and music too, I think.
@SLClaire yeah we do that one too. “Inconvenience store” for example!
I’ve been thinking of examples of detournement throughout the day after reading. One kinda silly idea is to go to the DMV when you’re renewing ones license, and pat your head and rub ones tummy at the same time while you’re waiting. Then I started thinking detournement could really get one in trouble if one upsets the status quo too much. I could see someone calling the cops if someone was putting their head and rubbing their tummy for 30 minutes straight in the DMV. Although I don’t think one could actually be arrested for such a thing..or could they?
JMG,
The Japanese seem to have a great talent and likeness for reveling in the performance phase. While we are always looking for the new new thing they are fascinated with the perfection of ordinary or traditional things.
Thus while certainly not the originators or innovators of Jazz they have over the last 60 years adopted it and obsess and play the heck out of it. Tokyo has probably the most vibrant jazz scene in the world with multiple clubs presenting jazz every night. And not with just old guys. Many of these groups are made up of young people who were born long after most of the jazz greats had passed away.
I have a feeling they will still be playing jazz so long in to the future that John Coltrane and Miles Davis will be as distant a figures to them as Mozart and Beethoven are to us. But there is nothing wrong with that as long as you accept it and make the best of it.
“putting” should be “patting” in my last comment. Also, a lot of prank Youtubers have gotten wildly famous and rich from detournement.
Clay @49 and JMG,
Ah, the Wacky Pack stickers! I started Kindergarten in 1973 but we Xers were into them too. And I still have my collection, 26 of them. I think my 9 year old will find them quite funny: “Jail-o, Sing Sing’s Favorite Dessert (With Metal File Included)”, “Vile Soap, Used by People Who Want Privacy” (this one has a skunk on label). Just a sample from the collection.
My husband also sites ’70’s Mad magazine as an antidote to the intentions of corporate entertainment.
And speaking of tricksters, that is part of our son’s personality; mayhap it’ll come in use in the future?
Ellen in ME
@Slithy #34 re: The OSR
As someone who entered the OSR scene near it’s high point (circa 2012, when Google+ roamed the web), I got to see a lot of that first hand, and still consider the OSR my spiritual RPG home. ACKS is great (and I was delighted to discover that the substacker “Tree of Woe” is, in fact, the designer of that game!), but for a great example of both rule system and setting creativity, if you’re not familiar, might I recommend Goblin Punch (https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/)? Arnold’s “GLOG” tweaks a lot of the sacred cows of D&D while still maintaining an old school, dungeoncrawling vibe, and his world of Centerra somehow manages to feel like a “normal'” D&D world while still being quirky and original.
Anyway, I’ll stop there before veering too much more off-topic.
Cheers,
Jeff
Another thing about fanfiction. What’s the future of fanfiction when the internet goes down? You won’t have the internet around to share you fanfics to other people like so many people do these days.
Interesting article, thank you! So, “détournement” is basically taking the free gift without buying the insurance? Or eating the free samples without buying the product? If so, that doesn’t need that much reprogramming at all, just using the product / tool / idea according to each individual’s necessarily divergent circumstances and ignoring the consensus. Not the easiest thing for everyone admittedly, but easier for me and my family at least.
That said, I can see why you describe “détournement” as a a counterspell that is more useful at the individual level, rather than at the collective. Kinda hard to work it when the bureaucracy eventually takes notice and (sometimes!) decides to do something about it.
I also found useful the idea that (1) you can identify the agenda behind a tool or idea, and (2) then decide to (i) use it as intended, (ii) subvert it to whatever use pleases you, or (iii) decide it’s not worth the effort of subverting. That’s a decision-matrix I wasn’t aware of before your post!
Dread Zeppellin – not only did they do reggae Zeppellin, but the lead singer was an Elvis impersonator.
At this page is the full list of all of the non-faith-specific requests for prayer that have recently appeared at ecosophia.net and ecosophia.dreamwidth.org, as well as in the comments of the prayer list posts (printable version here, current to 3/13). Please feel free to add any or all of the requests to your own prayers.
If I missed anybody, or if you would like to add a prayer request for yourself or anyone who has given you consent (or for whom a relevant person holds power of consent) to the list, please feel free to leave a comment below.
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This week I would like to bring special attention to the following prayer requests, selected from the fuller list.
May Bob W of Lake County, Ohio’s treatment for cancer go well so that he may heal and recover as quickly as possible.
May Open Space be filled with the strength he needs to heal quickly from his current bout of Chicken Pox; may his will remain strong, that he does not scratch; may he be healed completely, and suffer no scarring in its wake.
May Bob Ralston (aka Rasty Bob), who is in hospice care in Buckeye AZ, and who just lost his wife Leslie Fish, be blessed and find relief from his pain and discomfort; may Bob’s heart remain strong.
May Princess Cutekitten, who has made no comments on any of the Ecosophia blogs for a year now, and hasn’t responded to attempts at contact, be blessed wherever she is and in whatever form she may exist.
May Cathy N. of St. Marys, Ohio heal and recover from injuries caused by a fall.
May Dustin, a relative of Brenainn, be healed of a recently discovered heart condition.
May 1Wanderers’s partner Cathy, whose cancer has returned, be given the physical and mental strength to fight it, and tolerate the treatment, and may she enjoy a full and permanent recovery.
May Jule from Iserlohn, Germany, who is experiencing complications in her pregnancy due to an influenza infection, recover and have a pleasant pregnancy and birth.
May Larry Mulford, who has entered hospice after a year battling with pancreatic cancer, pass in the smoothest possible manner, and may his wife be enveloped in our love.
May Marko have the strength to seize the opportunities.
May Pierre’s young daughter, Athena, be healed from her fatigue and its root causes in ways that are easy, natural, and as holistic as possible.
May 5 year old Max be blessed and protected during his parents’ contentious divorce; may events work out in a manner most conducive to Max’s healthy development over the long term.
May Lydia G. of Geauga County, Ohio heal and recover from prolonged health issues.
May both Monika and the child she is pregnant with both be blessed with good health and a safe delivery.
May Mary’s sister have her auto-immune conditions sent into remission, may her eyes remain healthy, and may she heal in body, mind, and spirit.
May Trubujah’s best friend Pat’s teenage daughter Devin, who has a mysterious condition which doctors are so far baffled by necessitating that she remain in a wheelchair, be healed of her condition; may the underlying cause come to light so that treatment may begin.
May Kevin’s sister Cynthia be cured of the hallucinations and delusions that have afflicted her, and freed from emotional distress. May she be safely healed of the physical condition that has provoked her emotions; and may she be healed of the spiritual condition that brings her to be so unsettled by it. May she come to feel calm and secure in her physical body, regardless of its level of health.
May Frank R. Hartman, who lost his house in the Altadena fire, and all who have been affected by the larger conflagration be blessed and healed.
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Guidelines for how long prayer requests stay on the list, how to word requests, how to be added to the weekly email list, how to improve the chances of your prayer being answered, and several other common questions and issues, are to be found at the Ecosophia Prayer List FAQ.
If there are any among you who might wish to join me in a bit of astrological timing, I pray each week for the health of all those with health problems on the list on the astrological hour of the Sun on Sundays, bearing in mind the Sun’s rulerships of heart, brain, and vital energies. If this appeals to you, I invite you to join me.
Clay, and JMG,
As a jazz musician living in Japan, Clay’s comment of course caught my attention. My own opinion of Japanese jazz is that it’s not actually thriving all that much, and indeed is aging out. Of course there are young jazz players here, as in the US, as also there are young classical players in both countries. I do think that it’s interesting that jazz has lasted so much longer here than in other countries as a social force of any strength whatsoever (though honestly, it’s not that much) is Japanese fascination with the creative individualism inherent in the small unit version of jazz; it acts as a tonic to overall “group over individual” foundation that Japanese society rests on (just as, by the way, these very values can act as a tonic for Americans who come to Japan– they certainly have for me). That said, the ability to break past the fascination with creative individualism to actually becoming a creative individual (and I would certainly put most of the Japanese jazz artists westerners might know, such as Hiromi Uehara or Makoto Ozone, in that category) is another thing entirely. There is an awful lot of boundary protection that goes on in Japanese jazz– but that’s true in places like New York, actually.
I’m not entirely convinced by JMG’s assertion that jazz has a future as a performative art well into the future a la Classical music, as was for instance portrayed in “Retrotopia”. I think that the individual creative striving of singular improvisatory explorers is too baked into the cake of any jazz which is outside the big band or club vocalist mold; it’s just not jazz without it. In fact, that striving and exploration, on the level of the individual performer rather than of the individual composer (which of course also had its place in jazz), is I feel the particular creative element that the universe was looking to explore when it hatched and raised jazz over decades into its most vibrant, hothouse phases. If anything continues from jazz into future generations, I believe it’s that unique element over any other– the skill of artfully expressing through our instruments, in real time, as best as we can approximate, the unique melodic line which forever sounds within each of our souls– which will go forward in some form, rather than imitating the outward styles of Fats Wallers, Charlie Parker, or whoever else.
That said, if anywhere will indeed continue to perform the outward forms long into the future as a form of classical music, it’s probably Japan!
Justin P. # 48:
Indeed, nowadays everything really new has been tried by the last century art vanguards, which ironically have become part of Western tradition…So I think we are moving between the past revival (disguised with “new” variations) and the rehashed simulacrum of “artistic revolutions”, pretending apparent novelties.
By the way, the frantic effort made by Faustian believers in God Progress seems sometimes ridiculous, when they pretend today is better than yesterday. For example, I read a time ago a critical comment by a woke “thinker” here, against a novelist who remembered with “too much” love her childhood during the ‘90s. His “reason”? He pointed in the ‘90s there were only two genders (male and female), but nowadays we’ve got hundreds of them, of course thanks to woke warriors (cough cough). It seemed the most stupid “evidence” in favor of (social) progress I’ve read in my whole life…
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Clay D. # 49:
Well, I like the “Moron Salt” the best, for a fake consumer good, ha ha…
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Siliconguy # 52 and others:
It seems tradition of pop songs parodies changing lyrics and/or style is international, because I’ve just remember some Spanish pop/rock groups specialized in another groups comical covers. For example, “the PeterSellers”(pay attention to the British actor tribute) and “Los Gandules”(“the Lazy Guys”, who evidently they’re too lazy to write their lyrics he he…). They could be labelled alike as “stupid/comical pop-rock.
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JMG # 56:
I share with you your fondness with “deadpan absurd” humor, which is an important part of my personal humor sense, too. Unluckily, few average people understand it, and even less laugh thanks to my humor; because my personality is quite “strange”, to say it softly. I must take care of this when I’m with my friends, girlfriend and family to no scare nor upset them with my personal pranks.
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Phutatorius # 57:
Yeah, Sibelius. I’m a dilettante in classical music too, but I think he was the last great European composer worth to be heard during the past century. He was despised by Adorno, but maybe you already know Adorno was a Marxist, and Sibelius a politically Conservative man (ahem), so there was an ideological bias against Sibelius.
In a strictly musical aspect, Sibelius never broke deeply with Western musical tradition, which is good, methink.
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Clay D. # 62:
Yes, there are a lot of fondness for Jazz in Tokio by some Japanese “dilettantes” and experts, like the writer Murakami pointed some years ago. This novelist himself likes Jazz music, too.
@ Longsword # 28
Should you be minded to continue on from Dublin to Donegal, we’re rural, we have plenty of ground that could be camped on, and are always up for friendly conversation with ecosophians and other odd bods. 🙂
And should this interest you enough to talk about some more, my user name and the protonmail DOT com handle should find me.
Best wishes. Scotlyn
>One kinda silly idea is to go to the DMV when you’re renewing ones license, and pat your head and rub ones tummy at the same time while you’re waiting
CA being CA, if you’re acting weird in some harmless way, they’ll leave you alone. Things may have changed since though.
In a typical rural area, the “DMV” is the county courthouse. Which you may need to drive a ways to get to. There may be a line but it’s usually short if there is one. Sleepy towns are sleepy. Acting sufficiently weird in a courthouse will get the cops involved at some point. And cops do not like weird. And if the cops do not like you sufficiently, they will find a way to arrest you.
>they are fascinated with the perfection
When it comes to the Japanese you can start and stop right here. You should look into how the Japanese play baseball too. They play it. A lot. They watch it. A lot. That part I absolutely do not understand myself. Of all the sportsball games, watching baseball is like watching paint dry. The only other game that’s almost as tedious to watch is soccer. Yeah, you heard me. Soccer is painful to watch.
In any case, just like you never play DOTA2 against a Korean, never play baseball against the Japanese.
Here is a wee detourning style song I remember singing and giggling about with friends during my early teen years (1972 or so?):
McD*n*ld$ is your kinda place,
Hamburgers in your face,
Dill pickles up your nose,
French fries between your toes.
Last time that I went there,
They fried my underwear,
M*c D*n Ald$ Is Your Kind Of Place….
I’m glad others remember the Wacky Packs. We loved collecting them as kids in the 1970s. Another Wacky Pack: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/chock-full-onuts-bolts-wacky-packages-1st-series-1973–211106301269715567/
And for detournement artwork, there were the Nutty Mads. https://bid.vegalleries.com/Collection-of-14-Nutty-Mads-Marx-Figures_i39546104
yes, there was a lot of that sort of satire going around when I was a lot younger, and we were all getting a big kick out of that. The Smothers Brothers. Tom Lehrer. Satire was one of our favorite genres.
When European music came to America it started the long process of turning into something else. I do think that it is true, that when one resource of creativity becomes exhausted, people start turning to other cultures for material to renew our own. So much of “New Music” or 20th century contemporary “classical” was invigorated by both Indian Classical music and gamelan orchestras. This can be seen in the interest in microtonality and alternate tuning systems. Some of that went into minimalism, drone and in their more commercial aspect, ambient. I consider this kind of borrowing to be musical pseudomorphosis.
To give another example, in England it was a musical pseudomorphosis coming from Jamaica with reggae and ska having a huge influence on punk music as it evolved into post-punk, then came the rave scene and ambient dub music. Dub electronica has a huge presence in England.
I understand on the one hand about diminishing returns, yet, I also think in American musicians and composers of the 20th century were emboldended by the mindset of the pioneer and experimentalist, something still hardwired into us to a degree. I think there is an experimental tradition in the USA. It’s something I’ve been writing about this year in celebration of 2026, a series on my fifty favorite albums from the New World Records label:
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/new-world-records-and-the-american-experimental-tradition-part-1
https://www.sothismedias.com/home/new-world-records-and-the-american-experimental-tradition-part-2
Where that tradition will go in the future is interesting. The term experimental is problematic because many of the experiments have been done and now it is a genre and subculture unto itself with its own critical apparatus.
New World Records also releases old non-commercial music that is worth preserving, stuff like Tin Pan Alley, Vaudeville, old labor / work songs, operettas, spirituals, Native American music etc. So I’ve been including one of those in the series too, as well as the non-commercial recordings of composers.
Whether or not anybody but a small number of people besides myself like this stuff, I find it stimulates my mind and thinking. That’s part of why I like listening to this good ole’ fashioned dodecaphonic and atonal music.
I can still see bluegrass becoming a new kind of chamber music in our bioregional futures, as in this piece, that I learned about from Gioia who says it’s “like Bartók playing bluegrass at the YMCA”
https://lukecissell.bandcamp.com/album/string-quartets-nos-1-5
Recombinations of preexisting forms like this have big futures ahead.
@chuaquin, I think you are right and The White Castle is a philosophical novel disguised as a historical one. I had already dragged myself through his Nights of Plague, which has a similar hidden subject.
I’m a little bit in love with Amelia from Pathways.
Speaking of jazz, the free improvisation scene , that also combines elements of so called New Music, intuitive music, deep listening, noise and experimentalism, is strong, if small. Various writers on Free Jazz have commented on the concept of freedom being inherent in Free Jazz. Listening to what the other people are doing, then going off on your own tangent, riff, making it your own, transforming it, then it shoots back to another player -this is a beautiful mode and model of freedom.
If culture is downstream from imagination I certainly hope improvisational music continues for a long time to come.
Here is some Don Cherry & the Organic Music Society
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iu3OLnQvl-g
Let Freedom ring.
Gosh, Zohran Mamdani is a beta-Marxist! I just thought he was a spoiled rich kid who wanted to play mayor. Surprise, surprise – the problems of the big city seem to thwart Marxism of all sorts. The warm of collectivism killed off 18 homeless people who died in the cold. …. the list goes on.
Yet, he soldiers on playing mayor and tweaking the Conservatives into white hot anger over his religion. However, even Steve Bannion and Eric Bolling haven’t paid that much attention to him as I thought they would since, they are rapid anti-Islamists, who firmly believe that Sharia Law creep is upon us threatening western civilization.
How effective are beta-Marxists in their Democrat Socialist form?
About technology and Kindle. Having a brain injury makes me outside the norms. Not having a smart phone makes people nervous around me. They can’t text me or ping me or get my attention except by yelling “Hey You!” I end up testing every system out there for bugs that no one thinks off until I have to use their patient portal or whatever. Then, gee golly whiz, we never thought…….
As for Kindle and books. I gently remind indie authors to provide a print version for us brain types. I am a beta-reader for one author for his print versions. Apparently, I catch things that the e-book people don’t. I have a Kindle, but don’t use it for reading. I store expensive reference books on it – those university print pubs that cost lots of money.
Luke, well, how does that benefit you? Détournement isn’t simply a matter of messing with people’s heads — or at least it doesn’t have to be limited to that. As for getting arrested, any police officer more than a week out of the academy can figure out six reasons to arrest anybody, and yes, they will, if they decide you’re an annoyance.
Clay, Japan is very good at that. It’s one of the cultures that’s taken the performance phase further than most.
Ellen, a lot of kids channel the Trickster; with any luck yours will keep the talent.
Anon, fanfic existed before the internet. The original K/S (Kirk-Spock erotic romance stories, written by and sold to middle-aged women) was circulated at science fiction conventions in mimeographed form; you pretty much had to know someone to find out which tables in the vendor’s room had K/S in a box on the floor and would sell you some if you asked. (I knew some people who were into it, which is how I know.) The better grade of fanfic got published, either with a name change to deter copyright suits (August Derleth wrote quite a few Sherlock Holmes stories but called the detective “Solar Pons”) or with the author’s permission (Lovecraft did this, and more recently Marion Zimmer Bradley filled entire anthologies with Darkover fanfic by her fans). The internet is merely more convenient.
J, it can be quite a bit subtler than your two examples, but that “not much reprogramming” is a challenge to a lot of people, thus the need to be explicit about it.
DaveInWA, they were pretty far out there.
Ecoprayer, thanks for this as always.
Quin, I see the big band and club vocalist modes as the first forms of the future performance mode of jazz. It’ll be a very different sort of music — but then listening to a pianist play Chopin is very different from listening to Chopin improvising must have been.
Scotlyn, ha! Kids I knew routinely made up and sang comparable songs based on advertising jingles, as did I. It was a pleasant entertainment and a useful response to the barrage of commercial trash.
JJ, more blasts from the past! Thank you.
Patricia M, yep. I think it helped.
Justin, recombination only takes you so far, which is why so many of the recombinant genres only last a short time before falling into a rut and out of fashion. It may be a while before genuinely new inspirations start to appear — but we’ll see.
Neptunesdolphins, most beta-Marxists are spoiled rich kids who want to play at exercising power, so Mamdani fits right in. As for the effectiveness of beta-Marxists, they’re very effective at their actual purpose — giving disaffected elite youth a chance to act out their rebellious fantasies harmlessly. Social change? Hopelessly ineffective.
Dave…# 68:
Yes, Dread Zeppelin frontman was indeed an Elvis impersonator called “Tortelvis”(methink); I don’t know his reasons to choose that artistic name…
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Quin # 70:
I’m not a “dilettante” in jazz music (though I’m in some another topics), but to some extent I agree. Japanese cultural tradition emphatizes very much the group over the individual person, so the evident “spontaneous” and individual tendences in jazz players can be appealling to some fringe Japanese in contrast with their dominant social values context.
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The Other Owen # 74:
Yeah, Japanese tend to perfectionism playing baseball…and doing another “foreign” things. Do you know some Japanese are in love with Flamenco dance? In Japan there are some academies to learn and dance this Spanish dance and music, and according some of our experts, a few of them dance like the Andalusian original dancers…very well. I guess some Japanese like Flamenco because maybe it allows them (as dancers or mere audience of it) to show their inner feelings. Well, Japanese culture doesn’t allow very much feelings expression…
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Aldarion # 80:
Exactly. Pamuk wrote “The White Castle” in a philosophical way, so he wasn’t interested in any real action nor historical perfect truth (even he wrote some anachronisms, for example the “mad scientist” making a new war machine…). It’s difficult to understand and like it, if you’re not Turkish, but I managed to do it. Indeed, Spain (like Russia methink) has been in a relative fringe situation during some centuries with Central/North Europe (Protestant?) economy, culture and science. Although Spaniards and Russians are Christian countries and not a Muslim one like the Turks, I can feel empathic with the evident inferiority complex of Turkey people in front of Europe (and the whole West). Turkey Empire conquered partly East Europe in the past, and on the other hand, during past century, Turkey was bluntly and roughly “westernized” thanks to Ataturk (M. Kemal). This modernization and forced secularization had some advantages for that country, but traumatized until today the Turks, Pamuk included too…
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Some last words in my current comment about “Détournement” idea. I think you can’t understand and practice this tactic/strategy against the “System” without understanding well the Situ core term “Spectacle”. In the short form, Spectacle is propaganda plus everything that society is pretending you make believe in it, but it isn’t really true. So for the Situs, it’s “evil”. Of course “Détournement” is the good thing to fight against evil Spectacle: they’re correlative ideas. When you “détour” propaganda/advertising to subvert it, you put it in ridiculous and “nude” it to show its emptiness and lack of truth. This is my personal view about these two Situationist big ideas.
Neptune…# 82:
It doesn’t surprise me Mamdani actual situation, because I guessed his demagogue attitude would lead him to show soon or later his imposture (cough).
About Socialdemocrats as Beta-Marxists, well, I think they gave up their last ideological bonds with Marx a lot of time ago, at least in Western Europe. Indeed, Spanish “Socialists” renounced publicly to Marxism in late ‘70s or early ‘80s to attract middle class voters (and they reached power in 1982, so they succeed with that tactic). In addition to this, it seems Socialdemocratic European parties have been more influenced by F. Lassalle not Marxist Socialism ideology than by the Old Karl ideas.
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JMG # 84:
John, your reference to those old “erotic” fanfic tributes to imaginarian love relationships between Kirk and Mr. Spock has made me to smile, he he…
@Jeff Russell #65
Thank you for this! Skimming through his blog and work, he definitely seems to have some interesting ideas.
@JMG, “recombination only takes you so far, which is why so many of the recombinant genres only last a short time before falling into a rut and out of fashion.”
THANK YOU. To my mind there’s few things more dreary than someone thinking they’re being inventive by smooshing two, three, four genres together. You have to be much better than most artists are to make it work, and when it does work, it’s usually because you’ve accidentally reinvented some other already-existing genre in a cheap coat of paint. For example, most “science fantasy” is really either sword-and-planet with energy swords (ex: the first Star Wars movie) or comic book superhero stories with a sci-fi aesthetic (ex: most of the rest of the genre).
@Chauquin: We are in agreement pretty much about the art part.
Gender bending doesn’t bother me at all. I don’t claim to understand the younger generations obsession with gender, nor do I like any kind of fundamentalist ideology, whether it is about Jesus H. Christ or gender or communism or capitalism or any sacred cow.
I am actually listening to an audio book on cassette at work of a story cycle by Ursula K. Leguin called The Birthday of the World. I got the cassettes at a neighborhood swap meet. It’s rather good, imo, and explores some of her ideas about foursome marriages. To quote her from the story Mountain Ways, included in the collection:
“Marriage on O is a foursome, the sedoretu—a man and a woman from the Morning moiety and a man and a woman from the Evening moiety. You’re expected to have sex with both your spouses of the other moiety, and not to have sex with your spouse of your own moiety. So each sedoretu has two expected heterosexual relationships, two expected homosexual relationships, and two forbidden heterosexual relationships.”
It’s rather more imaginative than a lot of new books I see at my library job that are about someone’s sexual identity.
So was Triton, also called Trouble on Triton by Samuel R. Delany. Great older work exploring gender changes.
I really liked Stars In My Pocket Like Grains of Sand as well, that also plays around with gender and language. Excellent novel. Very imaginative.
Now these are older works, which is maybe why they are better than most of the new SF and other works that seek to address these issues, and do so with a lot less verve and imagination.
For hating Marx so much you use class analysis, dialectics, critique of ideology and structure/super structure extensively and that’s One of the main reasons your analysis are spot on most of the time. Btw Marx don’t talk about the end of history. That’s Fukuyama :).
just one word to say “Music”
@Aninymous #66: without the internet, fanfic will be published the way it was before, in ‘zines.’ That is, print media outside the publishing system. I used to have copies of some of them.
Soviet Russia had similar – underground – publications called Samizdats: there was a very short-lived one among fans of Louis McMasters Bujold called “Samizdat Barrayar.”
“Our culture is uniquely burdened in this context by its obsession with the phantasm of perpetual progress. Even as the arts themselves settle down comfortably into performance mode, with musicians striving to play Bach and Mozart perfectly and writers turning out endless variations on rigidly defined fictional genres—the murder mystery, the bodice-ripping romance, the politician’s press release, and so on—there are always intellectuals who can’t stand the thought that the Western world’s age of creative innovation has run its course in the usual way.”
Reminds me of a certain type of person who populates genre fandoms. The type who has seen enough of a genre to grow tired of its tropes, but who remains so committed to said genre that the thought of seeking out novelty in other kinds of stories never occurs to them. Instead they demand that the genre subvert or “deconstruct” itself for their entertainment.
The best example of detournement I ever saw was this billboard from 1979 but I saw it do the rounds later than that. Now I have a fancy French term to call it so thanks JMG.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CasualUK/comments/xlbfbb/old_skool_uk_graffiti/#lightbox
Some legendary but anonymous feminist did the honours. Bravo!
Regarding ebook readers: I use my device to read foreign language texts that are not yet available in my native language. The ebook (e.g., in epub or mobi format) is first converted to Word format (xdoc) and then sent to my preferred online translator (e.g., Google Translate, DeepL) for translation. The translated ebook is then reformatted back into an ebook. It works flawlessly. The translation quality is very good thanks to the Large Language Model.
Anonymous, yes, I know. I’m operating on the assumption that my fanfiction habit cannot and will not last forever. Doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it while it lasts, though.
The detournament that was around during my teens was Adbusters.
JMG,
A good example of Beta Marxists in action is Oregon’s governor and the Portland City Council. Half the city councilors are actually card carrying members of the DSA and our governor’s socialist proclivities are well known.
Recently the town’s only big league sports team, the Trailblazers, is in the process of being sold by Paul Allen’s sister ( she inherited it when he died) to a Billionaire from Texas who made his money on subprime auto loans. The Billionaire insisted that the public renovate the city’s arena to suit the whims of the new team and the league at the publics expense.
Of course the Beta Marxists jumped to the tune of their actual masters and quickly voted to round up the 600 million dollars that was demanded. No revenue sharing, no rent for the team, just a give away of the publics money to an out of state Billionaire. He keeps all the profits generated from the teams play at the new arena, the public gets bupkis.
An interesting thing has happened to Classical (i call it orchestral) music, particularly since the “contemporary” period (20th century, mostly up to the 1960-70’s). Underneath, that insufferable, inaudible avant-garde abomination , what was paying the bills was the détournement of all those operatic skills into … movie background music, anime background music and nowadays video games music. Many of those compositions, fed by cinematic vigor, rival in complexity, depth and creativity the compositions that came 200 years prior. I am wondering if the French situationism that our gracious host mentions didn’t contribute to that transformation (French avant-garde classical from the 60’s is in my opinion the most heinous form of noise generation ever devised). The timing and location certainly looks right.
For reasons I don’t entirely understand myself, I have always had some form of obsession with old computers.
Now not necessarily because that I’d find everything aesthetic or valuable about 1980s software and graphics;
But I cherish news like these:
https://gizmodo.com/this-old-ass-commodore-64-is-still-being-used-to-run-an-1787196319
You’ll find several sites mentioning the c64 computer from 1983 still running in a polish auto shop, apparently last confirmed well into 2023.
A simple thing, durable as such, it performs its duties without
useless obstacles-
“This C64C used by a small auto repair shop for balancing drive shafts has been working non-stop for over 25 years,” reads a post this week on Commodore USA’s Facebook page. “And despite surviving a flood it is still going…”
Since my youth I have dreamed weirdly of a world that is a hybrid between modernity and baroque unmodernity –
a world where computers and tele-communications exits, yet in very reduced and public forms, while everyday life is much more government by pre-modern agriculture.
Since I am learning Linux, and with what is coming, I don’t know if computers in Western Europe will be much of a thing in private households like they were, but if there is still a market, I bet running Linux on old machines to do the basics without useless additives and refurbishing old computers and laptops may be a thing.
Windows 11 is so horrible many people turn their backs on it.
What concerns security: apparently, if you don’t do anything stupid, you will not easily catch a virus on older Windows versions.
Low tech chip production is also still a thing, despite the race for the lowest nanometers; they’re more durable and befitting for basic tasks.
I find Vitranc’s meshtastic also a fascinating gimmick, if even at this time not yet of much use.
The idea of local decentralized networks where people exchange texts as basic information, when grid and internet are out of order, is a fascinating one.
Vitranc, also apparently a resident of Austria.
That brings me to the festival “Nova Rock” that has been around since at least my 2000s adolescence. I never cared for its mix of new metal, indie rock and the likes, what was typical then, I just found it remarkable that the line-up of this most well known festival in Austria last year was almost identical to fifteen to twenty years ago!
Cultural stasis is a thing.
And I supposed, having come to where we are, the climax of global resource use behind us, hard to believe what extraordinary quantity of data being sent around the globe at light speed every day, so much of it porn and useless leisure even,
taking a kind look to older but more durable things is the right attitude of this time, where the newer stuff starts to bring no real benefit anymore.
Justin P. # 89:
Well, it seems traditional binary two genders (and straight…) is too boring for some people, so I understand those writers have imagined how to improve it toward a new fantastic world of human relationships. No problem with personal fantasies…
Real problem begins when some zealots (the woke activists) identify their efforts to “inflate” the number of genders at will with a supposed (social) Progress; and even worse, when they try to impose their doctrine/ideology to the whole society, avoiding a real democratical debate. That’s not progress but political involution IMHO. Their favorite “modus operandi” has been usually indoctrination (MSM, mainstream movies, social media and schools/Universities) thanks to friendly “Progressive” governments and corporations; and open censorship (the infamous “cancel culture”). These attitudes and behaviors have helped to make the Left parties and trade unions become an empty shell (between another causes, methink). I could point that after the USSR collapse the mainstream leftists thought they had to accept implicitly “neoliberal” economics; so the “hard” fight against Capital abuses was given up, and the Left black beasts turned toward the gender(s) and another “soft” goals. Eventually, those “fights” ended crystalizing in the woke ideology and the cultural wars…I doubt there’s a “progress” in this nowadays situation.
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Federico V. # 90:
Only JMG can answer you properly about your criticism against him (including his supposed hate against Marx). So I’ll let him to defend by himself when he wants or he can do it.
However, I can say something about your claim that the “end of history” idea was originally said by Fukuyama. Indeed, I think it’s an old Hegel idea (maybe borrowed from Christian millenarism), which Marx in a implicit way, seemed to accept when he imagined a future edenic Communist society in the future, where everybody would be free and happy. Maybe he didn’t write about an explicit end of history, but a society without social classes is indeed how the known history must end, according Marxism. I write this comment recognizing I’m not an expert in dark prose German philosophers (so I’m not sure of it, I think it as “work hypothesis”).
JMG, regarding the future of jazz–
And I apologize for getting caught on a tangent–
Please give your outlook on the future of recorded music technology. How quickly do you expect mass produced recordings to be a thing of the past? In my own estimation, the answer to that question (an answer I am uncertain of), in particular, determines how soon I agree with you. As the age of easy fossil fuels and electricity winds down, certainly I do see a renaissance coming with instrumental live music on the horizon– maybe even big bands. To the extent that jazz was popular dance music, roughly the 20s through the 40s, it actually wasn’t necessarily all that different than what came before, just with a different cultural flair. Reading stories of ecstatic mass music events during the Romantic era and wild waltz balls supports your argument very well that jazz is already well on its way into the cooling-down process of “classicalification”.
And I totally get what you are saying about not getting to hear Chopin improvise. But over the last half of its history of cultural relevance (I’m talking late 1940s to mid 1980s here) I think what jazz was exploring was something else again. This art form of the spontaneously creative individual– having live musical conversations with a whole small band full of spontaneously creative individuals no less!– was something new and unprecedented, if only in scale. It’s true that improvisational skills were also valued at various points in the past of what’s now called “classical music”; but never before could masses of people listen to these improvisations, practice, transcribe, analyze, imitate, and transcend them. The pool of skilled improvisers participating in new explorations of improvisation expanded literally by orders of magnitude during the jazz age, and leviathans spawned in the oceans that were only pools up to the end of the 19th century.
I do not deny that what jazz was exploring through its lifespan as a culturally alive art form, has mostly been explored at this point, and to death. The Free Jazz that Justin Patrick Moore so loves is indeed the very evidence of this: the sound (to my slightly jaundiced ears) of great artists finding the very borders of the genre, moving beyond them, and then staking territory in an infertile land that comes to be populated on the whole– rare brilliant hermits aside– by carpetbagging amateurs who are generally just there for the social approval of being recognized for brilliance without any of the hard work. (Justin: I do admit to the utility, the sometimes raw power, and even the very occasional sheer beauty of free jazz… but it’s not a country I can ever bring myself to visit for too long.)
The musicians who are still called by jazz’s siren song– the “classical musicians” of the future, in other words– are not, in my experience (outside of universities and the nation of Japan), enticed by the outward aesthetics of big bands or torch singer units; those aesthetics are increasingly becoming as irrelevant to current culture as barbershop quartets. Rather, these entranced young musicians are drawn to the exploratory, improvisatory, individualist-in-communication-with-the-group aspect– and the Middle Way balance it threads between rules and chaos. Recording technology was the hothouse in which those magic beanstalks grew over the 20th century, and to whatever extent new artists still continue to climb them, it will be recording technology that sustains their existence. As soon as recorded music on a wide scale (at the very least to the level of the community jukebox) ceases to be, then so ceases to be jazz in any meaningful way, as far as I am (and I daresay the majority of jazz musicians would be) concerned. For without the ability to ever listen to them, directly causing jaws to drop to floor, any mythic tales of the improvising prowess of Art Tatum, John Coltrane, and Keith Jarrett will indeed be little different from those of Bach, Mozart, and Liszt.
Chauquin,
Thanks. Very interesting that you put “spontaneous” in quotes. Once attained as a skill to a certain level, improvisation truly is spontaneous. What’s happening, to the best I can describe, is that there is inside a kind of musical alphabet soup that one gradually adds thousands of letters to over decades, slowly simmering and deepening in flavor over time, that one dips into for these acts of spontaneity. For beginners, it’s random, slightly desperate, and with a small hack vocabulary (“T-A-C, I guess I’m spelling ‘cat’ again”), but over the years one builds increasingly skilled intent such that masters can spontaneously react as they come to weave them into improvised sonnets that surprise even them. Indeed, that’s one of its greatest joys, is not knowing quite where it comes from; in fact perhaps the loveliest fact of all is that the broth in which this alphabet soups float is as deep as creation, and occasionally the most unexpected living things will come floating up.
But I also know– vividly recalling my own memory from childhood of my uncle marveling at how jazz musicians are so good at pretending that they were making it all up– that probably most people don’t believe it’s real somehow! That’s okay too, as long as they have a good time 🙂
re: improvisational music.
It’s not just in jazz. It’s also early music – look up renaissance divisions sometime for some interesting examples and instructions on how to do it. And were doing it in classical music, from Bach to Chopin.
I’ve also run into and played plenty in non early music settings, though they weren’t labelled jazz. We were just a bunch of people hanging out and playing music by ear.
I think improvisational music is a lot more common than a lot of people realize, especially in less formal settings involving music played by ear and not high-stakes performances. I’m not sure that improvisational music isn’t the norm rather than the exception over the entire course of human history.
@JMG: There is no substitute for Awen!
@Chauquin: I didnt mention gender in my initial comments this week. I realize you brought it up to make a point, but it seems your main point was to make a point about gender. I just gave a counterpoint. Perhaps remixing the biological genders is a kind of personal detournement.
@Quin: I think there is serious talent in those worlds, but I also agree it draws people who just want to be seen and make noise.
– Happy equinox to all who celebrate!
Hey JMG and SL Claire
On the subject of rebranding the brands, when I was briefly a trolley-pusher in a shopping centre I amused my coworkers with my various alterations to the names of the supermarket chains we worked for or near.
Woolworths – woolw*nk
Coles – Cole sore
Target – Retar’git
Aldi – Al’s D*ck
Kmart – Gaymart
Hey JMG and Quin
On the subject of the future of Jazz, it is probably necessary to wonder how they will produce the necessary musical instruments, such as the essential saxophone, through the long descent.
While it would not be impossible to continue to manufacture the instruments manually, it would be hard to so due to their mechanical complexity. It’s likely simpler substitutes will be used.
It just so happens that an inventor of musical instruments named Bart Hopkins has made a likely prototype for one of these substitutes, a “Wooden saxophone” that is essentially a wooden trumpet that closely matches the sound of a true brass saxophone.
https://barthopkin.com/instrumentarium/wooden-sax/
Quin,
You have inspired me to place my ” the Cologne Concert” album in a sealed time capsule so many decades in to the future music lovers can still marvel at the improvisational skills of Keith Jarrett.
But I do think two genres of modern music will have the best chance of surviving in to the future as performance art are Jazz and Folk ( I include country music as a specialized version of folk). Both these genres can be performed in intimate settings without electrification if need be. Most Rock was built to be played at the Arena level which may be a situation that is less common 100 years from now.
> As I tried to show there, the closer you get to the collective, the more power the elite classes and their hired sorcerers in media and marketing have; the closer you get to the individual, the easier it is for individual counterspells to frustrate their efforts.
Only sorta. The problem is that kind of like with beta-marxism (which in principle works to bring about the revolution, and in practice works to help the system improve via critique and to give a passtime to disaffected youth), there’s a similar dynamic between the individual and the collective: Individualism is in principle all about self-empowerement, and in practice the surest way for people to be powerless isolated units, crashed not by the collective, but by the centralized.
The obsession with individualism, then, is more of an American peculiarity. And, the legacy of protestantism, the myth of the Wild West, and Walt Whitman aside, it came about mainly because Americans have been sold collectivism as the devil for a huge chunk of their formative cultural years: the whole of the Cold War and then some.
If beta-Marxists “pursue wholly ineffectual methods of social change” so do “individualists”. At least, when they even pretend their ways are in any way about bringing social change.
Often they’re satisfied with preaching self-change (which is not much help with everything around is turning into ****, and the bad guys are in charge, at best it amounts to loving your prison or finding some niche that’s still not claimed by those in power and clinging to it). Sometimes, they’re of the idea that if you start wit yourself, somehow this is supposed to bring social change by spontaneous coordination (or lack thereof) of many “shelves”.
The result of either way is the world we live in.
SLClaire #40
When my husband was alive, our front yard was mostly flowers, with a few shrubs. We had bees, birds, and a multitude of small critters hanging out and it was a joy to watch them. My husband had his own little plot of flowers that he constantly babied. That is one of my most precious memories of him.
The chemical drenched typical North American front lawn is a total disaster. When I was growing up in the 40s and 50s, I knew only one person with cancer and I was in my early 30s before I knew another one. Now it seems that every second or third person I know has cancer. A few decades ago, I belonged to a group that petitioned city council to ban the cosmetic use of pesticides, but they put it “to committee” and was never heard from again. Luckily a few years later, the Ontario government passed a law, with a few loopholes, that banned lawn pesticides.
Liz Primeau, a former editor of Canadian Gardening, wrote a book: Front Yard Gardens. If you or anyone else is interested, you may be able to get it in the library. IIRC, she had gardens from many different locations ranging from desert to cool rainforest.
Personally, I think expanses of green lawn are boring.
@Chaquin #101: it’s not a criticism. I love JMG political and ecological work. Even when I do not agree with him. Collapse now and avoid the rush changed my outlook on life and carreer. I love most of his old books. I think he dislikes Marx a lot because Marx shares the religion of progress as most of the people of his time. He is right about that of course but I would not old a grudge against Marx because of that. I just find that JMG uses a lot of marxist tools and that’s a matter of fact. There is a lot to save about Marx. He was one of the great. PS: Marx believed that the proletarian revolution was going to be the end of prehistory and the beginning of history. The end of class antagonism due to the mode of production (not of all antagonism, hardships and fights). He criticized heavily every form of utopism. I guess he wasn’t right but that doesn’t mean that he should not be understood for what he actually saId.
JMG Et al.,
If you like Zaparella, you might like Dub Side of the Moon. I think it’s a masterpiece, but then I like that album (Dark Side) and I like Reggae.
Ok lets just say there is movement already in the works to what y’all t conversing about jazz and such, that also depends how you define a genre. But i would guess when jazz was coming into light you did’nt know it was actually happening because you almost dont want to jinx a thing. musicians tend to be on the superstitious side. Now for the idea of recorded music this is also has had an influence with in itself too. For example when the 60’s and 70’s engineering and tech of speakers such as hearing the bass in its presence it allowed our ears to be trained easier. could go on writing “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”.
Chuaquin, I have to admit K/S didn’t and doesn’t make me smile, except in a certain wry sense — there’s an entire book to be written about how the existence of male/male slash fiction as a commodity produced and consumed by women annihilates some core elements of feminist theory. Still, glad you liked the reference.
Slithy, oh, granted. I hope my contribution to the genre isn’t a complete flop — The Weird of Hali, after all, is a smoosh-together of Lovecraftian weird horror and epic fantasy! But it’s a much riskier maneuver than most writers realize, and it can become dull or silly (or both) very, very easily.
Federico, “hating” Marx? Hardly. I simply put him in his proper place in the history of ideas, which is much less significant than his cultists insist. The analysis of class conflict as a key to history was invented by Giambattista Vico a century and a half before Marx was born, drawing heavily from Polybius and other classical historians. I freely grant that Marx updated Vico’s analysis to fit the industrial revolution, but (a) that was a long time ago and class conflicts have not stayed stuck in the capitalist-bourgeoisie-proletariat rut Marx described, and (b) Marx burdened the whole subject with a linear teleology borrowed from Hegel that renders his theories useless as a source of meaningful predictions for the future. That’s why I use Vico and Spengler in place of Marx — they offer analytical tools that aren’t burdened by warmed-over Christian eschatology in pseudosecular drag.
Hawk, er, okay; what did you intend to communicate with that one word? Put it down to my autism, but I don’t follow what you’re saying.
Valenzuela, thank you! Yes, and that same kind of fandom is also far too common in politics. What is the currently waning fad for transgenderism but an attempt to subvert and deconstruct the genre of feminism?
Bridge, ha! That’s a fine example indeed.
Grimmelshausen, hmm. Interesting.
Pygmycory, early on, Adbusters had some good and funny work in it.
Clay, that’s too funny. Yeah, there you see beta-Marxism as ordinary liberalism in clown makeup.
Rashakor, an important point! Yes, these days every composer with any talent is making a beeline for the movie, anime, and video game industry. The thing that fascinates me is that they’re doing very good work in a performance mode. I don’t do movies these days and I’ve never played a video game, but I recall the music for the original Star Wars movie; John Williams did a brilliant job of taking musical ideas from the classical tradition, especially from Wagner, and reusing them in interesting ways.
Curt, I wish I could use older computers than I do! I share your delight in hearing that the old machines are still in use. It’s quite possible that a deliberate movement toward that kind of retro hardware, which is much less complex to manufacture, could cushion the Long Descent considerably.
Quin, with vinyl records staging an impressive recovery these days, I expect recorded music to be around for another century or more. It’s possible, depending on how record technology evolves, that it will remain as a permanent or semipermanent addition to human technological suites — you can record and play analog records with very simple technology! So the possibility that jazz will survive at least for a while can’t be ruled out, I think.
Pygmycory, thanks for this, and for the reminder about improvisation in early music. You’re quite correct, of course. Some of the most impressive improv music I’ve ever heard has been Native American drumming — there’s no score, just a bunch of drummers sitting together and riffing off one another.
J.L.Mc12, funny! When I was a kid I used to get a similar effect by reading the names of stores backwards. There’s a US grocery chain named Albertons — it makes much more sense when you read it Snostrebla (pronounced “snoster-blah”)! With regard to instruments, oh, they’ll be using different instruments, for certain. The one that really can’t be sustained is the piano — those are impossible to build without serious industrial technology. Look up sometime just how much pressure the strings place on that steel frame…
European reader, you lost the plot once you fell into the standard Marxist theological rhetoric about “the bad guys in charge” and the notion that groups of people make social change. Au contraire, the people in charge are no worse than the rest of us — although I freely grant that they’re no better — and societies are organisms that evolve over time according to their own internal dynamics, subject to environmental constraints. What I’m suggesting is simply that individuals can expand the range of free choices available to them under the current system, while that system continues to stumble down the long curve of decline and fall.
Slink, hmm! That definitely sounds worth a listen.
Hawk, thanks for the clarification! Good to hear.
JMG, Hmm. I’ll try again. Perhaps an example of detournement is spending a lot of time outdoors while everyone else is inside? (I spent most of my nonworking hours today lounging in the grass. It was glorious.). PS. I had a dream where I saw you playing a Xylophone in the park. I thought that was mildly interesting, at least.
There’s also the right wing equivalent of beta-Marxism that you see today, beta-fascism and beta-white nationalism as ordinary American conservatism in edgy jackboot and Klan costumes.
>the people in charge are no worse than the rest of us
Most people don’t have sex with kids or eat them. I’d say they are objectively worse than the rest of us.
The really worst of the bunch are the ones who work for them, defend them and justify their behavior.
Luke, that’s détournement only if the grass is intended for some other purpose. It’s a great thing to do, mind you, and may actually have more to do with the next two strategies we’re discussing.
Anon, a good point. There are a lot of beta-movements these days.
Other Owen, one of the things that brings me close to despair sometimes is the sheer lack of imagination people have when they’re trying to whip up a witch hunt. Really, don’t you have anything more creative to suggest than the same tired old medieval blood libel that used to be aimed at Pagans and Jews, and used to justify murdering them? For your information, btw, child sexual abuse is a horrible reality at all levels of society — no doubt there are rich and influential people who do it, but the same is true among the middle classes, the working classes, and the poor. (And if you’re going to start accusing people of cannibalism, you’d better have something to offer other than the ravings of the latest incarnations of Messrs. Kramer and Sprenger.)
Jung had more than a few things to say about the projection of the Shadow, but I think he’d be taking copious notes right now, as a great many Americans try to deal with their own troubled consciences by projecting every nasty fantasy they can think of onto people who are more successful than they are. I’d suggest that the people who are engaged in that habit are more morally culpable than your “really worst of the bunch.”
Mawkernewek #: “Play the game with drug names, perhaps to create something reminiscent of the possible side effects.” That reminded me of this meme: https://img.ifunny.co/images/671bbb83035eec3ab5e5c97d2410fc722daeae79567306769a2d4dc5154ac8e7_1.jpg – I take a thyroid med and an antidepressant, so this was close to home for me (“LEVOTHYROXINE! CITALOPRAM!”)
Another example of “détouring” propaganda to subvert it: people running absurd presidential campaigns, e.g., Vermin Supreme, who has said that if elected President of the United States, he will pass a law requiring people to brush their teeth, and has promised a free pony for every American. And Pat Paulsen, the comedian who ran in 1968 on slogans such as “It’s time to stop the petty bickering and get down to some serious mud-slinging and name-calling.” These campaigns highlight the silliness of the whole process!
re: the Trickster:
Please, someone tell me I’m not the only one seeing a manifestation of the classic American Rabbit trickster archetype in this guy:
https://reason.com/2026/03/19/jury-clears-afroman-of-defamation-for-mocking-cops-who-raided-his-house/
Certain adult members of my household (we shall not rat them out) were howling watching the courtroom footage. But once *Rabbit* popped into my mind, I felt sort of bad for the cops. They had no idea who they were messing with. Nice to see the deep currents of America still moving and breathing. Glad it wasn’t me on the receiving end.
Re: Kindle:
The things are rabidly against “sideloading” (i.e. downloading any text you haven’t paid AMZN for) and will, if connected to wifi, “phone home” to the big muddy river and delete all my gutenberg books. Boo.
I set my son to solve this for me. There seem to be whole genres of internet content devoted to jailbreaking devices such as the Kindle, and he has kindly used them on my device, so I can read public domain books again. Some of these unauthorized modifications will also bestow on your kindle the ability to read other file formats, I believe. So if you have a tech-savvy person in your life who enjoys that sort of thing…
JMG
over the years we have had derogatory names for most brands and chain stores.
You will probably censor this for language, but one of the funniest examples of detournement was in London in the 1970s. There was a ubiquitous ad that said Typhoo put the tea in Britain, written crossword style. Some daring young soul risked life and limb to cross the electric underground tracks to write ” If Typhoo put the tea in Britain, who put the c**t in Scunthorpe?”,the latter being a town in the north of England.
Patricia M. # 92:
Indeed, I saw some “fanzines” (like we called them here) made with paper during the ‘90s in the “alternative” contracultural scene of my town, before the online wave arrived in its full way this century. So it’s possible that artistic/information/protest underground self publications have a revival in the future again.
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Curt # 100:
It’s a subtle irony that music event “Nova Rock” is nowadays being the same as it was when it began years ago, according your comment. You may know “Nova” is a Latin term which means “new”(ahem). So it’s not really new…
I’ve seen the same tendence to do the same music with some fake novelties in hip hop-rap and “regueton” in Spanish language music. Indeed, hip hop arrived to Spain in the ‘80s, and “regueton” appeared in the Caribe during ‘90s, but those music styles haven’t really changed much since then…I can say the same thing about hard rock/heavy and another music styles here.
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Quin # 103:
Well, when I wrote “spontaneous”, I was thinking from my relative ignorance of jazz music, that jazz musicians can reach those apparent improvisation levels thanks to a long time learning and playing music. So after they can achieve some skill level, they’re able to be spontaneous. Thank you for explaining me better how the jazz musicians work!
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Justin P. # 105:
OK, maybe I’ve been too focused in one of my personal black beasts (the woke left betrayal to the old fights and blah blah…), and I went “slightly” off topic.
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European Reader # 109:
I’ve seen the strong American tendence toward individualism too (I’m an “European commentarist” too), which has its advantages…and of course its blind spots. So I agree.
It’s interesting to see how the anti-Commie bias has identified every possible collectivism over the “nude” individual as evily evil Marxism; when we can see along the History and different cultures a wide spectrum of collective ways of life (from indigenous tribal people to modern Japan for example). Nearer to me, I come from a family whose near ancestors in the country had a strong collective idea of family and town…but they never looked at themselves as collectivists nor Commies. Even they were socially Conservatives.
I think the main European view is also individualist, but less extreme than the USA idea of it.
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(To be continued)
#58 NephiteNeophyte
Tracking: quite, but there are ways to combat this, as you suggest (for the time being). Proton ecosystem, created by some nice scientists from CERN. Huge benefits, especially for those on the European side of the Atlantic (no cables to cut, more political options, should / as things get trickier); and the absolute easiest, and hugely worthwhile change, for security and privacy, Brave Browser / Brave Search (and one can still access Google anonymously). I’ve moved to Ubuntu Studio for music, but Linux Mint is probably a safer bet for most people, and will instantly make whatever Windows machine you have faster (once installed by a younger relative ( 🙂 ), it’ll go fine as long as you don’t mess about with it. Also worth noting, “everyone and their (non-dead) dog” is scrambling to “protect the children” by implementing various laws (they will, and are, making things less safe for children… and adults!), that will effectively end up *monitoring everything* on your cell phones (and computers), or banning access… that last action obviously because Prohibition was such a resounding success !!
https://proton.me/
https://brave.com/
https://linuxmint.com/
#117 The Other Owen
“the people in charge are no worse than the rest of us”
In response to your response to this, to be fair… we did vote for them, and lots of adults have sex with kids, usually family members, or family acquaintances, not just those in positions of power.
Federico V. # 105:
I also think Marx had his own idea of Progress; when he points some day in the future will begin a Communist society without classes, he explains that good thing will need the previous full “development” of the productive forces, which it’s like to say the full industrialization, so the last remnants of “feudalism” will be erased, and in a long term, the Capitalists power itself…(by the way, there’s a rough contradiction between his love to industrialization and nowadays Ecologism, ahem).
We could start to have an argument about what wrote or said Marx, and what meaning had everything he wrote/said, but his prose is sometimes too opaque to spend too much time arguing about it. I can only point that Old Karl despised the utopian Socialists (I agree), but his claims for having thought a “scientific” Socialism have been discarded a lot of time ago: so its future Communist society idea is indeed another Utopia disguised like Science.
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JMG # 114:
The Kirk/Spock gay “tribute” is a very bizarre thing, so I smiled due to it. I couldn’t avoid it. Well, it’s even more bizarre that sub-literature was read by women. I’m puzzled. If you don’t mind to answer me, how that underground stories contradict the feminist ideology? I’ve noticed current feminist wave has big logic holes covered by the fig leaf of unending propaganda, but I can’t grasp your idea yet. Thank you in advance.
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Anonymous # 116:
Beta-Fascism? OMG! Maybe I could label it better like Beta-Far Right (which is a wider term than rehashed term “Fascism”).
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Yavanna # 119:
“Vermin Supreme” sounds cool IMHO; though I’m not a native English speaker/user, so maybe I’m biased to some extent by my personal circumstance…
JMG: “there’s an entire book to be written about how the existence of male/male slash fiction as a commodity produced and consumed by women annihilates some core elements of feminist theory” – that’s very interesting. By any chance would you care to expand on that a bit?
J.L.Mc12: You reminded me of something a little bit funny – they sometimes do it to themselves. I saw an image of a shopping center sign that advertised the businesses as follows:
Target
Staples
Aldi
[Richard’s]
The last is a necessary substitution due to the language policy, of course. 🙂
Hey JMG
You’re right about pianos, but I think it is possible that, assuming there’s enough of a desire for it, a simpler substitute that accomplishes most of what pianos do could be invented. The current mechanisms used in pianos could be replaced with something much easier to manufacture by hand, with less industrial machinery, but I’m not sure.
It’s more likely that in place of pianos some form of hammered dulcimer will be used. One variety of hammered dulcimer that I’m a bit fond of is the “Marxophone”, which uses a keyboard of lead hammers mounted on spring-steel strips. It seems like something that could easily be copied by a sufficiently skilled craftsman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxophone
@Synthase (#81)
No, I don’t think you’re a ‘little bit in love’ with Amelia; you’ve got a mad crush on her, just like the rest of us. Everybody loves Amelia – guys want to be with her, girls want to be like her. Even King Solomon swooned over a vision of her 3000 years ago: https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Song-of-Solomon-Chapter-7/
She’s also a great example of the détournement strategy we’ve been discussing here. Governing elites in the UK seeking to expand and enhance their power by converting future generations into hyperobedient zombies created her as an archvillian to be feared, but were undone by some random Youtuber who added in some very powerful Christian symbols (the lion, the cross, the whole armor of God, etc.) and had her – without ever breaking character – start preaching the gospel of Liberty In Christ. And now the whole UK government and all its gutwrenching socialist rhetoric are circling the drain…..
When I’ve commented European Reader comment about individualism vs. collectivism in USA and another countries, I’ve written individualism has been stronger in the US than in Europe. Well, I think it’s a stronger tendence there, but I can also say now that it isn’t an absolute tendence. According Mr. Sandel in his essay “Democracy’s Discontent”, there was a thriving trade unions activism within American Northern white workers, some years before Lincoln presidency (maybe imitating the British trade unionism during Industrial Revolution). It’s also curious and puzzling to me that trade unions American workers had good relations with Republican Party (which indeed in these times played the liberal/leftist role in the US politics, paradoxically). So yes, more individualism in the US, but it’s not all the historical truth.
People could always go back to using the 18th century version of the piano:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortepiano
How long do you think democratic socialism/beta marxism will last?
My uncles were alpha Marxists of the Twenties and Thirties, who went underground. They got defanged in the 1960s, when they started to get old.
I guess beta Marxists pretend to be Marxists, while hanging on to their money. Are the current crop of BMs (beta Marxists) simply doing live action role playing or are they in it for the money? It seems that democratic socialism is awash in money for the few like Bernie Sanders, who pleads he needs his private jet and his three houses. Then there the New York City housing director (I forget her name) who said home ownership was white violence or something like that. Then it turned out that she owned a house or two……
How does a person regard beta Marxists? Seriously? Pat them on their little heads? Challenge them?
Methylethyl, you’re not wrong. I’m torn between thinking of Rabbit and simply defaulting to the most famous modern American portrayal thereof, Bugs Bunny. As for Kindle, the trick I used is quite simple, at least with the elderly Kindle I have: you leave it in airplane mode all the time. That keeps it from trying to phone home.
Stephen, ha! That’s a very good example, not least because thereafter, nobody who saw that graffito could see the tea ad without thinking of certain aspects of feminine anatomy…
Chuaquin, I’ll explain that below in my response to Cynthia. As for beta-Fascism, nah, I insist on the colorful label. I recall a comment by I forget which writer on the modern neo-Nazi scene, which ran something like this: “During the time I spent talking to neo-Nazis in America, every single leader in the movement was accused by someone else in the movement of being a government informant, Jewish, or gay. The evidence I saw suggests that in many cases, these accusations are correct.”
Cynthia, it’s a complex subject, but one way into it is to recall all the talk about the “male gaze” that occupied so much space in feminist literature not that long ago. What’s demonstrated by the existence of K/S and other male/male slash, as a genre produced and consumed by women, is that there’s nothing specifically male in the “male gaze” as feminists discussed it. Male/male slash is as appropriative, as exploitative, and as depersonalizing as any work of pornography intended for a male audience. (Interestingly, many gay men despise male/male slash in the same way, and for much the same reasons, that so many lesbians dislike girl-on-girl pornography aimed at male viewers.) What this shows in turn is that the valid elements of feminist theory need to be absorbed into a wider understanding of power differentials in which women, as well as men, can and do take the hegemonic role — as of course happens quite frequently in the real world.
Mind you, there is such a thing as a male gaze, just as there is such a thing as a female gaze; it’s simply not defined by power differentials. I appreciate portrayals of women by lesbian artists precisely because they don’t see feminine beauty the way straight male artists do, and so viewing their artwork is like listening to a sentence spoken in an unfamiliar language.
J.L.Mc12, that’s possible, but it simply makes my point: a hammered dulcimer does not sound like a piano, and jazz played on the one will not sound like jazz played on the other.
Neptunesdolphins, I expect them to fade out once the bureaucratic-managerial elite loses the last of its grip on American politics. Beta-Marxism is entirely an affectation of the privileged, and as the old privileged class sinks back into obscurity and the rising entrepreneurial-technocratic elite displaces them, the children of the privileged will find new hobbies to occupy their time. As for how to regard them, yeah, I think a pat on their pointy little heads is a good start.
The Democrats in California are canceling Cesar Chavez over allegations of rape and sexual abuse:
https://apnews.com/article/cesar-chavez-sexual-abuse-allegations-08264e63b6f594278239af1ad23ba1fc
JMG # 132:
Beta-Fascism could be a good label if its original term (Alpha)Fascism hadn’t been so (ab)used to be thrown as thoughtstopper against the hated enemy du jour. So to some extent I agree. By the way, please look that Far Right isn’t exactly the same as Fascism, beyond the leftist propaganda.
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Well, I’ve read how you’ve explained the “porn for women” like an evidence to debunk (woke) feminist propaganda against straight men. Congratulations! I’ll ad it to my current panoplia against the (many) blind spots in current hegemonic ideology, if you don’t mind it. Thanks…
Rape is probably a lot more common amongst the average person than you would think. It’s just that for the most part everybody keeps it hushed so that the family or organization’s reputation isn’t tarnished.
My apologies John…..its not you it was me. This subject of music is dear to me because its been a practice of the work i do with the art i was handed in life. Got excited the list was discussing about jazz and so on.
With that said, i have a new music project in the last few years that has been doing just what you call The Art of Détournement. And there has been a openness to it. in my approach to music as well as a presentation of showing up to play through a feeling no schedule of where to be, word of mouth, from town to town. This has grown in many ways i have seen and adapted as well. Like a tape culture of passing around music and other forms of communication too. I think this is one of your more important discussions i have read here in years. Unfortunately never have been a very good writer so it takes some effort to express the ideas, better at yapping in realtime and poetry. this post it is timely and very important . Maybe when i am are on the road this spring and summer seasons we could do another discussion on the radio broadcast i have been on the road and presently where we could discuss this in depth. Have a feeling in my heart people would love and need to absorb more of this idea for there own communities.
One last comment i find the word Improv ironic, if you add an “e” it becomes improve.
Thank you for the years of dedication to all the arts it has improved and helped alot of us focus.
Peace Hawk
Chuck Norris died! And I thought he was an American version of a Taoist Immortal. Yes, off subject, can’t help myself.
Anon, those allegations have been around for decades; I remember reading about them in the 1970s. I suspect that what’s happening is that since so many Hispanic Americans are bailing out on the Democratic Party, the elites are reacting in anger by canceling one of the Hispanic community’s heroes.
Chuaquin, trust me, I’m well aware of the difference between fascism and the far right! I noted a long time ago, for example, that the most effective conspiracies against Hitler — the ones that nearly blew him to smithereens twice — came from the far right. As for the “male gaze” business, by all means.
Anon, I know. My late wife was molested by her father, for example. I don’t think she ever told anyone about it but me, one of her sisters, and a few very close friends.
BeardTree, good heavens. I always figured that Norris would take the scythe right out of the Reaper’s hands, spin it around himself like a naginata, and convert his assailant into a pile of loose bones. 😉 Sic transit gloria mundi!
I see someone mentioned the Commodore 64 upthread–
did you know they’re back? Only kinda. You can buy a brand-new Commodore 64, today, in-box. Its guts are going to be decidedly different from the original, however. The original had ICs for various tasks– a 6502 CPU, SID sound chip, VIC video controller, MOS RAM and mask ROMs, the new Commodore 64 has most everything on an Field Programmable Gate Array, or FPGA. FPGAs are, well, what they sound like: programmable computer chips. A SID chip is etched at a fab and can only ever be a SID. An FPGA can be set up as whatever IC you want it to be, assuming you have enough transistors. So the 6502, the SIDs, the VIC– those are all in the FPGA on the new C64. Possibly the RAM and ROM are too, but I do not recall offhand.
I would note that “retrocomputer” enthusiasts (as we call the hobby of wrenching on really obsolete machines) are finding the limits of semiconductor lifetimes. Early Commodores are failing as their chips deteriorate, particularly the Read-Only Memory (ROM) chips. This is especially notable in the 1970s PET line, but C64s stored in poor conditions suffer as well.
There has been some idle talk of trying to revive production of the original ICs rather than relying on FPGAs, but then each chip would end up costing more than the new C64. It remains to be seen how long FPGAs last, but odds are not nearly as long as silicon chips that were physically etched into the desired circuits.
Now, these are consumer electronics, not hardened in any way. It might well be you could make a computer of that modest sort last 1000 years with the right design quirks– but it might cost millions, and so will probably never be built.
Hi JMG,
Thank you for the article – very interesting as usual. My comment is only tangentially related to detournement, more of an intersection of detournement and retrotopia. This morning on a very conventional Russian news site, I read the headline: “At the Center of Moscow the Line to Get a Landline Phone is 3-4 Weeks”. They are apparently experiencing a disruption in cell phone connection, and people, especially businesses, are scrambling to go back to landlines. Here is a link:
https://dzen.ru/a/abqgXgAiTAtTbqmy
It’s in Russian, but still… They grab the attention with a picture from a very famous Russian comedy movie based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel.
“The future has already arrived. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” 😉😉
One of the reasons Twin Peaks was such a phenomenon was that it put middle class molestation right into the homes of viewers all across America. That, probably more than its eccentricities and surrealist tendencies, was, I suspect, the true reason it canceled off the airwaves, and why it still holds so much fascination for people. Laura Palmer, the victim, was thus a kind of character many people can relate to and the way Lynch and Frost showed all the dark stuff going on beneath the surface of the lives of everyone in the town, even more so.
One of the things that makes moral panics so destructive is that often awareness gets raised about real issues, but then the energy from the resulting righteous fury will be immediately redirected against the nearest convenient targets instead of the actually-guilty. And once a panic has begun, the categories of “people I hate” and “the people who committed these particular crimes” get blurred in people’s minds.
Nevertheless I can’t help but wonder if moral panics, and Shadow projection generally, doesn’t have some important function in human life and society. It’s too ingrained to be a bug, so it’s got to be a feature, albeit an easily-abused one. I suspect moral panics play an important role in motivating groups to solve some shared problem that no one member of the group can solve on their own, and Shadow projection can motivate action that is distasteful but sometimes necessary.
Hi JMG,
I hope things are well over your direction.
Much of your essay went right over my head, but a couple things jangled by gray brain cells. I have noticed (I don’t catch nuances) there is very little innovation happening.
(1) One sample: The supermarket I go to plays 1960s music, and not ‘soft’ rock either. Hard rock. Black Sabbath. Led Zeppelin. Beatles. Rolling Stones. I gather those in charge of what music to play gear towards Baby boomers, but they play absolutely nothing from the 2020s. My guess would be there is nothing worth playing that has been invented in the last fifteen years.
(2) Second sample: In film, video, books: No new storylines,— I will qualify that to say “storylines often make no sense.” There are, however, new storylines coming from video British murder mysteries. But doodly-squat originality coming from Hillywood. On the other hand, I am pleasantly surprised at the Sherlock Holmes (paper, usually anthologies) pastiches I buy (used): those storylines ARE original, are often absolutely fascinating plots along with terrific writing, written from 1900 to 2026. My sense is that writers are not bothering to write for Hillywood. I bet many screenwriters are moving away from California, like every sane person would who can scare up enough pennies to move out of California. Even the Amazonian jungle videos are the same-old regurgitated stories in different settings; as soon as I perceive a duplicate storyline, I hit the delete key.
It sort of feels nice that I am keep hearing in public old 1960s tunes being I grew up then. But do today’s teenagers who hear “Layla” and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” know they are listening to music invented sixty years ago? …that of the inventors are dead or decrepit? If they know, do they not think it odd?
I have heard a bit of music invented now, and have to say it is awful.
My sense is the arts are being recycled, at least nationally. Locally, that is a different story. A musician friend of mine “Faye” is doing nicely playing accordion (focusing on German songs) at bars and grills a couple times a week, Wisconsin having a huge number of ancestral-ethnic German, Danish, Scandinavian, Baltic coast peoples. Often, people get out of their chairs and do the polka or line-dancing. Faye works a day-job but her heart and soul is the accordion. People want LOCAL musicians. Her whole schtick keeps towns’ spirits up, something sorely needed during these uncertain, soul-renching times. Yay Faye🧑🏻🦳.
💨🪗🎨💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@BeardTree
Re: Chuck Norris died
No you’ve reminded me of what else I wanted to add in this week’s post;
I once watched Delta Force one of the most defining piece of Chuck Norris action movies with a comrade from school.
Both of us were stoned and we laughed frantically; to us, that film was an unwitting comedy. Some years past the last war on Iraq, none of us took the moral and patriotic posturing seriously there.
It was even marvellous as a comedy film, we found. In it you’ll see Norris punch and kick a Saddam Hussein lookalike seemingly endlessly through several scenes, as if to punish him demonstratively.
That was well before even the first gulf war, tragic as reality behind it was and is.
“You must like these old fashioned computer graphics” my comrade said, us watching a scene where Norris and his team are instructed via a vector graphics depiction of an air plane taken hostage or something, planning how and where to enter.
Sigh, the eighties. The end of which I was born. To witness this rotting corpse of a society and late stage culture.
Yet some fond memories certainly persist within me as well, of many things.
Re 118: Off topic a bit, but following on to what has already been said: Consistency over centuries isn’t necessarily a sign of lack of imagination. It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with other possible explanations for consistency over time. I only say this because the same phrasing about that “tired old libel” gets used fairly often. That, too, shows a certain lack of originality. Regarding more contemporary issues, the lacunae in those files certainly do invite speculation. (Also, I’m not at all familiar with Messrs. Kramer and Sprenger. Should I be?)
JMG, the rumor I heard is that Norris has been tapped to assist the Archangel Michael in chaining the devil when that time comes.
Supplementary to the above comments on détournement of tabletop role playing systems, I wanted to point out that the actual play of role playing games is, as often as not, also an exercise in détournement. While the published materials usually stay within the guidelines of licensed characters and settings (“properties”) and generic fantasy pastiche, game masters and players rarely stay on those rails for long.
As a GM designing a setting or scenario, you can name all your elf NPCs after prescription drugs (the similarities have been noted before), and base their personalities on their best-known side effects. You can turn a map of the U.S. Capitol building into a dungeon crawl, and populate it with whatever creatures your political inclinations suggest. You can base the appearance and mannerisms of the members of a royal court on your in-laws. The lyrics of ad jingles or pop songs can become ancient legends or quest goals. It’s even possible to do these kinds of things while keeping an overall serious tone, though of course satiric or comedic tones also work with less disguise needed.
All this can apply to live action role playing (LARP) as well, though LARP requires more organizing and many of the organized groups stick to their own internally approved properties and game systems.
In either case, one difference from conventional détournement is that the audience is small, even compered with the number of people likely to view for instance a vandalized billboard. But the work is also very close to the individual.
First of all: Happy Equinox to you!
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Anonymous # 134:
Maybe it isn’t my business, but I thought in USA (like within another western countries) there are a thing called “pressumption of innocence”: everybody has this right until he/she is declared guilty in a fair trial and blah blah blah…
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Beardtree # 138:
Oh, I mourn his death. He won’t pass to the History as the best actor, but in his movies and real life Chuck Norris showed he was good in martial arts.
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JMG # 139:
If you’re right with your theory to explain that Hispanic origin politician cancelation, I only can point “Democrats” are behaving very dishonestly (which indeed isn’t a real new thing) and having a tantrum…
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I’m glad to see you know one thing is far right and another one, real Fascism. My basic western political scheme is, from political center into the most extremists: Conservatives-Far Right-Fascists-(and maybe) Traditionalists.
And yes, relationship between Hitler and the not-really-Fascist German Right was, to said it softly, complex and problematic (ahem).
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Oh, I didn’t know what happened to your late wife with her father. It’s relatively easy to warn children to not trust in strangers, but sometimes the evil is at home.
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Inna # 141:
I didn’t know land line telephone is coming back in Russia. I think “Western” countries are blinded by the god Progress yet, and I can also think as work hypothesis Russian cultural mind and life level is different than here. It’s interesting that some people there have realized how brittle are really cell phones even in normal conditions (so do the math, how they would work under direct war time situations).
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(To be continued)
“Other Owen, one of the things that brings me close to despair sometimes is the sheer lack of imagination people have when they’re trying to whip up a witch hunt. Really, don’t you have anything more creative to suggest than the same tired old medieval blood libel that used to be aimed at Pagans and Jews, and used to justify murdering them?”
I wonder if this might be a sign that moral panics, like art forms, have a finite space, and once it’s been done, there’s nothing left other than performance…
Hey JMG
True, but another possibility could be a return to the piano’s somewhat younger ancestor, the Clavichord. Still definitely a different sound from a true piano, but I assume it would be less so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clavichord
But anyway, returning to the theme of technology and détournment, it occurred to me that you could apply it to military technology. In fact, I wonder if it would be right to say that many of the devices we use that have a military origin are acts of détournment? The opposite situation could also be a case of it. Could drone warfare be considered an act of détournment, specifically the repurposing of commercially available drones into cheap weapons?
J.L.Mc12 @ 128: The old Fender Rhodes was a fine candidate. Analog, with a pleasing sound, portable and with an action that felt similar to a grand. Music schools used them for practice. It’s pretty hard to find a nice used one these days.
Justin P. # 142:
It’s possible to explain the “Twin Peaks” success as cult series due to the dark family story behind Laura Palmer murder, between another reasons. I agree. It’s a topic uncomfortable to debate and denounce in public, until today.
By the way, when this TV series arrived to my country, in early ‘90s, private TV corporations had just started to broadcast their shows, breaking the old state TV monopoly. It was a sign of new times that “Twin Peaks” was shown by one of the private TV channels…Unfortunately, in the long term Spanish TV quality and ethics wasn’t improved by these new channels, but they worsened soon toward “junk TV” we can “enjoy” today here.
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Northwind Grandma # 144:
When I go to my nearest supermarket (or another public place with music), it isn’t music from the ‘60s what I hear, but mainly ‘80s and ‘90s pop/rock songs. There’s also a radio channel here which only plays music from ‘80s and ‘90s, and indeed it has a high audience here…I can explain this difference in “musical favorite eras”, maybe because the full musical revolution didn’t arrived very well here during the ‘60s (there was a dictatorship in my country in those times). However, when Spain became a western-like democracy, we were completely open to pop/rock influences from another western countries; in addition to this, more speech freedom allowed to experiment and provoke within new music groups. Indeed, I think ‘80s and early ‘90s were the most creative times for music in my country. However, in the Anglophone countries their “music peak” was during ‘60s (I point it as work hypothesis).
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Your comment about nowadays (mainstream) movies: no argument here. Any comment about last Oscar “best” movie?(and the rest of Oscars) No comments (from my point of view).
“And once a panic has begun, the categories of “people I hate” and “the people who committed these particular crimes” get blurred in people’s minds.”
On that note, Cesar Chavez has suddenly been cancelled. He is now an unperson. From the LA Times; Ideological purity is a tough one when standards change.
“Momentum builds to erase Cesar Chavez’s name from schools, streets and parks after allegations of sexual abuse”
I’m a little surprised Washington State hasn’t renamed itself to something Native given George was a slave-owner.
On topic, earlier today I ran across an image of the cover of “Vague” magazine with articles about dressing for the zombie apocalypse. DLSS (deep learning super samplings) “NVIDIA’s DLSS5 is met with backlash for its homogenized, AI-generated look that changes artistic direction and artistic cohesion.”
So memes have occurred.
https://www.dsogaming.com/articles/here-are-all-the-amazing-and-hilarious-nvidia-dlss-5-memes/
Beardtree @ 147 … tis all good …. because, after all: ‘Good Guys Wear Black!’
‘;]
Mr. Greer … with regards to your response to Neptunesdolphin re. ‘pointy heads .. well, pat them with Gauntlets only… Just sayin..
anonymous
I had a friend who worked with Cesar Chavez in the 60s/70s as a young woman/teenager. she never mentioned rape, but said that he did use his charismatic/heroic status to seduce young women in the movement who idolized him. It is a pretty common tale I am afraid.
Strange: I was with Rajneesh for a short time in the 80s. and realized that the good and the bad both existed and didn’t cancel each other out or balance to some mid point: they both just were. In Cesar Chavez case being a lecher didn’t mean he wasn’t a great labor organizer, and being a great labor organizer didn’t mean he wasn’t a lecher. There would be a lot less heroes if their personal lives were scrutinized more closely. Maybe that would be a good thing.
Stephen
Inna, fascinating! Add that one to the list of retro technologies on their way back…
Justin, interesting. I wasn’t aware of that.
Slithy, I see it as a bug hardwired into the process of community definition. Every community defines itself by who and what it excludes, and when that interfaces destructively with the process of shadow projection, you get a moral panic that can very easilty become murderous. Its dysfunctional status shows in the extent to which it drives self-defeating behavior — the Nazi regime’s efforts to rid itself of the Jewish nuclear physicists who might have given it the atomic bomb are only one of the more recent examples of this.
Northwind, oh, trust me, the kids know perfectly well that the music being manufactured and shoved at them by the big corporate music combines is complete trash, and a good many of them are deliberately turning their back on said trash and going retro. I visited my favorite local used vinyl store today, as a small celebration (my appointment to get my taxes done went very well), and a lot of the people who were flipping through old rock records as I did the same thing at the classical bin were less than half my age. (Two were rather less than a third my age.) Hollywood is in the same trap, and so are the big corporate book publishers — they’re in terminal decline, and it’s not just because they’re stuck in a rut. They’re not even creative in their reworkings of existing themes. The future belongs to your friend Faye and all the others like her.
Phutatorius, Kramer and Sprenger were the Dominican monks who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum (“Hammer of Witches”), the most famous witch-hunting manual of the early modern period.
BeardTree, yeah, the newly minted joke I heard is that the archangel Michael decided that the angels needed to get better at roundhouse kicks, in order to kick demonic butt, and sent for the best instructor he could find.
Walt, very true! Back when I played the DMs were always quick to ring their own changes on the published dungeon modules, and a great deal of satire found its way into the result.
Chuaquin, thank you. As I recall, a very large percentage of child sexual abuse happens within the family.
Anon, you may be right…
J.L.Mc12, or the harpsichord, which is another 14th century invention and thus can function on a much simpler technological base. That said, here again harpsichord jazz would have a very different sound. As for clavichords, I wish they weren’t so expensive — ever since I researched them for book purposes (Dr. Moravec, the main character’s grandfather in my Ariel Moravec detective stories, plays one), I’ve been interested in so quiet and pleasant sounding a keyboard instrument.
Siliconguy, well, the Democratic Party establishment had to get back at the Hispanic community somehow once so many Hispanic voters left the Democratic plantation! As for “memes have occurred,” if they hadn’t, I’d wonder if the end was nigh. 😉
Polecat, their heads may be pointy but I wouldn’t say they’re sharp…
I think in exchange for the Hispanic voters who have left the Democrats, the Democrats are going to get a lot of antisemitic Nazis, groypers, and white nationalists, who are currently pissed off at Trump and the Republicans for being too pro-Jewish and too pro-Israel, and who will blame Trump, the Republicans, Israel, and the Jews for destroying America after its empire collapses. And the Democrats will gladly welcome said antisemitic Nazis, groypers, and white nationalists into their coalition because their entire party is defined by nothing other than “Trump bad”.
Phutatorius 57
> for Trojan-enz with the slogan “What’s in your wallet?”
This gave me a good long stretch of “the giggles.” Tee-hee.
💨🤭🍆💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
@chuaquin
Ah yes, indeed Nova means new, I have learned basic levels of french and latin, but at time of writing my comment, I didn’t even think of that!
Because that name was always so everpresent and at the same time irrelevant to me as an Austrian.
In 2010 or so btw I wanted to have a land-line phone in my apartment reinstalled- company said, we’re not doing it anymore.
I hope Western Europe will at least revert to *some* degree of robustness and functionality these years.
But that is coming from me, who works for a metastasizing bueraucratic IT apparatus, because all other jobs I could do would just treat me worse, bt I wouldn’t learn anything useful either.
My old landlord with whom I drink tea regularily told me about his youth in the fifties, his father a factory worker, and how they husbanded rabbits and chickens, grew corn and potatoes, went everywhere by bycicle – industrialism, yet very rudimentary industrialism.
Whiule he is weary of modern industrialized agriculture, I told him, the past will be the future.
@TylerA
Ah yes that pseudo-c64 – it’s the whole point, I wasn’t interested in it precisely because it is contemporary consumer electronics cosplaying as an old product.
You can play all those old video games on it, but I am barely interested in video games bar three exceptions (nethack, Civilizatin III, battler for wesnoth), and otherwise, it is as you say not that durable kind.
Well true, the economies of scale of today trump yesterday’s electronics in price if not in durability.
Still as mentioned, a lot of low tech chips still get produced, but not for the private consumer market. Articles have mourned that even there the west loses its edge and China is boss in 80-120 nanometers chip production.
The russians have produced a prototype litograph for 120 nm chips, as they try to enter the market.
S. Pesrson # 157:
I think to seduce women it’s not the same as to rape them…It’s interesting to check how many powerful and famous and charismatic men have used their social position and fame to seduce woman, in every times and civilizations. The “erotic of power?”The “alpha males”?(Maybe). For example, Julio Iglesias and Benito Mussolini share their common “data”: it’s said (legend?) they had sex with hundreds, or even more than a thousand, women…
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JMG # 158:
I agree. Moral panic IMHO a very irrational fear. The Nazi hatred against Jews, indeed had unexpected consequences like your example about Jew origin scientists and the first atomic bomb…
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You’re welcome…Children abuse (in every of its ways) within families is a sad reality, which we often don’t want to see.
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Anonymous # 159:
The enemy if my enemy is my friend? It’s possible, though not sure yet, methink. We’re already in an ideological mess, at least in the West. It would be a wry irony that a bizarre coalition between woke leftists/“Democrats” and neonazis were made…against Trump (who could be labelled between Conservatism and Far Right, I’m doubting where the heck he’s really in the political spectrum).
Siliconguy 154
> articles about dressing for the zombie apocalypse
Being a seamstress, and taking note of so-called fashion trends since the 1960s, reading Western garment history, and being a seamstress, working-class women’s garments of the long descent will be loose-fitting, no two ways about it. It can be no other way. Looseness can manifest in gathers of 1600s peasant garb, or gathers of the 1910s, or “shifts” of the 1920.
I don’t know what will become of knits that are knitted by gigantic, warehouse-size machines; I think existing machines will permanently break down and be left to rodents that will make houses from them. Hand-knitting will still be done. I suspect that the knits exemplified by t-shirt fabric will halt. The likes of t-shirt’s stretchy fabric is a recent invention (1920s) won’t be made anymore. What will replace t-shirt fabric will likely be an ivory-colored muslin cotton fabric, with gathers like a pirate shirts. Or just plain baggy. The bodice has to let a wearer stretch her arms every which way without binding.
A thing that I feel will survive into the long descent is denim. There are thousands of producers of denim around the world, and it is such a versatile fabric, I think powers-that-be will make sure denim becomes a thing too big to fail. Denim comes in so many weights, from fairly thin like calico, to really thick like to upholster sofas. The weave of denim is a twill,— stable in the extreme. Twill weave doesn’t curl. Fabric content is usually cotton, or cotton with polyester, or cotton with nylon, or such. Denim is a pleasant fabric to have next to one’s skin. It has been a worldwide favorite for a hundred and fifty years.
On Public Broadcasting System (PBS) and now on Amizun Prime streaming, there was a show called “Cadfael” and was set in 1300s Britain. The costumes on that show were how I picture American garments of the long descent. No-nonsense, comfortable, with some styling. “How to fit” needs to be in the current curriculums of middle schools and high schools. Seriously, a full semester of learning fitting and only fitting. Fitting has been largely ignored, and this cannot stand. Fitting is a crucial skill for a girl (usually girls) who wants to be self-supportive starting in her teens, even with garments that are shifts or have gathers. A girl who knows how to fit, and knows how to prettily-mend will never starve, her kids will never starve, and starving will become a big issue, if it isn’t already. Or a girl individually seeks out a skilled seamstress who will apprentice her. I wish I knew this when I was 13. Sixty years later, I give advice. Maybe in my next life I will be a 13-year old also knows ballet. is my dream reincarnation. I have plans.
I think towards what types of garments people will likely wear in the long descent. Rich people will still have their tight-fitting, expensive garments that won’t allow them to budge, but that is 5% of garments. Loose-fitting will be a must for 95% of the population. And denim is such a great invention, I hope it has plenty of support pushing it to survive centuries from now.
💨👗👚👩🏼🌾🚜💨Northwind Grandma
Dane County, Wisconsin, USA
“I see it as a bug hardwired into the process of community definition. Every community defines itself by who and what it excludes, and when that interfaces destructively with the process of shadow projection, you get a moral panic that can very easilty become murderous. Its dysfunctional status shows in the extent to which it drives self-defeating behavior — the Nazi regime’s efforts to rid itself of the Jewish nuclear physicists who might have given it the atomic bomb are only one of the more recent examples of this.”
A slightly more recent example of such self-defeating behaviour on the part of the American regime, has been its successful effort to rid itself of peacemakers, of negotiators, and of those who have actively been preventing Iran from acquiring atomic bombs…
Thank you for the reply, I understand better now.
On the topic of memes, the Iran war has given us plenty, and it reminded me of something from way back.
In 2021, a bunch of witches on Reddit attempted to “mass hex the Taliban forces in Afghanistan”, leading to one witch in particular trying to face Allah alone in the astral, resulting in her being “spiritually injured to a great amount”. (details at https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/do-not-face-allah-alone-while-astral-projecting)
This resulted in the usual ridicule from the Internet hatebox, but I wonder if you have heard of this incident, and if so, your opinion on it?
“The enemy if my enemy is my friend? It’s possible, though not sure yet, methink. We’re already in an ideological mess, at least in the West. It would be a wry irony that a bizarre coalition between woke leftists/“Democrats” and neonazis were made…against Trump (who could be labelled between Conservatism and Far Right, I’m doubting where the heck he’s really in the political spectrum).”
Not that much of an ideological difference. The left has fifteen years worth of ideological framework already in place, the only thing that the left needs to do is to switch the target of their ire and hatred from heterosexual white males to Jews and Zionists, which is already happening if Twitter is any indication.
I vote for the harmonium as a low-tech keyboard instrument suitable for going forward in the times ahead.
You could play jazz, classical, classical Indian, and minimalist drones! A bard could rap over it too.
Thanks for this new word in my vocabulary, JMG. The first thing I see with “detournement” is that it includes the word “detour”. So to do it is to take the technology/art and bring it off the beaten path or whatever path was meant for it. For the longest time, I felt like I was the only one who truly saw how derivative and boring music had become. I’m a composer, though, and of course I would see it that way. I’m really glad other people are waking up to it. After suffering through four years of art music indoctrination in music school, I decided I had enough of musicians who could only marinate in the glory of the past or create postmodern noise pollution. I have produced “lowbrow” pop music ever since graduating in 1994. Here is my one and only jazz song: https://youtu.be/RIUaU2pNXXI?si=Fn2HMsP8Ke1tDdoE
Since the topic of slash fanfic came up, I’d like to offer a different hypothesis about what’s behind it. Voyeurism may not have much to do with it. First, I have to say I’ve read very little of it myself, I think a couple pieces out of curiosity, about 30 years ago. It doesn’t appeal to me.
The hallmark of a buddy show is a relationship of complete commitment and trust between the two characters. In dire straits, they hang on to the end and past it, certain they can save the imperiled partner, and somehow they do. Who doesn’t want a relationship like that? It’s such a powerful ideal. Naturally, a woman wants a relationship of complete trust, but with the added depth of romance and sex. So instead of inserting themselves into the relationship (the Mary Sue), they keep the demonstrated relationship between the characters but take it to that extra level that they crave themselves.
I have the impression—correct me if I’m wrong—that most of the women who write these things don’t do so well at real-life relationships and often don’t have a boyfriend or spouse. It seems pretty common in fandoms, or at least it was when I was involved 15 years ago and more. They may be naive about how real relationships work. So they let their fantasies play freely. Writing about gay sex, when you’re not gay, might be a way of pretending to be more sophisticated about sex than you really are. Or not; this is my speculation.
JMG,
One of the most interesting effects of the phenomenon of younger people discovering older music is the ” reaction video” on You Tube. There are now hundreds of young people who host you-tube channels where they play music from the 60’s and 70’s , and then react ( which. means they make comments and facial expressions).
I think this started as a work around for copyright law. They could get away with playing a music by acting is if they were reviewing it. This would make them some income with the volume of people casually listening, probably shutting the video off before the review started.
Then I think two things happened to make this segment grow. Young people started watching to discover music from an earlier era, and boomers watched because it gave them validation that the music they grew up with was better than what was being produced today. You can see this because the savvy you tubers realized this part of the audience and began fawning over every song from this era they played, even when happened upon a clunker.
These channels and individual videos are labeled something like ” rapper’s first time reaction to, Close to You, by the Carpenters”. Or ” young metal heads discover ” the age of Aquarius” by the Fifth Dimension”. The reviewers are always someone that appears unexpected. rapper, young girl from the projects, Rastafarian etc.
Luckily there is a huge amount of music from this period ( both good and bad) to uncover, but recently they have begun mining even further back, covering tracks by Lous Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and Glenn Miller.
Hopefully the young people who discover music this way go out and seek the original source via CD or LP.
Maybe it isn’t exactly the same thing as the K/S “Star Trek” gay stories for straight women, which JMG told us some comments ago; but I’ve thought in a similar malevolous “détournement” using pop culture characters.
Some years ago I read somewhere that within the Japanese subculture called “Otakus”, some of their members like to write/draw parodic “tributes” based in well known manga/anime characters, often making up famous fiction friends or comrades to be in “gay love stories”. For example, I found very embarrassing to know that even Doraemon and Nobita (main characters in a famous children anime), had been “détourned” in that way.
It seems these gay parodies have been read by men and women alike in Japan, so they differ in that aspect from the K/S gay stories. However, I think they share the same subversive “Détournement” of pop culture iconic characters.
The day the blacks leave the Democratic plantation is the day the Democrats turn on Martin Luther King Jr. over his sexual assault allegations and cancel him too.
The Democrats are cancelling Cesar Chavez because Cesar Chavez was a patriarchal tradcath who opposed illegal immigration and sent armed UFW farm workers to the border to block illegal immigrants from crossing the border. And Democrats these days are for illegal immigration and against patriarchy, traditional Catholicism, and farm workers taking up arms and defending the border.
Curt # 161:
I think some involuntary comedy happens when an event sells novelty, but indeed it has become “more of the same thing” every year (like that “Nova” event you said). It’s a general Faustian tendence to label “new=good” and “old=bad”, in arts, economics, politics and of course, in advertising. There’s more involuntary comedy when you realize near everything is being sold today as new, it’s really the same worn and rehashed thing with a few shallow changes…In a declining industrial civilization, the real novelties rates is coming to 0, but Faustian mind still denies that decline.
By the way, maybe you’ve noticed old things are despised, but ancient ones not (for example classic cars or books aren’t the same as old ones). Is there a difference between old/ancient which doesn’t seem arbitrary?
************
What your landlord told you about his youth during the ‘50s, it’s near the same memories I’ve got from my childhood in the ‘80s. My grandparents lived in a village, in a house with a small orchard and a shed near their house, in which they had some rabbits and hens/chickens. I went there during vacation time and a lot of weekends, but after my granma death my family didn’t keep those activities anymore. However, this tendence hasn’t died yet. Even today it isn’t strange some people near my town take care of orchards and small scale animal farming.
———————
(To be continued)
“Luckily there is a huge amount of music from this period ( both good and bad) to uncover, but recently they have begun mining even further back, covering tracks by Lous Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald, and Glenn Miller.”
I wonder if they will get all the back to Big Band. They should take a listen to Les Paul and Mary Ford as well.
The deconstruction of a legend continues, no trial felt necessary.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-03-21/covering-murals-removing-statues-erasure-of-cesar-chavez-is-underway-in-california
One of the most classic forms of technology détournement I know of is Open Source software, especially Linux. I highly recommend Fedora Linux, since the installation is so simple (you need a memory stick, an Etcher software like Balena Etcher to install Fedora on the memory stick, and you will need to find out how to run the computer so that it reads the plugged in USB stick first before booting itself; this varies from computer to computer).
If you are tired of Microsoft Office, I recommend LibreOffice. Very classy and clean, and completely free of charge. Likewise, I have used GIMP to edit images – for instance, remove the background from my photos to make them usable in professional circumstances. The options are nearly limitless.
I know this is off topic, but since it came up, I will give my two cents. I will post anonymously for reasons that should be obvious if you read what I typed below. Mr. Greer can delete if he so wishes.
As an American of Mexican descent from California, César Chávez always seemed a bit overrated. It felt like there were people (the equivalent of today’s green-haired ones with nose rings) in “our community” who wanted to have the “Chicano” equivalent of Martin Luther King, Jr., but they couldn’t apparently find anyone better than Chávez.
I doubt that I am alone among Mexican Americans in that sentiment.
John Michael wrote, “All three of these options, to be used intelligently, require certain habits of consciousness that the inmates of modern industrial societies are systematically taught not to develop, or even to dream of.”
Yes, because our dreams are where our least recognized assets and most effective strategies so often get highlighted for our conscious awareness to catch a fleeting glimpse of. Until we dare to dream new habits, we don’t really stand much chance of developing them… barring the occasional divine intervention, of course. Going to the trouble to learn those habits of consciousness most discouraged by one’s society’s gatekeepers, such as delimiting, deserting, and détourning, may not be the easiest task, but it’s nowhere near as difficult as those gatekeepers always try to make it appear. Monkeywrenching the obligatory over-hyped physical products of one’s society into unenvisioned and unapproved uses offers a brilliant way to begin learning to question the subtle presumptions behind its obligatory over-hyped metaphysical products as well. All of those myths and metaphors we so obediently swallowed until we could regurgitate them on command.
Despite the strident and studied posturing of the Situationists, I don’t think many of them ever learned how to apply détournment to the agenda-filled thoughts that had been so distractingly installed in their own minds. A pity, because they could have developed a much more revolutionary practice for training and developing verboten habits of consciousness. Alas, it’s hard to become a true revolutionary when all your effort goes into primping and preening in revolutionary drag. Tant pis!
Metaphysically, there is so much liberation and transformation that can be explored by applying détournement internally, rather than merely projecting it outward. Détournement’s outward projection onto society’s physical control mechanisms flexes our atrophied courage, confidence, and ingenuity, all of which will be necessary strengths once we turn that repurposing technique inwards. Inward détournement is inevitably more challenging because no external other, trying to force its agendas and interests on us, remains. We are left only with the vying parts of our larger Self’s ecosystem, jockeying for control. What parts of us are battling to maintain authority at the expense of other parts of us? A question that can scale fractally from the smallest part of the Self up to the societal level and beyond to include other beings and divine influences.
Though my parents, teachers, etc. may have originally written up parts of my script, I am the one who then methodically rehearsed it into personal habit, and I am the one who can repurpose my script to tell a different story to different ends. Will I be able to put my agenda-laden thoughts, feelings, and imaginings (to which I have become quite habitualized) to some unauthorized new use, preferably one that will upend the very agendas they’ve been supporting? Is there some deranged gatekeeper within me doing its best impersonation of the watcher on the threshold, in the hope of keeping the rest of me permanently intimidated? And for how long have I been allowing that aspiring overlord to keep me toeing its distorted line? Who exactly is it who has benefited from the habitual discouragements I’ve been programed with? Why, when I’m actively caught up in the midst of discouraging myself, do I find it so hard to draw a riduiculous Salvador Dali mustache on my downtrodden image of myself? That would certainly be more amusing, and probably more productive.
Hi John,
As always this latest post has provided much food for thought. It is in fact a refreshing relief to know that no more new art forms will emerge, and those who still believe in the religion of progress will continue to put out sewage and attempt to call it art. I’m just glad I can continue writing my cozy absurdist flash fiction with joyful abandon because in this slow civilizational decline why not, anything goes right? 😉 Thank gods for this space of sanity on the internet.
There’s a lot of male-male romance fanfiction that isn’t porn. It shows as stand-alone gay romances, but also very frequently as a subplot in fanfiction that isn’t primarily about romance and isn’t erotica. It’s actually so common these days that if you are looking for interesting plots about other things you often end up reading things with a gay male romance as a subplot, or as background/. Sort of ‘oh yeah, those two are a gay couple and have been together for years, now let’s talk about the war/fight with the big bad/political drama/action adventure story’. Or ‘story about main plot from the original novel, but let’s give x an unrequited crush on y as a side plot’. Not so different from how heterosexual romances in fanfics go, actually.
Huh, you know who else fought against illegal immigration alongside Cesar Chavez in 1969? 1984 Democratic Presidential candidate Walter Mondale and Martin Luther King Jr.’s right hand man Ralph Abernathy:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/cesar-chavez-minuteman/
Anonymous, well, I’ve been saying for a while now that I expect a significant number of far left radicals to cross the narrow gap that separates them from genuine fascists and get into armbands and jackboots. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if groypers and neo-Nazis were to make the crossing easy for them.
Scotlyn, no argument there.
J, I hadn’t heard of that incident, but it’s a great example of the gross ignorance and incompetence of the self-proclaimed Magic Resistance. In particular, it demonstrates what I’ve called stormtrooper syndrome, the delusion that who wins a conflict is solely a matter of moral goodness. Doubtless the woman who pulled that remarkably dumb stunt was convinced that because she was a Good Person™, she could easily take on an egregor built up over 1400 years by millions of believers in a warrior faith. After all, she was Frodo Baggins up against Sauron, Luke Skywalker against Emperor Palpatine, Harry Potter up against Lord Moldywarp or whatever the fellow’s name was, et cetera ad nauseam — they all won, so she should, right?
Justin, that’s a very likely choice. Indian instrument makers transformed the Victorian harmonium into a much smaller and simpler instrument that could readily be made by hand:
Kimberly, thanks for this! “Detour” is close enough in meaning, yeah, and if you’re stuck on a boring freeway, a detour into more interesting country is usually your best choice…
Karen, it’s an interesting speculation, though I’m not sure how well it fits the women I knew who were into slash.
Clay, here’s hoping.
Chuaquin, the cultural matrix is very different, but yes, Japan has been a hotbed of détournement for many centuries.
Jack, I’d be amazed if that didn’t happen.
Richard, and yet that was always the case. Why now? I think my hypothesis explains that.
Rajarshi, I use LibreOffice myself. I’ll try Linux once it gets to the point that I can load and run it as easily as any other program!
Anon, thanks for this. So what you’re saying is that what Gringolandians gave, they also took away!
Christophe, oh, you’re quite correct about the Situationists. I wonder how long it’ll take for my readers to realize that I’m détourning Situationism… 😉
Jane, if that’s the writing genre that works for you, go ye forth and do that thing. I wouldn’t say that anything goes — I don’t recommend mass murder as an art form, for example! — but once the delusion of progress is chucked, yeah, the range of possibilities widens considerably.
Pygmycory, yes, I know. That’s why I specified male/male slash of the K/S variety, so that my comments wouldn’t be taken as applying to all of fanfic. Keep in mind that my novels also include same-sex relationships!
Richard, yep. One of the oddest features of contemporary politics is the number of issues that have slid from one side of the spectrum to the other in just the last few decades.
If MLK ever gets the Chavez treatment, an awful lot of street names will have to be changed. Maybe Lansing, Michigan will once again have a “South Logan Street.” At present, that wide thoroughfare is lined with vast empty parking lots and deserted shopping centers.
Hey JMG
I had a brief look, and I see what you mean about clavichords. The cheapest one available in the website below is almost AUD$6000. I wonder if instead you convince a clavichord-player to play a few tunes on their instrument occasionally, just to see what it’s like?
https://earlymusicshop.com/collections/clavichords
@Curt
I am not talking about Meshtastic. Now a days the people are switching to MeshCore. It is the same hardware, but the software is apparently a lot better.
Interestingly about Nova Rock, but I cannot comment.
@JMG
Regarding both Hollywood and Chuck Norris; As I was informed of the most improbable death, the reference next to it was of an apparent movie to star the deceased Val Kilmer! It would seem that not only is Hollywood in a state of terminal decline, they have started to practice necromancy to boot. Not to mention that the last time I watched a news clip of The Oscars, the mannerisms and costumes of the attendees reminded me uncomfortably of the decadent council members of so many of their previous movies. It is like they are making themselves onto a parody of their own characters.
@ JMG, #182:
They give without asking if we wanted it in the first place, so I guess they’re in their right to take it back when they get bored with it. Another example is “Latinx.” Did they actually ask any real Spanish speakers what they thought about this? Of course not. We’re peons who are supposed to shut up and do as we’re told. They have a few Hispanic toadies (some of whom can barely understand the Spanish of their grandparents) who go along with it and agree to be their frontmen and women to give it a veneer of legitimacy, but it’s all show.
Hi John Michael,
Hope that you’re settling down in your new neighbourhood and making connections.
Thanks for the Lord Moldywarts comment above. 🙂 Chuckles and general mirth ensue! They’re nice fables, but I’m of the opinion that strife is generally won by: superior resources; deft strategy; timeliness; commitment to a result; and effective use of those resources. Morals don’t tend to enter that equation, and at times can be exploited because if your opponent can guess what you’re up to, they can take counter measures. Candidly I’m boggled that your media are hectoring the biggest chief for details of troop movements and deployments – presumably so they can plaster the details all over the media? They’re dumber than earlier estimations suggested.
If I may cheekily suggest, such journalists might benefit from releasing such details, only on the condition that they themselves are placed in the frontline at the exact time and place blurted out. Certainly it would be an instructive experience.
Thought you might be interested in political shifts down under. A state election in South Australia was held yesterday, and the opposition Liberal party, were smashed. It was not a pretty result for them. And of interest, the ‘One Nation’ party appears to be gaining significant traction in rural areas, as well as outer urban seats. If I may posit an opinion, if a person is living in a major capital city in an inner to middle urban area (which is the vast majority of the population in this country – people are very concentrated geographically) people are doing OK. Outside of those well to do areas, things aren’t so flash. It was hard to ignore that the state goobermint where I am passed compulsory land acquisition legislation for rural areas recently – apparently even for the purposes of proposed infrastructure (as distinct from approved projects). Barely made a mention in the media, but it’s stirred up some trouble in the bush let me tell you.
Anywhoo, strange days: One Nation’s moment arrives at SA’s election. It might only be the beginning
Cheers
Chris
Anonymous # 167:
Well, I think the Orwellian “newspeak” to hide the possible infamous changes under a thick propaganda layer is indeed available for the “Democrats” too, in the case they want to get rid of their main black beast (straight white men), and redirect their usual “minutes of hate” against another fashionable victims “du jour”.
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Karen # 170:
My knowledge of slash stories (gay stories for heterosexual women) isn’t direct nor complete, so I take into consideration your point of view. However, I also think JMG view about it deserves some attention so it shouldn’t be discarded as hypothesis. By the way, I guess Japanese “Otakus” who like bizarre gay parodies inspired by manga/anime male characters, aren’t usually very socially skilled (including dating…); but I’m not sure of it (Otaku isn’t the same as Hikikomori).
——————————
JMG # 182:
No argument here. According what I know (as a dilettante) about Japan history and culture, I agree.
————————-
To end my current comment, there’s been some commentarists before now (and John himself too, methink) writing about moral panic. I can point it can be an ominous warning of an incoming moral panic (a modern version of the witches hunt and the pogroms) when you begin to notice how ethics/moral is mixed and even confused with Law. In an ideal world (rule of Law, religions/state separation and so on), there’s a difference between sin and crime; however, I think during a moral panic prosecution of the Bad People is justified (between another possible subterfuges) by a “higher” ethics/moral Good People, whose moralism swallows the Law (which is the last way to punish wrong behaviors in an ideal world). So the Law becomes the Moralism slave, or even the legal fig leaf to the Good Guys moralist biases eventually falls…
@Rajarshi,
getting linux distribs onto a USB for installation is really hard if you aren’t technically inclined. Been there, turned the air blue and burst into tears over it. And that was with help over the phone from a technically-inclined friend. Seriously, do you know somewhere you can buy Ubuntu already on a USB? I do not ever want to go through that again, especially since I’ve now fallen out with said friend.
On clavichords: I built a double strung clavichord from a Zuckerman kit more than 50 years ago when I was working in a piano rebuilding shop. Clavichords tend to warp due the tension of the strings. That’s not good. Being “double strung” doubles the tension but increases the volume slightly. To make matters worse, I used the wrong glue: Titebond. Titebond is convenient and easy to use but it creeps under the constant string pressure. The proper glue may be traditional hot hide glue, like violin makers use. Yes, it weakens under heat and humidity but at least it doesn’t creep. (Violins need to have their seams re-glued from time to time, especially where the player’s hand comes into frequent contact with the violin body. That is routine maintenance for a good violin shop.) Possibly a modern epoxy could also be appropriate for clavichords and harpsichords, but definitely not for violins. (I have not kept up on all the “latest.”) But what glue was used in its assembly would be a good question to ask when purchasing a clavichord. (You just never know what odds and ends of information you might run into here.)
Not surprised by the results in Australia. Australia and New Zealand are countries where the current dominant political coalitions are left-wing coalitions ever since the 1980s (the previous political realignment), and the realigning parties will come from the right.
@JMG and Kimberly: “Detournement – detour. Yes!!!. exactly what I experienced on the trip to the Space Center and back: the trip down on the mail routes was a wall-to-wall-cars nightmare, and it took forever. The trip back on State Road 40 through the Ocala national Forest was totally pleasant, and a lot quicker – and through what I felt was “the real Florida,” once off the commercial Florida.
About slash fans – I ran in those circles, though I never went much for slash. The women I knew were plain, dumpy, and socially awkward. But not adorkable.
An aside that should drive some on the blog up the wall – but, whatever you think of Mercedes Lackey as a writer, she totally monkey-wrenched the romantic side of the Romeo and Juliet story in “Close to Home,” in which Romeo was a total cad, to make Jay in “Shoggoth Concerto” look like a pussycat by comparison, and there was a lot of sharp commentary on the marriage mart and the daughters trained to “Make A Good Marriage” – think Jane Austen in a really biting mood! (I just read it yesterday, and she totally tore that to pieces.
Side note totally OT: here in North Florida, we are under water restrictions; the big storms left us with a bit more than half an inch of rain. The Village hasn’t announced it openly, but the one irrigation in process I saw was in drip mode, and I’m doing a lot of cold-to-lukewarm handwashing. But the maintenance men who stopped my toilet from running told me of it and so did the head of the Green Committee, which I’m on. Talk about underground knowledge…..
Phutatorius, they’ll do that in a heartbeat, of course. It’s all performance theater anyway.
J.L.Mc12, nah, if I decide I want clavichord music I’ll chase down some vinyl. There’s a modest amount.
Vitranc, digital necromancy is the wave of Hollywood’s future. At this point it would be child’s play to feed every Chuck Norris movie and TV episode into a suitably designed computer program and get it to generate more footage of Chuck walking, talking, and kicking people into the middle of next week. Once that happens, the acting profession is going to suffer a cataclysmic decline. As for the Oscars, well, I haven’t watched those in my adult life, nor have I seen the movies in question, so I’ll take your word for it.
Anon, of course. Until quite recently, the entire structure of modern American politics consisted of two squabbling factions of insanely corrupt plutocrats, each of which has an assortment of captive constituencies to serve as cannon fodder and frontpersons. The Hispanic community used to be such a captive constituency. Now the system’s coming unglued, and yeah, crass absurdities of the “Latinx” variety are part of the reason why.
Chris, I’m all in favor of having the media exposed to some instructive experiences. As for One Nation, the populist movement seems to be getting traction in a lot of places these days — no surprises there.
Phutatorius, so noted and thank you!
Patricia M, it’s important to the story of The Shoggoth Concerto that all the characters, very much including Jay, should be a mix of strengths and weaknesses, not simpering Good People™ or total cads. I very quickly get bored by stories in which one or more characters are evilly evil with a double scoop of evil sauce over the top. This may be why I’ve only ever read one volume of Lackey all the way through — and that was a slog.
@pygmycory #193
You can buy Fedora Linux (or Ubuntu) USB installer sticks on Amazon. But if the price is significantly higher than the cost of the USB device itself, then you are probably being fooled, so don’t buy that.
There was a time when you had to fuss around with the command line to make your own, but nowadays there are nice friendly software that let you do it with a few clicks. You can download Balena Etcher for free, for instance: [Balena Etcher](https://etcher.balena.io/)
@ JMG # 183
Regarding Linux, proficiency usually builds up with experience and practice. I don’t think you can get good at loading and running it until you start using it. That said, Windows – especially old editions – render themselves pliant to several forms of détournement.
Young blacks and Hispanics are more antisemitic than the average American:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/abs/antisemitic-attitudes-among-young-black-and-hispanic-americans/5465F2124BC3D44B40521D2CD000D023
By pure demographics of the existing Democratic party coalition as composed of young people, blacks, and Hispanics it shouldn’t be surprising that the Democratic party would eventually become the antisemitic party.
@JMG – OUCH! Ok, you got me there. Suckered in again. The whole Good Guys vs Bad Guys is a very hard thing to shake.
I’m not American, so my knowledge of current US political and social mess is indirect and a bit local media biased, but I’d like to add my opinion about Hispanic people and “Democrat” party. I share John idea that Latin people in the USA have been usually a “captive vote constituency” like the Black Community for decades. However, things seem to have change since a few years ago, so Hispanic vote could be turning into the right wing side. It isn’t very strange, because indeed Latin people tend to be religious (Christian) and give a lot of support to the traditional family values; which contradicts clearly the woke ideology (official “Democrats” doctrine). In addition to this, unlimited “illegal” migration (also praised by wokesters), ironically goes against the long time American Hispanic workers/citizens too, due to its evident negative effects in economics and social aspects to local people there (but the American Left has a selective blindness to see them). For example, massive migration makes less legal jobs available for citizens, and it also helps job incomes goes down (more workers available competing for the same cake).
Jocular comment: Having just read your piece I suddenly realized that the ‘Demon Prince’ Viole Falushe, in Jack Vance’s “The Palace of Love”, was a Situationist! I quote from memory: “I am perhaps the greatest artist in history… I arrange the total environment, that I may suffuse the total entity…”
Good morning, everyone.
I’ve done a quick look at the wikipedia entry on chain saws. There is a photograph of an “osteotome”, which has more resemblance to a mechanical egg-beater than it does to a modern chain saw. It does have the combined blade + chain, however. (I do wonder about the maternal fatality rate when used in the process of delivering a baby.)
There was a somewhat odd knit “pocket” item sold recently by a (fruit-named) cell-phone company. Apparently $150 US would get you a brightly colored sock-like pocket for your fruit-phone. The pockets sold out quickly, were followed in short order by knock-offs., and were also analyzed by you-tube craft content creators.
So, one can quickly find instructions for knitting a phone-pocket by hand, knitting one with a home knitting machine, or crocheting something very similar. (I think I’m going to make a hand-knit version to act as a bag for dice. I can almost certainly accomplish this with yarn that already exists in my house, so the cash-grab object is now detourned into a free craft project.)
Maybe this is the year I get motivated to plant something edible in the front yard?
Hi JMG,
Using the principles of the binary, I see now that 20th and 21st Century Art has had a polarity with modern management and that is why it has sucked so badly.
On the one hand, you have clueless managers who, with their certificates, understand nothing of Beauty and measure everything in terms of productivity (for themselves). The International Style of architecture applies here, as well as modern art and pop music.
On the other side of the binary, you have the rogue artists, who see their job as dismantling the managerial state. This gives you subversive and reactionary art that is political in nature. Would Situationalist Art apply here? Andy Warhol and Punk music also fit this side.
Neither one of these polarities really inspires someone to believe in the transcendent nature of Art. Sometimes, truly good art does emerge — I’m thinking of early rock and roll as just one example. But eventually a CPA somewhere along with an MBA decide that there is an opportunity to (insert fashionable management phrase such as ‘disrupt’ — but to really make money) and turn that art form into a mushy, lowest common denominator revenue stream.
Fortunately, the Internet has allowed good art to be seen and used. Etsy has wonderful art available. I’d rather purchase a hand-sewn quilt from Appalachia than spend a second in the Museum of Modern Art or the Chihuly museum. The quilt, I know, was made with love.
Rajarshi #177 Said:
“One of the most classic forms of technology détournement I know of is Open Source software, especially Linux.”
I think the main bit of détournement is the General Public License GPL (and other such ‘copyleft’ licenses). It uses copyright law not to prohibit copying, but to allow it. On top of that it allows you to change the program and distribute your changes as well. The main restriction is that you have to release that changed code under the same license, so your work can also be built upon by the next person.
(Yes, it’s the license Linux and many other Free / Open Source programs use, but it’s originally from the GNU project and predates Linux)
–bk
JMG,
Would you say that derivative works are the rage of the future because we are in a narrative building phase of our culture? As the Faustian world declines, are we are looking to create new tracks in the astral space, as Levi talked about with Jesus, and from this a new world emerges?
JMG,
As I attempt to think of examples of possible detournement in modern life I keep running up against the issue of examples that are repurposing of things and those that are mild forms of grift or fraud. It also seems to matter as to who the act of detournement is being used against.
I will use two examples.
In one the participant changes the upc labels on fruit or vegetables to fool the scanners in the self checkout at the grocery store as a way to thwart the trend of forcing the consumer to provide labor that used to be provided as part of the transaction. This activity gives the participant a financial gain , the store a financial loss, and is considered shop lifting by the law.
In a second example a homeowner expands his home ( do-it-yourself) but stops short of completion. Thus by keeping the home in a state of construction they put off the cost of increased property taxes by years ( or perhaps forever). This could be seen as a protest against the government keeping ownership and control of private property in the form of mandatory taxes.
It would seem that the second is a much more acceptable ( or is it) form of detournement because it is not illegal (just deceptive) and the loser is the government and not another individual or business.
I guess what I saying is ” what are the rules”.
(Slightly off topic) I want to write about a topic loosely related to JMG idea pointing slash “gay stories” popularity among some hetero women, could contradict the usual boring feminist narrative. I’d like to say in addition to this uncomfortable idea, some more contradictions in today feminist ideology.
I can say every ideologies have blind spots, because human mind is limited to understand everything in the outer world starting from some ideas. In an ideal world, everybody should defend their ideas in a clean way in a free debate, knowing their ideologies haven’t monopoly of every truths; but in real world it’s easier to spread propaganda and to censor dissident ideas. Eventually, totalitarian ideologies lead dissidents to prison or even they kill them directly. By now, this doesn’t happen in “democracies”.
I don’t say everything in ideologies is b***t, but a complex mix of selected truths, half truths and lies.
Of course, feminism is an ideology too: a hard fact which some people doesn’t want to accept. It’s not a science nor philosophy, because IMHO many of its claims don’t survive the falsation test (according C. Popper ideas), and there’s not a true free self-criticism. Feminists (especially the last wave, the woke ones) don’t like to hear not-feminist criticism (indeed, their answers usually aren’t a reasoning example…if they dare to answer them). This tendence is similar to another ideologies, like Islamism (ahem).
Feminism like another ideologies too, has its Good People (in its case women) and its Bad People (evidently, men). It shares with another ideologies its fondness for propaganda and censorship against dissidents (woke cancel culture). Maybe its supporters are afraid to expose their doctrine big holes?(contradictions).
First elephant in the room: There’s a contradiction between the empowerment narrative (independent and powerful women), and the victimism one (women as perpetual victims of patriarchal men, in every times and historical cultures). Ah, here it comes the white knight to save ladies, the (woke) government. For example, against gender violence, State must punish bad guys with harder laws and police…Oops! Is not casually the State one of the several social structures which have allowed the infamous Patriarchy during millenies?(Kings and armies have been near always men business).
Second elephant: Woke “civil war” between TERF feminism (an ugly name!) and transgender activist, about what is and what’s not a real woman. I can confess I see with some Schadenfreude this inner “debate” which isn’t very clean nor rational, methink (for example, the Rowling-Harry Potter cancellation attempt, cough).
Third elephant: If we understand the term “Patriarchy” like a work hypothesis or a metaphor, we could debate it with freedom. However today feminism accepts it like an objective truth, even near scientific, cherry picking historical data they like to see, to explain everything. It isn’t a very honest reasoning, methink…According last feminist wave, Patriarchy seems to be the perpetual brotherhood between every times and countries men to oppress poor women. I think this view is near to the usual conspiracy theories (ahem).
A last big contradiction I see (by now) in actual Feminism: Its supporters have been shouting stronger and more stridently their complains against Bad People (men) since a few years ago. However, women situation in the West have been improved since the last 50 years until today. Well, nowadays situation here isn’t perfect, but it’s much better than in the West a century ago, or when you compare it with (ahem) for example, Islamic culture. Why this bitter and growing complaining? I could think with malevolence it’s a way to justify and rationalize Feminists power in Academia, MSM and “progressive” parties (woke attitude rules).
It could be more holes in the apparently thick woke feminist building, but I won’t bore you, and I understand I don’t have enough theorical level to debunk it systemstically.
I like the Idea of a creative and a performative stage in art. However, when comparing todays performing arts like music and play to that of the past, there is a huge difference. In historical times these things actually had to be performed to be consumed. However today we live in times of recording arts. So if we want to listen to Mozart, somebody has to perform his music, but if we want to listen to elvis we just pull the record. The same is true for play. If we want to see Shakespear, somebody has to perform it. If we want to see David Lean, we just watch the records of his movies. So the job of performing an art to keep it accessible is gone today. Still, we can see a trend of arts converting from the creative to the performative stage in an increase of cover songs and remake movies. Because we have perfect copies of every recent creative performance in either music or movies, it would be stupid to try to perform a song or a movie as close to the original as possible, because then you could just consume the original. Thus Artist who perform the inherited culture have to give their own spin and interpretation to the song or story to give their performance purpose and meaning.
Loading a Linux iso file onto a USB stick used to be “sudo dd bs=4M if=/path/to/image.iso of=/dev/sdb && sync” which is pretty cryptic.
Now they have written programs to do that.
Download and run Rufus (no installation required).
Select your USB device under “Device”.
Click “Select” to choose your ISO file.
Leave default settings and click “Start”.
The Mac equivalent to Rufus is balenaetcher.
Fedora wrote their version as well. See below.. I have not used that one even though I installed Plasma on my test rig last night. I have used both Rufus and Balena etcher before. They worked fine.
https://fedoraproject.org/kde/download/
The real fight is getting Broadcom WiFi working. If you have a cable network connection that won’t be necessary. If it is necessary then Linux Mint works well, but you need the cable connection to start so that Device Manager can download the correct driver for the WiFi card.
Plasma is pretty but flogs your video card pretty hard, an old one might not keep up. Nvidia cards can be problematic, the older the more trouble. Mint Cinnamon works well on anything newer than 2014, MATE (pronounced mah-tay) works on anything back to 2009 as does Xfce.
Linux has undergone a sudden burst of evolution that by serendipity has matched up with the Windows 11 debacle and the MacOS 26 Liquid Glass /Augmented Idiocy debacle. That’s what has prompted my test program.
Clay D. # 196:
Interesting “Détournement” examples, methink. Well, I haven’t a superstitious respect for Laws (especially the most evidently unfair ones), but I also think it isn’t very clever to break the Law roughly. However, I see there’s a grey area between the full obedience to the legal system and the illegal behavior. You can find your own country grey zone becauseI think it must be different in different legal systems. In addition to this, illegal behavior, at least in Western countries, doesn’t imply imprisonment in most of infractions. Of course, you can be fined by the government if you commit petty bureaucratic illegal activities. A high fine isn’t a joke, but it depends of your action you’ll be fined with more or less money to pay to the State.
Criminal Law is only for the worst illegal acts, according the govts codes: the last option to punish bad guys. At least in my country, if you commit a small fraud or theft, you won’t go to prison but fined by a judge (better when you haven’t been punished previously). Over a certain amount of money, you could be imprisoned.
So eventually you’ve got some legal space to be a “trickster”, to some extent, thought I think it’s better to be careful…
Rajarshi, Linux won’t replace Windows until it becomes as easy to start using Linux as it is to start using Windows. I’d like that to happen, but of course I have no control over it.
Peter, well, young people are increasingly veering right these days…
https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/politics/young-voters-shifted-right-2024-election-ash-center
…but so far, at least, the Black and Hispanic communities are still more often Democrat than Republican. If that changes, it’ll be interesting to see which way the antisemitic frogs hop.
Patricia M, the thing is, Good Guys™ vs. Bad Guys™ was a very popular gimmick in fantasy fiction when Lackey was at her peak of popularity; she paid close attention to her market and gave it what it wanted, which is why her novels sold more copies than mine ever will. Me, I got my fill of that gimmick back when I was an obsessive Tolkien geek, and got over it as part of the process by which I fell out of love with Tolkien’s fiction; these days, to me, it’s just dreary. So I like a different kind of story.
Chuaquin, thanks for this. That’s certainly been my observation.
Robert G, I suspect it’s not jocular at all. I’ll have to reread the Demon Princes series to see, but Vance was perhaps the most widely read of all the SF writers of his time, and it would be utterly in keeping with the man to make each Demon Prince typify some movement in French philosophy!
Sylvia, the thought of anybody getting a mechanical eggbeater near a woman in labor is horrifying enough! As for your example of détournement, it’s a good one; my late wife used to crochet bags for magical gear for the two of us, along much the same lines.
Jon, that makes enormous sense. I agree with you about the quilt, btw! In general, most of the really good art being produced these days is in fringe communities unconnected to either the managerial or the anti-managerial scenes. As for the narrative phase, no, we’re not there yet. Derivative art is part of the process by which the last creative phase gets digested and metabolized, thus clearing space for genuinely original visions to come.
Clay, to slip into Discordian language for the moment, in the historical stage of Consternation (also known as Bureaucracy), the great conflict is between the Aneristic force of bureaucrats, who try to force everyone else to conform to their rigid notions of what should be, and the Eristic force of ordinary people, who want to live their lives as they choose. Both the examples you’ve cited are perfect examples of the way this plays out, with ordinary people monkeywrenching the technology or the regulations of the bureaucrats to their own advantage and the bureaucrats’ discomfiture. The bureaucrats always respond by defining any such act of monkeywrenching as a crime. Thus the line dividing legal détournement from grifts and frauds is marked out entirely by the frantic scribbling of a bureaucratic pen. As for rules, the moment those get proclaimed they’re going to be détourned, you know! Once we pass into the fifth historical stage, Moral Warptitude (also known as Aftermath), the bureaucratic system will either pass through the last of its 73 permutations or run into a paper shortage, the Aneristic force will collapse, the Eristic force will dissolve into Void in the absence of anything to push against, and all these legal and illegal détournements will lose their meaning as people find their way back to, you know, just doing stuff.
Chuaquin, the main issue with contemporary feminism as I see it is that it’s morphed from an egalitarian movement (women should be equal to men) into a claim of privilege (women should be privileged above men) and become subservient to the class hierarchies that are the great unmentionable of our society. In a very real sense, organized feminism these days is an ideology used by middle and upper class women in their struggle to become even more privileged, rich, and influential than they already are. I noted this in a blog post back during Trump’s first presidential campaign, when Madeline Albright tried to bully poor women into supporting Hillary Clinton by saying, “There’s a special place in Hell for women who won’t help other women.” Of course poor women knew perfectly well that they couldn’t expect any help at all from Albright, Clinton, and their overprivileged peers; they knew that what Albright was saying was, “Listen up, peons, you’d better support the unbridled ambitions of your betters.” That was one of the reasons Clinton lost.
Deedl, I’d make two points. First, a recording is not the same as a live performance, which is why cover bands who do a letter-perfect imitation of some old rock band can count on plenty of gigs and enthusiastic audiences. Second, recordings don’t last forever. Most of the movies of the silent era no longer exist, for example, and my guess is that over the next century more and more of the recorded heritage of the 20th century is going to become increasingly inaccessible.
@Chuaquin
Yes, we’ve been discussing here and JMG putting forward, the evident endless rehashing in ou current times, culturally. My kosovo-albanian colleague into his forties also mentioned how all the old superstars of 90s/late 80s hollywood keep appearing again, yet no real new “superstars” appear who would ever reach their status since.
Certainly true. All the while endless remakes, not identical copies but with an idiotic spin added apparently.
I guess Nova rock was somewhat Nova in 2005 when it was founded, a last blip of musical recycling, as 1998-2002 new metal was, in any ways, a rehash already, not that I am against it, I think they still had some genuine talents.
Amongst the 2026 lineup in Nova Rock – Iron Maiden, The Cure, Sex Pistols (or what’s left of em), Black Label Society….
back in the day, as far as I know, the artists themselves were young and I’d bet the audience also younger.
Nova Rock was established on the ruins of a former well known jazz festival in Wiesen, eastern-most Austria.
As for your grandma: I guess, but Spain has been a traditional country for longer than Austria.
I saw the last of the last remnants of a more diverse, small scale agriculture in Austria myself as a child (I’m born 1988), but was nothing like what you describe, and soon enough, the train rode over all that and it was more and more a faceless industrial affair.
JMG,
Of course you are right. Detournement is hopeless if you must first act permission from the bureaucrats. Any form of Detournement that is effective at reducing the power of the bureaucracy and the ruling class will inevitably made illegal.
So one is left with a personal decision on how effective your actions are with regards to the risk.
I was just unpacking some books and came across my copy of ” Ecodefense, A field guide to Monkeywrenching” edited by Dave Foreman with a forward by Ed Abbey.
I think the end of Abbey’s forward is appropriate here. This was written with regard to Ecological monkey wrenching, but I think it applies just as well to your version of detournement.
” Its good for the trees, its good for the woods, its good for the earth, ands good for the human soul. Spread the word and carry on!”
I had a friend years ago who got a job as a city arborist and then quite happily designed in plantings of native oaks, actually also some not so native, but still good to eat or even tastier than the local ones because of climate change, just wanting to make sure that ecosystem and food for critters and humans would be there and if a variety, best oaks will self select. This was a city that had oaks in the surrounding hills and so was open to oaks.
I keep thinking there should be ways to deconstruct and make use of some of the nastier California themes, but have not come up with anything. Well, for jokes and memes I could ( the red hat wearing women my age with their quilted protest signs on the overpasses, who couldnt ? ) but it would do no good atm.
Some of the boondoggle initiatives pushed to homeowners and then free to some of them, maybe some could be repurposed. Let them pay for EV Ready electric service upgrade, so then you have the amps to rent out a studio in your garage, a form of cohousing to benefit both parties as we stair step down. A low water grant that rips out your lawn but installs some bedraggled ugly well spaced out baby bushes — but with a timed irrigation system, could you change out after their done to food producing bushes ? ( They might check)
But, actually, that initiative is already doing the detournement thing to us, the initiative is actually called “Climate Victory Garden” and what it does is rip out all live plants in the front yard and put in gravel or shredded bark cover with a few bushes and a timed irrigation for them. Not victory gardens ! Supposed to be water saving. It is like messing with us old school rip out your lawns and put in a vegetable garden types, nope, its take out your lawn and put in an ugly dead xeriscape.
I suppose we can just let them put the free gravel beds around our houses ( supposed to be more fire safe, but we know that it will be a weed filled maintenance mess within 3-5 years) and maybe all that gravel can get put to use for solar thermal storage in a greenhouse.
Imagine a mimeographed meme of a fiddler pasted over a black and white photo of Rome with some kind of caption of the Fiddler labled as GOvernor New-scum and money tansforming into gravel and plug in cars raining down on the burning roman buildings under a blazinf desert sun…..
Right now One Nation aren’t really realigners in Australia. The realigners would have to be calling for Australian sovereignty and Australian independence and decoupling from the American and British empires, and so far I haven’t seen any One Nation politician advocating for getting the American troops out of Australia, leaving the Commonwealth of Nations, Five Eyes, and AUKUS, and establishing its own independent foreign policy for the benefit of Australia rather than for the benefit of America or Britain at the expense of Australia.
Quote JMG: “At this point it would be child’s play to feed every Chuck Norris movie and TV episode into a suitably designed computer program and get it to generate more footage of Chuck walking, talking, and kicking people into the middle of next week. ”
Verily.
I gather you haven’t seen the AI-reels on Instagram, then. For the moment not as over-the-top as the AI-generated UFC match between Schwarzenegger and Steven Seagal last week, but still. Let’s just say the legend yet grows… 😉
Peter # 197:
I’d be very cautious before blaming someone for Antisemitism. Of course, Holocaust denial is rough Antisemitism, but I can also point some Jews (especially in current high spheres in Israel) have a very thin skin for reasoned criticism against their warmongering agenda; indeed they usually like to label as “Antisemitic” (thoughtstopper) everybody who aren’t openly pro-Israel politics. So maybe young Blacks and Hispanics tend to Antisemitism, or maybe not. What I think it could happen is the possible return of the old Antisemitic stereotypes due to Israel current politics and the naïve idealization of Palestinians by my “loved” woke left.
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JMG # 210:
You’re welcome…
********
Yes, to some extent, previous feminism
waves before its last woke mutation wanted women were equal to men; they had several inner branches, according their views, but they shared an “integrative” common view. Of course, sometimes there were some debate, for example, with old school Marxists (most of them men) about some topics, but feminism was in general terms one more tendence within old left.
I think woke feminism has “morphed” not only into a female privilege activism, like you’ve written, but it also has changed into an identitarian and victimist ideology. I can find an easy example of this not-egalitarian, identitarian and victimist tendence in my own country criminal laws: If a man attacks a woman, he’ll be punished harder (due to his gender) than if he attacks another man (I thought every person was equal under the Law…).
Your example with Mrs. Albright words to American low class women is very interesting in its sense of proposing a fake women “sorority” to avoid the social class difference. And it’s possible your view about actual feminism supporting middle and upper class Western women (most of them white), could explain the growing agressive speech, attitude and behavior within the last feminist wave across the West, which I’ve pointed previously.
By the way, in addition to my last comment: it’s interesting to know an usual way to build up every historical armies since organized wars began, until today, has been using slaves and/or conscripted young men (compelled to join armies). However, feminists (at least a heck of their pop activists) love to say Patriarchy has given privileges for every man has lived since ancient times…(cough).
Curt # 211:
Mainstream movies could be defined today with the word “pastiche”(I hope to be understood, if that term has reached English dictionaries…). The same thing as the new thing.
I also see this year Nova Rock stars are really old glories, according the groups you’ve said…
It’s a pity in Austria small scale farming hasn’t survived well during last decades. It’s true the situation here isn’t so “advanced” like in your country, but small scale agriculture has lived better times (though at least it hasn’t disappeared yet:”a little is better than nothing”)
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Clay D. # 212:
Yes, but before beginning to break laws is better to know what consequences would have your action(s) if/when you’re caught. Bureaucracy is slow, but often its lack of intelligence is overrated…It can be useful to prepare some legal defense, if s**t happens; unless you accept to pay fines (or in the worst cases, be imprisoned for a while).
By the way, I think a really unfair law can be challenged for example, by a civil desobedience campaign…if most people agree and they don’t obey it. Indeed, governments legitimacy to compel their citizens for obeying their laws (beyond the open threat: with reasons) has been a real headache for philosophers since many centuries ago.
I first heard of “detournement” decades ago in Adbusters magazine. I didn’t quite get it at first, until a later article gave a clear example, where the sort of people who very much aren’t Situationist nonetheless “detourned” the peace sign by naming it “The footprint of the American chicken”.
Later, on the (now-inactive) Ran Prieur “Dropout” forum, I experienced it used on me. I carelessly mentioned “I prefer my socialism on a national basis”, and someone took the opening to say “How do you have your NationalSozialismus? Neat or on the rocks?”. (What I actually had meant was a social democracy that doesn’t let the global poverty problem divert resources away from the quest to eliminate absolute poverty locally.)
Speaking of “American chickens”, somewhere back in comments to older posts the insult “chickenhawk” came up. If you’ll excuse a little bit of OT, I’d like to ask: Does Anyone Else feel more disrespect for a “chicken dove” than a chickenhawk? That would be someone who knows they have a past record of being “chicken” but wants to avoid the chickenhawk label, and resorts to motivated reasoning so that he never has to admit to being other than a strong dove.
Hi John Michael,
About maybe two decades ago, or more, I read a fictional book by the English author Ben Elton, which was set in Australia. The title was ‘Stark’, and I recall one plot twist was that the world wide cabal of elites couldn’t afford this monstrous project they’d set their hearts desires upon, so cutting the proverbial Gordian knot, they deliberately crashed the economy to reduce competition for all stuff, and so completed their horrendous project.
Now I dunno man, but that little idea has been floating around my brain for a few weeks now. And say if a European war over there wanted to be brought to a swift closure, and perhaps, resources were to be directed away from a whole bunch of stupid and wasteful stuff towards redeveloping a manufacturing base. This regime over here has been something of a thorn in the side. And heavy fuel availability is in terminal decline, probably the easiest thing to do, would be to crash the entire economy. Stuff sure would be cheaper afterwards for those who weren’t swimming naked (as the famous investment saying suggests) and with far less competition for energy and resources. As I mentioned previously, dunno, but we’ll probably get to find out how it all rolls.
My best guess at this stage is that we’ll be seeing petrol rationing down under once the Easter holidays have occurred. But as has been remarked upon by smarter brains than mine, predictions are hard, especially when they’re about the future.
By the way, my lady also loves the adventures of Kirth Gersen. Viole was a classic INFJ personality type (cough, cough, also the mustachio’d German bloke, Jane Eyre, and maybe some else here, err, awkward 🙂 ), who clearly held strong grudges. His nemesis, Navarth the mad poet was almost the exact opposite, and both characters have the wonderful benefit of having plausible back stories and comprehensible growth in both evilness and motivations. Viole had a hole in his soul which he sought to fill, whilst Navarth poked fun at him. A truly fine read, and a fave of mine.
By the way, plastic pipes are up almost 40% down here. It wasn’t all that long ago when we produced vinyl and polyethylene locally. Our elites fail to appreciate the difference between ‘just in time’ and ‘just in case’ – which was a candid opinion from a former senior military leader, who’s right.
Cheers
Chris
Hi anonymous,
No offence brother, but you introduced a technical term: ‘realigners’, without ever really explaining what you meant, and then you chucked in a random selection of wish lists which were presented as some sort of over arching goals to be achieved. I doubt they’ll ever happen. The Australian nation has always had overlords, and it is worth mentioning that the Great White fleet projected force here when we were but English colonies. It doesn’t take a high tech, big energy approach, to exert authority.
Cheers
Chris
The Flashman novels are a great example of detournement
Fuel rationing is beginning to happen in Europe now:
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/slovenia-limits-fuel-purchases-pumps-run-dry-2026-03-22/
Chris,
Like you I don’t see the Australians ever kicking the Americans out. The Americans will leave on their own volition since it can no longer afford to maintain an empire and troops on the other side of the world, and the Australians will probably be begging for the Americans to return.
Australia will probably have Chinese overlords after the Americans leave Australia, considering the amount of Chinese influence that has entered the country and the rise of China to a global superpower in the past few decades. Probably will end up as a resource colony for China with its rich resources being extracted out of the ground and exported for use in Chinese factories.
Clay, bingo. It’s always a personal decision: how much risk are you willing to accept to pursue your goals? Legal problems are simply one more part of the calculus.
Atmospheric, California is further into lethal bureaucratic overreach than most other parts of the US, so none of this surprises me. There’s a reason why so many people are leaving — which is another mode of détournement…
Anon, that is to say, you’re trying to redefine the populist upsurge in the light of the ideology you want them to adopt. That’s not a useful habit if you’re trying to understand what’s happening, because populism isn’t primarily ideological. The issues you wish they were upset about are not the issues they’re upset about!
Sven, no, I haven’t followed that, but it doesn’t surprise me. As for the legend, somebody pointed out yesterday that the fact that the Democrats waited to start trash-talking Chuck Norris until after he was dead is itself a Chuck Norris joke…
Chuaquin, the identitarian and victimist elements of feminism are, to my mind, simply ways of claiming privilege. Identitarian feminism says “All women benefit if you hand more privileges to me”; victimist feminism says “Other women have suffered, so I deserve to get everything I want.” I really do need to do a post on predicate thinking one of these days, don’t I?
Michael, those are great examples. As for chicken hawks and chicken doves, a chicken’s a chicken to me.
Chris, the global economy’s headed for the rocks anyway, so it isn’t entirely improbable that various people are trying to make sure it crashes in a way that advantages them. Interestingly, fuel is more expensive here but it hasn’t risen that much and is still readily available — and of course our fossil fuel companies are raking in the bucks via foreign sales. So far, at least, the pain is landing mostly elsewhere — and of course that’s entirely deliberate.
KAN, and like so much détournement, great fun.
I don’t think the Democrats would tolerate antisemitism. There are a lot of Jewish elected official members in the Democratic Party and they won’t take kindly to people saying that the Jews are the problem for America’s problems. What’s happening is that many on the left already hate the Democratic Party and have abandoned the Democratic Party because of their failure to address America’s problems. These are the people who have started to play around with antisemitism.
Australia ruled by the Chinese you say? Didn’t certain science fiction authors predict that a century ago?
Yeah, and I will leave when there is some positive reason/place, I know I wont be here long term . Too bad realy, used to be alright. So, yeah policies suck in the state overall. My little niche at my place has good energy for me, but I actually think the neighborhood energy is slowly going downhill, it finally occurred to me a few months ago, this exact neighborhood/block was the long time home of Babba Hari Dass, the silent Monk and he died in 2018 ( he was cremated and then ashes back to India) about 2 years before his spot and alot of the neighborhood burned down. New people all over and alot not as nature connected
With the current war in the Middle East, the American Empire is throwing its periphery to the wolves, such as East Asia, Australia and New Zealand, Europe, etc; they all stand to suffer from the destruction of the refinaries in the Middle East and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz since those countries get a lot of their energy from the region.
Michael, just as the GOP got taken over by populists, the Dems could be taken over by their own radicals. It’s happened before — and there’s already a fair amount of antisemitism on the leftward end of the Democratic party. As for science fiction authors, excellent! Yes, in Cordwainer Smith’s future history, Australia became one vast Chinese megalopolis named Aojou Nambien. As I recall, E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops” also referenced the Chinese conquest of Australia — and since Forster in that story predicted the Internet, in 1909 no less, I’d take it seriously.
Atmospheric, if you wait too long the state government may start charging steep fees to people who leave. Just saying…
Mark, that was always going to happen. As the American empire winds down, getting rid of peripheral outposts is an essential step, and doing it with the excuse of a war elsewhere is convenient.
You can purchase Dell and Lenovo laptops with Linux pre-installed on them, and they tend to be cheaper than the Dell and Lenovo laptops with Windows 11 pre-installed on them because you don’t have to pay for the Windows license on the laptop.
Anonymous #214,
Australia is an independent nation, although it is sometimes difficult to tell that. Entering into pacts and treaties with other nations with similar interests is just diplomacy. Personally, I believe that if the nations on the borders of Russia are nervous about Russia they should form their own defence arrangements.
The only problem with Australia becoming a giant Chinese megalopolis -JMG #229 – is that Australia is about 70% desert. Many say less but I say they need to get out more.
Michael D. # 218:
“Socialism with a national basis” isn’t a Nazi thing, but usual behavior of Socialist parties in real world. Indeed, though Socialists love internationalism in theory, they had to apply their politics in real countries. So relation between Socialism and Nationalism is complex (love and hate). Even the Commies worked within a national frame (when Stalin compelled USSR serfs…err…citizens…to win the war against Germans in WW2, he told them to fight more for the Motherland Russia than for Marxism…).
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Chris # 219:
In the short form, I think you’ve depicted an Economy term called “demand destruction”(I’m sorry if my DIY translation from Spanish is too rough). After part of the demand is destroyed, the correlative offer is balanced with the part of demand which has survived automatically (in theory).
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JMG # 224:
OK, no argument here. I’m waiting for your future post about the feminist mess, too.
*****
Well, here fuels are more expensive, but there aren’t shortages now (by now).
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Michael # 225:
I don’t know directly how works now political arena in the USA, but I can point there’s a term named “Overton window”, which explains how ideas apparently embarrassing to debate yesterday, can be argued and eventually accepted tomorrow. Antisemitism today is a thoughtstopper (more in US than in Europe methink), but tomorrow it could be fashionable (even the roughest Antisemitism, ahem).
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Mark # 228:
Yes. In addition to Europe, Australia…you haven’t forget East Asia: South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, three economics giants with mud feet. They don’t have oil within their territory, and they support sanctions against Russian oil. So do the math.
On the other hand, China could survive due to Russian oil and gas to some extent. Which I think it could be a big historical irony (we’ll see…).
@ BK # 203
I agree. GPL is the mother of technology detournement. Its an amazing idea – instead of patenting each product, create a single umbrella patent for a family of technologies built on top of one another that can be shared among people. GPL is an idea typical of the United States in its best age.
@ JMG # 210
I think it already has become easier than Windows. I have Linux (Fedora) at home and Windows on my work laptop, and honestly I find them equally usable (even without any need to type code into a terminal). I think part of the problem is reputation – Linux has a reputation for being geeky and technical, with Linux users continuously using the image of the terminal-user to represent themselves.
Other than that, there are three problems with Linux, broadly speaking – installing Linux, installing software on Linux, and updating Linux. The core user base uses terminal commands to install software and update the OS, so there’s not a lot of pressure to develop the software center.
Hi John Michael,
Like you, I’ll take on Linux when it can properly run Windows software, and not one minute before.
Yeah, it does make a certain sense to control a demolition job, and I’m guessing that that is what is happening. Tell you a funny story, what I learned from the recession of the early 1990’s, was that the splat does not impact upon all equally. A friend who is slightly older, sailed through those days in a secure job, and in fact remarked to me that the deflationary price pressures made life pretty sweet back then. On the flip side were the folks who enjoyed the 10% unemployment, or like me, took any job, at any pay, so as to keep a roof over my head and food upon the table. Being one car repair bill away from serious financial distress, sharpens a persons mind, let me tell you.
For those who are concerned about the Americans departing the shores of down under, I’d suggest to reconsider their fears. There’s been a lot of talk recently between the two friendly goobermints regarding rare earth mining here. And need I remind everyone that we export 40% of the worlds lithium? Iron Ore. Coal. Plus, correct me if I’m wrong, but a biggerer than big LNG terminal was recently direct hit in the middle east dust up, which leaves us as the biggest LNG exporter anywhere. Already I’m reading that some fuel ships have journeyed a very strange path via the Panama Canal from the Gulf of Mexico to Australia. Oh yeah, it’s happening. High fuel prices make this possible. And we’re the spoils of war, always has it been thus.
By the way, forgot to mention, Happy Equinox! 🙂 Hope you had an enjoyable local celebration?
Also I spotted diesel locally for AU$3.00 a Litre, or that’s almost US$8.00 a Gallon. That’s the future right there, we’ll run short, long before we’ll ever run out. And a potty mouthed former Prime Minister once called the country a ‘Banana Republic’ and he may have been more right than he realises, plus the cheeky scamp contributed more to deindustrialisation than most. That’s what you get when you vote in a supposed left leaning bloke who has a penchant for Ferraris and old clocks. Hardly a working class hero, and I’m guessing that his efforts will be unwound over the years.
Cheers
Chris
Some topics (slightly off topic, or not) I’ve thought while I drink a coffee:
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I’ve just known Habermas died some days ago. This old German thinker (if you didn’t know him yet) was very famous in European Universities, Spanish ones included. I’ve only read a few texts by him during my high school time (in Philosophy class), but I can tell you, in the short form, he was influenced by Marxism during his youth; but he became milder when he went into his mature age (more centered in politics). His main and more famous idea: in democracies, we need to argue every topics, but always reasoning. In his view, he openly was heir of old school Illustration. I agree, but…looking at the current politics “debates” in western democracies, it’s a bad joke to compare an ideal democratic world (like Habermas defended) with real nowadays speeches (cough cough).
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To the people who plans to “détour” bureaucracy/government Laws: I hope your “détournement” attempts will be low level provocations, or at least you manage to not be arrested; because legal charges aren’t a joke. At least in my country, for example, a not legally allowed demonstration in the street is heavily fined (a law implemented by a Conservative govt but kept by our current Woke govt: ahem). And sabotage actions without attacking people can be easily labelled as “low intensity terrorism” in some contexts. So you can end under antiterrorist law: your “habeas corpus” right will be relaxed (to say it softly), and you can spend more time in prison…
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Our woke govt is an unending source of wry surprises. For example, it has said lately it would like to approve a constitutional reform to make abortion right a basic right in our Constitution (like Macron did a time ago in France). Its first goals have been achieved: to please woke local feminist and upset the Bishops Conference. But beyond Catholicism provocation and satisfying its “cheerleaders”, I can point it’s a shallow promise. Our current govt is unable to approve ordinary laws (Socialists are allied to another left and secessionists parties, in a not reliable “friendship”), and constitutional reforms need a higher number of votes in Parlament than normal laws…The Right parties don’t want this reform. So do the math (more Spectacle…). Democratic consensus is impossible.
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Leftism and Antisemitism:
Maybe a first ominous sign of new Antisemitic bias in the Western Left is witnessing how they despise the Israeli warmongering (with some reason), but idealize Palestinians. For example, they pretend to ignore what’s Hamas and how “good” their members are with Palestinian women and gay people (cough).
Historically, there’s been some Antisemitic leftists, for example the Proto-Anarchist Proudhon. Even Marx himself (ironically he had Jew originis), wrote once: “Jews: their god is the money”(methink).
Last night I was reading Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer: Thoughts on the nature of mass movements.” Among his insights: at a certain point in a system on its way down, the “men of words” by ridicule and denunciation, lead the drive to discredit the old system (here’s your Detournement), which creates a hunger for something to believe in among those not deeply embedded in a close-knit community of their own.
Hoffer quotes Yeats’ famous summary of the results:
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.”
Enter the fanatics: Marat, Robespierre, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin……
And what can save the day are the practical men of action, especially the likes of Lincoln, Gandhi, Churchill, and Nehru, who steer the crisis and lead the recovery. (And we’ve all seen cases where such leadership didn’t happen.) I think it’s pretty clear where we are now. And I’m reminded of Rome’s Dying republic century, where the likes of Catalina and Clodius specialized in the sort of rabble-rousing Hoffer describes, and got nowhere, and it took Augustus to settle things down. Likewise, a long lifetime afterwards, when Nero’s day was over, it took the very pragmatic Vespasian to give the Roman Empire another period of stability.
And where our Detournement enters the picture is pretty clear. Hoffer, like E.M. Forster, called it on the nose. Run, do not walk, to the nearest used book store for this, the second of Hoffer’s best works, and be very afraid. (Or ready to take practical action.)
Just found this series of essays. When completed will you be putting this into printed book form as you did with the Commentary on the Cosmic Doctrine?
The Dell Linux laptops available right now (Dell Pro Max 14, Max 16, etc) are not for your average user, they’re for e.g., developers, for professionals running compute heavy models locally on their laptop, etc., and are pretty expensive due to the GPU/TPU hardware integrated into the laptops. Get back to me when Dell’s personal computers start being pre-installed in Linux instead of Windows 11 Home.
About California mandating lawns of raw gravel – any Southwestern garden shop could provide Californians with a long list of drought-tolerant plants, starting with white sage and going on from there. That’s what I had in my front yard in Albuquerque, and it wasn’t all cactus by any means. And let me remind the California burro-crats that the yards I’ve seen there that were gravel very quickly developed a ground cover of goat-head vines. You don’t ever want to step on one of those without thick soles on your shoes. Shakes head— are they crazy there in Sacramento?
Are Australia, Europe, Japan, etc really independent countries, or are they vassals of the American Empire, ultimately subservient to whatever comes out of Washington D.C.?
@Curt,
I’m not sure the process node matters that much, to be honest– my impression is that the chips are dying because the pins are funneling corrosion up into the die, or corroding away from the die. In that case the form-factor would matter more– a DIP 40 should last longer than a BGA with a million pins, even if the DIP chip was made on the latest itty-bitty process node.
For absolute longevity, if that is that is the case, I would suggest getting large-format DIP-style chips, desiccating the whole PCB, and then immersing it in dry oil. You could pot in epoxy, I suppose, but oil is good for thermal management and heat kills, too. Plus the oil gives you access if something (*cough*capacitors*cough*) inevitably does fail.
There are still microcontrollers you can get in DIP form that blow the old 6502 of C64 vintage out of the water– and they aren’t made on the latest process nodes, either, if that’s your worry.
Australia only has 2 oil refineries up and running and so is heavily reliant on oil imports from other countries.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-03-22/iran-war-leaves-asias-oil-refiners-scrambling/106470932
Labor is going to get a hammering because they’ve been the ones advocating for shutting down domestic oil production in Australia for a wide variety of reasons.
Anonymous 214,
One Nation politicians haven’t yet said anything about seeking sovereignty and independence from America because the negative consequences of America’s actions in the Persian Gulf haven’t yet reached Australia. The article above states that Australia will be guaranteed oil until mid-April, so there isn’t a reason for any Australian politician to blame America for their economic woes yet. But suppose April comes and passes and the Strait of Hormuz is still shut down and Australia is forced to ration oil like many Asian countries, I’d expect Australian politicians to turn away form America and towards countries like China and Russia who do have a reliable supply of oil.
@Rajarshi,
“The core user base uses terminal commands to install software and update the OS, so there’s not a lot of pressure to develop the software center.”
Hi Rajarshi! I suggest you short stocks in 2008, as you are clearly posting from the distant past. 😉
In all seriousness, while the package managers of 20 years back weren’t super intuitive, you never needed to hit the command line to install (supported) software even then. These days any distro with Gnome or KDE as the desktop has a one-click software store that isn’t any harder to use than Apple’s App store, or whatever abomination Microsoft came up with to copy it. Even mainline distributions that eschew Gnome or KDE to run on older hardware, like Linux Mint, have the same functionality, and have for several years now.
Ditto updates. Who updates via the command line? Every distro I’ve used this century has had a taskbar app that popped up to say “Hey there are updates” and it was a couple clicks to get them installed.
I have no idea if you’re a really old-school user who hasn’t kept up, or just haven’t ever used Linux and are commenting with the unearned confidence of an LLM, but it’s not helping.
There was something you wrote on a Situationism post a few weeks ago that stood out to me as important:
“Thus the movement toward freedom can never really be a mass movement. It can only be a movement of individuals in opposition to the mass”
My question becomes what now represents ‘the mass’? If it was back in Covid times I think it would be fairly clear what the mass is. But we’re all in our little bubbles online, our various flavours of politics, it really doesn’t seem clear who or what the mass is anymore.
I’m very interested in what happens if/when governments start looking at conscription to ensure it continues to receive cheap energy. In this case, would the refusal of conscription be akin to a movement of individuals against the mass? The mass being the narrative of “cheap energy = middle class lifestyles for everyone yay”. But if enough individuals refused (not out of pacifism but due to the lack of government legitimacy), would nations begin to have a greater capacity to think outside of the global energy reliance. In other words, if we wont fight for the preservation of this system, will it have to change?
Of course I’m not naive to how quickly people can be whipped up into a frenzy and go against their own will, but I do see a window of opportunity in the coming years to exhibit this kind of movement of individuals once more.
(when Stalin compelled USSR serfs…err…citizens…to win the war against Germans in WW2, he told them to fight more for the Motherland Russia than for Marxism…).
Thus completely overlooking the fact that he was Georgian, part of the Russian empire but not ethnically Russian. He adapted to the needs of the time.
re: Antisemitism,
It seems to me the Zionist entity has a very strong reason to foster antisemitism around the world. Israel’s whole point is to serve as the only safe haven for the Jews, and if Jewish people feel safe elsewhere, they aren’t going to see the point. In order to maintain support from the diaspora, Israel needs them afraid– hence, everything must be antisemitism.
Also see the “whatcha doing there, Rabbi?” meme. The demand for hate crimes has so far outstripped the supply that its even odds these days if you’re dealing with a real victim or a Jussie Smollett style fraudster. That doesn’t mean you don’t treat the potential victim with compassion… but it does mean you keep a hand on your wallet, and you don’t jump to join a lynch mob.
Patricia M. # 236:
Your polarity between fanatic men and men of action seems interesting to me, if you don’t make it a rigid binary dilemma. By the way, yes, Robespierre was a zealot, but before he started asking for beheading everybody, he defended freedom and slavery abolition. So he wasn’t exactly the same as for example, Mussolini (though I can see the French provoked a blood bath too).
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Anonymous # 240:
A good and embarrassing question, which isn’t easy to answer in a clear way. However, in the short form, I’d point every Western countries are under the last word by the US “Hegemon”, though there are several serfdom levels (for example, I think the UK has more fondness than France to serve USA interests (only a bit more methink), and Spain current government seems less eager to current US&Israel war mongering than another EU countries. Of course, govts can change after general elections…
Israel case is special: some people think it’s a “primus inter pares” within loyal US vassals; another ones point is an equal US partner; and some other think Israel drives US foreign politics (Zionist lobby). Current war in Middle Easy seems to give more reason to the last ones…
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Albert # 242:
Australia alliances changes could be possible if Iran war worsens and/or lasts too time. I think Australians share evidently a common language and another things with the rest of Anglophone world…but like New Zealand, they’re very far from their “brother” countries. So…
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In addition to one of the dirty secret of leftism (Antisemitism isn’t only a Right wing problem), I can say a lot of Marxist and leftists in general have been Jews or from Jewish origin; but “progressive” Antisemitism can’t be hidden under the carpet. For example Proudhon in his personal diaries, showed his hate against Jews (not for religious reasons: he was fiercely Atheist). Dreyfus case put usually French left in favor of Dreyfus and right wing in an anti-semitic view. Some western leftist supported Israel State when it appeared in 1948, but historical changes happens too…
@ Patricia
The drought “victory garden” lawn replacements do have some drought tolerant plants sprinkled about in a sea of either gravel or shredded bark, in general. But, in addition, we have a mandated ( not enforced everywhere yet) proclamation to have nothing but a “fire safe surface” within 5 feet of all houses, which in most cases means gravel. An old friend around the corner whose home burned down in the CZU, whatever builder or agency helped with her rebuild, for some reason she has about 30 feet of gravel all around you have to wade thru to get to the front door ! She did not want it, was erroneously told she had to, it only has to be 5 feet. SO, I imagine the “victory garden” will have to go to gravel between the drought tolerant spread out bushes. Spread out so they dont spread fire between them. Seems to me a better policy is an irrigated area of food growing plants, maybe even using greywater from the house….what an old fashioned 1970’s eco concept ! Go for life instead of a hell scape. Mandates aside, alot of drought tolerant plants catch fire easily compared to water filled vegetable plants. Our new chief bureaucracy, calfire, recognizes no difference, just all plants are bad, I plucked a green plant out and took a bic lighter to it while on the phone with one of their minions last fall – some plants are hard to start, and some will go even fresh like that- I have an invasive ground cover that likes to resprout by my deck that is hard to start a fire when fresh and green…. I agree with you on what a maintenance night mare gravel could be, cant weed wack it. I think I will need to get a propane flamer — so cal fire will in effect be forcing people to use propane flames to keep down weeds in the fire safe zone.
The detournement potential is to then move and repurpose the gravel to a better use is what I am thinking.
Hi JMG,
I have a small example of this. A friend convinced me once, a few decades back, to buy a “fruit brand” laptop, which I ended up not liking, and not really using for a few years, but when I decided I was going to start DJing, I needed a laptop for that and decided that would be a fitting use for it. This company has built these bright logos onto the flip side of their screens, so anytime you play a show you have this large lit up advertisement for them. I’ve always covered or defaced the brand names on any of my gear (not really sure why I did this, but I always ahd a strong feeling like I should), and so it distressed me that I was going to have this big glowing logo.
I ended up making my own mask that I covered their logo with, but by repurposing the light it now displayed my own logo, which was very cool to me. Felt a bit like a Judo move or something, thwarting their plans and super charging my own, I was happy with it anyway! I have been surprised that I”ve never seen another person do this (and it’s been over a couple decades now). I’ve only ever seen one person sticker right over the logo completely, but nobody has made use of the light itself to do their own work with.
Thanks,
Johnny
Hmmm… I like the way you have identified “identitarian” and “victimist” elements as ways of claiming privilege.
These habits are, of course, very widespread, and on offer whenever and wherever Victim status becomes central to an Identity, and women are far from the only ones who have so indulged.
I have often found your description of the Victim/Persecutor/Rescuer game (many posts ago, many years ago) to be a very enlightening framework with which to examine events. However, in recent times, I have also noticed the game being played with an additional move allowed to the Victim. In this version the Victim gets to play Vengeful Vindicator. Which is another way of putting into action the phrase ““Other [X’s] have suffered, so [this X] deserves to get everything [this X] want[s, including license to cause unlimited amounts of suffering to random others with impunity].”
It is a dynamic that is (among many others) taking us all into a War of Great Impact, so I appreciate the terminology, and the framing, which are enormously helpful for thinking about it from different angles.
The largest (in scale) “detournement” that I ever took part in, or witnessed, took place in Ireland in the aftermath of the Bank Crisis of 2008 and following years. During those years, Ireland took on an enormous amount of public debt in order to bail out the failed bets of private banks. Among other Irish government measures in response to the crisis, the idea was floated that there were national assets that could be privatised (a “sell off the family jewels to feed the kids” sort of moment), and one of the most promising of these were the public water services. (Please note that the Irish government had before it the British example – Britain had already been selling off municipal and public water services to private operators for decades).
There was a small glitch, though, which eventually became the Achilles heel that sank the whole project. The small glitch was that domestic water charges had been abolished in the 1970’s in a complicated political and financial manouvre that re-organised local county councils into a pattern that was more subservient to central government, by removing their capacity for local self-funding. Well, as a result, domestic water users were not used to paying a water bill.
But you cannot sell a water service without it having an already well-organised base of compliant bill-payers. So the first step was to make domestic water users start paying a regular water bill again. Locate them, register them, and send them bills… very straightforward. But it didn’t work. When it came down to it, more than 70% refused to register, and when sent bills anyway, refused to pay. The government got more and more irate, enacted more and more “solutions”, but people got more and more stubborn and it was the government that cracked first. Eventually.
Now granted, there were political meetings and there were protests, and (of course) much of this energy ended up being siphoned off into various electoral campaigns…. BUT… in my personal view, none of these factors had more than cosmetic impact on the result, compared to the simple fact of individual non-compliance on a very large scale. Individual people up and down the country, 90% of whom never attended a single meeting or protest or voted for a relevant candidate, by simply refusing to engage with this process, were what made this government policy impossible to implement.
Another commenter used the term “Irish democracy” above – which I had to look up. (Apparently it means “uncoordinated, wide-spread civil disobedience”). I’m not sure if this qualified. But, there it is. Whenever I hear people talk about what THEY are going to do, or what THEIR agenda is, I remember what WE did (or more to the case, what WE didn’t do) and I think… well, so? Whatever THEY want to do, or plan to do, or intend to do, is never going to be the whole story.
@TylerA
Well I am not the expert of course when it comes to chip fabrication, but many websites infer that mature nodes are more reliable/durable.
But admittedly, it may be due to other reasons:
https://techovedas.com/5-reasons-why-legacy-nodes-remain-crucial-in-the-1nm-era/
“Improved Reliability: Chips manufactured on legacy process nodes tend to be more reliable due to the maturity of the fabrication techniques used. The long history of these nodes allows for thorough testing and refinement, resulting in products that exhibit consistent performance and durability.”
because the process is more mature thus fewer defects.
https://semiengineering.com/legacy-process-nodes-are-critical-to-many-industries/
Unlike their advanced counterparts, which are typically focused on high-performance computing and specialized applications, legacy nodes offer the perfect balance of performance, cost, and reliability for mass-market high-volume products.
But its true, the reasons stated of high reliability of legacy nodes may be referring to a better geared process, i.e. fewer defects in production.
May also be that larger nodes are easier to design for robustness otherwise, but apparently you could tell more about it.
I would like to start by saying – happy spring! A few days late for the equinox, but I hope you had a good time welcoming in the warmth and life.
At last we reach the point, after lots of discussion of situationism, where it can be picked up and used – and for my favorite activity, monkeywrenching! I have a bit of experience here, but only with the literal and physical kind – I never thought of using culture or technology for this purpose! And in a much physically and legally safer way, too…
In a world where every aspect of our culture seems designed to enslave us, and direct resistance is deadly, this offers a wonderful way of liberating oneself and slowly eroding the bars of our cages. Refusal and repurposing seem to offer ways of going from a state of helpless dependence that defines much of modern life to having a sense of control over one’s destiny – a little bit of that sane version of new thought, offering the helpless and hopeless a reason to believe one can actually have some control over one’s life.
As an example of refusal, I find LLMs to be utterly worthless. There’s nothing they can do for me I can’t do for myself, whether its think through problems, write, research, etc. So I opt out. I flat refuse to use them under any circumstance. I firmly believe I’m keeping my mind sharp by doing this, compared to those who have chosen to become addicted to this digital drug. Indeed, watching people devolve into LLM dependence and psychosis reminds me uncomfortably of watching other friends of a previous age succumb to drug addiction. “I only use it when I need it… it’s not that bad and helps me get through the day… I can quit whenever I want… at least I’m not an (alcoholic, user of some other supposedly worse drug, etc.)” Soon they won’t go out, won’t interact with anyone who won’t do the drug with them, can’t function for any amount of time or do anything without their drug… truly, addiction is the most terrible of all chains, for they lie within our hearts and minds. I chose to opt out of the old chains, I choose to opt out of these new ones. What boggles my mind is how much money people pay to forge their own chains…
However, repurposing technology to counter our programming… so much harder, but so much more rewarding. I found out about the browser, Brave, about 7 years ago. It has the best adblocker ever. As in, I haven’t seen an ad on youtube in as many years. I mostly use it it to find music, and listen to albums of ages past and future. However, I’m sure more tech savvy people than me can find a million ways to monkeywrench tech that I’ve never even thought of. And with a bunch of programmers and beaurocrats about to be out of work thanks to LLMs replacing their mediocre performance with a cheaper mediocre performance, a lot of people with the right skills could find the way to repurpose the technological social control systems to do things they were never intended to do.
You hit the nail on the head about modern art forms. They’re all pretty washed up. I’m a music head, so that’s the scene I can speak to the most, and hoo boy. Rock has become a parody of itself, its wild rebellion now the soundtrack of the old established well to do. I watched the electronic music scene become a parody of itself. It does seem like the only form of expression left is parody or absurdism. Metal still has life left in it though, and there’s actually a lot of fresh metal bands you’ll never hear on the radio – in fact, its hard to find any of that music in any mainstream format. These two things are not unrelated. Metal, as a genre, began as an angry rebellion – not only against society, but also against what was happening to music, as it became more cleaned up, more synthesized, automated, more plastic and fake. Its very ethos was retro – it insists on having a traditional band, music must be played by humans, it should be rough and loud and raw and real. And, in fact, its very refusal to compromise to make money, gain mainstream acceptance, its insistence on live human performances, being offensive – all this is actually helping it stay vital. People want raw live experience with all the rough edges, and it’s what makes it one of the only music genres that’s still alive and kicking, in my opinion. You might find the music unpleasant, but that’s kind of half the point – pleasant, enjoyable, and popular are not the same thing as vital, creative, and alive, and this genre completely chooses the latter above the former as a fundamental tenant of the art form.
Excellent post, thanks for writing, sorry for being late to the comment party.
JMG,
Due to a little bit of serendipity (the number 242 just came up quite randomly as the answer to my friend’s truly random job interview question which matches the number of comments on this site), I’ve decided to take up a suggestion you offered a few weeks ago.
I’m going to write a book against AI using AI and get the thing published also using AI. How’s that for détournement? I’m giving myself a deadline of July 1st to finish the book because I only work well with deadlines.
These days you see a lot of the Victim/Persecutor/Rescuer game on the right. The victims are white people or Europeans, the persecutor are the liberals / leftists / Muslims / Jews / whatever, and the rescuers are self-identified white nationalists, many of whom are non-white.
Tobes # 244:
“The mass” could be the “silent majority” who’s addicted to social media (my hypothesis). They’re fighting online in favor or against some other people “echo chamber”, but they share their lack of inner life and real reflective thought.
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I’m s bit skeptic about western young men protesting and fighting in a massive civil desobedience style against conscription threat. If I look the Ukraine war, it seems some Russian and Ukrainian young men have managed to avoid conscription migrating to another countries, but raw militarism in both sides rules…Of course, maybe Western countries are in a different situation, but I also think it’s a bit naïve to believe nowadays declining democracies will going be democratic in near future (ahem).
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Siliconguy # 245:
Oops! You’re right about Stalin origin. USSR was made with many former nations, but of course, most Sovietic people were Russians, so…
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Tyler A. # 246:
Your view could be right, Antisemitism and Zionism seem a bipolarity. Well, nowadays Israeli call to every Jews of the world to go to the Promised Land maybe isn’t so successful like years ago (according current Middle East current events).
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Atmospheric River # 248:
Some drought resistent plants burns very easily. I agree. For example, rosmary (I hope I’ve written it correctly!) contains aromatical oils which protect it from desecation and smell well, but they’re very flammable. It’s a very common wild plant in my country.
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(To be continued)
Scotlyn # 250:
Interesting…Victimism seems one of the main attitudes which fuels woke ideology; but of course, wokesters didn’t discovered this manipulation tactic. It’s got a long history. For example, I can say certain small country was born (between another causes) by the victimism used by certain ideology people after 1945. Of course, I’m not an Holocaust denialist (genocide-s happened!), but Zionists often have used that emotional blackmail to allow free Israel politics until today (and the West support for them). Well, I could point Palestinians and their left supporters seem to have learnt partly that dirty lesson too, to some extent. I hope not having opened a can of worms…
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# 251:
Well, 70% refusing to register is a big majority, according your example. It isn’t strange that not formal civil disobedience (and “détournement”), thanks to its massive success within people, managed to block Irish government plans.
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Paedrig # 256:
Happy Spring to you, too!
You wrote you avoided to use LLM; I also tend to avoid them, though I avoid to become a wry anti-LLM obsessed man. Reckless anti/pro something reckless activism seems dangerous for mental health in the long term, methink.
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In addition to my comment about J. Habermas, it’s ironic the Frankfurt School (where Habermas accelerated his bright career as a philosopher) and Situationism were Marxism branches, first one in West Germany and the second one mainly in France. It’s ironic IMHO the utopian Mr. Habermas idea of a “deliberative democracy”(guided by reason) seems too naïve when you compare it with cynical but realist Situ idea of Spectacle. Indeed, modern politics (Macchiavellism with steroids) are part of the big Spectacle…and current situation is even worse than in ‘50s-‘60s (due to social media and another causes which I don’t want to point now). Habermas (who was an Adorno disciple) won a heck of prestige in Academia (at least in Europe) during his long life, but Debord and his friends were always fringe thinkers. However, the Spectacle idea debunks Habermas rationalist ideal politics, methink. Emotion and low instincts based nowadays politics make contrafactual “deliberative democracy”, unless we think it as an ideal which could be imitated in an imperfect way. For example, we can accept every debate has sone emotional aspect in it (human mind isn’t only reason), but we could also agree: to not be driven 100% by our feelings and instincts when we have an argument (it’s difficult…).
Richard, I haven’t bought a new computer in my life; I get mine used, and generally ten years behind current tech, which makes them cheap and generally means that the latest viruses won’t affect them. If I can get a used laptop with Linux preinstalled, I’ll give it a spin.
JillN, and Cordwainer Smith knew that very well — he spent time in Australia, among other places. He liked to do that sort of over-the-top science fiction!
Rajarshi, well, I’ll keep my eyes open for a used laptop with Linux.
Chris, oh, Australia will always have friends. Or owners.
Patricia M, Hoffer is always worth reading! Thanks for this.
Bessie2003, I’ll consider it.
Tobes, excellent! You’ve put your finger on one of the great fracture points of modern society — the point at which there is no longer a mass, because the mechanisms of information control and social manipulation used by elites to create mass behaviors no longer communicate effectively to an increasingly discontinuous and disaffected population. When that happens, btw, governments don’t usually change; instead, they implode.
Johnny, nicely done.
Scotlyn, that’s an important point. The problem with the revised Rescue Game is that allowing the Victim to be a Punisher removes the last shreds of any reason for those assigned the role of Persecutors to play the game at all — which may explain why so many such games go into the Circular Firing Squad endgame so quickly these days. Thanks also for the description of the Irish water wars — a very good example.
Paedrig, you’ll be amused to know that I’m responding to this on Brave, and I also haven’t seen an online ad in years. (Huzzah.) I do find metal unpleasant to listen to, but I respect it — there’s a reason why a metal guitarist is a sympathetic character in two of my tentacle novels…
Dennis, are you doing the détournement, or are you being détourned?
Anon, of course. It’s always been a panpartisan sport.
@ Chuaquin #257
Yes, you are right, Victimism is a very old, and very established, anchor for some types of Identity.
And the example you cite is one of many, many of its kind. (Certainly by no means either last nor least).
To paraphrase JMG: “contemporary [semitism] as I see it [has] morphed from an egalitarian movement ([Jewish people] should be equal to [non-Jewish people]) into a claim of privilege ([Jewish people] should be privileged above [non-Jewish people]) and become subservient to the [ethnic] hierarchies that are the great unmentionable of our society. In a very real sense, organized [semitism] these days is an ideology used by middle and upper class [Jewish people] in their struggle to become even more privileged, rich, and influential than they already are. …[various public figures have, in diverse comments] tried to bully poor [and ordinary Jewish people] into supporting [the British/American imperialist project known as “Israel”] by saying, “There’s a special place in Hell for [Jewish people] who won’t help other [Jewish people]” Of course poor [and ordinary Jewish people know] perfectly well that they [can’t] expect any help at all from [Netanyahu, Ben Gvir, Smotrich] and their overprivileged [British and American] peers; they [know] that what [these imperialists are] saying [is], “Listen up, peons, you’d better support the unbridled ambitions of your betters”.
However, there is nothing special or interesting about this example, since it is a such standard trope, and so many different people in so many different places and circumstances have used it to effectively advance their claims of unearned privilege.
Still it is worth noting, since it one of many good examples of the type.
I will welcome a post on predicate thinking from our host, if this further elucidates the mechanism and pattern behind the examples given.
JMG… Yes, indeed. 🙂 Unless the Punisher (or Vindicator) gets to Punish/Shame the Rescuer for being insufficiently keen in its Rescue. I do believe this dynamic is currently at work in the portion of the American Zionist community that is Christian (reportedly around 30 times as large as the part that is Jewish). However, the circular firing squad dimension surely approaches…
As to the Irish water story, it was a comprehensive demonstration (to me) of the fact that, compared to simple (and individual) acts of refusal, protest is nothing more than street theatre. 🙂
Grateful as always this is here tho I’m a bit under the weather and a bit underwater w responsibilities and havent got here until now. About false neutrality of technologies I never miss an opportunity to recommend Power of the Machine by Alf Hornborg. Core life influence encountered around 21, guessing bears much relation to The Social History of the Machine Gun and carries your succinctly stated point that the power relations hardwired into the tech far more important (and hard to see!) than the device. Still, strongly recommend. Thanks always for being here doing this.
JMG #258
It would seem that Cordwainer Smith knew an awful lot more about this country than most Australians do. Good on him.
@JMG
The state already charges a steep fee when I leave, $50,000 or more exit tax ( California State has its own capitol gains tax on the sale of my house, its not enough that I pay property tax every year)
JMG # 258:
If there’s no longer a real mass in today societies, but many “echo chambers” due to social media and widely spread discontent, professional politicians and journalist are in big trouble. Big “catch-all” parties and trade unions, and MSM are correlative of massive opinion tendences, so do the math. I also think in a “technical” sense there aren’t masses anymore, but in a wide sense the social media addicts share similar ways of “thoughts”, attitudes and behaviors beyond their partisan fighting.
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Scotlyn # 259:
A good paraphrase, changing woke feminism by Zionism…
Yes, Zionist ideology and its main consequence (Israel) is only one between many examples to depict Victimism today, but I can also point that unfortunately, it’s a very actual example, due to current Middle East events (maybe the whole area is indeed in a predicament, not with a mere geopolitical problem). Victimism usually is born from real hard facts. In the Zionist case, there’s been a real historical discrimination and prosecution against Jews, with its final Nazi frenzy (Holocaust). Of course, not only Jews were murdered in mass by Hitler, but this victimized group was the most successful in controlling the Holocaust Narrative (due to some causes I won’t depict here). However, when the Victim changes its role and goes on claiming its perpetual Victim role forever, I think it plays the Victimist role. And the cycle begins again: new Victims (Arabs/Palestinians) claim to be Victims, they’ve got their western supporters (leftists) and so on.
By the way, though he wasn’t a leftist, Nietzsche has been “loved” by some leftists (I guess due to his atheism), but indeed he was quite Antisemitic…
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Alice Em # 261:
Thanks for your recommendation, I take note of that book.
For the past 20 years I’ve been helping people move to Linux and all this time I’ve heard some people say they really, no REALLY, want to make that change. There’s just this one thing that’s holding them back, and when that’s fixed, they will surely make the move.
Well, most of them never do.
When you tell them that their perceived problem has been fixed many years ago they either don’t hear you or they think of something new that is really the only thing that’s holding them back.
I don’t claim to understand what’s going on in these people’s minds, but it reminds me of an abused spouse that grabs on to every glimpse of hope for improvement as an excuse not to leave their abuser.
–bk
Here’s a little bit of detournment that came to me late at night: “Showgoths: A Tentacle Novel With Stripper Poles.”
Here’s another, this one from real life: Some employees of a theme park in California were altering bumper stickers that read “I Survived the Tidal Wave” to read “I Survived the Tidy Bowl,” until their employer told them to cease and desist.
@ TylerA # 243
No, the software management tools that ship with most desktop environments (including both GNOME and KDE) are still clunky and inconvenient. For instance, Ubuntu’s GNOME software installer isn’t really very clean about when you are going to install something with Aptitude and when Synaptic is going to save a flat image into your filesystem. Fedora’s GNOME tool also does this, with Flatpack instead of Synaptic.
This is not a big deal for us, but for new people joining the community this is a profoundly confounding problem. The high level of abstraction in Windows guarantees that most people coming into the Linux ecosystem are not comfortable thinking of HOW software installation works, they simply expect to see it happen. They expect the process of installation to be predictable. So when a software gets installed as a flat image in a new logical storage partition, and they try to open a file from their home directory in that app and cannot do so, they end up superbly confused.
Last time I checked, Plasma has an awfully clunky software installer. I don’t know if that has changed, but I do not really see a lot of reason to believe that it has. Last time I used Plasma was not a lot of time ago.
Hello Mr Greer,
Very interesting article and I find it amazing how much food for thought was drawn from an obscure movement. Did you find the Situationist ideas particularly stimulating? Or is it that you would find something worthwhile in any system you seriously engaged with, and the Situationists were just those that caught your fancy?
The concept of détournement reminds me of my (mis?)understanding of what I gather to be one of key facets of aikido: using your opponent’s attack as source of energy. Is this something that could have an even more general application? I was thinking about harmful personal habits and patterns of behaviour that are at best energy draining, and potentially quite damaging. Simply suppressing them might not work if their sources remain unexamined and unresolved. Could a détournement-like strategy be used to put such behaviours in the service of the Self?
Australian politicians are calling for “covid-style protocols” due to fuel shortages:
https://www.news.com.au/national/politics/nsw-premier-calls-for-covidstyle-protocols-as-fuel-crisis-explodes/news-story/70d68084fd8a6471f2540476be70248a
I love this spoof radio ad from 1979
Rock Bottom Prices coming to a Grocery Store Near You…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a_cS3XJbPQ
Now it rings very true indeed…
Scotlyn, once the Victim turns on the Rescuer, the Game rarely continues for long, since the whole point of the game is to bolster the Rescuer’s authority. The circular firing squad endgame is, I think, very close — and if Trump does manage to pull off at least a notional victory in the current fracas, it’ll get much closer very quickly. Very nearly the only thing that keeps Israel and the Jewish community worldwide from civil war is the prospect of a serious threat to Israel from the surrounding countries. The irony, of course, is that at this point victory is both the one thing Israel has to have and the one thing that can destroy it fastest.
AliceEm, it’s an excellent book! I need to reread it soon.
JillN, he was good at that. The name of the planet that became the title of his most famous novel, Norstrilia, is a contraction of “Old North Australia.” It’s a world of vast gray plains and low rolling hills, nearly all of it desert or near-desert, and it got its name because the original settlers fled from Australia just before it was conquered by the Chinese. They set up sheep farming on Norstrilia, only to become insanely rich because the sheep picked up a native virus, became gigantic and distorted, and started producing a drug that makes human beings immortal. And the story goes from there…
Atmospheric, it’ll get worse as the state economy implodes. Just saying…
Chuaquin, exactly. The end of the mass is the end of every institution that depends on manipulating the mass. We’re approaching that point.
BK, I don’t have any great passionate desire to switch to Linux. I’m willing to try it if it can be done in a way that’s convenient for me. That hasn’t happened yet, so I keep on buying used Windows laptops that contribute nothing to Billy Bluescreen’s revenue stream.
Phutatorius, I’d be amazed if that wasn’t already in print. When I did some research into the pop culture portrayals of shoggoths, back before I wrote The Shoggoth Concerto, I was startled (and not in a good way) to discover how much shoggoth porn was already in circulation… The Tidy Bowl bumper sticker is great, btw.
Soko, I find Situationism surprisingly useful — much more so than many other alternative movements. You’re quite correct about aikido, btw, and yes, you can détourn your own bad habits in constructive ways — you can also détourn the emotional energy sources behind those bad habits.
Robert, oh, for the love of Pete. Why don’t they just put on the armbands and jackboots and stop pretending to care about the circumstances?
Robert # 270:
Not only Australia…
It seems there’s a growing motive of concern about oil and gas prices and eventually shortages (if/when the Iran war worsens and/or last more time), for some Western elites (economical, technical and political). For example, yesterday I saw an online infography whose source was the International Energy Agency (verified), in which its experts recommended non-oil-exporters countries citizens to follow some ideas to save money and fuel. Oh, but not only citizens, but also govts. In the infography, between other words, an ominous term: “oil shock” (unthinkable to use this words in public until current times). Some ideas were for common people (advices), for example, driving more carefully cars; to share cars (car sharing), and avoid travelling by plane. Another ones were advices to be implemented by governments (compulsory to their citizens if/when they would be legally approved). For example, harder speed limits in roads and highways, and allowing/banning partially cars mobility in different days of the week (I guess according car plate number). Oops! This doesn’t seem a joke, things could get more serious soon.
Unfortunately, I can’t link you that infography, due to my current tech limitations. But that information is really online now.
JMG # 271:
Yes, centralized and massive political parties led by professional politicians and equally massive and centralized MSM survive nowadays, but they’ve lived better times during past century. And they’re headed to harder times for them.
@ Chuaquin #264
Perhaps it is worth distinguishing VictimISM ™, from genuine suffering.
The point is that no human being is special, nor is any human being, specially immune from suffering, from attack, from oppression, from scapegoating and other terrors.
Victimism is an ideology that centres the suffering of specific people as Special – so special that similar Suffering has never happened to any other human person, and also as central to their ongoing Identity. Suffering has become not something bad that has happened, to which you bore witness, suffered and muddled through and survived well or badly. Suffering becomes the central Definition of Who You Are. This centering of suffering as the foundation of Identity has the effect of cutting the Victimist out of the run of common-or-garden human beings, and sets up a bid to be seen as somehow higher, more special, or more privileged.
I think it is this centering move (which is, essentially, a “Mary Sue” move) that JMG was referring to in his comment, and which borrowed, because I think has a much broader application.
To suffer, and to be capable of suffering, is human. And it is not special. To purport to BE a Victim and to make that the anchor of Identity, is to be seduced into thinking that one IS special.
JMG # 272:
Israel elites Spectacular narrative, in the short form, could be their implicit motto “Israel Invictus”: Israel always wins in a blitzkrieg against the Arabs/Muslims, who always are defeated because they’re cowards.
Well, a long bloody war doesn’t fit well to this Narrative, so we’ll see…
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Scotlyn # 275:
No argument here…Victimism and Identitarian attitudes, speeches and behaviors are “twins” and correlative. If you think your suffering make your group special over the rest of people of the world, you usually end believing your special own group is over the rest of human groups (closed Identity). And consequences are well known when we look some historical events…
JMG and Atmospheric River,
Another Californian here… 😊
“it’ll get worse as the state economy implodes”
Not necessarily… It might be that the worst happens just before the economy implodes, so maybe the worst is right now for Californians. When the economy implodes, the government may become impotent and unable to impose its will on California citizens. The moment of economic implosion may be a high time for Irish democracy in California. I’m not just saying. I lived through a similar situation when the Soviet Union exploded, so certain analogies come to mind. What do you think?
@ Chuaquin #273
““oil shock” (unthinkable to use this words in public until current times)”
Well, actually, the word “oil shock” was freely and liberally used in mainstream commentary in the early 1970’s, when every one of the measures you mention (both for individuals and for governments) were tried in many places.
There is nothing new under the sun… 😉
Thank you. And I think what you say is based on sound reasoning.
However, I have been reflecting on the “Drama triangle” as it is also known. And it is not obvious to me that the game cannot be run in slightly different versions, depending on whether its point is to bolster the authority of the Rescuer, or of the Persecutor, or of the Victim. In relation to the last, I often think of a type that I have actually encountered in person during the course of committee work I engaged in, around 20 years ago, which pretty much soured me on committee work for the foreseeable – this type is the “cry-bully”.
In the game played in our committee, the authority to be bolstered was that of the Victim-in-Chief, who was also the Chair[wo]man for Life. I discovered that I was among those who were interested in the Work and Purposes of the Committee, and not in the ongoing Authority of the Committee. (I had not yet cottoned on to the notion that the Purpose of a System is What it Does.) 😉
This led (eventually) to my expulsion, as I was maneuvred by the actions of the Victim-in-Chief, directing the empathetic energies of her coterie of Rescuers, into (inadvertently) falling into the designated role of Chief Persecutor, and lined up for the Righteous Vengeance of the Victim-in-Chief. I managed to forestall the vengeance part (really, there was an actual threat of an actual law suit), but, in response, I let myself sink almost immediately into invisibility and irrelevancy in relation to my professional colleagues.
The committee? Yes, it was a professional association representing acupuncturists. So… it hit very close to the bone for me. Also, it gave me a keen eye in relation to how the game could continue to run indefinitely even when its purpose was to bolster the authority of the victim – as it very clearly did in this instance which I know best. It probably depends on who has the authority when the game is set up, and what is the role they prefer to play.
Scotlyn # 278:
I didn’t live that time (early ‘70s) where it was said the “oil shock” expression. It seems everything is cyclical. Maybe history doesn’t repeat exactly, but it rhymes.
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There’s a “mirrors game” between Israel (and its western supporters) and the Muslim world (and its western supporters). To some extent, the trains crash includes opposite competing Victimisms, methinks. Like I’ve said before this comment, Zionists have used Victimism after 1945 as real masters, but Muslim world hasn’t rejected this way of manipulation for its own agenda, from 1948 until today.
Some days ago, I read a book titled “Inshallah: Understanding Islam”, written by several muslim origin authors. It’s interesting they accepted and pointed (well, with a bit of reluctancy) that muslim countries people often lack a serious self criticism, and they don’t like constructive criticism from outside its beliefs (like ahem, wokesters).
They also wrote muslim civilization has suffered first the crussades and then European colonialism (like another parts of the world). More recently, muslim countries people have witnessed with sadness and anger another western actions which they understand (with some reason) as attacks against Islamic world: from the support to the new born Israel in 1948 to the Gulf wars (current war included, I’d like to say).
However, that book authors were honest and brave enough to reject the Victimist role. Arabs/Muslims are (at least partly) responsible for their own problems, due to their religious and socioeconomical Conservatism: Islamism, women margination, lack of freedoms, real democracy, State/Religion separation, muslim migrants integration in European countries (xenophobia goes in the two ways), and another long time problems. However, according the writers, muslims often prefer to blame Israel and the West for every problems they suffer as a subterfuge to avoid asking themselves some embarrassing questions (Islam countries attitude it’s not an honest view me think). For example, why China and to a less extent India have succeed more than Muslim countries in improving their economies, and having a thriving middle class?(Ahem)
Of course, situation isn’t the same in every Islamic country, but in the book its writers don’t depict a rosy average “landscape”. I agree.
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There’s been some comments about civil disobedience against governments bureaucracy, which I think it could be a kind of “Détournement”. However, I’ve realized Thoreau wrote about peaceful disobedience in the XIXth Century, and Situationists lived during past century. Détournement avant la lettre?(by Thoreau and then for example Gandhi). I don’t know wether Debord and his comrades read Thoreau or at least Gandhi writings, or not (maybe Situs and Thoreau casually were into a mental “evolutive convergence”).
Re: Pianos in the de-industrial future.
JMG mentioned that the Steinway type grand pianos require serious industrial technology to make, which is true.
However, their predecessor, the pianoforte (or forte-piano), does not require an industrial base. The piano works of the Baroque, Classical and early- to mid-Romantic composers (down to and including Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert) were all written for the forte-piano.
The forte-piano is not as massively powerful as its Steinway successors, but its sound is often more clear and transparent. Also, the frames are wood, and the strings were often gut string (metal came later). They did not require an industrial base, but they DID (and do) require serious craftsmanship (they are still made, by the way). So, they will not be commonly seen in average households.
That being the case, the classical repertoire down to Chopin will still be playable in the de-industrial future. The mighty concertos of composers like Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, sadly, will not be, at least not to the sound we are used to today.
@Chuaqin & JMG “The end of the mass is the end of every institution that depends on manipulating the mass. We’re approaching that point.”
John please let this be a part of you non-fiction works and not of the tentacled kind. 😉
@Walt #148 — Adolescents are not the only ones doing Detournement;
One of the music professors where my wife went to college (in Pennsylvania) also played organ in an Anglican church on Sundays. He would get tired of the same old music from time to time– One Sunday during the offering, my wife heard, in the base line of his organ piece, “You… De… Serve… A.. Break.. Today… So… Get… Up… And… Get Away…. To… [McDougall’s]” A lot of people couldn’t understand why her face turned red while she was laughing into her program…
Northwind Grandma–
I work in a retail environment where I am subjected to the constant torment of stale music from the ’60s and ’70s– I have fallen into listening to Bulgarian folk and popular music– It’s refreshingly different, at least to me! Why not try some foreign music, and see if it helps?
For example, ‘ Zaspalo e Chele-bi-ichay’ (= Pre-teen Boyfriend is Sleepy) has the same story line as ‘Wake up, Little Suzy’ with skeptical roosters thrown in, but done in an airy choral way that’s very refreshing– Here’s a link;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UsDtmdWFBxU&list=RDUsDtmdWFBxU&start_radio=1
Another example, a pop song from an album that artist Mariya Anglelova wrote about her upcoming marriage;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4T6lq002aI&list=RDp4T6lq002aI&start_radio=1
Someone named ‘ellococatra’ posted an English translation in the comments that you can sing to the original music. This sometimes happens with non-English YouTubes…
Re JMG:
Yeah, I know. My remark was not especially meant for you, but more in general about the spectacle of helplessness that our society likes to cultivate. Billy G and his minions are a strong example of that.
(I’ve worked for an engineering company with incredibly smart people designing and building machines I can’t begin to understand, but when you put these people behind a computer many of them become like a helpless child…)
–bk
My personal example of Detournement would be buying clothes and other items from thrift shops. Where I live in Florida, there are a lot of shops who collect for various charities, like animal shelters, homeless people, veterans, troubled teens and general religious organizations. I can get items new from Walmart, Shein and other brands and know that not one penny I spend will go to the corporation original intended! And it IS going literally to the charities of my choice. So support your local thrift shops!