Three years and too many bereavements back, somewhere around where I started writing this email, I found myself with an off morning in Rotterdam, on the tail end of a presentation we were giving at the Nieuwe Instituut about a co-op design history project I’ve been quietly working on (more on that in a future email). I decided to kill that morning by visiting Mind Expanders, the featured exhibition at the Kunsthal.
We’d spoken about Haus-Rucker-Co just a few weeks earlier at an online evening course I’d been doing at the Brooklyn Institute of Social Research. The course (a fantastic one which you should totally do next time they run it) was about experimental architecture, big impossible dreams never meant to be built, and how we use them to make sense of not just the chaos we live in but the possibility that lies beyond it. From the City on Springs) to Red Vienna to Ant Farm to Forensic Architecture, we looked at those hybrid artistic and civic blips where moments of implosion are taken as the fresh terrain from which we might provoke deeper thinking about what comes after. When all of your norms and assumptions are gone, when there’s nothing to do but construct what’s next rather than protect what came before, what do you choose to build?
The theme of much of the work in the Haus-Rucker-Co show, and their work in general, was about ways to shield, mitigate and collectively shelter ourselves from what eats at our collective edges. In their work it’s mostly all inflatable retreats and interactive membranes — literal bubbles we could draw over ourselves to not feel what was outside. “The bubble was a tool for probing the perils and possibilities of the geological epoch we now refer to as the Anthropocene,” Esther Choi wrote about them in Hippie Modernism. (Though we’re not officially meant to refer to it as the Anthropocene anymore, another topic for a future issue, and fuck them pencil pushers anyhow.)
In the Kunsthal show, we could shroud ourselves in these various remnants of their retreats. It probably used to be more fun before they were preserved, but so it goes for all art of this kind. In a video for Food City from 1971, a scale model of a typical shitty downtown was built entirely of edibles – bread and cake, lemonade and candy cane. The invitation then was for participants to gobble up the model itself, to consume it wholesale, the good bits and the empty calories, after which everybody could collectively discuss new ideas for what to build in its place. Preserved in another frame, sensor suits from 1968 were fitted with both receivers and transmitters so that wearers could “experience sensory liberation” while also entangling themselves in the senses of others. Of course now, many of the once-interactive pieces were protected by “Do Not Touch” warnings. Best we behold these as artifacts of past thinking, not shrouds for now. There were some cool goggles I could pull on though, throwing new prisms of perception in front of the busy video screen in front.
What the artists of Haus-Rucker-Co were asking was how we find agency beneath the pressing weight of all of it. All of this shelter was a provocation to break out from inside of it. What we needed to do was find new ways of looking, and new ways to protect ourselves, and live beautifully, while we do.
It’s rough in here, in the internet. We’ve been stuck inside of it for a long time. I have, at least. You too, I’m guessing. From where we stand right now, surveying what I don’t feel like calling the wreckage so much as the still-smoldering scorched earth upon which we’re all trying to find our feet while burning models that simulate sentience are tearing through what little brush is left, it’s tempting to try to pinpoint where things inverted, when the insides became the outsides, when the big screen in the Situation Room during an illegal war was a social feed and a giant crying eyes emoji, when the fascism went from coded to open across the globe, when those of us who are old enough to have entered here with optimism could no longer see the exit door we thought was always just safely behind us, when the places we used to hang out became bots talking to each other about video clips they can get away with posting because nobody currently breathing gives two shits about the IP (or because they’re bots hired by the studio owners of that dead IP to monetize it however they damn can), alongside endless loops of pleasing-looking phone games that don’t actually exist? Was there an Alien chestburster moment when the fascists ripped out from inside the vaporwave shitposters? Or did it happen in depressing microincrements we all sort of noticed and felt just a little bit worse about, time after time? I think you and I both know the answer to that.
There’s always a rough descriptor I’ve loved to tag onto this newsletter that an important early reader gave it (hi Jay, hope you’re still out there!) — it was about “not internet culture, but culture, given the internet.” Perhaps it felt like you could still draw a meaningful line between the two back in 2016 when we sent the first of these. It might have been the last moment when you could. Now, though… I suppose that’s the question I’ve been wrestling with in thinking about how to bring this email back to life, three years since we last sent one. Where are we, given the internet? And what are we to do, given the internet?
What did we know and when did we know it? In the early 90s, before most of us knew what we were letting ourselves in for, I was a teenager grabbing fragments from bulletin boards, getting a sense of a thing forming that was bigger than anything I could comprehend. The local sysadmin on our BBS in our city at the edge of nowhere wired up a way that we could get files from the internet over email. At least it was a bit better for our family than what I was doing to the phone bill by dialling up to long distance chatrooms in Europe. The day it really changed was when somebody in my school snuck me a login for the local university’s student server, where I could dial in and use a text-based browser to explore whatever was being uploaded to Usenet and Gopher. Gopher, if you weren’t around in here yet, was a lower-fi attempt at structured, hyperlinked knowledge, the best we had before Tim Berners-Lee got his hands on the pots and pans at CERN and cooked up the trouble we’re in now. (And bless Berners-Lee to the ends of this dark earth and back, he still truly does believe this can all lead to a place of compassion and betterment, if only we get the frameworks more perfect). The infinite possibility of messaging, the even more infinite possibility of causing a coke can in a remote vending machine to drop. I posted on Usenet in the Terry Pratchett fan group. I sent Terry Pratchett an email to the address in the signature on his Usenet posts, and Terry Pratchett replied. I gave my parents a presentation on the ways social justice movements around the world were beginning to use these tools to organize, and thus ipso facto I really should be online. I was old enough to have read my Abbie Hoffman, and just old enough to have an inkling that the old chestnut that “freedom of the press belongs to those who own one” wasn’t much longer for the world. (At least, not that flavour of it. Turns out it still belongs to those who bought one in a firesale, and you can choose to use that freedom to burn what you bought to the ground.)
“Our identities have no bodies”, was the early cry. It was meant as emancipatory. A cri de coeur from a world sans coeur. Legal concepts don’t apply because they are based on matter, John Perry Barlow told us, and “there is no matter here”. This thrilled me for about half a second when I first read the words, while working the nightshift looking after a supercomputer (an actual one, a room-sized one) tasked with processing reams of seismic survey data pulled from the ocean floor. The boats dropped charges, the cacophony resonated, the marine life scattered, the data noise of it all captured on tape. The tapes ended up in boxes, the boxes came back on the boat, ended up on a shelf in the room next to me. When the engineers wanted that data, they’d submit a job request, which would spit out line by line on the dot matrix by my desk. A list of tapes and their boxes, ready for me to feed one by one into the beast over the course of the night. There is matter here, I thought – through all these layers, there’s something that’s survived from the depths.
There was a lot of downtime between those job requests, and there wasn’t yet an IT security department. Just a chill dude who didn’t care what I did so long as we could talk about Raymond E. Feist novels at the shift change. I learned to compile software on the Unix command line. Learned to compile a web browser. Discovered the little spikes of weirdness and friction showing up in places like Suck.com, tried to explain them to my friends back in the real world where identities still had bodies, where we learned about music in newsprint magazines that took three months to make it to our newsagent so we created entire soundscapes based on our idea of what something might sound like without ever having heard it. I was trying to tell them about how different it was all going to be, and relishing how small and close it felt on there for those of us who already knew.
This all feels rose tinted. A utopia of possibilities. But when I check my notes, even to this teenager learning to be extremely online extremely early, the stress and the strain were always there, because anything good we build isn’t easy, and you know that even when you’re a teenager. Perhaps it felt like there was too much hope in the idea that all of this would go so far as to throw out the entire history of how people behave to each other, and how people feed off of each other. It did feel like a place of possibility, if only we fought for what we believed it could be. The default, if we did not, would be the opposite. And that opposite was too monstrous for any of us to get our heads around.
I wrote essays at university with titles like “Repetitive Strain Injury”, scratching towards the parts of it that were already beginning to feel off. At my student newspaper, still learning how to do interviews, I spoke to Douglas Rushkoff, sometime around his book Media Virus, about what it meant that capitalism was now creeping into this realm of hackers and outsiders. Well, they’ll ruin it all, was something like what he said, but when it falls apart they’ll leave us with a lot of infrastructure we can really use to build what’s next. I don’t think I thought to ask him back then what timelines he was thinking on. I wish I could still find the little cassette that interview still lives on in a drawer somewhere. He’s still right – we’re going to be left with a lot of data centres, alongside perfectly reasonable questions about how to power them, and what we might do with them when we do. The next time I saw Rushkoff after that he was presenting at a conference about the Singularity, and Peter Thiel was brushing past me in the lobby. We’ll save that for the 2012 chapter of What Did We Know and When Did We Know It.
I find myself talking a lot these days with others who were around at this time, often in positions of more influence than I was (which was none at all). You lurch into conversations about all of this and they wonder what they could have done differently. Were we derelict in failing to head off social media, or to redirect it somewhere less dark? What else could we have done? And as we fall headfirst into this next version of the internet where nobody in charge wants us to have any agency outside of the license agreements we’re trapped in and our own personal relations with our bot agents of choice, mediating it all for us just so, what can we still dig back down and retrieve from the hope that was there at the start of it? How do we imagine our way forward into something better than all this?
I remember at the time how tied our liberated thinking was to rave culture (still new then, still fresh, still worth thinking about). The busting open of temporary autonomous zones was the utopian version of move fast and break things that presented to us a different way of being. Pull things apart, fuck with them, and see what happens when you try to put them back together was at the core of every crusty anarchist hacker/activist convention I found myself at the edge of. Even more fun when you’re dancing. Even more fun when you’re high. Let’s build our own networks, and from there we’ll build something new when the beat drops. And there were theorists, too, doing this work. Many of them in and around the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit at the University of Warwick, whose prolific output I devoured wherever I could find it, not really realizing that embedded in that same utopian, all-the-roads-are-open ideal were the intellectual seeds of accelerationist techno-nihilism that would form the intellectual foundations of where we are right now. Maybe I was just too dumb to see it. Though I read back on my university thesis on the culture jammers I so adored and do see my anxiety at the edges of things.
Old friend of Buckslip Elmo Keep’s essay for The Monthly down in Australia late last year, Barbarians inside the Gate, goes right back to this exact same moment in time, through the lens of the cypherpunks and others who were already kicking around the scene back then and quietly shaping the accelerationist long game. Elmo’s been on this beat for a long time, and there used to be more places left that could pay her to write about it – I’m both sorry that she still is, and glad to be able to read her. In particular, she sees how our desire to pull down those shrouds lets these instincts run ever wilder and freer:
There may be much agreement among non-reactionary citizens that current systems – democracy as hollowed out by the forces of capitalism – have alienated us so completely from a sense of political agency that disengagement is the only way to cope. When roughly half of young people in Australia are opting out of starting a family as they cannot afford to, and those pressures are twinned with a worsening climate crisis, they might well look desperately to anything that promises to reverse those trends. If that means gutting government completely, maybe that is the answer from a vantage of desperation, when the simple right to have a stably employed existence has become luxurious to so many people.”
So what else, instead? In a future issue I think I’ll write about dark forests and new alternatives rising up, and maybe talk to some others about whether any of that means anything. I’ve had this 2024 Noema essay by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, “We Need To Rewild The Internet”, hanging around for a while at the top of my bookmarks, trying to figure out what I make of it. I’m resistant to the metaphors that posit ecology as a solution, particularly the ones that see wilderness as a reset point rather than its own complex ongoing set of contradictions and struggles and brutal successions. But Farrell and Berjon at least understand there’s no going back, even as they’re writing just before the LLMs totally took over. I wonder if the space for imaginative resistance they posit still exist in the same way even less than two years later.
Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine…Everything we collectively make that’s worthwhile is complex and thereby a little messier. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.
Internet infrastructure is a degraded ecosystem, but it’s also a built environment, like a city. Its unpredictability makes it generative, worthwhile and deeply human.
Just like the crime-ridden, Corbusier-like towers [Robert] Moses crammed people into when he demolished mixed-use neighborhoods and built highways through them, today’s top-down, concentrated internet is, for many, an unpleasant and harmful place. Its owners are hard to remove, and their interests do not align with ours.
Our identities, bodies and all, wander through the realms of all of this confused, the bodies on the ground, the shitposting in office. Every now and again we’re reminded that at the same time that all of this is real, none of it is. What did Minneapolis teach us? Gaza? Iran, now? That the overreach in these places prove that the real world isn’t just content. It isn’t content at all. When you try to tear it apart, it’s the connections between us that surprise even the worst of us when they prove that they matter. Is that a stupid thing to hold on to hope with?
There was one exhibit at the Haus-Rucker-Co show that wasn’t hands off, and it was the most popular thing in there. A bouncy castle, the size of an entire room of the museum, in pristine white, with huge inflated balls. Kids and adults alike were largely ignoring the rest of the show to get to this fluffy cloud of a playpen. Later, I was looking up stuff about the show, and found a description of a previous installation of Giant Billiard “What do you do? Do you jump for your life, do you let yourself be run over, or do you pass the ball to someone else while stumbling around on a vast white air mattress?“ it asked. Good questions, I thought.
Back in the museum, I suppose I was sort of asking them. There is no matter here, I thought, as I took off my shoes and leapt onto the art, throwing myself against a ball a kid had launched from the other direction.
You might as well start posting them things, right?
As this newsletter has been sitting in stasis in the time since I went bouncing, we’ve been asking ourselves what it needed to be for our readers when it eventually did return (which is now). I’d love for you to let us know your thoughts on that, so hit reply or jump into the comments to let me know.
What we know for sure is that nobody needs a link roundup blog warding off The Discourse – Today in Tabs exists for that, and nobody’s going to ever do it better than Rusty Foster, whose soul I pray for every time he lands in my inbox. And anyway, where even is the discourse now?
In the Atlantic back at the start of this long year, Charlie Warzel wrote about a world where reaction videos and memes are not just the background noise but the actual machinery of whatever’s left of the world order. “Governance through content creation,” he called it. A society of the spectacle that even the most hard-drinking Situationist couldn’t numb themselves to. And the content is as repulsive as it was a decade and more back in the foment of the message boards that created it. Does one resist that through more earnest content creation in return? I’m not sure that’s served us well so far.
I do think and hope there’s still space for the version of this email for you patient readers who come along with us as we weave threads from the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library to the emerging global market for pickleweed via the changing habits of the thick-billed murre in Hudson Bay to our bewilderment on what scientists are playing at creating mirror life in the lab. From this point on we’re going to keep doing this stuff, alongside commissioning essays, interviews and other original content from some of our favourite collaborators and co-conspirators. Maybe just holding open a space for some collective figuring? We’ve even scraped up a little (little!) budget to pay the good writers again, so if you’re reading and have a pitch and feel some sort of motivation to carve out a space to think into some of this, heck, go on, pitch us.
We’re not going to be pushy about asking you for financial support on this until such time as we’ve proven we’re sticking around, but the support option is turned on if you feel like encouraging us as we do the proving.
“The cockroaches took the capital city by storm. They came by train, by bus, by air, by metro, their numbers increasing by the hour. Hours before the first rays of sun lightened Delhi’s monsoon skies, they began to pour into Jantar Mantar in the tens of thousands. By sunrise it was clear that a generation of desperate and furious young people, who have seen their future snuffed out before their eyes, intended to reclaim what their parents and grandparents’ generations had conceded: our dignity as a people and as a country. Our rights as citizens of a democracy. The protesters exorcised the corrosive fear that has become second nature to us all with their sheer courage and grace.”
— Arundhati Roy in Equator on hope and protest on the streets of Delhi
“At its core, What.CD was much more than a torrent tracker—it was a community of dedicated music fans volunteering their time, effort, and knowledge to create a labor of love. While the internet has opened up new doors for musicians, the increasing corporatization and algorithmic takeover of online spaces has done irreparable damage to organic music discovery and independent communities. Rather than bringing about the financial stability that was supposedly impeded by piracy, the recording industry has offered meager artist payouts and a product with a sterilized user interface. Nearly ten years since their unexpected goodbye, the magical feeling of logging in to What.CD has yet to be replicated by any streaming service. Though my days of stealing music are well in the past, it’s clear that musicians are still being stolen from.”
— Eden DaSilva with an extensive history of music’s peak torrent era. Was there anything more influential on the formation of my music tastes in the depths of the early 2ks than my Oink’s Pink Palace membership? Other than RTRfm, probably not.
“We don’t typically praise Costco for its logistics in the way that we do Amazon. But the former in fact offers a far more logistically elegant and socially beneficial model of goods provision than the latter. Amazon dominates when it comes to logistically-complex operations, but there is no inherent reason to prefer complicated operations to simple ones. If anything, simplicity should be the rule. Why do you need to figure out how to integrate robotic arms into a fulfillment operation dominated by autonomous mobile units when you can cross-dock full pallets? Is it more logistically impressive to solve difficult problems or to eliminate the need to solve them in the first place?“
— In Phenomenal World, Benjamin Fong with a deep logistical appreciation of Costco, the anti-Amazon (and pretty much the only company that has supply chain figured out in Newfoundland where I write to you from)
“I’ve come to feel that there’s something not fully developed in How to Do Nothing. That something has to do with who or what is on the other side of observation, as well as who or what is doing the observing. There are a few moments where I sort of hint at it. At one point, I write that, while looking at birds, I’ve gone from asking “What’s there?” to “Who’s there?” And I quote Gloria Bird, member of the Spokane Tribe of Washington State, recalling how her aunt once looked at what was left of Mount St. Helens and said, “Poor thing.” Bird’s aunt, she writes, “spoke of the mountain as a person.” The difference between a what and a who has to do with time. In the case of birdwatching, you may first identify something by how it looks or sounds, but years later, still watching, you continue to see varied behaviors, varied responses. More familiarity just brings more questions—the birds become more mysterious, not less.”
— I bet when you read that quote, you’re not prepared for the fact that Jenny Odell’s about to go deep into critical thought on James Cameron’s The Abyss with you as part of her argument for a “dialogue of earthliness”, are you?
But in the spirit of softening one’s eyes and listening more intently, maybe spend some deep time in Nicholas Rougeux’s astounding, loving, epic restoration of William Jardine’s 1830s The Naturalist’s Library. There are more than 1,300 plates to delight in. Here’s an eel to get you started:
Other stuff we’ve been doing
If you really want to know why this email went quiet for three years, I wrote an essay that explains some of it:
Grief Breaks the Brain: A Writer’s Long Journey Back to the Page
When tragedy destroyed his ability to write, Patrick Pittman went looking for a way back to the page. But is the cure for writer’s block in your heart, or in your head?
The Story Horizontal LogoPatrick Pittman
But also when not not writing, I’ve been writing some fun stuff, like this review I’m proud of, that I would like more people to read (and Arcade, btw, is edited by Chris and me and is full of great critical writing that more people should read!):
Batten the Hatches: On Sarah Hall’s Helm
Everything the wind blows on has decisions to make. The latest novel from Sarah Hall joins a growing conversation about non-human consciousness—and explores it with more joy, and more filth, than your average climate novel.
Arcade from Koffler ArtsPatrick Pittman
And we helped our dear friend Nick Foster out behind the scenes with his wonderful book, which is coming out in paperback soon:
Could Should Might Don’t: How We Think About the Future
An invaluable guide for how to think—and not to think—about the future, from one of the leading futurists of our time. You might not know the name Nick Foster, but after just a moment of googling you’ll realize he’s been guiding the missions of companies that have been shaping the world you live in. From Sony, Nokia, and Dyson to Google itself, where he was the head of design at Google X, Foster has been at the forefront of innovation for over twenty-five years, but his name might be unfamiliar because until this point, he’s been hidden behind countless NDAs.Could Should Might Don’t is Foster’s public debut, the first time this much-sought-after designer is free to share his perspectives, explore how other people approach the future, and suggest how we can all improve our thinking about what might lie ahead. But this isn’t a book filled with predictions and prophecies, and it makes no assertions about what the future will hold. It’s a book that unpacks how we think about the future. Foster has identified Could, Should, Might, and Don’t as the four primary mindsets we all adopt when thinking about what’s over the horizon, but he doesn’t advocate for any one of them. Instead, he explores how humanity has grappled with the concept of the future throughout history, tracing the emergence of distinct schools of thought and exploring the virtues, blind spots, and inevitable shortcomings of each. The book is, in some ways, about the history of the future and the history of the different futures that we have imagined, designed, or projected for ourselves.But most of all, Could Should Might Don’t is a no-nonsense appeal to every one of us—whether we’re busy creating future ideas or trying to understand them—to radically improve how we think about the future, so we can improve what we leave behind for those who will follow.
Also Chris made a zine:
Degenerate
A kink zine created mainly by rubberists. Interviews, art, stories.
DegenerateDegenerate
And Buckslip professor emeritus Eli Burnstein has his second book out in a couple of months:
Phrased & Confused: The Curious Meanings of Timeless Quotations
This incisive and witty collection from humor writer Eli Burnstein unpacks commonly misunderstood and enigmatic quotations, revealing what they really mean--and why they still matter.Designed for the curious reader who wants to understand big ideas without the jargon, this is a sharp and light-footed stroll through the world of philosophy, literature, and language.In Phrased & Confused, Burnstein (contributor to publications including the The New Yorker and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and host of the popular event Spelling Bee) takes readers on a lively, thought-provoking tour of some of history’s most enduring quotations, unpacking the ideas, contexts, and curiosities behind the words we think we know so well. Familiar phrases reveal unexpected depth when examined a little more closely.With clarity, wit, and a gift for explanation, Burnstein explores how timeless quotations came to carry such weight--and why they continue to resonate, confuse, and provoke debate centuries after they were first written.Phrased & Confused is perfect for language lovers, curious readers, and anyone who has ever paused mid-quote and wondered, Wait--what does that actually mean? An illuminating guide to the quotations we all recognize--from “In the beginning was the Word” to “A rose is a rose is a rose”--and the meanings we often misunderstand.
For Nicolas
Right at the very start of last year, we received the awful news that our friend and collaborator Nicolas Nova had died, without warning, while out hiking. Nicolas was not only a reader of this email and a regular sharer of it, but a great quiet backchannel encourager for us doing this at all.
More than anything, Nicolas taught us to notice, and that wherever we looked, there were things worth noticing. Whether you knew of Nicolas’s work or not, we encourage you to explore the memorial website set up in his memory by friends and family.
This issue, us coming back, is dedicated to him. Let’s see what we notice together.
That's enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!
Rest in peace, Béla Tarr.
You are the sun. The sun doesn't move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun.
And now, we'll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness.
Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don't notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in it's brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening?
We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun's flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger... and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment - say that it's around one in the afternoon - a most dramatic turn of event occurs.
At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds... the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then... Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us...
But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness.
— That's enough! Out of here, you tubs of beer!
But Mr. Hagelmayer. It's still not over.
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