All Tomorrow's Blog-parties

It's fascinating how would-be radical blogs in the US blogosphere mimic the life-cycle of the authoritarian Left parties which historically preceded them. These blogs first emerged out of scattered, desperate moments of individual resistance to neoliberalism -- a textual Leninism, as it were, borne of the irreconcilable confrontation between the critical consciousness and the thorny contradictions of neoliberalism.

During moments of neoliberal crisis, and if the blog founder has the requisite talent and energy, the blog quickly expands. It soon hits its peak with a slew of fresh contributors, each contributing something new and useful to the conversation.

At a certain point, however, the intellectual reach and managerial capacity of any single founder (or even group of founders) begins to run aground on the sheer amount of information aggregated by the site. That information requires a collective set of skills, theories, and experiences, and most of all a cooperative division of labor which must be slowly and painfully constructed over time (think of the effort required to create and maintain the average university department).

This necessity comes into conflict with the original mandate of the blog, which was to showcase the particularity of the founder's voice. The inevitable result is a wild oscillation between information bloat -- useful items are buried under an ocean of trivia -- and trolling -- the recourse to lazy epithets, idiotic cliches, and foolish propaganda. Both poles of the oscillation drive out thoughtful posts and rigorous critical thinking.

At a certain point, it becomes a chore to sift through the dross to find the gems. Suddenly, textual Leninism generates the inevitable recoil of administrative recentralization, a.k.a editorial Stalinism. The critique of neoliberal dogma turns into a new kind of doxa -- as stagnant and unthinking as what it once claimed to critique. The same bloggers who once shared their insights on topics they know better than anyone else suddenly turn, as if by magic, into the most provincial and ignorant blowhards, whenever they are confronted with concepts or experiences outside of their professional competence. They stop doing original research, reading new books, or engaging in any contemporary cultural activity, and retreat to an inner circle of long-time experiences, arguments and cronies.

The most characteristic sign of this new doxa is the intellectual regression away from class struggle and back into conspiracy theory. In the realm of the US blogosphere, this new doxa critiques the lies of the US plutocracy - by declaring the lies of non-American plutocrats to be truth. It critiques the genocides of the US empire - by denying that the genocides of the numerous other empires in the world-system ever happened. It complains endlessly about the foolish voters who vote for the Reps or Dems - by denying that any other country has elections worth paying attention to, or democratic processes worth learning from, or actual citizens with their own opinions and modes of political organization.

The laudable attempt to democratize information recoils into its opposite: into yet another information monopoly, where the self-selected few know all -- because the masses are, by definition, too stupid to know anything, and anyone who disagrees is obviously a CIA agent. That is why the single most prevalent emotional tone of such blogs is a chaotic, insensate despair -- leavened with rage at the occasional dissident and heretic who dares to contradict the doxa.

To paraphrase Brecht, even if has a thousand posters, such blogs end up having only one-tenth of a brain.

Conversely, the task for we digital commoners of the 21st century is to do just the opposite: to enable a network of one hundred to think with the productivity of one thousand. One of the most intriguing models for this productivity is the transnational videogame studio, where small groups of three to four hundred talented developers are creating game-worlds and interactive experiences far richer, more detailed, and more satisfying than the multiple thousands of personnel and hundreds of millions of dollars required by the average Hollywood blockbuster.

Panda-monium

China's summer internet sensation: the Chopstick Brothers' Little Apple. It's outrageously, deliriously good, brimming with more postcolonial smackdowns than you can shake a camcorder at. The song is Chinese, while the video is South Korean, making this one of the first East-Southeast Asian transnational blockbusters.

The Chopstick Brothers (筷子兄弟)

Bae Seul-Ki (배슬기) All But Steals the Show

If you downloaded the video or teach media, feel free to download these English-language SRT subtitles (I've slightly corrected them and cued them to match the video), available here.

After the Global Minotaur

Long essay on the changing face of 21st century geopolitics is up here. Short version: (1) neoliberalism is a fancy word for transnational capitalism, (2) no single country will ever be able to dominate the transnational world-system the way Britain ran the 19th century and the US ran the 20th century, and (3) all class struggle has become transnational class struggle. Comments/critique welcome!

Russo-imperialism Just Lost Kazakhstan

History keeps accelerating. Nazarbayev, one of the savviest politicians on the planet, scraps the Eurasian energy-rent model of accumulation and tells the Putinists to step off, all at once:

Address of the head of state to the people of Kazakhstan, November 11, 2014

Translation: "Don't even think about pulling a Crimea on our northern territories, Putin. Remember how us Kazakh soldiers ripped apart the Wehrmacht in WW II with our bare hands? Well guess what -- your nice, polite gentlemen would be facing 5 million of us... on our home turf. Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to get ridiculously rich by investing our oil wealth in infrastructure and trade with China and India."

In short, Kazakhstan just bailed from Putinism's phantom empire.

Which leads to an obvious question. Lukaschenko is backing Ukraine's sovereignty and cozying up with the EU, Tajikistan is getting $6 billion from China's Silk Road project to co-develop Central Asia, Mongolia is a stable democracy, and Georgia is gone from the imperial fold. So who exactly was supposed to join Putinism's mighty empire?

Neoliberalism's Wild Hunt

Call of Occupy

My mind. Officially. Blown.

For years, the Call of Duty franchise was stagnating in a horrible, endless loop of ludicrous neo-national villains, Terror War boosterism, and US neo-imperialism. So when I took a peek at the latest CoD, my expectations were zero.

But they finally got it right.

Just three short years after Occupy tore a continent-sized hole in the heart of neoliberalism's matrix, the single most neoconservative franchise of our time has joined the anti-neoliberal barricades.

I kid you not.

The short version: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is the CoD remix of Metal Gear Solid 4, only without Ocelot. Rogue PMC plutocrat bent on world domination: check. Underlying theme of biowarfare: check. Feisty female soldiers: check. New game mechanics: check (no spoilers, but be prepared to think and move... in three dimensions.) Yeah, they could've done a little more with the stealth elements, but the core pleasure of CoD has always been about delivering paintball at lightspeed, so no worries there. And I won't spoil the ending, but the denunciation of the Terror War comes through loud and clear.

Kudos to Sledgehammer, the Activision studio, for finally getting rid of the last rusty scrap metal of neocon revanchism, and letting us players run amok with the sleek exoskeleton of a true 21st century shooter. (Also, I suspect the game benefited enormously from its 3-year development cycle, rather than the 2-year cycle typical of past titles).

The only piece of the puzzle still missing is lead character diversity. The incidental characters and the environments are finally as transnational as they need to be (the kickass Nigerian level was an especial high point), but the main characters still need more postcolonial pizzazz. The folks at Ubisoft Montreal seem to have gotten this memo, and are finally introducing a postcolonial lead character in Far Cry 4. While many franchises have the problem that they're restricted to some level of historical veracity, CoD has basically been a science fiction franchise for some time, so there's really no barrier to creating stories featuring, say, some badass commando from Quang Tre or Lviv in 2060.

First They Came for the Monuments...

...because nobody stood up for the monuments. Russo-imperialism just took down a monument to that dangerous, fire-breathing radical... Steve Jobs. Can't. Make. This. War-mongering. Insanity. Up.

Round 2 of Putinism's monstrous, evil colonial war is about to begin. About 10,000 Russian army soldiers have gathered during the ceasefire in a tiny sliver of Donbass, with hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces and heavy anti-air missile systems. They will be launching an offensive very, very soon against what the Russo-imperialists, completely drunk on their own imperial dementia, deride as a bunch of drum-beating African tribes -- the subhuman Ukro-menschen who must be exterminated for glorious rule of Oil Czar, Greatest of All Czars, Master of Pipelines Which Enrich Czar's Plutocrats.

43 million Ukrainians will resist tooth and nail, and when the shock troops are driven back, a full-scale Russian invasion will begin.

War is coming. It will be terrible and bloody.

It will end with the abysmal failure and fall of Eurasia's Bonaparte, just like France's far savvier and more cosmopolitan historical original. But I shudder to think of the price tag.

All I can say to ordinary Ukrainians is that we citizens of the democracies of the world (two-thirds of the world's population) as well as almost all the remaining citizens who live in transitional governments (because most have bitter memories of colonial invasions, and know exactly what you are fighting for) -- will support you. We will lobby our governments to provide you with the weapons and ammunition you need to defend yourselves, as well as the expertise and advice you need to help improve your democracy.

All I can say to ordinary Russian citizens is that there is no crime in refusing to carry out the orders of a criminal. The Ukrainians are your Slavic brothers and sisters, and killing them for the sake of an aging gangster's bruised ego is the most terrible sin.

There was a brief shining moment, during the annexation of Crimea, where things could have gone differently. The Ukrainians did not use force to stop the Russian invaders, but chose civil disobedience, the rule of law, and free and fair national elections. As is typical with autocratic regimes, Putinism learned the wrong lesson from its quick triumph, and assumed that the Ukrainians would never fight for their autonomy. The Russo-imperialists mistook $110 per barrel for an economic policy, and the imperial past for the postcolonial present.

Ironically, Putinism is now in a desperate race with time. In the short term, the Russian economy is going to melt, along with those formerly sky-high oil prices, which will stumble along at $70-$80 for the next few years. But in just three short years, solar grid parity will be here for 80% of the planet, and whatever else happens, the hydrocarbon age will come to an end.

Bye-bye, Eurasian petro-colonialisms. You will not be missed.