Sundry Notes, August

Democracy's New Brand, Bodies Without Spirits, Telegram, and Nina Power

Very often, I have many scattered thoughts which I want to write about but don’t want to turn into essays. I’ve decided to try collecting these in a monthly series, “Sundry Notes.” Here’s the third one.

I.

I mentioned earlier (in The Woke Olympics) that, after finding myself quite confounded by the exuberant insanity around me, I revisited Guy Debord’s brilliant work, Society of the Spectacle. It seems others suddenly have, too. In the last two weeks, I’ve seen quite a few other writers reference it. Some seem, like me, to be revisiting its meaning again, while others seem to have just encountered it for the first time.

It’s great to hear it mentioned so often, though I’ve been noticing many seem to have missed the same thing thing I did on its first reading — its metaphysical aspects. Really, I’d somehow completely missed this the first time. There’s quite a lot of it, especially in the later sections where Debord discusses the understanding of linear time within capitalist society, and how it was a final break from the cyclical understanding of ancient societies.

In fact, the transition of earlier cosmological and religious understandings to the modern one is crucial to his main argument. To put it plainly, the spectacle is capitalist religion, and the mystical aspects of products become the subject of our devotion.

How else to make sense of something like this?

Yes. That’s a real photo. And I’ve seen quite a few others like this, along with other really bizarre outpourings of religious enthusiasm for the capitalist class’s new product.

Earlier in the text, Debord says:

The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities: the use of commodities becomes sufficient unto itself; the consumer is filled with religious fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities. Waves of enthusiasm for a given product, supported and spread by all the media of communication, are thus propagated with lightning speed. A style of dress emerges from a film; a magazine promotes night spots which launch various clothing fads. …. The fetishism of commodities reaches moments of fervent exaltation similar to the ecstasies of the convulsions and miracles of the old religious fetishism. The only use which remains here is the fundamental use of submission.

That last point about fetishism and submission is exactly how to see the slobberingly absurd exuberance — nah, religious exaltation — over Kamala Harris.

She’s not just the DNC’s latest release, but really liberal democracy’s newest product. Shiny, full of “joy,” and as easy to consume (and as empty of nutrients) as the most highly-processed industrial foods.

She’s got no platform, sure, but she doesn’t need one. No one drinks Coke or buys an iPhone because of what it will do for you, but rather how it will make you feel. And Kamala is all feeling to everyone. Even when she explicitly utters some of the most jingoistic and violent rhetoric possible (“…the strongest, most lethal fighting force in the world…”), all people hear is “joy” and “democracy” and whatever else they really want to hear.

The submission to the fetishized commodity explains how DNC operatives can openly mock the illusion of democracy without anyone blinking an eye. The absence of street riots in response to Gavin Newsom’s statement, “it was bottom up, yes, that’s what I’ve been told to say” is only comprehensible when you remember that no one cares anymore about democracy itself, only its aesthetic.

We don’t want anything to be actually democratic anymore, we just want it to look that way. We want the public rituals without any of the meanings which they were first created to contain and manifest. We only want the appearance of a functioning state, the appearance of wealth and civil stability, and especially the appearance of equality. These are the images we have been trained to seek out, and we’ve forgotten there was ever anything to which those symbols originally corresponded

There’s a joke about an archeologist concluding ancient peoples had no skin or internal organs, because all she ever finds on digs are skeletons. That’s exactly why we see devotional candles lit not to saints or the virgin, nor to the gods and spirits which they displaced, but rather to Harris/Walz™. Sure, devotion was originally an action directed at the divine, and representative democracy was something that actually existed. But we have neither democracy nor the divine any longer, and not even an idea what those even felt like. We have only empty images, skeletal remnants of participatory politics and collective devotion. That is, only the spectacle.

II.

Readers who’ve been following the work I’ve been doing for my series, The Mysteria (and the even longer work towards writing a manuscript of the same name), might really enjoy this essay from John Michael Greer.

His discussion overlaps with some of the topics I’ve covered, especially on the matter of Vitalism in The Mysteria, part eight: Ghosts in the Machine. Here’s a bit of what I said in that essay:

That’s ultimately what spirits were really seen to be: vital forces. There was always some extra dimension of a natural process that could not be explained with recourse to the material or chemical mechanisms of the process, just as there was always some extra dimension to human life that could not be reduced to its constituent parts. Separate a human into his constituent parts and no matter what how well you put him back together, it won’t be him any longer. That’s because there’s some irreducible element to a human — his vital essence, his life — that flees from him the moment you’ve hacked him into bits.

It was this apparently very subtle shift that initiated our “modern” era of disenchantment. What really happened is that we stopped including a reverence or even mention of natural processes as vital (living) forces. Everything in the world could only be explained only through inert, mindless mechanisms (the machine), and there was no longer some irreducible vital force, presence, or spirit involved in the world.

There was also another consequence to this turn for the Christian conception of God himself. Before, the belief was that God had created countless active agents to enact his will in the world, populating all of nature with spirits who reflected some aspect of his being. It was through them, his servants, that the world existed and was in a state of constant creation. Now that they were gone, however, God seemed even more distant and abstract, more an engineer or clock maker who’d wound up the whole machine and then just left it alone.

Though Greer doesn’t delve into the matter of the intermediary (vital) spirits, he does describe the historical-political forces which required the suppression of belief in vitalism:

… Similar processes took place in other western European countries, but England was the one that counted, because that’s where the industrial revolution took off.  It’s also where the system of centralized representative government, which concentrates power in the hands of capitalists and aristocrats while giving everyone else the illusion of participation in politics, first took root.

The suppression of the life force was part of that. The life force was the keynote of Hermeticism, the bond that united mind and matter and explained how magic and other occult sciences worked, so out it went. That expulsion was redoubled in the nineteenth century when the capitalists and the aristocrats turned on each other, using the squabbles over Darwinism as their excuse; once the capitalists won, the aristocrats were stripped of most of their remaining political power, and the Christian churches lost the last of their authority, today’s dogmatic materialism became the order of the day, and the new centralized systems of education that replaced older, decentralized, more or less religiously based arrangements all over Europe and North America proceeded to enforce that, ramming the new doctrine down the throats of each subsequent generation.

He’s mostly correct here, though his essay was far too short for him to delve further into the Calvinist roots of this shift. Also, Hermeticism has hardly been the only thread of vitalism running through pre-capitalist European thought. By privileging it over these others, he makes the same mistake the Christians did, writing out the personhood of those vital forces (what the Christians saw as intermediary spirits and what pre-Christian Europe saw as spirits of nature).

And he’s very correct in one of his conclusions, which is that the insufficiency of the worldview which replaced vitalist ones (which Greer calls “scientific materialism” or “dogmatic materialism,” but what I and Marxists such as Silvia Federici would call the mechanistic worldview or what

Paul Kingsnorth

might call “the machine”) is leading to a renewed surge in interest for non-dominant healing frameworks:

Thus it’s anything but an accident that a great many people who want to take control of their own health back from the fantastically corrupt and abusive medical industry we have here in the US have turned to health care modalities that use the life force.

There’s definitely the need for an essay about this, which I’ll maybe write sometime. Those “health care modalities” have been the target of relentless attacks by a certain class of urban left-liberal (for instance, the Conspirituality podcasts hosts) because they tend also to be embraced by quite a few manipulative influencers. Many of their targets absolutely deserve the criticism they get, but the healing methods they advocate aren’t the problem.

In capitalism, health becomes a commodity, and those influencers are trying to cash in like the much more influential pharmaceutical companies. But that doesn’t mean the methods they advocate are therefore corrupt. The problem, though, is that few people are actually equipped with the training and understanding to figure out what’s wishful thinking and what actually works, and that makes people just as easily abused by the alternative healing influencers as by the pharmaceutical companies.

Anyway, perhaps this will become an essay sometime.

III.

The only guaranteed way to communicate privately with others is in person.

We all know this, but we forget. These last ten years or so are probably the first period in the history of humans where we communicate this much with people over a distance. This is new to us, almost as new as having the tracking devices called “smartphones” in our pockets wherever we go.

It’s pretty wild when you think of it. Much of what we say and almost every place we are can be monitored at any time, and we’ve just all gotten used to this. It’s a “normal” that snuck up on us, with very few ever noticing how fucked we were getting ourselves.

Of course, most of us aren’t really saying anything that we’d get in real trouble for saying. Or, at least we don’t think we are. But then, jokes told between friends in a messaging app and then interpreted by the “court” of public opinion can certainly destroy a person. We’ve seen such things happen relentlessly, and yet we still keep pretending we’ll never have an audience. I know I certainly do.

There have certainly been a few “safe” ways of communicating over distance, and I mean this in the same way we mean “safe” sex. In other words, safe — but not really. There was Telegram, for instance. Was, because its creator, Pavel Durov, was just arrested in France.

If you don’t know much about Durov, he’s been called Russia’s “Zuckerberg” for helping to create a highly-popular Facebook alternative in Russia. After leaving (well, essentially fleeing) when Russia’s demands to censor dissidents got too intense for him, he then went on to create Telegram, an encrypted messaging service.

What you usually hear about Telegram is quite negative. For instance, The Guardian and other liberal-left publications usually mention the app only in articles describing how far right ideologues were using it and no one could stop them. In fact, the propaganda on this was so severe that, before I’d even encountered the app myself, I’d just assumed it was only being used by such people.

The problem for these commentators was that Telegram was both too open and too private. Unlike WhatsApp and Signal, which identify you by your phone number, you can just create an anonymous username for Telegram. That makes you virtually untraceable, and states don’t like that. Neither do antifa groups, who’ve taken upon themselves the divine crusade of “exposing” their targets whenever they find them.

And yes, some really awful people use Telegram. But unfortunately, if you’re going to have this kind of encrypted communication, you can’t actually block some people from using it. Otherwise, it’s no longer actually private and free.

Here’s where we see the idiocy of Karl Popper’s “paradox of tolerance.” In that idea, you have to be intolerant towards intolerant people, otherwise they’ll destroy open societies. But once you allow such a logic, anyone and anything can be declared “intolerant,” depending on the fads and fashions of the dominant political order.

It’s the same with free speech and private communication. You have to allow it for everyone, otherwise it will collapse in on itself. “Bad people” will say stuff you don’t like and you must allow them to do so. Sure, it sucks. But “bad people” is a moving target, and anyone can be put into that category at any time, so you have to allow them, too.

Anyway, the Russian government hates Durov. So, too, does the French government. And also, so does the US one, but they first started out by trying to convince Durov to create a back door for the FBI. This is from an essay

Yasha Levine

wrote about Durov back in 2017, for which he interviewed Pavel Durov:

…the FBI wanted to set up some kind of informal backchannel process that would enable Telegram to hand over data on particular users in the event of a terrorist threat; they even came prepared with official-looking documents in hand. “They showed me a court order and told me, ‘We respect your values about privacy and cryptography very much, and we respect what you’re trying to do. But there is terrorism, it is a serious problem and we have a duty to protect society. We hope you understand and share our views. We want to create a process of data exchange so that you can help us when there is a terrorist threat,’” Durov recounted….

After failing to buy off Durov, the FBI then tried to buy one of his employees:

Durov would not disclose the name of this developer, but he recounted the story that his employee eventually told him. The FBI wanted to work out an arrangement in which the developer would secretly feed its operatives information about Telegram’s inner workings—things like new features and other components of the service’s architecture that they might want to know about. The arrangement would be strictly confidential, and they were willing to pay. “We will make it worth your while,” they said. They said he would be “consulting” for the FBI—a thinly veiled euphemism for what was clearly a pay-off. “The FBI agents gave him a range,” said Durov, munching on a piece of bread. “It was on the order of tens of thousands of dollars.”

Levine’s whole essay is absolutely worth your attention, especially if you’ve ever been under the impression that private distance communication is ever really private. But what’s currently fascinating to me is how the liberal-left (and also the antifascist ‘left,’) has, for years, warned people off of Telegram and essentially called for it its annihilation — because people they don’t like use it.

In other words, they’ve basically been begging the authoritarians of the world to become more authoritarian. Or, put another way, they’ve gleefully argued to take away privacy for everyone just so they can stop the privacy of a few people they don’t like. And it looks like they’re getting their wish.

There’s another issue here, though, and that’s the problem of absurdly rich men being our own real bulwark against authoritarian states. We’re in a stupid situation where we have to rely on billionaires like Elon Musk and millionaires like Pavel Durov to protect our ability to communicate freely, while other billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg willfully cave in to government demands. This is a shit choice.

Again, though: the only guaranteed way to communicate privately with others is in person. That’s where our real focus should be.

IV.

In that previous section, I was hinting at a great tragedy which has haunted me since it happened:

Of course, most of us aren’t really saying anything that we’d get in real trouble for saying. Or, at least we don’t think we are. But then, jokes told between friends in a messaging app and then interpreted by the “court” of public opinion can certainly destroy a person.

That’s what happened to

Nina Power

.

The specifics of the situation are quite complex, but a rather brilliant essay by James Robb summarizes it quite succinctly:

The occasion for this new eruption is Nina Power’s having been declared bankrupt after losing a court case for libel. In 2020 Power’s friend, the artist Daniel Miller, began a libel case against another artist, Luke Turner, who had repeatedly accused him and Power of being anti-Semitic and being Nazis, resulting in their ‘cancellation’ – losing speaking, exhibition and publication opportunities, as well as assaults and death threats being made against them. Turner was apparently reacting to criticisms and ridicule of his art 2017 installation called He Will Not Divide Us, a response to the election of Donald Trump.

Nina Power joined the libel case a short time later. Turner then made a counter-claim of harassment against Power and Miller, and refused all attempts by Power and Miller to negotiate a mediated settlement. When the case came to court in October 2023, both the libel claim brought by Power and Miller and Turner’s harassment counter-claim were dismissed. Since they had initiated the case, legal costs were awarded against Power and Miller, resulting in their bankruptcy. Power also resigned her job as senior editor on Compact magazine in the face of mob pressure.

The result of the trials was that no one won. The actual legal court didn’t find one side or the other more correct. But just after Nina Power declared bankruptcy — meaning she no longer had any money and therefore no legal power to challenge him — Luke Turner then went on a new smear campaign against her, and some really awful people gleefully joined in.

Specifically, Turner published trial evidence that Power had willingly provided —archived texts between her and Miller — and re-narrated them as “proof” that Nina Power was a Nazi. Remember, though, neither side won in the trial, but Luke Turner then decided to make it seem as if he had.

Turner’s prime ‘evidence’ of Power’s claimed Nazi sympathies consists of transcripts of conversations between Miller and Power on WhatsApp that were discussed in court. These chats were disclosed by Miller and Power to demonstrate that they were not colluding to harass Turner in 2018.

Turner helpfully highlighted the juicy bits in yellow before uploading them to X/Twitter.

It is impossible to read these transcripts without a deep sense of unease, a sense that just to read them is a gross violation of the privacy of the two people concerned. It is as if we are looking at revenge porn. Only those caught up in the logic of the witch hunt, and convinced of their own righteousness, could be unaffected by a feeling of disgust about how these private conversations between two friends have been broadcast across the globe. The two friends had already, at the time these conversations took place, been ostracised and relentlessly slandered as Nazis, and had more need than most for the right to private conversation and private jokes with each other.

That, I think, was the grossest bit of all this. It really was like “revenge porn,” and I cannot imagine for a moment that those gleefully spreading it weren’t whispering a silent prayer of thanks that it wasn’t their own private jokes amongst friends being examined.

I hate that I said nothing. Not that anything I said or did could possibly have helped. Some of the people who went knives-out for Nina have previously attacked me, and they’re the ones primarily responsible for my book, Here Be Monsters, getting no promotion by its publisher. Also, Nina came to the book’s release event in London, and we had damn lovely time together, drinking sodas in a bar just before that event.

Actually, I’ll tell you even more. Nina’s always been quite supportive of my writing. I’m sure there’s plenty of stuff we don’t agree on, but that doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I didn’t say anything when this shit was happening, and that’s not the kind of person I want to be.

I imagine I’m not the only one who feels this way. The few people I saw pushing back at all this immediately became targets of the same kind of smears, and I imagine the others watching this got scared like I did. And we cannot fix that, and this is particularly tragic.

What I can do is say this, though: if you’ve concluded for any reason that Nina Power is a “bad person” based on anything you read about her in the last few months, please look again. I especially recommend the essay I quoted above, and not only as a defense of Nina. Towards the end of the essay, its author provides the best narrative of how the left became what it is now. Here’s a bit of it:

A witch hunt is led and directed by individuals, but at heart it is a convulsive social motion that operates in a certain social milieu.

The politics of capitalist liberal-leftism has a particular social base and material roots. Its social base is the professional middle class, centred in the state itself, especially its educational and juridical institutions, as well as in the broader technical, communications and news media bureaucracies, both state and private. This sector of the middle class is sufficiently remote from the process of economic production that its political thinking is not dictated by the drive for profit (which conditions the thinking of the capitalist class itself as well as middle-class producers like farmers.) Nor is its thinking governed by the necessity of the working class to defend its wages and entitlements, and the social cohesion which is the only source of strength of the working class. The professional middle class enjoys a certain freedom from economic insecurity and leisure to consider social problems and formulate solutions, in the name of the common interest of all. It considers itself, by virtue of its middle position, uniquely qualified to speak on behalf of all, and to preach moderation and reconciliation between the classes. Ultimately, however, its privileges depend on  the continued stability of capitalism – thus its ‘leftism’ has strict limits!

…

The minority-liberalism of the last century had allied itself with the defence of democratic rights – chiefly the freedoms of speech, of association and of assembly, and protections for those accused of crimes – rights needed by the working class to organise and fight for its class interests. But liberalism transformed into the dominant current of bourgeois thought – liberalism at the helm of state – has proved itself every bit as hostile to these freedoms as its conservative predecessors. The defence of liberal orthodoxy increasingly involved zealous suppression of heretical ideas beyond the liberal canon, and unwillingness to engage in debate.  “No to ‘hate speech’! No platform for fascists!” were inscribed on their banner, and for the more daring among them, “Punch a fascist.” Censorship and self-censorship became the norm. Liberals who continued to defend freedom of speech found themselves, to their great surprise and dismay, lumped together with rightists and fascists.