Fifty Six Degrees North with Bram E Gieben
I talked to the writer, podcaster and musician Bram E Gieben about his new book The Darkest Timeline and what it means to “live in a world with no future”. You can listen to his podcast Strange Exiles here: Strange Exiles | Substack You can catch Bram at book launches at Lighthouse Books and All Good Bookshop here.
Also check out the interview with Bram on the Glasgow Review of Books.
You can listen to previous episodes of Fifty Six Degrees North HERE.
The audio takes a couple of minutes to start, sorry, just drag on a moment
Pity the podcast didn’t cover (the chapter on?) gaming culture, where patterns (of interaction), systems (both gaming and meta-gaming) and the philosophical implications of the multiverse could have been briefly explored. I would have classed the copying of ‘red flag’ claims as a pattern, not a meme. I didn’t really get a sense of how the world was projected to end from this timeline either. It might have been interesting to look at the Jackpot ideas of cyberpunk author William Gibson, for example. Still, some stuff to think about.
You’re right these topics would have been good, its a pretty packed book of ideas and references.
So you mean ‘white flag’?
@Editor, sorry, I mean ‘false flag’ claims.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag
While these are typically classified as disinformation ruses (in information warfare), at great volume and level they work more as cacophony. And quite different from (quiet) scepticism. I don’t think it helps to classify these as ‘memes’. There is a repetitive pattern of interaction (claim, counter-claim, theory, presentation of evidence, rejection of evidence, debunking, sometimes eventual tacit or open admission etc) that go along with these which may be more important for actors that the dissemination of the first claims themselves. To make public debate a hostile and intimidating environment/battlefield, to act as time/resource soaks, perhaps. Yes, you may ironically claim a false flag incident happened to make fun of your opponents’ tactics, but if they were vulnerable to irony, I guess they wouldn’t be using such tactics in the first place.
Something interesting is happening on the ‘rule of law’ front, which is much more likely to target vulnerabilities in USAmerican hypocritical hierarchies.
Interesting – I’ll ask Bram to comment
Thanks for the thoughts on false flags. I think what I was driving at in the podcast was particularly the idea that anything your opponent frames as a fact or an event can now be framed as an opinion, or a simulated event.
We’re at the stage of left/right gaslighting, and although that’s a Trumpian phenomenon in the recent past, it’s observable on the left too.
Also worth saying that false flag /psyops might be part of conspiracy discourse, but are those ideas based in fact? Of course.
I think it was Edward Snowden who said conspiracy theories conceal conspiracy practices. I write about this a little in the chapter on Meme War.
@Bram E. Gieben, thanks for the reply. I should have given examples to illustrate my point about patterns better.
I’ve just watch the Danish-made documentary on Roger Stone, A Storm Foretold:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m0021l5v/a-storm-foretold
Whatever the deficiencies of this kind of embedded documentary, let us suppose that the makers were interested in what patterns of USAmerican politics might be picked up and replicated (with adaptations and alterations) elsewhere. At one point the director asks Stone what he intends to do next, assuming some ‘chess game’ of thinking moves ahead and getting inside the head of the opposition to anticipate them. (Incidentally, I played chess at club level and I lament the dreadful misuse of ‘chess game’ as a simile but let that rest). Stone disappoints by simply raging about going on the attack.
There is an obvious pattern of ‘race to the bottom’ in these kinds of political attacks. If you go lower, your opponent may respond by going lower still. Your actions may become templates for others (hence copycat crimes). But there is always a metagame (at least potentially). Is this the Wild West, or Westworld? Is this grassroots or astroturf? Native or neocolonial?
Or to step up the abstract: what is the opposite of political corruption? Presumably there is an opposing influence otherwise politics would become increasingly more corrupt? In geopolitical as well as domestic terms, rulers and powerful groups have tried to crush ‘good examples’ just as orthodox religion has persecuted heresy, apostasy, infidelity and unbelief. What are the risks? Well, martyrdom for a start. And we see these patterns play out over myth and history, one reason the stage has such political potential, one reason that philosophical dialogues have stood up so well.
One could simply point out there is no ‘left’ in presidential politics. Stone calls the USAmerican Democrats ‘communists’, which seems absurd since the party is funded by capitalists just like the Republicans, but what does that do to political discourse? We can separate effects from (presumed) intentions. But what does it mean when the likes of Stone (and Ronald Reagan before him) talk of an imminent Rapture? Is the USA bankrupt? Is the political horizon shortening to mean major politicians don’t think they will ever have to answer to their crimes any more (because the world will end in fire or flood or financial failure)? Have we seen patterns like these before?
Sleeping Dogs, these are all valid and interesting questions which I’d view through the lens of Zizek’s writing on how ideology plays out, conceals itself, performs itself, or denies itself.
Each party in mainstream electoral politics until recently tried to present itself as the face of a common sense, non-ideological politics that was both in tune with the free market, and liberal values. Zizek would say, at the very site where non-ideological common sense is symbolically invoked, we find ourselves at the heart of pure ideology.
The recent rise of extremist positions, explicitly ideological, in the political centre feels less to me like a new development, and more like the revelation of a neoreactionary current with roots in the Christofascism of Nixon/Regan and the neoliberal ruthlessness of Thatcherite economics. The reclaiming of the ‘common sense’ centre by the likes of Starmer is inherently vulnerable to populist, extremist insurgency because its non-ideology conceals the pure ideology of neoliberalism itself.
That’s why the crushing of Corbyn’s project, despite Corbynism’s many flaws, was such a betrayal. There’s a genuine appetite for change that these parties can’t ignore forever.