Most critiques of this article are basically nit-picking. The laws mentioned, well, they're still quite solid. The central metaphor remains. In Vampire: the Masquerade, a vampire can increase their potency through an act of diablerie: draining another, old, stronger vampire of their blood at some moment of weakness. Twitter, as an example, is where people go to gamble their reputation, and get a shot at taking someone else's. A well-timed "call-out" increases the reputation of the caller and decreases that of the one called out. In short, the Vampire Castle is about a zero-sum (perhaps even worse than zero-sum) game of reputation, where people rise by draining those who ought to be their peers. The Vampire Castle has only temporary allies and no friends at all. One keeps the neck rigid and protected via orthodoxy and any lapse is an invite to a bite. No rest, only continual hyper-vigilance, waiting to pounce or be pounced upon.
I've watched this (plus your basic purity spiral) more or less destroy a couple of forums. It's depressing and it solves exactly nothing.
My main problem with the current system is that it has become disconnected from economic value creation. It has become a game of who can come up with the better extractive scheme. Who can work the money printer and the government. A negative-sum game akin to musical chairs or squid game.
The worst part is the constant gaslighting by elites who keep repeating the sermon about how the pie can be made bigger; while they themselves are laser-focused on expanding their extractive moats. They're even building moats around their moats by monopolizing the media and public communication channels (via algorithms) to shift all opportunities towards themselves... In an environment where they already have so many opportunities that they can't even read their own inbox!
The average elite's idea of 'spam' is the average person's idea of 'opportunity of a lifetime'. The inability of the elite to facilitate opportunities due to the complete saturation of their attention bandwidth may be the biggest waste of opportunities and human potential we've ever seen. That's why we need decentralization and why we need to move away from a monetary environment which artificially facilitates infinite wealth compounding.
Regular people aren't even talking to each other now. The free market is dead. Everyone is too busy trying to score some funding from elites who keep ignoring them. Why are regular people so focused on raising money from elites instead of getting together and bootstrapping? Because they know what's going on; they know it's the only way to succeed!
Because the pie is shrinking and the only way to get a tiny piece is to ask someone who has a huge piece to share theirs.
I love this comparison.
Seems like the acceptance of a zero sum game applied to relationships as reality is detrimental to large groups. (Zero proof for this hypothesis, just experience).
On the other hand, accepting that we live on a planet with limited resources, in a biosphere (not “environment”) which can only take so much destabilizing impact before it becomes unliveable, is important.
Our minds seem to embrace the former and refuse the latter.
The latter is being used by elites as a justification to take resources from the plebes while maintaining their own quality of life. Celebrities taking private jets to climate conferences.
> It has become a game of who can come up with the better extractive scheme. Who can work the money printer and the government. A negative-sum game akin to musical chairs or squid game.
This perfectly characterizes my concern with Elon Musk - he cosplays as a fighter for the proletariat while clearly pursuing goals that aren't guaranteed to help the average person in any time span. "Maybe eventually it will be good for everyone", but with no clear plans to get there or safeguards in place to guide the system.
The "in principle" part is what concerns me. Cars that are cheaper and more reliable are definitely good, but if that's taking resources away from public transit (or worse by using the Boring company to delay and sabotage public transit options) then it seems like definitely a net negative for most people, sold under the guise of helping them with technology
I really hope he does truly want to help people and is just making mistakes right now, but it keeps seeming more malicious over time
I can’t say I followed all of that and I felt pretty tired by the end of everything/ one tagged with some level of privilege, sexuality… something. It’s one of my pet peeves to see everything labeled like that. I think it is unfair to everyone labeled/ distilled.
That aside…
I did find this aspect something appealing.
> such questioning should take place in an atmosphere of comradeship and solidarity, and probably not in public in the first instance
Someone involved in the education system in my area recently said something unwise.
They apologized, explained themselves in detail.
A few weeks later they finally resigned after a lot of pressure.
The response to the resignation by the folks opposed to this person was “Well he is not alone, I bet the other people on that board feel the same way.”
I couldn’t help but wonder then, wouldn’t it be better to have someone who sincerely apologized and discussed their words openly on that board?
If the whole shaming/ calling out can only end in some level of ostracizing, won’t people just be better about hiding those things? Does that do us any good?
I have trouble with all the shaming / calling out if there isn’t an endpoint/ no chance for anyone to be better.
> Someone involved in the education system in my area recently said something unwise.
> They apologized, explained themselves in detail.
> A few weeks later they finally resigned after a lot of pressure.
TLDR: If you're ever the target of a mob, your chances are innumerably better by simply refusing to resign. A non-zero chance of keeping your job (by not resigning) is infinitely better than the 0% chance of keeping your job (by resigning).
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In all the high-profile cases of people targeted by cancel-mobs, apologising only increases the pressure the target experiences. Apologising is taken as an acceptance of liability and admission of guilt to much more than what was originally accused.
If the target apologises, and then resigns, then they lost their job due to their own actions and no individual in the mob can be pointed out as the person perpetuating cancel-culture, and the mob feels vindicated: After all, they wouldn't have resigned if they didn't say/do anything wrong, would they?
If the target resolutely ignores the mob, and refuses to resign, then someone has to fire them, and that someone has to at least pretend to have investigated, and that someone could still be on the hook if the mob was wrong anyway.
"The privilege I certainly enjoy as a white male consists in part in my not being aware of my ethnicity and my gender, and it is a sobering and revelatory experience to occasionally be made aware of these blind-spots. But, rather than seeking a world in which everyone achieves freedom from identitarian classification, the Vampires’ Castle seeks to corral people back into identi-camps, where they are forever defined in the terms set by dominant power, crippled by self-consciousness and isolated by a logic of solipsism which insists that we cannot understand one another unless we belong to the same identity group."
"Like so many other things, identity politics is deployed by elites in the service of their own interests, rather than in the service of the vulnerable people they often claim to represent."
A great essay (also check out "The Left is Not a Church" by Benjamin Studebaker) but by 2013, feminist bloggers online had made all these same sort of urgent, crucial observations about female solidarity. Eventually, I'm sure they will be seen as the original canaries in the coal mine of the post-Bush internet-enabled progressive-political holding pattern.
Mark Fisher's writing had a lot of impact on me as a young adult and my personal politics, as had a lot of the people that came out of the Warwick ecosystem, but I really think this particular piece has not aged well.
It seems bitter and in a way and anticipates a lot of the cultural grievances that are now being talked about all the time, so it's prescient if anything, but I think in reality he's just bitter that his focus on class and disregard for 'moralising' wasn't going anywhere.
He's way too harsh on the critics and way too generous to his friends, in particular what he's saying about Russel Brand here has aged horribly. Looking at the rabbit hole Brand is going down these days the criticism of him wasn't wrong.
The criticism of Brand was wrong. His critics were almost to a rule sneering upper-class Brits and those critics did not predict that Brand would get into woo-woo weirdness like Anti-vax.
The best critique of Brand is that he's an entertainer, and entertainment is not a vessel capable of carrying left politics forward.
For the sake of a counterpoint to this essay, which widely derided at its time of publication - this is an example of the contemporary backlash it received. I’d urge anyone taken by Fisher’s essay to consider giving it a read.
Nine years later, Mark Fisher is in the grave, and his proposed great voice of the working class Russell Brand is hawking crank nonsense like anti-vaccine conspiracies [1] and the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 [2].
I think it can be quite comfortably said that the essay hasn’t aged as well as some would like to imagine.
Between this essay and your counter, I'd say the essay has aged a lot beter. Intersectionality is still used primarily, in practice, to promote the interests of higher classes against lower ones. Brand was, as it turned out, dragged down by personal attacks rather than any real refutation of his politics, and identity politics still serves primarily as a stick for the powerful to beat the weak with. "Queer approaches to identities" as described in your link sound like an excellent thing, but one that bears no relation to the approaches to identities that the self-proclaimed spokespeople for the queer community actually employ. And for what it's worth, historical witch hunts actually victimised men more than women.
> Intersectionality is still used primarily, in practice, to promote the interests of higher classes against lower ones.
I don't follow what this means? How does one 'use' intersectionality to promote interests? I thought intersectionality was the idea that intersections of identities have different experiences than the components.
Ex: Black women have experiences that are unique to that intersection of identity, which aren't experienced by people who are only one of women or Black.
> I don't follow what this means? How does one 'use' intersectionality to promote interests?
The same way as any other idea/concept/framework; one finds arguments which it supports that promotes the interest one wants to promote. What's so strange about that?
I guess I didn't think 'use' meant 'use facts to make arguments to advance your interests'?
Like, I wouldn't say that I 'use' 'asymptotic complexity' to promote engineering priorities over product management. I read a lot of nefariousness in that phrasing, but I guess that's not what was meant.
I've certainly seen cases where people would "use asymptotic complexity" to, say, argue for a system that was better for their CV than one that was appropriate to the amount of data actually being processed. I did mean to at least suggest a certain amount of nefariousness; I think a lot of those who adopt intersectionality as a way of framing/approaching issues do so not solely out of sincere truth-seeking but because (consciously or otherwise) it makes it easier to reach conclusions that suit the upper classes and, perhaps even more importantly, makes it easier to avoid reaching conclusions that don't suit the upper classes.
That is a rather smug way of putting it. Fisher’s suicide was a tragic event caused by lifelong depression. The fact that he killed himself doesn’t make the essay age better or worse. Bringing it up as some kind of “own” against him is pretty disgusting.
We changed the URL from https://web.archive.org/web/20131129003704/http://www.thenor... to a different copy of this article. Please don't post archive.org links unless there's really no other option. It's fine to include archive.org links in comments, of course.
I've watched this (plus your basic purity spiral) more or less destroy a couple of forums. It's depressing and it solves exactly nothing.