The old forms of the left are moribund and the new forms are stupid. We're making a podcast that discusses the need to organize a dialectical pessimism and develop a Marxist salvage project capable of putting up a good fight as the world burns around us. A clean, honest, and unsentimental melancholy is required; we are cultivating one and would like to share it with you.
https://www.patreon.com/theregrettablecentury
episode 30: No One is Bored, Everything is Boring, Everyone is Anxious
"Perhaps the feeling most characteristic of our current moment is a mixture of boredom and compulsion. Even though we recognise that they are boring, we nevertheless feel compelled to do yet another Facebook quiz, to read yet another Buzzfeed list, to click on some celebrity gossip about someone we don’t even remotely care about. We endlessly move among the boring, but our nervous systems are so overstimulated that we never have the luxury of feeling bored. No one is bored, everything is boring."
For this episode we read a couple of articles by Mark Fisher and the Institute for Precarious Consciousness discussing some of the mechanisms that capitalism exploits to dampen our abilities to organize against it. While the production of this episode really is us just feeding more content into a machine that devours our time and creativity, we are kinda hoping this is an example of the capitalists selling us some rope.
Mark Fisher: No one is bored, Everything is boring
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/no-one-is-bored-everything-is-boring/
Institute for Precarious Consciousness: We Are All Very Anxious
http://intercommunalworkshop.org/we-are-all-anxious/
Jodi Dean: Communicative Capitalism and Class Struggle
http://spheres-journal.org/communicative-capitalism-and-class-struggle/
Music: Savages- Shut Up