Was I the only one whoooo didn’t love acoss spiter verbse

The "Not Like Other Girls" Virus & ratbag's exit girl

2D imaginary friends are better than normie "sack-men". ratbag, at least, seems to think so given their mingling of revitalized emo aesthetics that are ever-so-known in the subculture they clutch onto within their music video. Whether the "exit girl" is leaping away from normative society through juxtaposing 2D creatures (who, mind you, are drawn to look as eccentric as they do) with sack-bags (that all look alike and act alike, and even behave alike), or if there is some underlying feminist critique the band failed to represent (apart from some drink passing): it is as if the day-and-old “normie” critique that has been passed along punks like a gene that can not be avoided—a virus, really— is as vital for the aesthetics they are attempting to explore as it is a cliché. Of course, the rejection ratbag's frontman faces in the clip by these so-called standardized sacks for normies (what novel depiction for punks to make!), heavily contrasted with all that is oh-so lively and animated in the visual world the band carves out for itself, emphasizes this best. Their performance blends a little too well with those “not like other girls” memes that were passed around Tumblr back in 2014, a cyberspace where alt-communities continue to flourish.

Still, there is nothing punk about this notion in an age where the sort of “normie-murdering” rockism (literally, if death by 2D characters counts), which colors itself to be anti-capitalist; anti-consumerist; anti-everything-that-is-not-studded-black-and-quirky, is worn as a philogyny-weapon that fights off labels through setting up more of them. Where capital and consumerism intersect, punks have always escaped this space by actively fighting against tradition, whatever way it would manifest itself, in whatever environment it would exist. Tartan for the Brits is as counter-cultural as excessive tanning is for the Japanese, after all. ratbag reverently references this "free from all dogma" trope, but even their clip's promising "drink passing" scene weighs like a herding monster because it uses a citation method—so dated—for its quote. Frontman Sophie Brown’s spiky, characteristic punk hairdo and pro-stereotypical emo costuming (as seen on American TV) do not make this better in a day and age where her wardrobe can be found in non-Hot Topic stores. There is no clarity as to what dominant—or consumerist—culture is being fought off, other than a harmful stereotype that in its transmission has often targeted (mostly) women. How revolutionizing that the punk-monster, eclectic in its shapes, continues to target the bimbo!

At the end of the day: this normie "party culture" detested by ratbag involves women dressing to trends, unlike those "I’m-a-creep-I-don’t-belong-here" girls who resist sack-conformity (à la “all women these days look like the Kardashians" discourses) as well as abstain from drinking, and thus, do not have to face their drinks getting spiked, nor the donning pink, phallic wounds that are bound to appear underneath their dresses à la mode after. Yet, “with those clothes, she is only asking for it,” and “if only she had stayed home,” and “if only she did not have a sheep’s (sack’s) mentality, this would not have happened to her,"—right? Any kind of standardized notions of normies like these are the types of sayings that would come out of the mouths of those who have internalized the cliché juxtaposition ratbag’s exit girl is trying to leech onto. They are the type of jerk off-able notions your average pop-music hater, MAGA-believing, Joe, frees his seed to.

The clip, then, feels like a stereotype honoring stereotypes by imposing more stereotypes onto stereotypes. Tumblr otherness has become equivalent to Facebook rockism, and no rooms have an exit when their entries are shaped into geometrical forms and figures. The band, having started off on TikTok, where subcultures—or aesthetics—transact and interact with one another, fails to realize that even traditions change and “fighting norms” encompasses more than simply dragging down those that fall victim to “dominant ideology". Who, in 2023, is ratbag’s audience? What is their target, really? It all feels a bit too imaginary. 

The Record Begins With a Song Of Rebellion

First Draft Of the Capitalist Surrealist Writing Project. Steal and appropriate, critique and interrogate, with the author's full endorsement and permission. Looking (back)(for)wyrds After the Bush interregneum and the long, terrible, progress destroying Reagan years, the American empire had something like a moment of hope. Riding high on the peace dividend and a delusion of idealism among the donating classes, the economic aristocracy which in effect was the senior partner in “American Democracy” (and so duly represented in both parties) and the voter was a paternalized junior to be both petted and protected had selected the Clinton dynasty. The grand bargain between labour and capital against the state resulted in the bitter fruit of the Bush years, as Conservatives paternalists rightly mocked the Clintonian urge to middling action on domestic issues while gladly partnering with him to rob labour at large. While a wealth transfer had already been going on as part of a trend for the better part of a century, this phase in which a semi-coherent ruling class dynamic of the donating classes and the government service classes became visible. It is beyond satire now, but this was not always so visible, as racism, white supremacy, American exceptionalism, various fundementalist and conservative (as well as equally harmful, supposedly liberal versions of the same) religious beliefs; Turtle Island was rife with reasons for temporary cross class solidarity in order to oppose an other or to advance an idealistic goal.

And yet moments of class consciousness and solidarity have perenially emerged, from the “grassroots” as the insiders like to say. They frame the people as “the base” or “the grassroots” and narrowly target their interests to make people find conflict with each other. It is irrelevent (for this missive) whether this is a conscious, semi-conscious, or unconscious process; it is enough to notice it happening. Despite this, moments in the pre new-modern (to be defined later, promise~) politics that predate terms like Black Lives Matter or Trans Rights are Human Rights show that these movements represent an unbroken chain of revolutionary attempts at self-consciousness and conscience transformation that coincide and are just as important as any history of violence. The Ides of March, and the campaign of anonymous internet citizens against Scientology, represents such a moment. Occupy Wall Street was such a movement. “We’re Here, We’re Queer, Get Used To It!” was such a phrase. The many quotes attributed to names like Mandela and James Baldwin; the Black Panthers, the revolutionary feminists, the Hippie movement, down back to the (In the American mind) hoary days of yore when the Wide Awakes would march a brass band around the houses of pro slave Senators.

It is a poor yet accurate summation to say that the ‘present’ (a dubious notion) political reality is the sum of all of these and more; a reader can orient themselves to the history of late stage capitalism by the growth of the donating classes influence and the acceleration of their detachment from society at large. Moments which also impact this reality are the donating classes sense of pessimism about the future; the devaluing of nearly all forms of labour, the increasing visibility of law enforcement brutality; the list can be referenced in the moment to moment, wide eyed and angry reporting of self-matyring, news-junkie amateur journalists found anywhere online, the shocked and angry expressions of young activists at protests and the weary, numbed faces of the old. Up and down the class system, there has been a wide spread death of hope.

Enter the climate crisis.

Before climate consciousness achieved real steam, our escatological fears were (mostly) confined to the realm of human action or cosmic events unimaginable (and unrelatable) to the modern person’s experience of life. For decades, the effects of climate change were reported to a world told not to care. As Terrance Mkenna said, ““The apocalypse is not something which is coming. The apocalypse has arrived in major portions of the planet and it’s only because we live within a bubble of incredible privilege and social insulation that we still have the luxury of anticipating the apocalypse.”

The impact of this can and will be expanded upon, but it is safe to say that the bubble has been popped. Whatever finds popular currency within the dialogue around it, that the climate is changing rapidly in ways inemical to human society at large/at present is true by material impact; people everywhere have experienced some negative result of the changing conditions, and there is a rising anxiety in the classes who cannot afford an escape pod or fortress bunker that the people they’ve entrusted themselves to intend to withdraw to safety and abandon them, or even expose them to more harm in order to “make more of the earth’s carrying weight available in the reclamation” (this kind of talk is not alien to them, though this specific quotation is my own invention.

It is important to acknowledge that the bubble has popped. It is the exclamation on Capitalist Realism; it is the moment of awareness, that encounter with a death of hope, in which Capitalist Surrealism, our phenomenological experience of the Capitalist Real, is born. While this Surrealist stage is both uncomfortable and has deleterious effects on the human condition, it represents the chink in the armour of banality and inertia, and the diminishing politics of the powerful. The sense that anything, absolutely *anything,* can happen to you, is both incredibly terrifying, and when looked at squarely, an opportunity for radical freedom.

It is this radical freedom that we see ourselves invited to in the many facets of human expression and convention which have experienced an awakening of new consciousness (or the restoration of old ones. Beliefs, ways of interacting with the world, and surviving are no longer benefited by or even neutrally treated by their operating environment anymore; if the complete weight of propaganda in circulation at the moment could be translated into sound, it would present an impenetrable and unlistenable wall.

It is that environment that individual ideologies not sanctioned by the operating environment have struggled against; all of them now have new life and vigor because despite that wall, and the spectacle societies which generate them, the literal truth of material impacts trump all prior arguments. With awareness of most likely outcomes of the climate crisis on a sliding scale, we see radicalization and existential depression of all varieties spike; the answers they attempt to generate to these apparent conditions lack hope in broad but uneven spikes along that scale of awareness, with the suicidally depressed expert climatologist and the radical anarcho-primitivist sharing the same ontological space in orientation to that crisis.

This project, among other things, is an attempt to generate an alternative answer (what that project consists of is entirely based in literature and mutual aid, the oldest Christian platforms for emancipatory action.) Terms like Solarpunk and Cloud City Futures approach but fail to capture the spirit of an alternative answer, mostly with an appeal to the world of aesthetics, a dubious method for summoning change at best. Terminology alone, or even in tandem with education, is also not sufficient; the noise environment they enter into immediately drowns out the creators meaning, especially if these terms are successful and gain currency with the wealthy.

Rather, we must articulate the positive from all our apparent negatives: The apocalyptic futures we anticipate cannot begin actually describe the terrain of the future, and the apparancy of our material conditions impact on our lives is now drowning out the sound of the standing ideologies. This is a brave time, where people blaze trails for others to follow out of the collapsing structures of the past and into the dwelling places of the new future. Our experience of reality, though surreal, has now unlocked an awareness of an apparent power: making meaning.

It is with the tools of meaning-making that these, who are the heirs of their elders, queer and colour revolutionary and indigenous land defender and abolitionist, pioneer the hopeful vistas of the future. It is necessary that they *be* hopeful; it was the Buddha who taught that people deceived by Samsara may be “deceived” by the apparent gifts of pursuing enlightenment, the majority of which are ancillary incidentals not to be meditated on. The king calls his indolent heirs out of the burning palace with a promise of gifts; when they arrive, they protest the lack of gifts, but it is in his embrace of them we realize they are the gift, and their survival was worth the promise of chariots and ponies.

But there must also be chariots, and ponies; luxuries, and finery; the grim tools of “defense” and all the things the human animal finds comforting in their resting environment to assure them of its stability. In the Dao De Jing, (Though Mueller butchers the poetry,) the Sage articulates this and describes how to create it: “Let there be a small country with few people,

Who, even having much machinery, don't use it.

Who take death seriously and don't wander far away.

Even though they have boats and carriages, they never ride in them.

Having armor and weapons, they never go to war.

Let them return to measurement by tying knots in rope.

Sweeten their food, give them nice clothes, a peaceful abode and a relaxed life.

Even though the next country can be seen and its doges and chickens can be heard,

The people will grow old and die without visiting each other's land.” A.C. Mueller Translation, The Dao De Jing, Attributed to Lao Tzu

It is as naked an appeal to a return to the life of the community and the village as can be found. A return to idigenous ways of being, which speaks to the preservation of folk ways, while the reality that the sage is administering them (even if only by moral teaching) shows a potential for new ideas to be instanced; innovation is not a property innate to the colonizing and walled world, and memetic culture and the society of truth-telling through representation around it reflect callbacks to this desire. The political movement around Land Back, while perennial to the causes of indigenous people, crystalizes an actionable answer for individuals and collectives to support. Its cousins in other colour movements, many of them representing indigenous people displaced by imperialism in the first place, are also generative of positive futures; it is a fact of history that as the rights of people classified as “minorities” are raised, the general quality of life for all in society rises, with the exception of those who could never be touched but by the highest tides.

These movements and moments of consciousness are their own inestimable goods, not mere ends for the would be conscious person to hijack for their goals. This is in fact a position inimical to the success of any of these movements; grifting starts at home, and it is the white leftist who is more easily conquered by the white liberal, since neither of them have conquered their own whiteness in the first place. But that supporting them generates positive benefits for all can only be argued against if you value the lives and comforts of some over others; those who value the general benefit first can see a clear path.

It is that clarity that gives meaning makers license to create the vistas of the future. It is the “Mandate of Heaven” that endorses the artists, a general operating license to create. Because the material impact of the present is louder than the noise of Capital, there an outburst of fertility and growth, the very seeds of hope, breaking out in the midst of this Surrealism. It is with the tools of meaning making, and the canvas of the crisis, that people escape the real.

You will not be surprised to be told that Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, contains a series of attacks on diversity, immigration, feminism, and “identity politics.” You may, however, be surprised to be told that the book contains high praise for Ralph Nader, quotes from Studs Terkel, laments the disappearance of the anti-capitalist left, and presents Jeff Bezos as one of its central villains. Carlson has written a book that is as staunchly nationalist as one would expect. Yet it’s also a little bit socialist.

Carlson’s basic framework would commonly be described as “populism.” There are the people, and then there are the “ruling class” elites. The rich and powerful care only about themselves. They do not care about Middle America, and have presided over the opioid epidemic, the hollowing out of industrial towns, and exploding inequality. Meanwhile, ordinary workers suffer. At times, he almost sounds like Bernie Sanders. His analysis is persuasive, well-written, and often funny. It’s also terrifying, because elsewhere in the book, Carlson makes it clear: he wants a white-majority country, thinks immigrants are parasitic and destructive, misses traditional gender hierarchies, and dismisses the significance of climate change. Carlson’s political worldview is destructive and inhumane. Yet because it has a kernel of accuracy, it will easily tempt readers toward accepting an alarmingly xenophobic, white nationalist worldview. Carlson’s book shows us how a next generation fascist politics could co-opt left economic critiques in the service of a fundamentally anti-left agenda. It also shows us what we need to be able to effectively respond to.

First, let’s look at the parts that are most right, and perhaps most unexpected. In an analysis almost identical to that of leftists like Thomas Frank, Carlson says that Republicans and Democrats are now both beholden to corporate power. Sometime in the 1990s, Carlson says, he began wondering “why liberals weren’t complaining about big business anymore,” and had started celebrating “corporate chieftains” like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the Google guys. Ralph Nader should be a hero to all liberals, spending his days “greeting a parade of awestruck liberal pilgrims” from a retirement home. Instead, he is “reviled,” even though “every point Nader made was fair” and “some were indisputably true.” Suddenly “both sides were aligned on the virtues of unrestrained market capitalism… left and right were taking virtually indistinguishable positions on many economic issues, especially on wages.”

The “prolabor” Democrats, Carlson says, were “empathetic and humane” and “suspicious of power.” But today they have disappeared, and the party of the New Deal is now a party of Wall Street. Carlson points out that Hillary Clinton won wealthy enclaves like Aspen, Marin County, and Connecticut’s Fairfield County (the hedge fund capital of the country). “Employees of Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, and Amazon donated to Hillary over Trump by a margin of 60-to-1,” and while “Seven financial firms donated 47.6 million to Hillary,” they gave Trump “a total of $19,000, about the price of a used pickup.”

As a result, Carlson says, Democrats are now largely silent on labor issues: “When was the last time you heard a politician decry Apple’s treatment of workers, let alone introduce legislation intended to address it?” Corporations make vaguely “socially liberal” noises, like decrying gun violence and being pro-LGBT, and as a result escape criticism for mistreating their workers or contributing to economic inequality. Carlson cites Uber, which has prominent liberal Arianna Huffington on its board and has had to commit to reforming its “bro culture.” And yet it still treats its drivers like crap:

“[Uber is] running an enormously profitable business on the backs of exploited workers… An obedient business press [has] focused on the ‘flexibility’ Uber’s contractors supposedly enjoyed. … [But] Feudal lords took more responsibility for their serfs than Uber does for its drivers… Uber executives weren’t ashamed… They sold exploitation as opportunity, and virtually nobody called them on it.”

What happens, Carlson says, is that corporations “embrace a progressive agenda that from an accounting perspective costs them nothing.” They are, in effect, purchasing “indulgences from the church of cultural liberalism.” Sheryl Sandberg published Lean In and Mark Zuckerberg is floated as a possible Democratic presidential candidate, but Facebook is an evil corporation to its core. Sean Parker has admitted that Facebook was engineered to be addictive, that its designers thought: “How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?… We need to sort of give you a little dopamine hit every once it a while.. To get you to contribute more content.” Carlson notes that the company commits “relentless invasions of the public’s privacy,” and that epidemiologists have linked the product “with declining psychological and even physical health.” Carlson writes:

“Evidence has mounted that Facebook is an addictive product that harms users, and that Zuckerberg knew that from the beginning but kept selling it to unknowing customers. Those facts would be enough to tarnish most reputations, if not spark congressional hearings. Yet Zuckerberg remains a celebrated national icon.”

We know Facebook is manipulating people’s emotions to sell advertising, and yet we still get headlines like “How To Raise The Next Mark Zuckerberg.” Or look at Amazon. Jeff Bezos supported Hillary Clinton for president, yet “no textile mill ever dehumanized its workers more thoroughly than an Amazon warehouse.” Carlson asks: “when was the last time you heard a liberal criticize working conditions at Amazon?… “Liberals and Jeff Bezos [are now] playing for the same team.” Successful businessmen “pose as political activists,” and pitch their products as woke. That way: “affluent consumers get to imagine they’re fighting the power by purchasing the products, even as they make a tiny group of people richer and more powerful. There’s never been a more brilliant marketing strategy.” He goes on:

“The marriage of market capitalism to progressive social values may be the most destructive combination in American economic history. Someone needs to protect workers from the terrifying power of market forces, which tend to accelerate change to intolerable levels and crush the weak. For generations, labor unions filled that role. That’s over. Left and right now agree that a corporation’s only real responsibility is to its shareholders. Corporations can openly mistreat their employees (or “contractors”), but for the price of installing transgender bathrooms they buy a pass. Shareholders win, workers lose. Bowing to the diversity agenda is a lot cheaper than raising wages.”

Carlson mocks the “socially liberal” Davos elite who hand-wring about inequality while reaping its fruits. He points to the example of Chelsea Clinton, who talked nobly about her values (“I was curious if I could care about [money] on some fundamental level, and I couldn’t… That wasn’t the metric of success that I wanted in my life”) before buying a $10 million, 5,000 square foot apartment in the Flatiron District that spanned an entire city block. Chelsea Clinton’s career, for Carlson, shows how contemporary believers in “meritocracy” benefit from an unjust and nepotistic system: Clinton was paid $600,000 a year as a “reporter” for NBC despite appearing on the network for a sum total of 58 minutes. The bubble of privilege that many elites inhabit was exemplified in Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, which suggested that “Things in America are Fine.” (The slogan was actually “America Is Already Great.”) Carlson is not wrong here: Hillary Clinton herself was so out of touch that she is still saying things like “I won the places that represent two-thirds of America’s gross domestic product… So I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.”

Carlson also says that there has been a troubling tendency for both sides to embrace the military-industrial complex. Key Democratic figures supported the Iraq War (e.g. Feinstein, Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Edwards, Reid, Schumer). It was New York Timesreporters who contributed to scaremongering about Saddam in the leadup to the war, the New York Times op-ed page where you can find contributions like “Bomb Syria, Even If It’s Illegal” or “Bomb North Korea, Before It’s Too Late,” and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman who said that Iraq War had been “unquestionably worth doing” because it told Middle Easterners to “suck on this.” Barack Obama (who was given the Nobel Peace Prize, Carlson says, for “not being George W. Bush”) killed thousands of people with drones, including American citizens, prosecuted whistleblowers, kept Guantanamo open, and failed to rein in the vast global surveillance apparatus. Hillary Clinton pushed aggressively for military action in Libya, which destabilized the country. There is a D.C. consensus, Carlson says, and it is pro-war. Some of the book’s most amusing passages come when Carlson flays neoconservative hacks like Max Boot and Bill Kristol, who have now become allies of the Democratic Party in paranoia about Russia. Boot’s career, he says, publishing articles like “The Case for American Empire” and advocating invasion after invasion, shows us how “the talentless prosper, rising inexorably toward positions of greater power, breaking things along the way.” The hawkish consensus is no joke, though, and Carlson says he misses the liberal peaceniks, who “were right” when they warned that “war is not the answer, it’s a means to an end, and a very costly one.”

To many on the left, everything Carlson says here will be familiar. The phenomenon he’s pointing to, by which Democrats and Republicans both became free market capitalists,  has a name: neoliberalism. Larry Summers was quite open about it when he said that “we are now all Friedmanites.” Carlson’s point about how corporations whitewash exploitative practices by appearing socially progressive is one leftists make frequently (see, for example, Yasmin Nair’s essay “Bourgeois Feminist Bullshit” and Nair and Eli Massey’s “Inclusion In The Atrocious“). The foreign policy stuff is a little off: it’s not that Democrats used to be pacifists, since the Vietnam tragedy was initiated by JFK and expanded by Lyndon Johnson. Empire has always been a bipartisan project, antiwar voices in the minority. Aside from the suggestion that this is new, it’s accurate to say that American elites have largely embraced the projection of American military power.

But Carlson is not going to be joining the Sanders 2020 campaign. His book has a dark side: a deep suspicion of cultural progressivism, inclusion, and diversity. Carlson believes that liberal immigration policies have been imposed because they serve elite interests (Democrats get votes and Republicans get cheap labor for Big Business). As a result, the fabric of the country is fraying. He writes:

Thanks to mass immigration, America has experienced greater demographic change in the last few decades than any other country in history has undergone during peacetime… If you grew up in America, suddenly nothing looks the same. Your neighbors are different. So is the landscape and the customs and very often the languages you hear on the street. You may not recognize your own hometown. Human beings aren’t wired for that. They can’t digest change at this pace… [W]e are told these changes are entirely good… Those who oppose it are bigots. We must celebrate the fact that a nation that was overwhelmingly European, Christian, and English-speaking fifty years ago has become a place with no ethnic majority, immense religious pluralism, and no universally shared culture or language.

To some people, what Carlson writes here may not seem racist. And like many conservatives, he resents having what he sees as common sense treated as bigotry. I don’t think there’s any way around it, though: Carlson’s problem is that the United States looks different, that it’s not “European” any more and has no “ethnic majority.” He’s explicitly talking the language of ethnicity: it’s destabilizing that we’re not a white-majority country anymore. This isn’t simply about, say, the “Judeo-Christian ethic” or embracing the “American idea.” If that were the case, then it would be hard to make a case for why we shouldn’t let in the Catholic members of the migrant caravan, who love American culture and want to march across the border saying the Pledge of Allegiance. The problem is that they are not European, that they change the look of the place, that they disrupt the “ethnic majority.” Europeans are the real Americans, the ones that hold the fabric of the nation together, and minorities, people who are different, threaten to undo that fabric.

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