And after I put that in our shared newsletter doc, Austin pointed me at this piece by Darren Allen: What passes for culture is not culture — the wild — but cultivation — domestication; the covering of the unnatural inner life of men and women with superficially stimulating effects, dead knowledge divested of its living core and the economically and socially profitable pretense of art: To be cultivated means: to hide from oneself how wretched and base one is, how rapacious in going for what one wants, how insatiable in heaping it up, how shameless and selfish in enjoying it. It only takes two people to love that, to recognise its reflection in great art and wild nature and to be courageous enough to make sacrifices for it — to suffer for it — for culture to live. But there are times when the sheepdog manages to lock its jaws around the wolf’s throat and remains clamped onto it until the wolf can’t withstand the pressure anymore; the dog persists until the wolf submits. Usually only RPGs have this much text, and this many dialogue choices, but as you play through KR0 you get the feeling that the choices you make don’t really matter. Because I think, quite seriously, the whole culture might be sick. Are you writing more Voidwitch Saga books? We need the familiar because it is all we have the energy to digest. But I agree with Damien that our culture is sick. Whether or not my book does well seems a very minor concern right now, but I hope if nothing else it might give people a break from ubiquitous Coronavirus news for a few hours. Corey White read 95 books of his goal of 52! I believe them, of course. Don’t lash out against the people who have already suffered, just because you don’t want their allegations to be true. It’s like looking to the past and seeing what could have been – where could our culture be now if something different had risen to the top? So much of what’s released today fits into that comfortable zone  – the same but different. A lot of the ideas, discoveries, movements, etc that Higgs discusses will likely be familiar to anyone with a decent understanding of modern history, but it’s the context that it’s offered in that makes it such an interesting read. I need to avoid this impulse. We can’t continue on the way we’ve been going, not unless we want to irreparably damage our biosphere. You don’t have to exist online for too long to realise how right Higgs is – see people arguing with artists about the intended meaning of their own art, see people unflinchingly arguing a scientific topic against a person who holds a PhD in that very thing, or even watch the way people try and turn themselves into brands, as though they’re such an important figure they should be a youtube star/instagram influencer/viral sensation. I think of it as something like a podcast in text form – we share a bunch of interesting links and recommendations, with room for a little conversational back and forth. By the end of the book he reveals a sort of thesis that he’s been building toward the whole way: that the politics, culture, and economics of the late 20th Century have caused us to shift away from communal concerns to an extreme of individualism. I want their wealth taken from them, I want their exorbitant fucking pensions stripped from them and used to provide all our tortured refugees the kinds of lives they deserve here (and the therapy they will no doubt need after all that we have inflicted on them).

Take a look at Corey’s Year in Books. But — it only takes two of us to nourish it. Like we’ve just gotten progressively meaner, and harder, and more afraid, and more paranoid, and more spitefully willing to fuck ourselves into oblivion to prove some kind of point. Here is an audiobook excerpt here I can share with you. First off, I was interviewed for the Nerd Feuilleton podcast – it’s a German language podcast, but the section with me (in English, sadly I’m not bilingual) starts at around the 54 minute mark.