on resisting authoritarianism and the flaws in contemporary realism
Our dreams are birds, they pluck fruit from high branches we cannot reach with our hands. They carry the fruit down to us, and we choose what to do with it. Some dreams are totally alien and need to be examined, while others are easier to digest. Some dreamers cannot recognize their fruits and toss them aside. Others examine them closely. Whatever kind of dreamer you are, these dreams are speaking to you. They hold meaning no matter how strange or insipid they seem. At some point in life, we all experience a dream so striking and bizarre that we are haunted by it into the next day, even if it was completely abstract and not a conscious fear. This is the essential language of dreams, and the font of surrealism’s power.
Category: Mayhem
The Rise of Neo-Kaczynskiism
Altman got Molotoved. Warehouses are burning. The ruling class brought this on itself — ad still won’t tap the release valve.
For years, we’ve been bearing witness to the rise in what some call neo-Kaczynskiism – a swell that’s going to crash harder and harder into the ultra-wealthy and their bottom lines. Last week, multiple attempts were made on OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s life. The 20-year-old from Spring, Texas who allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman’s home published a lengthy diatribe beforehand on his Substack arguing that artificial intelligence is a threat to human existence. Not 48 hours later, shots were fired at Altman’s same residence in San Francisco.
Ted Kaczynski – the “Unabomber” – authored a manifesto that offered a hauntingly accurate critique of industrial society before ultimately resorting to random acts of violence, murdering 3 people and injuring 23 others in a nationwide mail bombing campaign between 1978 and 1995 targeting those he believed were advancing modern technology and destroying the natural environment.
Neo-Kaczynskiism is an apt term for the rise in lone acts of violence and destruction we’ve been witnessing – including the 7 warehouse fires (and counting) that have cropped up across the country in the last week. Like Luigi Mangione, accused of murdering UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December 2024 and currently held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, these seemingly random acts of violence don’t occur in a vacuum. They’re connected.
The targeting of billionaire tech oligarchs and millionaire health insurance CEOs, the employees setting their workplaces ablaze, the surge in individual acts of violence against the rich – it’s all a symptom of the economic regime we’re living under. And it’s going to escalate.
Someone has been reading our site?
Man facing federal charges for allegedly setting massive fire that destroyed warehouse: DOJ
Abdulkarim allegedly said in the video, “If you’re not going to pay us enough to [expletive] live or afford to live, at least pay us enough not to do this [expletive],” the DOJ said in a statement.
A man is facing federal charges for allegedly purposely setting the fire that destroyed a massive warehouse in Southern California, prosecutors said.
Chamel Abdulkarim, 29, is charged with arson of a building used in interstate and foreign commerce and used in activities affecting interstate and foreign commerce, the Department of Justice said on Friday.
On April 7, Abdulkarim allegedly took video of himself setting fire to paper goods in the Ontario, California, distribution center, prosecutors said.
Antarctica has lost ice 10 times the size of Los Angeles over the last 30 years, scientists say
The rapid retreat in one region is unexplainable, scientists said.
Antarctica has lost enough ice over the last 30 years to cover the City of Los Angeles area 10 times over, according to new research.
Glaciologists at the University of California, Irvine, used satellite images from the last three decades to measure the retreat of ice sheets over the Antarctic continent.
“A World Governed by Force”
The Attack on Venezuela and the Conflicts to Come
“We live in a world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller told CNN host Jake Tapper, on January 5, 2026, spelling out the fascist program as he justified seizing Greenland by force. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
The Tangle
Justin Robertson’s debut novel is a trans-dimensional trip into the mysterious knot of nature; a journey into the ‘brilliant darkness’ where the timeless divine spirit of the ‘Tangle’ weaves its spell and all mankind’s hubris is rendered insignificant by the radically non-human force of phantom ecology. Salvation, revelation and a terrible reckoning dwell in the ancient roots.
A time travelling account of what occurs when unknowable frontiers are breached and humanity finds itself, once again, lost in the woods, The Tangle invites us into a grotesque world of eco-horror, echoing with the spirit of writers such as Saki, Ballard, M R James, Ursula Le Guin, Brian Catling and Thomas Ligotti.
LINK: https://store.whiterabbitbooks.co.uk/products/the-tangle
We Are Making A Film About Mark Fisher
We Are Making a Film About Mark Fisher is not a documentary. Less biography than collective memory-work, the project inhabits the gaps and glitches in cultural time where Fisher’s voice still resonates.
Developed openly on Instagram (@markfisherfilm), the film is stitched together with no budget, no studio backing, no institutional permissions – just the circuitry of solidarity, shared labour, and digital proximity. In this, the film enacts what Fisher insisted was still possible: decapitalised cultural production, collective agency in the ruins of neoliberal atomisation. A reminder that DIY doesn’t mean private – it means mutual.
Nine disjointed chapters drift across hauntological terrain: from Felixstowe’s windblown beaches to the CCRU’s delirial hyperstition lab; from K-punk’s midnight blog posts to the echoing chambers of The Vampire Castle; from viral slogans (it’s easier to imagine the end of the world) to streets filled with protest and grief. These aren’t scenes in a life — they’re pulses in a system that won’t let go.
The film gathers not just what Fisher said, but what he summoned. Brexit. Thatcher’s death. The Dump Trump rally. Starmer’s ‘Island of Strangers’ – the phrase itself sounding like something K-punk might have decoded into its spectral components.
But this is not nostalgia. Fisher warned against that. It is an evocation of failed promised futures. The film holds space for it. And in doing so, it becomes a kind of working group for collective dreaming – a counter to the doom scroll machine of capitalist realism. All about the people who connected in some way.
The CCRU was a virus. Fisher caught it, carried it forward – but unlike Nick Land, he chose care over cruelty, collectivity over collapse. Where others accelerated towards Mars (Musk et al), Fisher re-routed the signal through public pedagogy and pop music, transforming chaos into clarity. His genius was in making complexity speak in plain language, not in simplifying it, but in dignifying the reader: you can understand this. You’re not alone. The NME.
Capitalist Realism now reads as a user’s manual for the political psychosis of post-Brexit Britain: precarity normalised, education hollowed, a tech elite mimicking myth. And yet in 2025, something stirs. There is talk again of solidarity. Of reconnection. People are, quietly, logging off. Refusing the misery feed. Turning toward each other, asking new (old) questions.
This film doesn’t seek to explain Fisher. It lets him haunt the now.
Art is War: Fear and Loathing on the Internet
Current work in process. Expected release date, late 2026.
An art manifesto for our changing times.
Watch my Substack for release announcements.
Make Culture Weird Again
Even failures and half steps will be more interesting than the boring stuff.
Twenty-five years into the 21st century, culture is markedly different than it was in the previous millennium. Everyday life has never contained more stuff—an endless reel of words, ideas, games, songs, videos, memes, outrageous statements, celebrity meltdowns, life hacks, extremely talented animals. Yet audiences can sense what’s missing. For all the energy society invests in culture today, little has emerged that feels new, and certainly nothing revolutionary enough to properly outmode the past.Some commentators have argued that cultural progress is at a standstill. In The Crisis of Culture, published in English in 2024, the French political scientist Olivier Roy claims that the canon has been abandoned, subcultures have been reduced to superficial identity groups, and the marketplace has swallowed everything. As a full diagnosis, this seems too pessimistic. In its broadest definition, culture always exists, and subcultures remain—there are just fewer conspicuous ones now, and those have less influence. The canon is not dead; the problem, rather, is that it casts too long a shadow over the present. Kurt Cobain would have wanted the next generation’s musicians and listeners to kill their idols, including him. Instead, they wear his face on T-shirts.
Still, the lingering reverence toward Cobain and other larger-than-life 20th-century artists suggests a deeply rooted collective respect for the agents of radical cultural change. What’s missing now is a veneration of the artistic mindset, which possesses the imagination to reject kitsch—art that trades in well-worn formulas, stock emotions, and immediate comprehensibility—and pursue work that expands the possibilities of human perception. Doing so requires at least some creators in the cultural ecosystem to strive for complexity, ambiguity, and formal experimentation—attributes that power the masterpieces that draw millions of people every year to museums.