THE GRAB is a jaw-dropping global thriller combining hard-hitting journalism from The Center for Investigative Reporting with the compelling character-driven storytelling of director Gabriela Cowperthwaite (BLACKFISH), taking you around the globe from Arizona to Zambia, to reveal one of the world’s biggest and least known threats.
Tag: Xen
The Doomsday Organism
Scientists working on synthetic “mirror life” have come to realize that, if created, it could pose an existential threat to life on Earth.
Seasoned bioethicist Laurie Zoloth has a trick she likes to play in her seminars at the University of Chicago. She tells each student to pick up a pencil, then she gives them a series of instructions about how to maneuver it in their hands. At some point, nearly everyone drops the pencil. And that’s the point she’s trying to illuminate: “Humans always make errors,” Zoloth told me over Zoom. We drop things, we forget to switch things off, we lose our focus, we get tired. “Being human is like driving in a snowstorm, all the time,” she said, the hint of a smile emanating from beneath her round glasses.
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.
Dark green religion : nature spirituality and the planetary future
Description:
In this innovative and deeply felt work, Bron Taylor examines the evolution of green religions” in North America and beyond: spiritual practices that hold nature as sacred and have in many cases replaced traditional religions. Tracing a wide range of groupsradical environmental activists, lifestyle-focused bioregionalists, surfers, new-agers involved in ecopsychology,” and groups that hold scientific narratives as sacredTaylor addresses a central theoretical question: How can environmentally oriented, spiritually motivated individuals and movements be understood as religious when many of them reject religious and supernatural worldviews? The dark” of the title further expands this idea by emphasizing the depth of believers’ passion and also suggesting a potential shadow side: besides uplifting and inspiring, such religion might mislead, deceive, or in some cases precipitate violence. This book provides a fascinating global tour of the green religious phenomenon, enabling readers to evaluate its worldwide emergence and to assess its role in a critically important religious revolution.
DOWNLOAD: http://library.lol/main/B9BBB2CCA0487F104A243B0C16D053BC
The Descent of Autofiction … and the Rise of the Literary Thrill-Seeking Industrial Complex
February 4, 2022 • By Jack Skelley
AUTOFICTION IS A fiction. It does not exist. More specifically, defined as a form of literature in which a first-person narrator may or may not represent the author, autofiction excludes next to nothing but genre fiction — e.g., crime stories, fantasy. If it’s everything, it’s nothing.
Just ask Chris Kraus. The co-publisher and editor (with Hedi El Kholti and the late Sylvère Lotringer) of Semiotext(e) has brought decades of character-narrative to light, including the early work of autofiction pioneer Kathy Acker. “I always hated the term,” Kraus tells me. “‘New narrative’ is more accurate.”
When it ignited in the late 1970s, Acker’s work had no specific classification. It did anything and went anywhere. Today, its giddy, free-range, punk-rock, first-person spews and cut-ups (spatula’d together equally from porno and the literary canon) liberate quasi-multitudes. Kraus was also among the first to consciously codify this non-genre when she detonated I Love Dick (Semiotext(e), 1997), her novel that plays with the “I” in supremely unsettling bursts. You could even argue that I Love Dick, which often slips into art criticism and political commentary, also opened the way for “autotheory” — e.g., the bio-based lyric essays of Maggie Nelson.
With the proliferation of indie presses, “now is as good a time as any in writing,” Kraus tells me.
People are inclined to adopt these forms. But Kathy Acker had something no longer possible: a chamber audience. The art and literary world of her day was like the French court of the 18th century: she was writing to a set of known persons. There was a real-life distribution network of bookstores, record stores, coffee shops, and other intimate hangouts. People don’t live in cities in the same way now.
But if intimacy abates, new narrative booms. Its dissociative forms and themes — the anxiety/bliss of romance/sex, psychic roleplay, identity-in-ideology, dream states, trauma, more sex — now serve a community of passion addicts, haunted memoirists, and mental thrill-riders hungering for a higher high, some even using books as panic management, with somatic responses in “triggered” modes or via sub-sub-subgenres. Raise your hand if you’re into “ambient body horror.”
TED K Trailer (2022) Sharlto Copley, Thriller Movie
An exploration of Ted Kaczynksi’s life in Lincoln, Montana in the years leading up to his arrest as The Unabomber.
Psywarfare: Dwid Hellion Explores the Past & Present of Noise Music
If I had to pick my own introduction to the genre of noise, it would be around 1992. We were skateboarding one night, and this kid that I kinda recognized from school rolled up with “FVG/\ZI” and the Crass logo spray painted on his grip tape. He had a mohawk and an army jacket, and a hell of a one-footed ollie. The next day, I went to the record store Noise Noise Noise and bought The Feeding of The 5000, and was hit by a 2-minute and 42-second dose of spoken word/noise called “asylum”.
In 1996, Victory Records released a split 7-inch with Integrity and Psywarfare, and two years later a split 7-inch with Integrity and Lockweld. I may not have totally understood the sounds at the time, but I accepted them.
By 2008, I was experimenting with making my own noise and shortly after, struck up a friendship with Dwid Hellion that has resulted in more productivity and encouragement around my creative endeavors than almost anyone in my life.
Internet Piracy Is Surging, Researchers Say
New studies reveal that people love to pirate TV and books, and that Americans outpace every other country when it comes to piracy.
The pandemic caused piracy to spike in 2020. According to a pair of reports from security researchers, 2021 was another growth year for online piracy. As first spotted by TorrentFreak, new reports from research groups Akamai and MUSO revealed that users visited pirate sites a total of 132 billion times in the first months of 2021, a 16% rise over the previous year.