Gil Durán’s new book, The Nerd Reich, catalogs how tech oligarchs like Peter Thiel took over America.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Harun Ozalp/Anadolu via Getty Images, Florencia Tan Jun/Web Summit via Sportsfile via Getty Images and Marco Bello/Getty Images.
This completes the COMPLEAT Broadcast series. It will remain here on this Substack so you may revisit it or share it. If you’d like a print copy of the book section of this work, it is available through https://compleat.store
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
